My Life’s Battles: Will Thorne

First published in 1925, My Life’s Battles is a classic memoir of a great working-class leader. Will Thorne was the founder of the Gasworkers’ Union and Labour MP for West Ham for nearly forty years. Thorne’s moving tale of devoted commitment to the improvement of living and working conditions of the people of the East End and elsewhere is told in a lively style – learned partly from Eleanor Marx with whom he worked closely.

As secretary of the Canning Town branch of the Social-Democratic Federation, Thorne mixed with some of the most famous and influential early socialists – Tom Mann, H.M. Hyndman, Edward Aveling and Friedrich Engels among them. His most important contribution to the labour movement, however, was as one of the founders of the ‘New Unionism’ which, in the late 1880s, organised semi- and unskilled workers for the first time.