Tag Archives: gandhi

A WOMAN FROM GUJARAT AT AN INDUSTRIAL DISPUTE IN LONDON’S WILLESDEN

Posted on by
Reply

WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST memory of a news item? In my case, I remember my parents discussing something about Cuba. This was The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. I had little or no idea about it, but later I learned that US President John F Kennedy was involved in its resolution. A year later, when we were staying in the USA, we were there when he was assassinated. I well recall that and my feelings about it at the time. That remains in the forefront of my memory, but far back in the fleshy recesses of my grey matter, the name Grunwick resides. While visiting an exhibition at the Tate Britain recently, I saw several photographs that brought this vague memory back into my consciousness.

Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories (‘Grunwick’), located at Willesden in northwest London, processed photographic films and produced finished prints from them. Photographers (mostly amateurs) put their undeveloped exposed films into an envelope along with payment, and sent them to Grunwick, who later returned the developed film and the prints made from it. In 1973, some workers at Grunwick joined a trade union and were subsequently laid-off by the company. The company employed many workers of Asian heritage – including a substantial number of ladies. As the then Labour politician Shirley Williams pointed out, the Asian ladies were being paid very much less than the average wage, and conditions were bad – hours were long, overtime was compulsory (and often required without the employer giving prior notice).

On the 20th of August 1976, Grunwick sacked Devshi Bhudia for working too slowly. That day, three other workers walked out in support of Devshi. Just before 7 pm that day, Jayaben Desai (1933-2010) began walking out of the factory. As she was doing so, she was called into the office and dismissed for leaving early. When she was in the office, Jayaben said (see guardian.com, 20th of January 2010):

“What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.”

Thus began a two-year long strike, which was supported not only by the company’s workers but also by many politicians and trade unions, including, for a short time, the Union of Post Office Workers, who refused to cross the Grunswick picket lines.

Jayaben was born in Dharmaj, now in the Anand district of the Indian state of Gujarat. Soon after marrying, she and her husband migrated to what is now Tanzania. Just before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1968) made it difficult for Commonwealth citizens to settle in the UK, the couple moved to England. There, she was obliged to take up poorly paid work, first as a sewing machinist, and then as a worker at Grunwick.

Not only did Jayaben initiate the strike, but she helped keep it going until the dispute was resolved. In November 1976, when the Post Office workers stopped supporting the strike, she told an assembly of  Grunwick’s workers:

“We must not give up. Would Gandhi give up? Never!”

Later, like Gandhi, she employed his tactic – the hunger strike – outside the Trade Union Congress in November 1977. During the court of enquiry led by Lord Justice Scarman, she gave powerful evidence against her erstwhile employer. When the strike was over, she went back to sewing, and then later became a teacher of sewing at Harrow College. After passing her driving test at the age of 60, she encouraged other women to do so to increase their freedom.  After her death, some of her ashes were deposited in the Thames, and the rest in the Ganges.

The reason that Grunwick came to mind at Tate Britain was that its current exhibition “Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990” (ends 7th of April 2024) includes several photographs taken at Grunwick during the strike. Three of them include portraits of Jayaben in action.

As I wrote earlier, I had heard of Grunwick, but I could not recall why until I saw the exhibition. As for the remarkable Jayaben Desai, I am happy that I have become aware of her and her amazing achievements.

A socialist and a vegetarian by the seashore on the Isle of Wight

Posted on by
Reply

A DISTINCTIVE BUILDING stands opposite the Art Deco Winter Garden (built by 1936) high above the seashore of Ventnor on the south side of the Isle of Wight. With a tower overlooking the sea, the edifice facing the Art Deco structure was which was built in 1846 by the Reverend Richard John Shutte (1800-1860), who had once been a canon at St Paul’s Cathedral. It was named St Augustine Villa (see photograph below), and now houses a hotel and restaurant.

Several Russians opposed to the Imperial Romanov regime, including the writer Ivan Turgenev(1818-1883) visited Ventnor during the 19th century. Amongst these was Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), who was the ‘father’ of Russian Socialism’. In 1852, he and his family began living in England for several years. During this sojourn, he made some visits to the Isle of Wight. In September 1855, Herzen stayed in Augustine Villa, which he had rented. However, he was not alone as the commemorative plaque on the Villa notes. He stayed there with Malwida von Meysenbug (1816-1903).

Now, I had already heard of Herzen. I became familiar with his name when watching a trilogy of plays by Tom Stoppard about 19th century Russian Socialism. However, I had never come across Malwida von Meysenbug until I saw that plaque in Ventnor. A writer, she was born in Kassel (Germany) and was a friend of both Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner.  By the time that Herzen and Malwida had their holiday in Augustine Villa, she was living with Herzen’s family and helping to look after his children. Alexander’s wife Natalia had died in 1852, and he had hired Malwida to educate his children.

Malwida was much more than a mere governess as the UCL academic Sarah J Young explained in her excellent, highly informative article (http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2011/11/10/in-herzens-footsteps-a-visit-to-ventnor/). In this essay, Dr Young gives excerpts from Malwida’s published “Memoirs”. The following is particularly interesting:

“We spent happy days in beautiful Ventnor. In the evenings we were usually with the Pulszkys, who were spending the summer there. Therese’s mother, an educated and intelligent Viennese lady, had come to visit them, and this made for many a pleasant hour with her keen humor and wit. The Kossuths were also there, and he was much more pleasant in a more intimate setting than he had been at the formal gatherings in London. At the time, our thoughts were preoccupied by the war Russia had started with Turkey. Herzen, more so than the others, was very excited. He prophesied the Russian defeat and wished for it, since he believed it would lead to the downfall of autocracy.”

The Kossuths, were members of the family of the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth, whom Herzen was extremely excited to have met during his stay in Ventnor. Another exiled Hungarian revolutionary, Ferenc Pulszky (1814-1897) was also staying with his family in Ventnor at the same time as the Herzens and the Kossuths. Pulsky’s wife, Theresa, and Malwida spent time drawing together in Ventnor, and made several competent sketches of Ventnor and its surroundings,

Dr Young also quoted Herzen, who noted in his diaries that Malwida:

“… spent all her time in the water …”

From what Dr Young and others have discovered during their research, Malwida was out of the sea long enough to create works of art depicting the seaside resort.

Herzen liked Ventnor but had some reservations as he wrote in a letter (quoted from Dr Young’s article):

“For three days the weather has been like June – and I’m bathing recklessly in the sea. But before that there were four days of storms, rain and bitter cold … If it were not so boring, I would live here, but there are no resources at all. And getting to Ryde is expensive … “

Many years have passed since Herzen and Von Meysenbug holidayed in Ventnor. Slightly less time has elapsed since the future Mahatma Gandhi visited Ventnor in 1890 and 1891. According to one source (www.bonchurchvillage.co.uk/post/bonchurch-gandhi), Gandhi:

“… had wanted to study medicine but his father had objected, and his studies were in law.   He was a prominent member of the London Vegetarian Society, and that may have led to his staying at Shelton’s Vegetarian Hotel at 25 Madeira Road in Ventnor, in January 1890 and again in May 1891, on the second occasion addressing a Vegetarian meeting in Ventnor.”

In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote of the following experience in Ventnor:

“My cowardice was on a par with my reserve. It was customary in families like the one in which I was staying at Ventnor for the daughter of the landlady to take out guests for a walk. My landlady’s daughter took me one day to the lovely hills round Ventnor. I was no slow walker, but my companion walked even faster, dragging me after her and chattering away all the while. I responded to her chatter sometimes with a whispered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or at the most ‘yes, how beautiful!’ She was flying like a bird whilst I was wondering when I should get back home. We thus reached the top of a hill. How to get down again was the question. In spite of her high-heeled boots this sprightly young lady of twenty-five darted down the hill like an arrow. I was shamefacedly struggling to get down. She stood at the foot smiling and cheering me and offering to come and drag me. How could I be so chicken hearted? With the greatest difficulty, and crawling at intervals, I somehow managed to scramble to the bottom. She loudly laughed ‘bravo’ and shamed me all the more, as well she might.”

I do not think that Gandhi made any other visits to Ventnor or elsewhere on the Isle of Wight.

Today, Ventnor is still delightful and although much has been modernised since the Victorian era, it still retains an almost unspoilt old-world charm. I fancy that were it possible for Herzen and Malwida and their revolutionary friends to return today, they would find much in Ventnor that they would easily recognise.

Seeing the plaque on Augustine Villa made me curious about Herzen’s stay in Ventnor and the identity of Malwida von Meysenbug. By reading up about it, I learned of other noteworthy visitors to the town, and as I did so my interest in Ventnor has increased considerably.

PS: a list of some more of the famous visitors to Ventnor can be found at /www.ventnortowncouncil.gov.uk/about-ventnor/famous-residents/

Seeing India through the eyes of a Londoner

Posted on by
Reply

AMONGST THE 101 diverse topics in my book about travelling in India, you will find the following four: observing a padlock made by a company called Hitler; encountering jackals on a golf course; travelling in coracles on crocodile-infested waters; and having spectacles made by Gandhi’s optician. Since getting married in India in early 1994, I have made over fifty visits to the country during which I have spoken to many people and explored a multitude of places – both well-known and hardly known except to locals. My book, “The Hitler Lock & Other Tales of India”, contains a selection of my experiences in the country. The book aims to fulfil the idea of great Jean Molière (1622-1693), namely, “If you want to edify, you have to entertain.” I hope that you will find that I have achieved that.

You can purchase my book from Amazon (either as a paperback or a Kindle e-book) by clicking on the picture below:

In the Shadow of Freedom: Indians in Nazi Germany

Posted on by
Reply

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945) is probably the most famous Indian to have spent time in Nazi Germany. Less well-known is Ayi Ganpat Tendulkar (1904-1975), who spent much longer in Germany than his illustrious compatriot. While studying in Paris, he married Sasha Alexandra Passini in about 1924. Soon after this, the marriage ended, and Tendulkar began studying in Berlin. He married one of his professor’s daughters – Eva Schubring. In 1933, after Hitler had come to power and Tendulkar had divorced again, he began a close relationship with the screenwriter Thea Von Harbou (1888-1954). Thea had just divorced her second husband, the great film director Fritz Lang (1890-1976) – one of my favourite film directors.  The relationship between Tendulkar and Von Harbou was very close, and had Hitler’s racial laws (against marriages between ‘Aryans’ and others) not been enacted, there is a good chance that they would have married.

Tendulkar returned to India just as WW2 broke out. There, he met and fell in love with Indumati Gunaji (died 2006). From the start, her family were against the relationship, and Indumati ran away from home to live with Tendulkar. Both were followers of Mahatma Gandhi – she more than he. Soon, Tendulkar, who had published anti-British articles in Berlin and elsewhere and was under suspicion because of his long stay in Germany, was imprisoned by the British. Meanwhile, Indumathi helped the villagers where she lived. Her life was not easy, and she missed Tendulkar greatly.

Eventually, Indumathi and her family, who were concerned about her and her romantic attachment to Tendulkar, became reconciled to some extent. Her father, a Gandhian, suggested that they ask Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of the relationship. His reactions to the situation were far from simple, as is revealed in the pages of “In the Shadow of Freedom” by Laxmi Tendulkar Dhaul – the daughter of Indumathi and Tendulkar.

Ms Dhaul’s well-researched book is a fascinating read. It covers the extraordinary lives and relationships between Tendulkar, Indumathi, and Thea Von Harbou, both in Germany and in India – before and after independence. Despite some unfortunate errors missed by the proofreader, this is an un-put-downable book. It opened my eyes to the interesting subject of Indians living in Nazi Germany as well as Gandhi’s rather intriguing views on the purpose of marriage.

Mahatma on Madeira

Posted on by
Reply

UNTIL AIR TRAVEL really ‘took off’, travelling between South Africa and London involved a long sea voyage, either via the Suez Canal or via the Atlantic Ocean. Boats carrying passengers up and down the Atlantic often called in at Funchal in Madeira. Aged three, I travelled with my parents to South Africa by sea. I have seen a photograph of me dressed in a toga made from a sheet from our cabin. I was taking part in a fancy dress party to celebrate crossing the Equator.

Many years before that – in 1906 – a barrister, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, travelled by ship from London to South Africa. He was on his way back to South Africa, having petitioned young Winston Churchill, then Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, against the Black Act – a law promoting racial segregation. Apparently, when his ship docked in Funchal, the future Mahatma received news that his efforts had been successful, but this news turned out to be false.

On the 5th of September 2019, a bust of Gandhi was unveiled on the seafront in Funchal, close to the harbour where liners dock today. The bust, which unusually shows Gandhi without his characteristic round lens spectacles, was sculpted by Ram Vanaji Sutar (born 1925 in Gondur, Maharashtra). Sutar is also the sculptor of the massive Statue of Unity, depicting Sardar Vallabhai Patel in Gujarat. Beneath the bust there is a quotation incorrectly attributed to Gandhi; it was actually said or written by the Dutch American pacifist AJ Muste (1885-1967). The artwork was unveiled by HE Miguel Albuquerque, President of the Regional Government of Madeira and HE Nandini Singla, Ambassador of India to Portugal. It celebrates the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth.

I am grateful to our friend Claus for telling us about the bust, which is not easily visible despite its position so near the waterfront: it is partially hidden by plants.

Over the years, I have visited Porbandar where the Mahatma was born; Rajkot where he went to school; Bhavnagar where he went to college; West Kensington where he lodged when studying for the Bar; Mumbai where he attempted to work as a lawyer; and the Gujarat Club in Ahmedabad where he first met Vallabhai Patel, and also set up his ashrams. So seeing him on Funchal has added to my attempts to follow in his footsteps.

Three Indian men in London’s Bloomsbury

Posted on by
1

MAHATMA GANDHI IS commemorated by a statue in Tavistock Square in London’s Bloomsbury. He is probably the most famous of three Indians with statues in Bloomsbury. Crafted by the sculptor Fredda Brilliant and presented by the Indian High Commission, it was unveiled by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1967.

The next most famous Indian represented by a sculpture in Bloomsbury is a Nobel Prize winner, the celebrated writer and polymath from Kolkata (Calcutta), Rabimdranath Tagore (1861-1941). The memorial depicts Tagore’s head. It was created by the sculptor Shenda Armery, and unveiled by the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, on Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary year in July 2011. The bust stands in Gordon Square, close to University College London, where Tagore studied law briefly. His face looks away from the college towards the southeast. – towards India, his homeland. On one side of the plinth, there are some words written in Bengali script. On another side, there is a translation of this brief text (by Tagore) in English:
“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresher life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new. At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in a great joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass and still thou pourest and still there is room to fill.”
This is from Tagore’s collection of poems – “Gitanjali”, translated into English from Bengali by the author in 1913. It was this collection that led to Tagore being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. In 1915, King George V awarded him a knighthood, but following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, he renounced his knighthood to express his horror at the murders that had been perpetrated on innocent Indians by British troops in the Punjab.

Thiruvalluvar

Call me ignorant but I had never heard of Thiruvalluvar, whose bust stands in a garden next to the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury. According to a plaque next to the bust, this man was author of “Thirukkural”, which was a classic of Tamil philosophy and ethics. The bust was donated by the Governent of Tamil Nadu in 1996, and unveiled by the then Indian High Commissioner Dr ML Singhvi. Celebrated as he is in Tamil Nadu, little is known about his life. It is possible that he was born or lived in Mylapore (now a district of Chennai) in the south of India. According to Wikipedia:
“His work Tirukkuṟaḷ has been dated variously from 300 BCE to about the sixth century CE.”
As for his great work “Thirukkural”, the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica remarked:
“…Tirukkural (“Sacred Couplets”), considered a masterpiece of human thought, compared in India and abroad to the Bible, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the works of Plato.”

I have described monuments to three notable men from India, but omitted one woman, whose memorial is close to those already described. The WW2 heroine Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944) is commemorated by a bust, which, surprisingly, I have never noticed, in Gordon Square. Sculpted by Karen Newman, it was placed in the square in 2012. This artist also sculpted a bust of Violette Szabo (1921-1945), which is on the embankment of the Thames near Lambeth Palace. Both Noor and Violette worked for the British SOE, and perished in Nazi concentration camps.
Once the epicentre of the British Empire, it is not at all surprising that one comes across memorials to notable Indians whilst wandering about in London and other places in the UK.

Meeting Mahatma Gandhi in 2023

Posted on by
Reply

INDIA BECAME A REPUBLIC on the 26th of January 1948. Every year since then the 26th of January has been a public holiday known as Republic Day. On the 25th of January 2023, we met a senior advocate sitting in the Gujarat Club, which is next door to Ahmedabad’s Civil & Sessions Court. After showing us around the court building, he invited us to join him and his colleagues for the next day’s celebration.

The Republic Day celebrations began in the garden of the Court building at 9 am. A few soldiers, some of them armed with automatic rifles, arranged the flag raising. At 9 o clock, the Indian flag was unfurled by one of the senior judges, wearing a colourful pugree on her head, in front of a large group of senior advocates and some of the court’s staff. Many of the female advocates were attractively dressed in saris decorated with the colours of the Indian flag (green, saffron, and white). One of the ladies told us that 25 of these had been specially ordered from Agra.

When the flag was unfurled at the top of the flagpole, everyone sung the national anthem,”Jana Gana Mana”. Then everyone began taking photographs of one another. After this, we moved en-masse from the court garden to the compound of the Gujarat Club, where Mahatma Gandhi met Vallabhai Patel for the first time.

You can imagine my astonishment when I saw an elderly man who looked just like Mahatma Gandhi, both in physiognomy and in his manner of dressing. Holding a wooden staff and dressed in a white dhoti, sandals, and a shawl, he was a highly credible Gandhi lookalike.

Residing in the USA, this Gandhi impersonator has attended many Indian patriotic ceremonies. To date, he has appeared in 35 in the USA and about 60 in Ahmedabad. His presence was a huge success. Everyone wanted to be photographed alongside him. With his sturdy staff in one hand, he held his mobile phone in the other. Had they been available, I wonder whether the real Mahatma would have been happy to use one.

The lookalike took part in the Club’s flag raising ceremony, giving a short speech. After the ceremony was over, we were invited to join the advocates for a special breakfast in the Club. We were served jelebis, ganthia, kadhi, and shredded raw papaya with whole green chillies.

We were very happy to have been invited to join the advocates in their extremely enjoyable celebration of Republic Day at the Gujarat Club. This occasion increased my already great affection for the lovely city of Ahmedabad.

Where Mahatma Gandhi met Vallabhai Patel in Ahmedabad

Posted on by
Reply

THE GUJARAT CLUB, the oldest club in Ahmedabad, stands opposite the Ahmed Shah Masjid, the oldest mosque in the city. The club was founded in 1888 by Rao Bahadur Nagarji Desai. With over 1000 members, the much used clubhouse is in an unmodernised condition. Located next to the recently constructed (2020) City Civil and Session’s Court, the Club is a ‘hang-out” and informal meeting place for many senior advocates. In former times, the place was frequented by Ahmedabad’s wealthy Mill owners and high ranking Britishers. It was the first Indian club that admitted Indians as well as Europeans from the moment it was established.

Vallabhai Patel above a doorway at the Gujarat Club

The Club is located close to a house where Sardar Vallabhai Patel (1875-1950) lived. Patel frequented the Club regularly and played bridge there. It was where he first met Mahatma Gandhi in 1916. A tree marks the spot where they chatted.

After having passed the Bar Examination at London’s Middle Temple, where my wife achieved the same thing many years later, Patel came to live in Ahmedabad. The first meeting with Gandhi at the Club marked the start of Patel’s attachment to the Mahatma’s cause. Years later, Patel played a key role in uniting the former Princely States with what had been British India to form the India of today. An important freedom fighter for Indian independence, he became a senior member of the country’s government after 1947. A close associate of Gandhi, the two men chose to differ on how to deal with certain issues, for example the creation of Pakistan.

We sat under the verandah of the Gujarat Club and enjoyed cups of tea. From where we sat we could see a large rectangular open space, which was being used as a car park. The ground was marked out with tennis court lines and a couple of nets were stretched between rows of parked cars.

We began conversing with an advocate at the next table. When he learned that my wife was a barrister, he kindly offered to show us around the neighbouring court building.

We spent well over an hour sitting in various court rooms. Most of these had two layers of glass screens, separating the judges and the court officials from the rest of the room: a covid precaution.

Several things impressed my wife as being different from what happens in British courtrooms. First, the plaintiffs are permitted to speak directly with the judges, rather than via intermediaries such as barristers. Secondly, the judges seemed to be handed the papers of a case at the moment it was about to be heard, rather than in advance. Thirdly, each judge was able to switch seamlessly between fluent Gujarati, Hindustani, and English. Also, they made decisions far more rapidly than their counterparts in the UK.

After our fascinating visit to the court house, our host and a charming advocate from his firm invited us to return to the court and the Club to celebrate Republic Day on the following morning, the 26th of January 2023. We accepted, and I will describe the events in another essay.

Our visit to the vibrant Gujarat Club proved far more exciting than we had anticipated. What was once a place where mill owners rubbed shoulders with British officers and officials, where Patel first met Gandhi, is now a congenial place where advocates meet, converse, read, and relax.

Art deco discovered

Posted on by
Reply

BOMBAY IS RICH in fine examples of buildings in the art deco style, which flourished roughly between the end of WW1 and the end of the 1930s. There is a good collection of buildings in this style along Marine Drive in Bombay, the Oval Maidan, and elsewhere in the city. London has some fine examples of structures that exhibit features of this kind of decorative style, but, apart from along a stretch of the A4 road, there are few concentrations of art deco buildings in London, such as can be found in Bombay. In London, the art deco buildings are mostly scattered around the city.

At the end of December 2021, we were walking with friends along the bank of the Thames between the London Apprentice pub at Isleworth and Richmond Bridge when I spotted a row of houses built in the art deco style. I had never seen them before. They line the south side of Park House Gardens in Twickenham. The detached house nearest the river, number 66, is larger and more attractive than the others in the street. The rest of the art deco residences on the street are rather mundane pairs of semi-detached homes, constructed to a pattern that I have seen elsewhere in London’s suburbs. Most of them have curved art deco period Crittall windows, which have panes of glass framed in metal rather than wood.

Park House Gardens was laid out in the early 1930s when:

“…gravel pits were filled in with, according to the local people, rubble and other material from the foundations of the Old Hotel Cecil in the Strand. The first houses were then built in Park House Gardens at prices of up to £1600 for semi-detached with garages, about the price of a garage today.” (www.twickenhampark.co.uk/a-brief-history.html)

The Cecil Hotel was in the Strand. Of its many guests, one was Mahatma Gandhi.

Another source (https://haveyoursay.citizenspace.com/richmondce/easttwickenham-spd/supporting_documents/East%20Twickenham%20SPD_Oct%2015.pdf) dates the houses differently:
“The buildings are semi-detached with Art Deco details though they do not appear to have been built until c. 1950s.”

Apart from the above information, I have found nothing else about these art deco style houses and would love to learn more.

Mahatma Gandhi in Hampstead

Posted on by
Reply

WHEN I USED TO visit Hampstead with my parents in the early 1960s, we always walked past a place that intrigued me when I was a youngster. It was the still standing Hampstead Quaker Meeting House, which has a lovely front garden. The latter is overlooked by its neighbour, the late 18th centuryMansfield Cottage, which in the 1960s housed a tearoom or restaurant. The Meeting House with art nouveau (Arts and Crafts) features was built in about 1907 to the designs of Fred Rowntree (1860-1927). According to James D Hunt in his detailed book “Gandhi in London”, Mohandas K Gandhi (1869-1948), the future Mahatma, spoke in this meeting house on the 13th of October 1909:

“… perhaps travelling there by the recently opened underground line … The Society of Friends (Quakers) were not at this time much interested in Indian affairs … The 1909 meeting was sponsored by the Hampstead Peace and Arbitration Society”

The speech, as recorded by Robert Payne in his “The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi”, was entitled “East and West” and outlined the evils of the British occupation of India and the sufferings of Indians in South Africa. I knew nothing of this or about the house when we used to stroll down Heath Street.