How Battersea Gave The UK ‘Its Own Barack Obama’Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United Kingdom on 2018-01-30 04:01Z by Steven |
How Battersea Gave The UK ‘Its Own Barack Obama’
Londonist
2017-03-21
 John Richard Archer began his mayoralty with a cheeky dig at his detractors |
He has been described as Britain’s Barack Obama. Except John Richard Archer was elected to power almost a century before the 44th US president. And his seat wasn’t in Washington DC, but Battersea, London.
Born in Liverpool in 1863, Archer’s rise to political stardom was by way of being a naval man, medical student and photographer. In the early 1900s he set up a photography studio on Battersea Park Road. Ironically, it’s said he didn’t allow photographs taken of himself without consent, leading to some papers purposefully publishing dated images of him.
Voted onto Battersea’s council in 1906, Archer was elected Mayor of Battersea on 10 November 1913. He won by a single vote; the margin may have been slim, but the result was monumental. (Though the first mayor in London to be black, Archer was not the first in the UK. That was Allen Glaser Minns of Thetford, Norfolk, elected in 1904.)
Not everyone was pleased for Archer; during his campaign, and following his victory, he was battered with the kind of racist abuse and cockamamie conspiracy theories that will sound familiar to those who’ve followed politics in recent years…
Read the entire article here.