4. Axel Munthe

The wild cruel beast is not behind the bars of the cage. He is in front of it.

-- Axel Munthe

During the 1930s, Club Row Market gained a reputation for being a centre for sharp practice. Britain was still recovering from the horrors of the First World War, which were compounded by the punishing economic impact of the Great Depression. While the rich economized, those living in the slums starved. Spitalfields, with its many slums and reputation for being a centre of criminal activity, fell deeper into an economic crisis. Yet Club Row Market thrived.

The 1930s in Europe was a time of great political upheaval, and London became a shelter for refugees and political dissidents escaping persecution in Central and Eastern Europe. The Brick Lane area, which had long been home to thousands of immigrants, became a hub for the spread of socialist activism. Future socialist leaders such as Lenin and Stalin had held party meetings and mass gatherings in squares in East London near Club Row, rallying Londoners to their cause. These activities contributed to the East End’s already rowdy and colourful atmosphere and had a major impact on the markets there as well.

As cockfights and other forms of animal abuse fell out of fashion and became the objects of vigorous campaigning, Club Row came under growing domestic and international scrutiny. The market had since its inception been a place that tolerated cruelty: birds were routinely blinded and shoved into tiny cages and paint and other crude tricks were used to conceal scars on dogs. Alan Bell of the Saturday Review noted that, "considering how brisk the trade at Bethnal Green and other marts, curiously few wild birds are seen in English homes", his explanation being that the vast majority of birds died in the first week of captivity (Brutality or Bird Seed?, 1933). Despite these horrors, the RSPCA or the RSPB had staged few formal interventions by this point. In its Annual Report for 1904, the RSPB noted that it lacked any legal authority and that regulations were already in place.

Enter Axel Munthe. Born in 1857, this Swedish doctor to the Swedish Royal Family is today known as the author of The Story of San Michele (1929), one of the twentieth century’s best selling memoirs. Munthe was a passionate animal lover and campaigner, who spent most of his life on the fabled Italian island of Capri, where he owned a pet baboon, an owl, and several dogs.

On a trip to London in the early 1930s, Munthe stopped by Club Row Market. As a keen bird lover, he was outraged by the sight of limbless, diseased, and asphyxiated birds that greeted him. His experience formed the basis of a petition that he submitted to Benito Mussolini, then dictator of Italy, to turn the whole island of Capri into a bird sanctuary. In his letter to Mussolini, he cited Club Row Market as a prime example of the barbaric cruelty towards birds that continued to be tolerated in the present. Munthe’s petition was successful and, thanks to support from the Queen of Sweden, Capri was officially designated a bird sanctuary, which it remains to this day.

Munthe’s campaign was documented and praised in many newspapers, including in Britain, where his scathing description of Club Row Market caused outrage at the cruelties being carried out there. Pressure mounted for the British government to impose greater restrictions on Club Row. Just one month after Munthe’s intervention, the Protection of Birds Bill was submitted to the House of Lords by Lord Buckmaster. Its main clause was to outlaw the trapping of wild birds, most of which had made their way to Club Row, where a miserable fate awaited them. In relation to Club Row, Lord Howard of Penrith even went so far as to compare this trade in birds to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

In his article in The Spectator in 1933, Lord Howard declared: "In the case of the slave trade in human beings, the organized slave-dealers went out into the forests and jungles of Africa, caught their victims, or bought them from native chiefs, carried them captive to the coast; there piled them into dark holds of schooners, often without enough food or drink and always without enough air, so that a large percentage invariably died on the way across the Atlantic. The wretched captives were so cheaply obtained that the death of a large number before they came to the market was a matter of little moment. So it is to-day with our wild birds." The comparison may have been extreme but opposition to cruelty to birds was on the rise at the time. Even so, there were some who objected to this Bill, saying that it "impaired an innocent recreation", referring to the trapping of birds (Bell, 1933). Although the proposed law was never passed in the House of Commons, tighter restrictions on Club Row Market followed.