A Confluence Of The Independent Labour Party

When you get a confluence of rivers you get two of more insignificant rivers joining together to become significant. When you get a confluence of ideas you often get a sea-change in science, technology, the arts, or some other field of human activity. But sometimes you just get a confluence of things - names, places, words, shapes - and we call it serendipity. And it's interesting. This week I have had a confluence of the Independent Labour Party.

It all started on Sunday when we called in on our old friends Kathy and Arthur and they gave me a photograph (which features me, amongst others, holding a framed portrait of Kier Hardie) taken some 35 years ago at an Independent Labour Party (ILP) gathering at Clarion House in Nelson. The photograph is reproduced on my Daily Photo Blog.

And then, a couple of days later and quite independently, I was sorting through some old papers and I came across a collection of three documents which date back to the 1914 Conference of the ILP which was held in Bradford. The three documents are illustrated here and they are a wonderful Souvenir Programme, a quite beautiful silk badge or bookmark, and a delegate's credential in the name of Mr J. S Middleton. For a moment I wondered how I had acquired these three quite rare artifacts, but the name of the delegate provided the necessary clue.

J. S ("Jim") Middleton (1878-1962) was the assistant to James Ramsey MacDonald, the first General Secretary of the British Labour Party. At the time the ILP was still an integral part of the Labour Party and therefore he would have been at the 1914 ILP Conference which was that organisation's "Coming of Age" Conference. Jim later went on to become General Secretary of the Labour Party, a position he held until the end of World War II.

I never met Jim - who had died before I got involved in politics - but in the 1970s I did know his widow, Lucy Middleton. Lucy herself had a long and outstanding career in the labour movement, serving as a MP in the 1945 Labour Government and later becoming the first Chair of "War on Want". I knew Lucy well and she encouraged me in my own involvement in the Labour Party. We shared a love of Labour History and it was her who gave me the three documents reproduced here.

The ILP cropped up a third time this week when I was reading Andrew Marr's "A History of Modern Britain". In the first chapter he discusses that tremendously influential 1945 Labour Government and looks at the background of several of its leaders such as the Prime Minister, Clement Atlee. Atlee was also active in the ILP having joined in 1908 and in 1913 he became a Lecturer at the London School of Economics. But, as yet, I have not been able to discover whether he was at the 1914 Bradford Conference, but no doubt someone will write in and tell me. If he was it would make the confluence almost perfect.

Coming Face To Face With Victor Grayson

Last night I saw Victor Grayson. It was in the upstairs room at Marsden Socialist Club. I was killing a few moments during the Beer Break of the Marsden Jazz Festival Committee Meeting. Victor was doing nothing other than smiling at me from an old photograph on the wall. I'm not sure how our meeting affected him, but for me it made me go home and re-read the very strange and very mysterious story of British socialism's lost leader.

Grayson was born in Liverpool, the son of a carpenter, in 1881. Like many great orators, he had a bad stammer as a child, but overcame this and became active in the nineteenth century trade union and socialist movement. In January 1907 the Colne Valley Branch of the Independent Labour Party - more than likely meeting in the very room in Marsden where his picture now hangs - adopted him as their candidate for the forthcoming elections. The leadership of the Labour Party tried to pressure the local ILP branch to drop their support for his candidacy (there was an informal electoral pact with the Liberal Party) but they refused and against all the odds, Grayson was elected. Politically, he stood on the extreme left wing of the Party and openly preached the need for revolution and the overthrow of capitalism. Angry at their opposition to his candidacy, Grayson refused to join the official Labour Group in Parliament, and sat as an independent socialist. He quickly fell foul of the rules and conventions of Parliament and was removed from the House on several occasions.

However, just as frequently, he removed himself from the House. He attended few debates, preferring to concentrate on lecture tours and increasingly frequent bouts of heavy drinking. Stories of his drunkenness and luxurious lifestyle quickly spread and in the 1910 election he lost his parliamentary seat. In the years that followed, there were episodes of heavy drinking and several attempts to re-launch his political career, all of which failed. He surprised many of his socialist supporters by becoming a ardent supporter of the First World War. In 1915 he left Britain to go to New Zealand, but immediately joined the New Zealand army and returned to the Western Front where, in 1917, he was badly wounded.

After the war he returned to Britain where he became involved in a bitter campaign against the then Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. He claimed to have proof that Lloyd George was involved in selling political honours and the involvement of an MI5 agent, Arthur Maundy Gregory, in this corrupt practice. In September 1920, Grayson was beaten up in The Strand. He claimed that it was an attempt to silence him and stop him naming the "monocled dandy" (Gregory) as a key player in the sale of honours. A few days later he received a telephone call whilst out drinking with friends. He told his friends that he would be back shortly and left them. Later that evening he was seen entering a house down by the River Thames. After that, he was never seen again.

No body was ever discovered, no trial ever took place. But there were rumours and sightings and theories and speculation. Many claim that he was murdered to silence him. Some claim he fled the country and lived under an assumed name in Australia. Nobody knows. What is known, however, is that Gregory continued to have a somewhat shady involvement in British politics (he was one of the people behind the forged Zinoviev Letter that helped defeat the Labour Party in the 1924 election) before finally being imprisoned in 1932 for attempting to sell political honours.

So many aspects of the story have a contemporary feel about them. I would have happily sat down with Grayson for an hour or two and attempted to find out what he knew and why he vanished. But Victor Grayson wasn't talking. He was just looking at me from his spot on the wall in the upstairs committee room. Smiling knowingly.