Nunquam

"Had there been no Robert Blatchford, there would have been no Clarion. Had there been no Clarion, there would have been no Clarion Cycling Club," wrote Tom Groom in his 1944 Jubilee Souvenir. "The older hands", he continued, "who have been through the early struggles, must be permitted to give their thanks and their gratitude to those who first fired their enthusiasm in the cause of Socialism. And the man they will always best remember is Robert Blatchford ".

Blatchford, the son of travelling actors, started worked as a journalist on the Sunday Chronicle, in Manchester, in 1887. Under the pen name Nunquam he gained a large readership, writing passionately about the appalling living conditions endured by poor people in Manchester.

Joe Waddington, a reader of Nunquam's articles who was an unemployed joiner and a Socialist activist, suggested that he should go inside the houses and cellars to meet the people living in them.

"I set off alone", wrote Blatchford forty years later, "and went hopefully into a small court in a penurious district of Hulme." The memory of what he found there and in Ancoats remained vivid, painful and grim. He remembered that he paid for a doctor to visit a baby whose father was unemployed. It was too late; the child died soon after of bronchitis. Blatchford used his influence to find a job on the railway for another man; he would have to walk four miles and start work at 4am for a pittance.

Nunquam's bitter exposures of life in the slums grew ever more impassioned. But however popular it was with readers, the paper's owner and its editor were not pleased with this kind of journalism. Matters came to a head when Blatchford declared in print his allegiance to Socialism - "the only way to a better future". It seems that he was finally convinced after reading a pamphlet, What Is Socialism?, written by William Morris and H. M. Hyndman.

The inevitable row with Edward Hulton soon followed and Nunquam walked out after telling him, "You will not have Socialism in your paper - and I won't write anything else". He recalled many years later that in March 1891 he had a fat bank balance and a salary of £1,000 a year (perhaps the equivalent of about £40,000 in 1995) and by October he was out of work and heavily in debt.

The Clarion

Max Thompson, Edward Fay, William Palmer and another sympathiser, Robert Suthers, all resigned from the Chronicle with Robert Blatchford. They were joined by Robert's brother Montague who also gave up his job, and on the l2th December 1891 they 'went to sea in a sieve' by bringing out the first issue of a penny Socialist weekly, The Clarion (fondly referred to as the 'Perisher') from a tiny office in Corporation Street, Manchester. There were printing difficulties caused by cheap paper, and the publicity posters were washed away by heavy rain, but 40,000 copies were sold, largely on the strength of Nunquam's already-established popularity with working-class readers of the Sunday Chronicle.

In his first leading article Blatchford wrote:

The Clarion is a paper meant by its owners and writers to tell the truth as they see it, frankly and without fear. The Clarion may not always be right, but it will always be sincere. Its staff do not claim to be witty or wise, but they do claim to be honest. They write not for factions; but for the people. They fight not for victory; but for the truth. They do not seek to dazzle, but to please; not to anger, but to convince. Wheresoever wrong exists they will try to expose it. Towards baseness, cowardice, selfseeking or roguery, no matter where or in what class it may appear, they will show no mercy.

The essence of this new journalism, for it is a new journalism, and a journalism created by the men now risking this venture, is variety. I would, therefore, beg our serious friends to remember that truth may lie under a smile as well as under a frown, and to our merry friends would say that a jest is none the less hilarious when it comes from the heart. The policy of The Clarion is a policy of humanity, a policy not of party, sect or creed; but of justice, reason and mercy.

It has been said that Blatchford's Socialism was based on ethics, not economics. His gift was to be able to write movingly about injustice and inequality and to present a Socialist argument clearly. His founder-colleagues ('The Board', as they became known) laid down no agreed policy or programme, so that the paper became an open forum for different Socialist groups and individuals.

After the editorial office moved to Fleet Street, London, in 1895, circulation grew steadily to reach over 80,000 by 1908. The Clarion sold well not only because it was written plainly and unpretentiously, but because it was entertaining, and professionally produced. Apart from political articles and editorials which aimed to "make Socialists", as Blatchford put it, by explaining the principles of Socialism "in the simplest and best language at our command", there was much which merely aimed to amuse. There were regular weekly features on music, theatre, books and sport (including cycling), plus a Children's Corner and a Woman 's Letter.

Nunquam, The Bounder (Edward Fay), Dangle (A.M. Thompson), Mont Blong (Montague Blatchford), Whiffly Puncto (William Palmer) and the rest were not only admired but loved by readers. In tens of thousands of working-class homes the members of the Clarion Board were friends rather than just names. When, in the summer of 1894, a group of Birmingham readers heard rumours of financial difficulties they wrote in:

It's going down means personally an interest in life gone; socially a serious blow to our movement. Although none of the undersigned has ever met the Clarion staff personally our sense of comradeship towards you is as vivid as though we met each day ... The Clarion is too good to lose.

One advertisement for the paper declared: "There is nothing like it. There never was anything like it. There never will be anything like it." And the reason why this was no empty slogan is that the Clarion, unlike other Socialist papers, espoused a Socialism which was not in the least solemn, difficult, highbrow, dreary, theoretical or dogmatic, but rather a way of life to be enjoyed here and now, in which men and women, young and old, would live in fellowship with each other in their everyday work and leisure activities.

In February 1894, six young men met in Birmingham, at the Labour Church in Constitution Hill. Here they discussed how they might "combine the pleasures of cycling with the propaganda of Socialism". They formed the Socialists' Cycling Club, a name which at the second meeting was changed to the Clarion Cycling Club, after their favourite weekly paper. They also invited the Bounder (E.F. Ray) to be their president.

By the end of 1894 there were four other Clarion C. C.s - in the Potteries, Liverpool, Bradford and Barnsley. By Easter 1895 when they held their first national meet, about 120 people came from all across the Midlands and North of England. The number of clubs was steadily growing.
Tom Groom, who called the original Birmingham meeting, speaking at the meet:
We are not neglectful of our Socialism, the frequent contrasts a cyclist gets between the beauties of nature and the dirty squalor of towns make him more anxious than ever to abolish the present system. To get healthy exercise is not necessarily to be selfish. To attend to the social side of our work is not necessarily to neglect the more serious part. To spread good fellowship is the most important work of Clarion Cycling Clubs. Then, perhaps, the 'One Socialist Party' would be more possible and we should get less of those squabbles among Socialists which make me doubt whether they understand even the first part of their name.

The meet agreed to set up a national club whose object was to be "the association of various Clarion Cycling Clubs for the purpose of Socialist propaganda and for promoting inter-club runs between the clubs of different towns."

The number of clubs continued to rise, 30 by the end of 1895, 70 by early 1897. The meets grew, reaching a height of popularity and influence in Shrewsbury in the summer of 1914.

Without the Clarion Cycling Clubs the circulation and influence of the Clarion would not have reached the heights which they eventually achieved. It is said that in the twenty years before the First World War a Clarion cyclist, almost by definition, was someone riding a machine with saddlebag crammed or carrier piled high with copies of the paper, all of which would eventually be sold or given away.

"By the summer of 1894, the first season of its existence, the members of Birmingham Clarion CC were discussing ideas for spreading the Socialist message when they met at Rugeley with their comrades in the newly-formed Potteries Club. Tom Groom took up the suggestion made by Nunquam in the paper a few weeks earlier:

"How about a cycling corps of Clarion Scouts?" he wrote. "A pocketful of leaflets and an extra copy or two of the Clarion carefully left at the different stopping places may have good results."

Merrie England

It was the printing of a penny edition of Robert Blatchford's pamphlet Merrie England in the autumn of 1894 which gave the growing number of Clarion CCs and Scouting groups the greatest opportunity for propaganda work. A series of letters addressed to an imaginary "John Smith of Oldham, a hard-headed workman, fond of fads" had first appeared in the Clarion in the spring of 1892. Early in the following year the letters were put together as a shilling paperback with the title Merrie England and it quickly sold 20,000 copies. In August 1894 it was announced that 100,000 of a penny edition were to be printed at what was expeded to be a small financial loss. "One gross (144) to any address in the United Kingdom for ten shillings, money with order", said the announcement. Orders came in for 200,000 even before the first printing, and over 700,000 were sold within a year. (Liverpool Scouts, for example, sold 5,000 copies at an international football match played in the city.) Eventually, two million copies were to be sold world-wide, including editions in Dutch, German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Hebrew, Norwegian Spanish, and Welsh.

Clarion Scouts

By the end of the cycling season in October 1894, the four Clarion Clubs formed by then were reporting their propaganda activities in the paper. Of the 25 Bradford members, 22 had formed a Scouting Corps which was domg good work in the outlying villages. Liverpool had cycled out to Knowsley on the Earl of Derby's estate. Although, as they reported, his lordship had not invited them to dinner, they supplied bis tenants with Clarions and Clarion leaflets. "We also called at the police station", their Secretary wrote, "and left some tracts for the edification of the gentlemen in blue." Members of the Potteries CCC, based in Hanley, had also distributed literature and claimed "the actual conversion of a few to Clarionism." And in the November local council elections both Liverpool and Bradford cyclists helped Socialist candidates in their own cities.

In the spring of 1895, so great was the enthusiasm for propaganda work that a new monthly paper was started for the activists called The Scout - A Journal for Socialist Workers . It was edited first by William Ranstead and then by Montague Blatchford. The first issue, in March, contained Robert Blatchford's "Instructions for Scouts", with advice about house-to-house distribution of tracts, leaflets, and the penny edition of Merrie England. In the factories, mines and other workplaces Scouts were urged to "permeate" their companions with Socialism, and in their own districts to form branches of the ILP or SDF where none existed already. They were encouraged to write letters to the press, ask questions at political meetings and place themselves at the service of Socialist candidates in elections.

Remaining calm, polite and good-humoured, they should try always to build unity between the various organisations in the Labour Movement. The importance of the bicyde in the work of the Scouts was emphasised by the paper's editor, who suggested the compiling of a list of speakers able to cycle twenty to fifty miles on Saturdays and Sundays to address public meetings in towns and villages which had, as yet, no Socialist organisations. Cyclist supporters could paste walls and fences with stickers bearing Socialist slogans, these being obtainable from the Clarion Office in London.

The Clarion and Women

It has been said with some truth that Robert Blatchford was no supporter of feminism: he once complained that women did not even try to understand politics. Yet in 1895 we find him trying to make his views clear in reply to women's criticism, writing in a Clarion editorial:

"Women must have equal rights, political, industrial, social and civic, with men. They must cease to be chattels or vassals, or servants, or inferiors. [Man had a duty to woman]... to grant her at once complete freedom and complete equality, and having done that, to add as a free gift as much affection, tenderness, reverence and admiration as his rather coarse and rather selfish nature will allow."

Whatever Nunquam's own attitude, the paper he edited gave an enormous boost to the women's movement by winning thousands of female readers for Socialism and to the struggle for equal voting rights. The most influential part of the paper in this respect was Our Woman's Letter, written from October 1895 for the following twenty years by 'Julia Dawson' (the pen-name of Mrs D. J. Myddleton-Worrall.) It is she who must take the credit for taking up (though not inventing) a method of Socialist campaigning which was to involve thousands of Clarion cyclists during the years between 1896 and the 1920s.

The Clarion Women's Van

The idea of a touring horse-drawn caravan for spreading a political message in the countryside was pioneered by two organisations advocating common ownership of the land. The Red Van of the English Land Restoration League and the Yellow Van of the Land Nationalisation Society were already well-known when Julia Dawson announced in the Clarion on 29th February 1896 a plan which she said had been taking shape in her mind for some time. It was for a thirteen-week Clarion Women's Van Tour starting in June that year. Women would tour with the Van two or three at a time; and a tent would be provided for a boy (somebody's young brother perhaps) who would volunteer to look after the horse, make fires and wash up the dishes - without wages.

William Ranstead, the land-owning Clarion writer and supporter who, like Julia Dawson, lived in Cheshire, had already offered a suitable vehicle. It had been used before on the streets of Liverpool as a Soup Van selling bowls of broth for a farthing to the poor and unemployed, as well as acting as a bill-board for posters advertising the Clarion and promoting Socialism. That was in the winter months, but in the previous summer it had been part of the Clarion Camp at Tabley Brook near Knutsford.

The plan was for Socialist leaflets and literature to be distributed and sold at open-air meetings held on village greens and in the market-places of small towns. Julia Dawson's appeal was for women volunteers to speak at the meetings, for the loan of a horse, and for money (about £80 initially) to buy food, fuel and equipment. If successful this could be an annual summer activity, eventually with four or five vans on the road in various parts of the country. And the Clarion cyclists would have an important part to play in supporting the vans wherever they went.

1894-1914 - A New Way of Life

For large numbers of Clarion readers, its apparently non-political features were the most important. All the various cultural, social and leisure activities promoted in its columns offered a complete way of life outside the toil and drabness of the world of work and crowded urban living. Indeed, the Clarion movement in its first two decades can be seen as an attempt to pre-figure life under Socialism, as William Morris had seen it before his death in 1896. And the weekly paper, with its announcements and reports, was essential in enabling Clarion organisations to get started and maintain their existence in the localities.

In addition to cycling, which gained the biggest following, the main activities before the First World War were choral singing and rambling (the latter combined with nature-study). All the activities were, to a greater or lesser extent, connected with Socialist propaganda work. And they tended to overlap, so that cyclists, choirs and ramblers often met up at the same Saturday or Sunday afternoon venue.

By the middle of 1895 more than a dozen of these choirs had been formed, and Montague Blatchford had become leader of the Clarion Vocal Union movement nationally. His stated object was "to encourage unaccompanied vocal music [performed] creditably and with understanding". By far the biggest local group was in his hometown, Halifax, where by 1895 there were 146 members plus an "elementary class" of 48, and an orchestra. The average weekly attendance for rehearsals was 120, and Mont Blong was teacher and conductor.

It was in South Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire that the CVUs, like the Cycling Clubs, took deepest root; and soon they were eager to arrange inter-club meets. Hardcastle Crags, a beauty spot near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, not far from the border with Lancashire, became a regular venue for CVU picnics and outdoor concerts.

At the first of these gatherings, on Saturday 1st June 1895, there were present about a hundred Clarion members, with 150 relatives and friends. Many came on their bikes, proudly wearing the new silver badges pinned in their caps. The mixture, according to the report in the paper, was of "sandwiches, laughter, tea, tobacco and singing". There was also a thunderstorm, followed by a rain-soaked dash to the railway station where songs echoed round the platforms as they waited for their trains home.

Liverpool had a Socialist Brass Band which practised every Wednesday night I'll preparation for performances at indoor and outdoor public meetings. ("There's nothing like sweet music and singing to draw the people", a Clarion writer once commented). Glasgow and Bristol both had choirs by 1896, when national CVU membership reached 1,250. The second Hardcastle Crags Meet that year attracted more than 2,000 people to listen to massed choirs on the hillside, and speeches by Caroline Martyn and Keir Hardie.

In May 1899 the first CVU United Concert at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester took place, with 450 singers in fourteen choirs competing for the ivory and gold Challenge Baton which had been presented by the Clarion Board. This was to be an annual event for the next thirty years, bringing hundreds of Clarionettes to Manchester, cyclists and non-cyclists alike.

Songs were specially written (like the 'Song of the Clarion Scout') and poems were set to music to form an extensive Socialist repertoire. Young composers and musicians were drawn to the cause, like Gustav Holst, who was a regular cyclist and often rode with his trombone strung across his back. While studying at the Royal College of Music and living in a bed-sitter in Hammersmith, Holst became the first conductor of the Socialist Choir there. He wrote reports for the Clarion about the choir, one of whose members was his future wife Isobel. Holst's fellow student Rutland Boughton, set poems by William Morris to music, and they appeared in the Clarion Song Book published in 1906.

Other activities organised under the Clarion banner included dramatic societies, camera clubs, artistic and handicraft groups and clubs embracing several different sports.

The decline of the Clarion movement after 1914 may have been a result of the war and broad political changes, but Robert Blatchford's support for British militarism must also have played a large part. The cycling clubs grew in popularity and continued as a semi-political activity into the 1930's, and as mostly apolitical racing cycling clubs, are still around today. The Clarion Van continued touring until 1929. The Vocal Unions remained popular into the 1930's while the number of clubhouses fell steadily, though some are still in use today. The Clarion itself ceased publication finally in 1934. The movement has never completely died: a few club houses maintained by local labour movement activists; assorted left or community papers have been published including 'Clarion' in their name; more recently a new socialist choral movement has emerged, many groups named " ...Clarion Choir".

Most of the written material on this page is taken from 'Fellowship is Life - The National Clarion Cycling Club 1895 - 1995' by Denis Pye. Copies can be obtained from him at 34 Temple Road, Halliwell, Bolton, Lancashire, U.K. BL1 3LT. Cost £4.95 sterling including p&p.
Also to be found at the WCML is a dissertation (1990) by John Christopher Goode entitled The Clarion, Cycling and Nascent Socialism.

Recently received (Nov 2003) has been some information on the Clarion Round Table, a youth group from c.1921-3, and their publication Camelot. More information welcome.