BIOGRAPHIES

ALFRED BARTON

Alfred Barton was born on 30^th July 1868 at Kempton in Bedfordshire, the son of a foundry laborer Henry Barton and his wife Eliza, née Savill. Self-educated, he became well informed in philosophy and history, especially classical history. He was able to read several languages. Not much is known of his early years in Bedfordshire. His first job was in a public library at the age of 12. He left home around 1890 to go to Manchester. Here he became a member of the Socialist League, and already had strong anarchist tendencies. He worked first as a clerk and then in Rylands Library. He threw himself into the work of the League which began an intensive propaganda campaign. Active alongside him was Herbert Stockton (an odd job man and later an industrial assurance agent according to George Cores), who ran a drapers shop in Levenshulme, and his brother Ernest.

Very active during the free speech fight led by the Manchester anarchists (1893–1894) during which he was arrested. Barton married Eleanor ‘Nellie’ Stockton (born 1872/1873) sister to Herbert and Ernest in 1894. She was one of many young women who supported the open air meetings. She was a very prominent member of the Women’s Cooperative Guild and like her brothers described herself as an anarchist-communist. The Bartons moved to Sheffield in 1897. Here Alf joined the Independent Labor Party and started moving away from his radical positions. He gained a reputation in Sheffield as ‘The Monolith Orator’. He had by now abandoned anarchism, joined the Shop Assistants Union and was its delegate to the Trades Council. In 1907 he was elected councilor for Brightside Ward, but lost the seat in 1910. Discontented with the Labor Party, he joined the British Socialist Party in 1911, issuing the pamphlet The Universal Strike, which harked back to his anarchist ideas, in the same year. He regained Brightside in 1913 as a B.S.P. candidate and without Trades Council support and held it until 1920. He supported World War One. After a brief period with the Communist Party he rejoined the I.L.P. After two unsuccessful parliamentary contests he rejoined the Trades Council in 1926, becoming an alderman in 1929. He died on 9^th December 1933. Nellie eventually emigrated to New Zealand where she died in Papatoetoe on 9^th March 1960.

CYRIL BELL

Cyril Bell, medical student and lecturer, who gives the information in Commonweal that he was a “mountain devil” from mid-Wales, was active in Scotland, Sheffield and London. He spoke in Edinburgh in 1891 for the anniversary of the Chicago martyrs. Later he was secretary of Louise Michel’s Free School in Fitzrovia, London.

LOUISA SARAH BEVINGTON

Louisa Sarah Bevington was born into a Quaker family on 18^th May 1845, in St John’s Hill, Battersea. The occupation of her father was described as a ‘gentleman’. She was the oldest of eight children, seven of whom were girls. She started writing verse at an early age.

Not long after she published her second volume of poems in 1882, she went to Germany and in 1883 married a Munich artist Ignatz Felix Guggenberger. The marriage lasted less than eight years, and she returned to London in 1890. She began to frequent anarchist circles, restarting her career under her maiden name. By the mid-1890s, Bevington knew many London anarchists and was recognized as an anarchist poet. She probably became acquainted with anarchism through meeting Charlotte Wilson, who had jointly founded the anarchist paper Freedom in 1886.

Rejecting the tactics of the bomb and dynamite being espoused by some anarchists in Britain, she associated with the anarchist paper Liberty (subtitled A Journal of Anarchist Communism), edited by the tailor James Tochatti from January 1894. She wrote many articles and poems for it, as well as for other anarchist papers, like the Torch, edited by the two young nieces, Helen and Olivia, of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She was involved in efforts to set up an organization, the anarchist-communist Alliance and wrote an Anarchist Manifesto for it, which was distributed on 1^st May 1895 (the Alliance appears not to have survived long). She translated Louise Michel’s essay on the Paris Commune into English and was a good friend of the author.

At the age of 50 in 1895, Bevington was still active but was suffering from bad health, namely heart disease that had been afflicting her for years. She managed to write some articles for Liberty in that year and her last collection of poems for Liberty Press.

She died on 28^th November 1895 in Lechmere, as the result of dropsy and mitral disease of the heart. Her funeral at Finchley cemetery was attended by her old comrade James Tochatti, Kropotkin, and the Rossetti sisters, among others.

GUSTAVE BROCHER

Gustave Brocher was born in Delle, France in 1850. He was raised by his father in a Fourierist tradition. Despite this he studied theology and became a priest but appears to have rejected this, and then went off to Russia as a private teacher. He went to London in 1875, where he eventually joined the Vpered! group and became a socialist.

In 1879 he became an anarchist under the influence of Paul Brousse and co-edited the newspaper Le Travail (Labor) between 1880 and 1881. He became active in the Socialist League and anarchist circles in London. He chaired a committee to organize a London Anarchist Congress in 1881, and he represented the Iowa Icarians at the International Social Revolutionary and Anarchist Congress on 14^th to 19^th July 1881.

He met Victorine Rouchy there, and they later got married in 1887 and adopted five orphans of the Paris Commune. He contributed articles to Henry Seymour’s monthly paper the Anarchist (1885–1887). With Frank Kitz he published an English language Freiheit in defense of Johann Most, and seven issues of this appeared from April to June 1881.

Hammersmith Socialist Society minutes report that he lectured to the branch twice in 1885 on ‘The Phalanstere’ and ‘The Icarian Communities’. The August 1885 Commonweal reports his singing of the old song from the French Revolution, ‘La Carmagnole,’ at the first annual League conference. Between 1885 and 1897 he published three French translations and readers in London. In 1891 he moved to Lausanne in Switzerland. Later he returned for a while to London. An 1893 issue of Freedom lists him as a speaker, and he may well have been the Brocher at Mary Mowbray’s funeral in 1893 who spoke as a representative of a ‘French Anarchist Section’ of the League.

He taught at the academy of Fiume in Italy from 1911 to 1914. He contributed to many anarchist periodicals and publications like the Encyclopédie Anarchiste and, as a militant freethinker from the 1880s on, to numerous secularist papers. He was editor of La Libre Pensée (Free-thought) from 1918 until his death.

He wrote several books between 1915–1918 in France on Russian topics, and edited selections of a Dictionaire des Athées (Dictionary of Atheists). His pamphlet Absurdités et atrocités de la Bible (Editions de L’Idée Libre) appeared in 1926.

NANNIE FLORENCE DRYHURST (MRS DRYHURST)

Hannah Ann Robinson was born in Dublin on 17^th June 1856. She was the daughter of Alexander Robinson a dyer and Emily née Egan. Her sisters called her Nannie, and she decided to change her name to Nannie Florence. This was because she had a friend called Florence who died young. After her father’s death in the mid-1870s she became a school governess in Ireland and then London where she looked after Nellie Tenison an Irish doctor’s daughter. The doctor may have sexually harassed her, as indicated in letters, and she suddenly returned to Ireland.

Doctor Tenison was the family doctor of the Dryhurst family, and this may have been how she met Alfred Robert Dryhurst, usually known as Roy. They became engaged in 1882 and were married in August 1884. There seems to have been some ambivalence from Nannie towards the relationship, which had been conducted for a long time in the form of letters. Nevertheless the marriage took place. A year later a daughter, Norah, was born in London, and three years later another daughter, Sylvia (who as Sylvia Lynd was to become a poet and novelist).

Nannie was passionate about the Irish independence struggle. She gravitated towards the group around Charlotte Wilson and became involved in the anarchist movement from the late 1880s. She had broken with the Fabians and became an anarchist-communist and atheist. She became a regular correspondent for Freedom from the beginning. As William Wess wrote in a memoir in Freedom of January 1931: “speaking, debating, handing out bills, or going around with the collection plate; nothing was too much or too little for her to do.” She often edited the paper whilst Charlotte Wilson was away, as well as “writing up notes and comments on contemporary events, corresponding with comrades all over the country; getting them to send up reports of propaganda; putting ship-shape all their notices and reports” (Wess). She spoke French, German, and Irish Gaelic and was an experienced translator (she was also an accomplished artist and painted Christmas cards to order). This was of great use in her translation of articles for Freedom, and she translated Kropotkin’s book The Great French Revolution into English. At the beginning of the 1890s she replaced Wilson as editor for a short while.

She taught at the International School, the anarchist free school set up at 19 Fitzroy Square in London in the early 1890s by the exemplary French anarchist and Communard Louise Michel, working alongside her and Charlotte Wilson, Agnes Henry and Cyril Bell. In 1897 she was active in giving support to Spanish anarchist refugees fleeing from savage repression. She visited and financially supported the anarchist colony at Clousden Hill, near Newcastle, which existed from 1895 to 1902.

She began a long affair with the journalist Henry (H.W.) Nevinson whom she first met in February 1892. This relationship finally collapsed in 1912. It was through her that Nevinson briefly became involved with the Freedom Group and became a close friend of Kropotkin.

In 1906 she became a member of the Georgian Relief Committee, traveling there on fact-finding visits. She learned Georgian from the anarchist associate of Kropotkin, Vladimir Cherkesov, and the following year spoke at an international conference at the Hague on the subjection of Georgia by the Czarist Empire. Her involvement in helping the Georgian cause meant a distancing from editorial work with Freedom. She became honorary secretary of the Nationalities and Subject Races Committee and also returned to her support for Irish independence. She wrote occasional articles on Irish history for the Daily Chronicle and Irish papers. She was a friend of W.B. Yeats and appeared in his play The Land of Heart’s Desire in June 1904. She died in 1930.

She was slight and graceful and was described by the rural writer George Sturt in 1889 as “surprisingly young looking” with high cheekbones, dark eyes and her hair in a coiled plait.

AGNES HENRY

Born in Tipperary, Ireland, in 1850 Agnes Henry was to later inform historian of anarchism Max Nettlau in the questionnaire that he sent to English and foreign anarchists that from her youth she had participated in movements to alleviate suffering.

Most of her life was spent studying kindergarten theory, which she regarded as essentially anarchist. In the 1880s she ran a kindergarten in Trinidad.

In anarchist newspaper Freedom of July 1887 there appeared an article by her arguing against the prohibition of women workers from the pit brow (the 1886 Mines Regulation Bill).

She went for a while to Italy and as a result of her experiences there was able to write an article for Freedom, ‘How Italian Risings are Promoted and Suppressed by the Italian Government’, in July 1891. It would appear that she got to know various leading lights in the Italian anarchist movement like Errico Malatesta and the lawyer Saverio Merlino. In 1890 she translated a collection of fairy tales by the German writer Wilhelm Hauff entitled The Cold Heart. This book was used in many schools.

She participated in an experiment in communal living at 29 Doughty Street, near Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury at the Fellowship House until it closed in 1892. It had been set up by the Fellowship of the New Life, a group which advocated a more ethical approach to life and “the cultivation of a new character in all.” Other members included Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis. The Fabian Society emerged from this group.

She then moved to St Augustine’s Road, Camden. Here Freedom set up office in February 1893 with the printer William Wess, moving there with the type. Freedom’s office was in the damp basement, which had a bad effect on Wess’s health so the composing was moved. Together with Louise Michel she ran the International School in Fitzrovia at 19 Fitzroy Square.

She wrote Women under Socialism in March 1892 and gave a ‘Wednesday lecture’ at the Hall of Science in London on ‘Women’s Position under Anarchy’. She opposed state maternity support.

She was to say: “In anarchism I see the only base for women to escape marriage without love and obligatory maternity and the degrading laws and servile customs to which women of all classes have been subjected for so long.”

In April 1893 she went on a speaking tour to Scotland to promote anarchism.

When Alfred Foster, an unemployed activist and anarchist, was arrested in Peckham in March 1894 she offered to put up bail but was rejected because she was a woman.

In November 1895 she was due to lecture on anarchism to the Birmingham branch of the Independent Labor Party, but this invitation was withdrawn because the Party feared that “she might advocate violence.”

She adopted a young girl Adelaide, with an age variously given as six or eight, whom Nettlau described as “run wild.” This was the daughter of the Italian anarchist Antonio Agresti, who was then able to marry Olive Rossetti and move to Italy (both these former anarchists ended up as avid supporters of Mussolini).

Around this time, in January 1895, she moved to Paris and from June of that year until March 1896 lived in Pont Aven in Brittany, trying to earn a living by teaching and by translating. The Decadent poet Ernest Dowson records encountering Henry and the child there.

She returned to England in April 1896. In a letter in Seed-Time, magazine of the Fellowship, she said that she would be “exceedingly glad” to meet a small family to share a house with her in North Walsham, “if possible in the Associated Home System” that had been adopted by Fellowship House.

She had to move to find a suitable school for the child, which was Suffield Park Girls School in Cromer, which disapproved of competition.

In 1896 she published Anarchist Communism in Relation to State Socialism, put out by James Tochatti’s Liberty Press. In September of the same year she brought out The Probable Evolution of British Socialism Tomorrow.

The same year she was deeply involved in the activities of the Associated Anarchists founded by Carl Quinn, which made an effort to develop effective organization within the British anarchist movement. As a result she moved away from the group around Freedom. Unfortunately the Associated Anarchists were only able to bring out a few issues of their paper Alarm and fell apart within a year.

Also in 1896 she attended the congress of the Second International held in London, acting as a delegate for French syndicalists unable to attend, along with Archie Gorrie, John Bullas, Alf Barton, J. Welsh and John Headley.

In April 1897 a letter from Agnes Henry appeared in the paper of the Independent Labor Party, the Labor Leader, in which she stated that it had almost persuaded her to join the I.L.P. In July she explained that she was now anxious to join it, rather feebly justifying her decision as an anarchist-communist to join a political and parliamentarian party.

George Robertson, an Edinburgh anarchist, was to reply that “you can take part in no political contest without renouncing your claim to Anarchism.” The Italian anarchist Merlino’s move to reformism seems to have influenced her.

She was one of quite a few anarchists in this period to move over to the I.L.P., representing some loss of nerve within the movement (others were Archibald Gorrie and a while later Tom Barclay, both of Leicester, John Headley of Great Yarmouth, Alf Barton, W.B. Parker, Tom Pearson, John Paton, etc.). Other indications of this demoralization were the collapse of both open-air and printed propaganda, with the movement not recovering until around 1903.

Agnes Henry was listed on the Roll of Honor of Suffragette Prisoners 1905–1914 (compiled by the Suffragette Fellowship around 1950 based on recollections of participants) and appears to have been one of those arrested during the pre-World War One actions.

She felt enough allegiance to her old comrade Malatesta to speak on his behalf at Trafalgar Square, alongside anarchist speakers, when he was threatened with deportation in 1912.

FERD LARGE

An anarchist from Walthamstow, house painter by trade. He was active in Aldred’s Industrial Union of Direct Actionists in 1907. Ferd later moved to the Whiteway colony in 1914, when he was 33 years old, and remained there until 1926, during which time his wife left him and moved to Leamington. He emigrated to Canada. (Nellie Shaw, Whiteway: A Colony on the Cotswolds)

BILLY MacQUEEN

William ‘Billy’ MacQueen was born on 14^th January 1875 at 34 Charlotte Street, London W1. Son of Robert MacQueen, a painter, from a family of tailors originally from Scotland, William started in the painting trade before leaving home. He later worked as a commercial traveler and always used his going around the country in the job to do anarchist propaganda. He became an active anarchist in Manchester and Leeds at the end of the 1890s.

He was a good public speaker, especially in Burnley where his speeches on the market square worried the Social Democratic Federation, the Marxist group headed by Henry Hyndman. Anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker said that he was the best of the English speakers in Leeds and an “able and extremely likable young man.” He arranged meetings for the visiting American anarchist Emma Goldman in Leeds on her tour in 1895. He organized a massive and successful demonstration on 1^st October 1899 in Leeds with nine speakers and a crowd of 2,000 in opposition to the Boer War. He was badly beaten and nearly lynched by a jingoist mob after his speech against the Boer War in 1900 at a following demonstration in Leeds.

He was the driving force behind the activity of the Leeds Anarchist Group. For a time he lived in a house with Solomon Ploschansky and Hanna Kiselevsky, both anarchists. He wrote articles for the anarchist paper Freedom, and he edited an anarchist monthly in Leeds called the Free Commune (1898–1899) with an associate, Henry.

He became friends with Rudolf Grossmann (Pierre Ramus) the Austrian anarchist. Together with the anarchist Alf Barton of Manchester (see libcom.org/history/manchester-anarchists-fight-free-speech) he brought out the Anarchist Newsletter in 1900 with a view to promote means of communication between the comrades (31^st August 1900). He brought out an English translation of German Johann Most’s Communist Anarchism in 1901. He continued to bring out pamphlets in Leeds under The Free Commune imprint, before moving to Hull, a center for German anarchist refugees.

Unemployment and the persuasion of Most led him to emigrate to the States, and he became editor of the anarchist paper Liberty in Paterson and New York (1902–1903). He was imprisoned for five years as a result of agitation during the Paterson strike of 1902 with Luigi Galleani and Rudolf Grossmann when they all addressed a mass meeting.

They were all arrested for inciting a riot under the newly introduced Criminal Anarchy laws along with Johann Most. He jumped bail, but returned to face trial. He was released after three years on condition he leave the US and never return. His health broken, as a result of the appalling prison conditions, due to which he contracted TB, he returned to England and died soon after at the age of 33 in 1908.

TOUZEAU PARRIS

Thomas Collins Touzeau Parris, usually known throughout his life as Touzeau Parris, was born in Honiton, Devon in 1839. He attended Bristol Grammar School and Bristol Baptist College. He became a Unitarian minister and chaplain for Samuel Courtauld, the mill owner. He helped his father sell books in Bristol. He became a secularist and was an agent for the secularist newspaper The National Reformer in Clifton, then a suburb of Bristol.

When in 1877 two leading secularists, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, were put on trial for publishing a work on birth control, Touzeau Parris and his wife Annie moved up to St John’s Wood in London to help with the defense committee.

He became a lecturer for the National Secular Society and was very popular on the speaking circuit.

From 1884 his firm of gelatin manufacturers, based in South Acton, appeared in business directories. In 1885 he was living in Hammersmith, and in September of that year wrote to William Morris offering his help to organize against the prosecution of Morris and other socialists arrested after a police raid on the International Club at 7 St Stephen’s Mews. He appears to have joined the Socialist League in that year.

In July 1886 he lectured to the Hammersmith branch of the League on socialism from an anarchist point of view and appears to have developed anarchist-communist positions. Later in the 1880s he became a neighbor of Morris, living at 23 Upper Mall until 1902, and becoming his good friend. Whilst continuing to be an anarchist, he remained, like James Tochatti, with the Hammersmith Socialist Society after the split in the League in November 1890, and despite the rejection of anarchism by the H.S.S. in their manifesto. In February 1891 he was a member of the committee set up to organize a meeting to commemorate the Paris Commune, where Kropotkin and Gustave Brocher spoke. He was a propagandist and speaker for the H.S.S. at the pitch at Bridge End Road and continued to lecture for the H.S.S. even though at a meeting on the 6^th May 1892 (from which he was absent) there was questioning of anarchist views being expressed at the H.S.S. outdoor meetings. Fortunately, Philip Webb and Morris put forward a motion which led to the subject being dropped. He gave a graveside speech at the funeral of Mary Mowbray in that year. In 1894 he contributed articles to Tochatti’s anarchist-communist paper Liberty.

On 13^th January 1893 he sponsored a motion on establishing an alliance of all socialist groupings and was one of the five on the committee set up as a result. He was still a member of the H.S.S. in 1896 and was its delegate to the International Socialist Congress held in London in that year. His last recorded activity as an anarchist was his participation in the meeting to commemorate the Chicago martyrs in 1896. In 1907 he fell seriously ill and as a result fell into poverty. His comrades rallied round to support him and Tochatti was to write to George Bernard Shaw to thank him for a check that he had written to help out saying that he was “still the old Parris, only very weak.” George Meredith was another who contributed to the fund. Parris died the same year at the age of 68 on 28^th October at St Columb in Cornwall, the money raised being given to his widow.

W.B. PARKER

W.B. Parker was a stalwart of the Socialist League and an anarchist within it. He had been a founder of the Social Democratic Federation and appears to have joined the League in 1886. He took a regular part in S.L. propaganda work and was often a speaker and lecturer.

He was living in Dalston in 1885 and in Holborn in 1888. He took part in the benefit to help the Berner Street club run by Jewish anarchists in January 1888.

He again came to the help of the Club when it was attacked by the police on 16^th March 1889 and three of its members arrested, speaking at the subsequent defense meeting. In 1888 he was an organizer of the committee set up by the League to celebrate both the Chicago anarchist martyrs and Bloody Sunday 1887 when the police brutally attacked socialists rallying in Trafalgar Square.

He was secretary of the Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill branch of the League and informed the Secretary of the League that he was prepared to take charge of the Kingsland Green speakers’ pitch if the League could assure him of a regular supply of lecturers.

In the same year W.B. Parker himself became Secretary of the League and appears to have carried out that role competently.

Alongside Kitz, Mowbray and Nicoll, he addressed large meetings during the dockers’ strike of 1889. Again with Nicoll, Mowbray and John Turner he was involved in the ‘No rent!’ agitation of 1891. He was one of the speakers at the large Hyde Park protest meeting following the arrests of Mowbray and Nicoll in 1892.

In the same year he was secretary of an anarchist group set up in Paddington.

W.B. Parker was one of the fairly considerable number of anarchists who defected to the Independent Labor Party in the 1890s in what can be described as a ‘loss of nerve’ within the ranks of the anarchist movement. In 1906 he was chairman of Islington Trades Council.

In 1912 he still felt enough loyalty to his former comrades to speak at the large meeting held in Trafalgar Square to protest the threatened deportation of Malatesta.

He was vice-chair of the Islington Trades and Labor Party at the beginning of World War One and indeed he adopted a pro-war stance and he was one of the I.L.P. notables who addressed mass meetings to recruit for the armed forces. He was a Labor Poor Law Guardian for a considerable period of time. He died in the 1930s. Max Nettlau in a letter to Ferd Charles in 1930 perhaps rather unkindly describes him as a “very active and plausible comrade, but … not of an elevated character at all and of no interest to history” but may have had his defection to the I.L.P. in mind.

HERBERT STOCKTON

Born 1860. Like his brother Ernest, an engineer, and his sister Nellie active in Manchester Anarchists and in the free speech fight of 1893, during which he was arrested twice. Herbert Stockton married and had five children and ran a drapers shop in Levenshulme. He also, according to Cores, joined the Independent Labor Party. Ernest Stockton emigrated to Canada.

JACK TANNER

Jack Tanner was born on 28^th April 1889 in Whitstable. His father had a job as sports manager at Alexandra Palace, so Jack moved as a young boy to London. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to an engineering firm in Southwark, but tiring of this he joined the Merchant Navy and traveled around the world. He acquired the nickname of ‘Handsome Jack’ because of his looks.

On his return he worked as a fitter and turner. He joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and became active in it, also joining the Social Democratic Federation. He read Kropotkin and became an anarchist, subsequently involving himself in syndicalist activity (he frequented the shop of the anarchist tailor James Tochatti in Hammersmith and may have first been introduced to anarchism by him). He had a part in the foundation of the National Federation of Women Workers. During the 1910s he was active in the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, subsequently joining the Industrial Democracy League in 1913, and contributing regularly to its paper Solidarity, which first appeared as a fortnightly in September of that year, gradually taking more and more of an editorial role. He became a coordinator of anarchist meetings in London after a meeting in August 1911. He spoke regularly at anarchist pitches and was for a while a member of the anarchist group in Marylebone formed in 1912 after a series of anarchist open air meetings in Regents Park.

In 1913 he was secretary of the Ettor-Giovannitti Protest Committee, to defend two Wobblies imprisoned in the USA, speaking alongside anarchist Errico Malatesta. Later in the same year, he was secretary and treasurer of the Malatesta Release Committee after the famous Italian anarchist was arrested by the British police. He was shortly replaced in this role by Guy Aldred. Also in 1913 he chaired the first International Syndicalist Congress in London, attended by delegates from twelve countries. He was involved in the amalgamation committee movement.

Around this time he met Will Lawther, down from Durham (he was to take a similar trajectory to the right as Tanner, though speedier), and they both contributed to the anarchist paper the Voice of Labor. He also contributed regular letters from London to La Vie Ouvrière, paper of the French syndicalist Confédération Générale du Travail. During World War One he worked as an engineer in the Paris suburbs and was active in the Confédération Générale du Travail. He returned to London in 1917 and worked at the Royal Aircraft factory in Farnborough. The black American writer and activist Claude McKay mentions meeting him at the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch during the war, along with Aldred, George Lansbury, A.J. Cook, Sylvia Pankhurst, etc. The Club was located at 28 East Road, off of City Road.

He wrote a pamphlet, The Social General Strike, in 1919. He became active in the Shop Stewards and Workers Committees Movement, and in 1920 attended the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow as one of its delegates. He expressed classic syndicalist views at the conference, such as: “A number of those who are active in the shop stewards’ movement are not greatly concerned about the formation of the party, because they have been convinced from their experience in other parties that it was a loss of time to share in the work of such parties.” He met Lenin there, and on his return joined the Communist Party, although his membership only lasted eight months. In this period he worked in activity for the expansion of the Red International of Labor Unions serving on its London District Committee (the London R.I.L.U., interestingly, produced a short-lived paper called Solidarity). After he left the C.P. he had an ambivalent attitude towards it. He was active within the National Minority Movement (a Communist Party front established in 1924 to work within the reformist trade unions) and served on its executive.

He obtained work at the Evening Standard and by 1930 was the London District Committee Organizer of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. He became its president in 1939 and served as such until 1953. He remained in an ambiguous relationship with the C.P. He welcomed the World War Two enthusiastically. He saw eye to eye with the C.P. for the need for joint production committees and economic planning in industry in the war years. His increasing right-wing trajectory saw him become president of the Trades Union Congress in 1954. After his retirement in that year he became director of the right-wing Industrial and Research Information Services (I.R.I.S.), which reported on and worked against Communist Party activities in the unions.

He died on 3^rd March 1965.

Nick Heath

AFTERWORD

The re-edition of John Quail’s classic chronicle of the Victorian anarchist movement, The Slow Burning Fuze, is most welcome. It will make readily accessible in hard copy one of the few — and certainly one of the best — texts on British anarchism in the Victorian era. It also provides an excellent opportunity to restate the many merits of this landmark study and assess its contribution to the scholarship of anarchism. It may seem a little facile to argue that Quail’s seminal study has not aged. It is nonetheless true, and this is no small feat, given that the book was first published in 1978, and that the research area that it covers has been extensively revisited in the last two decades or so.

One of the highlights of The Slow Burning Fuze is the fact that it brings together so many strands that have since generated a great deal of scholarship. Among these are terrorism and the now-familiar concept of propaganda of/by the deed, as well as police surveillance, which occupy the last two chapters, reflecting the deepening influence of these themes in the early 1890s. Quail’s remark that “the arrest, trial and sentencing of the Walsall anarchists in 1892 deserve more attention than they have received from the historians of the left in Britain” cannot fail to elicit a smile, since so much research has been produced on this and related issues in the context of the current wave of Islamist terrorism, beginning with 9/11; the work conducted by Richard Bach Jensen, in particular,[497] as well as a lively debate in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence, which revisits the era of propaganda by the deed as a point of comparison for Islamist terrorism.[498]

From the perspective of current historiography, an especially interesting aspect is Quail’s emphasis on individuals and actions rather than political theory, underpinned by a close attention to the sociological, philosophical, political and organizational dimensions of the movement. As Quail stresses in his ‘Personal Introduction’, “it is an unfortunate fact that political theory, no matter how worthy or perceptive, is curiously disembodied; it gives no clues to the passions, the heroisms or the squalid conflicts that it inspired…. The forms of the movement were shifting and decentralized, making it rather difficult to pin down numbers, events and the particular activists involved and forcing the historian to rely on a myriad snippets of information.” This emphasis on individuals and their connections, grounded in a conception of political history as embodied and driven by individuals and the associations they form, is pivotal to the continued relevance and very current feel of the book.

While convergent with other classic studies of grassroots anarchist movements, such as Jean Maitron’s comprehensive Histoire du movement anarchiste français[499] or Paul Avrich’s work on U.S. anarchism,[500] Quail’s perspective also has much in common with current investigations into networked activism, charisma, ‘history from below’ approaches, revisited biography, etc. — all of which have been key themes for historians of anarchism in recent years. These approaches have been increasingly developed since Davide Turcato’s influential article on ‘Italian anarchism as a Transnational Movement’ (2007),[501] with a great wealth of studies examining the role of individuals and their associations in anarchist activism. This has generated a great deal of research into political networks (including some formal network-mapping exercises) and the status of nineteenth-century anarchism as a social movement.

A different take on the same theme is visible in the current interest in biographies of anarchists, for instance Davide Turcato’s study on Malatesta,[502] my own work on Jean Grave and Louise Michel,[503] and various authors on Emma Goldman[504] — although it may be argued that these studies of charismatic and highly influential figures are at odds with Quail’s ode to ‘unsung demi-heroes’ and ongoing efforts to explore the role of intermediaries and everyday militants. Similarly, much of the book shows the human dimension of some of the ‘big narratives’ of socialist history successfully interweaving these various dimensions. The anarchists’ engagement with the nascent labor movement in the 1880s, strike organization and public speeches are considered important events in Quail’s history, resulting in a very innovative form of labor history for its time, reconciling levels often regarded as dissociated: practical everyday organization and activism but also theoretical elaboration, grassroots and ‘leaders’, everyday activism and major conferences. Quail shows that organizational history rested on constant interactions, especially in militant spaces and practices, and that politics occurred primarily outside party conferences. While networks — one of the central concepts of contemporary anarchist historiography — are not explicitly mentioned, his history is nonetheless informed by a nuanced understanding of networks of places, people, organizations and paper distributors.

The history of British anarchism is embedded in a broader history of British labor and provides a great introduction to the complexities and specificities of labor activism in Britain at a time when socialism was ‘a submerged and sometimes only just discernible tradition’ derived from Robert Owen. The first chapter starts with the Chartists and the differences between radicalism and socialism, the radical club culture integral to the Socialist Revival and the dilemmas of reform vs. revolution. As such, The Slow Burning Fuze sits alongside classics of British radical/labor history, such as E.P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1977) and Stan Shipley’s Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London (1972) in recounting the teeming and complicated early years of the Socialist Revival as seen from the grassroots. Among these books, Quail’s is unique is giving center stage to anarchists, and despite all the work done since on international anarchist movements active in Britain in this period, it continues to stand out due to its rare foregrounding of British activists. It is pleasing to see that even as labor history has become increasingly marginalized in academia, the study of anarchism, especially in a transnational perspective, has opened up great prospects in this area, with significant results: much has been written about the history of syndicalism, with a seminal volume co-edited by Hirsch and Van der Walt[505] and the recent volume Wobblies of the World: A Global History of IWW.[506]

This leads us to the broader theme of transnationalism, a dominant trend in recent anarchist historiography. Quail’s narrative portrays cosmopolitanism and the role of foreign refugees as essential features of the movement from its very beginning, starting with the 1878 influx of German socialists and Johann Most, as well as examining the role of recognized personalities who were of dual origin, including Kitz. Alongside the focus on British militants — ‘native’ anarchism, as it is sometimes called — Quail points to the transnational elements of the movement, long before the lexicon of transnationalism became so omnipresent. He conveys quite effortlessly how fluid and nonetheless occasionally fraught the exchanges and connections between these various circles and levels were. Discussing the July 1881 Social Revolutionary and Anarchist Congress in London, he remarks that “the minutes of the proceedings reveal that the English delegates played little part; yet many of the people involved were more or less permanent exiles in London and it was partly through contact between them and the British socialists that a more sophisticated libertarian philosophy was to develop relevant to British conditions.”

There are countless leads that have subsequently been explored by historians in a specifically transnational perspective. These include the history of how the early Freiheit was smuggled internationally from Britain to Germany by sailors — since then, the theme of paper circulation has gained importance, with a growing focus on anarchist print culture as a medium for propaganda but also anarchist identities and, more broadly, processes of information sharing and exchange. While these processes are now commonly described as networks of dissemination and ideological circulation, they are evidenced and discussed in less scholarly terms in The Slow Burning Fuze and are clearly integral to the way Quail understood anarchism as a doctrine of action — the main difference is one of language, as Quail remains (mercifully, some might say) jargon-free.

The Slow Burning Fuze has not really aged. This in turn raises interesting questions about the historiography of pre-World War One British anarchism — has the field really barely evolved since 1978? It straddles the gaps between scholarly research and a more militant book, as reflected in the book’s relatively short bibliography. The subtitle, ‘The Lost History of British Anarchists’, invites reflection and may well be the one element in Quail’s analysis whose validity has become problematic. It certainly points to a historiographic tradition that for a long time hid the historical importance and the rich but elusive legacies of British anarchism. The book provides a healthy reminder that for some time everything was at play and revolutionary politics might have prevailed; in that sense, it is correct to claim that the revolutionary narrative has been unduly obscured. Just forty years later, is it still correct to claim that this history has been lost? Not quite. Looking at studies with a British focus, and with preemptive apologies for inevitable omissions here, David Goodway, Judy Greenway, Ruth Kinna, Matt Adams and Carissa Honeywell have all done excellent work on twentieth-century anarchism.

The historiographic marginalization of anarchists has at least been partly revised. There are also countless studies, most of them transnational in nature, where British anarchism features as a secondary focus, for instance Ole Birk Laursen’s research into the Indian revolutionary movement in Europe (which prominently features the fascinating figure of Guy Aldred),[507] Pietro Di Paola’s work on the Italian anarchist diaspora in London,[508] and, recently, Daniel Laqua’s study on German anarchist circles.[509] However, it might be argued that, for all the research it has generated, the transnational turn has also had the unwanted effect of replicating the dominant narrative that British anarchism was insignificant in comparison to the size and relevance of other anarchist movements and perpetuating the erroneous notion that British anarchism was primarily exilic. Quail remains mandatory reading to rectify such interpretations.

There are, of course, a few aspects to which today’s reader may object. The main one is the titular reference to ‘British anarchists’ in a study which is overwhelmingly London-centric, despite close-ups on Walsall and Manchester. Scottish anarchism, for example, is nowhere to be seen, although this may be the result of the chronology adopted — which is also a little unsatisfactory for today’s reader. This, however, is a matter for future discussions, which will hopefully continue with the great vigor of recent years. Having been introduced to British anarchism by Quail in the early stages of my PhD, it is wonderful to come full circle and pay homage to this great book. Long may it continue to inspire readers and researchers.

Constance Bantman, University of Surrey

Bibliography