Connecting Hoxton Design Consultation

Celestine Edwards (1857/8–1894)

Born in Dominica in 1857/8 and descended from enslaved Africans. He became a renowned anti-colonial activist and anti-racist writer and the first known Black editor in the UK as the founder and editor of the anti-racist journal ‘Fraternity’. He confronted the white supremacy of British imperialists through his writings and speeches.

Celestine Edwards lived and worked in Hackney, during the latter years of his short life, where he was also a popular speaker in Victoria Park.

Unfortunately for Edwards, a period of poor health in 1894 saw him return to Dominica where he died the same year. Upon learning of his death, the Shoreditch Observer wrote ‘no speaker in Victoria Park on Sundays (and elsewhere) was more popular than the above named gentleman, and the news of his early death, which occurred in the West Indies on July 20th, will be received with the greatest sorrow by thousands’.

Scholars now believe the anti-racist book Hard Talk to be his seminal work, published just before his death aged just 36 years old.

Claude McKay (1890–1948)

Born in Jamaica, McKay’s maternal family were enslaved from Madagascar. He published two volumes of dialect poetry, Songs of Jamaica which were pioneering at the time. He moved to New York and joined the Black Intellectual Group supporting international socialism (seeking better social and economic conditions in America). In direct response white supremacist terrorism and racial riots that occurred across the US in 1919 coined ‘The Red Summer’ that he wrote If We Must Die. This was his boldest attempt to use his art as a writer to respond to “the desperate conditions of his people with an unsparing, unapologetic condemnation of those responsible for the violence against them”.

McKay lived in London between 1919–1921, where he developed a Shoreditch connection attending the International Socialist Club at 28 East Road, Shoreditch, and writing for and editing Sylvia Pankhurst’s newspaper The Workers Dreadnought.

Kay Beauchamp (1899–1992)

Kay Beauchamp’s historic papers (held at the Peoples History Museum) cover her involvement in the Movement for Colonial Freedom/Liberation, and her papers on anti-racism and anti-imperialism, as well as her activities in Hackney organisations.

She was at the warehouse meeting in Tabernacle Street, Shoreditch on December 31st 1929, which established the Daily Worker and was the first women editor. She acted as liaison officer to the Cypriot Communists’ London branch of AKEL (Progressive Party of Working People) and served as International Secretary of the Communist Party. Kay was active from the start in the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), founded in 1954, and worked with many future leaders of emergent Africa.

Over several decades, she maintained her commitment to local campaigning activities, first in Finsbury, where she was briefly a communist councillor, then in Hackney. A copy of her pamphlet Black citizens is in Hackney Archives.

Kwaku Takui (died 1737)

Leader of the Antigua revolt of 1736, also known Prince Klass. 

Kwaku is considered a national hero in Antigua. This name is relevant to the removal of the Tyssen in Hoxton as the family were absentee plantation owners where successive generations of the Tyssen family inherited enslaved people to work for their profit. Kwaku was tortured and executed due to revered influence over the enslaved population.

May Scott (1911–1990)

Born in Wigan, Scott was a Quaker and pacifist who dedicated her adult life to the working class communities of Hoxton.

She arrived in London during World War Two and worked at Hoxton Hall from 1944, then managed by the Quaker Trust (previously the Bedford Institute). She started as assistant warden, 'organizing secretary and club leader'. In 1957 she became warden and served until 1974. So strongly did she become identified with Hoxton Hall that the hall was generally referred to in the area as 'May Scott's'.

In a 1967 report it was recorded that our Warden, May Scott, has built up a Neighbourhood Centre which caters for people of all ages… there are clubs for children, teenagers and old people; there is a playroom five mornings a week where small children are looked after while their mothers go shopping… there are outings to places of interest and summer holidays for children.

Ros Bacon recalled, of the 1960s, that 'May Scott was an incredibly patient and kind person’.'

Importantly for the legacy of Hoxton Hall today Scott presided over its rediscovery of theatre and in 1963 marked its centenary with an exhibition on the history of music hall, mounted by the British Music Hall Society. Music-hall performances were revived in the years following.

May Scott then welcomed a group of teachers involved in contemporary theatre. These enthusiasts formed, in 1970, an amateur group, Nevern Square Theatre, which at first used Hoxton Hall as a rehearsal space, and then mounted productions in the theatre, notably Victorian melodramas and a version of Child of the Jago. A team of seven generated their productions communally and one member was to take after Scott's retirement in 1974, continuing its development as a theatre and arts provision for young people and the local community enabled by Scott foundations.

Robert Wedderburn (1762–1835)

Born in Jamaica to an enslaved mother. Wedderburn’s father was a Scottish plantation owner. He came to England to escape plantation cruelty and racism and became a radical abolitionist, and revolutionary socialist.

Working as a tailor (by trade), in the Shoreditch area he was known across London as a writer and campaigner, often targeted by the authorities for his campaigns for freedom of the press. His death was registered in nearby Bethnal Green.

Sara Wesker (1901–1971)

Wesker was a British trade union leader and organiser. She was active in the East End and Hackney's garment industry in the first half of the 20th century. Wesker was also a communist, often working with or alongside the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Wesker was Jewish and grew up in Spitalfields, in a tenement in east London which housed mostly working-class Jewish families. As a young woman, Wesker worked in the clothing industry as a machinist, and led her first strike at the Goodman trouser factory she worked at in 1926. This all-female group of colleagues demanded a farthing for every pair of trousers made.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Wesker participated in and organised many strikes in Hackney including at Rego and Polikoff factories in Shoreditch and Mare Street, Hackney and the famous Simpsons Clothing Factory at 92–100 Stoke Newington Road.

Wesker spoke Yiddish as well as English, meaning she could communicate well with older women workers. In 1936, Wesker was at the Battle of Cable Street, a clash between the British Union of Fascists and anti-Nazi forces in Bethnal Green, Stepney, Shoreditch and Hackney. Communists, Jews, trade unions and Irish protestors joined together to oppose Oswald Mosley's march through Jewish communities.

Sara Wesker is the aunt of playwright and writer Arnold Wesker. The character ‘Sarah’ in his play Chicken Soup and Barley is based on his aunt.