Victor Grayson: In Search of Britain's Lost Revolutionary

Victor Grayson

‘Victor Grayson was a socialist firebrand and trailblazer. The leftist equivalent of a spectacular firework, he blazed gloriously, but briefly, before falling to earth – and from grace. This is a gripping account of his spectacular political rise, challenge to the cosy Labour establishment, bizarre ideological volte-face and sudden, never solved, disappearance.’

—Peter Tatchell, human rights defender

‘Wonderful.’

—Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the Labour party

‘Remarkable ... cuts through the mystery and fabrication that has surrounded Grayson’s tumultuous life and brings us a step closer to the true story of one of the most renowned socialist politicians of his generation.’

—Dan Carden MP

‘Casts a new light on its fascinating subject.’

—Dr Kevin Hickson, Senior Lecturer in British Politics, University of Liverpool

‘A fresh and lively portrait of Victor Grayson built on sound research and archival discoveries.’

—David Clark (Lord Clark of Windermere), former Colne Valley MP and author of Victor Grayson: The Man and the Mystery

‘Delves into Labour’s most fascinating cold case to produce a lively and compelling story of a working class hero.’

—Paul Mason, author of How to Stop Fascism

Victor Grayson

In Search of Britain’s

Lost Revolutionary

Harry Taylor

Foreword by Jeremy Corbyn

First published 2021 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Harry Taylor 2021

The right of Harry Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4398 3 Hardback

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ISBN 978 0 7453 4400 3 Kindle

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Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

Contents

Illustrations

Foreword by Jeremy Corbyn

Introduction

1The Boy from Liverpool

2The Student Revolutionary

3The By-Election

4‘The Boy Who Paralysed Parliament’

5Member for the Unemployed

6‘England’s Greatest Mob Orator’

7Revolution Delayed

8The Battle for a Socialist Party

9More Than Just a ‘Cheap Orator’

10 A Taste of War

11 To Passchendaele

12 On Lloyd George’s Service

13 Towards the Truth

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

List of Illustrations

1. A young Victor Grayson before his election to Parliament holding a copy of the Clarion under his arm.

2. Victor Grayson’s Colne Valley by-election address.

3. Just a section of the huge crowd waiting to hear the result from the by-election count.

4. The Colne Valley Labour League after the by-election victory in 1907.

5. Artist’s impression of Grayson’s protest which saw him suspended from the House of Commons.

6. When he could find no audience in the House of Commons, Grayson toured the country preaching ‘Socialist Unity’. Newcastle, 1909.

7. Grayson places the Labour crown on his head as MacDonald, Glasier, Snowden and Hardie exit the stage.

8. Grayson with admirers in 1909. He was always well dressed, whatever the occasion.

9. Grayson giving a fiery speech at the London demonstration against the execution of Spanish educationist, Ferrer.

10. No Right to Work – No Right to Live. A rare surviving election leaflet from Grayson’s January 1910 General Election campaign in Colne Valley.

11. Grayson speaking from a Clarion van at the opening of his last-minute campaign in Kennington during the freezing December 1910 General Election.

12. The card which Grayson’s small but dedicated band of supporters handed to voters on polling day.

13. The classic portrait of Victor Grayson.

14. The actress, Ruth Grayson, adopting her husband’s standard salutation ‘thine fraternally’.

15. Grayson posing in his full ANZAC uniform in 1917, before the Battle of Passchendaele.

16. The mysterious envelope from 1930 given to Derek Forwood in the early 1960s by friends of Grayson who believed it held the answer to Grayson’s disappearance.

Foreword

Victor Grayson, his life, his speeches, his inspiration and his apparent disappearance are the stuff of Labour movement legends. Almost 120 years after the Colne Valley by-election, the stirrings and importance of that campaign are still alive in the Labour movement’s rich lexicon of great achievements.

Grayson, born into poverty in Liverpool, worked in factories and later enrolled into Church missionary work. Despite an early speech impediment, he learned to speak and hold a crowd for street Christianity, and later for socialism. In Grayson’s eyes he saw them as part of the same story.

His life passage saw so many similarities to that of Keir Hardie, who was a Church and temperance orator and later trade union and Labour organiser. Victor Grayson and Hardie were never close and had a tense and difficult relationship. However, their lives were so similar, both born into wrenching poverty, then embracing religion, temperance, trade unionism, Labour movement and eventually Parliament.

Grayson based his life in Manchester where he was studying theology for a religious career but was increasingly in demand as a socialist speaker. His travels all around the North of England gave him a unique basis of support in Colne Valley. When a long-predicted by-election took place in 1907, Grayson should have been the Labour candidate, but a bureaucratic and very typical Labour argument over rules and interference from the Independent Labour Party national office resulted in him not being the official candidate but supported by Labour. Keir Hardie lent his support, but was always critical. The argument between local selection of candidates and national interference by the Party machine is not new.

Grayson’s dashing style, endless arguments with trade union leaders – who preferred to deal with the Liberals – and ability to excite popular support, won him a place in the hearts of the people of Colne Valley and the eternal jealousy of the then leading lights of the movement. His famous campaign embraced the cause of women’s right to vote and a clear and straightforward socialist message. He used methods of community organising that made the official Labour machinery nervous as his appeal was the street meeting with the enthusiasm of music and presence. Massive meetings of people, many of whom were disenfranchised by being women or lacking the qualification to vote, meant that he won, very narrowly, in July 1907.

His first foray after the historic election was to go not to London, but Belfast, with Jim Larkin to support the dock strike and then raise the cause in Parliament. Parliamentary life had its ups and downs. The Parliamentary Labour Party never accepted him and his disruption of Parliament in support of the unemployed did not bring him friendship or support in the Tea Room or in the House. But it did make him a big name in the Labour movement and his amazing capacity for popular writing gave him a unique advantage over the dour, establishment-leaning, Labour figures.

As with many a famous and sought after figure, his cheery facade was hiding a lonely person. His stupendous energy sent him on a never-ending round of trains and meetings and urgently written articles, but he never had the time or support to develop any kind of theoretical basis for his socialism.

Human frailties increasingly affected him as he became a prolific whisky drinker. This and the refusal of the Labour Party to fully embrace him meant he fought a less effective defence of Colne Valley in 1910 and lost.

Only three years in Parliament still made him a legend. Children, including the later TUC General Secretary, Vic Feather, were named after him. There was genuine and huge love for him. The dashing young orator whose lips could bring such messages of joy to grotesquely exploited people in mills and factories. Grayson had made a huge impact but always seemed, somehow, to miss the boat, in creating the kind of socialist movement he dreamt of. The arguments during 1907 in Colne Valley undoubtedly robbed Labour of a future leader whilst his refusal to challenge the Independent Labour Party leaders in 1909 left him an outsider.

At a distance of over a century, the intensity of debate about the Labour Party and its very existence in the period up to the First World War seems odd. Grayson helped form the British Socialist Party (which a decade later was the basis of the Communist Party), but played no part in it as he was outmanoeuvred. He was still a much sought after speaker, essentially without a party, but always preaching socialism and political trade unionism.

The First World War changed everything. Hardie was against war and was destroyed by it. Grayson, then an outcast, became a different figure in the eyes of the movement, and the previously very hostile media. He supported the war and became a recruiting sergeant. His use of a clever mixture of class rhetoric and demand for better working conditions after the war helped to gain working-class support for the war. His old adversary, Churchill, saw the value of his oratory and sent him to Australia and New Zealand. He joined the New Zealand forces in response to a challenge at a public meeting to his pro-war credentials. He duly served and was badly injured in Passchendaele. Despite the sight of death and destruction he became a useful tool of the establishment alongside the former suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst.

How, one asks, could a man born into poverty, who was such a brilliant and revolutionary speaker, who could challenge the very structures of society, become seduced into the very heart of the British War Machine? At his last public meeting, in Hull, in the intense industrial activity of 1918, he attacked those who were taking strike action for wages and rights.

Harry Taylor has written a wonderful book, building on previous books by Reg Groves and David Clark in bringing Grayson’s story to life. His research is painstaking and extensive. However, a degree of mystery remains. Grayson disappeared and various sightings right up to the 1940s never really told the whole story.

The ever-secretive British state knows the answer, somewhere in some files from Scotland Yard or the Home Office, the truth is known. And why it is still a secret is at one level strange, but at another, very obvious. His power of oratory frightened the establishment, the fear of socialist unity and industrial success meant its best voices needed to be silenced. If they could not be silenced they had to be used, and at the end of his known life he had become a tool of the establishment he so hated.

However, his voice and energy gave thousands a vision of how their lives could be changed by their empowerment, and the way socialism could be built. That vision he gave people never went away, and although he was only three years in Parliament, Grayson will always be remembered and revered for giving that precious message of hope. In his memory, we should fight to mould the Labour movement into one of hope, that shapes the lives of generations to follow.

Jeremy Corbyn

MP Islington North

8 March 2021

Introduction

In the midst of a wartime London still under constant threat of aerial bombardment from the Luftwaffe, journalist and future Labour Party candidate, Reg Groves, was called in to Scotland Yard for questioning by the Metropolitan Police. Groves was at first perplexed. To his knowledge, he had committed no crime and he was not involved in any subversive activities. He had been the founder of the small London-based Trotskyist Balham Group but this had scarcely been more than an irrelevance. There was only one thing it could be. For the past few years Groves had been chasing a man who had once made headlines across the world, who had once shaken the British political establishment and had once inspired fear in the hearts of Europe’s capitalist class. But Albert Victor Grayson, better known as Victor, had been missing for 20 years. Why were the police so interested in Grayson and why now, when the outcome of the war was still in the balance?

Reg Groves was a young member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) when he first heard the name Victor Grayson. Older members of Groves’ ILP branch spoke of Victor (there was never any need for the surname) as the greatest orator they had heard, a maverick who had put the cause of socialism before all others, and the lost hero of their generation. At that time, in 1924, it was taken for granted by Groves’ comrades that Grayson was alive and well but had simply retired from public life. In fact, Grayson had hurriedly left his plush London apartment with two official-looking men one September evening in 1920 and, despite a string of credible sightings, had officially been missing ever since.

As Hitler’s armies swept into Czechoslovakia in mid-March 1939, Groves had heard a whisper amongst several of his Labour comrades that Victor was living and working under an assumed name in London. By that time several public attempts had been made to find the missing former politician, not least by his dying mother. All were unsuccessful, but sightings were regularly reported in the national media. It seems that Groves was now let into a secret that had been kept for nearly two decades; that Grayson had renounced the socialism of his youth as well as the alcohol that had so nearly killed him, had married a wealthy younger woman and was working in business (possibly banking) around the Chelsea area. No one seemed willing or able to go into any more detail, but Groves was captivated and determined to find the truth and document Grayson’s adventurous life. Throughout 1939 and into the first years of the war, Groves pursued Grayson relentlessly. As war with Germany became increasingly certain, he visited the scenes of Grayson’s youthful success in Manchester and the Colne Valley in Yorkshire, and scoured the streets and apartments of London that Grayson was now rumoured to frequent. Just three months later in June, Sidney Campion, who now worked in the parliamentary press gallery but who as a youth had known Grayson, reported to his colleagues that he had just seen him on the District Line of the London Underground. Grayson and a younger, glamorous woman had boarded the train at Sloane Square. Campion was dumbstruck, he had assumed Grayson was dead. Further, the younger woman referred to the man as ‘Vic’. Campion alighted after six minutes in the carriage with the couple. He had been so taken aback that he had found himself unable to quiz the man he was certain to be Grayson, but when he reported the incident to his press colleagues the story made international news. The incident seemed to confirm the rumours Groves had been hearing for some weeks and he continued his search for the next 18 months. But just as Groves felt he was getting nearer to the truth, and having possibly identified Grayson’s female partner, the trail abruptly went cold. Rumours circulated that Grayson had been killed in a German air-raid on Chelsea and sightings of him came to an abrupt end. It was the following year, 1942, that the Metropolitan Police called upon Groves. An unnamed but senior figure in the wartime government had ordered the Met to carry out a full and thorough search for Grayson and wanted to find out what Groves knew. The latter co-operated and handed over some of his papers (which were never returned) but was nevertheless surprised that Britain’s stretched security services were being employed to look for a man who had left Parliament more than 30 years earlier. After all, this was a period in Britain’s history which the Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself later referred to as ‘The Hinge of Fate’. The investigation appeared thorough: archives were scoured and public appeals made for information relating to Grayson. A mass of papers, from his school reports to personal letters, were collected (and in some instances stolen), but no outcome was forthcoming, at least publicly.

In retrospect, the 1942 investigation seems very odd. What was so important about Grayson to Britain’s wartime coalition government that warranted such an investigation? Why did the Metropolitan Police spend decades denying it had ever taken place, despite their own public appeals for information at the time? When confronted with the evidence that they had carried out an investigation, the Met said all records had been passed to the National Archives (formerly known as the Public Record Office). When the National Archives confirmed they had never received such documents the Met then claimed the documents had been destroyed (when or by whom they could not say). We now know that police officers had scoured wartime Britain for any documents relating to Grayson’s life, no matter how small or insignificant. The mass of papers collected during the police investigation was said to resemble several large telephone directories, but no one seems sure exactly what happened to them.

Whatever the oddities of the police investigation, Reg Groves was able to have a book published as The Mystery of Victor Grayson (Pendulum Publication) in 1946 which, though unadvertised and poorly produced, sold its entire print run of 10,000 copies in twelve weeks. It was never reprinted, probably owing to paper restrictions in the immediate post-war years in Britain. The biography collected first-hand accounts of Grayson’s life and speculated on his fate with the possibility that he could still be alive. After all, Grayson was just three years older than Clement Attlee who had been Deputy Prime Minister in the wartime coalition and who, just the previous year, had become Prime Minister when Labour swept to power. The book’s real legacy, however, was to kick-start more searches and memory-racking. The surviving documentary evidence was slim. Victor had destroyed most of his private papers prior to 1920 and his surviving family appeared less than forthcoming in Groves’ quest for answers. However, following the publication, Groves received a steady stream of correspondence from those who knew Grayson. Some of it was genuinely helpful whilst others warned him off continuing his search for Grayson. Augusta Grayson, Grayson’s younger sister, had launched a legal case against Groves for his suggestion that Victor might not have been born in the slums of Liverpool, but could actually have been the illegitimate child of an aristocrat. Although the case was dropped, the solicitor instructed by Augusta, Reginald de Mornay Davies, felt there was an attempt by elements of the British establishment to cover up the true story of Victor Grayson. A search through Reg Groves’ papers shows that de Mornay Davies worked secretly with Groves to crack the riddle of the missing politician once and for all. Throughout the early 1950s they scoured death, burial and immigration records in Britain and Ireland. By this time, they expected Victor to be dead from cirrhosis of the liver, resulting from his years of alcoholism, which was recorded in his army medical records. Yet a thorough search of all records to March 1953 revealed no death or burial record for Albert Victor Grayson. The pair concluded that this was surely proof that Victor had assumed a new identity.

The investigation carried out in the early 1950s by Groves and de Mornay Davies differed from the 1942 police investigation in one important respect. Whilst Groves (and the police) was entirely open about his mission in the 1940s, this time around he kept his search secret. The solicitor de Mornay Davies wrote to Groves, ‘Yes, great care must be taken to keep our enquiries as secret as possible as one small slip and the whole of our mutual exertions will be completely ruined.’ It was also clear that Groves was blocked from making any contact with Victor’s surviving daughter Elaine, for whom his sister Augusta would not pass on the address.

Groves made no mention of the extensive 1950s investigation in his second Grayson biography, The Strange Case of Victor Grayson (Pluto Press, 1975), nor did he make any reference to de Mornay Davies and the many obstacles that had been put in their way. If he had done so, he might have received better reviews at the time and a kinder treatment from those historians who saw it as a lost opportunity to track down the few remaining individuals who might have been able to solve the mystery. Rather bizarrely, Groves abandoned much of his last three decades of research – leaving large portions unpublished – and threw in his lot with the journalist and crime writer Donald McCormick who had written Murder by Perfection (John Long, 1970). McCormick was a prolific author who specialised in writing sensationalist books on unsolved crimes and mysteries, usually claiming to have discovered key information others had missed that proved the breakthrough in long-debated cases, including that of Jack the Ripper. In Murder by Perfection McCormick described the murders of Victor Grayson and Edith Rosse by J. Maundy Gregory. Gregory was an Edwardian conman and political fixer who raised money for the Conservative and Liberal Parties through dubious means, including the selling of honours. The first half of the book dealt with Grayson’s disappearance and the reader familiar with his story would have been amazed by the amount of new information McCormick brought to light, mostly from individuals long dead, in describing Grayson’s life after the Great War. It read like a spy-fiction thriller with Grayson as the handsome, rebellious hero who uncovered serious political corruption involving the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and his fixer, Gregory. In McCormick’s account, Grayson is last seen on a boat on the Thames heading to Gregory’s house by the painter, George Flemwell, who recognised Grayson so unhesitatingly, having painted his portrait some years previously. Gregory, we are told, murdered Grayson because he was threatening to expose his corrupt practices. The story seemed to fit together so well that it convinced a generation of journalists and historians, and to some extent still does. Television documentaries and books are still being released parroting McCormick’s 50-year-old theory, but, unfortunately, it was all pure fiction. Privately, Groves seemed to have his doubts too. Not only did McCormick’s theory contradict much of the research he had latterly carried out, but he was very guarded when Groves wrote to him questioning some of his assertions. McCormick informed Groves that he had disposed of most of his papers and was therefore unable to help his investigations. Despite these misgivings, Groves went along with McCormick and his decision to do so would radically alter the public memory of Victor Grayson.

When David Clark, a former Colne Valley MP himself, came to write the first scholarly biography of Victor Grayson, he contacted Donald McCormick to probe further some of the more surprising aspects of Murder by Perfection. Whilst McCormick had told Groves in 1974 that he had disposed of his Grayson/Gregory notes, he now (in 1980) told Clark that he had made a full search through his Grayson notes but was unable to answer any of his specific questions. Clark had his doubts, but McCormick was convincing and his theory was given another airing. Nevertheless, Clark’s Victor Grayson: Labour’s Lost Leader (Quartet, 1985) revived interest in Grayson in the 1980s and two television documentaries followed. Of particular interest was the fact that Clark had tracked down some of Grayson’s surviving family who suggested that their missing relative was preparing to disappear. This seemed to chime with Groves’ earlier investigations which had suggested Grayson was preparing for a new life.

In the three decades which followed Victor Grayson: Labour’s Lost Leader, interest in Grayson never abated. He continued to be mentioned in television documentaries dealing with unsolved missing persons and to appear in histories of the Labour movement as the great lost hero of Edwardian England. Interest in Grayson and his political significance in the history of the Labour Party found a new, younger audience when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015. Corbyn’s surprise victory coupled with his unashamedly socialist approach renewed interest in Labour’s history of internal ideological struggle. Grayson’s name appeared frequently on social media, and whereas he had previously been synonymous with unsolved mysteries, he was now becoming the focal point of discussion for a young generation of socialists. Twitter users pointed to his great by-election victory as evidence that Labour could win on a socialist ticket, whilst others pointed to his inconsistent parliamentary performances and the limitation of spellbinding oratory with little practical application to back it up. Rather surprisingly, internet searches for Grayson far outnumbered those for his contemporaries such as Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden. To meet this renewed interest David Clark’s 1985 biography was revised and re-released in 2016 as Victor Grayson: The Man and the Mystery (Quartet, 2016). The book brought to light new information on Grayson’s personal life and gave more colour to his final years. However, in many respects Grayson remained just as much a mystery as before.

So why write about Grayson now? In 2007 I went to my university library to find a book about Hugh Gaitskell. The book was not there but next to its empty space on the shelf was a copy of Clark’s Victor Grayson: Labour’s Lost Leader. I knew nothing of the subject but sat and read the book from cover to cover late into the evening. Being a student in Liverpool, I knew some of the streets where the young Grayson had grown up and I found his life an exciting but ultimately a cautionary tale. There were no other books about Grayson in the library and the ones I searched for were long out of print. That was that, or so I thought. Five years later I was canvassing in the dismal Police and Crime Commissioner elections in Warwickshire, held in November that year. After a day of particularly fruitless campaigning in the rain, we retired to the warm home of two elderly Labour Party members. The conversation came round to the history of the Labour Party and one of the members, Ann, mentioned an MP who had disappeared. She could not remember his name so I asked whether it was Victor Grayson. Indeed it was, and we had a brief discussion about Grayson and that period of politics. A few weeks later I received a call from Ann who was moving house and had found two boxes of Grayson papers that had belonged to her husband which were going to be thrown in the skip. I gratefully saved them from destruction and spent the next few days going through the mass of information. The papers were in fact a collection of research into the life of Victor Grayson carried out in the very early 1960s by Derek Forwood, himself a Labour politician who had sadly died in 2007. Amongst the bundles of papers were letters from key Labour luminaries such as Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison with their memories of Grayson, together with detailed letters from dozens of people who knew Grayson personally, including those who had seen him alive after his disappearance. The papers by themselves represented a significant mine of information that existed nowhere else, especially since many of the authors had died before David Clark began his serious research into Grayson’s life. In addition to these papers are my own findings – the culmination of more than a decade’s research – which finally uncover the true life and legacy of Victor Grayson, Britain’s lost revolutionary.

History may well repeat itself and in the aftermath of Labour’s 2019 General Election defeat we see again the struggle for the soul of the Labour Party in which Victor Grayson was the principal player from 1907 until the outbreak of the Great War. With the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, many of his supporters are looking outside the party for avenues to achieve socialism in Britain. They look, as Grayson did, to the primacy of extra-parliamentary action over the slow, creeping progress down the parliamentary road to socialism. We see in Grayson’s story that in Britain, with its first-past-the-post electoral system, it is, to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Party or nothing.

If history repeats itself then so do historians. So much nonsense about the life and career of Victor Grayson has been blithely repeated in newspaper articles, biographies and history books in the last century that he has been side-lined as a principal player in the story of the Labour movement and of British politics in the Edwardian age. This biography will try to set the record straight.

1

The Boy from Liverpool

The life of Victorian England was an intolerable life, and ought not to be borne by human beings.

E.P. Thompson1

I have known much poverty and many of its suicidal horrors …

Victor Grayson’s sister, Augusta2

If Victor Grayson’s life was shrouded in mystery, then that of his parents was no clearer. In fact, Victor should not have had the last name Grayson at all. His father was born William Dickinson in Ecclesfield, Yorkshire, in 1849. William was the son of a carpenter but was temperamentally ill-suited to work and authority. Eager to escape a life of drudgery and seeking adventure, William enlisted for the 51st Regiment of Foot of the British Army in 1866. Like many young men he lied about his age