Henry Hyde Champion
Henry Hyde Champion was a socialist journalist and activist, regarded as a leading figure in the early political organisations of the British labour movement. From a middle-class background, he was an early advocate of socialism in Britain. However, Champion was dogged by persistent mistrust within the labour movement arising from his lack of working-class roots and his self-presentation as a 'gentleman' with refined tastes and mannerisms. In 1894 he left Britain for Australia where he spent the latter part of his life.
From 1883 to 1887 Champion was a key member of the Social Democratic Federation, Britain's first socialist political organisation. In 1888 Champion became secretary of the Labour Electoral Association and established the Labour Elector journal. He was a member of the strike committee of the London dock strike of August and September 1889. Champion visited Australia from August 1890 to February 1891, during which his lukewarm support for a major industrial dispute led to him being described as a 'traitor' to the unionist cause. After returning to Britain he participated in various political activities and resurrected the Labour Elector. In 1893 his attempts to take a leadership role in the newly-formed Independent Labour Party were undermined by a growing suspicion of his allegiances to working class causes and labour politics.
After returning to Australia in 1894 Champion settled in Melbourne and made a living as a journalist and publisher. He supported various causes and participated in political activities, including the formation of the Victorian Socialist Party. In 1898 Champion married Elsie Belle Goldstein and the couple established the Book Lover's Library and Bookshop. Champion became a book publisher under the imprint of the Australasian Authors' Agency. After a period of declining health, Champion died in Melbourne in 1928.
Biography
Early life
Henry Hyde Champion was born on 22 January 1859 in Poona, in the Maharashtra state in western India, the eldest son of James Hyde Champion, an officer in the Bombay Army, and his wife Henrietta. Henry's mother was from a family of aristocratic Scottish descent and there was a military tradition on both sides of his family. When he turned four years of age Henry was brought to England by his mother to begin his schooling. From 1873, aged thirteen, he was educated at Marlborough College, a public school at Marlborough in the county of Wiltshire. Henry's father retired from service in India in 1877, having attained the rank of major-general.After completing his secondary education Champion attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in south-east London. In 1878, after graduation, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery and was posted to the Bombay Presidency of British India. During his service in India Champion participated in the Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-1880. After becoming ill with typhoid, in 1881 Champion was invalided back to England, by that stage disillusioned with British imperialism and the treatment of its subject population in India.
During his convalescence Champion was taken to the slums of London's East End by Percy Frost, a friend from his school days at Marlborough College and the son of a wealthy clergyman, where they witnessed the poverty that existed there. Later in 1881, while Champion was still on sick leave from the Army, the two friends visited the United States. In America Champion read Progress and Poverty by Henry George. The author argued for a tax on land as the answer to ending poverty and for a time Champion was a "devoted adherent" of the American reformer's economic philosophy. After returning to England, on 17 September 1882 Champion resigned from the British Army in protest at the British conquest of Egypt and joined the British socialist movement. Champion's commitment to socialism as a young man was described by his biographer, John Barnes, as being a process "akin to discovering a sense of mission".
The Socialist movement
After he resigned his commission from the Army in late 1882, Champion received sufficient capital from his father to invest in an established publishing house. After three months he declined the offer of a directorship in the firm, withdrew his money and purchased a half-share in a printing press owned by John C. Foulger, a radical who was publishing a monthly journal called Modern Thought. Their printing business in Paternoster Row operated under the imprint of 'The Modern Press'.Champion's earliest political associates were men with whom he shared a public-school background. By June 1883 he and James L. Joynes were editing The Christian Socialist: A Journal for Thoughtful Men, a publication of the newly-formed Land Reform League. The journal identified with the Christian socialism of F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley and had an editorial policy of excluding "class hatreds and class prejudices".
On 9 August 1883 Champion married twenty-eight year-old Juliet Bennett. Champion makes no mention of his wife in his later writings and little is known of Juliet except that she died after less than three years of marriage, one of the causes of her death being ascribed to alcoholism.
Champion "played a central role" in the formation of the Fellowship of the New Life, an organisation based on the ideas of Scottish philosopher Thomas Davidson. The objective of the society was "cultivation of a perfect character in each and all" by setting an example of clean simplified living, with many of the Fellowship's members advocating pacifism, vegetarianism and simple living. Champion was one of sixteen present at the inaugural meeting on 24 October 1883 in the London suburb of Regent's Park. Others present at the first meeting were Henry Havelock Ellis and Champion's Christian Socialist co-editor James Joynes. Soon after its formation some of the Fellowship members, including Champion, expressed a desire for a degree of political involvement, leading to the formation of a separate organisation named the Fabian Society. Although involved in its formation, Champion took no further part in the Fabian movement after he became actively involved with the Social Democratic Federation.
In 1884 The Modern Press acquired and financed a periodical called To-day: The Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism which had been published since April 1883, edited by Ernest Belfort Bax and James L. Joynes. After the acquisition Champion became a joint editor. In 1884 an early novel by George Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist, was serialised in To-day magazine. An earlier novel by Shaw called Cashel Byron's Profession was serialised in To-day from April 1885 to March 1886 and published in book form by The Modern Press later in 1886.
The Social Democratic Federation
By 1883 Champion was the secretary of the Democratic Federation, a political organisation whose chairman was Henry M. Hyndman, a journalist from a wealthy middle-class background who had been converted to socialism after reading Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto. The Democratic Federation had been formed in 1881 as a union of radical and republican organisations with an agenda based on the collectivisation of property in Great Britain. In 1883 the Democratic Federation issued a socialistic manifesto demanding adult suffrage, a republican government and nationalisation of land and "other means of producing and distributing wealth". Champion, as secretary, was one of ten signatories to the document. In January 1884 the Democratic Federation began producing a weekly newspaper called Justice, initially edited by Charles L. Fitzgerald but soon afterwards replaced in that role by Hyndman. Champion contributed to the Justice newspaper, including a series of articles on "wage slaves" focussing on the "intellectual proletariat" working in shops and offices. At the fourth annual conference of the Democratic Federation, held on 9 August 1884, the party's name was changed to the Social Democratic Federation.From mid-1885 the SDF began holding open-air meetings at Dod Street, an established location for Sunday meetings and public oratory in the riverside Limehouse district of London. On 9 August 1885 a SDF member, W. B. Parker, was arrested while speaking to a crowd of onlookers on the corner of Dod and Burdett streets. He was charged with obstruction and bound over to keep the peace for six months. During the week Champion wrote to the Home Secretary, Sir Richard Cross, objecting to the SDF being singled out by police. On the following Sunday Champion himself was arrested while speaking at Dod Street. These incidents led to a series of arrests of SDF speakers at Dod Street. As the crowds grew, the confrontation between the SDF and the police escalated. On 6 September Jack Williams was arrested and fined 40 shillings or one month's imprisonment, and chose the latter. This was followed by further meetings in support of free assembly, with other left-wing organisations also putting up speakers, supported by crowds of several thousand. Further arrests were made, and a large crowd gathered outside the courthouse when the cases were heard. A large socialist demonstration was held on 27 September 1885, with a crowd estimated to number sixty thousand. On the eve of a general election, the Conservative Party Home Secretary ordered that the police should not interfere.
The SDF decided to run a parliamentary candidate in the November 1885 general election in a seat in Nottingham. John Burns, a strong public speaker with a working-class and unionist background, was chosen to contest the Nottingham West constituency, supported by a local committee and a local newspaper. At the last minute SDF candidates were also nominated for two seats in London, using funds offered to Champion from an unidentified source. Burns and the two London candidates were the first socialist parliamentary candidates in British history. Although each of the SDF candidates were unsuccessful at the general election, the "pathetically small vote" for the two London candidates damaged the public reputation of the SDF. The "fiasco of the London candidatures" prompted George Bernard Shaw to observe that "all England is satisfied we are a paltry handful of blackguards". The prevailing suspicion was that the funds had come from the Conservative Party with the intention of taking votes from the Liberal Party by splitting the progressive vote. Champion had received the offer of funds through his friend, the journalist Maltman Barry, a former Marxist variously described as a "maverick Tory Radical" and a "Conservative agent". The offer had been accepted and an amount of £340 was transferred to the SDF. After the election it was found that Hyndman and Champion had acted without consultation and that the SDF treasurer, J. Hunter Watts, was unaware of the transaction. Watts publicised details of the affair in an "angry letter" to The Pall Mall Gazette. In The Democrat journal of 12 December 1885 the journalist and member of the SDF executive council, Charles L. Fitzgerald, denounced Hyndman and Champion for their irresponsibility and for "trying to run the Federation in military style". Champion was subject to recurring accusations of having received 'Tory gold' and the controversy was to dog him for the remainder of his political life. After the details of the 'Tory gold' episode became known, Champion resigned as secretary of the SDF.
In certain ways Champion was not suited to formal organisational structures. The respected trade unionist Tom Mann described him as "a man of vigorous individuality" who would sometimes "act upon his own initiative" and "commit the organisation to plans and projects without consultation". Mann concluded that Champion "was profoundly convinced that his judgment was right" and when situations arose necessitating decisive action "he could not endure to wait several days before the committee met". Champion's biographer, John Barnes, makes the point that his subject favoured open-air meetings and demonstrations as a way of focussing attention on particular issues and playing "upon the anxieties of the governing class", with such occasions satisfying "his desire for action, and his taste for theatre".
The mid-1880s were years of high unemployment in Britain, a condition that liberal and leftist groups ascribed to cheaper foreign imports taking British jobs under free trade conditions. Agitation for tariff reform came from two distinct movements, the socialists and protectionists such as the Fair Trade League, existing side-by-side but with distinct differences in ideology. The underlying idea common to both was Protectionism, but where the Fair Traders "postulated that the workers needed to be protected from enemies abroad", socialists by contrast maintained "their enemies were in their midst" with foreign competitors often being "financed by British capital unpatriotically invested in foreign lands".
File:S.D.L. Leaders in Court IllustLondonNews 27Feb1886.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.5|The SDF leaders in the Bow-Street Police Court, Jack Williams, Henry M. Hyndman, Henry Hyde Champion and John Burns.
The Trafalgar Square Riots of 8 February 1886 were disorders in the West End of London following a counter-demonstration by the Social Democratic Federation in Trafalgar Square against a meeting of the Fair Trade League. The meeting in Trafalgar Square ended in a riot and a destructive attack on the clubs in Pall Mall and St. James Street and on shops in Picadilly and Audley Street, after which another open-air meeting was held near the Achilles statue in Hyde Park. The four SDF speakers, Jack Williams, Henry Hyndman, Henry Hyde Champion and John Burns, were "charged with maliciously and seditiously contriving to disturb the peace, and to incite people to riot and tumult, by inflammatory words moving to hatred of the law and government of the realm". On 17 February they were brought before the chief magistrate at the Bow Street Police Court. After evidence was given by journalists regarding what was said by the defendants at the Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park meetings, the case was adjourned for a week, with the defendants admitted to bail. Belford Bax posted bail for Champion.
The four defendants were eventually brought to trial at the Old Bailey on 6 April 1886, charged with "uttering seditious words and with conspiring together to utter seditious words". Burns and Williams were defended by Mr. W. Thompson and Champion and Hyndman conducted their own defence. The prosecution was led by the Attorney-General Sir Charles Russell. On 10 April the jury returned a verdict of not guilty for each of the four defendants. In announcing the verdicts the foreman singled out Burns and Champion for a special comment, saying that the jury "are of opinion that the language of Messrs. Burns and Champion was highly inflammatory and greatly to be condemned, but on the whole of the facts brought before us we acquit those two defendants of any seditious intent".