Members of parliament these days mostly begin their political careers at university, and end them as highly-paid consultants to the companies they did favours for when they were in office. They are invariably graduates, and few of them have ever held jobs outside politics. The idea that democratic representatives should represent us is considered dangerously old-fashioned.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that this wasn’t always so. For most of the 20th century MPs were drawn from every walk of life and every variety of experience – alongside the inevitable apparatchiks and silver-spoons sat coal miners and school teachers, railway workers and shop assistants. If parliamentary democracy has even the faintest hope of surviving in this country, then that survival must surely begin with abolishing the professional political class and returning to a heterogeneous House.
Will Thorne, union leader, mayor and MP, started full-time work at the age of seven. Not only didn’t he have a doctorate in Political Science – at the time of his first wedding he could not read or write well enough to sign the register.
He was born in Birmingham on 8th October 1857 to parents who both worked as brick-makers. But when Will’s father was killed in a drunken fight, an already tough life became one of extreme poverty. At six, Thorne had a weekend job and at seven he was working a nine-hour-day as a wheel-turner for a ropemaker. He worked in various industries during his youth, including, crucially, a gasworks.
Thorne moved to London in his twenties (“moved” in those days meaning “tramped”), and became involved in that city’s vibrant socialist scene. He’d already led strikes back home – against Sunday working, for instance – but efforts to permanently unionise his various workplaces had been unsuccessful. In London, Eleanor Marx taught him literacy, and he joined the Social Democratic Federation. It was in 1889 that Will Thorne became one of the most significant figures in trade union history, as part of a trio who founded The National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers.
Based at the Beckton gasworks in east London, the union’s main aim was to reduce working hours from twelve a day to eight. (It was routine for men to do back-to-back shifts, 24 hours straight, at least once a fortnight, during the changeover from day rota to night rota.) Concentrating on hours rather than wages was unusual for a trade union at the time, but Thorne’s lifelong conviction, born of his childhood experiences, was that excessive work destroyed people, in body and spirit.
The eight hour day was conceded by management almost immediately, without the need for a strike, and the union grew rapidly as a result to become the largest in the country. Thorne remained general secretary of this union and its successors until 1934.
The gas workers’ success was key to the emergence of what was known as New Unionism, when for the first time thousands of workers who were classed as unskilled or semi-skilled, and had previously been considered impossible to organise by the labour movement, formed unions, took action, and frequently won great improvements.
Will Thorne was always a union man first and foremost, but he was also an elected borough councillor in West Ham, from 1891 until his death in 1946, and served as MP for West Ham South from 1906-18. When that constituency was abolished, he was instead elected as the member for Plaistow. Incredibly, he received 94.9% of the vote; you have to feel sorry for the returning officer, trying to build up the tension: “And the winner is … Wait for it … ”
Though famous as a speaker at factory gates and on picket lines, Thorne was no Commons orator. Rather, he had a reputation as a “sharpshooter,” feared by government ministers for his damagingly knowledgable and well-prepared interventions at question time. He only retired from representing Plaistow in 1945, by which time he was 87, and the oldest member of the Commons. Thorne was widowed three times, and survived by his fourth wife.
Of the 26 Labour MPs elected in the breakthrough general election of 1906, more than half had, before the age of ten, been “half-timers” – that is, working at jobs in the morning and going to school in the afternoon. The new member for Newcastle, for instance, was an orphan who grew up in a workhouse and began as a farm labourer when he was nine. At the start of his political life, Thorne felt that parliament was of no use “as it was then constituted, with every interest except labour adequately represented.” What would he make of it now?
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Sources:
https://spartacus-educational.com/TUthorne.htm
www.johnhearfield.com/Gas/Gas_strike.htm
Labour Heritage Bulletin Spring 2018
Labour Heritage Bulletin Summer 2020
www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/parliament-and-the-first-world-war/parliamentarians-and-staff-in-the-war/written-portraits-of-parliamentarians-during-the-first-world-war/will-thorne-1857-1946/