John Benn and family
Like other East End politicians, the convictions of John Benn weren’t just forged by observing the poverty and suffering of others, they came from bitter personal experience.
In the 1860s, Will Crooks had been forced into the Poplar workhouse with his siblings. In the early 1900s, George Lansbury would return from a failed emigration to Australia, angered by the falsely rosy picture of what lay there for Britons seeking to improve themselves. He poured his disappointement into political activism. And back in the 1850s, John Benn had seen his father Julius removed from his job because of debts from failed investments. There were other curious parallels: both men would found dynasties that encompassed both socialist politics and Hollywood. The Benn story was more remarkable yet - including a bloody murder that lay concealed for a century.
John was born in Manchester in 1850, the son of Julius and Ann. His parents soon moved to run the London City Mission in Stepney, and then opened the Home in the East, a school for homeless boys in the East End. This refuge, a converted rope factory nicknamed “The Star in the East”, makes an appearance in Sketches by Boz.
The institution was such a success that the Government invited Julius to head up the first Reformatory and Industrial School in Britain at Tiffield in Northamptonshire. Success again, but Julius’s attempts to supplement the meagre family income of around £100 a year (and with eight children to support) ended in disaster. He invested in an agricultural equipment supplier, which went bust taking the family’s money with it. Julius, heavily in debt, was forced to resign.
Returning to the East End, he became a missionary with the East London Congregational Evangelistic Association, saved hard, and paid back the debt - it took him 17 years to do so. Public service and self-help were equally important in the Benn household and John, who received his schooling at home from his parents, was expected to help with the finances. He set up a stamp business and by 14 he had posted a profit of £80.
By 17 he was working for wholesale furniture company T Lawes & Co, first as a clerk and then as a designer. At 23 he had married Lily Pickstone, a distant relative of the Wedgewood pottery clan, and was earning £300 a year as a designer and manager of the company. John and Lily had a large family, the start of a clan at the heart of British politics to this day.
John had the touch for business that had eluded his father. He returned from a visit to the 1878 Art and Industrial Exhibition in Paris having penned an article on the show, and sent it to The Furniture Gazette. Stung by their refusal to publish it, he put £800 of his life savings into starting The Cabinet Maker. Launched in July 1880 the magazine grew to become the main journal for Britain’s furniture trade (it’s still going strong), and established the company of Benn Brothers in the process.
But tragedy was to strike the family. John’s brother William married Florence Nicholson in December 1882, but before his honeymoon was over he was warning his family that he feared for his sanity. He arranged for several weeks leave from his job as a shipping clerk, but in January suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to Bethnall House (a private asylum in Cambridge Heath Road). The superintendent, Dr John Millar, was a leading light in the Employment and Relief Association, a charity with close connections to East End churches. He advocated rest cures rather than confinement and, crucially, was very discreet. But Millar’s approach was to lead to disaster.
After six weeks, William was released back into the care of Julius - now pastor of the Gravel Lane Congregational Meeting House in Wapping. Julius took his son for a vacation to Matlock Bridge in Derbyshire. Matlock was ‘the Switzerland of England, with healing waters and thermal baths, a haven for convalescents. On the Sunday of their stay, the Benns failed to emerge from their suite of rooms at George Marchant’s boarding house. Pushing open the door at noon, he found William in a blood-soaked nightshirt, blood spattering the floor, ceiling and walls, and the sheets soaked with blood. Julius lay dead on the bed, his head broken by a single vicious blow from the enamel chamber pot. The dazed William had attempted to slit his own throat with a tortoise-shell penknife, a wound which local GP William Moxon stitched, before allowing Police Constable Smith to charge him with murder.
In the weeks leading up to the inquest William was under suicide watch - on one occasion flinging himself 17 feet from the window of Derby Infirmary (his police guard was temporarily distracted by pulling on his boots), but only broke an ankle. John Benn headed the family group at the inquest, defending William against accusations of religious mania from newspapers excited by the Benns Noncomformist religious background: ‘His brothers explicitly repudiate the notion that he was actuated by any of that excitable religious fervour which characterises the Salvation Army,” reported the Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal.
William was, however, unarguably insane. At his committal he insisted on addressing the magistrate as ‘Pontius Pilate’ and was sent to Broadmoor, where he would remain for nine years.
Meanwhile, brother John was devoting himself in equal measure to business and charity work in the East End. His son, William Wedgewood Benn (his middle name a nod to his mother’s ancestors) remembered walking to chapel and seeing a man with a placard reading ‘I have suffered a great injustice’. John commented ‘Will, I have suffered many injustices … let’s give him a couple of shillings.’ It made a deep impact on his son. And John was increasingly becoming involved in politics, accepting the Progressive Party candidacy for East Finchley for the inaugural London County Council in 1889. Sons Ernest and William, though just 14 and 12, helped run his campaign.
The Progressives (formed by a grouping of Liberals and Trade Unionists) swept 70 of the 118 seats, their number including such future Labour figures as Sidney Webb and Will Crooks. The same year Benn became involved in the London Dock Strike, hosting meetings at his home. The successful paralysis of the East End docks would lay the foundations for mass trade unionism in Britain.
In 1891, Benn was adopted as Liberal candidate for Wapping. That same year, he was told his brother had recovered from his mental illness; John approached the Home Secretary and asked that William be released into his care. William joined his wife in Balham - she had written to him every day, and twice on Sundays, during his incarceration. He changed the family name to Rutherford and the following year the couple had their only child, Margaret, who years later would become one of Britain’s best-loved actresses.
The dynasty continues
John Benn won Wapping in the 1892 General Election. He now handed over running of the family firm to son Ernest and devoted himself to public transport - with a particular interest in developing an efficient tram system for London. But the 1895 Election saw him lose his seat to the Conservative, Harry Marks, by a mere four votes. Benn argued that Marks had bribed, cheated and bought the seat. He brought the case to court, lost and had to pay legal costs of £6000. He was also banned from standing for Wapping for seven years. Still on the LCC, he threw his energies into public transport, and in 1903 London’s first electric trams were introduced.
In 1904 He returned as MP for Devonport and in 1906 was joined by his son William. Elected for his father’s old seat of Wapping the 28-year-old William Wedgewood Benn was ‘Baby of the House’, the youngest member in the Commons. William was already grounded in politics and dissent. As President of Union Debating Society at University College London he had argued furiously against Britain’s involvement in the Boer War - and been hurled out of a window by angry students. In Parliament he accused a Conservative, Percy Simmons, who voted against the 1906 School Meals Act, of being ‘against the feeding of children’. Simmons sued for libel and won £5000. Father John managed to pay off the debt.
William also maintained his support of the trade union movement, upsetting fellow ministers - by now he was Junior Lord of the Treasury - when he helped raise funds for the 1912 London Dockers Strike. When war was declared in 1914, Lllyd George put him in charge of the National Relief Fund. With the help of the Fleet Street papers he raised over £1m in ten days. War service was another thread that ran through the family. Resigning his seat William joined up, training as a pilot and winning the DFC, the Croix de Guerre and the Italian Military Cross. And although 62 at the outbreak of World War II, Benn signed up again, as a pilot officer, flying operational missions for the RAF. Now he was joined by two of his sons Tony and Michael, both pilots, though Michael was to be killed, tragically young, in a flying accident.
He was still a politician, by now switched to the Labour Party in protest at Lloyd George’s leadership of the Liberals. Son Tony joined him there in 1950, succeeding Stafford Cripps as MP for Bristol South East. At 26 he was, like his father before, ‘Baby of the House’ and with soft left views that owed much to the families Liberal and Noncomformist history. In later years he would move firmly to the left (though would justifiably argue that the Labour leadership had moved much to the right).
William died in 1960, leaving Tony an unwelcome legacy. He inherited the title Viscount Stansgate (which had been intended for brother Michael, who was to have become a clergyman and sat in the Lords). The family plan was that Michael could argue for the family from the Lords and Tony from the Commons, but in an unexpected twist, the younger brother was now barred from entering the Lower House. He even fought the by-election caused by his elevation … and the voters of Bristol re-elected him, though he had to give the seat to runner-up Malcolm St Clair. Three years later he would finally win his fight to renounce the peerage, and St Clair sportingly took the Chiltern Hundreds, triggering a further by-election, which he won.
A Benn was back in Parliament and Anthony Wedgewood Benn served with honour and controversy in equal measure, under Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and finally as a backbencher under Tony Blair. Often at odds with the leadership and his fellow ministers, Benn oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, the launch of Commemorative stamps, the Concorde project and took charge of Britain’s energy policy. He became an outspoken critic of British war policy, most recently as a member of the Stop the War Coalition. ‘All war is a failure of democracy’ is one of his quotes. He is, unsurprisingly, no fan of Tony Blair; his retirement in 2001 from Parliament, as Labour’s longest-serving MP, allowed him to ‘devote more time to politics’. His son Hilary had followed him into politics as the fourth generation of Benn MPs and now serves as Secretary of State for International Development.
Amidst it all, the family had been a source of strength for the Benns. The sprawling, activist, teetotal and tea-drinking Benn clan had always found great strength in the home, but in 1983 the Benns had a nasty shock. A lurid book by Margaret Rutherford’s son-in-law had splashed the story of the murder of Julius Benn, a hundred years before.
‘It was all over the News of the World.’ Benn recalls. ‘They’d hired someone to investigate my ancestry, and identified my connection with Peggy Rutherford and Julius Benn. I was worried that it would be politically embarrassing, but the only person who ever referred to it was a cab driver who said, “sorry to hear about your uncle’, as if it had happened last week.”