What Islington pubs did the 1905 Bolshevik Congress meet in?

Which Islington pubs did the 1905 Bolshevik Congress meet in?

This post may appear to be rather more niche (even) than many of the other posts on this blog.

It focuses on which Islington pubs the 1905 Bolshevik Congress met in (actually since this relates to socialists and pubs perhaps it isn’t quite so niche)

On Saturday evening I received several WhatsApp messages querying what pub the 1905 Bolshevik Congress met in.

I suspect the specific reason for the messages related to a link to the below circulating on social media.

Robert Henderson was a curator of the Russian section of the British Library and his knowledge of Lenin’s several periods in London is unparalleled.

The 1905 Congress is of wider interest because while it was a meeting of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) in practice some of the Menshevik wing of the Party did not attend but held a breakaway meeting in Geneva. This meant that it was in effect the first Congress where delegates of what became the Bolshevik Party were in a majority, although far from all those attending were Bolsheviks and some were in fact Mensheviks or other currents.

Lenin did chair and speak at most of the sessions.

According to Henderson these sessions began on 19^th April at the Crown and Woolpack in St John St, Angel, Islington and ran, off and on, into May. They changed location quite a few times. The other Islington pub where the 1905 Congress certainly gathered was the Hare and Hounds at 181 Upper St (more or less opposite Islington Town Hall).

The Crown and Woolpack which is now a hairdressers, became known because a secret policeman gained admittance and hid in a cupboard to report on proceedings.

The puzzle is that there are numbers of references on-line (including BBC and Morning Star reports) that the pub the Bolsheviks met in was the Three Johns. This is just around the corner from the (ex) Crown and Woolpack in White Lion St and still functions as a pub (when it is allowed to).Henderson makes no reference to it in his book.

It may be that it was another of the several locations the 1905 Congress did actually meet in but I can as of yet find no hard evidence on that.

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party congresses were held in London in 1905 and 1907, with Lenin in attendance on both occasions. Henderson quotes Victor Sebestyen’s assessment of the 1905 congress – in his recent book Lenin the Dictator – as ‘probably the most pointless of all the various leftist conferences before 1917’. Henderson disagrees, but such gatherings did take place under challenging circumstances. The head of the Russian secret police claimed that a third of the delegates at the 1907 congress were in the pay of his service. Russian spies weren’t the only ones paying attention: Scotland Yard was in the game too, and at the 1905 congress, held in an upstairs room of the Crown and Woolpack in Clerkenwell, one of its Special Branch men hid in a cupboard to eavesdrop, though he probably knew no Russian. Despite the revolutionaries’ precautions against infiltration by unauthorised persons, the same man got into another meeting under heavy disguise and was able to report that ‘a vote on revolution’ had been carried by 21 to seven.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, extract from review of Robert Henderson, Lenin in London (2019) London Review of Books 7^th January 2021