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Although The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is well known, the same cannot be said of its author, Robert Tressell, who was said to be ‘extremely reticent.’¹ Fred Ball, Tressell’s biographer, admitted that even after extensive research, he still did not know whether Tressell’s real name was Noonan or Croker. I shall refer to him as Tressell, that being the pen name he chose in honour of the trestle table, part of the basic equipment of house painters and signwriters.

Fred Ball wrote two lives of Tressell, the first in 1951² and the second after it was discovered in 1967 that Tressell’s daughter, Kathleen, who had been presumed killed in a car crash in Canada, was alive and living in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. The story was topical because BBC2 had recently screened a dramatisation of Tressell’s novel which Kathleen had been unable to see because she could not afford a television set. The second biography, however, does little more than correct some minor errors in the first, for example the claim that Tressell wrote his book in response to what he considered to be the shortcomings of fellow socialist George Meek’s book, George Meek, Bathchairman, when in fact Meek’s book was not published until 1910, the year that Tressell finished The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

Tressell was probably born in Dublin in 1870, the illegitimate son of Samuel Croker, an Inspector in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and Mary Noonan who had three other children in addition to Tressell: Adelaide, Ellie and Mary Jane. One source says that Tressell’s father, to whom he was deeply attached, died when he was six. It is not clear whether this was Croker or another man whom Mary had married in the meantime. Either way she remarried and Tressell was later to leave home, partly because of financial difficulties and partly because he did not get on with his stepfather. The move prevented this promising scholar – he could speak several languages – from finishing his education with the result, as his biographer, Fred Ball, explains, that ‘[h]e was now a working man without having been nurtured as one.’³

Tressell next appeared in Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked as a signwriter and also wrote sketches for various newspapers, exploiting to the full his ‘eye for queer characters.’⁴ This was the most prosperous period of his life; he made enough money to buy a plot of land and had a servant called Sixpence. He also married, but the union was not a happy one and, after his wife’s death from typhoid fever in 1895, Tressell moved to Johannesburg with Kathleen.

His time in South Africa came to an end with the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. One story claims that he was active in the formation of the Irish Brigade which fought with the Boers. He was then captured and transported to Cape Town in an open railway truck, a journey that may have triggered the tuberculosis that was to kill him at the age of forty. After the war, Tressell was released and returned to England. Another story, however, claims that he left South Africa before the war and that his ill health was due to his excessive whisky drinking and then getting chilled when riding across the veldt on cold nights.

Back in England, Tressell settled first in Hastings with his sister, Adelaide, and her son Arthur, before finding somewhere for himself and Kathleen. Being a skilled artisan, Tressell was able to find employment as a signwriter and housepainter despite the depressed state of the building trade in Hastings. To his fellow workmen he was known variously as Raphael, the Professor or, most affectionately, as ‘little Bob.’

However, although as a craftsman Tressell earned more than the ordinary labourer, it was not enough to banish the constant spectre of poverty. Consequently, he was always exploring other ways of making money, particularly as he was anxious that Kathleen be provided for should anything happen to him. He set up The South Coast Amusement Company taking lantern lectures around the Sussex villages, but this quickly folded. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to hire the St Leonard’s Pier Hall to show ‘moving pictures’. He even taught himself aeronautics but could interest no-one in his designs. All his plans had come to nothing. He then decided to write a novel, referring to it as ‘this work which must be done or I will die in the workhouse.’¹ He kept the book secret from his workmates because, Ball suggests, of working class prejudice against the arts.

Tressell began The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists sometime in 1906-7. Working a fifty-six and a half hour week meant that he could only write in the evenings and on Sundays, and the constant toil aggravated his already poor health. The novel was completed in 1910. Tressell sent it to publishers but, since the manuscript was only hand-written, it was rejected without being read. Disillusioned, Tressell decided to emigrate to Canada in the hope of making a better life there before sending for Kathleen. Sadly, he fell ill en route and died, in Liverpool, on 2 February, 1911. Kathleen had no money to pay for or even to attend her father’s funeral and he was buried in a pauper’s grave. His last letter to her ended: Je vous aime toujours, Dad.

What Kathleen did have, however, was the manuscript. Some time after her father’s death she moved to London and obtained a post as a nurse governess with a Mr and Mrs Mackinlay. She told a friend of theirs, Jessie Pope, about her father’s manuscript. Pope suggested she show it to the publisher Grant Richards who was sufficiently impressed to publish it buying the sole rights from Kathleen for £25. His only stipulation was that the manuscript, which he felt was repetitious, be cut from 250,000 to 100,000 words. Kathleen said that the repetitions were necessary because ‘my father felt that he had to hammer home his message to get the workers to see it’² but she eventually agreed to Richards’s terms and the book was published on 23 April, 1914. It has never been out of print since.

Jessie Pope was responsible for the editing of the novel. So as not to offend the moral and political sensibilities of middle class readers she omitted from the original manuscript Chapters 23, 38, 39, 47, 48 and 51 and concluded the novel not with Tressell’s vision of a socialist future, but with Owen’s contemplation of suicide in Chapter 34. This clearly interfered with Tressell’s aims, one of which was to describe the effects of poverty and how it might be eliminated through socialism once it is properly understood.