Robert Blatchford, Socialist And Prophet

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 304, 23 December 1943, Page 4

Robert Blatchford, Socialist And Prophet

TTHE day the news came through ■*• of the death of Robert Blatchford, I told it to two well-read young women, one in the twenties and the other in the thirties, and both looked blank. They had never heard of him. Then I told a professor, and it did not seem to mean much to him. I am not blaming these three. I am simply stating By Cyrano this to show how completely a man can fall out of the public eye. These people had been brought up in an age that didn't know, or had forgotten, Robert Blatchford. Forty or fifty years ago mention of his name would have meant something to them. In the 'nineties and the nineteen-hundreds Robert BJatchford was one of the best-known men in England. One of the founders of the British Labour party, the leading Socialist writer of his time, a propagandist of genius and a •'character," Blatchford was a man you could not ignore, however much you disagreed with him. Last of the Pioneers He died the other day at the great age of ninety-two, and he must, 1 think, have been the very last of those stalwarts of the 'eighties and "nineties who founded the modern Socialist movement in England, and from it the Labour party. There was Hyndman, the aristocrat (he always wore a top hat), who wanted his own way, and must have been difficult to work with—an unsocial Socialist. There was William Morris, great man of letters, who for his Socialist State looked back to the Middle Ages. There were John Burns and Ben Tillett and Keir Hardie and others, each man with his own particular contribution to the cause. Burns and Tillett were born organisers and agitators, and when Burns took Ministerial office he lost most of his dash and fell short of expectations. Blatchford was the journalist of the party. No one else since Cobbett, who was one of his literary models, has written with quite the same simple, clear, direct force as Blatchford. He was one of seven men who founded the Labour party some fifty years ago, and Blatchford insisted that it should be absolutely independent of the other two parties. It was to have no truck with them. He didn't care for the party side of the campaign. Political organisation didn't appeal to him. His business was to write, and write he did, in such a fashion that the Manchester Guardian said that for every one man converted by Karl Marx in England Blatchford converted a hundred. The explanation was largely that whereas Marx was German, Blatchford was English, as English as Dickens. He had English tastes—cricket for one—and English humour. As he said himself, he was a Briton first and a Socialist afterwards. Chesterton, who profoundly disagreed with him on some vital matters, wrote of Blatchford that "very few intellectual swords have left such a'mark on our time, have cut so deep, or remained so clean. . . . His case for Socialism, as far as it goes, is so clear and simple that anyone would understand it, when it was put properly; his genius was that he could put it properly." Blatchford • was also a short story writer of high rank and a first-class literary critic. In the Army

His life was a struggle and a triumph. The only thing that mattered to him was what he regarded as the truth. His father died when he was two. His mother, an actress, was half Italian. She did her best for her boys, but she couldn't do much. Robert enlisted in the Army, served seven years, became a sergeant, and, according to his lifelong friend, A. M, Thompson, was offered a commission. It was very difficult to rise from the ranks in the 'seventies. Blatchford greatly enjoyed the Army, and wrote about it with gusto. His experience profoundly influenced his outlook. He got to know men in the raw. "The Army taught us boys teamwork and loyalty and camaraderie and love of country," he said. For the rest of his life he took a keen and intelligent interest in the Army and military policy, and his experience must have stood him in good stead when he set out to warn his countrymen about the German menace in the years before the first world war. Discharged from the Army, he resolved to become a journalist, and started to educate himself. Carlyle was his hero, and he records that he threw "Sartor Resartus" across the room in despair at never being able to write like that. But in a few years he was earning £1000 a year as a journalist. Then came his conversion to Socialism and a clash with the paper. He insisted on writing Socialism, and told the proprietor that if he couldn't write what he believed in he would have to find another paper. So they parted, and the Clarion was born, in 1891. Blatchford and his colleagues made the Clarion the most famous paper of the kind in the English-speaking world. The circulation soon rose to 40,000. The German Menace Blatchford started his warnings about Germany in the Clarion, but alienated readers without reaching the general public. So in 1909, in desperation, he approached the Daily Mail, and the result was a series of articles, of which a New York journal said that "since the days when Demosthenes thundered forth his warnings in the ears of the decadent Athenians, no more eloquent and patriotic appeals have been made." His forecast of the military course of the war in the west was afterwards described by a French paper as "positively stupendous." In England Blatchford was the centre of a Etorm of abuse and ridicule. Mr. Lloyd George said Northcliffe had sent for Blatchford to work up a war scare. Northcliffe was in Canada at the time and the suggestion of the articles came from Blatchford. It is a melancholy chapter in British political history. When the war did come, to confound these complacent people, Fate had an ironical stroke for this man who predicted it. The Clarion, which had reached a circulation of 780,000, was ruined. He did other journalistic work, regular and free lance, into his old age. It was a happy old age. "I have a garden rich in roses," he said when he was 80, "a house well stored with books, music to the heart's desire, memories sad and sweet, like 'apples of gold in pictures of silver'; singing birds and noble trees. The fates have spared me many dear old friends, and my two wonderful daughters had risen up and made me blessed.' He had been, so he ventured to claim, "an honest writer and a loyal Englishman." With these words of his own, we may take leave of this gifted and lovable man..