Samuel Gompers
The East End was built by the industry and endeavour of generations of immigrants – Huguenots, Jews, Irish, Bangladeshis and more.
But just as fascinating are tales of the youngsters who left the poverty of east London in search of a better life and made their fame and fortune abroad.
One lad who was a product of both these tides of immigration was Samuel Gompers. Though born into a poor Dutch family in Spitalfields, he would go on to dominate US trade unionism for almost half a century.
Gompers was born in Tenter Street, Spitalfields, on 26 January, 1850. He got his education at the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane but his school days were shortlived. Young Sam was apprenticed to a shoe- maker at the tender age of ten.
He soon swapped trades, becoming apprenticed to a cigar maker at a wage of just one shilling (5p) a week. It was a humble start, but one that was to dictate his fate.
Many people were emigrating to the New World in search of a better life and Samuel and his family decided to try their luck in America, boarding a ship to New York in 1863.
But if the Gompers’ were expecting a land of milk and honey upon arrival at Ellis Island, they were in for a shock.
Life was tough in the slums of New York, swollen as they were by millions of immigrants in search of work. For the Gompers’, descendants of Huguenot immigrants, it must have seemed like the Spital-fields story all over again.
Young Sam, eager to take up his trade, found that there were few large cigar factories in the city. Instead, most of the work was done in thousands of sweatshops – often the workers rolled the cigars in their own tenement blocks. The echoes of the East End and its sweated match and garment workers were hard to ignore.
By 1885, Gompers had become an expert at his trade and was working in one of the larger shops.
And with trade unionism rising in power throughout the western world – back in the East End, the dockworkers and matchgirls were at last rising up against their appalling pay and conditions – Gompers realised that collective action was the only way forward.
He was respected by his fellow workers, most of them Germans, and they elected him president of Cigar Makers Union Local 144 (his local branch). Unpaid organisers like Gompers fought furiously to keep the union together under attack from mechanisation and the flooding into New York of new immigrants – most of them from Bohemia in eastern Europe.
This was only the start for Gompers, who realised that if more workers got together, they would grow stronger. In 1886, he was elected president of the new American Feder-ation of Labor, a kind of TUC.
Much work, little pay
Working out of a tiny shed, with his son as the office boy, Gompers laid the foundation for organised labour in the US. With a budget of $160, he described it as “much work, little pay and very little honour!”
Just four years later, the AFL had signed up a quarter of a million workers.
For 38 years, with just one year out, Gompers headed up the AFL. His influence didn’t end in the US.
At the end of the First World War, he travelled to peace negotiations in Versailles, where he helped set up the International Labour Organ-isation, a world-wide TUC.
Gompers died in Texas in 1924. Look around Tower Hamlets and you won’t see a street named after one of the borough’s most influential sons. But if you ever travel to Chicago, you might remember an East End lad made good with a visit to Gompers Park on the Northwest Side.