London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
There’s a house in Primrose Hill that changed the world.
Not Buckingham Palace.
Not Downing Street.
Not the Houses of Parliament.
A handsome Victorian villa in Regent’s Park Road – where, for 25 years, one of history’s most extraordinary double lives unfolded.
By then Friedrich Engels had retired.
Retired at the age of forty-nine.
Comfortably rich.
Fond of fine claret. Particularly Château Margaux. An enthusiastic horseman. A member of smart London clubs. Impeccably dressed.
And every waking hour devoted to the destruction of capitalism.
You couldn’t make it up.
Engels was the capitalist who financed communism.
Without him there would almost certainly have been no Karl Marx as we know him.
Certainly no Das Kapital.
Certainly no completed Marx.
That alone earns him a place in London’s story.
He was born in 1820, the eldest son of a wealthy textile manufacturer in what is now Germany. His parents expected him to inherit the family business.
Instead, while still a teenager, he began writing fiery radical journalism under a false name.
His father probably wished he’d taken up gambling instead.
Then came Manchester.
In 1842 the family packed him off to England to work in the firm of Ermen & Engels.
The cure was supposed to be commerce.
It had exactly the opposite effect.
Manchester was then the greatest industrial city on earth.
It was also one of the grimmest.
Engels walked everywhere.
He deliberately explored the districts respectable citizens avoided.
He talked to factory workers.
Visited overcrowded courts.
Read government reports.
Interviewed Chartists.
His guide to much of this hidden Manchester was an Irish factory worker named Mary Burns.
She became the love of his life.
Out of those walks came one of the most influential books ever written about industrial Britain: The Condition of the Working Class in England.
It wasn’t just a catalogue of misery.
It was an argument that the modern industrial city had created a new force in history.
The working class.
Karl Marx read it with fascination.
Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that Engels helped convert Marx from philosopher into economist.
The two men had first met briefly.
Then they met properly in Paris in 1844.
They talked for days.
By the end of it they had found their intellectual soulmate.
They would remain collaborators for the next forty years.
And here’s the thing.
Marx supplied the genius.
Engels supplied the cash.
Marx was chronically broke.
Hopeless with money.
Creditors hovered like vultures.
Furniture disappeared into pawnshops.
Children went without.
Again and again Engels quietly reached for his cheque book.
It’s estimated that at times he gave away half his annual income simply to keep the Marx family afloat.
Imagine supporting another household for twenty years.
That’s what Engels did.
To earn that money he endured what he regarded as a kind of daily imprisonment.
From 1850 until 1869 he returned to Manchester and worked in the family cotton business.
Eventually he became a partner.
His income rose to around £3,000 a year, a huge sum.
By day he mixed with manufacturers, bankers and businessmen.
He belonged to the Albert Club and the Manchester Athenaeum.
He hunted with the Cheshire Hunt.
Then he’d go home to Mary Burns in Ardwick and spend his evenings plotting revolution.
It’s one of history’s most astonishing balancing acts.
When he finally retired in 1869, he escaped to London.
Now came the happiest years of his life.
He settled in Regent’s Park Road, only a few doors from Marx.
The two old friends became almost inseparable.
Marx was forever tramping round the corner to see Engels.
Their daughters drifted between the two households.
Visitors arrived from across Europe.
Socialists.
Trade unionists.
Political refugees.
Young intellectuals.
Everybody wanted to meet “The General.”
That was Engels’ nickname.
He’d acquired it because of his encyclopaedic knowledge of military history.
Mention a battle in Hungary.
An uprising in Poland.
A campaign in the Crimea.
He could discuss troop movements, artillery and logistics until breakfast.
London suited him perfectly.
The British Museum Reading Room became part of his working life, just as it had been Marx’s.
The capital of the world’s largest empire also became the headquarters of the international socialist movement.
Letters poured into Primrose Hill from every corner of Europe.
Engels answered hundreds of them.
He became mentor, adviser, referee and father figure to a generation of socialists.
Then, in 1883, Marx died.
Standing at Highgate Cemetery, Engels delivered one of history’s great funeral speeches.
He declared that just as Darwin had discovered the law of development in nature, Marx had discovered the law of development in human history.
It was a magnificent piece of Victorian rhetoric.
But his biggest task still lay ahead.
Marx had left behind mountains of chaotic manuscripts.
Boxes upon boxes.
Half-finished chapters.
Scrawled notes.
Contradictions.
Fragments.
Engels patiently sorted the lot.
Without him, volumes two and three of Das Kapital would never have appeared.
He spent the last decade of his life editing his friend’s unfinished masterpiece.
It was an extraordinary final act of loyalty.
Engels himself died at Regent’s Park Road on this day, August 5th, 1895.
Cancer of the throat.
His funeral took place at Woking Crematorium, still something of a novelty in Victorian England.
Then came his final request.
He didn’t want a grave.
He wanted his ashes scattered into the sea.
So friends carried them to the white cliffs at Beachy Head.
There they cast them into the Channel.
The man who had spent his life crossing borders disappeared into open water.
Today, if you walk along Regent’s Park Road you’ll find the blue plaque.
It marks the house.
But perhaps not the achievement.
Because Engels wasn’t simply Marx’s assistant.
He wasn’t merely the man who paid the bills.
He was a formidable thinker in his own right, the author of one of the greatest accounts ever written of industrial Britain, and one of London’s most remarkable adopted sons.
Not bad for a cotton manufacturer who thought paradise was a bottle of Château Margaux.
See you tomorrow.