Dare to Be a Daniel Read Online Free

State for Industry, I tried to devise policies that would help small businessmen make their way with the minimum of difficulty, for they cannot employ a battery of lawyers and tax advisers, as the huge multinational corporations do – and they have to struggle with the administration and bureaucracy themselves, which can be most oppressive.
    F ATHER’S SIDE
    It is said of Julius Benn that when, as a teacher, he took his students to an Anglican church one Sunday, the vicar attacked Martin Luther in his sermon. This enraged my great-grandfather, who rose from his pew and said to his little flock, ‘Boys, we leave the church at once,’ and they marched out of the church together. For this – and because he had lost money backing an unsuccessful invention – he was asked to leave the school and, with all their possessions in a wheelbarrow or pram, the family had to find lodgings. Julius later moved his family to London to the Mile End Road, where he worked as a newsagent and became the minister of the Gravel Pit Chapel in Hackney.
    One of his children, John Benn (my grandfather), described the ‘reduced circumstances’ in which they lived. John went to work on his first day as an office boy in the City of London when he was eleven, wearing his mother’s pair of ‘Sunday boots’. Suffering some of the humiliations that many office boys experience, he wrote about this in his autobiography
The Joys of Adversity
.
    John found himself employed by Lawes Randall and Co., a wholesale furniture company in City Road, as a junior invoice clerk. But he had a talent for art and practised drawing, inspired by the draughtsmen and designers, and later became a designer for the firm. By 1880 he had become a junior partner, and this enabled him to establish a little illustrated trade paper of his own, called
The Cabinet Maker
. This struggling business kept him going, despite regular financial difficulties, and he earned extra money later by lecturing, during which he would draw lightning-quick sketches of prominent figures; he also drew sketches of his parliamentary colleagues after he had been elected as a Liberal MP in 1892. At his peak John was earning £2,000 per year from lectures. One of his sketches showed housing in Bethnal Green:

    His real love was London and he had a desire to improve the lot of the Londoner. He was a member of the first London County Council, which met in 1889 with a massive 2:1 Progressive majority against the Moderates (Conservatives).
    Writing of that occasion, John Benn said, ‘The Progressives were already full of great schemes, mostly framed to secure a millennium for London by return of post. The Reformers, fresh from the polls, hotly resented any obstruction to their wishes. They were indeed in deadly earnest.’ John was a genuine entrepreneur, combining enterprise with a passionate belief in municipal trading, including the common management and ownership of the tramways, gas, water and electricity. The story of the introduction of electric trams, and Grandfather’s role, is most interesting.
    The Progressives’ strategy was to buy out the many privately owned horse-drawn tram companies, whose operations brought chaos to London’s transport system, and to introduce electric trams. Despite stubborn resistance, the first LCC electric trams were inaugurated in May 1903 and ran until 1952. John Benn believed that the revenue from fares could be used to reduce rates and alleviate the ‘disgraceful conditions’ of the poor; tramway employees received a minimum wage (twenty-five shillings) for a maximum sixty-hour week.
    My grandfather fought a notable battle against the ‘surface’ or ‘stud’ system for trams, whereby connection was made between the tram and a wire contact in the road. The system was introduced by the Moderates and was supposedly cheaper, but had caused the death of a horse and cars to catch fire, because many of the studs were found to be live. John spoke about ‘the