S.P.G.B. Lecture List For October 1911. Johnny Holmes

Unlike the posts for A. Barker and Frederick S. Leigh, this October 1911 Socialist Standard adjacent post is not connected to Keith Scholey's founding members document.

Johnny Holmes was not a founding member of the SPGB. He first joined the SPGB via its short lived Earlsfield Branch in August 1909. A regular outdoor speaker for the Party in the period of 1910-1911, he primarily spoke at outdoor meetings in South and West London (Battersea, Tooting, Paddington and Peckham). There is no record of when he lapsed his membership, but we do know that he rejoined the Tooting Branch of the SPGB in April 1921. Sadly, there's no record of when he left the Party for the second time. 

'John Henry Holmes' is briefly mentioned in a couple of books I have encountered on my political reading travels. His son, Len Holmes, speaks of his father in the Hugh Jenkins' 1980 book, 'Rank and File'. Jenkins was the Labour MP for Putney from 1964 until 1979 (defeated by David Mellor at the 1979 General Election) and was firmly on the left-wing of the Labour Party. 

'Rank and File' was a collection of interviews with Labour Party members in his Putney Constituency Labour Party, and the purpose of the book was to give a human face to that much maligned figure in the 1970s and 1980s: the left-wing Labour Party activist. During this period of political history, the tabloid press had the scent of blood in its nostrils at the notion that student radicals and 'bedsit revolutionaries' were infiltrating the Labour Party up and down the country in order to deselect such sedate centrist characters as Reg Prentice and Bob Mellish. There's no denying that Trotskyists were sending their members into the Labour Party during this time - the Militant Tendency being the best known example - but Jenkins - and most of the people interviewed in his book - represented a longstanding Labour Left tradition rooted in left-wing reformism and such single issues as nuclear disarmament and anti-apartheid.

Len Holmes was one such left-wing local activist, and he said the following about his father:

". . . I was born in Wandsworth and my father, Johnny Holmes, was a well-known leader of the unemployed workers’ movement between the wars. He was a great character but no one would employ him and so with seven children and my mother dying of cancer we had hard times. My wife was born not far away in Wimbledon.

. . .  You mentioned your father?

"Yes, Johnny Holmes was well known as a pacifist in Wandsworth between the wars. During the First World War he drank a lot of water before medical examinations and was always rejected because this increased the pulse rate. He was a street-corner orator and he fought a parliamentary election in Wandsworth as an independent although he eventually joined the Labour Party. He was a friend of Saklatvala who held Battersea briefly for the Communist Party and at one time was a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He was put in Wandsworth Prison for six weeks after leading a demonstration against Wandsworth workhouse. He marched into the institution and demanded that the inmates be fed proper food instead of pigswill. Once he lead a 50,000 strong demonstration of the unemployed to the Cenotaph. He was stopped by the police because he had a banner which read: For those who are dead and not forgotten and for those who are here and are forgotten. My father brushed the police aside saying that they would fight their way there if necessary and he successfully led the demonstration to Whitehall. However the demonstration was broken up there by mounted police and my

father was kicked in the head. He was injured quite badly but eventually recovered and was soon attacking the Royal Family from a soapbox on the corner of Magdalen Road. My father wanted clean sheets and bed linen for the workhouse inmates and porridge and bacon and eggs for breakfast. When he was taken to Wandsworth Prison there were demonstrations outside every night with singing of the Red Flag until the authorities removed him to Brixton. When he came out there were several thousand unemployed to meet him and they marched all the way to our house in Wandsworth.

Quite apart from the fact that there was no money for it, my father did not believe in paying rent to private landlords and was always being taken to court for non-payment. He accumulated £500 in arrears and never paid it. He argued his own case and the landlord said he wished my father was on his side. He was a very clever man. He studied what the magistrate had said on other occasions and quoted him. Once he was offered a job on condition that he changed his politics but he would have nothing to do with capitalism. He was an ardent socialist and knew all the leaders of those days, Lansbury, Greenwood and Bevin but he became a bit disillusioned with the Labour Party. They were not nearly socialist enough for him." (pages 54-56.)

I can't find any record of his father standing as an independent candidate in Wandsworth at a parliamentary election, and I have to wonder how plausible it could have been that a long term unemployed man could have raised the money for an election deposit in the interwar years. It would have been a substantial sum of money. Maybe Len Holmes misremembered. It happens.

The second mention of Johnny Holmes is in Harry Wicks' posthumous memoir 'Keeping My Head: The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik'. Published in 1992 by the independent Trotskyist publisher Socialist Platform, 'Keeping My Head' is a very readable account of Wicks political journey from his teenage political awakening in Battersea in South London just after the end of World War One to the YCL sending him to the Lenin School in Moscow in the 1920s to his central involvement in the earliest days of the British Trotskyist movement.

As a Battersea boy, Wicks encountered members and ex-members of the SPGB. One of those was Johnny Holmes. As he recalls:

Unemployed agitation in the years of 1918 and 1919 emphasised the indignation felt by the ex-servicemen at the conditions they met on their homecoming. The long dole queues and the paltry demobilisation payments never matched the politicians’ promises. The old comrades’ association was most vociferous in its demands for mass protest. When the short-lived postwar boom ended inSeptember 1920 the unemployed agitation discarded its ‘No charity, give us justice’ image, and took on amore aggressive tone. From all over the country, local unemployed committees and associations met in conference and launched the National Unemployed Workers Movement with the demand for ‘Work or Full Maintenance’.From the first, Battersea’s NUWM became widely known, a constituent part of the local labour movement. Hunger marches from all parts of the country found shelter and sustenance ready for them at Latchmere Baths. A Battersea contingent were always marching in the London demonstrations, which in those days all too frequently ended with a police baton charge. 

A host of speakers and agitators sustained the ceaseless campaign at the local guardians for outdoor relief. The memory of one or two is vivid to this day. Johnny Holmes was one such agitator. A short, rather tubby man with a sunshine face, he was on and off unemployed platforms for a decade. His early training as a speaker had been in the SPGB. In his pocket, he always carried a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings which functioned as his speaker’s notes. Many still remember the meetings he addressed during the 1921 miners’ lockout. Johnny talked on the income of the Duke of Northumberland, a big coal owner. Thirty bob a minute was his income, as much as a miner received for three days’ work at the coalface. He had an infectious smile, as though he was laughing at his own speech:

‘Imagine, 30 shillings each minute of the day. Whatever the Duke was doing, going to bed, eating his bread and cheese or sitting in his bathroom having a sh-sh-sh-shave.’

Each itemisation of the crowded minutes in the Duke’s life brought fresh convulsions of laughter from the crowd.

. . . Another outstanding unemployment speaker in the 1920s was Tom Waller, affectionately known as Workhouse Waller. He too had got his Socialist education from the SPGB. Like his voice, his speeches were strong and rasping. Wage slavery and capitalism were his enemy, a Socialist society his objective. When the local board of guardians said that there was to be no more poor law relief without task work — which meant the workhouse — he was ready with the answer: ‘We enter the workhouse all together.’ (pages 20-21)

Wicks' book also provides a brief biographical note of Holmes in the appendix to the book:

Holmes, Johnny. Ex-SPGB, Secretary of Wandsworth Unemployed Committee and member of Communist Party. Very active in 1921 and 22. See Michael Ward The Unemployed in South West London 1918-23 (draft manuscript), and Red Flag over the Workhouse, Labour and Social History Group, 1980. (page 199)