Robert Tressell

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Robert Tressell (18 April 1870 – 3 February 1911) was the pen name of Irish writer Robert Croker, who later changed his name to Robert Noonan. He is best known for his novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

Early life

Noonan was born in Dublin, Ireland, the illegitimate son of Samuel Croker, a senior member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. He was baptised and raised a Roman Catholic by his mother Mary Noonan. His father, who wasn't Catholic, had his own family, but attempted to provide for Robert until his death in 1875.[1][2]

By 1875 Noonan was living in London. He was recorded on the 1881 England Census, under his step-father Sebastian Zumbühl's surname, living at 27 Elmore Street, Islington, London. Noonan 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, and left his family, declaring he "would not live on the family income derived largely from absentee landlordism". It was around this time he changed his surname to his mother's maiden name.[2]

Adult life

Liverpool

In 1890, Noonan was a sign writer living in Queen's Road, Everton, Liverpool. On 10 June 1890 he appeared at Liverpool County Intermediate Sessions court at Sessions House, Islington, Liverpool after previously having pleaded guilty to housebreaking and larceny on 31 May 1890. On 27 May 1890 he had broken into the dwelling house of his sister's employer, Charles Fay junior, shipping agent, Courtney Road, Great Crosby and stolen a quantity of silver and electro-plated articles. He was given a six-month prison sentence. The case was covered by the Liverpool Mercury newspaper on 2 and 11 June 1890.[2][3]

South Africa

By 1891, Noonan had moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where he was a painter and decorator. When he married in 1891, he was recorded as 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 Noonan acquired all the property, including their house in an affluent suburb of Cape Town.

Noonan and his daughter moved to Johannesburg, where he secured a well-paying job with a construction company. It was here that he learned the ways of the industry he would later write about in his novel, although Noonan's actual circumstances varied greatly from the proletarian characters of the book. After becoming 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 a black manservant called Sixpence, of whom he was said to be "very fond".

In 1897, Noonan led a successful protest against the employment of black skilled labour. During 1898, he became a member of the Transvaal Executive Committee of the Centennial of 1798 Association, which commemorated the revolutionary nationalist United Irishmen.

As a '98 Association member, Noonan helped form the Irish Brigades, an anti-British force that fought alongside the Boers in the Second Boer War. At this point, accounts of his life differ. Some assert he took up arms and was interned by the British until the end of the war, when he returned to Britain. Others say he left South Africa just before hostilities began in October 1899.

England

In any event, around the turn of the century, Noonan ended up in Hastings, Sussex. Here, he found work as a sign writer, but at much lower wages and in far poorer conditions than he had experienced in South Africa. Kathleen was initially sent to boarding and convent schools, but eventually Noonan could no longer afford them and Kathleen then attended state schools instead.[4]

Noonan had to take part-time jobs in addition to his full-time position. He seems not to have joined 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.

In sharp contrast to the days when he aided and perhaps fought with the Boers against Britain's imperialism, he now was designing aircraft, which he hoped would be accepted by the War Office. In 1905, his designs were rejected, and he turned leftwards once again. Influenced by the Marxist-influenced ideas of designer and socialist William Morris, he joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1906. The next year, after a dispute with his employer, Noonan lost his job. Despite the demand for his skills, his health began to deteriorate and he eventually developed tuberculosis. Unemployed and unable to remain politically active, he started writing, something he hoped would earn enough money to keep him from the workhouse.

He wrote under the pen name Robert Tressell as he feared the socialist views expressed in the book would have him blacklisted. He chose the surname Tressell as a play on the trestle table, an important part of a painter and decorator's kit. (Until the full manuscript was published in 1955, all copies of the book cited the author as Robert "Tressall".) He completed The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, (originally called The Ragged Arsed Philanthropists) in 1910, but the 1,600-page hand-written manuscript was rejected by the three publishing houses. The rejections 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.

Death

Unhappy with his life in Britain, he decided that he and Kathleen should emigrate to Canada; however, he only reached Liverpool when he was admitted to the Royal Liverpool Infirmary, where he died of 'phthisis pulmonalis' (i.e. pulmonary tuberculosis) on 3 February 1911, aged 40.

Noonan was buried in a pauper's grave on 10 February 1911 at Liverpool Parochial Cemetery, later known as Walton Park Cemetery.[5] The location of the grave was not rediscovered until 1970. Twelve other people were buried in the same plot. The plot is now marked although the land is no longer used as a cemetery, it is now used by Rice Lane City Farm.[6] The site is opposite Walton prison. A nearby road is named Noonan Close.

Posthumous publication

Kathleen mentioned her father's novel to a friend of hers, writer Jessie Pope, who recommended it to her publisher. In April 1914, the publisher bought the rights to the book for £25, and it appeared in Britain, Canada and the United States later that year, in the Soviet Union in 1920, and in Germany in 1925. The version as originally published was heavily abridged by Pope, with much of the socialist ideology removed. Pope's version ended with the novel's hero, Frank Owen, who taught that "money was the cause of poverty", contemplating suicide.

The original manuscript was subsequently located by F. C. Ball and, after he had raised funds to acquire and reassemble the original version, an unabridged edition was published in 1955.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has been cited as a factor in the landslide Labour victory in 1945,[7] and even for the election of two non-Labour-endorsed Communist members of Parliament that same year. It has been taught in schools and universities, and adapted for stage, television and radio, and readings have been performed at trade union meetings.

Declan Kiberd has argued that Pádraic Ó Conaire's seminal novel in Irish, Deoraíocht, has many parallels in its progressive socialism with Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.[8]

Use of Tressell's name

Tressell's name has been used over the years by various groups and individuals, mainly in and around Hastings: and by an inmate at HMP Liverpool called Griff in poem called 'Political Chemeleon' "Tressel had vision and said what he saw men in power Rinsing the poor" while resident in 2005 on a course called BigHouseArts run by Delia Brady-Jacobs

References and notes

  1. ↑ Irish Genealogy ie
  2. 1 2 3 Harker, Dave: TUC History Online – Robert Tressell
  3. ↑ Ancestry.
  4. ↑ Harker, Dave: TUC History Online – Robert Tressel
  5. ↑ Ancestry
  6. ↑ Find A Grave
  7. ↑ Rose, David; "What MPs Read" LRB.co.uk (Letters, Vol.24 No.6), 21 March 2002 (Retrieved: 8 September 2009)
  8. ↑ Declan Kiberd, Idir Dhá Chultúr (Baile Átha Cliath, 2002), p. 137
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