The Lansburys
It sounds like a pub quiz question - though not one many of us could come up with the answer to. What links the Poplar rates rebellion of 1921, the fight for women’s suffrage, Murder She Wrote, The Good Food Guide, The Clangers, Peter Ustinov and Godspell. The answer is an East End dynasty, founded by the man historian AJP Taylor called ‘the best loved man in politics’, George Lansbury.
Lansbury is one East End politician who will never be forgotten, and rightly so. A campaigning local MP, he resigned his Bow and Bromley seat to stand as a candidate for women’s suffrage (a cause for which he was jailed). He campaigned against British involvement in World War I, and in the 1920s was imprisoned again, in Brixton, for leading the Poplar Rates rebellion. A sometimes recklessly brave leader, this proponent of ‘Poplarism’ was never a man to be afraid of taking a contrary position - and local people loved him for it.
But the extended Lansbury clan had many other claims to fame - though it was in the light entertainment, rather than the political field, that they would make their mark. George Lansbury was the father of Daisy and Edgar. Daisy married Raymond William Postgate in 1918. The multi-talented Postgate wrote mystery novels, social history and on the subject of food. He was also a socialist and a conscientious objector during the First World War, and had been jailed for refusing to fight. But his marriage to the daughter of Lansbury was the last straw, and his Tory father banned the pair from the family home.
A prolific biographer, Postgate would go on to edit the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Tribune, and in the fifties his great love of food writing saw him launching the Good Food Guide. Towards the end of his life, Postgate published a biography of his father in law, The Life of George Lansbury.
Raymond and Daisy’s son was writing too, though many of us will be more familiar with his work than his father’s. Oliver Postgate created The Clangers, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engline, Noggin the Nog and Pogles’ Wood, with partner Peter Firmin. Any child who watched BBC TV during the sixties, seventies and eighties will know Postgate’s work. But political blood still ran in the Lansbury/Postgate veins … Oliver being active in the anti-nuclear power movement.
Lansbury’s other child, Edgar seemed to have opted for a quieter life, working as a timber merchant. But with his marriage to Irish actress Moyna MacGill, he wasn’t going to be staying out of the limelight. Moyna already had a film career dating back to 1920. She had also been married before, and had a young daughter, Isolde. The couple had first a daughter, Angela, in 1925, then twin boys Edgar and Bruce. But Edgar senior was to die suddenly in 1934, and when World War II broke out, the widowed Moyna left her Bow home for the safety of the United States. Moyna soon began landing film roles in Hollywood; soon too, Angela would join her on screen: winning a contract with MGM in 1944, she was nominated for an Oscar for her very first film (Gaslight, 1944).
Mother and daughter would appear together in the 1945 adapation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and once again Angela received an Academy Award nomination. Over the course of a career that now spans more than 60 years, Angela would be nominated three times (though never win an Oscar), be nominated for 10 Emmys and win four Tonys. She would win a BAFTA and, in the 1990s, be made CBE by the Queen. Her work spans dozens of films, much TV work and a critically lauded career on Broadway.
Half-sister Isolde, meanwhile, had also married into the business, and was wed to Peter Ustinov from 1940 to 1950. Both Edgar and Bruce, meanwhile, were to become film producers, with Edgar also producing the debut of Godspell on Broadway in the 1970s. The theatrical dynasty continued, with Edgar having a son, David Lansbury, also an actor, and who would marry Hollywood actress Ally Sheedy.
By the late 1960s, Angela Lansbury’s life in California had soured somewhat. Her home in Malibu burned down and her daughter became involved both with drugs and the Charles Manson ‘Family’. A worried Lansbury perhaps wisely decamped from Southern California to a new life in Ireland. She was to eventually return though, and now she’s probably best known to current viewers as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running ‘Murder She Wrote’ (on a TV near you on any given afternoon). And the Lansburys are still keeping it in the family - son Anthony was the producer.