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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 569
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WCL 569 Sep 2007
Speakers' Corner
(by Ted Wheatley)
Speakers' Corner is on the north-east corner of Hyde Park in London. Every Sunday crowds collect and listen to speakers talking about saving your soul, the Islamic faith, socialism, black power or just personal rants. I speak from the "One World" stand.
Hyde Park and Speakers' Corner go back a long way. Crowds have collected there on Sundays for over 700 years. It was the place of public executions. The gallows stood there from 1388. At first men were executed singly, but the volume of malefactors increased so greatly that a vast triangular gallows was erected in 1571 so that up to 27 men could be hanged at a time. This was always done on Sundays or public holidays and attracted thousands of people.
It was the custom for those about to die to make a final speech. We don't know whether everyone took-up the opportunity. Certainly some apologised for their crimes and others protested their innocence. It did provide an outlet for criticism of the government, while it pointedly reminded everyone of what happened immediately after such criticism. So was Speakers' Corner born.
The tradition was for the hangman to be allowed to prepare the body for burial and keep the victim's clothes. This did lead to one strange incident. Three men were due to die together and the cart duly delivered them to the hangman, but suddenly a horseman arrived with a royal pardon. The hangman was peeved at losing three sets of clothes so he stripped the men completely and kept their clothes. The men had to find their way home naked.
It used to be a pretty rough place. stalls selling hatpins, orange-sellers and pickpockets al) crowded together. "The stench of liquor, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions conquers the air and we are stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park", Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth.
In 1960 Denis Lovelace and I set up our stand and put the case for world government on behalf of what is now the Association of World Federalists. At first it was every Sunday afternoon, but then it moved into the mornings. When my family moved away from London I could only manage to come on the first Sunday morning of each month. Various other speakers have joined us, but it was a bit of a surprise in 1984 when our 14 year-old son Daniel asked to speak. He was rather good and has been speaking ever since. Our stand is for "One World" and makes the case that we are all world citizens now and need some form of world government created through making the United Nations more democratic and giving it the funds to do the job. We have been going 46 years so far.
In recent years the crowds at Speakers Corner have got smaller, but television cameras are taking the message all over the world. In all those 46 years I estimate that we have been heard live by one million people. One TV crew alone, C-span, a cable channel from America, said that every time they used one film they made of us at Speakers Corner it was viewed by a million people; one regular viewer was apparently Bill Clinton. We are currently televised about once a year, although it may be either a brief or a more extended appearance. Camera crews come from all over the world, but so far never from Britain.
One of the other side-benefits is that sometimes one meets interesting people and other things develop. A contact at Speakers Corner led to me setting up the stand in the market square of Biberach in southern Germany. One lady in the audience was a headteacher and this led to both Carole and I giving a series of talks at her school. A passing contact with a visiting university professor from Japan led to an invitation to make a lecture tour of Japan, speaking to conferences, clubs and universities; all was paid for by the Japan Foundation, a quasi-government organisation and organised by the Japanese World Federalists.
It is always good to make a case for a World Parliament to be added to the United Nations and no doubt some seeds get planted in some minds.
If a television camera takes the message further that is all to the good. But there is another benefit from the 'One World' stand that is not immediately obvious. It takes the internationalist pulse of global society.
When Denis Lovelace and I started holding forth in 1960 it was to a white, mainly British audience. The world has now shrunk. Most peole today are tourists, and British people come in all colours. The audience is in many ways representative of the whole world. Eighty percent are from overseas. The faces in front of us are black, white, brown and yellow. They do not represent the poor of the world; the poot are denied the money to become tourists. Yet our audience is in many ways a microcosm of our global society.
A little story illustrates this. One day Carole and I were driving to a theatre in London. A taxi drew up alongside and the driver started shouting at me as we cruised up Shaftsbuty Avenue. I assumed I had cut him up or that my wheel was falling off. "Armwivya, Armwivya!" he kept shouting at me. "Armwivya". It seemed some foreign language until we came to the traffic lights. "I'm with you! I'm with you! Heard you at Speakers Corner. Just wanted you to know I'm with you!"
The ground is becoming more fertile. The time for harvest is getting near.
Ted Wheatley
[This piece is reprinted from The Federalist Debate, July 2007]
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