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From International Socialism (1st series), No.29, Summer 1967, p.38.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Great Figures in the Labour Movement
J.N. Evans
Pergamon Press
This should be useful in schools and technical colleges, or to give newcomers to the Young Socialists a nodding acquaintance with the lives of eleven leading figures in the history of the British Labour Movement, from Robert Owen to Aneurin Bevan. It’s all at a break-neck pace but manages in the process to give a potted history of at least the political wing of the Movement. There is space for only the scantiest analysis of the leaders’ thoughts and of the forces which threw them up; but most of the better known anecdotes are there, and others of which one knew little – William Morris returning to the SDF in his last years, Keir Hardie finding his own constituency party split over his anti-war stand in 1914 and the 1907 Congress of the Russian Social Democrats, at which Lenin gained control, financed by Joseph Fels, an American soap manufacturer and Socialist.
The compiler’s prejudices seem reasonable, although eyebrows may rise at reading that ‘During the whole of the present century the LSE has been the training ground for the intelligentsia of the Labour Movement’ and that Bevan became an authority on Marxism in the thirties. Anyone recommending this to beginners should, however, warn them against some careless slips, including a mix-up of the Internationals on page 108 and Keir Hardie protesting against the arrest of the editor of the Workers’ Weekly in 1924 – he might well have done so, but he had been dead for nine years.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 6 May 2010