S.P.G.B. Lecture List For August. (1913)

Party News from the August 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Once again, I don't have enough room in the label section to include all the listed speakers, so some brief information on some of the speakers missing from the sidebar.

• C. Elliott was a member of the Tooting Branch, originally joining the SPGB in September 1909. There is no record of when they lapsed their membership.
• F. J. Rourke was a member of the Tottenham Branch, originally joining the SPGB in June 1909. Their membership was lapsed in February 1914. ("Moved away".)
• H. Joy was a member of the Tooting Branch.
  William Lewington was a member of the Tottenham Branch, originally joining the SPGB in March 1907. He resigned from the SPGB but no date is given for his resignation.
  C. Gatter is possibly Alfred G. Gatter, who was a member of Stoke Newington Branch. They originally joined the SPGB in February 1910, and their membership was lapsed in April 1919.
  A. L. Cox was a member of Islington Branch.
  B. Seach was probably G. Seach, who originally joined Hackney Branch of the SPGB in September 1912. His obituary appeared in the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard.

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For December. (London District.) (1912)

Party News from the December 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Once again, I don't have enough room in the label section to include all the listed speakers, so some brief information on some of the speakers missing from the sidebar.

• C. Elliott was a member of the Tooting Branch, originally joining the SPGB in September 1909. There is no record of when they lapsed their membership.
• F. J. Rourke was a member of the Tottenham Branch, originally joining the SPGB in June 1909. Their membership was lapsed in February 1914. ("Moved away".)
• F. Stearn was a member of the Tottenham Branch. There were actually two 'F. Stearn's in the branch at the time - possibly father and son - so I don't know which one was a listed speaker for this month.
• H. Joy was a member of the Tooting Branch.
• William Lewington was a member of the Tottenham Branch, originally joining the SPGB in March 1907. He resigned from the SPGB but no date is given for his resignation.
• J.M. Wray was a member of the Wood Green Branch, originally joining the SPGB in May 1909. He resigned from the SPGB in June 1924.

A few of the names featured in the lecture list are not listed in the early membership records, This could be explained away in two ways: 1) Further confirmation that the membership records to hand are incomplete. 2) A number of SPGB members were operating under pseudonyms in their visible party activity because of the threat of blacklisting.

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For August. (1911)

 Party News from the August 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Daily Express” policy. (1911)

From the July 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commenting on the article “King Capital’s Coronation” in our June issue, the Daily Express of June 8 waxes righteously pharisaic.

It compares Socialism, which “means degradation and ruin,” with Daily Expressism, which “supports all measures designed to lift humanity to higher levels, to improve the conditions of life for all classes, to add to the sum of human happiness, and to promote the welfare of the whole community.”

Also—but this quite incidentally—”to make the workers more efficient” and “to give the British manufacturer fair play.”

That is what we workers are too stupid to see. If instead of studying Socialism we read the Daily Express, what an improvement would be wrought in us. Made thereby wiser and more efficient we should no longer dream of wronging the poor downtrodden manufacturer. We should learn to love “laws which are immutable” and to bear patiently “distresses which must continue as long as the world shall last.”

But a horrid thought obtrudes.

If economic laws are immutable and social distress unending, why does the Daily Express waste its time in supporting measures designed “to uplift humanity to higher levels,” etc ?

Can it be that Mr. Pearson, who is really responsible for this balderdash, doesn’t care a hang about the world’s impossible uplifting, but looks only to certain social and financial benefits which such twaddle obtains from the capitalists and their Government ? Perish the suggestion !

None the less, there is something the workers can learn from the Daily Express.

It is not to throw money away buying it.

A. Hoskyns

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For July. (London District.) (1911)

 Party News from the July 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

My usual moan when posting the lecture lists from the Pre-WW1 period: Not enough label space on the blog for all the speakers listed, so it becomes an SPGB Sophie's Choice at my end. (Poor taste? Just a tad.) Anyway, here's some brief info about some of the speakers who missed the cut:

• H. Joy: A member of Tooting Branch. Joined the Party in October 1907.
• C. Parker: A member of West Ham Branch. Joined the SPGB in May 1906, and was lapsed from membership in October 1929.
• F. Stearn: A member of Tottenham Branch. Lapsed during the war.
• H. Cooper: A member of Earlsfield Branch. Was a member of the SPGB from 1908 until 1915.
• F. J. Rourke: A member of Tottenham Branch. Was a member of the SPGB from 1909 until 1914.
• C. Ginger: Another member of Tottenham Branch. Charles Ginger was one of those SPGB members who joined the Party more than once. There's a suggestion that C. Ginger could also be Frank Grainger, who had originally left the SPGB to join the Herald League. (See Ken Weller's book). Frank Grainger eventually rejoined the SPGB in the 1930s, and was actually selected as the Party's parliamentary candidate for the East Ham North constituency, which the Party was planning to contest at the probable 1940 General Election. (WW2 intervened.) According to Ken Weller, after he resigned from the SPGB, later worked for the Economic League.
• J. Nightman: Here's a wee mystery. J. Nightman is listed 6 times in the July 1911 lecture list but there's no record of a 'J. Nightman' in the membership records. As I've mentioned previously on the blog, the membership records are incomplete and it's possible 'J. Nightman' is one of those missing members. Alternatively, it could have been a nom de guerre that a socialist had had to adopt whilst fighting the class war. We'll never know.

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For June. (1912)

Party News from the June 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For April. (1913)

Party News from the April 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

S.P.G.B. Lecture List For July (1912)

Party News from the July 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speeding-Up The Admirals. (1911)

From the March 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

Avast there, comrades! Haul in your slacks while I shiver my timbers.

The Navy, sirs, is going to the dogs. Senior officers are now expected to know something, and a special instructional course began at Portsmouth on Feb 13, with fifty rear admirals, captains, and commanders as pupils. How George must congratulate himself upon his shore appointment!

Feel for a proud flag officer like W. B. Fisher, fifty-seven years old and second in seniority, having to study gunnery and torpedoes. It is related of a distinguished admiral, who sometimes neglects to eat between drinks, that he once rolled up on deck and, gazing wildly at the far horizon gasped “Say, is that a sea-serpent?" He was told that it was. “Thank heaven!" he exclaimed, with relief. “I thought 1 had 'em again." Now, so absurd a position could not have occurred had the great man learned at a special instructional course for senior officers to recognise submarines at sight.

Cato studied Greek long after he became entitled to the old age pension — at eighty, I believe. But Greek is less undignified than signals and naval war, through a course of which Admirals F. T. Hamilton and Herbert Lyon, aged fifty-four. are compulsorily fagging. Waterloo was won in order to advertise the playing fields of Eton and Harrow. Let us hope the Government won't get up another Trafalgar in order to star their special instructional course for senior officers.

Seriously. this speeding-up is a national menace. While it affected only the productive working class, it did not much matter. But if it spreads to the upper ranks of employment, it may reach the Civil Service and compel the bureaucrats to work. In winch case the "end of all" is a safe prediction.

A. Hoskyns

The Attempted Suppression of Free Speech in Islington. (1911)

Party News from the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The attempt of the Islington Borough Council to suppress Socialist propaganda in their midst has proved ineffectual. Refused the hall of the Caledonian-road Baths, the Islington Branch of the Socialist Party commemorated the 40th. anniversary of the Paris Commune on Monday, March 20, at Myddleton Hall, Almeida Street. N. The meeting was largely attended, and, unlike so many Tory and Liberal gatherings, was marked by equal enthusiasm and orderliness.

Islington ratepayers may with advantage be reminded of the circumstances that led to this futile effort on the part of their municipal representatives to dictate what subjects may or may not be discussed in the borough.

In March last year our Islington comrades applied for and were granted the use of the Caledonian-road Baths for Commune-commemoration purposes. A deputation of ratepayers thereupon waited upon the Council to protest against the letting of the hall and to urge that our contract should be illegally cancelled. Their spokesman melodramatically predicted that, as the result of our teaching, the streets of Islington would be ”bathed in blood.” By a majority of sixteen the Council rejected the deputation’s appeal. Our meeting was held and was officially reported by the superintendent of the Baths as having been “conducted in a very quiet and orderly manner.”

Moreover, despite bourgeois apprehensions, the streets of the “merrie” mediaeval suburb did not run with blood. As a matter of fact, they did not even run with water, then or since; and, notwithstanding legitimate complaint, the filth which disfigured them in 1910 may be seen, with a year’s accretion, in 1911. So wretched an environment has its natural reflex in the conduct of certain residents and their elected representatives. To what other opinion can one come, after reading these observations from the Council’s discussion published in the Islington Daily Gazette of March 21, 1910 (italics ours):         

    “Alderman. Crole-Rees held that they ought to cancel, rule or no rule, whatever the cost might be. It was a sacrilege to hold such a gathering in the baths.
   Alderman. Vorley thought technicalities ought not to stand in the way of cancelling. The meeting was not political—it was revolutionary, and something near to treason.
   Mr. A. O. Clarke said any damages that might be obtained from the Council would be remote and small."

That is to say, break the law of contract as against Socialists and trust the courts to uphold such breach.

The Islington Daily Gazette, an avowedly anti-Socialist paper, expressed in unstinted terms, in its issue of March 23, 1910, its view of the matter. The editor wrote:

    "We are a little surprised that the Islington Borough Council should have made itself look ridiculous in the eyes of the public by endeavouring to prevent a meeting.  . . . The conduct of the meeting has proved how childish were the objections raised in the Council to the letting of the hall to the Socialist Party. . . . The uninitiated might have thought, after listening to the debate on Friday night at the Town Hall, that the Socialists of England were suddenly overcome with blood lust.”

Yet, in defiance of the ridicule and censure thus heaped upon last year’s attempt to suppress free speech, the Council did not hesitate to reject this year’s application by our Islington comrades for the same meeting-place. The Baths and Wash-houses Committee wrote: “ Having regard to the fact that a large number of ratepayers objected to the meeting held last year at the Public Hall, and that a deputation waited upon the Council to protest against the meeting, the Committee do not feel justified in letting the hall again for the purpose named ”

On this refusal becoming known, Mr. B S. Bailey, an Islington ratepayer, published in the Islington Daily Gazette of March 14, 1911 an emphatic protest and a stinging rebuke of the Council’s own disregard of the amenities of public life. He said :

   "I attended the Commune meeting held at the Baths last year, and I say (and challenge contradiction) that it was the most orderly and best conducted meeting that has been held in Islington by any political party. Surely a deputation of a dozen bigoted ratepayers and the Borough Council are not going to place themselves on a pedestal and tell us what we shall hear and what we shall not hear. . . .  I would advise our servants (and I hope the Council will not object to this description since they address themselves as such when appealing for our suffrage at elections) to conduct their meetings in as orderly a manner as the Socialist Party, then we shall not have so many bear-garden meetings, for which West Islington is notorious.”

We ourselves were as little surprised at the absurd protest of the deputation as we are unmoved by the foolish action of the Council. The Paris Commune, alike in its mistakes and its achievements, is to us a guiding cresset. That alone would make it an object of hatred and fear to capitalism, the antagonism of whose puny champions, therefore, appears in our view not less natural than contemptible. How expect such dunces to know, or care for, the truth? No doubt, they willingly believe the deliberate lie that the Conmune caused the streets of Paris to run with blood. But, in very fact, the 1871 massacres were the work of the cowardly French master class and their criminal hangers-on. When these found heart to return from flight, with the support of their German conquerers, they were maddened at the successful efforts of the proletariat to direct, as themselves had failed to do, the machinery of administration. So they glutted their vengeance in a popular butchery, which ceased only through fear of a pestilence from the growing heaps of slain.

As the British heirs of those brave dead, brutally sacrificed to class interests, we welcome from the myrmidons of Capital any earnest of the class struggle already long declared. It is enough that with them fraternise the Social-Democrats, the Labourites, and other spurious friends of the exploited and oppressed worker. For us it is battle now and all the time!

The truth is, those struggling tradesman and professional snobs of Islington — parasites on parasites — obey blindly the preservative instincts engendered by our iniquitous system. They are slowly but surely being crushed between the upper and nether millstones of economic development, and their desperate hope to “get on” is only paralleled by their abject fear of “falling out.” Sycophants to their “betters,” bullies to their "inferiors,” they seek a frantic sanctuary in property, sacrificing to Mammon their present peace, their children’s future, and the whole welfare of their kind.

They hate the proletariat, because through the slightest mishap they may themselves be proletarianised. They oppress the toilers, because through their exploitation only can they hope to attain economic safety. And they, who scarcely know a night’s rest free from business worry, warn the still more miserable wage-slave to beware of Socialism. They are whited sepulchres from which judgment and conscience have been snatched. Is it other than madness to bolster up the competitive system when even a capitalist organ like the Daily News (March 23, 1911), in dealing editorially with the appalling universal increase of suicide, admits that to-day “even to live with an independent income is more of a strain than to struggle for a living was a century ago.”

Workers, we are out to destroy this man-made hell on earth. We can show you that the greatest of our social evils are directly traceable to the fundamental wrong of stealing from you the product of your work. We ask you to unite with us for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth.

A. Hoskyns

Free Trade in Females. (1911)

From the May 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Mormons are busy in our midst.

The Christian henchmen of the capitalists are busy in their midst.

At Birkenhead, where the meek ministers of the “gentle Jesus” are always fighting over something, there has been an anti-Mormon riot.

The American Latter Day Saints want women for the Salt Lake market. The English Latter Day Saints want women for the home market. Now, polygamy is a horrible thing, against which the Christian raves. Promiscuity is a mere incident, regrettable but unavoidable.

You remember how angry the Church was with that clergyman who married a Frenchwoman while his English wife still lived, undivorced from him. You cm hardly have forgotten how indignant the Church was with one of its curates, the Rev. Smythe-Piggott, for living at the Abode of Love with several spiritually-spliced darlings. And you must have noticed how shocked the Church was with that vicar whose Lax conduct created so much scandal and with those other holy clerks who recently figured in divorce and affiliation cases.

But the Mormons are a great danger.

They evidently offer certain sinister inducements to our women, for the latter are willing, nay eager, to go with them. And what are the counter-inducements to stay home?

Let us note some of them.

At the Easter conference of Telephone employees, a delegate described the conditions under which telephone girls work:

   “They are slaves. They sit at the (operator's) board and are driven as if they were slaves. These girls stand from nine to one and then from two to six. It is ruining the health of our girls. Large numbers of them are constantly off sick. Nervous prostration is what they suffer from. At one exchange in Manchester girls are taken downstairs in hysterics. Those girls will be the mothers of the future generation, and they are having their nerves absolutely torn away."

The Women’s Trade Union League has just exposed the conditions under which waitresses work:

   “Many are at work sixteen hours a day, and the general rule in almost all establishments is twelve hours a day on duty. Wages are very low — starvation wages. The girls in some places live in constant danger of the traps and pitfalls laid in their way by unscrupulous men."

Can it be that those base. unprincipled Mormons offer English women an existence in Utah which is not body-wearing, nerve racking, and soul-degrading, and that English women have so far forgotten the lessons of the Church as to prefer a polygamous marriage there to a life of sweating or prostitution here?

If so, the thing must be stopped. We have only 80,000 acknowledged unfortunates, not including future peeresses, on London’s streets, and pro rata elsewhere. To relieve this market, ere it be quite congested, is a crime in the eyes of honest, virtuous Christian capitalism.

A. Hoskyns

Mechanical Loyalty. (1911)

From the June 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

An English nobleman once tried to train a mule to box scientifically with its hind hoofs. The verdict was “Death from very natural causes."

When the capitalists created a cheap gutter Press they little suspected it would contribute to their undoing. Yet the rags continually, if unconsciously, deal murderous blows at the system they were intended to strengthen.

Just an instance:

That the Queen rehearses her train-bearers may be good reading, but it scarcely conduces to popular acceptance of her inherent grace. Snapshots of the State horses being inured to cheering, firing, and flag-waving seems calculated to take the gilt off the ginger-bread—or even off the State coach.

The people should be given to understand that all things royal are spontaneously dignified. Else what price a circus parade?

But the cruellest Press photos were those of the elephants learning to kneel, the dromedary and pony learning to bow. Not so would the show have been given away in the past. Our forefathers believed that the very animals recognised and did homage to anointed majesty.

Coronation—hungry children—Church and armed forces—full pubs.—full gaols. What a hotch-potch! Also enthusiastic obeisance from well-trained quadrupeds and well-drilled humans.

And the royal nonentities will carry on as if they swallowed it all. Poor henpecked George will try not to look thirsty, while his grim-faced consort conveniently forgets that she married him after his brother (her first betrothed) died, selling her body for a crown as surely as some of her less fortunate sisters sell theirs for five shillings.

A. Hoskyns

The Terror-Torn Capitalist (1911)

From the April 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

As thinkers we Socialists are pitifully shallow. We don't seem to get to the root cause of things, like the panders of the capitalist Press.

Not, for instance, like Lady McLaren, who has recently illumined the World (both this terraqueous globe and the newspaper of that name) on the subject of race suicide. The decline of the birthrate, it would appear, is causing consternation in our Upper Circles. So her ladyship, instead of wasting time in absurd condemnation of an economic system which slaughters wholesale the children of the very poor, dives below the mere surface and makes the problem plain.

In a tense drama the comedian need not be excruciatingly funny to excite amusement; amid the tragedy of penal courts the magistrate calls forth laughter without being inordinately witty. But to arrest public attention on the peril of the race, writers in our prostitute Press must be beyond exception profound, persuasive, gushing. Lady Mac squares the circumference to a nice-T.

Admire her penetration. She maintains that the marked tendency of the birthrate to decline is due more to the unwillingness of husbands to support children than to the unwillingness of wives to become mothers. When you walk along our dirty proletarian streets and watch our ill-clad, half fed kids, meditate on the meanness of workingmen, who, although blessed with 24s. 9d. s week and acquiescent helpmates, refuse to bring into this happy land families of more than seven, nine, eleven, or thirteen potential wage slaves.

But, behind the obdurate father, someone else is primarily to blame. Who? Unthinking Socialists, you would never guess. The modern politician!

Yes. “The child is no longer an asset; it is a financial burden," our titled sociologist discovers. Formerly “the man depended for comfort upon the extra earnings of his children, and both parents regarded sons and daughters as an insurance against starvation in their old age. Modern politicians have changed that condition of things." So now you know.

We Socialists pass nasty strictures upon old-age pensions, exposing their fraudulent pretence, insulting insufficiency, and rate saving reality. As usual, we only skim the surface, and it has been reserved for the McLaren genius to explore their true hideousness. Listen and perspire.

“The granting of Old Age Tensions is merciful. But the effect on population will be marked. As certainly as old age is sheltered from want without the aid of children, so certainly will families be smaller."

Shade of Malthus, painfully invoked from deserved oblivion! 'What a monstrous shape is taken by this demoniac gift of five bob a week at the long last of life! In the affluent independence of a secured future, tho workingman will override his wife's willingness, capitalism's claims, and nature's dictates. He will set at naught the laws of God and the exigencies of the labour-market. We see him, selfishly unproletaneous, march onward to his septuagenary, careless as to what becomes of the industrial reserve army, unmindful as to who will bear arms, do the dirty work, and create surplus-value. Rosebery's “end of all" is on the horizon. The cloud of the weekly dollar, albeit not so large as one's palm, portends a cataclysmal storm. 

A. Hoskyns

The Call of the Almighty-Dollar. (1911)

From the May 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rev. Dr. Jowett has left Birmingham and gone to New York.

He didn't want to, but a call from God and a big increase in salary pointed his saintly way.

He got only £1,000 a year in Birmingham, because that city makes cheap idols for expensive export. He gets £2,400 in New York, plus a motor-car and a Fifth-avenue residence rented at £1,600 yearly.

I wish I could get a call from God. My telephone number is 5s. 13/4/11, Attenborough.

Before his departure, but after his feed with Georgie Rix (at which there was considerable Wettin), the rev. gent. protested that the New York stipend out not to be larger than the Birmingham "screw." Once in America, however, he found the cost of living so high that, in his opinion, Jesus himself would require £2,400 of Caesar's image, a £1,600 house on Fifth-avenue, and a motor-car.

This explanation aims a blow at the Tariff Reformers. All the Liberal papers therefore have given it prominence.

Dr. Jowett wasn't a Presbyterian in Birmingham; he was some other brand of Christian. But the call specifically mentioned the Fifth-avenue Presbyterian Church as the custodians of the Almighty dollar, so Jowett did what John Burns, Ll D. or Keir Hardie, or any other wise Christian would have done for less than £4,000 a year. He changed his label.

Fellow workers, the moral for you is this:

Stick to your job, if you have one, and be content with your wages when you get any. Your reward will come after death, in the shape of a nice, new, six pedal harp. Verily, it is easier for a needle to go through the eye of a camel than for a poor man to pass the New York Custom House.

A. Hoskyns