The Slow Burning Fuse : The Lost History of the British Anarchists

Notes
P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, London, 1908, pp. 255–6. Club and Institute MS appeal, dated January 1873; quoted in John Taylor, Self Help to Glamour: The Working Men’s Clubs, 1860–1972, History Workshop Pamphlet No 7, London, 1972. John Taylor, op. cit. Quoted in John Taylor, op. cit. The biographical information on Kitz is taken from his ‘Recollections and Reflections’, in Freedom, January–July 1912, and also from Stan Shipley, Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London, History Workshop Pamphlet No. 5, London, 1972. Quotes to this point from Freedom, January 1912. For the ex-members of the British Federation of the First International he mentions, see Documents of the First International, London/Moscow, 1964. Of particular interest is George Harris,... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Afterword
BIOGRAPHIES ALFRED BARTON Alfred Barton was born on 30th 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... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHY To paraphrase Kropotkin, the history of anarchism does not reside in books — at least as far as England is concerned. Nevertheless two books must be singled out for special mention even though the first is hostile to anarchism and the second never seems to have heard of it. These are E.P. Thompson’s William Morris and Walter Kendall’s The Revolutionary Movement in Britain. E.P. Thompson’s book exhaustively covers the Socialist League period and Morris’s relationship with the anarchists and gives a more detailed picture of the early socialist movement than I had space to do. Outside these areas, particularly when he is dealing with anarchists, he should be treated with caution. Walter Kendall’s book is only about a part of the revolutionary movement in Britain but gives a fact-packed summary of some of the developments on the left before and during the Syndicalist Revolt and is particularly interesti... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 16 : In Conclusion: Continuity and Change in the Anarchist Movement
Chapter 16. IN CONCLUSION: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT The anarchist movement did not cease circa 1930. Anarchism was to enjoy something of a resurgence in the later 1930s, largely inspired by the activity of the anarchists in Spain during the Civil War and Revolution of 1936–1939. The younger militants of that time, or at least some of them, are still active in the movement, and the events of that time and the years since then are still live issues and matters of polemic. (It would be a brave historian who tried to argue too much with the living, particularly since the tone of voice of history is one which implies that the events it describes are past and done with. My comrades would not relish that.) The anarchists have since shown the same astonishing ability to suddenly come from nowhere when everybody had assumed that they were finished with as they did in the years before World War One, though perhaps on a smaller scale. The... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 15 : World War One -- And After
Chapter 15. WORLD WAR ONE — AND AFTER When war was declared on 4th August 1914, it came as a surprise. No matter that warning voices had been raised on the danger of war, no matter the direst predictions of the anti-militarists, the fact that a war had started in Europe was a surprise. From our position in history we look back at that bloody waste of life, appalled and wondering. How could people not only allow themselves to be sucked into that war, how could they voluntarily march off into its jaws? Yet in 1914 the only wars that generations had known had been squalid little wars conducted by regular armies in far-flung corners of the world, carving out empires and markets over the bodies of native populations hardly equipped to resist. The exceptions (at the Crimea and the Franco-Prussian War) were many years in the past and had been much less than total wars. The tightening web of alliances arising out of the rival imperialisms of the m... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

FOREWORD John Quail’s history of British anarchism was a groundbreaking document. It was one of the first books to address itself to the ‘lost history’ of the movement. Only Albert Meltzer had previously addressed the subject in any detail in his The Anarchists in London 1935–1955: A Personal Memoir which had appeared two years before in 1976. As Comrade Quail notes in his bibliography, E.P. Thompson’s book on William Morris had important information on anarchist activity in the Socialist League, though, as he warned, whilst it was sourced from primary sources it has a quite pronounced bias against anarchism. Since then we have had Ken Weller’s Don’t Be A Soldier! The Radical Anti-war Movement in No... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Movement in 1894
Chapter 10. THE MOVEMENT IN 1894 In the years 1889–1891 there had been a positive orgy of trades union organizing. There has been no satisfactory attempt to describe and analyze this phenomenon as a whole, much needed though it is. It is clear though that the ‘terms of trade’ had swung in favor of labor, which made such organization very much more simple. The combativeness had obviously been stimulated by the unemployed agitation and socialists in the previous years. The gains of 1889–1890 began to be eroded by unemployment and the counter-attack of the employers. Unemployment rose seriously between 1891 and 1893. Yet the earlier gains were not given up without a struggle. Defensive strikes occurred in many places. S... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Greenwich Park Explosion
Chapter 8. THE GREENWICH PARK EXPLOSION If H.B. Samuels had only been a self-publicizing terrorist of the word perhaps the worst one could say of him would be the assessment made by a contemporary anarchist who knew him quite well, Louise Sarah Bevington: “about the most rubbishy character possible. … The keynotes of his character are vanity and vindictiveness.” But the circumstances surrounding the explosion of a bomb in Greenwich Park which killed the man who was carrying it led some anarchists, the most prominent of whom was David Nicoll, to assert that Samuels was an agent provocateur employed by the police. This further led to accusations that Samuels was responsible for this man’s death. Anarchist bombs in Eng... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Democratic Federation and the Socialist League
Chapter 3. THE DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION AND THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE The working-class militants were concerned with the practical problems of socialist propaganda on specific issues at the grass roots. As Frank Kitz put it, “the English Section and the comrades of the Labor Emancipation League worked with only one aim and that was to permeate the mass of the people with a spirit of revolt against their oppressors and against the squalid misery which results from their monopoly of the means of life. No thought of kudos or personal aggrandizement had entered into their efforts to spread the light, and therefore the squabbles between would-be leaders had no interest for them.” This assertion was certainly true of those who formed the lib... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Anarchism Develops in the Socialist League
Chapter 5. ANARCHISM DEVELOPS IN THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE For all its hopeful beginnings there was a built-in time bomb in the Socialist League. The group of people that had seceded from the S.D.F. had done so for different reasons, some because of hostility to Hyndman, others because of hostility to Hyndman and his politics. There were continual attempts by the group that initially centered on the Avelings to turn the League into an electoral party. At first these attempts took no great part of the League’s time or attention. The first proposals that the League should strive “to conquer political power by promoting the election of Socialists” were rejected at the annual conference in June 1885. Another attempt was made the fo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)