James Connolly, A Full Life: A Biography of Ireland's Renowned Trade Unionist and Leader of the 1916 Easter Rising

By Donal Nevin

'Hasn't it been a full life, Lillie, and isn't this a good end?', were James Connolly's last words to his wife in Dublin Castle in the early hours of 12 May 1916 just before his execution for his part in leading the Easter Rising.

James Connolly, the son of Irish immigrants, was born in Edinburgh. The first fourteen years of his life were spent in Edinburgh and the next seven years in the King's Liverpool Regiment in Ireland. In 1889, he returned to Edinburgh where he was a socialist activist and organiser for seven years. In 1896, at the age of 28, he was invited to Dublin as socialist organiser, founding the Irish Republican Socialist Party and editing The Workers' Republic.

Connolly spent seven years in America between 1903 and 1910, returning to Ireland in 1910 as organiser of the Socialist Party of Ireland. Connolly was appointed Ulster Organiser of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union by James Larkin, succeeding him as acting general secretary in October 1914. As Commander of the Irish Citizen Army, Connolly joined with leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the Easter Rising in 1916, becoming Commandant-General of the Dublin Division of the Army of the Republic and Vice-President of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.

For their part in the Easter Rising, Connolly and thirteen of his fellow revolutionaries were executed in Kilmainham Gaol by the British government. Connolly, the last to be executed, was wounded in the Rising and had to be strapped to a chair to face the firing squad.

This biography deals with Connolly's activities as soldier, agitator, propagandist, orator, socialist organiser, pamphleteer, trade union leader, insurgent, and traces the evolution of his political thinking as social democrat, revolutionist, syndicalist, revolutionary socialist, insurrectionist. It is based largely on Connolly's prolific writings in twenty-seven journals in Scotland, England, Ireland, France and America, and some 200 letters which are particularly revealing of his relationships with colleagues. James Connolly is the very best survey of Connolly's remarkable life and times.
James Connolly, A Full Life: Table of Contents
Preface by Des Geraghty

- PART I Edinburgh 1868–1882
- PART II Ireland 1882–1889
- PART III Edinburgh 1889–1896: Social Democrat
- PART IV Dublin 1890–1903: Revolutionist
- PART V America 1903–1910: Syndicalist
- PART VI Writings
- PART VII Ireland 1910–1916 The Red and the Green: Revolutionary Socialist–Insurrectionist
- PART VIII Revolutionary Thinker
- APPENDICES

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Aug 30, 2005
• ISBN: 9780717162772

Donal Nevin

The late Donal Nevin was a distinguished labour historian and former General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. SIPTU General President, Jack O’Connor, has expressed his deep regret at the death of Nevin, describing him as a man ‘of great intellect and absolute integrity’. Nevin was General Secretary to the Congress from 1982 to 1989. He also wrote James Connolly: A Full Life.

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James Connolly

Born 107 Cowgate, Edinburgh, 5 June 1868

King’s Liverpool Regiment, Ireland, 1882–9

Socialist League, Social Democratic Federation, Scottish Labour Party, Scottish Socialist Federation, Independent Labour Party, Edinburgh, 1889–96

Founded Irish Socialist Republican Party, Dublin, 1896

Editor, The Workers’ Republic 1898–1903

Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain, 1903

Socialist Labor Party of America, 1903–8

New York Organiser, Industrial Workers of the World, 1907

Founded Irish Socialist Federation, New York, 1907

National Organiser, Socialist Party of America, 1908–10

Editor, The Harp, New York, 1908–10

Organiser, Socialist Party of Ireland, 1910–11

Founded Independent Labour Party (Ireland), 1912

Ulster organiser, Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, 1911–14

Acting general secretary, ITGWU, October 1914–April 1916

Commander, Irish Citizen Army, 1914

Editor, The Workers’ Republic, 1915–16

Military Council, Irish Republican Brotherhood, January 1916

Vice-President, Provisional Government of Irish Republic, April 1916

Commandant General, Dublin Division, Army of the Republic, April 1916

Court-martialled in Dublin Castle, 9 May 1916

Executed, Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, 12 May 1916

PREFACE

James Connolly has a special place in the hearts and minds of the Irish people. Though physically small, Connolly remains a titanic figure in the history of modern Ireland. As an effective labour leader, he helped to shape the modern Irish trade union movement. In a lifetime of struggle he managed to combine a visionary socialism with a hard-headed and practical realism about what it was possible to achieve in any engagement. His insightful understanding of Irish history in Labour in Irish History helped to dispel much of the mythology surrounding the prevailing concerns for kings, lords and ladies and replaced it with the assertion that the ‘Irish Question’ was fundamentally a social question.

During a life of virtually unrelenting hardship and struggle he demonstrated remarkable ability to analyse and debate the major issues of the day with all-comers. His controversial views regularly evoked responses from friend and foe alike but Connolly continued to use public discourse to raise the consciousness of workers about the issues of the day. Many of his views on Labour, Nationality and Religion, on the Workers’ Republic, on the Co-operative Commonwealth, or War and Peace have echoes in today’s world and continue to be debated vigorously across the globe.

Although best remembered as an Irish patriot and martyr for the cause, after his execution by a British firing squad on 12 May 1916, Connolly deserves to be remembered more for his life than for his death. At different stages in his development he demonstrated a commitment to a variety of tendencies, for example socialist agitator, militant syndicalist, radical republican or anti-war activist, yet he displayed a remarkable consistency in favour of the poor and oppressed of all nations.

His views cannot be readily transposed into today’s world or used as an unerring guide to modern struggles but his vision and his values remain remarkably relevant to our society. They are particularly important for the labour movement. I hope the availability of his writings now will stimulate even greater debate about Connolly’s vision and assist a thoroughly informed, critical and constructive appraisal of the present ‘Republic’ and the people who inhabit it.

In Connolly’s words:

Ireland without its people is nothing to me, and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for ‘Ireland’ and can pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and suffering, the shame and degradation wrought upon the people of Ireland, aye wrought by Irishmen upon Irish men and women without burning to end it, is in my opinion a fraud and a liar in his heart.

That is the challenge for our generation.

Des Geraghty

General President SIPTU 1999–2003

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Coming to this biography of James Connolly the reader may well ask why another biography, given that there have been eight over the past eighty years: Desmond Ryan (1924), R.M. Fox (1946), C. Desmond Greaves (1961), Proinsias Mac An Bheatha (1963), Samuel Levenson (1978), Carl Reeve and Ann Barton Reeve (1978), Seán Cronin (1978) and Austen Morgan (1988). There have also been a number of monographs notably by Owen Dudley Edwards (1971), Ruth Dudley Edwards (1981) and J.C. Hyland (1997) not to mention numerous political commentaries.

This biography has been constructed on three pillars – the first being Connolly’s letters, the second, his writings and the third, Greaves’s masterly work, The Life and Times of James Connolly, one of the great Irish biographies of the second half of the twentieth century.

In using Connolly’s writings and the more than 200 letters of his that survive, in the writing of this biography, it is hoped that the work might be seen to resemble an autobiography. Connolly’s letters throw much light on aspects of his personality and temperament. In them he is frank about his relationships with his colleagues, caustically critical of their shortcomings and inactivity and ever ready to dispute opinions contrary to his own.

Connolly’s unshakeable faith in the ability of the working class to rise up, shake off the shackles of capitalist oppression and build a new society based on co-operation and community action emerges vividly from the letters. Likewise his firm belief that the international solidarity of the workers would prevail and that the workers of the world would indeed unite under the banner of socialism. These convictions, manifest in his letters, Connolly maintained throughout his life.

The second pillar of this biography, Connolly’s writings, have led to him being described by Professor John A. Murphy as ‘a brilliant polemicist’, by Professor R.F. Foster as ‘a gifted writer’ and by George Dangerfield as ‘a master of polemical prose’.

Throughout an active political life spanning a quarter of a century, Connolly was a prolific writer and journalist contributing an editorial and other articles to almost every one of the more than one hundred issues of the Workers’ Republic which he edited between 1898 and 1903. It was the same with The Harp, published in America between 1908 and 1910, and the second series of the Workers’ Republic in 1915–16. He also contributed to some twenty-four other journals in Ireland, Scotland, England, France and America. These extensive writings are a major resource, demonstrating the evolution of his industrial and political ideas over two decades. Extracts from them constitute a major part of this biography and help to establish that Connolly was, in Professor J.J. Lee’s words, ‘probably the most remarkable thinker produced in twentieth-century Ireland’.

Greaves’s pioneering research over ten years, his tracking down and recording the recollections of so many of Connolly’s colleagues from Scotland, England, Ireland and America, and his unearthing of an abundance of valuable material from contemporary papers and journals, puts in his debt anyone who writes of Connolly and his life’s work. This writer freely acknowledges his debt to Greaves’s work. The Life and Times of James Connolly was described in 1961 by Roy Jenkins (later the President of the European Commission, and himself a notable biographer of political figures) as ‘a generously proportioned life’ whose general note was one of ‘careful scholarship’ with few facts about Connolly and the events in which he participated which were not sifted and considered.

James Connolly wrote in Forward, 9 May 1914, that ‘human nature is a wonderful thing, that the soul of man knows what powers or possibilities for good or evil lie in humanity,’ adding that he tried to preserve his receptivity towards all new ideas, tolerance towards all manifestations of social activity. His writings and his letters establish the honesty and integrity of Connolly’s thinking and his actions in a world that was changing so radically and so rapidly over the twenty-five years of intense activity dedicated to the pursuit – even to the death – of his vision of a socialist future for humanity.

As Professor Thomas Duddy has noted in his recent A History of Irish Thought, Connolly’s thought was nearly always a response to developing circumstances rather than to theoretically dogmatic or discursive concern. Connolly’s originality, Professor Duddy wrote, consisted precisely in his preparedness to be eclectic and adaptable in his response to local events and conditions, particularly in his avoidance of dogmatic or schematic thought.

The writer trusts that this volume does justice to James Connolly – social democrat – revolutionist – syndicalist – revolutionary socialist – insurrectionist: James Connolly, labourer, soldier, agitator, propagandist, organiser, orator, editor, pamphleteer, writer, historian, trade union official, insurrectionist.

I am greatly indebted to many people for the help, guidance, information and, not least, the valued advice given so generously. Shirley Cosgrave had the unenviable task of deciphering hand-written drafts and revisions while contributing valuable editorial advice to the author. Theresa Moriarty, Carol Murphy and Anne Nevin gave considerable research and archival assistance over an extended period. Francis Devine and Manus O’Riordan were ever-ready to give any help sought and provide information and advice. Des Geraghty, then General President of SIPTU and Tom Dunne, facilitator extraordinary, were unstinting in their encouragement and support.

For help in locating books, papers and documents I wish to thank the staff of the National Library of Ireland and in particular Dónall Ó Luanaigh, Keeper of Collections and Kevin Browne, Library Administration; Dr Jack McGinley and Dr Jane Maxwell (TCD Library), Gerard Whelan (RDS Library), Theresa Moriarty (Irish Labour History Museum and Archives), Comdt Victor Laing and Comdt Dermot O’Connor (Military Archives, Dublin). I thank the Indian Embassy in Dublin for their efforts to locate material relating to Connolly’s service in the British Army.

I thank the following who provided information and facilitated research: David Begg (Irish Congress of Trade Unions), Audrey Canning (University of Strathclyde), Mary Clarke (City Archivist, Dublin City Library and Archives), Helen Clarke (Keeper of Social History, City of Edinburgh Council), Mairéad Delany (Abbey Theatre Archives), Joseph J. Dolan (Board Chairman) and Rebecca Palmer (Irish American Heritage Museum, Albany, New York), Edith Philip (Librarian, Scottish United Services Museum, Edinburgh), Ann Rix (Central City Library, Edinburgh), Dr Isolde Victory (Senior Library Clerk, House of Lords Library, London).

As regards the illustrations in the print book, I am particularly grateful to Seamus Shiels (SIPTU) and Kevin Browne (National Library of Ireland) for their invaluable assistance and advice, to Deirdre Price (SIPTU) and photographers Tommy Clancy, David Monaghan and Kevin Cooper.

Many colleagues and friends helped in various ways, giving advice and encouragement, providing information. I mention particularly William J. Blease (Lord Blease of Cromac), John Brady, SJ, Eddie Bray, Hilda Larkin Breslin, Charlie Callan, Joe Deasy, Barry Desmond, Hugh Geraghty, Jean Kennedy, Fr Leonard, OFM Cap., the late Professor Patrick Lynch, Rev. Terence McCaughey, Jack McGinley, Tom Morrissey, SJ, Tom Murphy, Shivaun O’Casey, Ulick O’Connor, Michael O’Halloran, Deirdre Price, Seamus Sheils, T.K. Whitaker, Gerry Whyte. I am also grateful to Fergal Tobin, Publishing Director, Deirdre Rennison Kunz, Managing Editor, and their colleagues at Gill & Macmillan.

I thank my wife, Maura, for her forbearance and patience over the long gestation period of this work.

I am grateful and proud that this work has been sponsored by SIPTU and for this I thank the general officers of the union: Jack O’Connor (General President), Brendan Hayes (Vice-President) and Joe O’Flynn (General Secretary). SIPTU has contributed generously to the cost of publishing this substantial volume.

SIPTU is also sponsoring the publication of James Connolly’s collected writings including his letters. These are being edited and annotated by myself with the assistance of SIPTU colleagues, Francis Devine, Theresa Moriarty, Carol Murphy and Manus O’Riordan. The first volume will include letters of James Connolly from 1888 to 1916 in the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library and the Irish Labour History Museum as well as letters in a number of private collections. Some 234 letters written by James Connolly will be included together with the full correspondence between James Connolly (in America) and John Carstairs Matheson (in Scotland) between 1906 and 1909.

Subsequent volumes will include Connolly’s writings in some twenty-six journals in England, Scotland, Ireland, France and America between 1893 and 1916. Connolly’s major works, Socialism Made Easy (1909), Labour in Irish History (1910) and Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910) will be published in a separate volume.

While researching this biography, the author discovered that James Connolly, a soldier in the King’s Liverpool Regiment, was almost certainly stationed for a time in the 1880s in Ship Street Barracks, in the Lower Castle Yard, Dublin Castle, later the offices of the Statistics Branch of the Department of Industry and Commerce (now the Central Statistics Office) where the author worked in the 1940s.

Donal Nevin

PART I

Edinburgh 1868–1882

For a’that and a’that

It’s coming yet for a’that

That man to man the world o’er

Shall brithers be for a’that.

ROBERT BURNS

C’est la lutte finale,

Groupons-nous et demain

L’Internationale sera le genre humain.

Is í an troid scoir í a bhráithre

Éirimís chun gniomh an tInternationale

Snaidhm comhair an cine daonna.

EUGENE POTTIER

(TRANSLATION BY MÁIRTÍN Ó CADHAIN)

What is this the sound and rumour? What is

this that all men hear,

Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm

is drawing near.

Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?

’Tis the people marching on.

WILLIAM MORRIS

Chapter 1

CHILD OF THE COWGATE

In W.P. Ryan’s The Irish Labour Movement from the ’Twenties to our own Day, published in 1919, it is stated that Connolly was born near Clones in Co. Monaghan on 5 June 1870 and that his family emigrated to Edinburgh in 1880. Ryan knew Connolly well as a friend and colleague and as a contributor to his paper, The Peasant. When Ryan’s son, Desmond, came to write the first biography of Connolly in 1924 he repeated that he had been born in Clones in 1870 and that he had passed ten years of his childhood in the north of Ireland. Desmond, who was in his early twenties when he wrote James Connolly: His Life, Work and Writings, knew Connolly and was with him in the GPO in Easter Week 1916 when he acted as secretary to Patrick Pearse. In 1951 he told Desmond Greaves that his father had collected much of the material for the book and that it was given to him when he fell ill and had to relinquish his job as a journalist with the Freeman’s Journal.

So it was that the myth of Connolly’s birth in Monaghan in 1870 came to be accepted as fact despite many fruitless searches of birth records. The details of the actual birth place and birth date of James Connolly were ultimately discovered by Desmond Greaves and published, along with a facsimile of Connolly’s birth entry, in the Irish Democrat in March 1951. In an article in the same journal in 1968, Greaves recalled his search.¹ In 1951, he had gone to Edinburgh to try and trace Connolly’s early connections with that city. The then secretary of the Trades Council showed him the minutes for the years 1891–6 which contained many references to a J. Connolly. The City Treasurer showed him the City Council’s minutes for the same period. Here it was indicated that a John Connolly had been dismissed for political reasons from his job as a carter. There was nothing about James. He next visited Len Cotton, secretary of the Socialist Labour Party, a man then in his early seventies who had preserved all the records of the SLP. A search of the files of The Socialist (the organ of the SLP, first issued in 1902) revealed nothing about Connolly’s early life. Cotton sent Greaves to Charles Geddes, a leading figure in the setting up of the SLP, who introduced him to an old man, John Conlon, a once close friend of John Connolly. Conlon lived at the top of a spiral staircase lit by dim gaslights which he said had been installed as a result of one of James Connolly’s campaigns. He spoke about John Connolly (James’ brother), who had enlisted and gone to India under the name of John Reid, and about the Scottish Land and Labour League ‘that we all came from’. He asked Greaves, ‘with a bright twinkle in his eye: Did you ever hear where James Connolly was born?’ Turning to Geddes he said, ‘He was born in the Cowgate.’ A search of the birth entries revealed that Connolly was born on 5 June 1868, in the Cowgate, Edinburgh. Afterwards, an old friend of John Leslie who had introduced Connolly to socialist politics in Edinburgh in 1890, H.A. Scott, searched the census records and established that the birth entry referred to the right man. Greaves later discovered that H.W. Lee had given Edinburgh as Connolly’s birthplace in his History of the Social Democratic Federation.

According to Greaves, John Connolly and Mary McGinn, both twenty-three years old, were married by Fr Alexander O’Donnell of St Patrick’s Church in the Cowgate, Edinburgh, in the priest’s house at 17 Brown Square on 20 October 1856.² The two witnesses, Myles Clarke and Mary Carthy, being illiterate, each signed the register with a cross. Little is known of the newly-married couple’s parents. John Connolly described himself as an agricultural labourer and Mary McGinn, a domestic servant. The surviving parents were Mary Connolly (born Markie) and James McGinn, a labourer. The deceased parents were John Connolly, a farm labourer and Maria McGinn (maiden name Burns). John Connolly was born in Ireland and James McGinn and his wife, Bridget Boyle, in Co. Monaghan. By 1858, John Connolly was living at 6 Kingstable, Edinburgh and was employed by the Corporation as a manure carter. Three years later he was involved in a scavengers’ strike which secured for the workers a wage of fifteen shillings a week. His first son, also named John, was born on 31 January 1862. A second son, Thomas, was born in Campbell’s Close, Cowgate on 27 April 1866. The youngest son, James, was born in lodgings at 107 Cowgate on 5 June 1868. Later the family went to live at No. 2A Kingstable, Edinburgh. The Cowgate, a continuation of the Grassmarket, was in the Old Town, close to Edinburgh University. St Patrick’s parish, Little Ireland, as it was called, was a densely-packed parish in which 14,000 Irish immigrants lived in poverty in slum tenements where disease was rampant. (The site of the tenement in which Connolly was born is now the Herriot Watt University.)

The three sons went to school at St Patrick’s on the Cowgate. John spent some years in various employments and at about 14 years of age enlisted in the army. Thomas Connolly worked for a time in Edinburgh as a compositor’s labourer. Nothing is known about his subsequent employment. It is likely that he emigrated.

The well-researched information about James Connolly’s early years given by Greaves in The Life and Times of James Connolly indicates that the first verifiable job held by him was in a bakery at the age of ten but it has been suggested that before that he had spent a year or so in the office of the Edinburgh Evening News where his older brother worked. W.P. Ryan tells the story that when the Factory Inspector visited the works, James was put sitting on a high stool behind a case of type. The stratagem was discovered and he was dismissed as he was not yet of the age at which boys could legally be employed.³ His work in the bakery seems to have lasted about two years. W.P. Ryan, who appears to have got his information from John Leslie, an associate of James’ brother, John, states that as a result of the rigours of his work in the bakery, his health failed. He then got a job in a mosaic tiles depot, working there for about a year.

James Connolly’s boyhood in Edinburgh was one of deprivation, harsh poverty, grim housing conditions and hard toil. He had little schooling and from the age of nine earned paltry wages to help keep the family above the bread-line. Such conditions were the common lot of the children of casual labourers in the cities of Britain, as in Dublin and Belfast, in the 1870s.

Little is known about Connolly’s uncles or aunts. W.P. Ryan refers to an uncle, an old Fenian, influencing him on Irish affairs. There seems to be little foundation for this family tradition. Ina Connolly, a daughter of James Connolly, refers to her grandfather’s brother being obliged to flee to Scotland where he found work with Edinburgh Corporation and that it was through him that John Connolly obtained employment with the Corporation. She remembered her uncle, Peter Connolly, visiting the family in Belfast in 1912 when he sought to persuade her father to go with him to Co. Monaghan in order to sign over the small family holding to him as the lease had run out. Her father refused to go as he was then involved in a strike in Larne.⁴

Little imagination is required to conjure up an image of the brutally hard times endured by the Connolly family in their various lodgings and tenements in Edinburgh in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Mary Connolly, chronically bronchial, died at the age of 58 in 1891. John survived a further nine years, dying of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1900. He had suffered a serious accident in 1889 and subsequently worked as a caretaker of a public convenience in the Haymarket. His last years were spent in great poverty. There are no records to indicate James Connolly’s relationship with his mother who had died little more than a year after her son’s return to Edinburgh after an absence of some seven years. Nora Connolly, James Connolly’s second eldest daughter, remembered her grandfather as ‘a tall man with a red curly beard’ when she visited him in 1898 with her father. She remembered too her father rushing from Dublin when his father became terminally ill, and staying until after the funeral.⁵

In The Harp (June 1908), Connolly described how as a boy ‘his father would set him to do ten minutes work and find him an hour after, sitting dreaming, with the job not yet commenced.’ He told his daughter, Nora, how ‘the light of the fire served as illumination and when the fire was going out, I couldn’t read.’ Nora also recalled her father speaking of his experience while working in the bakery where the work lasted from six in the morning till late at night: ‘the few shillings I could get were needed at home. Often I would pray fervently that I would find the place burnt down when I got there.’ At night he suffered nightmares. It was the conditions he endured as a boy that probably caused his squint and poor eyesight; his short stature and his slimness into his thirties, and stoutness in middle age, may have been caused by a glandular disorder, according to Connolly’s biographer, Austen Morgan, who added that he bore signs too of having had rickets as a result of vitamin deficiency in his early years.⁶ Sean O’Casey, in Drums Under the Window, described Connolly as having ‘a rather awkward carriage’ with bow legs adding to the waddle in his walk.⁷

The 1881 British census return from 2A King’s Stables, Edinburgh where the Connolly family resided, shows four persons in the household: John (a 47-year-old carter born in Ireland), Mary (his wife, aged 44 and also born in Ireland), Thomas (a son, printer-compositor apprentice, aged 15), and James (a son, baker’s apprentice, aged 13). Both Thomas and James were registered as born in Edinburgh. (The third son, John, had by this time enlisted in the British army.)

Source: Fintan Lane, Saothar 28, 2003.

PART II

Ireland 1882–1889

Soldier

The standing army in any country is a tool in the hands of the oppressor of the people and is a generator of prostitution: the British army is in this particular the most odious on the face of the earth.

JAMES CONNOLLY, THE WORKERS’ REPUBLIC, 15 JULY 1899

The Army is, in plain matter-of-fact language, what the Socialists so blatantly describe it to be, viz. a body of hired assassins.

The army is a veritable moral cesspool of corruption all within its bounds, and exuding forth a miasma of pestilence upon every spot so unfortunate as to be cursed by its presence.

JAMES CONNOLLY, THE WORKERS’ REPUBLIC, 21 OCTOBER 1899

Chapter 2

IN THE SERVICE OF THE QUEEN

The legend that Connolly had been born in Monaghan in 1870 and that his family had emigrated to Scotland in 1880, had implications for perceptions about his boyhood years. It was believed that he had lived with his family in Edinburgh till 1882 when he would have been 14 years of age. It was known that he was married about 1890. Where had he spent the intervening years? Connolly’s first biographer, Desmond Ryan, suggested that after leaving Edinburgh, he became ‘in turn tramp, navvy, and pedlar, spending a roving and eventful life in different parts of Britain’.¹

Desmond Ryan pointed out that Connolly had been reticent about these missing years. According to Greaves, Connolly’s old associates in Edinburgh spoke of deliberately misleading visitors from Dublin in order to conceal the fact that he had served in the British Army. Some of Connolly’s colleagues in the Irish Socialist Republican Party in the late 1890s must have known of this fact though it is possible that Connolly, concerned that the authorities should not become aware of it, particularly since he had left the army some months before his enlistment period had ended, may have gone to some pains to conceal it.

It is said that James Larkin was aware of Connolly’s army service but never spoke about it, or made any indirect reference to it. On two occasions, the anti-Larkin paper, The Toiler, referred to ‘a terrible revolutionary Socialist, Jim Connolly’ who, it was rumoured, was ‘an ex-member of the Monaghan Militia, or at least, that he took the Queen’s bounty about twenty years ago,’ and then ‘hopped the twig to Scotland’.² In a later issue, the paper claimed that at an early age Connolly ‘joined the British militia, deserted and went to Scotland’.³

William O’Brien, Connolly’s closest colleague in Ireland, certainly knew that he had served in the British Army but when he first became aware of this is not known. On 1 November 1916, Connolly’s friend and mentor, John Leslie, wrote to O’Brien that Connolly ‘was away from Scotland for a considerable time and about this period of his life he was reticent … Understand me, I know the reason and to my mind, there was no occasion for reticence, but such was his wish.’⁴

Connolly’s army service was referred to in letters to William O’Brien from John J. Lyng, the younger brother of Tom and Murtagh Lyng, two of the founding members of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, and acting secretary of the Irish Socialist Federation in New York in 1907. On 29 April 1951 Lyng wrote to O’Brien:

Here in the USA Irish Socialist Clubroom, Jim [Connolly] said of his military service: ‘I was carried away by the John Boyle O’Reilly propaganda to infiltrate the British Army [O’Reilly had enlisted in the 10th Hussars so that he could recruit Irishmen for the Fenians. He was sentenced to death in 1866] and found myself in India like most of the other Irishmen who enlisted for the same reason.’⁵

There is a manuscript note in the William O’Brien Papers in the National Library of Ireland dated 2 February 1957, in which O’Brien wrote: ‘It is believed he [Connolly] enlisted under a false name. A man in Edinburgh thought it was John Reid but was not sure.’ Also among the O’Brien papers is a letter from Fintan Kennedy, then assistant to the general secretary of the ITGWU, to William O’Brien enclosing copies of material relating to Connolly which had been requested by O’Brien, and saying: ‘I found it [the material] most interesting and informative too, as prior to reading it I had not known that Connolly served in the B[ritish] A[rmy] in India or anywhere else.’⁶

Greaves’s extensive research indicated that little was known about Connolly’s life, or indeed his whereabouts, during the 1880s other than that towards the end of the decade he had met his future wife, Lillie Reynolds, in Dublin. On the basis of evidence from ‘statements in Connolly’s correspondence, his own statements to such friends as John Mullery⁷ and the indications of his having had military experience,’ Greaves had concluded that he had served in the army between 1882 and 1889: the evidence was ‘part personal testimony, part inferential’. The fact that Connolly enlisted under a false name rules out direct documentary proof in the Public Record Office in London where Army Muster Rolls up to 1898 are held.

Greaves noted that Connolly had stated that he spent twenty years among the exiles in Britain and seven years in America. He must therefore have spent twenty-one years in Ireland: these included 1896–1903 and 1910–16. The missing years cannot be placed before 1880 so they must, Greaves concluded, fall between 1882 and 1889.

If Connolly was in Ireland then, as he must have been on his own statement, what was he doing? There is no alternative to set against the fact that the first battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment was in Ireland from precisely July 1882 to February 1889.⁸

The evidence cited by Greaves seemed to be conclusive and the inference obvious. But twenty-two years later, Greaves’s assertion that Connolly had served in the King’s Liverpool Regiment was challenged by Connolly’s American biographer, Samuel Levenson, in James Connolly, A Biography, where he stated that Connolly had served in the Second Battalion of the Royal Scots Regiment. His source for this information was a David Stuart of Edinburgh, who told Levenson that he had got his original lead from the daughter of James Connolly’s older brother, John.

Enquiries by the present writer have revealed that David Stuart was an ex-serviceman (probably World War One) living in Edinburgh who was interested in Connolly. Research by Helen Clark, Keeper of Social History at the People’s Story Museum in Edinburgh, indicates that Stuart had been based in Whiteford House, a home for ex-servicemen in the Cowgate, Edinburgh, but had transferred to Murray House Nursing Home in 1987. He had not been there after 1994. Some time after 1988 Stuart donated to the People’s Story Museum a box of papers which contained what was referred to as ‘a thesis’ about Connolly that he had put together in 1969. It consisted of pictures with captions typed on cards. There were no references or sources of information with the material. The pictures were of army installations and barracks in Ireland, including Haulbowline in Cork Harbour; Beggar’s Bush Barracks, Linen Hall, Pigeon House Fort, and Ship Street Barracks – all in Dublin; and Castlebar. Other pictures in the ‘thesis’ included Dundee, Edinburgh and Youghal. The captions attached to the pictures of army locations in Ireland indicated either that Connolly had served there or that the Royal Scots Regiment had been based there.⁹ It might be noted that all the locations had been referred to in Greaves’s biography.

The Regimental Records of the Royal Scots show that the First Battalion of the Regiment was in Ireland up to January 1875 when it embarked at Cork en route for India. The Second Battalion of the Royal Scots was in India from 1866, embarking for home in 1880 and landing at Queenstown (Cóbh) on 4 December 1880. It remained in Ireland until January 1884 when it returned to Edinburgh Castle. Between November 1881 and January 1884, drafts left Ireland to join the First Battalion in India. In March 1883 what was left of the Second Battalion transferred from Fermoy to the Curragh Camp and at the end of June 1884 returned to Edinburgh Castle.¹⁰

The Royal Scots Regiment was not in Ireland after June 1884, when Connolly would have been aged 16 years. Levenson’s assertion on the basis of Stuart’s statement that Connolly served in the Royal Scots Regiment is patently wrong.

The third quarter of the nineteenth century saw an important reorganisation of the British army including its command structure, regimental organisation and conditions of service. Britain, unlike France and Germany, did not have conscription for military service. The quality of the young men who enlisted in the army, usually through economic necessity, was low; they tended to be of poor health and had little education, even the most elementary. The army’s role at home involved assisting the civil powers where industrial disorder or rioting arose. Increasingly, however, it was committed to upholding imperial power in overseas territories, principally, after the Indian Mutiny.

Reforms initiated under the Secretary of War, Edward Cardwell, and later under his successor, Hugh Childers, improved terms of enlistment and conditions of service. Army discipline remained severe. The physical rigours of service, especially basic training, remained and took an increasing toll of urban working-class recruits of indifferent physique. As late as 1881, a War Office committee on ‘wastage’ pointed out that a large proportion of all losses from death and invaliding out which occurred in the first year of a soldier’s service was due to ‘the extreme youth of the men who enlist and cannot stand the labour and fatigue to which they are subjected’.¹¹ Pay remained ‘a shilling a day’ though by the end of the century it had risen to 1s.3d. a day with stoppages and this at a time when the average wage of a farm labourer in Scotland was 21s.2d. a week. For the skilled working class which provided so many of the activists in the labour movement in Scotland, ‘the red tunic that soldiers had to wear at all times was something which was akin to the mark of Cain and enlistment a near disgrace.’¹²

For the son of an Irish immigrant family in Scotland in the 1870s, service in the army was an economic necessity when no work was available. Since his older brother, John, had also enlisted in the army, this course must have seemed inevitable to the not yet fourteen-year-old James Connolly. According to Greaves, John Connolly had enlisted in the King’s Liverpool Regiment (Second Battalion), apparently under a false name, probably in 1875 or 1876.¹³

Before the implementation in 1881 of the Cardwell reforms which formalised the territorial links of regiments to a particular recruiting area, recruits could enlist in the regiment of their choosing. Why, then, did John Connolly enlist in the King’s Liverpool Regiment? Greaves has noted an article which appeared in the United Irishman in November 1900, which he suggests might possibly have been written by James Connolly, which described how the Fenians joined the King’s Liverpool Regiment with subversive intent and related that in 1867, the year of the Fenian Rising, all rifles were held in the depot. He also states that the regiment counted as an Irish one: the uniform was dark green and the badge an Irish harp surmounted with a crown.¹⁴

When James Connolly at about 14 years of age came to enlist in 1882, the local regiment recruiting in the Edinburgh area would have been the Royal Scots. According to the National War Museum of Scotland, if Connolly wanted to join the King’s Liverpool Regiment ‘then he would almost certainly have had to travel to their recruiting area.’¹⁵ It may be that since he was joining the army under age, and with a false name, he may have found it expedient to enlist away from his place of residence. The most likely reason, however, was that he was simply following in his older brother’s footsteps.

The Childers reform, taking forward Cardwell’s work, had further rationalised the regimental and home command systems in the army bringing Regulars, Militia and Volunteers together in one structure. The Ninth King’s Regiment, so named in 1751, was renamed First Battalion The King’s (Liverpool) Regiment in 1881 when its Second Battalion, formed in 1857, was renamed the Second Battalion The King’s (Liverpool) Regiment. The two battalions became formally connected with the city of Liverpool. Initially renamed ‘The Liverpool Regiment’, they were retitled ‘The King’s Liverpool Regiment’.¹⁶

The first battalion of the regiment was home-based during most of the 1880s. The second battalion in which, according to Greaves, John Connolly enlisted, served in India from 1877 until its return to England in 1892: some of the enlisted soldiers however would have returned home before then.

The First King’s was stationed in Salford Barracks, Manchester in 1881 when a Fenian bomb attack blew up the ration shed, killing a child and severely wounding its mother. The same year the King’s were called out in aid of the civil powers during a strike by miners at Wigan and subsequent rioting. The following year the battalion left for Ireland where, according to the Regiment’s historian, Patrick Mileham, their tour of duty was only relieved by ‘the excitement in 1886 of assisting the civil powers to quell the riots in Belfast’.¹⁷

The postings in Ireland of the First Battalion of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment can be tracked in the historical records of the regiment.¹⁸ It embarked at Liverpool for Queenstown (Cóbh) en route to Cork where it arrived on 30 July 1882. Two Companies proceeded to Haulbowline and another Company to Carlisle Fort.

At the end of September 1884, the Battalion left Cork head-quarters, six Companies for the Curragh and two Companies for Castlebar. Six months later, in March 1885, A and B Companies rejoined head-quarters at the Curragh. In September 1885, A C E and F Companies proceeded to Linen Hall Barracks, Dublin, and Head-quarters, with B D G and H Companies, to Ship Street Barracks (adjoining Dublin Castle). On 1 June 1886, the Battalion moved to Beggar’s Bush Barracks at Haddington Road/Shelbourne Road. On 15 February 1889 the Battalion embarked at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) for Aldershot.

Thus over the years 1882–9, James Connolly as a private in the First Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment could have served in the Cork area, in Castlebar, at the Curragh and in Dublin. Greaves quoted John Mullery’s recollections of Connolly having told him that he spent the night on guard duty at Haulbowline when Myles Joyce was executed for his part in what was called the Maamtrasna massacre in 1882.¹⁹

The probability is that Connolly served in the Curragh between October 1884 and September 1885, and in Dublin from October 1885 to sometime in 1888. With only a few months of his enlistment period to serve he went absent without leave and deserted the army. No very convincing reason has been given as to why he did this. Greaves suggests that anxiety over the health of his parents prompted his decision. But his mother had been chronically ill for years and the accident which left his father seriously incapacitated did not occur until February 1889. The further suggestion that the threat of parting from his fiancée, Lillie Reynolds, whom he seems to have met sometime in 1887, does not carry conviction as the Second Battalion was being posted to Aldershot and this would not have inhibited his marriage. (They eventually married in Perth in 1890.)

Greaves surmises that there was some confusion in the battalion’s records and that Connolly’s departure was not discovered before the battalion had left Ireland. Many years later, in New York, Connolly was to express surprise to Jack Mulray that he had never been apprehended. Connolly’s immunity may have been facilitated by the fact that he had originally enlisted under a false name.

It is an intriguing thought that Connolly may well have been among the soldiers of the regiment who were despatched to Belfast in 1886 to quell serious sectarian riots in the city. It is probable too that Connolly was among the troops who took part in the celebration of Queen Victoria’s jubilee in Dublin in 1887.

Before leaving the matter of Connolly’s army service, the question arises as to whether he served in India.

Over the period that the First Battalion was in Ireland, several drafts were sent to join the Second Battalion in India. Eleven drafts embarked at Queenstown (Cóbh) between 1882 and 1888 comprising 1,271 NCOs and men.²⁰

Connolly seems to have deserted late in 1888. The battalion had moved to Dublin in October 1885 when Connolly was over 17 years of age. His first meeting with Lillie Reynolds was probably in late 1887 or in 1888. It may be that it was reports that a draft from the battalion was to leave Dublin in September 1888 to join the Second Battalion in India that prompted his decision to leave the army.

Regarding Connolly’s possible service in India, the first reference to this is in the letter from John J. Lyng to William O’Brien, already quoted, which became public when the William O’Brien Papers were deposited in the National Library.²¹

John J. [Jack] Lyng had supported Connolly in the internal disputes that plagued the ISRP at the beginning of the century before he settled in New York with his brother, Tom. The Connolly family stayed with the Lyngs in New York for a time in 1905. Two years later Jack Lyng became the first secretary of the Irish Socialist Federation. Lyng was therefore close to Connolly who may have wished to share the secret of his service in the British army with his colleague.

Connolly, from his arrival in Dublin in 1896, showed an interest in Indian affairs. Indeed the second article that he contributed to an Irish paper was in the Limerick Leader in July 1897 on ‘British Rule in India’. The long article, described as Special to the Leader, is discussed later but here attention may be drawn to the following:

The writer, having had for some time exceptional opportunities for learning the real position of affairs in that country [India] feels he is doing a service to the cause of freedom and humanity in laying before the readers of the Leader a short sketch of the predisposing causes which have led up to the devastating famine which at present holds, and the incipient rebellion which threatens, the Indian Peninsula.

Connolly reprinted this article, with a few minor changes, in the Workers’ Republic (3 and 10 September 1898) under the pseudonym ‘Setanta’, and again, under his own name, in the first two issues of The Harp (January and February 1908) under the title ‘The Coming Revolt in India. Its Political and Social Causes’. Following the publication of Connolly’s article in the Limerick Leader, the Shan Van Vocht (2 August 1897) referred to the article, stating ‘we shall either quote from this article in our next number, or invite Mr Connolly to deal with it in a special article for us, as he exhibits a special mastery of the subject.’ For whatever reason no further reference to the matter appeared in the journal. (Connolly contributed three articles to the Shan Van Vocht.)

The sentence in the Limerick Leader article just quoted was repeated in each of the later versions. Surprisingly, none of Connolly’s several biographers has referred to this passage. It could be that his knowledge of economic and social conditions in India arose from contacts with his brother John Connolly, who served for some years in India in the late 1870s.

If it were the case that Connolly saw service in India, it would have been with the Second Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment which was in India from 1877 to 1892. In 1882 and 1883, drafts comprising 270 NCOs and men were sent from the First Battalion in Ireland to join the Second Battalion in India. Connolly could have been among them. If so, his period in India would have been relatively short as he certainly was stationed in Dublin in 1886. It could be that he was transferred home for health reasons. On the other hand, Connolly’s statement to Jack Lyng may have been intended to mislead if Connolly wished his army service in Ireland to remain secret.

There is nothing in Connolly’s article in the Limerick Leader about Indian conditions which could only have been known to him through serving in the army there. For the most part, the article quotes sources that would have been readily available in journals and libraries. It might be noted also that Connolly evinced a continuing interest in Indian affairs as is evident from the several extracts from socialist papers about economic and social conditions there that he reprinted in the Workers’ Republic.²²

It must also be said that Jack Lyng’s memory may not have been reliable as to what Connolly said to him in New York more than forty years before. In the same letter to William O’Brien in which he quoted Connolly as having spoken to him about his service in India, he said that his brother Murtagh Lyng had told him that Connolly was raised by foster parents. On one matter, Lyng was inaccurate in his recollection. In the letter, he reminded O’Brien of ‘the series of articles in the Workers’ Republic about The Coming Revolt in India’, saying that ‘Jim gathered the facts while serving in India, for that series.’ In fact this was the title of the articles in The Harp (January–February 1908) ten years later; the title of the articles in the Workers’ Republic (September 1898) was ‘British Rule in India’.

Greaves, who first revealed the fact of Connolly’s army service, did extensive research on the matter, yet nowhere in his main work on Connolly or in any of his extensive writings in the Irish Democrat and elsewhere did he even mention the possibility of Connolly having served in India.

The evidence suggests that Connolly served in the King’s Liverpool Regiment from about 1882 when he was fourteen years of age to some time late in 1888 or early 1889. Throughout that time the regiment was in Ireland though drafts from the regiment were sent to India on a number of occasions. It is difficult to accept that Connolly could have been included in one of the early drafts in 1882–3, returning to Ireland after a very short period in India.

In 1998, Dr T.K. Whitaker, the former Secretary General of the Department of Finance, informed the present writer that in 1958 when he and J.J. McElligott, the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, were leaving for India to attend meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in New Delhi, Dr McElligott was asked by William O’Brien, then a director of the Central Bank, to take a packet containing typed copies of articles by James Connolly on India to present to the Prime Minister of India, Pandit Nehru. O’Brien told McElligott at the time that Connolly, when very young, joined the British Army and served for some time in India.

(McElligott served with Connolly in the GPO in 1916. He had turned in for duty as a member of the Irish Volunteers on his way back from the races at Fairyhouse on Easter Monday and was later detailed by Connolly to join a group of Volunteers occupying the buildings opposite the GPO.)

The packet was delivered to Nehru who wrote to McElligott referring to ‘that most interesting article’. Later Nehru received the two Irish delegates and again expressed his deep interest in Connolly’s article which, he said, had historic significance. He said it was a balanced composition, and in many respects, seemed to anticipate the trend of events in India. In a letter to William O’Brien (13 October 1958), McElligott stated that Nehru had said he ‘was surprised, very much so, to learn that Connolly had been a British soldier in India’.²³

Dr Whitaker was under the impression that the packet delivered to Pandit Nehru contained evidence of Connolly’s army service in India. In 1999 the Embassy of India in Dublin had a search made of the National Archives in New Delhi and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library but failed to find any information on the matter. However, it seems certain that the packet contained only the article by James Connolly on India referred to and not evidence of Connolly’s army service in India.

It was while serving with the First Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, stationed in Beggar’s Bush Barracks at Haddington Road, Dublin, that James Connolly met Lillie Reynolds. They first met, probably late in 1886 or early in 1887, when both missed a tram at Merrion Square which failed to stop.²⁴

Lillie Reynolds and her twin sister, Margaret, were born in 1867 in Carnew on the Wicklow-Wexford border. Their father, John Reynolds, was a farm labourer who died when Lillie was young. The family, two brothers, Johnnie and George and the twin sisters, were raised by their mother, also Margaret (neé Newman).²⁵ They moved to Rathmines in Dublin where Lillie found employment as a domestic servant with the Wilson family, members of a stock-broking firm, living in Merrion Square. Ina Connolly remembered her mother telling her that a French governess, also employed by the Wilsons, promoted her to teach the younger children while she prepared the older ones for public school.²⁶ Lillie Reynolds, a member of the Church of Ireland, would have had more formal education than her future husband who was a year younger. She helped him with grammar and literary style when he started writing for socialist papers and preparing political speeches. When Connolly’s book Labour in Irish History was published in November 1910, he inscribed a copy:

To my dear wife, the partner of all my struggles and the inspirer of my achievements.²⁷

It would seem that the couple decided to emigrate to Scotland and arranged to meet in Perth. This plan appears to have fallen through and Lillie spent some time in London while James was in Perth.

Difficulties arose in arranging their marriage. Eventually, the banns having been published in Edinburgh, the necessary letters received from the registrar of marriages as well as the dispensation from the Catholic Bishop of Dunkeld, they were married in Perth at St James Church on 13 April 1890, according to Greaves; at St John the Baptist Church on 20 April 1890, according to Levenson.²⁸

Letters written by James Connolly to Lillie Reynolds before their marriage are given in Appendix I.

PART III

Edinburgh 1889–1896

Social Democrat

As long as I live I will have no rest, only working, educating, organising and fighting to destroy the forces that produce poverty.

JAMES CONNOLLY

It’s not a Labour party the workers need. It’s a revolutionary party pledged to overthrow the capitalist class in the only way it can be done by putting up the barricades, arming the workers and taking over the factories by force. There is no other way.

JAMES CONNOLLY (CIRCA 1891)

Socialism represents the dominant and conquering force of our age, the hope of the worker, the terror of the oppressor, the light of the future. Workers of Ireland, salute that light, when once it shines full upon your vision the shackles of ages will fall from your limbs. Freedom will be your birthright.

JAMES CONNOLLY

When the hour of the social revolution at length strikes and the revolutionary lava now pent-up in the Socialist movement finally overflows and submerges the kings and classes who now rule and run the world, high up in the temple of liberty a liberated human race will honour the heroes and martyrs who have watered the tree of liberty, with the blood of their body and the sweat of their intellect.

JAMES CONNOLLY

Chapter 3

CAPITALISM AND CLASS STRUGGLE

By the last decade of the nineteenth century when James Connolly set out on the political course that he was to pursue over the next quarter of a century, the capitalist transformation had been accomplished in Britain and was developing at a fast pace in the United States and Germany. The massive economic changes of the second half of the century had been accompanied by the expansion of the British Empire into the five continents, the most widespread empire in history. The main concerns of Connolly arose out of these developments, the struggle against capitalism and against imperialism.

By 1870, fully three-quarters of the 24 million inhabitants of Britain belonged to the ‘manual labour class’. Only 15 per cent were skilled workers, the so-called aristocracy of labour, whose weekly wages ranged from 28 shillings to £2. For the unskilled, over half of whom were agricultural workers, women workers and other low-paid, wages amounted to ten to twelve shillings. Skilled craftsmen of the manual trades (builders, tailors, printers) and also workers in basic industries such as cotton mills, coal mining, machine and shipbuilding, had become organised in trade unions following the changes in trade union law in the 1870s. Even so, only half a million workers were organised.

There was a total absence of social security, the only public provision for the poor being the Poor Law system. It was not until 1891 that elementary education became effectively compulsory. Illiteracy was widespread. The largest occupational group was domestic servants, overwhelmingly women and girls. In 1871, out of under 13 million employed persons in Britain, about one and a half million were domestic servants.

Over a period of some twenty years the general price level fell by about a third. Ever-increasing supplies of cheap foodstuffs from America reduced the cost of living significantly since food constituted well over half of the household expenditure of working class families. By 1900, average real wages were one-third higher than in 1875. This was partly the result of the transfer of labour from agriculture to better-paid jobs in industry.

With the completion of the rail network and the introduction of electricity, Britain entered the period of full industrialisation. It had become the workshop of the world but by the end of the century it was but one of three great and growing industrial powers. After the advances made in the first three-quarters of the century, the British economy stagnated and entered what economists referred to as the ‘Great Depression’. Faced with growing competition from the United States and Germany, British capitalism responded by the development of markets in hitherto unexploited areas of the world, in particular Africa and India.

Politically, there was an extension of democracy with the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884–5. The main political parties now depended on working-class votes. This shock to the system found expression in the saying of a member of one of the great aristocratic families, the Cecils, that ‘democracy meant socialist.’ This spectre was throwing its shadow over the British scene as James Connolly was growing into manhood.

These political changes were to alter the face of British politics. By 1870 the bulk of the bourgeoisie and of the politically-conscious working class supported the Liberal Party of William Ewart Gladstone but by 1890 the party had split with large segments seceding to the Conservatives. Soon an Independent Labour Party backed by trade unions and supported by growing numbers of socialists was to appear on the scene.

Change was also evident in Europe and America, with trade unions and social democrat/socialist parties growing in strength, and industrial conflict and social unrest extending in western European countries.

It has been said that the British Marxist movement began in 1880 when a wealthy London businessman read a French translation of Karl Marx’s Capital on an Atlantic steamer bound for North America. Within four years, H.M. Hyndman had formed the first socialist party in Britain and emerged as the unchallenged spokesman of native Marxist orthodoxy in Britain. In little more than a decade he had ‘instilled for the first time a Marxist tradition into the advanced ranks of the British working class.’¹

Karl Marx devoted fifteen years of his life to the writing of Capital: the three volumes cover over 2,000 pages. The English edition was not published till 1888, five years after Marx’s death. Capital sought to analyse capitalist society, trace its origins, examine its inner workings and its outcome. It dealt with ‘the system of capitalist production based on the fact that the workman sells his labour power as a commodity’. Marx assumed that labour only produced value and that wages were the remuneration for the expenditure of labour power; that profit, rent and interest sprang from surplus value – that portion of value produced by labour which was not paid for but which was expropriated by the capitalist. More surplus value was achieved by more intensive exploitation of the work-force. With the development of monopolistic forces grew ‘the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation’, but with this, too, grew the revolt of the working class. ‘The monopoly of capital then becomes a fetter upon the mode of production that has sprung up ... Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they became incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.’

Central to the writings of Marx was the materialist concept of history. Marx claimed that the prime motive power effecting changes in social arrangements, and in human consciousness, lay in the way in which man produces the means of life. He held that as the productive forces expanded, the old conditions of production became impediments. Opposition between the new and the old created a social crisis and society entered on a revolutionary period with unrest and class conflict.

With the rise of private property, society divided into two classes, the working class, those whose source of living is labour-power, and the capitalist class whose source of income is property. The workers’ main interest turns upon wages (the price of his labour power) while the capitalists’ main interest centres round property (including the profits that arise from it). Between these two classes, Marx taught, there was an irreconcilable opposition of economic interests. Eventually, workers, organised in trade unions and political parties, realise that there can be no significant improvement in their conditions until the capitalist system is superseded by a system in which the means of production are in the control of the whole society; that they cannot attain full freedom and equality within the existing order of society, and that socialism only can bring about their emancipation.

All of Connolly’s writings on economic and social issues are infused with the basic premises of Marxism as propagated in Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century when he was imbibing his ideas from Marxist leaders of the British socialist movement in parties which were avowedly Marxist, the Socialist League and the Social Democratic Federation. The language used by Connolly up to the end of his life is replete with Marxist phrases and mottoes. The two issues of socialism, class struggle and international solidarity, were to be the focus of his life-work.

It was Hyndman’s writings that introduced British socialists to Marx’s doctrines, notably England for All (1881) and The Historical Basis of Socialism in England (1883). It is probable that these two books were the original source of Connolly’s knowledge of Marxism.

Max Beer, the historian of British socialism, acknowledged that

... it is due to Hyndman that Marxism has found some footing in British soil. For, although Webb, Shaw, and Morris have also been more or less influenced or rather stimulated, by the writings of Marx, it was Hyndman who became his English disciple and spread his views in season and out of season, and even created an organisation which is based on the doctrines of Marx.²

Hyndman’s Socialism Made Plain (1883) had an enormous circulation throughout Britain among trade union activists and provided the basis for Connolly’s political thinking when he became involved in socialist politics in Edinburgh in the early 1890s. The main thesis of the book was that social and political power was monopolised by those who lived on the labour of their fellow men. The result was poverty for the working classes, luxury for the few,