Con Lehane: A Correction (2004)

From the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the September Socialist Standard we stated that Con Lehane, who was a founder member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, went on to become in the 1930s and 40s a member of the IRA and a Republican member of the Irish parliament. This was not the case and was due to a confusion with someone else with the same name.

The Con Lehane who was a founder member was born in Cork in 1878 was indeed an Irish Republican but he died in New York in 1919, shortly after being released from prison where he had been detained for his political activities. In 1916 he had published a pamphlet entitled The Irish Republic arguing that the so-called Easter Rising in Dublin that year had been a workers’ revolution.

The other Con Lehane, who was on the Army Council of the IRA in the 1930s and a Clann na Poblachta deputy from 1948 to 1951, was born in Belfast in 1912 and died in 1983 (see Irish Times, 27 September 1983).

The original source of the error was an article which appeared in the anarchist paper Freedom on 8 February 1992. Our apologies for not having first checked this thoroughly enough – Editors.

S.D.F. apologist and S.P.G.B. critic. (1906)

From the July 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speaking at Watford on June 24th last Mr. A.S. Albery, of the S.D.F., a one-time member (for a few months) of this Party, in answering questions put to him from the audience, stated

1. That he was not a consenting party to the appearance of his name on the manifesto issued by most of the active London members of the S.D.F. prior to their withdrawal from that body (because it had ceased to be the political party of the working class) to found The Socialist Party of Great Britain.
2. That he protested against the use of his name in that connection and that a Party must be corrupt that would use names in such away without authority.
3. That he was no sectarian Socialist and did not therefore withdraw from the I.L.P., of which he was a member, during the period of his association with The Socialist Party of Great Britain.
4. That he was a Marxian Socialist.
5. That the S.P.G.B. did not seem to understand what Marxian Socialism was.
6. That it was true that members of the S.D.F. were members also of the National Liberal Club, but only for social purposes. Membership of that club had no political significance.

We take the trouble to deal with these statements because Mr. Albery is a fairly prominent member of the S.D.F. whose methods we attack and may be accepted as representing the views of that organisation upon the questions raised. Also because Mr. Albery’s brief association with the S.P.G.B. may incline some to the view that he has special knowledge of this Party’s position and has expressed that knowledge in the statements recorded above. Further, because we welcome any criticism of our position and are glad of any opportunity to reply to it and remove any misapprehension that may exist, our desire being to discuss plainly and properly all matters of working-class concern and vindicate the correctness of our attitude thereupon or acknowledge our error.

Our replies to these assertions therefore are, (1 and 2) that the individuals who drew up the first manifesto containing an indictment of the S.D.F. position and a justification of the attitude of the protesting members, included A. S. Albery, who framed part of it himself; that he was present at the several meetings, held at his own house, at which the manifesto was discussed in detail and finally approved of; that Albery was a member of the Provisional Committee which arranged the matters preliminary to the formation of this Party ; that as a member of that Committee his name appears upon a second manifesto issued prior to the establishment of the Party, a document which confirmed the first manifesto in every particular and added considerable additional evidence for the conclusion that the S.D.F. was politically corrupt. This second document also called the meeting at which the Party was inaugurated. Albery was present at this inaugural meeting. He said no word of opposition to the formation of the Party, nor of protest against any unfair use of his name. He accepted nomination for membership to the first Executive Committee and was elected. He approved the Declaration of Principles, which all members must sign, and we have his signed form in our possession. As a member of the E.C. he endorsed the attitude of the Party, and undertook the administration of the Party policy and the application of the Party rules. He never questioned, because he could not then and cannot now, the accuracy of any statement appearing in the two manifestoes (which, as we have said, he was part author of), nor can we find any record or recollection of any protest of the sort now entered.

If in the face of all this Albery asserts that he did not acquiesce in the publication of the document referred to, he either deliberately fabricates or is the victim of a woeful mental aberration. If it was not issued with his full knowledge and approval, he has to explain his large participation in the subsequent development of that document. If, on the other hand, the recital of particulars contained in the foregoing enables him to remember sufficient to justify the withdrawal of the statement now made, he has to explain when the S.D.F. ceased to be the corrupt organisation he asserted with good evidence it was, two years ago. So much for numbers 1 and 2.

(3) The Declaration of Principles (see page 1 of this paper) signed by Albery pledges opposition to all other political parties. If, therefore, he was a member of the I.L.P., which he was pledged to fight as a member of the S.P.G.B., Albery is correct when he says he is not a sectarian Socialist—he is merely a fraud.

(4) Actions speak louder than words. The acts of Marxian Socialists express consistent and unwavering antagonism to Capitalism and the capitalist class. The acts of the S.D.F. which Albery claims membership of, do nothing of the kind on Albery’s own shewing in the second manifesto previously referred to. Albery, therefore, either does not know what Marxian Socialism is or asserts what he knows to be untue.

(5) This statement certainly lacks the only thing that can give it weight—evidence. Albery was challenged to produce his and could not.

(6) The subscriptions of members to the National Liberal Club are used for Party purposes. The Club is the Head Quarters of Capitalist Liberalism and its sycophants. It is directly concerned with the organization of the Liberal vote and the direction of the Liberal forces. Its act in donating £100 to John Burns wages fund in the old days was chock-full of political significance. Every member who joins it is a supporter of the Liberal Party if only to the extent of his subscription.

That is our answer to Mr. Albery’s allegations. In defence of his present unfortunate, not to say ludicrous, position as a member of a Party whose actions on his own shewing will not bear analysis, he may be making the same or similar charges and assertions in other places. We shall always be glad to deal with any such directly they reach us. Misrepresentation and inaccuracy are exceedingly difficult to overtake and we prefer to give them as short a start as possible. We are, therefore, obliged to our Watford Comrade for his prompt action.

We only need add that if Mr. Albery has any desire to communicate with us direct upon any point which may constitute a grievance with him or a charge against us, we shall be happy to hear from him.

Some Black Sheep (2004)

From the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note: With regards to the passage about Con Lehane, you have to check out the afterword which corrects some bum information about Lehane that we got via Laurens Otter.

What have a Labour member of the House of Lords, a President of the TUC, a member of the Army Council of the IRA, a Communist Party journalist, a Syndicalist pamphleteer, and a Tory mayor and magistrate have in common?

    

Answer: this was the subsequent fate of six of the 140 or so present at the meeting on 12 June 1904 which set up the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Obviously, we are not proud of what these particular founding members became, but it does at least show that the meeting did have some significance even from a non-socialist point of view. And, since more is known about the lives of these six individuals than for most of the others who set up the SPGB, their political trajectory before and after 1904 can give some idea of the sort of people involved and of political developments in the first half of the last century

McEntee in ermine.

The Labour Lord

The future Labour Lord was Valentine McEntee. Born in Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) south of Dublin in 1871, the son of a doctor from the Protestant minority, he was orphaned at an early age and was apprenticed as a carpenter. He was an early member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party which had been founded, largely on the initiative of James Connolly, in 1896 as the Irish equivalent of the SDF. In 1899, like many Irish workers, he emigrated to America, to New York, but within a year returned to Europe, but to London not Dublin. He joined the SDF and was also the secretary and chairman of the Walthamstow branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.

    

At the inaugural meeting of the SPGB he moved that the name of the new party be “The Socialist Party of Great Britain and Ireland” but his motion only obtained six votes, presumably because the others felt that workers in Ireland should organise their own socialist party. His membership was not to last long since in December 1904 he was nominated by his union as a potential parliamentary candidate, which would have meant him standing for the Labour Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labour Party. Called to account for this, which would of course have been contrary to the SPGB’s principles, he was eventually asked to resign and did so in February 1905.

    

After that he rejoined the SDF and began his career as a budding Labour politician. In 1908 he was an (unsuccessful) candidate for Walthamstow council. In 1909 he self-published a short pamphlet entitled Socialism Explained. This was a general criticism of capitalism but went out of its way to claim that socialism “is neither pro nor anti-Christian” and was supposedly supported by “ministers of the Gospel of all denominations”.

    

In 1920 he was finally elected to Walthamstow Council and in 1922 as Labour MP for Walthamstow West. Defeated in 1924 he was re-elected in 1929 and remained an MP till he retired in 1950. In 1951 he was made Baron McEntee of Walthamstow. He died in 1953.

The leftwing Trade Union leader

George Hicks was also to become a Labour MP, for East Woolwich from 1931 to 1950, but it was as a leftwing trade union leader at the time of the 1926 General Strike that he has a place in working-class history.

    

He was born in 1879 in Venham Dean, near Andover, in Hampshire where his father was a builder. In 1904 he was working as a bricklayer and (like a number of other founder-members) an active member of the Operative Bricklayers Society. The records show that he resigned in March 1905 but rejoined in December 1908, resigning again a few years later as his trade union career took off. In 1912 he was appointed a national organiser of the OBS. By 1919 he was its General Secretary and President of the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives. In 1921, having successfully seen through the amalgamation of this federation into a single union, he became the first general secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, a post he was to occupy for the next twenty years. As such he was elected a member of the General Council of the TUC.

    

In 1925 he was one of a group of leftwing trade union leaders who went to Moscow where they agreed to set up an Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee. Stalin and the Russian government had an interest in this as they wanted to build up mass support in countries like Britain against military action to invade Russia, but it is difficult to see what was the advantage for the trade union movement; no doubt the trade union leaders involved, including Hicks, mistakenly felt that what existed in Russia was some sort of workers’ regime. When the general strike occurred in Britain the following year, the leftwing trade union leaders on the Anglo-Russian Committee were unable to prevent the majority on the TUC General Council betraying the miners. Trotsky saw this as a heaven-sent stick with which to try to beat Stalin for relying on “left lackeys of imperialism” such as “Purcell, Hicks and other traitors”. But Trotsky, who by this time was on his way out, had clearly lost touch with reality, wanting to “orient the working class toward a general strike and an armed insurrection in the course of a war”. Hicks, whose turn it was to be to be TUC President in 1927-28, survived. Trotsky did not.

    

Hicks rejoined the reconstituted SDF, now affiliated to the Labour Party, and in 1931, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its founding, was invited to give the keynote address. This was later published as a pamphlet Poverty from Plenty. The Industrial Depression: Its Cause and Cure. He began: “its cause is capitalism: its cure is Socialism”. Although his analysis was rather too under-consumptionist, it did show some evidence of his passage through the SPGB.

    

In 1941 he became a junior minister – Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Works – in the war-time coalition government, with as his parliamentary private secretary none other than the future Lord McEntee. He died in 1954.

Jackson in 1905.

The Communist Party hack

When the Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in July 1920 among the founding members was Thomas (T. A.) Jackson. Born in Clerkenwell, North London, in 1879, he left school at 13 to be apprenticed as, like his father, a compositor. He joined the SDF in 1900. In his autobiography Solo Trumpet, published in 1953, he claimed to have been only marginally involved with the SPGB, which he doesn’t mention by name simply referring to some mysterious “impossibilist” (in his original manuscript he had written “leftist”) group. The records show, however, that he was a very active member for nearly five years, being on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Principles, speaking outdoors and indoors, writing articles, serving on the executive committee and even acting for a short while as General Secretary (and he married another founder member, “Miss K. Hawkins”).

    

These activities resulted in him having difficulty in finding a job in his trade and, in 1909, as he frankly told some Party members at the time, he decided to sell his speaking abilities to other propagandist groups in order to survive. He thus ended up joining the ILP but without really believing in what they stood for. When he moved to Leeds he got a job speaking for the Secularists. Later he was a freelance speaker, depending on his audience putting money in his hat.

    

During the war he was able to find employment as a storeman. By its end he had joined the SLP and it was as a member of its pro-Bolshevik wing, which was one of the constituent organisations that set up the CPGB, that he became a founder of that party. For the rest of his life he was a paid writer and journalist for the CP and its papers the Sunday Worker and then the Daily Worker. In the 1920s he was in fact one of the leading figures in the CP, editing its first weekly journal, The Communist, and a member of its central committee and executive committee. In 1929, when Stalin ordered the parties in the Comintern to “turn left”, he was one of the leaders who were removed as “rightists”. He remained a CP member, but only as a journalist and writer. As such he wrote numerous articles and a number of books, but none of them showed the slightest evidence of anything he had learned while in the SPGB, not surprising for someone who declared that he had come “to see Marx and Engels through the spectacles provided by Lenin and Leninism”. Quite the worst was a long turgid book on Dialectics (1936), pretentiously subtitled “The logic of Marxism, and its critics: an essay in exploration”, which regurgitated Lenin’s ideas on philosophy. He wrote a nationalist history of Ireland, Ireland Her Own, for which he dishonestly allowed himself to be billed as a “Protestant Nationalist” (when his connection with Ireland was very tenuous). He also wrote a book on Dickens and other literary subjects. He died in 1955.

The Tory Mayor

The strangest case is that of Jack Kent. Prior to joining the SPGB, he had been a prominent member of the SDF, serving on its national executive, writing in its journal Justice and organising its activities. As such he was probably the most high-profile SDF member to have gone over to the SPGB. Born in Lambeth, in South London, in 1870, in 1904 he was working as a clerk at the head office of Whitbreads, the brewers. In the elections for the Party’s 1905 Executive Committee he topped the poll; he was an outdoor speaker and indoor lecturer, wrote a regular column in the Socialist Standard, organised speakers’ classes, and in 1907 was the Party’s treasurer. He resigned in 1908. He had been promoted at work to departmental manager and was able to afford to move to the then up-market west London suburb of Acton. Here he turned his coat completely, helping to form an organisation called the “Constitutionalists” whose aims were “to uphold the Constitution, advocate a Consolidated Empire, to oppose Socialistic legislation, to propagate Tariff Reform, and to contest Municipal elections”. As this outfit ran street-corner meetings, no doubt the skills he had acquired in the SDF and the SPGB proved invaluable. In 1912, after sitting on the local Coronation Committee, he was elected a member of Acton Council. From then on it was downhill all the way. Joining the Acton Volunteers to serve British capitalism (if only on the streets of Acton rather than in the trenches of Northern France), he was chairman of the local Conservative and Unionist Association in 1918, a magistrate in 1920, Mayor of Acton in 1922-23, and a Middlesex County Councillor. At the time of his death in 1945 he was chairman of the local magistrates bench as well as of the local Tory Party. Why did he turn? Initially at least, probably for the same reason as Jackson: to earn a better living. Yet further proof of how unfree workers are under capitalism and its wages system, forced by economic circumstances to compromise their views.

Allen in 1905.

The Syndicalist pamphleteer

One of the youngest founder members of the SPGB was Ernest Allen, or E. J. B. Allen as he was known. Born near Oxford in 1884 the son of a butcher, he had joined the SDF there when only 16, later moving to London where he played an active role in the “impossibilist revolt” within the SDF. A speaker and writer, he was particularly interested in the trade union question. The early SPGB had not yet worked out a fixed policy on this and Allen was one of those who favoured the setting up of a socialist union in opposition to the existing trade unions based on the sectional interests of their members. At the party’s first annual conference in 1905 he moved that as soon as the party had attained 5000 members it should set up a socialist union. There was no seconder.

    

In 1906 a series of special party meetings were held at which the matter was thrashed out. Many members were hostile to the existing unions because of their non-socialist nature and their association with moves to set up a reformist Labour party. In the event no agreement could be reached and the position was left as it had been before: that SPGB members could be members of the existing ones (as many of the founder-members had been, McEntee and Hicks for instance), supporting any action of theirs on sound class lines and opposing all actions on unsound lines. Although the votes were close, and despite the subsequent myth put about by later opponents (starting with the Labour activist and historian G. D. H. Cole), the SPGB never took up an anti trade union position. Ironically, the SLP, which Allen was to join for a while, accused the SPGB of being pro-trade union! Before the debate within the SPGB on the trade union question was over, Allen had joined an organisation called the “Advocate of Industrial Unionism”, whose aim was to set up in Britain the equivalent of the IWW in North America. As the SPGB did not regard the IWW as a socialist organisation he resigned. In the years that followed Allen passed through all the variant positions associated with those who advocated “socialist industrial unionism” to overthrow capitalism: from holding that this should be complemented by political action at the ballot box (the SLP position), through arguing that industrial action alone to “take and hold” the means of production would be sufficient (the anarcho-syndicalist position, expressed in his 1909 pamphlet Revolutionary Unionism), and then ending up as a propagandist for Tom Mann’s Industrial Syndicalist Education League which advocated industrial action for reformist ends too.

    

In 1912 he emigrated to New Zealand where he continued his syndicalist activity. His pamphlet was reprinted, and for a while he was president of the General Labourers Union in Auckland. When the war came he supported it, including conscription. This destroyed for ever his reputation as any sort of revolutionary. After the war he ended up as a supporter of the NZ Labour Party and later of the leftwing breakaway party set up by ex-Labour MP John A. Lee for whose Weekly he wrote articles. He also wrote and spoke for the NZ Rationalist Association. He died in1945.

Lehane in 1905.

The IRA man [See correction below.]

Con (Cornelius) Lehane, who was the Party’s General Secretary for the first two years of its existence, was born in Cork and, like Valentine McEntee, had been a member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party before moving to England and transferring to the SDF. He worked as a clerk and later trained to be, and became, a solicitor. In school, as part of the Gaelic revival, he had learnt Irish which he spoke fluently, ending one of his contributions to the Socialist Standard, in the Irish spelling of the time, “Saoghal fada dho! – Conchubhar”. It was in fact through militant Irish nationalism that he came to socialism. However, it was not this that led to him leaving the SPGB. Yet again, it was an issue related to the trade union question.

    

Lehane was on the wing of the Party which (unlike another former ISRP member, James Connolly, who was a founder member of the SLP in Britain) didn’t think much of the so-called “economic power” of the working class and insisted that socialists should concentrate on getting the working class to first win control of political power, i.e. to expropriate the capitalist class politically so as to be in a position to then expropriate them economically. He fell out with the Party because he felt that the Executive Committee was not taking a tough enough attitude towards industrial unionists who had joined the Party. To protest against this, in 1906, the Islington branch, of which he was a member, suspended all propaganda activities and got itself expelled for dereliction of duty. After his expulsion Lehane published a couple of pamphlets attacking the SPGB for having gone off the rails.

    

Ironically, he was next heard of as a supporter of Jim Larkin, the leader of the ITGWU who favoured syndicalist tactics. It is not clear when he reverted to his original Irish republicanism, perhaps when he was in America during the First World War. In any event, during the 1930s he was a member of the Army Council of the IRA, which earned him an 18-month jail sentence in 1935 for sedition after the Council issued a statement promising “maximum support” for a strike of Dublin transport workers. After his release he left the IRA and, together with former IRA Chief of Staff, Sean MacBride, and others was of a founder-member in 1940 of the leftwing republican party, Clann na Poblachta. In 1948 he was elected a Clann member of the Dail for Dublin. Following this election, in which it had won 10 seats, the CnP joined in an anti-Fianna Fail coalition government. So, ironically for a one-time “impossiblist” who had advocated political power for the sole purpose of achieving socialism, he ended up as a supporter of an openly capitalist government. He lost his seat in the 1951 general election.

Adam Buick

Con Lehane: A Correction

In the September Socialist Standard we stated that Con Lehane, who was a founder member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, went on to become in the 1930s and 40s a member of the IRA and a Republican member of the Irish parliament. This was not the case and was due to a confusion with someone else with the same name.

The Con Lehane who was a founder member was born in Cork in 1878 was indeed an Irish Republican but he died in New York in 1919, shortly after being released from prison where he had been detained for his political activities. In 1916 he had published a pamphlet entitled The Irish Republic arguing that the so-called Easter Rising in Dublin that year had been a workers’ revolution.

The other Con Lehane, who was on the Army Council of the IRA in the 1930s and a Clann na Poblachta deputy from 1948 to 1951, was born in Belfast in 1912 and died in 1983 (see Irish Times, 27 September 1983).

The original source of the error was an article which appeared in the anarchist paper Freedom on 8 February 1992. Our apologies for not having first checked this thoroughly enough –Editors.

Obituary: Trudy Mertons (2000)

Obituary from the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trudy Mertons who died in April at the age of 95, joined the Socialist Party in 1932. Her father, Tom King, was a founder member of the SPGB but Trudy joined in her own right.

She will not be well known to the younger members of the Party, but she was part of the loyal comrades, who kept the Manchester Branch alive during the Second World War. After the war when the Party was able to engage in wider political activities she was involved in the administration of Manchester Branch and was very supportive at party meetings, along with her husband, Arthur Mertons, who was a well-known speaker in the area. Across the years they both gave hospitality to numerous members whose party work took them to the Manchester area.

During her long illness she was still able to uphold her socialist principles and never forgot the Party.

Margaret Hopwood

T. A. Jackson. (1909)

T. A. Jackson at the 1905 SPGB Conference.

From the August 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

When early in the year the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of Great Britain received from T. A. Jackson a deeply significant letter of resignation, neither resentment nor anxiety arose in the breasts of those who heard the pitiful epistle. Knowing the man’s particularly bad circumstances, generous sympathy and pity came uppermost. Hoping that he might pass into oblivion without prejudice to the working class and Socialism we contemplated no action against him. This was not to be, however: Jackson has taken the pay and has to pipe the tune called—to wit, the mal-education and betrayal of the working class So much to show that in publishing this exposure we are not animated by stupid feelings of spite, resentment or revenge.

We make no excuse for using every weapon to hand: as between feelings of old comradeship or the conventions upon the one hand and the well-being of the working class on the other, the Socialist can but choose the latter.

Information has reached this office that T. A. Jackson is now actively engaged speaking from the Clarion Vans and the platforms of the “Independent Labour” Party. However unfortunate this may prove for the I.L.P., etc., does not much concern us: the duty of exposing a budding “Labour-fakir” and incidentally the removal of a false impression, is our reason for dealing with the matter in these columns.

Speaking for the I.L.P. in North London recently Jackson delivered himself to the following effect with reference to the S.P.G.B. “He had been in the Socialist Party but he had got tired of being out in the political desert. After four years he found he was wasting his time, so he—as he had always done, no matter what the cost—had come outside as he was after the truth and the right and he would hold by that to the end in spite of all obstacles. He had lost many friends, but principle with him came first, etc.” He then endeavoured to ridicule the charges made by us against the I L.P. by referring to their age, but not once did he attempt to deny the truth of them. His whole effort was calculated to give his hearers the impression that he had gone over because he sincerely believes the S.P.G.B. wrong and the I.L.P. right. But from correspondence in our possession we are able to prove that T. A. Jackson believes nothing of the sort. He knows that the S.P.G.B. is the Socialist Party, and alone worthy of the support of the workers. He knows that our attitude toward other parties is correct. He knows that our charges against them are true. But T. A. Jackson left the Socialist Part of Great Britain because that Party does not buy men to stay in it.

In his letter of resignation he makes it abundantly clear that it was the hope of getting money for his services that induced him to join the “enemy," as he terms the I.L.P.

Jackson penned another to one of our comrades that is nothing short of a cynical presumption of our comrade’s disloyalty to the working class. In this letter (Jackson, by requesting destruction of the letter sought to make our member an accomplice in treachery) he emphasises his guilt and makes the whole matter clear as a pikestaff. After referring to his own poverty and the prospects of “jobs and money” by belonging to the I.L.P., S.D.P., etc., he says "So I will join the S.D.F., I.L.P., and “Clarion” mobs and peg away—bleed the swines —till I am expelled.”

More need not be said. Jackson has joined the ranks of those whom he formerly called “labour bleeders.” He has become one of them and has left sufficient evidence to prove it. His letters above referred to deal also with other matters and are too long to print in full—unless Jackson wishes it; while should any interested in the matter doubt our bona-fides arrangements can be made for the inspection of the originals at this office.

Obituary: Death of Harry Martin (1951)

Obituary from the May 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Through the medium of a correspondent we have learnt with regret of the death of Harry Martin, who was a familiar speaker to those in London who attended meetings at Tower Hill and similar spots.

He was one of the small group that took part in the foundation of our party forty-seven years ago and fought out the problems the solution of which helped to clear our vision and reinforce the soundness of our general attitude.

In the early years of the Party he came into conflict with the majority on the question of the attitude to be adopted by a delegate if elected to Parliament. He held the view that such a member should be so unswerving in his hostility that he must vote against every measure, from whatever source, that came before parliament—except of course the measure to introduce Socialism. He held that whatever the nature of such a measure voting for it or even abstaining from voting would constitute pandering to reformism. Thus, according to his view, a Party Delegate would be committed, without examination, to voting against any measures designed to improve educational facilities, safety facilities in mines and factories, the removal of disabilities on trade unionism. and even a proposal, however fatuous it might be. to abandon the prosecution of a war.

As the Party would not accept his view he resigned his membership and never rejoined although, in his propaganda, he supported the Party’s outlook, sold our literature and urged listeners to join with us. Those who knew him well believed that his reason for not rejoining was simply that he preferred to remain a free-lance speaker.

He propagated socialist ideas sedulously, during a long life-time, on the outdoor platform in all weathers and was a familiar figure to those interested in change. Though his knowledge was not wide he had a firm grasp of the essentials, of the socialist position and was indefatigable in pounding away with rough humour and a fierce scorn of all that was put forward to patch up and support the system that exploited the workers. He was the means of helping many workers to an understanding of Socialism and there are many, including some who opposed his ideas, that will be genuinely sorry to hear of his passing.

He died in St. James’ Hospital, Balham, on the 2nd February at the age of 87 and was buried in Garret Lane Cemetery. Up to the last he remained what he had always been—a fierce and resolute opponent of Capitalism and a staunch advocate of Socialism.

Gilmac.

The Passing of a Founder Member (1956)

Obituary from the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have to record that our old Comrade Hardcastle passed away on September 15 at the age of 93. He was one of the only two survivors of the group that founded the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904.

Comrade Hardcastle attended nearly all of the Party Conferences and was present at the last one. He also attended many of the indoor and outdoor propaganda meetings, putting in a regular attendance at Clapham Common. During the last two years failing eyesight limited his attendance at evening meetings, as it was too much of a risk for him to travel far in the darkness. He was a lively, tough little man, who never lost his conviction of the ultimate success of the movement he helped to start on its journey.

In the last week of the illness that brought his life to a close his brain was still alert and he demanded news of all that was happening in the world at large—including the latest developments over Suez.

Although Comrade Hardcastle did not figure on the platform, or in literary columns, he was a staunch supporter of the Party, who did propaganda in his own way.

The final departure of a loyal old comrade is always a sad event; we send our sincere sympathy to his relatives and the expression of our own sorrow at losing him.