Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford (17 March 1851 – 17 December 1943) was an English socialist campaigner, journalist, and author in the United Kingdom. He was also noted as a prominent atheist, nationalist, and opponent of eugenics. In the early 1920s, after the death of his wife, he turned towards spiritualism.
Early life Blatchford was born 17 March 1851 in Maidstone, Kent. His parents, John Glanville Blatchford, a strolling comedian, and Georgina Louisa nee Corri 1821–1890), an actress – named him after the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel who died the year before. His maternal great-grandfather, Domenico Corri, (1746–1825), was an Italian musician and publisher who, in the late 18th century, moved from Rome to Edinburgh to teach music. One of his grandnieces, Christine Glanville (1924–1999), was an acclaimed English puppeteer.
Blatchford's father died in 1853, leaving him in the care of his mother. She continued her acting career for nine years, and Blatchford spent much of his early life close to the stage. To help support the family, Blatchford and his brother Montagu would perform with their mother, doing comedic renditions and dances for extra income. In 1862 the family moved to Halifax, where it was hoped that Blatchford and his brother could learn a trade. Blatchford was first employed as an odd job boy in a lithographic printing works, for which he earned a salary of eighteen pence a week. As a child he attended school only occasionally, firstly in Halifax and later in Portsmouth. In spite of the brevity of his educational experience, he called the education system a "cram" method.
Though lacking a formal education, Blatchford taught himself from the age of eight, reading the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and the works of Charles Dickens. Throughout his childhood he was frail and sickly, and doctors suggested that he would not reach adulthood. This illness gave Blatchford time to read, something he would not have been able to pursue as thoroughly if employed. Around 1864, Georgina secured full-time employment as a dressmaker and immediately apprenticed both her sons, sending Montagu to a lithographic printer and Robert to a brush maker. At the brush maker factory, Blatchford met Sarah Crossley, whom he would marry in 1880.
By 1871 Blatchford left Halifax, though his reason for doing so has been the cause of debate. Laurence Thompson argues that the departure was due to a quarrel with his mother, but Blatchford's daughter Dorothea maintains that his decision to leave was caused by the difficulty of his life in Halifax. On May Day 1871, Blatchford walked to Hull, then continued on to London via Yarmouth.
Military and early journalistic career After leaving Halifax, Blatchford joined the Army and rose to become a sergeant major by 1874. By the time of his promotion, he had also achieved the Army's second class certificate of education. Blatchford served with the Irish regiment 103rd Dublin Fusiliers and the 96th Regiment of Foot. The pleasures of army life stimulated some of Blatchford's best writing, but in 1877 he left the army to become a clerk in the Weaver Navigation Company. While employed as a clerk, he carefully used his spare time to learn grammar, syntax, and shorthand. In 1880 he married Sarah Crossley, whom he had met in Halifax, at the Zion Chapel. They then settled in Norwich. Sarah was the daughter of a domestic worker and a mechanic. Around this time Blatchford became frustrated with his job and decided that he wished to become an artist. Because employment opportunities for artists in Norwich were scarce, however, he instead decided to become a writer. Blatchford's writing career began in 1882 at the Yorkshireman newspaper, where he had a sketch published. He obtained his first full-time writing job through his friend Alexander Muttock Thompson, who worked for the Manchester Sporting Chronicle. Thompson recommended Blatchford to a friend who ran the newspaper Bell's Life in London. A year later, Blatchford moved his family to South London to write for Bell's Life and the Leeds Toby.
In 1885, Blatchford began to write for the Manchester Sunday Chronicle. When Bell's Life failed two years later, he moved to a full-time position at the Sunday Chronicle. Before beginning at the Sunday Chronicle, Blatchford took a short holiday on the Isle of Wight after the death of his two children. At this time he had not begun to espouse socialist views, but the societal reactions to the competitiveness of industrial society in Northern England began affecting his sentiments. The largest political influence on Blatchford was the South Salford Social Democratic Federation. This change is seen in a series of 1889 articles he wrote for the Sunday Chronicle which denounced the housing conditions in Manchester and organised two working men's Sanitary Organisations in the area.
Reflecting back on this period, Blatchford stated in the Fortnightly Review in 1907 that "Dr. Cozier is mistaken if he thinks I took my Socialism from Marx, or that it depends upon the Marxian theory of value. I have never read a page of Marx. I got the idea of collective ownership from H. M. Hyndman; the rest of my Socialism I thought out myself. English Socialism is not German: it is English. English Socialism is not Marxian; it is humanitarian. It does not depend upon any theory of 'economic justice' but upon humanity and common sense."
The Clarion In 1890, while based in Manchester, Blatchford became actively involved in the Labour Movement. He founded the Manchester branch of the Fabian Society, and launched a weekly socialist newspaper, The Clarion, in 1891. Later that year, he used his column to announce that he had accepted the invitation of the Bradford Labour Union to become the Independent Labour candidate in Bradford East. However, his socialist stance forced him to leave the Sunday Chronicle, which in turn left him with a severe reduction in income.
Having left the newspaper on 12 December 1891, Blatchford set up The Clarion, but a printing error made its first edition almost completely illegible. Nevertheless, it still sold at least 40,000 copies. It continued to sell this number and more during the following years. By 1910 it was selling about 80,000 copies of each issue. Bernard Semmel described it as "the most successful socialist publication in Great Britain during the period before the war of 1914".Semmel, p. 214.
By 1892 Blatchford had removed himself from the candidature in Bradford East and began siding with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) against the Fabians' policy of "permeation." The joining of The Clarion and SDF resulted in the formation in 1892 of the Manchester Independent Labour Party, which soon devised the Manchester Fourth Clause. By 1893 Blatchford was the leader of his own clique within the newly founded national Independent Labour Party, the Clarionettes, whose extraordinary dynamism was expressed in its numerous choral societies, Clarion cycling clubs, Socialist Scouts, and Glee clubs.
Central to the Clarion movement were the Clarion cycling clubs, whose members, frequently accompanied by the "Clarion Van", travelled the country distributing socialist literature and holding mass meetings. Robert Tressell's socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists contains a detailed account based on a meeting organised by the Clarion scouts.
The Clarion movement also supported many industrial disputes at this time, including the three-year lockout of the slateworkers of the Penrhyn slate quarry in North Wales. The Clarion collected £1,500 to support the people of Bethesda.
There was a revolt in the county federation created by the ILP in 1894, as Blatchford urged the formation of a united socialist party. In the same year he resigned from the editorship of The Clarion due to ill health and developed depression. He started to edit it again in 1896. He supported the Boer War, which lost him support from some sections of the labour movement. Blatchford denounced his "cosmopolitan friends, who are so cosmopolitan that they can admire every country but their own, and love all men except Englishmen".Semmel, p. 217. He criticised the "smug, self-righteous prigs" in the labour movement who, while "despising military glory, are yet so eloquent over the marksmanship and courage of the Boers". He wrote that his "whole heart is with the British troops ... When England is at war, I'm English. I have no politics and no party. I am English."Semmel, p. 218. Responding to claims from the right-wing press that he wanted to ‘turn people against their country’, he retorted that he wanted ‘to make people so fond of their country that they shall desire to possess it’.
After the war Blatchford continued to agitate for a united socialist party and supported the London Progressive Party. He was critical of the Labour Party, which was founded in 1900, for what he perceived as its complete subservience to Liberalism, especially in its Cobdenite internationalist views on foreign policy.Semmel, p. 215. Blatchford said of himself and his colleagues at The Clarion: "We were out for Socialism and nothing but Socialism, and we were Britons first and Socialists next."Blatchford, p. 199.
Blatchford criticised free trade from an economic nationalist perspective. Free trade had made it impossible for Britain to feed herself and had destroyed British agriculture. This was especially serious in wartime because Britain could be starved into submission due to the dependence for her food on foreign nations. When Joseph Chamberlain launched his crusade for Tariff Reform in 1903, Blatchford's response was ambiguous. He did not formally endorse Chamberlain's campaign, but The Clarion praised his aims—the revival of British agriculture, a self-sufficient Empire, and producer-focused instead of consumer-focused economic system.Semmel, p. 219. Blatchford said he did not believe in tariff reform as applied by Conservatives, but that a socialist government would find it a necessary instrument.Semmel, p. 220.
A further development in Blatchford's thinking cost him further readers, when he began denouncing organised religion in such works as God and My Neighbour (1903) and Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog (1905). Again, to antagonise the ILP, the Clarion raised funds for Victor Grayson, whom the ILP had declined to support. He justified his attacks as being because Labour was too close to the Liberals.
Merrie England
A series of articles on socialism in The Clarion were published in book form in 1893 as Merrie England. The first edition sold 30,000 copies. The year after, a pocket-sized edition was published, which sold 25,000 copies.Thompson, p. 98. A penny edition was published in 1894, with 250,000 copies being ordered before publication and within a year 750,000 copies had been despatched across the English speaking world.Thompson, p. 99. In Britain and America, the book sold over two million copies. In the opinion of Robert Ensor, the book "helped to make socialism really well known in England for the first time...It was Blatchford's highest flight as a propagandist; he never surpassed it, and through it mainly he left his mark upon history".R. C. K. Ensor, ‘Blatchford, Robert Peel Glanville (1851–1943)’, rev. H. C. G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006, accessed 13 January 2014. The book was translated into Welsh, Hebrew, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and German.Thompson, p. 101.