Robert Tressell
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Robert Tressell (pen name used by Robert Noonan; April 17, 1870—February 3, 1911) was an Irish-British writer best known for his novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
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[edit] Life
[edit] Early life
He was born in Dublin, Ireland, the illegitimate son of a senior member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, Samuel Croker, and was christened as Robert Croker in the Roman Catholic Church. His father was not a Catholic, and besides, he had his own family, children and wife, although before he died in 1875 he attempted to provide for Robert.
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.
[edit] In South Africa
In 1888, Robert moved to Cape Town in South Africa where, despite not having an apprenticeship, he learnt to become a painter and decorator, and when he married in 1891, he was recorded as being “Robert Phillipe Noonan, Decorator”. 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”. When he joined the Transvaal Executive Committee of the Centennial of 1798 Association, which commemorated the Irish Rebellion of 1798, he led protests against the employment of skilled black labourers.
[edit] In Britain
As a member of the 1798 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 as a signwriter, 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.
Robert had to start working 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.
Influenced by the quasi-Marxist ideas of the designer and socialist 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. Unable to remain active in employment or politics, he found himself able to write, something that he hoped would earn enough money to keep him from the workhouse. 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. (Until the full manuscript was published in 1955, all copies cited the author as Robert "Tressall".)
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 immigrate 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.
[edit] Publication of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Kathleen saw her father's novel published when by chance she happened to mention it to a writer friend, Jessie Pope, who recommended it to her publisher. In April 1914, this publisher 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 appeared as a version heavily abridged by Pope, with much of the socialist ideology cut out, and ended with Owen, who taught that "money was the cause of poverty", contemplating suicide.
The full manuscipt was subsequently located by Tressell advocate F C Ball and after raising funds to acquire and re-assemble the paper manuscript, a full edition was published in 1955.
The novel has won generous approval across the left-wing political stream and in academia. It has often been cited as a factor in the landslide Labour victory in 1945,[1] and even of the election of two non-Labour-endorsed Communist members of parliament in that year. It has also been taught in schools and universities, adapted for stage, television and radio, and extracts performed at trade union meetings.
The full text was recently re-published by Penguin.
[edit] Robert Tressell's name used in Hastings
Tressell's name has been used variously over the years by groups and individuals, mainly in and around Hastings:
The Robert Tressell Workshop: A publishing concern based in Hastings. Their sign-painted premises is still visible in the town.
Robert Tressell Close: A small residential street in Hastings named after the writer.
Tressell ward: a political ward in Hastings.
The Robert Tressell Lectures: Name given to a series of annual lectures, mainly about The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists but also about other aspects of left-wing politics and sociology.
Tressell Publications: a small political publishing house.
[edit] References
- ^ London Review of Books, Letters, Vol. 24 No. 6 accessed 13 July 2007
