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.)

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION Some years ago I was talking to a friend of mine in Leeds who was doing a thesis on British labor history. He asked me if I had ever heard of a group of people who had been arrested for a bomb conspiracy in 1892, a group known as the Walsall anarchists. What? British anarchists? I had never heard anything like it. I had cut my eye teeth as an anarchist arguing with Trotskyists and communists over Spain and Russia. I had wondered why left-wing politics always had to do with foreign parts, though I had found much disputational mileage in the events in Barcelona in 1936 (‘the capacity of the proletariat for spontaneous self-activity’) and Kronstadt in 1921 (‘the Bolsheviks were not fighting the counter... (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.)

The Labour Emancipation League
Chapter 2. THE LABOR EMANCIPATION LEAGUE Frank Kitz and his associates were not the only British revolutionary propagandists in London by the time the Rose Street club was formed. The importance of Kitz in the 1870s was that he provided an active link between the veterans of the International (and veterans, too, of earlier movements) and the new socialism of the 1880s. In the mid-1870s there might not have been much young blood about — on a visit to Oxford, Kitz was introduced as ‘the last of the socialists’ — but by the later 1870s there were new and interesting developments and new figures were emerging. One such was Joseph Lane. Born in 1850 in the village of Wallingford, Oxfordshire, he spent his early life &ldqu... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Cooperative Colonies
Chapter 12. COOPERATIVE COLONIES Cooperative enterprises of a utopian kind in England have suffered the fate of all enterprises designed as rehearsals for a great change that has not yet come. They have been defeated and have collapsed, or they have changed and become absorbed, being no longer dangerous. Yet they represent a continual and continuing attempt to place the relationships of work and living on a basis which differs severely from the norm that has existed since the Industrial Revolution. Their makers have attempted to realize in a concrete way ahead of time the conditions they desire or expect in society as a whole. They have attempted in varying degrees to achieve communism in property, cooperation in production and a rather ind... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Collapse of the Commonweal
Chapter 9. THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMONWEAL The anarchists had become the apostles of total destruction in the more gullible sections of the popular imagination. The mad professor in The Secret Agent, the anarchists in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and the figure in cloak and wide-brimmed hat carrying a bomb marked ‘BOMB’ in Pip Squeak and Wilfred cartoons were all variations on a stereotype developed in the early 1890s. This was obviously related to some of the activities and statements of recognized anarchist militants. But it was also to do with the activities of agents provocateurs like Coulon, whose Anarchist Feast at the Opera had been read to such effect at the Walsall trial, and the quite blatant use of ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)