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Born:
c1841? Exhall, Warwickshire? (First International)
E.W. Randle was an elastic web weaver
and was Secretary of the Leicester branch of the First International. The
local branch attempted to get the local Republican Club to affiliate to
the International in 1873.
Sources: Midlands Free Press 22nd
February 1873, Bill Lancaster, Radicalism Co-operation and Socialism
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(British
Socialist Party, Labour Party)
Frank Rands was active in support of
Hartley’s bye-election candidature in 1913 intending to ‘smash
MacDonaldism and stand for Socialism.’ That year, he stood as a
Socialist candidate for West Humberstone when the I.L.P. stood no
candidate in deference to its electoral pact with the Liberals. In the
1930s he was active in the Labour Party.
Sources: Leicester Daily Mercury 20th
June 1913, Leicester Pioneer, October 31st 1913
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Born: Sept
1923, died: June 1986
Harbans Ratoo was a Sikh businessman
who had come to Leicester in the late 1950s. He was prominent on the
Community Relations Council and President of the India League. In 1972,
the British Asian Welfare Society was set up to assist the arrival of
refugees from Uganda and Harbans Ratoo became its president. Its office
was behind a cinema in Belgrave Gate which he owned. However, it was not
long before Mr Ratoo was being seen as having accepted the City Council’s
policy of advising the refugees not to come to Leicester. He was strongly
criticised by the local branch of the Indian Workers Association (GB) for
‘scare mongering’ and ‘opportunism.’ He later adopted as a Labour
candidate in the local elections.
Sources: Leicester Mercury 10th
June 1986, Valerie Marett, Immigrants Settling in the City, 1987
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(I.L.P.&
Labour Party)
She became the first woman on the
Executive of the Leicester Labour Party in 1913.
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Born: c1865
Leicester (I.L.P. and Labour Party)
A.H. Reynolds was orphaned at an
early age and he was left in the charge of Henry Thomas Chambers, JP,
alderman and later mayor. Unlike many others in the I.L.P., he received
the best possible education, going to a private school on New Walk and to
the Mill Hill House School on London Road. After working in the printing
trade, he worked as a clerk for the Corporation’s Water Works Dept. for 17
years. He left to become manager of the New Pioneer Publishing Society,
who published the Leicester Pioneer.
He was very active in the temperance
movement, but he began to realise that temperance alone was not the answer
to social problems. He attended the Wycliffe Adult school and was
influenced by the election campaigns run by Joseph Burgess. He was elected
to the executive of the I.L.P. and general committee of the Labour Party.
He was apparently a speaker who was much in demand. He was a director of
the Temperance Hall Company and chairman of the executive of the Leicester
Temperance Society.
He was elected as town councillor for
Newton ward 1909 and 1912. He was Ramsay MacDonald’s agent in the 1910
election. Following refusal of the Labour Party nationally to support the
candidature of Geo Banton in the 1913 parliamentary by-election, he
offered his services to the British Socialist Party’s candidate Hartley.
Sources: Yorkshire Herald, 24th
June 1913
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Born: 24th
August 1906, died December 1995 (Communist Party)
 Johnny
Rice was the son of a militant suffragette. In 1936 he was arrested by the
Gestapo whilst working in Germany and was released following the
intervention of Anthony Eden. He worked in France and America as a waiter
and joined the Communist Party in 1939. He worked for the gas board as a
meter reader and was the steward at the Trades Council for many years. He
was a Communist Party candidate in local elections in Castle ward in 1960
and other subsequent elections through to the 1970s. He was a familiar
figure in Gallowtree Gate on Saturday mornings where he sold the Morning
Star. He was a member of the British Soviet Friendship Society and was on
‘pro soviet’ wing of the Communist Party.
Sources: Leicester Mercury, May 1960,
author’s personal knowledge
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Born: 25th
March 1863 died: 1942 (S.D.F., I.L.P.& Labour Party)
 Freddy
Richards was born in Wednesbury Staffordshire, the son of a commercial
traveller who was a Conservative. Freddy Richards was educated first at a
Church school and then at a Board school, and began work as a half-timer
at the age of eleven. A year later his father died and the family -
mother, four boys and a girl - found themselves poor. Freddy then went to
work full-time, and had a variety of ill-paid jobs until he saved enough
money to pay an apprentice's premium to become a boot-laster in
Staffordshire. He then moved to Leicester and joined the National Union of
Operative Boot and Shoe Riveters and Finishers (later the National Union
of Boot and Shoe Operatives) in 1885. He soon made his reputation as a
vigorous and lively critic of the union establishment. He led a series of
successful unofficial strikes in 1889 and challenged the Liberal
leadership of the NUBSO.
He was a keen student of Tom
Barclay’s socialist classes, sharing his teacher’s love of Ruskin. Freddy
Richards was a committed socialist by 1889. At that time he was a member
of the S.D.F. He became a delegate to the Trades Council in 1892 and in
July 1894 helped found the I.L.P. in Leicester.
During the early 1890s, he strongly
supported the ideals of co-operative production and advocated the use of
union funds to set co-ops up. This was opposed by the union’s national
leadership. However, in 1893, the St. Crispins factory was started with
£1,000 of interest free capital given by local NUBSO branches. Although,
Richards, Curley and Clarkmead lobied for more union funds for the
venture, the co-operative failed in 1895. Whilst Richards, stopped
lecturing branches on the Industrial Co-operative Scheme, he remained
involved with its successor, the Self Help Co-operative for many years. In
the 1920s, this was one of 16 boot and shoe factories owned and controlled
by the workers employed.
Richards was strongly opposed to the
principles of arbitration in his trade, and agitated within the union for
a political commitment to an advanced programme including large-scale
nationalisation.
In December 1894, Richards became the
first Independent Labour councillor to be elected to the Town Council in
1894 for Wyggeston ward. Based on the I.L.P. programme approved on October
22 1894, during the election he advocated:
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That councillors to be paid an
allowance, that aldermen should be abolished and that magistrates should
be elected.
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That the Borough accounts should be
published and reporters should have the right to attend council
committee meetings
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The municipalisation of tramways and
‘busses
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The building of healthy council houses
and the abolition of gas meter rents
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The ending of contract labour by the
council and the introduction of direct labour employed at TU rates
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The establishing of municipal farms
and gardens to absorb the unemployed
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An 8 hour day for all council workers,
a minimum wages for workers and a maximum wage for officials. All
council workers to be placed on an equal footing with regard to holidays
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The opening of municipal bakeries and
council runs depots where coal and other items can be sold to the public
at a low cost
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Opposition to compulsory vaccination
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That Labour newspapers be placed in
the Town's free libraries
He was elected junior vice-president
of the important Leicester No. 1 branch in 1892, vice-president in 1894,
and president in 1897. In 1893 he had become a permanent official of his
local branch and by 1899 was on the national executive council. Richards
played an important part in persuading the union to affiliate to the
Labour Representation Committee.
“Mr Richards’ pale face and sharp
almost ascetic cast of features, combined with his somewhat slender build,
fail to convey to the stranger the virility and nervous energy which he
possesses. Yet Mr Richards is full of activity and as the Town Council is
fully aware, is a born fighter. For biting sarcasm and stinging satire he
is, when occasion calls, a terror to his opponents.
In June 1900, J. Ramsey MacDonald was
invited to address the annual conference of the Boot and Shoe Operatives
in Leeds and it was Richards who proposed the motion that the membership
should be balloted on the question of affiliation - the result of which
was affirmative, although the total vote was small. When Richards, the
leading ILP member in the union, stood for the general secretaryship of
the union in 1899 he polled 3139 votes against 4501 for the Lib-Lab
candidate, W.B. Hornidge. Richards was appointed a full-time national
organiser in 1904 but he resigned during the following year, giving as his
main reason the serious difficulties involving his own Leicester branch.
But a new career was about to begin, when he was adopted by the
Wolverhampton Trades Council as the L.R.C. candidate for Wolverhampton
West in 1903. At the election, on 15 January 1906, Richards just won the
seat with 5,756 votes against 5,585.
Richards' four years in the House of
Commons followed a common enough pattern. He was elected a Junior Whip for
the Labour group. He was a good debater and controversialist and he
immersed himself in the minutiae of parliamentary business, the full
detail of which he recounted in his union's Monthly Reports. His general
attitudes, however, were becoming less radical and more moderate, and
within a year of his election he was being vigorously criticised by the
active Socialists within his own union.
During the 1900s, Freddy had mellowed
in more senses than one; in physical appearance as well as in thought and
attitude. He was counted among the first dandies of the trade union
movement. Bow-tie, carnation in his button-hole, white waistcoat and white
spats were the keynote (together with what was known in the Labour
movement, with affectionate derision, as an ‘anarchist’ or straw hat). A
few sneered at the ‘Beau Brummell’ of the trade unions; some derived an
obscure vicarious satisfaction at seeing a Labour leader dressed more
smartly than some of the employers with whom he was dealing.
He lost his Wolverhampton seat at the
January election of 1910 and unsuccessfully contested the East Northants
constituency in the second general election of that year. On this occasion
he fought without any financial help from the union. The reason given was
the Osborne judgement, but Richards was convinced there was prejudice
against him by some members of the union's council, and the incident
rankled for many years. He twice attempted to get back on the Town Council
in 1914, but failed. In 1910, he was elected president of the union and he
retained the office until 1929.
The need to increase production
during World War One strengthened the union’s position, giving it a power
and prestige which it had never previously enjoyed. Unlike his colleagues
in the I.L.P., Richards supported the war: “I advised both my boys to
join up and should have done so myself if I had thought that by doing so I
could have done more good. I have sung the ‘Red Flag’ and was prepared to
fight for it and kill militarism in this or any other land.” In August
1918, this pro-war stance was the reported reason for his rejection as the
Labour parliamentary candidate for Northampton. It is not known why, in
1917, he declined the award of a C.B.E. for his services to the war
effort. Perhaps it was a gesture towards his anti-war colleagues.
He remained a hardworking and
efficient union administrator, and found no serious difficulty in
containing the vigorous challenge to the established leadership of the
union which came from the Minority Movement in the 1920s. He became
president of the Trades Council in 1928 and retired from union work in
1929. On his retirement from union office, he was returned as Labour
councillor for the Newton ward of Leicester City Council and he served for
the next ten years.
He was twice married: firstly to Emma
Mee (c1862-1915) in 1882, by whom he had two sons and a daughter, and
then, in 1916, to Mary J. Bell, secretary of the Leicester Women's branch
of the Boot and Shoe Operatives. He died at his home in Birstall,
Leicester, on 4th October 1942, survived by his wife, a son and
daughter by his first wife, and an adopted son.
Sources: Leicester Trades Council,
Trade Union Congress Leicester 1903, Official Souvenir, 1903, Fox, Alan, A
History of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Workers, F. P. Armitage,
Leicester, 1914-1918,
Leicester, 1933. 1958, Bill Lancaster, Radicalism Co-operation and
Socialism
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Born: 1870
(I.L.P.& Labour Party)
The first impression one gets of him
is of a mild looking man in spectacles, very correct in dress and
manner…he doesn’t quite look like a Socialist.
Frederick Riley was born in Stoney
Stanton. Both his parents were of Irish extraction and his father was a
framework knitter. He came to Leicester at the age of 15 and worked as a
postman and then as a clerk. He became an officer of his union in 1902. He
was elected to the Town Council in 1906 and was for five years, chair of
the Arts, Libraries and Museums Committee. He had, according to the
Pioneer he had a notable interest in and knowledge of artistic matters and
a private collection of pictures. He was the Labour Party parliamentary
candidate for South Leicester in the khaki election of 1918. However, as a
clerk in the post office he was barred from standing for parliament and
consequently had to resign his job in order to become a candidate.
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 Born:
c1852 died: April 1937 (I.L.P.& Labour Party)
John Riley was born in Stoney Stanton
and had very little education and his family could not spare him to go to
grammar school. His father was a stockinger and he worked with him as a
winder as well as working on the land. He came to Leicester and worked as
a framework knitter and in Cooper and Corah’s hosiery factory. When he
went to work at a factory in Canning Place, there were some very old men
there who had belonged to the Chartist movement and had walked the streets
with Thomas Cooper. Riley had a love of books and although some of these
old Chartists could neither read nor write, one of them, Robert Bingley,
advised him to read Cobbett. He was also advised in his choice of books by
John Newell who also insisted on him going to evening classes at the
Working Men’s College. He was later able to read Virgil, Caesar and the
New Testament in Latin. He was active in the hosiery union and in his
early days used to meet with kindred spirits in the Red Cow where Tom
Barclay was a visitor.
Riley was attracted by the radicalism
of P.A. Taylor MP and was an active supporter of temperance, a member of
the Band of Hope Movement and the adult school movement. He joined the
I.L.P. in 1894 and won Aylestone as Labour candidate in 1905 after
campaigning strongly on the right to work. Unfortunately his health forced
him to retire from the council soon after. When he had recovered from his
illness, he was elected to the Executive of the Hosiery Union and was
president for three or four years. He became president of the Trades
Council in 1918. He presided over the May Day meeting of 1918 which was
disrupted by jingoistic supporters of the war and never forgot the
spectacle of the faces of men and women “so distorted almost out of
recognition by hatred and passion as on that day.” He was elected to
the board of LCS c1916 and served for at least10 years.
Sources: Leicester Pioneer, 22nd
February 1918
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(Labour)
Before coming to Leicester Helena
Roberts had be a councillor and mayor of an East London borough. She
retained Newton ward for Labour for several years before standing down in
1967.
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Born? (R.S.L.)
Robinson was the uncompromising
leader of the Trotskyite Revolutionary Socialist League in Leicester in
the late 30s and early 40s. His historic legacy seems to be a wrangle with
fellow Trotskyites over whether the working class should demand deeper air
raid shelters. (This had been CP policy since 1936) In his view: “If
one favoured a deeper shelter, why not a better gas mask, a more rapid
firing machine gun, a faster tank? If revolutionaries began to make
concessions of this kind they might be led inexorably to improving the
military efficiency of capitalism: they had to desire their own
government’s defeat.”
Robinson flatly opposed any demands
on the state for protection; he made this demand in midst of the blitz
from the comparative safety of Leicester. A document was issued,
‘Bolshevism or Defencism,’ which indicted the Trotskyite Centre for
capitulation and was the start of a long and tedious polemic.
Sources: Martin Upham: The History
of British Trotskyism to 1949
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Born:
Leicester or Leicestershire circa 1837, died: c1897 (Socialist League)
George Robson was a framework knitter
by trade. He was a socialist and secularist and friend of Tom Barclay and
Joseph Dare. He was an activist in the Leicester Amalgamated Hosiery Union
in the 1880s and worked at Corah’s with Tom Barclay where they were
supporters of Charles Bradlaugh. They then became a converts to William
Morris and founded the Leicester Branch of the Socialist League on Nov 1st
1885. He was a frequent speaker on platforms at Russell Square and
Humberstone Gate. He contributed to Thomas Barclay’s Country and
Midland Counties Advertiser.
From the 1870’s, Robson was an
enthusiastic naturalist who made a complete collection of specimens of
Leicestershire moths, butterflies, beetles and plants which found their
way into the Museum’s collection. Barclay described him as a working man
scientist, who did not always speak grammatically However, he gave up his
job and sold his collection of fossils so he could study to be a certified
teacher. Barclay recalled that he was a better writer than a lecturer.
Sources: The Wyvern, 16th
July 1897, Bill Lancaster, Radicalism Co-operation and Socialism
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(Republicans and
Secularists)
George Ross (born, Leicester c1830 died in Bedfordshire
1907) was a Wharf Street butcher and committee member of the
re-established Secular Society Ross of 1867. He acted a secretary, as did
his wife Deborah (born, Wymeswold c1828 d1881), during the 1867-71 and was
also active in the local Republican Club. In 1878, George Ross a Bradlaugh
supporter was secretary of the local branch of the National Secular
Society, which went through a period of poor relations with the
respectably minded Leicester Secular Society. Both Deborah & George are
buried in Welford Road cemetery
Sources: Midlands Free Press, 17th May 1873,
F. J. Gould, The History Of The Leicester Secular
Society, 1900, David Nash, Secularism, Art and Freedom,
census returns
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(Framework-Knitters Association, Hampden Clubs)
In 1816, Thomas Rowlett, who had
passed half a century in the hosiery trade, emerged as one of the radical
leaders of the local Hampden Clubs. The club cost a 1d a week to subscribe
to an its basic principles were that representation alone constituted
political liberty, that the vote should be given to all those who paid
taxes and that parliaments should be elected annually. He was also a
prominent leader of the framework knitters and became secretary of the
framework-knitters. During the strike of 1817, a charge was brought
against him for breach of the Combination Laws. In March, 1823, he gave
evidence to Committee on Artisans and Machinery which paved the way for
the repeal of the Combination Laws.
Sources: A. Temple Patterson,
Radical Leicester,
Leicester 1954
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Born: 1754,
died 1792
Charles Rozzell was a self-educated
framework-knitter who became by turns a teacher, official spokesman for
the framework-knitters, and bard of the local Revolution Club among other
things. He wrote on many topics of local interest, from the Leicester
Infirmary to local cricket matches, and he also produced a great deal of
Whig propaganda at election times.
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Died: 20th
June 1961 (Labour Party)
Robert Russell was elected to the
City Council for Abbey ward in 1945 and was Chair of Finance Committee
1956-60. He was also president of the City Labour Party 1949-50, a
magistrate and a member of the National Health Executive Council for
Leicester from its formation in 1948. He died in office.
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Born:
Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Ireland, 1921; died: June 1997 (Labour Party)
 Martin
Ryan worked in the Scottish coalfield before moving to Leicester in 1947.
He worked in the Desford Colliery for 14 years before being elected as an
official of the N.U.M. He later became president of the Leicestershire
National Union of Mineworkers. He was chairman of the Leicester South
Labour Party in the 1970s and was elected to the County Council in 1974.
During the 1990s Martin was leader of the Labour Group on the County
Council representing Spinney Hill and later Mowmacre ward. He was chair of
the County Council in 1987. He died from a brain haemorrhage after being
taken ill at a Labour Party meeting, just one month after he had given up
his seat on the County Council.
Sources: Leicester Mercury. June
1997, author’s personal knowledge
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© Ned Newitt Last revised:
June 28, 2011. |
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Index
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