Eleanor Marx

by Rachel Holmes

  Numerous tactical errors on both sides made it seem that merger between the two factions was unworkable. Eleanor realised the imperative for a united congress and, to that end, rallied the trade unions, ‘and as after all, a single Congress is desirable we must do our best for that’.4 Hyndman, meanwhile, published some mischievous assaults on what he dubbed the ‘Marxist clique’.

  Engels wrote a pamphlet stating the Marxist case, countersigned by the leading German Social Democrat Bernstein. Three thousand copies were printed and distributed around England. Eleanor and Bernstein then visited Hyndman at his plush home to talk with him directly about the need for a single international congress:

  Hyndman looked green when he saw me, and knowing what an awful temper I have, did his best to irritate me. But though I’ve a bad temper I’m not a fool. I saw his game and would not play up to it. I remained quite polite and amiable, even when he began his usual calumnies against us and Paul. I only remarked . . . that if Lafargue was accused of all manner of sins to the party, he, Hyndman, too, was so accused, and that it all came to a question of personalities rather than facts . . . but what’s that to do with the Congress? Then came up the old sore of our family. You and I should feel proud. We’re supposed to be doing it all! About twenty times Hyndman informed Bernstein that I was a ‘bitter partisan’. I am, and I’m not ashamed of it. However the upshot of it all is (you could trust me and Bernstein, Jews that we are, to drive a bargain) that Hyndman will, we think, do all he can to bring about some sort of ‘conciliation’. He evidently was staggered when he heard that all Socialist Europe is practically with us.5

  From opposing camps, Hyndman and Liebknecht both put pressure on the Possibilists to compromise, without success. Engels grumbled about Liebknecht’s ‘mania for unity’.6 He thought that two rival congresses could comfortably sit alongside each other without any harm, ‘one of Socialists and the other chiefly of aspirants to Socialism’.7 Let people listen to both cases and decide for themselves. William Morris set himself and followers against the merger, though for different reasons, believing the Possibilists fostered only election opportunism and no real socialism. Tussy felt for him: ‘His army is one that would have put even Falstaff to the blush. He himself blushes at it. Morris is personally liked, but you would not get half a dozen workmen to take him seriously.’8

  Eleanor slaved in the political factory. ‘I’ve today sent off 500 copies of the last invitation, and some hundred letters and postcards, and am dead tired,’9 she scrawled to Laura. And this was not the end of it. After sending off 600 pieces of handwritten correspondence since the morning, as well as cleaning the grate and getting food from Shepherd’s Market for Edward’s dinner, she still had ‘to see half a dozen Trade Unionists tonight about the Congress’.10

  Eleanor and Edward spoke frequently at Radical Clubs, effort that seemed to be paying off. ‘Only last night I lectured to a capital audience, who, some three or four years ago, would have either laughed at my lecture or yelled at me . . . if the official Socialists are in a bad way, the real workers are getting on.’11

  Once she arrived in Paris, Eleanor barely had time to step outside the conference venue, Salle des Fantaisies Parisiennes on rue Rochechouart. She was on a standing committee of the congress with Morris and other English representatives and, simultaneous to this executive position, was chief interpreter from French and German into English. She translated a long speech by an Italian professor on anarchism and was roundly attacked for unfair editing. Conversely, her translation of Clara Zetkin’s speech on the question of female labour met with approbation, including from its author. Zetkin was a delegate for the women workers of Berlin and later the co-founder of International Women’s Day. Eleanor and Clara struck up an instant rapport and became friends ever after.

  Eleanor translated the main business of the congress: the resolution in favour of international eight-hour legislation; the resolution in favour of disarmament to challenge the capitalist arms industry; and the resolution for the establishment of an international labour demonstration for 1 May, in which Eleanor played a vital role. Eduard Bernstein testified to Eleanor’s labour:

  Some few of us were struck by the superhuman effort she put into this task [as interpreter]. She was ceaselessly busy, from morning to evening, generally interpreting in three languages. She gave herself no respite, missed no session. Despite the oppressive heat in the hall she stayed the course of the whole Congress doing this thankless, gruelling work: in the truest sense of the word the ‘proletarian’ of the Congress.12

  Tussy spent her few snatched breaks with Johnny (thirteen) and Edgar Longuet (nine). Edgar remembered her ever after as ‘my loved Ant [sic] Tussy, who was so good to her nephews’, taking them to the Paris Exhibition on the Champ de Mars to see the son et lumière show illuminating Gustave Eiffel’s 300-metre-high ironwork tower, the centrepiece of the exhibition. At seventy, Edgar still remembered the taste in his mouth ‘of a remarkable strawberry sirup [sic] she presented to me’13 as they gazed up at Eiffel’s tower. The General thought it a monstrosity and the whole exposition vulgar capitalist gimcrack.

  Eleanor’s prodigious work at the Paris congress was greatly facilitated by her favourite piece of new technology: her typewriter, acquired four months previously on hire purchase. She taught herself how to use the ‘machine’, declaring it ‘very easy’,14 and advertised her typing services. Typewriters had been mass-produced in America since the end of the 1870s, but took longer to penetrate the British retail market. Olive Schreiner sent the first chapter of her unfinished novel From Man to Man from South Africa and asked Tussy to type it up, for which she insisted on paying the full rate. Twelve copies of a lengthy pamphlet Eleanor typed for Swan Sonnenschein earned her two shillings.

  Shocked at how badly the work was paid by hourly rate, Tussy did some investigative journalism into typists’ wages and labour conditions, published as ‘Sweating in Type-Writing Offices’ in the People’s Press.15 Typists who needed to live by their labour ‘must work at high pressure and a good many more hours than eight a day’.16 She proposed that ‘the unhappy human machine’17 should form a union of those who typed in businesses and from home. Her own quick skill at typing was of course soon pressed into unpaid political service.

  Like her father and Engels, Eleanor paid close attention to advances in technology and their impact on the time and motion of workers’ jobs and employers’ profits. Almost every sector of industry was now in the process of mechanisation. She calmly challenged the persistent misrepresentation of British workers as Luddites resistant to technological modernisation, a favourite propaganda theme of the political right, employers and shareholders.

  The truth was that, from the worker’s perspective, technological advance created the capacity to make the eight-hour day a reality, accelerating speed of production, providing greater safety and healthier working conditions, thus increasing efficiency. Instead of stumbling home exhausted in the middle of the night, an employee who could complete their daily labour in eight hours might realise the dream of a life with a little family and leisure time to live for themselves rather than alienated labour. Employers, however, viewed mechanisation as an opportunity to suck increased profit margins from the production process, not revitalise the lot of their wealth-producing workers.

  Aunt Tussy brought her nephews back to London with her after the Paris congress. Outgoing Johnny and his shy, bookish little brother Edgar stayed for several months, treated with visits to the zoo, museums, walks on Hampstead Heath and trips to the theatre, including one of Edward’s performances. The General and Lenchen loved having the Longuet boys to visit. The General entertained them and let them sit at his desk and use his ink, paper and blotter. Tussy once again silently wondered at his contrasting aloofness with Freddy Demuth, evidenced by Engels’s entirely uncharacteristic withdrawal and avoidance of Freddy whenever he came to the house.

  Shortly before they returned to France, Johnny and Edgar were at her side whe
n Aunt Tussy addressed a massive crowd of 100,000 people at a rally in Hyde Park in support of the Dock Strike. The dockers struck on 14 August. Within a fortnight they successfully brought London commerce to a standstill. The great trading Thames was eerily silent, the familiar commercial river traffic that had busily plied its waters since Roman times hushed. Shipping magnates, bankers and investors in the city and Tories and Liberals in parliament were terrified. Never had industrial action brought mighty London trade to such a still point.

  The famished, broken-down dock labourers from the East End docklands to the mouth of the industrial estuary endured appalling employment conditions. Eleanor had already written about how they were forced to physically fight each other every morning to get work for the day. Dock workers had to compete with each other for every farthing they earned. All the more significant therefore that the dockers collectivised and organised themselves into a consolidated group of 50,000 workers, planned and implemented a mass strike, and pulled in after them all and every trade and support service in London in any way connected with shipping, including even the fire services and river men.

  The wealthy, powerful dock companies felt suddenly anxious and insecure. Much like a dock worker might every morning wake with the anxiety of whether he would be able to earn a subsistence wage for the day. The London Chamber of Commerce complained that the strike had a worse impact on trade in general than if ‘a hostile fleet had held triumphant possession of the mouth of the Thames’.18

  The dockers ultimately won some significant benefits and the new Dock, Wharf, Riverside and Labourers’ Union of Great Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands was formed, with Ben Tillett at its helm as secretary. In 1921 it became the Transport and General Workers’ Union, one of Britain’s leading worker institutions.

  Johnny and Edgar – accompanied by Lenchen, her grandson and Freddy – saw their Aunt Tussy in a new light that Sunday of the mass congregation in Hyde Park. MP Robert Cunninghame Graham described the event in the Labour Elector:

  And so speaker succeeds speaker. To Mann and Burns succeed Mrs Aveling, Tillett and MacDonald. Curious to see Mrs Aveling addressing the enormous crowd, curious to see the eyes of the women fixed upon her as she spoke of the miseries of the dockers’ homes, pleasant to see her point her black-gloved finger at the oppression, and pleasant to hear the hearty cheer with which her elegant speech was greeted.19

  The following day Eleanor and Edward went up to the Trades Union Congress in Dundee. The successes of the Dock Strike and the Gas Workers’ Strike that preceded it buzzed in every meeting, conversation and corner of the annual congress. As Will Thorne, the gas workers’ leader pointed out, these were the first strikes in over half a century to merit capital letters.

  This was the era of gas as a main form of domestic and commercial energy. Electricity was still expensive and less used than gaslight. Gas was a public utility. The gas companies operated as a massive monopoly, their allocation profits regulated by parliamentary legislation. The work was seasonal. It required considerable skill and endurance in a hazardous environment, yet gas workers were considered unskilled labourers. They did not serve a formal apprenticeship and thus were not considered tradesmen. Fifty-two weeks of the year they worked like soldiers in a state of battle in a permanently combustible atmosphere. The carbonisers in the retort houses worked twelve-hour shifts, day and night, in infernal conditions – it was literally hot as hell and the works held enormously dangerous machinery.

  For almost twenty years, gas workers had tried and failed to organise for better pay and conditions. Employers quickly stifled the first gas stokers’ union, formed in 1872. Further attempts in 1884 and 1885 suffered similar defeat. Now the gas workers finally succeeded, taking the ground for new unionism. The gas workers were not alone. So-called ‘unorganisable’ unskilled workers were organising all over the country. The stirrings began in 1886 with the Bryant and May match-girls strike. This was followed by strikes of sailors and then tram-men, amongst other worker collectives which unionised.

  The year 1889 was critical for new unionism. Earlier in the year the London gas workers won the eight-hour day, led by Will Thorne who had joined the Canning Town branch of the SDF in 1884. Eleanor, Edward, Tom Mann, John Burns and Ben Tillett gave their full support and helped Thorne form the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers. The new union was launched at the end of March with the aim of reducing the working day from twelve to eight hours and establishing double rates for Sundays, to recognise that Sunday work was overtime labour. On 7 June the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland was formally registered, with the hopeful motto ‘Love, Union and Fidelity’.

  Will Thorne was born in Birmingham. He had no access to education in his childhood. His parents were illiterate. At the age of six he began his working career as a child labourer in a rope-spinning factory where he toiled a twelve-hour day, six days a week. He had to take his own dinner to work and there was no time for study or play. His introduction to numeracy and letters came from factory education groups. Later, Thorne attended all the evening classes he could at the institute of adult education on Barking Road, East London. Here he was taught physiology by Aveling, whom he admired, and literary courses by Shaw, whom he did not.

  ‘It was a time when one Socialist, active and determined, giving assistance to the unskilled workers, was worth twenty discussing revolutionary tactics in their private clubrooms,’20 wrote a historian of the epoch. Tussy was usually one of those few active and determined Socialists. Will Thorne and Ben Tillett were unequivocal about Eleanor’s role in the sequential Gas Workers’ Strike and the Dock Strike. Like Thorne, Tillett started his working life as a child labourer. His first job, aged eight, was as a labourer in a brickyard. These men recognised hard graft. Thorne observed that Eleanor worked long hours as a correspondent for the strike committee, walking home late at night or in the early hours of the morning when public transport was no longer running. Tillett remembered Eleanor:

  . . . doing the drudgery of clerical work as well as more responsible duties . . . Brilliant, devoted and beautiful . . . she lived all her life in the atmosphere of Social Revolution . . . during our great strike she worked unceasingly, literally day and night . . . a vivid and vital personality, with great force of character, courage and ability.21

  Tillett regretted the ‘very unhappy conditions’ of Eleanor’s life with Aveling, but observed that this ‘did not, however, break her spirit, or cause her to waver in her devotion to the working-class cause’.22

  Tom Mann recorded Eleanor’s ‘valuable service’ as a volunteer in his memoirs. To him she was ‘a most capable woman’:

  Possessing a complete mastery of economics, she was able alike in conversation and on a public platform to hold her own with the best. Furthermore, she was ever ready, as in this case [the London Dock Strike], to give close attention to detailed work, when by so doing she could help the movement.23

  This work she did at the Wade’s Arms pub at Poplar, the headquarters of the strike committee.

  Tussy worked behind the scenes to educate and encourage proletarian leaders, men and women. Once appointed secretary of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers, Thorne soon found himself struggling with the administration and accountability required by his office. He did not have the benefit of an education to equip him with these skills. Thorne raised his anxieties in confidence with Tussy and asked for her help, which she readily offered. Thorne, a formidable leader, acknowledged Tussy’s role in educating him: she ‘helped me more than anyone else to improve my very bad handwriting, my reading and my general knowledge’.24

  Eleanor assisted Thorne in composing and drafting the rules and constitution of the union. She helped him do the accounts and write the half-year report from March to September 1889, circulated to 30,000 members around the country. In 1939, at the age of eighty, in an interview in the House of Commons, Thorne described Eleanor as the most intel
ligent woman he had ever known, who had an immeasurable influence on his life. He described her voluntary tuition and her help in teaching him to do his job in the early days. Eleanor never once mentioned it.

  On Christmas Day of 1889 Tussy wrote a long letter to Laura, reviewing the year, before she and Edward headed off to Regent’s Park Road for Christmas festivities with the General and Lenchen and their guests. Edward, Tussy reported, was happily busy writing plays, being a theatre critic and churning out short-order journalism. He still did some coaching but his union and Socialist League work now largely superseded his teaching.

  For my own poor part, look you, life seems to be becoming one long strike. First there was the Dock Strike. No sooner was that over than I was summoned to Silvertown, and for 10 mortal weeks I travelled daily to that out-of-the-world place; speaking every day – often twice a day, in all weathers in the open air. I began to hope for peace – when lo! the Gas Strike begins. For this, I have, so far, not had much to do (we both spouted in Hyde Park o’Sunday) but . . . I may well be called at any minute to ‘help’ with the Committee work.25

  That ‘help’, as Laura understood, was a euphemism for running it.

  Silvertown took its name from the industrial compound and chemical factories that dominated the London docklands. Silver’s India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Ltd had been in West Ham in one form or another since 1852, when it started life as a small waterproofing works. By 1889 it had six factory departments for rubber, ebonite, gutta percha, electrical and chemical, and a sister factory in France. Silvertown supplied sales offices all over the United Kingdom, British colonies and to global trading partners. During the strike, management attempted – unsuccessfully – to ship in blackleg workers from the French factory.