Tom
Mann, the son of the clerk at the local colliery, was born in Foleshill,
near Coventry, on 15th April, 1856. Tom started school at six but
left at nine to work at a farm. The following year he became a trapper
at the Victoria Colliery. A series of underground explosions closed
the colliery and in 1870 the family moved to Birmingham
and Tom started a seven-year engineering apprenticeship.
Tom was a religious boy and on a Sunday he would sample different
church services. He considered joining the Nonconformist
and Quaker groups before becoming a teacher
at the local Anglican Sunday School. Tom
also attended a large number of political meetings and heard people
such as John Bright, George
Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh and
Annie Besant speak in Birmingham.
After Tom Mann finished his apprenticeship in 1877 he moved to London.
Unable to find work in his trade, Mann did a variety of different
menial jobs before being employed in an engineering shop in 1879.
Mann's foreman, Sam Mainwaring, was a socialist and introduced him
to the ideas of William Morris. Mann became
interested in improving his education over the next few years spent
his leisure time reading writers such as John
Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, John
Ruskin and Henry George.
In 1881 Mann joined the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers and soon afterwards participated in his first strike.
He also became a member of the Fabian Society
and the Battersea branch of the Social Democratic
Federation (SDF) that had just been established by John
Burns.
Mann was a strong advocate of the eight-hour day, one of the leaders
of the Social Democratic Federation, Henry
Hyde Champion, suggested that he should write a pamphlet on the
subject. The pamphlet, What a Compulsory
Eight-Hour Day Means to the Workers, was published in June,
1886, and helped to persuade a large number of people to support this
measure. Mann formed the Eight Hour League and this group was influential
in convincing the trade union movement to adopt the statutory eight-hour
day as one of its core policies.
Mann read The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels in 1886. Mann was converted and after this date he openly
admitted to being a communist. He now saw the main purpose of trade
union activity was to try and bring about the overthrow of the capitalist
system.
In 1887 Tom Mann moved to Newcastle
where he became the SDF's northern organizer. While in the area he
helped form the North of England Socialist Federation. He also acted
as the manager of the campaign to get Keir
Hardie elected as MP for Mid-Lanark. After this he returned to
London and worked as an investigative journalist
for the Labour Elector, a journal edited by Henry
Hyde Champion.
When the London Dock Strike started in August
1889, Ben Tillett asked Mann to manage
the distribution of relief tickets to his union members. Tillett's
union was demanding four hours continuous work at a time and a minimum
rate of sixpence an hour. During the dispute Mann emerged with Tillett
and John Burns as one of the three main
leaders of the strike.
The employers hoped to starve the dockers back to work but other trade
union activists such as Will Thorne, Eleanor
Marx, James Keir Hardie and Henry
Hyde Champion, gave valuable support to the 10,000 men now out
on strike. Organizations such as the Salvation
Army and the Labour Church raised money
for the strikers and their families. Trade Unions in Australia sent
over £30,000 to help the dockers to continue the struggle. After
five weeks the employers accepted defeat and granted all the dockers'
main demands.
After the successful strike, the dockers formed a new General Labourers'
Union. Ben Tillett was elected General
Secretary and Tom Mann became the union's first President. In London
alone, 20,000 men joined this new union. Tillett and Mann wrote a
pamphlet together called the New Unionism,
where they outlined their socialist views and explained how their
ideal was a "cooperative commonwealth".
Mann was
now one of England's leading trade unionists. He was elected to the
London Trades Council, became secretary of the National Reform Union,
and a member of the Royal Commission on Labour (1891-93). He remained
a strong supporter of Christian Socialism
and in 1893 considered the possibility of becoming an Anglican
minister.
In 1894 Mann was elected as secretary of the new Independent
Labour Party (ILP). He stood three times for Parliament as a ILP
candidate. He was defeated in the 1895 General
Election at Colne Valley and at a by-election in North
Aberdeen in the following year, he came within 500 votes of victory.
A third attempt at a by-election in Halifax
in 1897 also ended in failure.
Mann remained an active trade unionist and in 1897 he helped form
the Workers Union and although growth was initially slow, it and eventually
merged with others to became the Transport
& General Workers Union.
In December, 1901, Mann emigrated to Melbourne in Australia. He was
active in both trade unionism and politics. He became an organizer
for the Australian Labour Party and in 1910 formed the Socialist Party
of Australia. He was arrested twice and charged with sedition but
in both cases was acquitted.
Mann returned to England in 1910 and his old friend Ben
Tillett, employed him as an organizer for his Dockers
Union. Mann also wrote a pamphlet, The
Way to Win, where he argued that socialism would be achieved
through trade union activity rather than by parliamentary elections.
He established the Industrial Syndicalist Education League and edited
The Industrial Syndicalist.
Tom Mann led the 1911 transport workers strike in Liverpool,
and although it lasted for seventy-two days, the employers eventually
accepted the union's demands. During the strike Mann published a leaflet
written by a railwayman, Fred Crowsley, urging soldiers not to fire
upon striking workers. After the strike was over Mann was arrested
and charged with sedition. He was found guilty and sentenced to six
months imprisonment but only served seven weeks before public pressure
secured his release.
Like many socialists, Mann was opposed to Britain's involvement in
the First World War. He joined the British
Socialist Party, an organisation hostile to the war and in 1917 supported
the Russian Revolution and suggested the
creation of soviets in Britain.
Tom Mann was elected to the post as Secretary
of the Amalgamated Engineering Union in 1919 but two years later
was forced to resign as he had reached sixty-five, the compulsory
retirement age. He continued to travel the world advocating socialism
and published pamphlets such as Russia in 1921, where he supported
the measures being taken by the Russian communist government.
Mann, now in his late seventies, continued to upset the authorities
with his speeches and pamphlets. After a speech he made in Belfast
in October 1932 criticizing cuts in poor relief, he was sent to prison
under the terms of the 1817 Seditious Meetings
Act. Two years later he was put on trial in Cardiff
for sedition but was acquitted. Tom Mann died in Leeds
on 13th March, 1941.
(1)
Tom Mann, Memoirs (1923)
I had only a very short time at school as a boy, less than three years
all told. When I was nine years old I was considered old enough to
start work. My father was a clerk at the Victoria Colliery; so it
was counted fitting that I should make a start as a boy on the colliery
farm. A year as a kiddie doing odd jobs in the fields, bird-scaring,
leading the horse at the plough, stone-picking, harvesting, and so
on, and I was to tackle a job down the mine.
My job was to make and keep in order small roads or courses to convey
the air to the respective workings in the mines. The air courses were
only three feet high and wide, and my work was to take away the mullock,
coal, or dirt that the man would require taken from him as he was
worked away at 'heading' a new road, or repairing an existing one.
For this removal there were boxes known down the mine as dans, about
two feet six inches long and eighteen inches wide and of a similar
depth, with an iron ring strongly fixed at each end. A piece of stout
material was fitted on the boy around the waist. To this there was
a chain attached, and the boy would hook the chain to the box, and
crawling on all fours, the chain between his legs, would drag the
box along and take it to the gob where it would be emptied.
(2)
Tom Mann, Memoirs (1923)
Although I was connected with the Anglican Church, the Bible class
I attended and liked so much was conducted by Edmund Laundy of the
Society of Friends. Mr. Laundy was a public accountant, a precise
speaker, a splendid teacher. He taught me much, and helped me in the
matter of correct pronunciation, clear articulation, and insistence
upon knowing the root origin of words, with a proper care in the use
in the right words to convey ideas.
(3)
Tom Mann, Memoirs (1923)
In 1884 I joined the Battersea branch of the Social Democratic Federation.
It held meetings every Sunday morning in the open air, at Battersea
Park gates, on Sunday morning in the open air, on Sunday evenings
in Sydney Hall, and at various other places during the week. John
Burns was the foremost member of the branch, and had already won renown
as a public advocate of the new movement. I threw myself into the
movement with all the energy at my command.
(4)
In his book, Memories
and Reflections, Ben Tillett describes
meeting Tom Mann for the first time in 1889.
He combined the qualities of whirlwind
and volcano. His was the genius of sheer energy. His tremendous capacity
for the work he enjoys the most became a mighty factor in the supreme
crisis of the Dock Strike. For Tom Mann I entertain a deep respect
as a comrade which has not been destroyed by the intellectual vagrancy
into which his energy led him in after years. I remember old Henry
Hyndman saying that Tom's intellect was a tidal one, swayed by changes
in the moon, and capable of the same ebb and flow. Still, he has been
a consistent class-conscious fighter for the various causes to which
he has adhered; sound at heart, self-sacrificing and courageous, he
has never deserted the flag, even if he has sometimes attempted to
plant it in impossible places.
(5)
Philip Snowden, An Autobiography
(1934)
In the early days of the Independent Labour Party Tom Mann became
General Secretary of the party. He was at that time a well-known figure
in the Labour movement. He had come into prominence in connection
with the Dockers' Strike. He was the most volcanic speaker I have
known, and a man of marvellous physical vigour. If Tom Mann had possessed
one thing he lacked, namely, steadfastness of purpose, he would have
been undoubtedly one of the most prominent men in the Labour Party
of today. But he never could remain long associated with one movement.
He had not the gift of settling down to one job and pursuing it to
success. He was one of the most charming men personally I have known,
kind-hearted and generous and tolerant. I never heard him speak an
unkind word of anyone.
(6)
In his book, Memories
and Reflections, Ben Tillett describes
the work that Tom Mann did for the Dockers' Strike in 1889.
I placed Tom Mann in charge of the difficult
duty of seeing that the system of relief was systematically organised.
The strikers, I might even say the dockers in general, involved in
the stoppage of work, were recipients of relief. They were all desperately
in need and when it was announced that relief tickets were to be distributed
some thousands of them gathered before the door of the dingy little
coffee tavern where Tom Mann and his helpers, having just received
the relief tickets from the printers, were preparing to issue them.
(7)
Charlie Glyde, Thirty Years' Reminiscences (1923)
Tom Mann was invited by the SDF to come to Bolton as organizer. A
shop in one of the main streets was stocked with tobacco, newspapers,
etc., and he was installed as manager. Tom drew very large crowds
to the Town Hall Square. Street corner and propaganda meetings were
held in the surrounding towns and villages. his fiery speeches were
marvels of eloquence and power. Tom Mann was well grounded in socialism
and economics. He was one of the best speakers I have known. Of medium
height, well built, with black hair, and with the first word uttered
he gripped his audience and kept them spell-bound until the end.
(8)
Tom Mann, Memoirs (1923)
My close friendship at this period with various ministers of religion
led to the circulation of a report that I was about to enter the Church.
One morning a pressman called upon me to ask what truth there was
in the statement that appeared in The Times on 5th October,
1893. I contradicted the statement that matters were arranged, but
did not deny that the subject had been under serious consideration.
(9)
Fred Crowsley, Open Letter to British Soldiers (1911)
"Thou shalt not kill," says the Bible. Don't forget that!
It does not say, "unless you have a uniform on". No! Murder
is murder, whether committed in the heat of anger on one who has wronged
a loved one, or by clay-piped Tommies with a rifle.
Don't disgrace your parents, your class, by being the willing tools
any longer of the master class. You, like us, are of the slave class.
When we rise, you rise. When we fall, even by your bullets, you fall
also.
(10)
Tom Mann, Memoirs (1923)
Trade unionism is of no value unless the members of the unions are
clear as to their objective - the overthrow of the capitalist system
- and are prepared to use the unions for that purpose. Political action
is of no value unless all political effort is used definitely and
avowedly for the same end, the abolition of the profit-making system.
As far back as 1886, I took an active part in celebrating the Commune
of 1871, and have continued to participate in the anniversary celebration
down to the present time. I gladly accepted the name of Communist
from the date of my first reading of The Communist Manifesto,
and have ever since been favourable to Communist ideals and principles.
(11)
Beatrice Potter heard Tom Mann make a
speech on 19th November, 1889, at Toynbee Hall.
Tom Mann is a fine fellow, absolutely straight and a warm enthusiast.
He opened his speech by reference to Co-operation. socialism means
the Co-operative organization of industry when no one shall be outside.
This was the ideal state towards which they were all striving. He
went on to argue that the only method of reducing the great army of
unemployed was to reduce the hours of the workers so as to divide
the employment among all persons in the trade.
(12)
Beatrice Webb, diary entry (23rd January,
1895)
Last night
we had an informal conference with the ILP leaders. Ramsay MacDonald
and Frank Smith (who are members both of the Fabians and the ILP)
have been for some time harping on the desirability of an understanding
between the two societies. To satisfy them Sidney (Webb) arranged
a little dinner of Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, Edward Pease and George
Bernard Shaw and the two intermediaries. I think the principals on
either side felt it would come to nothing. Nevertheless, it was interesting.
Tom Mann said the Progressives on the LCC were not convinced Socialists.
No one should get the votes of the ILP who did not pledge himself
to the 'Nationalisation of the Means of Production'. Keir Hardie,
who impressed me very unfavourably, deliberately chooses this policy
as the only one which he can boss. His only chance of leadership lies
in the creation of an organisation "against the government";
he knows little and cares less for any constructive thought or action.
But with Tom Mann it is different. he is possessed with the idea of
a 'church' - of a body of men all professing exactly the same creed
and all working in exact uniformity to exactly the same end. No idea
which is not 'absolute', which admits of any compromise or qualification,
no adhesion which is tempered with doubt, has the slightest attraction
to him. And, as Shaw remarked, he is deteriorating. This stumping
the country, talking abstractions and raving emotions, is not good
for a man's judgment, and the perpetual excitement leads, among other
things, to too much whisky.
I do not think the conference ended in any understanding. We made
clear our position. We were a purely educational body, we did not
seek to become a 'party'. We should continue our policy of inoculation,
of giving to each class, to each person, that came under our influence
the exact dose of collectivism that they were prepared to assimilate.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
