Tom Quelch

Tom Quelch was a communist activist in Great Britain in the 1920s.^[1]

Tom was the son of veteran Marxist Harry Quelch. Tom joined the British Socialist Party. His 1912 appeal for soldiers to refuse to act as strikebreakers caused a Conservative MP, Oliver Locker-Lampson, to complain about him in the House of Commons.^[2] He was involved in founding The Call in 1916, resisting attempts to turn the BSP into a Social Patriotic organisation at the outbreak of the First World War. He was delegated to attend the Second Congress of the Comintern and attended the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East.^[3]

He was living in Wimbledon, London in 1940, when he wrote to the Manchester Guardian with reminiscences of his meetings with Vladimir Lenin.^[4]

Writings

• Review of William Morris' “The Revolt of Ghent”, Justice, 1 October 1910, p. 3
• 'The New Paganism', The New Review, June 1913, pp. 593–95.
• The War and Its Outcome, Justice, 17 September 1914, p. 4
• 'Parliamentarianism, Lenin and the BSP', The Call, 22 January 1920
• War or Peace?, The Call, No. 200, 5 February 1920
• (with W. M. McLaine) Report as to the Communist Movement in Britain, The Communist International, June–July 1920, no.11-12, pp. 2241–46
• Opposition to the Social Revolution in Britain' The Communist International, 1921, No. 16-17, pp. 99–100
• The Trades Councils: The Need for the Extension of their Scope and Work, The Labour Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 3 (March 1922), pp. 238–50
• The Importance of Trades Councils, The Labour Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 5 (May 1926), pp. 313–7
• 'Foreword', The Militant Trades Council: A Model Constitution for Trades Council, 1926

References