Tom Mann
|
|
Tom Mann (15 April 1856 - 13 March 1941) was a noted British trade unionist. Largely self-educated, Mann became a successful organiser and a popular public speaker in the labour movement.
| Contents |
Background
Mann was born in a suburb of Coventry, the son of a clerk who worked at a colliery. He attended school from the ages of six to nine, then began work doing odd jobs on the colliery farm. A year later he became a trapper, a labour-intensive jobs that involved clearing blockages from the narrow airways in the mining shafts. In 1870, the colliery was forced to close and the family moved to Birmingham. Mann soon found work as an engineering apprentice. He attended public meetings addressed by Annie Besant and John Bright, and this began his political awareness. He completed his apprenticeship in 1877 and moved to London, however he was unable to find work as an engineer and took a series of unskilled jobs.
In 1879, Mann found work in an engineering shop. Here he was introduced to socialism by the foreman, and decided to improve his own education. His reading included the works of William Morris, Henry George and John Ruskin. In 1881 he joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and took part in his first strike. In 1884, he joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in Battersea. Here he met John Burns and Henry Hyde Champion, who encouraged him to publish a pamphlet calling for the working day to be limited to eight hours. Mann formed an organisation, the Eight Hour League, which successfully pressured the TUC to adopt the eight-hour day as a key goal.
Activist and Leader
After reading the Communist Manifesto in 1886, Mann became a communist. He now believed the main purpose of the labour movement should be to overthrow capitalism, rather than just to ameliorate the condition of workers under capitalism. He moved to Newcastle in 1877 and organised the SDF in the north of England. He managed Keir Hardie's electoral campaign in Lanark before returning to London in 1888, where he worked in support of the Bryant and May match factory strike. With Burns and Champion, he began producing a journal, the Labour Elector in 1888.
Along with Burns and Ben Tillett, Mann was one of the leading figures in the London docks strike of 1889. He was responsible for organising relief for the strikers and their families. With the support of other unions and various organisations, the strike was successful. Following the strike, Mann was elected President of the newly-formed Dock Wharf Riverside and General Workers Union, with Tillett as General Secretary. Tillett and Mann wrote a pamphlet called New Unionism, which advanced the utopian ideal of a co-operative commonwealth. Mann was also elected to the London Trades and Labour Council and as secretary of the National Reform Union, and was a member of the Royal Commission on Labour from 1891 to 1893. In 1894, he was a founding member of the Independent Labour Party and became the party Secretary in 1894. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the party in the 1895 General Election. In 1896 he was beaten in the election for Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. He helped create the International Transport Workers' Federation, and was its first President. He was deported from a number of European countries for organising trade unions.
Mann religious belief was as strong as his politics. He was an Anglican and organised support from Christian organisations like the Salvation Army during a number of strikes. In 1893 there were rumours that he intended to become a minister. He advocated the co-operative model of economic organisation, but resisted alliance between the ILP and other socialist organisations in Britain, like the Fabians. In 1895, the Fabian Beatrice Webb criticised Mann's absolutism and described his goal derogatorily as, "a body of men all professing exactly the same creed and all working in exact uniformity to exactly the same end". Philip Snowden, a member of the ILP, liked Mann but was critical of his inability to stay with any one party or organisation for more than a few years.
Australia and Liverpool
In 1901, Mann emigrated to Australia to see if that country's broader electoral franchise would allow more "drastic modification of capitalism". Settling in Melbourne he was active in Australian trade unions and became an organiser for the Australian Labor Party. However, he grew disillusioned with the party, believing it was being corrupted by the nature of government and concerned only with winning elections. He felt that the federal Labour MPs were unable and unwilling to change society, and their prominence within the movement was stifling and over-shadowing organised labour. He resigned from the ALP and founded the Victoria Socialist Party.
Returning to Britain in 1910, Mann wrote The Way to Win, a pamphlet which argued that socialism could only be achieved through trade unionism and co-operation, and that parliamentary democracy was inherently corrupt. He founded the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, and worked as an organiser for Ben Tillett. He lead the Liverpool transport strike of 1911, after which he was convicted of sedition. His prison sentence was quashed after public pressure. He was opposed to Britain's involvement in the first World War on socialist and religious grounds and addressed pacifist rallies. In 1917, he joined the successor to the Social Democratic Federation, the British Socialist Party, which had affiliated to the Labour Party the previous year.
Veteran Campaigner
In 1919 he again ran for election as Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and was this time successful. He held the post until 1921, when he retired at the age of sixty-five. He welcomed the Russian Revolution and the Communist government, and called for soviets to be formed in the United Kingdom; in 1920 he was one of many members of the British Socialist Party who were inspired by the Revolution to break with Labour and form the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Tom Mann continued to actively champion socialism, communism and co-operation until his death in 1941. He published further pamphlets and regularly addressed public meetings in Britain and abroad, and he was arrested for sedition on several more occasions. He continued to be a popular figure in the labour movement, attracting large audiences to rallies and benefits. During the Spanish Civil War he wanted to fight on the Republican side, but was by that time far too old. A unit of the International Brigade, the Tom Mann Centuria, was named in his honour.