Bohemia Village Voice

Blue plaque in London Road in Bohemia marking the house where Robert Tressell wrote his best-selling novel.

Robert Tressell was born in Dublin, Ireland, the illegitimate son of a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Samuel Croker, and was christened as Robert Croker in the Roman Catholic Church. Robert had, in the words of his daughter Kathleen, “a very good education” and could speak a variety of languages. However, when he was sixteen, he showed signs of a radical political consciousness, leaving his family and the money that had cared for him, declaring that he “would not live on the family income derived largely from absentee landlordism”. It was then that he began to call himself Robert Noonan after his mother’s maiden name and to distinguish himself from his father.

CAPE TOWN

In 1888, Robert moved to Cape Town in South Africa where, despite not having an apprenticeship, he learnt to become a painter and decorator, He married in 1891. The marriage was an unhappy one, with his wife having numerous affairs after the birth of their daughter Kathleen. They divorced in 1895, and Robert acquired all the property, including their house in an affluent suburb of Cape Town. Robert and Kathleen moved to Johannesburg where he had a well-paid job with a construction company.

It was here that he learnt of the ways of the industry that he would later write about in his novel, although his actual conditions were a world away from the proletarian characters of the book. Despite becoming the Secretary of the Transvaal Federated Building Trades Council, he was able to afford to send his daughter to an exclusive convent school and also to employ his own black manservant called ‘Sixpence’ and of whom he was said to be “very fond”.

HASTINGS

As a member of the 1898 Association, he helped to form the Irish Brigade, an anti-British force that fought alongside the Boers in the Second Boer War. Here accounts of his life become complicated – some assert that he himself took up arms in the war and was interned by the British until the end of the war when he came to Britain. Others say that he left South Africa just before hostilities began in October 1899. Either way, around the turn of the century, Robert ended up in Hastings, Sussex. Here, he found work, but at much lower wages and in far poorer conditions than he had experienced in South Africa. Kathleen was sent to more boarding and convent schools, before Robert could no longer afford it and she attended state schools instead.

AIRSHIP

Robert had to start working in part-time jobs on top of his full-time occupation, and did not join a trade union. For a while, his political beliefs appeared to have moved rightwards, like many leading socialists of the time, to a more social-chauvinistic and anti-German viewpoint. Far from the days when he helped and maybe fought with the Boers against Britain‘s imperialism, he instead began to design aircraft, culminating in his plans for an airship which he proposed to the War Office in 1905. It was rejected, he smashed up his models and looked leftwards once again.

TUBERCULOSIS

Influenced by another painter and decorator, the socialist-cum-Marxist William Morris, he joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1906. The next year, after a dispute with his employer, Robert lost his job. Despite the demand for his skills, his health began to deteriorate and he eventually developed tuberculosis. He started to write.He wrote under the pen name of "Robert Tressell" as he feared that the socialist views expressed in the book would have him blacklisted. He chose the surname Tressell as a pun on the trestle table, an important part of a painter and decorator’s kit.

REJECTION

He completed The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in 1910, but the 1,600 page-long hand-written manuscript was rejected by the three publishing houses that he submitted his work to. The rejection severely depressed him, and his daughter had to save the manuscript from being burnt. It was placed for safekeeping in a metal box underneath her bed. Unhappy with his life in Britain, he decided that along with Kathleen he should emigrate to Canada. However, he only got as far as Liverpool, where he was admitted to the Royal Liverpool Infirmary Workhouse, where he died of phthisis pulmonalis – a wasting away of the lungs – on 3 February 1911. He was buried in a mass grave with twelve other paupers opposite Walton Prison in Liverpool. The location of the grave was not discovered until 1970.

PUBLISHED

Kathleen was determined to have her father’s novel, "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists," published. In April 1914, a publishing house bought the rights to the book for £25, and it appeared in Britain, Canada and the United States in that year, and later in the Soviet Union in 1920 and Germany in 1925. However, it was only an edited version, and much of the socialist ideology had been cut out, and ended with Owen, who taught that “money was the cause of poverty”, contemplating suicide. The full edition was not published until 1955, although

 even the edited edition was credited with the landslide Labour victory in 1945, and the election of two non-Labour-endorsed Communist members of parliament in that year. [abridged from Wikipedia]

□ The Robert Tressell Centre, 84 Bohemia Road, Bohemia Village, Sussex,  TN37 6RN. Please note that this address is for correspondence only. The local repository for Robert Tressell material is the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery