POLITICIAN, GEORGE LANSBURY – Tower Hamlets

Born in 1859,  at Halesworth in  Suffolk  he was a British politician, socialist, Christian pacifist and newspaper editor. He was a Member of Parliament from 1910 to 1912 and from 1922 to 1940, and leader of the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935.

He was a campaigner for social justice and improved living and employment conditions for the working class, especially in London's East End.

His earliest political involvement was with the Liberal Party, which he joined in 1886. He acted as electoral agent for Samuel Montagu in Whitechapel at the General Election of 1886, and for Jane Cobden, who stood for election to the London County Council as a Liberal candidate in 1889. That year Lansbury took up the issue of pressing for a legal eight-hour day, but after failing to secure the support of the National Liberal Federation at their 1889 conference he became increasingly disillusioned by the Liberals. He came into contact with the Social Democratic Federation and, in support of the famous 1889 Dock Strike, joined the recently formed Gas Workers' and General Labourers' Union.

Lansbury left the Liberal Party in 1892 and, with friends, formed the Bow and Bromley branch of the SDF. He became a prominent member of that organisation, standing twice as a parliamentary candidate for the SDF in the 1890s, before leaving to join the Independent Labour Party around 1903.

In 1910, he became MP for Bow and Bromley, when the sitting Liberal MP retired and the Liberals supported his candidature. Two years later he clashed with Asquith in the House of Commons over the issue of women's suffrage and resigned his seat in order to stand in a by-election in support of the Suffragette movement. However he was unsuccessful, and did not return to the House of Commons for ten years. Continuing to support the campaign for women's suffrage, Lansbury was charged with sedition in 1913 and jailed in Pentonville, during which time he hunger-struck and was temporarily released under the Cat and Mouse Act.

He lived at 39 Bow Road, Tower Hamlets. Sadly the family home was flattened during German bombing a few months after Lansbury's death in 1940. Today on the site there is a block of flats that bear Lansbury's name and carry a memorial plaque. Outside the flats, at the corner of Bow Road and Harley Grove, there is a stone memorial to George Lansbury with an inscription that includes the words "A great servant of the people."

George Lansbury's name and memory live on in the Lansbury Estate and Lansbury Gardens, East London, numerous London street names.