A ragged trousered philanthropist and the empire: Robert Tressell in South Africa

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 51, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 64-86

  Hyslop, Jonathan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND   (South Africa)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0041756816     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/2001.51.64     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1978 (hereafter RTP). All page references are to this edition.
2. Peter Miles, 'The Painter's Bible and the British Workman: Robert Tressell's Literary Activism', in Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.), The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, Edward Arnold, London, 1984, pp. 1-17.
3. F. C. Ball, One of the Damned: the Life and Times of Robert Tressell, Author of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1973, pp. 178-85, p. 257.
4. Miles, 'Painter's Bible', pp. 2-3.
5. Ball, Damned, pp. 185-6, p. 257.
6. Ball, Damned, p. 186.
7. Ball, Damned, p. 189.
8. Miles, 'Painter's Bible', p. 3.
9. John Nettleton, 'Robert Tressell and the Liverpool Connection', History Workshop Journal 12, autumn 1981, pp. 163-71.
10. http://www.btintemet.com/∼inthered/writers.html
11. http://www.1066.net/tressell/festival.htm
12. My source for these claims, which are explained later in the article, is National Archives of South Africa, Cape Town Archives Repository, CSC 2/1/1/336 no. 30, 'Robert P. Noonan, Plaintiff and Elizabeth Noonan, Defendant', Saturday, 27 Feb. 1897.
13. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1994.
14. Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Verso, London, 1998, p. 282.
15. Raymond Williams, 'The Robert Tressell Memorial Lecture, 1982', History Workshop Journal 16, autumn 1983, p. 76.
16. Ball, Damned.
17. Documentation from the South African National Archives, Pretoria, shows that Kathleen Noonan's memory, reported by Ball, Damned, p. 19
18. that Robert had some land in South Africa at a place called Forest Hills, is correct (WLD 5/45 617/1904, 'Turffontein Estate Ltd. and Robert Noonan', 1904;
19. WLD Illiquid Case 14/1905, 'Turffontein Estate versus Robert Philip Noonan', 1905). Kathleen even remembered the stand number - 16 - correctly. Although this property acquisition does show that Robert had some disposable income in his Johannesburg period, it does not necessarily indicate that he was doing especially well financially. What he owned, from June 1898, was a lease on a small, empty plot of land, suitable for house construction, in what was to become the white working-class southern suburbs of Johannesburg. The lease payment on this property was three pounds sterling per year - not a huge amount of money, even then. Robert kept up the payments until he had left Johannesburg, and then defaulted. In 1904, the land company, Turffontein Estate, brought a legal case in the Transvaal courts against Noonan (whose whereabouts they did not know) and in 1905 were awarded fifteen pounds overdue lease payments, and costs, and had the property restored to them. It is not clear whether Robert ever heard of this judgement. If he did, it may have added to his financial insecurities, as Turffontein Estate had a London office. A better indicator of some improvement in Robert's financial position towards the end of his stay in South Africa, is the fact that in Cape Town, during 1899-1901, he was able to live in the securely middle-class suburb of Rondebosch, a much more affluent area than Mowbray-Observatory, where he had lived between his marriage and 1894.
20. Ball, Damned, p. 15.
21. Anonymous, The Paint House: Being the History of Herbert Evans and Co. Ltd., Herbert Evans, Johannesburg, no date (1960?).
22. Anna M. Smith, Johannesburg Street Names: a Dictionary of Street, Suburb and Other Place Names, Compiled to the End of 1968, Juta, Cape Town, 1971, p. 270.
23. Trevor Hopper, Robert Tressell's Hastings: the Background to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Hopper Books, Brighton, no date, pp. 36-8.
24. Ball, Damned, pp. 11-12, and CSC 2/1/1/336 no. 30, extract from marriage register (see note 12 above). Ball read the house number in Strand Street on the copy of the marriage register entry which he obtained as 78, but the copy in the CSC file could also be read as 58. Ball read the names of the witnesses to the marriage as 'N. G. and W. H. Eckhovoff', but I read them as M. G. Eckhardt and W. H. (or W. A.) Evershed.
25. There is one other possible, although less clear, South-African place-name reference in the book. This is the suburb of Irene, RTP, p. 631. There is an area called Irene close to Pretoria.
26. Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heynigen and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town: the Making of a City: an Illustrated Social History, David Philip, Cape Town, 1998, p. 177, p. 212.
27. As note 24, p. 213.
28. As note 24, p. 227.
29. As note 24, p. 217-226.
30. Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town, Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, 1995, pp. 164-85.
31. RTP, p. 593.
32. RTP, p. 601.
33. CSC 2/1/1/336 no. 30, Noonan and Noonan (see note 12).
34. According to Robert's court testimony, he and Elizabeth lived, after their marriage, in the suburb of Mowbray. This was a lower middle-class area. This move from central Cape Town, where working-class housing was generally in bad repair, probably marked an improvement in Robert's living conditions. Suburban living in places like Mowbray had become possible from 1864, when a commuter railway was built around the eastern side of Table Mountain. Many immigrant artisans preferred to live in the lower middle-class Observatory-Mowbray area, rather than in the city centre or the inner working-class suburbs of Woodstock and Salt River. Worden, and others, Cape Town, pp. 249-62. Obviously though, this was a relatively expensive option, which may have added to Robert's money troubles.
35. Certain dates in this paragraph have been estimated on the basis of evidence in CSC 2/1/1/336 no. 30, Noonan and Noonan (see note 12). I assume Robert arrived in Johannesburg late in 1894, on the basis that he talks of three years of married life in Cape Town before leaving. I assume Elizabeth first returned to Cape Town from Johannesburg in December 1895, as Robert talks of her arriving on 15 September and staying for two and a half months, and as Lindenbaum's evidence puts Elizabeth in Cape Town in December.
36. CSC 2/1/1/336 no. 30, Noonan and Noonan.
37. RTP, p. 49.
38. RTP, p. 138.
39. Noonan's anti-temperance attitudes may have developed in Cape Town, which in the early 1890s had strong outposts of the Templar movement, the YMCA and the Salvation Army. The Salvationists' General Booth visited city in 1891. See Worden, and others, Cape Town, p. 234.
40. RTP, p. 601.
41. RTP, p. 601.
42. Ball, Damned, p. 31.
43. The outstanding text on early Johannesburg is Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914, vols. 1 and 2, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1982.
44. For a good analysis of the local politics of this era, see Diana Cammack, The Rand at War, 1899-1902: The Witwatersrand and the Boer War, James Currey, London; University of California Press, Berkeley; University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1990.
45. Olive Schreiner to Edward Carpenter, 13 Nov. 1898, Olive Schreiner Letters, ed. Richard Rive, Oxford University Press, 1988, vol. 1, p. 340.
46. Van Onselen, Studies, vol. 2, p. 117.
47. Anonymous, Paint House.
48. An account of the dynamite explosion can be found in Thelma Gutsche, A Very Smart Medal: The Story of the Witwatersrand Agricultural Society, Howard Timmins, Cape Town, 1970, pp. 48-9.
49. Anonymous, Paint House.
50. Anonymous, Paint House.
51. Transvaal Leader, 2 May 1908.
52. Transvaal Leader, 2 May 1908.
53. Standard and Diggers' News, 15 May 1899.
54. Cammack, Rand at War, pp. 15-17.
55. For Bain's life see R. K. Cope, Comrade Bill: The Life and Times of W. H. Andrews, Workers'Leader, Stewart, Cape Town, no date (early 1940s), throughout;
56. Ivan Walker and Ben Weinbren, 2000 Casualties: a History of the South African Labour Movement, South African Trade Union Council, Johannesburg, 1961, throughout;
57. entry by 'C. R. O.' in W. J. De Kock (ed.), Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 1, National Council for Social Research, Pretoria, 1968, pp. 38-9;
58. The Star, 29 Oct. 1919;
59. Rand Daily Mail, 30 Oct. 1919;
60. and The International, (Johannesburg) 31 Oct. 1919.
61. Bain provided some information on his participation in the Zulu War in Standard and Diggers' News, 2 Jan. 1900. Following the events recounted in this paper. Bain was captured while fighting for the Boers in the South-African War. The British Army imprisoned him on Ceylon. On his release. Bain returned to Johannesburg. He worked there as a fitter, later moving to the Premier Mine near Pretoria. He founded the Transvaal Independent Labour Party in 1905. Bain became Secretary of the Transvaal Industrial Federation, an umbrella body of the white trade unions, in 1911. In this capacity he led a general strike in the Johannesburg area in July 1913, which, following violent clashes between strikers and British troops, imposed a humiliating settlement on the government and the mining houses. In early 1914 Bain and eight other unionists were deported to Britain. There they received massive support from the labour movement. The deportees were allowed to return to South Africa later that year. In 1919 Bain led a 'Board of Control', which conducted a workers' occupation of Johannesburg municipality. He died in Johannesburg in October 1919.
62. Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride, p. 134.
63. Laurence Thompson, Robert Blatchford: Portrait of an Englishman, Victor Gollancz, London, 1951.
64. Cope, Comrade Bill, p. 45.
65. Johannesburg Witness, 1 Sept. 1899. This copy, in the Strange Collection, Johannesburg Public Library, seems, tragically, to be the only surviving issue of this newspaper.
66. Standard and Diggers' News, 15 May 1899.
67. David Ticktin, 'The Origins of the South African Labour Party 1880-1910', PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1973, vol. 1, pp. 92-5.
68. Ball, Damned, pp. 63-5.
69. William Morris, 'Useful Work and Useless Toil', in William Morris, Selected Writings, ed. G. D. H. Cole, Nonesuch Press, London 1946, pp. 603-23.
70. E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Pantheon, New York, 1976, pp. 388-9.
71. Rand Daily Mail, 30 Oct. 1919.
72. Rand Daily Mail, 6 July 1916.
73. Transvaal Leader, 2 May 1908.
74. South African National Archives, Pretoria, SS 6805 15143/97, Correspondence between the Federated Building Trades Council and the Uitvoerende Raad of the South African Republic.
75. Ticktin, 'Origins', vol. 1, pp. 92-6.
76. Standard and Diggers' News, 15 May 1899.
77. Jonathan Hyslop, 'The Imperial Working Class makes itself "White": White Labourism in Britain, Australia and South Africa before the First World War', Journal of Historical Sociology 12:4, Dec. 1999, pp. 398-421.
78. Elaine Katz, A Trade Union Aristocracy: a History of White Workers in the Transvaal and the General Strike of 1913, African Studies Institute, Johannesburg, 1976.
79. Hyslop, 'Imperial Working Class'.
80. RTP, p. 28-9.
81. RTP, p. 28.
82. RTP, p. 492.
83. For a case study which provides support for these arguments, see Jonathan Hyslop, 'White Working Class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: "Purified" Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for a "Mixed" Marriage Act, 1934-1939', Journal of African History 36, 1995, pp. 57-81.
84. Mrs Joan Johnson, Robert Noonan's grand-daughter, kindly sent me a copy of Robert's membership card for 'The Transvaal '98 Commemoration Committee', which gives the names of the members of the committee's executive.
85. Donal McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers 1877-1902, Perskor, Johannesburg, 1989;
86. Arthur Davey, The British Pro-Boers 1877-1902, Tafelberg, Cape Town, 1978, pp. 130-44.
87. Padraic Colum, Arthur Griffith, Browne and Nolan, Dublin, 1959, pp. 33-41.
88. McCracken, Irish Pro-Boers, pp. 132-4.
89. George Dangerfield, The Damnable Question: a Study in Anglo-Irish Relations, Constable, London, 1977, p. 260. This gesture may be regarded as generous, as MacBride was Yeats's successful rival for the love of Maud Gonne, who contracted a disastrous marriage with the heroic but personally feckless soldier. Nevertheless, in 'Easter 1916', Yeats reminded his readers that MacBride was 'A drunken, vainglorious lout', before having him transformed by the 'terrible beauty' born of his martyrdom.
90. Anonymous, The Great Transvaal Irish Conspiracy, Ross and Lewis, Cape Town, no date (1899-1900?), p. 5. Despite the rabidly Unionist tone of this pamphlet, much of the information in it does correlate with the sources on the Transvaal Irish cited elsewhere in these footnotes.
91. McCracken, Irish Pro-Boers, p. 78.
92. Maurice Hennessy, The Wild Geese: The Irish Soldier in Exile, The Devlin Adair Company, Old Greenwich, 1973, p. 205.
93. Transvaal Sentinel, 23 March 1898; 30 March 1898.
94. Colum, Griffith, p. 38. Note that the correct street name is Rissik, not 'Russik' as given by Colum.
95. Ball, Damned, p. 16.
96. An advertisement in the Johannesburg Witness, 1 Sept. 1899, gives the full address of Mitchell's shop - 106 Pritchard Street, on the corner of Von Wielligh Street. This does not contradict the address given by Stewart Ogilvy in Forward, 14 Dec. 1945, and reported by Ball - between Delvers and Smal streets - as these streets bisected Pritchard on either side of Von Wielligh. Note that Ball wrongly gives Delvers as 'Pelvers'.
97. Ball, Damned, p. 16.
98. On the Irish Brigade see Richard Ruda, 'The Irish Transvaal Brigades', The Irish Sword, vol. 11, 1973-4, pp. 201-11
99. McCracken, Irish Pro-Boers, pp. 145-9
100. Hennessy, Wild Geese, pp. 204-8
101. Davey, British Pro-Boers, pp. 130-44. There was a second Irish Brigade under Arthur Lynch, but it played a much less substantial military role than the Blake-MacBride unit.
102. Anonymous, Irish Conspiracy, p. 5.
103. Cammack, Rand at War, p. 54.
104. RTP, p. 25.
105. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Vintage, New York, 1990, p. 16.
106. I am grateful to Paul Stewart and Phil Bonner for this information.
107. Thompson, William Morris, p. 722.