'Victor Grayson: a reappraisal of the life & politics of Britain's lost revolutionary' talk 22.9.21

We're pleased to welcome people back both in person in our annexe here at the library and on zoom to the second in our autumn series of Invisible Histories talks. Our talks are free but we do of course welcome donations and there's a donate button on our website Harry Taylor is with us today to talk about his decade researching the life and politics of Victor Grayson most often remembered for winning a remarkable by-election at Colne Valley in 1907 before his still unexplained disappearance in

1920 I’m going to share our screen now so that we can see the slides. Harry thanks over to you well thank you everybody first of all for me today so it's a great honour to be here and I should say thank you first to work with us because I actually did some of the research here and spent a couple of days writing here and the library kindly let me use a photograph as well from one greatest elections which are reproduced in the book which have been published before so thank you for that I thought w

hat we’d do today is look at kind of reappraise Victor's life through looking at three key moments in his own probably key moments of his history and see how the historical what's been accepted as historical fact differs from the actual facts and how that has affected our view of Grayson and looking back in history so if I have the next slide, please so why Victor Grayson I’ll just start off with it kind of gives you a taste of how I’ve come to this subject uh I was researching a paper on Hugh G

aitskell when I was a student before university and there was a book called ‘leader lost’ couldn't find it he wasn't there but next door to that book was lost leader by David Clarke so my first thought was how many damn lost leaders has the labour party had but secondly it was quite captivating. As we were students doing an arts degree we had a large amount of free time so I read the book and I was absolutely captivated by it it was an incredible story and I thought why haven't I heard of this m

an before and also saw a lot of parallels of what was happening in the labour party a century ago with what was happening now then which was 2007 2008 you had the transition from Blair to Brown and kind of factional fights about the direction of the Labour Party so I couldn't find any other books on Grayson they were out of print there wasn't much material that I could find at the university and that was that and then fast forward five years ago I’m sorry five years since 2012 as a diligent memb

er of the Labour Party I was out knocking doors in November of 2012 when we had the first police commissioner elections during it was the first ones that we had which about three people voted in and it was dark it was cold it was wet and we retired the one day I was in Warwickshire and we retired to uh the home of a member in Atherstone Warwickshire to to dry out and to get something warm to drink and she was having a conversation with an elderly mentor about a politician that disappeared and me

you know being cultural I said oh do you mean John Stonehouse and she no I don’t mean John Stonehouse much before your time and I said do you mean Victor Grayson and she said yes I mean Victor Grayson and how have you heard about him I wrote a book about it a few years ago and she told me that her husband who was derrick forward who was a former parliamentary candidate for labour I think about six occasions and former council leader for the labour party he had conducted a lot of research into G

rayson in the late 1950s and early 1960s and he'd spoken to people who knew him first hand they were very old at the time they were friends of kids and people that said they're his distant relations. she gave me these papers there was a couple of boxes of papers and there was letters from family as well as others like Victor Gallancz from the Left Book Club, numerous other people that knew Grayson. There was election material in there, photograph stuff that hadn't been published or seen before a

nd so I kind of made the decision there to instead of just donating it to an archive I wanted to greedily use it to write something about Grayson because he was a figure that interested me so much so I decided to start writing a biography of him which is harder than it sounds because Grayson did not leave an archive so you cannot go to a university or a museum to look for the Grayson papers. In my experience it was almost impossible literally to find anything. So you had to rely on memoires whic

h are long out of print, surviving letters which are scattered around the globe an interest in the grace of not only excuse me excuse me I’m sorry to interrupt and I’m probably very bad but I cannot hear properly because uh I don't know where you're speaking but you are not speaking clearly it's not the height of the depth of the sound it's it's a bit blurred I don't know whether it's just me and my equipment or whether it's generally for those of us who are on zoom please we're somebody who's t

raveling thank you Valerie thank you very much we we're we're just moving the speaker can you hear me now that's a bit better it isn't the level of your sound it was the clarity of your enunciation thank you we've had comments on the chat which I haven't been able to access so uh we've just been told that it is hard for people on zoom to hear apologies we've just moved the speaker across nearer to the microphone and we're going to do it from there well what do you say to that a regional accent u

m sorry about that folks I hope you can hear it much better now I’m the only one what I was getting at was that there was no sole Grayson archives so you have to rely on memoirs which are usually longer to print letters which are scattered around universities there's some I’ve published in the book which uh in Illinois of all places and sadly not much in Manchester the other point about Grayson is and this is one of my key issues that labour history has been written by Grayson’s detractors or ce

rtainly by people that thought he was either useless or saw him as a threat so I don't think he's had a fair hearing um from historians so I thought what we do today is to go through three instances what has become accepted truth uh in the history of Grayson and look at that actually comparing it to the facts so what does it actually say in contemporary newspapers what does it say in those letters that Grayson wrote himself and what does it say in books written at the time not what has been writ

ten 40 50 60 years later so the first of these is Grayson was high born so you might know the the story uh Grayson is supposedly a illegitimate member of the Marlborough family someone even reported that he was a half-brother of Winston Churchill and this was based on rumour to start with so in the first biography of Grayson uh written by Reg Groves he's he gives this story that there were rumours that Grayson was actually illegitimate because surely someone that looks so good who could speak so

well that was so presented I chose that picture because here he is very smart he's got his Edwardian colour on the nice carved chair surely this guy couldn't have come from the sun to Liverpool surely he must have blue blood in him so Groves states this uh in his fourth biography which Grayson’s sister Augusta reads and then threatens to sue Groves because she says absolutely outlandish but she doesn't have the finances to actually prosecute okay forward that slightly so it remains the the accu

sation remains David Clarke in his biography repeats it but David does go and find Victor's birth certificate and Victor's birth certificate is marked with a cross where his mother's name should be and it simply says the mark of Elizabeth Grayson so surely that's proof because Victor's mother was Scottish even though she was working class the Victorian Scottish education system was much superior to ourselves so it was taken for granted that she must have been well educated or at least be able to

to read and write so it must have been her religious conviction that made her put a mark on Victor's birth certificate because she couldn't bring herself to tell a lie so she must have just marked it with a cross so when I started researching this I got a copy of Victor's birth certificate and then thought well he had seven other brothers and sisters so let's get their birth certificates as well because surely if his mother was going through this kind of turmoil of lying about victor's real ori

gins she would have told the truth for other children so I had all the birth certificates arrive in the post and they're all there marks with the cross which demonstrated I think that she was illiterate so then I went to have a look for her birth certificate to see where she was born she doesn't exist simply because in Scotland at the time she was born we think three years before it became it was you had to legally declare the birth of a child it was usually 90% of the time extremely poor famili

es that didn't register the birth of children before it was before you legally had to so I think that was again busted one of the myths you know all these rumours have been put about usually by Grayson enemies because Grayson was well dressed he liked nice wine he likes to to go to nice places surely a working class socialist doesn't like nice things but Grayson did he was born with nothing he was definitely born into that working class family he had no shoes on his feet when he was growing up h

is father's an alcoholic out of work the children in Grayson’s family including him himself was sent to work to provide so that was the first big myth and Grayson you know when we talk about his politics and how he's remembered in history this is always brought up by somebody always he's Churchill’s half brother he's one of the Marlboro family he's not really a product of the British working class but he is and the facts say that he was so the second myth now Grayson’s great protest in parliamen

t when he's thrown out of parliament for trying to raise the issue of unemployment it's been handed down to us by Grayson’s detractors and then taken for granted that he must have been drunk when he did this you know why on earth would anyone protest in parliament about the unemployed he must have been drunk and they've used this to say well Grayson was not a planner he had no political theory behind him he was quite whimsical about his politics actually if we look back to the parliamentary sess

ion in 1901 and forgive me I’m going to read a couple of extracts because I think it gives you a flavour of Grayson’s politics and actually that he was performing well in the house of commons so 1908 second session they're talking about an unemployment bill so the liberal government is well sorry the bill's been put forward by the opposition and it's being debated now this is how it was reported if we go back to the 13th of March 1908. Grayson noticed consternation when the responsibilities of t

he government were pointed out to the liberal benches when they accepted office they accepted responsibility for every social problem and he confronted them with this problem of unemployment he had noticed an irresistible tendency on the part of honourable members opposites to show distaste for the hateful realism of this question of unemployment why upset the beautiful picture that honourable members have built up for themselves why upset their castles of illusion that allowed them to go throug

h life without bothering about these questions why bring into the view of house of commons the haggard site of the working with the working man whom they were meeting every day not many yards from the house honourable members were confronted every night with a problem that made them feel ashamed not only of having to be jointly responsible for a state of mismanagement but the professed Christianity of their nation this is not a man who's standing up drunk in parliament with no kind of idea of wh

ere he's going Grayson is quite clearly I think here building a picture of the difference of the land owning class in parliament and in control of the country with the real state of the British working class and the unemployed situation on the streets of England and now he goes in to give I think a classic um kind of exposition of the socialist message in England and he says he's quoted in the last 50 years wealth has increased by miraculous leaps and bounds and while it was endeavoured to be sh

own that the increased wealth of the country was due to free trade the problem remained grimly ever present through all our prosperity it was not that they could not find work for everyone it was that they were trying an impossible task they were trying to lift themselves up by their boot laces they were trying to solve the unemployed problem while leaving vested interests alone they were trying to find work for workers without interfering with the interests of those who had rents and position p

ossession of wealth it would never be done and he did not hope that this house would do it as a present composed it would only be done when the means of production distribution and exchange without access to which they could not live were in the hands of the people and not in the hands of a small clique it might it might seem like a dream from afar but the government persisted in their present method of flouting serious social problems and if they continued their dispiriting criticism of serious

measures which might have faults but which contained vital principles then socialism would not be so much a dream as obtained at the present moment and the inactive and futility of the present government would be real obvious now Grayson is giving you know what became labour's uh from 1918 one of labour's core principles clause 4. you know the workers should own by hand and by brain production distribution exchange influence in the economy then Grayson moves on to his anti poverty crusade so re

member that as the background we're told that what he's going to call is just a flight of fantasy from a drunkard there's been no prior planning but Grayson moves on now to his anti-poverty crusade which takes place just a few streets away from here and there's Robert Blatchford there there's the clarion movement there there's Margaret Bonfield there McDonald’s first labour government and at this meeting they declare war on unemployment they put forward Grayson’s program essentially in the clari

on programme and Grayson gets up and says he's going to parliament in the next session whatever the discussion is on he's going to raise the issue of unemployment again whether people wanting to or not he's going there to do this to highlight it and it's going to be the the starting gun on a uk-wide anti-poverty crusade he goes to parliament back to parliament the third session starts that year in 1908. there's a licensing bill being debated of all things when there's serious problems going on i

n the country that the commons is spending days debating this bill Grayson walks calmly into the commons chamber carrying his hat and he sits down crosses his leg and he listens he tries to get the speaker's attention he doesn't want to give him Grayson he doesn't want to give his attention to Grayson Grayson jumps up and he starts his protest which he's spoken about and he ends up by if I read a bit more I mean this is where he really breaks from the labour party um and he goes for the fellow m

embers of the party he says that dignified assembly is composed of 670 members parliament mostly capitalists their good human complacent apathy is hardly their fault they have never lived near enough to the heart of humanity to feel its beat they have never trapped boots unwanted by civilization what do they want what do they know what can they know of the haunting spectre that tracks every step of the lookless worker he's asked to sit down and shut up and to go away quietly which after calling

his labour colleagues traitors to their class which you can imagine they're all very happy to hear Grayson walks out of the chamber but he goes back the following day when they're still debating the licensing Bill and he goes in again calling no one reports by the way at the time that he's worth the drink absolutely fine he walks in crosses his leg again then he jumps up starts his protest again and he shouts out I leave the house as I said yesterday with pleasure because I feel that no man can

stay in this house another moment when he's told that he's not entitled to address the house of commons Grayson and says well then I leave the house as I said before feeling that I’ve gained in dignity by leaving this institution and I hope that and then he's being shouted down continuously and all he's heard to say as he's leaving is this house this house of commons is a house of murderers and at that moment I think Grayson had severed his links with the parliamentary labour party but if we loo

k at how that's reported at the time even his detractors report it and that they don't say that Grayson’s drunk he seems you know quite aware of or in control of his faculties and aware of his surroundings and this is where we bring in Fenner Brockway who probably doesn't need any introduction Brockway in his memoirs says that he was him and other young members of the ILP were absolutely behind Grayson with his protest they thought he was the hero but then Keir Hardie tells Brockway who at the t

ime was a teetotaler that Grayson only did it because he was drunk and all of a sudden because Keir Hardie who's going to not believe what Keir Hardie says Brockway and his friends break with Grayson over this he has no other evidence of it and he writes a letter to Derek Forward I talked about the forward papers and Derek had asked him dear Fenner do you have any direct recollection of victor Grayson or any memories of him and Brockway writes back no I’m afraid not I’m well aware of Grayson and

I supported him but I never met him personally and didn't spend any considerable time in his company but then we hear in David Clarke’s biography he had spoken to Brockway after Brockway had written his network and Fenner Brockway had told David Clark that actually he had been to visit Grayson that Grayson was clearly the worst for wear for drink during the time of this protest that was made in parliament and then it was taken us back so what Brockway had said to Clark was then repeated and rep

eated and repeated and it's then taken as fact that this actually a quite brave protest and part of the biggest scheme of protest for the socialist movement was simply done on a whim by a drunkard who spent too much time in the parliamentary bar and that's one of the dangers I think of of history that rumours become printed and become taken as fact then reported as fact and reported reports and and because Grayson didn't write his memoirs he started but didn't finish they were never published an

d because as I said history has been written largely by his detractors this has been forgotten and this myth has been built up by Grayson and that's that's the second one um second instance I think where we need to reappoint I think the book does reappraise um what Grayson is doing the third one is that Maundy Gregory murdered Victor Grayson I think this is probably um for some people the most interesting aspect of Grayson’s life it's certainly the the most known by people that aren't uh on inte

gration so to speak it's a theory that's been repeated in television documentaries I think it was Andrew Mars making of modern Britain he talks about Victor Grayson and being murdered by Maundy Gregory um but this all comes from one book and it's a book that comes out in 1970 called murder by perfection by an author called Donald McCormick who must surely be trustworthy because he was the foreign correspondent for the Sunday times so surely he's trustworthy Gregory writes sorry McCormick writes

in this book that Gregory had been tasked with following Grayson because Grayson had come out of the first world war and he was a dangerous left-wing revolutionary so the government was spying on Grayson to make sure that he wasn't going to try and overthrow the government like Lenin and Trotsky had in Russia and then Grayson finds out that Gregory’s selling honours on behalf of Lloyd George raising money for the liberals and the Tories and that Gregory bumps him up and in the book McCormick has

all these wonderful sources and he says oh yes well there was the private Adams there who saw what was going on he was a contemporary of Grayson’s in the new Zealand forces and he witnessed Grayson being followed and this murky stuff no private Adams has ever been found David Clarke looked for him I look for him there's no record of this particular private Adams the next piece of information is from a from a painter Flemwell who is apparently start painting on the Thames and he sees this electr

ic canoe go pass with Victor Grayson in from enough and the canoe pulls up at Maundy Gregory’s girlfriend's house and Grayson jumps out goes through the door but he never comes out of him and this painter who supposedly goes to the house knocks the door and says oh he's Victor there oh no never heard of him must have been bumped off but it turns out that McCormack was a fraud he wrote something in the range of 53 books in 15 years some of them erotic novels some of them on ufos ancient Egypt ali

ens anything you can think of ghosts uh Jack the Ripper as well and in every single one of his books he managed to find documents and evidence that no one else has ever found we've ever been able to see his entire story about Grayson and he gives all these great names and he's spoken to Robert Blatchford about it when he was 12 years old Blatchford would have been dead for 30 odd years when this book came out he was a fraudster but it's been taken as fact so Reg Groves firstly his second biograp

hy accepts this story and goes to it even though as I explained this book I think Groves actually found out what happened to Grayson but nevertheless he accepts this story probably to sell books uh it's taken as fact then no one else looks back into it David Clarke accepts the uh the Maude Gregory theory although he does have the caveats that it's fully this because this Donald McCormick lovely guy he won't let me look at any of his evidence he's got but nevertheless so McCormick has since been

revealed as a serial fraudster so that made me go back into the the archives and see what was really going on so in the national archives there was a shadowy organisation called the national war aims committee and they were tasked with putting pro-war propaganda out into the country speaking tours of pro-war individuals to to make sure that industry kept working for the war effort and the men kept signing up and there was no strikes but we've got to keep strikes down to a minimum and actually fa

r be it from uh you know McCormick talked about Grayson and being his left-wing threat as he’s working for the government there's letters in the archives the national archives signed by Lloyd George’s secretary they come from 10 downing street asking Grayson to tour the country can you go to Huddersfield can you go up to Clydeside and speak to the ship workers can you go to this pit here in barrio Ferguson because there's the the unions are looking a bit shaky we think a bit strong we needed to

go up there and persuade the message and Grayson’s message was it's far easier to build socialism in Britain in a parliamentary democracy than it is under the jack boot of the Kaiser so Grayson is in the pay of the British government he's being sent all around the country but he then disappears doesn't he uh in 1920 and just before that he retreats from from public view and we're told that he retreats from public view because Gregory is on to him or trying to blackmail them so I went through thi

s there's sheets of receipts of money that Grayson was receiving in the archives as well and the simple reason that Grayson retreated I think from public view is that he was paid five pounds then for a public appearance or he was paid a pound to 500 words to write a leaflet sorry other way around you've given five pounds to write a leaflet or a pound for a public appearance which is a great deal of money then so what would you do I mean Grayson was a man he didn't have much money he went into th

e war poor came out of it poorer lost his wife lost his daughter now if you want to get yourself back on your feet it seems to me you stay at home in some quite nice surroundings he had the nice uh block of flats for London you would stay there and you would write send your articles off get your money back up so again I’ve deviated slightly but this is you know the truth is stranger I think than fiction it's another example of how you know the history and our view of Grayson has been totally tai

nted um by people that frankly made things up so we haven't 100% solved what happened to Grayson but we are we can you know we know his movements right up to the point he disappeared we know who he was talking with we know what he was doing we now know as I’ve said his early years we know he wasn't uh some villagers of a child of random Churchill we know that he wasn't drunk in parliament he had a drink problem of course we know that he liked to drink but so do other parliamentarians if we've fr

ank about it so this is how Grayson and I think our view of him has been walked and I hope that this book is going somewhere to put that right. so that's it. I hope everyone could make out what I was saying I’m just going to stop the share ah funny enough she's a teacher um right folks I am um back and I’m about to take questions or comments originally uh initially from from in in the annex here um and then I’m uh and and then I’ll turn to to our zoomers so do get ready for uh zoomers for thinki

ng about uh questions and if you put them in the chat that might be great okay um um uh Inaudible what I should have said was that it's hard for people on zoom to hear the questions in the hall so what I’m going to do is ask Harry if he can in answering that kind of summarize what the question was that you're answering I’ll also turn this around so that at the risk of you being seasick zoomers I think this is going to be better for you to be able to see Harry but also hear him can you hear me ok

ay is that great thanks everybody thanks for sitting through that as well um well great questions um should we start with the British socialist party so part of Grayson’s message once he gets into into parliament and with his great friend Robert Blatchford as well as editor of the Clarion is a movement for socialist unity so he wants there to be one core grouping of socialists initially in the labour party to kind of carry out the socialist message now Grayson falls out with the labour party bec

ause the labour party under Hardie and McDonald and Snowden very much believes in the parliamentary road the incremental road to socialism and don't forget that one of the major um parts of the party is the trade union movement now people my age tend to look back at the trade union movements as surely it must have been radical from the beginning to radical socialist organizations but if you look back to Grayson’s time they weren't they were very often liberal supporting or even tory supporting o

rganizations even though some of the members could have been socialists in their views the leadership was generally quite small c conservative so when Grayson has his protest and he's thrown out of parliament he starts touring the country calling for a new socialist party and then when he loses his seat in Colne Valley in 1910 the first of the 1910 general elections he ups the ante for a new socialist party and he wants to unite all these disparate left-wing groups and you mentioned the sdf but

there's others as well Marxist socialists a few co-operators even some anarchists he wants to bring them all together into this British socialist party which is formed mainly because of Grayson’s effort and around Grayson as the principal leader in 1912 but Grayson’s inexperience gets the better of him the leaders of the sdf Henry Hyman in particular I think it's Harry Quelch as well they undermine him and before he knows it Grayson realizes that even though the the ex everyone had accepted that

their own organizations were going to be diluted and everything put into the British socialist party he realizes that the British socialist party is formed without the social democratic federation the SDF dissolving their party the SDF take total control of the British socialist party and they freaked Grayson out of this so they've used him essentially to um propagandise on on behalf of this new party used his appeal to bring in members and I put in the book you know lots of names that we know

now like John McClean um people have joined the British socialist party did so because of Grayson and yet he was he was shut out of it so I think that's an example of him not having the experience the back room experience not having the scars on his back anyone that's been a member of committees knows that they can go on for hours sometimes and Grayson just didn't have the patience although he was a planner he didn't have the patience when it came to these really old-school left wingers with the

labour unrest yes Grayson did identify with I think if you look back to the newspapers 19 10 19 11. Grayson’s there with them he's speaking on behalf of them when Tom Mann is locked up Grayson even raised in parliament that Grayson is almost goading the government to have him locked up because Grayson is filling in for Tom Mann when Tom should be speaking and he's brought up in parliament by a liberal MP that we can't arrest Grayson even though what he's doing we should lock him up we can't bec

ause it will cause a huge backlash against us and we'll actually drive more people to the socialist movement but Grayson and the interesting thing is after the war and this is what really makes a mockery of Donald McCormick’s view of Grayson being this uh dangerous Marxist 1918 especially 1919 this country comes closer to revolution than it ever has been and never has been since and what's Grayson doing at that time he's not on the barricades he's not leading strikes he's actually writing pro-go

vernment's propaganda supporting the government because Grayson is a socialist and English socialist in the sense of Robert Blatchford William Morris and Edward Carpenter he's not a Bolshevik and I think I was talking to you earlier sir about Lenin’s comments about Grayson being a man of no principles foreign or the rest of it and Grayson was not a Bolshevik and I think that he saw that tendency creeping into the British socialist movement uh labour movements and uh he was aghast so I think does

that answer thank you right okay so Steve if you could uh tell yes tell us your question but I think harry if you can summarize it for our zoomers that'd be great of practical questions you mentioned there's another process and secondly it was a gentleman before his speeches in protest so I mentioned Thank you thanks for the question Steve so I mentioned his mother's version quite rightly he said what about his father's um yes it doesn't exist um I’ve put it in there his father was born a son o

f a carpenter in Yorkshire south Yorkshire and he's a bit of a wayward from the start so he doesn't really settle down to work doesn't like school ends up signing up for the army gets shipped to Ireland which is where he meets Grayson’s mother I think because she's working in service in Ireland and he finds himself always in prison uh the equivalent of army prison because he's just does not do what he’s told if he goes off on leave he doesn't come back he's always drinking um which obviously pas

sed on that to his son I expect and then he's supposed to go to India they're supposed to be shipped out from southern Ireland to go to India and he never shows up he absconds and his name is William Dickinson that's how he was born he moves he gets the I don't know how he gets to Liverpool but I expect he just jumps on a ship with false papers or hides himself on there to get to Liverpool and he emerges as William Grayson so he was quite a character in himself um what was the second question no

w yes hansel I don't record his speeches um there's only small sections on them though mainly because and they don't put this in the outside the large sections couldn't be heard by the recorder because of the the shouts and the cries towards him which is why in the book I’ve gone towards uh some of the journalists that were there because they recorded what was being shouted at Grayson um and they seem to have recorded some of it slightly better so that's why do you have a question yeah yeah than

ks very much fascinating I would love to see a discussion between yourself yeah Inaudible um was absolutely um well I think the first point is that I couldn't have done this book without David Clarke because you know on a very basic point it was reading David’s book that got me onto the subject but secondly David has been fantastic you know I’ve we've shared information when David did his last book I shared some of the information I had and he's done the same for me he's read it for me um it's b

een quite exciting actually because to share things I’ve found out subsequently and say to David I look at this he's brilliant he's oh great you know you've got to get it published and David is yeah this I say in the acknowledgements this is very much standing on the shoulders of giants so I do owe David a lot. really contradicts uh what david has written a lot of David’s work he kind of asks questions and he says well this is what's in the Donald McCormick stuff he says well this is the story b

ut it doesn't really seem right uh or the stuff about him being a Margaret and he's saying well you know I’ve been told this but it doesn't fit right but there are similarities between him and Churchill so I think what I’ve done is to actually follow those leads and to clear up some of those questions that David raises and I like to see this as kind of us getting a couple of steps further down the road to really getting the the real picture of Grayson the man you talk about Hardie and Snowden wa

s it jealousy uh in short I think yes um Ramsay MacDonald as well I’d like to add to that I mean McDonald’s if you go back to the the letters that are in the uh People's History Museum around Grayson’s selection because one of the big ferraris was that Kier Hardie and Russell McDonald wanted to drop or parachute in one of their colleagues into the car whereas the members wanted Grayson and even when they've been told you can't choose Grayson they still select him anyway and if you read the docum

ents MacDonald is there saying to Grayson don't worry Victor I’m on your side I know you're good I know the people love you I’m doing everything I can and then he's also writing to the NAC which is the equivalent of today's national executive committee saying we can't have Grayson he's too young he doesn't know anything about the movement he's just got a big gob on him he's got no real policies so McDonald is you know he's a friend to no one Snowden as well clearly bitter I think we see that he

actually wanted Grayson’s seat and ended up as an MP for Carlton and one of the stories actually interesting that David Clarke didn't report in his book was a sighting from John Beckett of Grayson and Snowden doesn't mention this or he mentions it slightly in his memoirs but doesn't get into the meat of it and I I contacted John Beckett’s father he was Francis Beckett the broadcaster and the guardian journalist and Francis said well I’ve got this memoir that my dad wrote he wrote his memoirs in

the 40s never published them do you want them I said brilliant yeah I was reading through and he talks about he's starting at Grayson so not only has he this guy come up to them at this uh outdoor rally and said I’m Victor Grayson not made a big deal of it and took them to the pub afterwards they've had a couple of drinks and Francis Beckham’s writing in here he says well the guy clearly had shell shock what we call shell shock he talks about his experience in the new Zealand forces talk about h

is father-in-law he's a Bolton bank manager this is stuff that wasn't known at all at the time they knew he'd been in the forces but didn't know shell shocked his family relations john Beckett goes on and he says then we went to parliament and we went to see Philip Snowden, Snowden knew Grayson pretty well and we spent quite a lot of time with Snowden and he wanted to know exactly every last detail about this man what he looked like what he spoke like what he wore what he talked about his manner

isms and john Beckett says we came away from that meeting and Snowden was convinced that we met victor Grayson 100% convinced that Snowden doesn't mention that this one was that he writes a few years later and that's for one of two reasons one that he kind of doesn't want to give any fuel to the the rumours of Victor Grayson and coming back or coming back into politics because remember at the time he's still younger than Ernie Bevin who's in the labour government but there's the other point that

john Beckett who obviously wrote the memoir went over to the British union of fascists then he went even further so maybe it was that aspect that made Snowden not want to mention Beckett maybe it's because he didn't want the ghost of Victor Grayson to come back but yeah, I think there's certainly jealousy there throughout the leaders of the party towards Grayson okay I am aware that people on zoom are saying that it is hard for them to to hear the questions we do appreciate that social distanci

ng wise logistically we can't uh get us get the questions coming up but uh Harry is is doing his his best to summarize the question as he's doing the answer what uh what I will do um is take a question from zoom now and and have people if there are other people in the hall think of a really pithy question um then then that would be great but I can see that um frank is asking how Harry do you think that Grayson died that's the big one isn't it um can you hear me ok. he wasn't murdered by Maundy G

regory i think actually and I’ve got this in the book there is a lot of circumstantial evidence and also some physical evidence that Grayson lived out his years in Maidstone Kent under an assumed name now that's you look at all the sightings the sighting I’ve just spoken about which was probably the most realistic sighting of him that happened in Maidstone other sightings of him are all cantered around Kent Maidstone and London now there's some information in Reg Groves archives and this is one

of my bug bears with reg Groves why didn't he go with this instead of the McCormick story is that he interviewed the lead investigator into Grayson’s disappearance during the war because there's a big investigation into Grayson’s whereabouts during the second world war which in itself is a mystery because why would you have an investigation into a man that has been missing for 20 years who was still being bombed by the Germans but on that document it said that Grayson remarried and lived in Kent

and I think I mean there's no death records there's no burial records for an hour Victor Grayson I’ve been through everything David Clark’s been through everything Reg Groves went through everything in Ireland or Britain so I do believe that he lived under an assumed name that he died probably in 1940 1941 because that's the point when all of the sightings stopped all of the sightings in this country by people that knew him stop and uh that's my theory did you have access to Grayson’s unfinishe

d autobiography Yes I found it uh he only got as far as writing the what would you call it the kind of summary the introduction of it and the first three chapters but yes I’ve found it and he's got this scrawl that's quite hard too hard to read but I managed to to go through it and I’ve used it in the book and it does give you more of a sense of what his life was like in Manchester sorry in Liverpool growing up and some of the the things he got up to so there's a story when he he absconded from

home and he's supposed to go to school one morning and he actually jumped on a ship and tried to get to Chilli there's a bit of an adventure so he gives the first-hand account of it in there so so little things like that to give us a kind of clue as to what his life was like in Liverpool um so yes I have used it the risk of making you see sick again um if anybody else wants to type something into the chat or you can try waving at me and we can see if we can we can hear you on on the on zoom anyb

ody on zoom want to wave to me no okay is anybody else in the hall wanting to right okay Inaudible the question is about public meetings and how many people turned up at Grayson’s meetings you mentioned Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership especially the first year or two. Phenomenal crowds of people coming to hear and speak and I worked for the labour party as you know and I escorted Jeremy to meetings in the west midlands as a member of party staff and I write in there that one of the reasons for

getting Jeremy to do the forward was that I’ve never met a politician before or been in the presence of a politician before who when he met some people they would literally cry with joy and astonishment that they'd met Jeremy Corbyn and yet you could have someone on the other side of the road shouting hang the bugger or he should be shot it was unbelievable I’ve never witnessed that in my life before especially the labour politician so there were similarities in that sense and I did think at the

time imagine being as vilified as this like Victor Grayson was but not having the party machinery around you not having party staff around you and just being you it must be a harrowing experience you talk about how many people would have been at a Grayson meeting I mean there's some famous pictures especially I think there's one of the unemployed on tower hill in 1908 or 1909 and you can see this pin prick of a guy going like that and it's Grayson’s stood on the top of a wagon and there's a sea

of thousands upon thousands of flat-capped unemployed workers there listening to and there's things I mentioned in the book during his election campaign in Colne where there's two to three thousand people and this is before we've got twitter or Facebook to tell people that you know Victor Grayson’s on his way over they just assemble it's incredible to the extent that Grayson has to let a milk cart through at one point the people will not get out of the way so Grayson has to say please you know

he's not part in the red seas to get them through so it's a phenomenon that it has rarely been seen in British politics and I think that's another reason you know paul mentioned jealousy you know you have people there that have been at it for 30 40 50 years and they may be able to command 100 or 200 people Grayson had thousands from the off and the guy was a phenomenon so, we've got a question on zoom why do you think Grayson was so supportive of Britain’s war effort during world war one was it

a case of being strapped for cash or do you think he was following Blatchford, Heiman and so many others in the movement in being pro-war Grayson came from a family of uh servicemen his father was a soldier all be it a terrible one his uh both of his older brothers fought in the world war they both then and they're both older than Grayson signed up for the first world war they weren't conscripted they signed up as soon as war broke out one of them John was killed in the last days of the war so t

his is a patriotic family even despite the fact that Grayson’s saying well you know this British empire is built on the blood and sweat of the working class and we're not getting anything back from it he still loves his country despite its ills and he says and I i mentioned the quote that we'll only be able to build socialism after the war if it's through the British system the British parliamentary system not under the jack boots of the Kaiser and that's why I think he was supportive he was ver

y much we need to win the war then we can build socialism but the the threat of German militarism was uh more considerable to socialism than the British parliamentary system I mean the guy had been elected for goodness sake department there's no chance he would have been elected uh under a German military regime so it wasn't just for money although he certainly used his connections to make money he tried to sign up as soon as war broke out like his brothers did um he was a member of the governme

nt he looks quite possibly like it was Winston Churchill that wouldn't let him sign up but said actually you need to be out there on the platform you know encouraging people to sign up and to keep the industries working so um yeah partially for money but there is certainly principles there we've got a question from Hazel who spoke to us about Fenner Brockway and she's interested in that of course uh says very influential but not always reliable his uh Brockway’s autobiography were there other ac

counts like this or was Brockway the primary source for that myth well thanks for that Hazel um yes Brockway did idolize Hardie and I think a lot of people his age did and that's the problem this these the generation that became the next generation of labour MPs which carried on that myth um yes there were others uh I’m just trying to think beyond the spot um there was the only one that actually spoke up in defence of Grayson and this was quite interesting because Grayson says to the newspapers

a few days after his protest that the PLP the parliamentary labour party were fully aware of what he was about to do and yet afterwards none of them support this they say we had no idea he did it on a whim but there was one there was Will Thorne who's the founding father of the modern day GNB union who says I was there Grayson told them he was able to do this and they egged him on they encouraged him so unfortunately the majority like Hardie Snowden McDonald Bruce Glasier is another one derided

Grayson and said he did it because of drink I don't think he did I think looking back at the newspaper articles nothing there is written about him being drunk Will Thorne who was there as well says actually this was premeditated the evidence that we see with the anti-poverty crusade and his performance in parliament building up to that point show it as part of a serious campaign against poverty in Britain thank you right I think we've done the questions on zoom I think Ralph did you have another

another question Inaudible in Manchester um Grayson’s support for women’s suffrage particularly in Manchester well Grayson when he moves to Manchester from Liverpool joins Manchester central ILP independent labour party which is the um the same constituency if you like the same branch there's the Pankhurst family Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and Sylvia Pankhurst don't forget she remained a socialist until her dying day Grayson there was Keir Hardie was very much a supporter of the suffrage

movement but if you look back to the documents and the the meetings of the labour party and at labour party conference the majority of the men there are saying we don't support Mrs Pankhurst she's a middle-class woman who is only interested in giving votes to other middle class women actually what we should be having is universal suffrage where all men and women over the age of 18 can vote but Grayson was extremely supportive of the Pankhurst’s there was a meeting in Manchester that Hardie came

to speaker and Grayson actually supported him and this is in 1905 I think where they are supporting the Pankhurst’s the women's struggle so Grayson was a rarity actually because there was few MPs that were as vocal on the suffrage uh issue as Grayson was especially socialists because a lot of the socialist men some of whom I mentioned that were in the SDF or ended up in the SDF were very much no because Mrs Pankhurst wants to vote for herself she doesn't want it for a servant uh you know that w

as their their way of looking at it so Grayson is quite unusual in that respect and he's a university of course we discussed earlier with Christabel Pankhurst they set up the Manchester student socialist association together which in itself is worth looking into again this has been lost you know a lot of this has been lost in the effort and I think the fact that the Pankhurst you know Emmeline Pankhurst especially Christabel moved very much to the right after the first world war um means that we

don't tend to look at their kind of socialist roots as much and we forget very much about Richard Pankhurst as well Emily’s husband rooted in Manchester friend of Kier Hardie and a founder of the labour party okay paul um The question is about the anarchist tradition and did did that come into uh Grayson’s beliefs and Paul mentioned about you know Grayson not being a Marxist and I absolutely agree with that the only bit of Marxism that Grayson seems to preach is the surplus value the theory of

surplus value which it's kind of becomes a standard socialist banner which is you know what the work the uh what the worker is paid is probably a third of what they should be paid and everything they produce over that is surplus value which is how the capitalist makes the profits so Grayson’s a big proponent of that is he an anarchist or does he have some that Liverpudlian anarchist streak in him um yes I think he does he's very happy isn't he to go it alone he's not scared to go it alone now ma

ybe that's because he's got a sea of people and supporting him but to be from his background he had to be tough as old boots anyway for want of a better better phrase um and his friends in Liverpool you know Jim Larkin is one of his big friends in Liverpool and I write about it in the book Larkin is again this great figure with a bit of an anarchist tendency he's five or six years older than Grayson but they live live near to each other they they drink in this Clarion tea shop together because G

rayson’s a teetotaller totally quite um unbelievably so yeah and he is he's certainly influenced by the likes of Larkin um so yes I would agree there is an anarchist tendency but I wouldn't class him as as an anarchist he was he was too organized for that I think perhaps we have one one last question in the hall here yes um the question is is about Grayson’s sexuality yeah I think without doubt Grayson was bisexual um there's a good argument to be made that he was gay actually um but certainly

bisexual so there were some letters and I think Terry McCarthy is on the on the zoom call um Terry was the director of what was then I think it was the national labour history museum correct me if I’m wrong from um when these letters came about and they were to a another Liverpool called harry Dawson and they corresponded with the letters that exist from 1905 to 1911 and to me I’m to David Clarke and it was very clearly have a homosexual relationship and I think these were later used against him

I’ve mentioned in the book what terry told me so in the sense of them influencing decisions that he made the fact they were found within the papers of Jimmy Thomas who is a leading supporter of Ramsay McDonald shows I think that they were used against now do they influence decisions in his life before that yes I think they do um Grayson when he's younger and in Liverpool he sets off on a career to be a preacher but something happens with the particular strand of Christianity that he's supportin

g in the group he's with where he suddenly leaves them and moves to the unitarians and I think if we look at the history of the unitarian movement it's been a much more accepting of gay people and in fact they were not ordaining but kind of blessing um gay relationships back into the 1970s and 1980s into this country which shows you how forward thinking they are so I think that that certainly influenced his his religious shift and there's lots of strange comments uh offhand comments made about G

rayson that when you put them together they do indicate that um he was certainly bisexual I’ll leave you with the one probably the most famous one was Robert Blatchford his daughter Winnifred uh Blatchford was so besotted with Grayson and him we've heard by all accounts that people thought they were engaged already and then we look back at the we've got the letters now David Clark saved these letters from destruction Blatchford’s letters to the daughter where he says I know you like Victor I lik

e him as well but there's things about him that you do not understand and he cannot be trusted he's not the right man for. Looking back on it this may have been alluding to his sexuality okay well folks we've covered a lot and thank you very much for all of you who are um asked oh elaine are you are you are you wanting to ask a que a question I can try and get you to unmute I’m not sure how well this is going to work okay oh my god it's working yeah okay um going back to the question of women's

suffrage I wondered if there were any connections between um Victor Grayson and George Lansbury because George Lansbury is also in a re is also a rebel at that time in that he resigns his seat um in 1912 it's down in London though in bow um and stands on the platform of women's suffrage without any support from as far as I’m aware from the um the PLP but I wonder if you know the the sort of the Grayson and the Pankhurst connection sorry is that too much no it's fine no that's elaine asked about

the whether there was any connection between Grayson and Lansbury yes there is um there's documentary evidence which I quote in the book um two things one is that Grayson spoke at the launch of the daily herald of which uh Lansbury was the the editor and that the two did you know clearly have a relationship before that Grayson’s in America and there's a guy called Joseph Fells fells I think I’ve got that right and he's a very wealthy man uh soap manufacturer but he's also the proponent of a sing

le tax so flat and there's a telegram from Fells to Lansbury who is also in America and I think him and Grayson went to America together on the kind of fat farming mission where fell says Grayson in bad condition has asked me for money I’ve said no go and look him up getting bad reports worse for drink so here's a guy we find the telegram as well from Grayson begging Fells for money because he's spent it all probably on whiskey so yes Lansbury knows Grayson well enough to travel with him to Amer

ica to speak on his behalf and the Lansbury to be asked to intervene when Grayson is clearly in a poor state so there are connections there but strangely George doesn't mention uh Victor in his autobiography and in biographies of Lansbury Grayson isn't mentioned but what documentary evidence there is to suggest they knew each other very well yeah oh good okay I think what this is telling me is that you all need to buy Harry’s book because there's clearly every every question that he's asking he

goes yes it's in my book uh but politely has not actually been uh been plugging it just give just let me wave it at everybody Pluto press um um there is a link on our website and uh I would encourage you because Harry is very uh graciously come and given us his time and um I would like to thank him very much on your behalf for uh being with us today thank you It's very nice to have virtual and real applause together isn't it This is the first talk I’ve done on this so thank you for your patience

and perseverance yes thank you very much to all of you uh both here and uh and on zoom uh for your participation so if you joined us late or if you want to recommend it to others this talk has been recorded and will be uploaded to the library's YouTube channel with a link on the event web page next week's talk is online only on Wednesday the 29th of September at 2 p.m. we'll be welcoming Uthra Rajgopal to talk on Grunwick strike leader Jayaben Desai till then best wishes to you all in solidarit

y from all at the Working Class Movement Library, goodbye thank you