Victor Grayson

In Search of Britain's Lost Revolutionary

Harry Taylor

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780745343990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Steeped in conspiracy, scandal and socialism – the disappearance of radical icon Victor Grayson is a puzzle that's never been solved. A firebrand and Labour politician who rose to prominence in the early twentieth century, Grayson was idolised by hundreds of thousands of Britons but despised by the establishment. After a tumultuous life, he walked out of his London apartment in September 1920 and was never seen again.

After a century, new documents have come to light. Fragments of an unpublished autobiography, letters to his lovers (both men and women), leading political and literary figures including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, and testimonies from members of the Labour elite such as Clement Attlee have revealed the real Victor Grayson. New research has uncovered the true events leading up to his disappearance and suggests that he was actually blackmailed by his former Party.

In a time when homosexuality was illegal, and socialism an international threat to capitalism, Grayson was a clear target for those wanting to stamp out dissent. This extraordinary biography reinstates to history a man who laid the foundations for a whole generation of militant socialists in Britain.

1

The Boy from Liverpool

The life of Victorian England was an intolerable life, and ought not to be borne by human beings.

E.P. Thompson¹

I have known much poverty and many of its suicidal horrors …

Victor Grayson’s sister, Augusta²

If Victor Grayson’s life was shrouded in mystery, then that of his parents was no clearer. In fact, Victor should not have had the last name Grayson at all. His father was born William Dickinson in Ecclesfield, Yorkshire, in 1849. William was the son of a carpenter but was temperamentally ill-suited to work and authority. Eager to escape a life of drudgery and seeking adventure, William enlisted for the 51st Regiment of Foot of the British Army in 1866. Like many young men he lied about his age and, just 17 years old, he claimed to be 20. He was paid £1 as a bounty and joined the regiment in Sheffield, but the army failed to change his ways and within four months of enlisting William had his pay withheld for indiscipline and to recompense the government for destruction of army property.

Throughout 1867 William spent most of his time in army prison cells awaiting trial, conviction and further imprisonment for repeatedly going absent from duty without leave. The following year saw a slight improvement in his behaviour and he was rewarded with one month’s leave. But William once again found himself incarcerated over Christmas 1869, just before his regiment sailed for Ireland. After a period of extended leave William returned to his unit as it moved from Curragh to Athlone, about 50 miles west of Dublin. Here, he was again repeatedly punished for poor behaviour and in 1872, when his regiment moved to Fermoy, in the south of Ireland, to embark at Queenstown (renamed Cobh in 1920) for passage to India, William deserted. This was an era when desertion and persistent bad conduct could still result in branding and flogging before a dishonorable discharge. But William managed to make good his escape and he likely stowed away to Liverpool, leaving all record of his life as William Dickinson behind him.

Victor Grayson’s mother, Elizabeth, had a similarly mysterious past. In separate census records she claimed to have been born in both Scotland and Ireland around the year 1852. It is likely she was born in Scotland and later worked in service in Ireland. No exact match for Elizabeth Craig (or Creag) can be found in the Scottish records, though there are several possibilities, but compulsory registration of births did not become law in Scotland until 1855. Therefore, we cannot be certain she was registered at all. The young Elizabeth would have been entitled to a comparatively good standard of education in Victorian Scotland, so it is strange that on the birth certificates of all her children she marks her name with a simple cross denoting ‘The mark of Elizabeth Grayson’. Biographers and historians have pointed to the cross on Victor Grayson’s birth certificate as evidence that the devout Elizabeth could not bring herself to sign a fraudulent document, thereby questioning Victor’s true parentage. However, all of Elizabeth’s children have the cross in common on their birth certificates. Her illiteracy, coupled with her birth not being registered, suggests her family was amongst the very poorest. A common occurrence for a Scottish girl whose family was financially unable to keep her was to be sent to Ireland to work in service, which is what happened. However, we cannot be certain which family she worked for, though there is enduring speculation that it was the Marlborough family.

An old Grayson family legend has it that when Elizabeth was working in service she met the wayward soldier, William Dickinson. Whether Elizabeth ran away to Liverpool with William or joined him later we cannot be sure, though the two are later recorded as being married as William and Elizabeth Grayson. Yet no actual marriage certificate exists for the couple which suggests they were not legally married. Although nowadays we would not think twice about an unmarried couple cohabiting and starting a family, in mid-to-late Victorian England there was an enormous stigma attached to such an arrangement. It was not uncommon for unmarried couples to be evicted by their landlords and for social support to be limited, so the couple would have been careful not to leave a paper trail and they probably found life easier to simply say they were married. This might explain why the couple regularly moved from rented properties around several districts of central and north Merseyside. Further, as the couple were not married, all the Grayson children were born out of wedlock – socially scandalous at a time when families went to extreme lengths to cover up such a secret. Indeed, the lack of a marriage certificate and dates not adding up on existing records are strong indicators to today’s family historians that children had been born out of wedlock and that the family attempted to cover their tracks. Records for the nineteenth century show that half of all murder victims were babies; the shame and stigma of an illegitimate child was so great that mothers would kill their own children. In this atmosphere, it is not surprising that the Grayson family guarded their secret so desperately.

Family secrets aside, life in late Victorian Liverpool was far from easy. The kind of homes the Grayson family lived in had no electricity or central heating and relied on gas lamps and coal fires. There would be no indoor toilet and no running water. If children survived birth, they had incurable tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox and scarlet fever to deal with. If they made it to school age unaffected, they were likely to find two or three children in their class knock-kneed, bow-legged or hump-backed.³ Despite poverty in large swathes of the city, Liverpool had become a major world port in the lifetime of William and Elizabeth Grayson. With the development of artificial waterways like the Leeds-Liverpool canal, Liverpool became the main distribution centre for many of the goods produced in Britain’s northern industrial heartlands. It was perfectly situated to export South Lancashire coal and Cheshire rock salt whilst receiving West Indian sugar and Virginian tobacco. As ever-growing industrial demand brought with it economic expansion, Liverpool needed an ever-increasing army of workers and it became a magnet for those seeking a better life from Ireland, Wales and Scotland. But the boom in population growth was not matched by increased housing provision. Already existing poor social conditions were exacerbated by the influx of workers, particularly for unskilled and casual work. Unscrupulous landlords, landowners and builders simply crammed as many of these desperate souls as possible into the court and cellar dwellings which came to dominate the poorer areas of the city. A Liverpool historian described the living conditions in detail:

these court areas, a small area of ground of about thirty to forty feet wide, [were] wholly or partly surrounded by walls or buildings of appreciable height, which served to shut out the very light of day for most residents. With this cul de sac arrangement, access to the court was gained through a narrow passage with usually one communal water tap in the middle and one or two communal toilets at the end of the court. Often toilets would be in disrepair or choked for lack of water supply, making the conditions and atmosphere both noxious and very unhealthy.⁴

Whilst other cities of Victorian Britain were little better and ‘displayed a facade that concealed some of the most appalling social and environmental conditions imaginable’, Liverpool was the worst example of the hideousness of Victorian city life. It was on Merseyside that ‘Poverty was more desperate, housing more squalid, the state of public health more shocking and social distinctions more cruel than perhaps anywhere else in the country.’⁵ The Unitarian Rev. Richard Acland Armstrong arrived in Liverpool in 1885. He recalled:

I came to Liverpool as a stranger … to take up my residence in the second city of the mightiest Empire the world has ever seen. I admired its public buildings, its vast docks, its stately shipping, its splendid shops, its lovely parks … But after the first glance I was appalled by one aspect of things … The contiguity of immense wealth and abysmal poverty forced itself upon my notice … the superb carriages of the rich, with their freights of refined and elegant ladies, threaded their way among sections of the population so miserable and squalid that my heart ached at the sight of them. I had seen wealth. I had seen poverty. But never before had I seen the two so jammed together.⁶

It was into this Liverpool that Albert Victor Grayson was born on 5th September 1881 at 8 Taliesin Street in the Everton district of the city. Within weeks of his birth the family packed up and moved a mile or two to 15 Elbow Street, Kirkdale. The new addition was William and Elizabeth’s third son and he joined William Henry Grayson (nicknamed Harry), born 16th December 1876 and John Dickinson Grayson (whose middle name preserved his father’s real identity), born 5 May 1879. Whilst the eldest son William had been born in Liverpool, for reasons unknown the Grayson family moved for a few months to 12 Hill Street Place, Poplar, in East London where John was born. Possibly they tried to start a new life in the capital or moved short term to escape debt or questions about William senior’s past. Some historians have imaginatively suggested that the London episode was an excuse for Elizabeth to either give birth to Victor (as an illegitimate son) or to take delivery of Victor from a poor maid who had succumbed to the charms of a wealthy aristocrat. However, it was Victor’s elder brother John Grayson who was born there and the family returned to Liverpool shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, William and Elizabeth waited until 1 February 1884, some two-and-a-half years later, to have Victor baptised. Though some also point to this as further evidence of conspiracy regarding Victor’s true origins, it is clear that the parents were at best quite disorganised in their stewardship of the family and that William senior spent more time drinking than he did working. Some of the Grayson children were baptised within months, others the following year but it is true that Victor took the longest. When he was eventually baptised, it took place at the same time as his younger brother, Frederick, born a few weeks before on 6 January 1884. But Frederick was a sickly child and died shortly before his second birthday. The death of Frederick was followed by happier news and two daughters, Augusta and Florence, were born. Augusta would remain a constant friend to her favourite brother, Victor, throughout his life and dedicate her final years to publicising his disappearance and appealing for information about him. A further mystery surrounds just how many children William and Elizabeth did have. All the records indicate six in total, yet in later years Victor claimed to have been one of seven. Still later, his sister Augusta wrote that ‘Victor was the seventh son of William and Elizabeth Grayson’ which would mean they had at least ten (not unusual for that time). It has been suggested that Elizabeth lost children during pregnancy, but this would not have been recorded. More likely Elizabeth had several stillbirths and/or children who died not long after birth, in which case they would probably have been named by the family, but not recorded in birth, baptism or census records.

It is an irony of history that Albert Victor Grayson, who became the fearsome face of revolutionary socialism in Britain and whom the Americans dubbed ‘Britain’s greatest mob orator’, was in fact born tongue-tied and potentially incapable of speech. According to his sister Augusta, Victor’s father William ‘set out in great alarm and brought the doctor from his bed to cut the baby’s tongue’. It was a simple procedure that released the tongue, rooted to the base of the mouth, with a small cut of the doctor’s knife. This anecdote reinforces what we know of the family’s social status; there were no medically trained staff present at the home birth, standard fare for a working-class family at the time. But the release of the baby’s tongue did not immediately ensure Grayson’s ability to speak or his future as a great orator. During his early years he suffered from a pronounced stammer and the family are said to have scrimped to provide elocution lessons which helped the boy overcome his speech impediment but also removed any trace of a Liverpool accent.

Though the Graysons were acutely aware of their surroundings, there is no indication that either William or Elizabeth was politically active. In contrast to their son’s future as a leader of the socialist movement, they were considered quite conservative and respectable. But in truth William had changed little from his army days. He was generally idle, described as having a ‘colourless’ personality, a drinker, though a subdued one, at least outside the home. It was noted by a family friend that he only worked when he absolutely had to and even then his skills as a carpenter were not always in high demand. Elizabeth was described as ‘a good transparent woman’ who was ‘quick and interesting in her speech’ and knew the Bible thoroughly. It was noted by those who knew the family that Victor got his best qualities from her.

With a work-shy father, money was tight. It was the Grayson children who earned the wages which kept the family from destitution, whilst Elizabeth supplemented her children’s income by taking in lodgers. Victor’s older brothers William and John worked as a docker and clerk, respectively, before both joining the Grenadier Guards. Victor aged ten worked as a weekend boy in a greengrocer’s shop on Great Homer Street. A Mrs E. Nelson, whose father employed Victor, wrote to the Liverpool Echo in 1954 to describe the young man:

He was a pale faced lad, about 10 years old, and not very sociable. He got his gift of being able to talk from his mother, and she had a keen sense of humour. My eldest sister managed the shop and Mrs. Grayson spent many hours in there. Her husband was the type that went to work when he was broke. It was a sordid life for Mrs. Grayson. There were three sons and two daughters to be provided for. Many a time I have taken a large dish of stew and soup my mother made for them. She used to say to me, ‘Take this to the Graysons’. They just lived around the corner.⁷

Next door to the greengrocers was a boot shop which housed the Mission Hall of a Plymouth Brethren group in the rooms above. Victor took an interest in this, particularly the open-air meetings the group held. Though described as a shy, quiet but kind-hearted young man, he was born with the spirit of an adventurer.

As a child Victor found his family home a crowded place, but he tucked himself away and spent much of his early life obsessively reading stories of the Wild West and his fictional childhood hero, Deadwood Dick. Dick was a Robin Hood type based in the Black Hills of Dakota who kept the American Indians at bay. He was created by Edward L. Wheeler, the brains behind a string of such heroes who populated cheap fiction, known as Penny Dreadfuls. The ‘Dreadfuls’ were booklets, usually eight pages long, cheap and mass-produced with illustrations. Such works were marketed to young working-class audiences and sold at newsstands across Britain. The middle classes looked on in horror as working-class youths consumed tales of bandits, thieves and murderers. One such working-class boy, Thomas Okey, who later became a Calvinistic Methodist Minister, recalled the childhood joy of the ‘Dreadfuls:

It introduced me to a romantic world when pennies were scarce, and libraries seemed far beyond my reach. We read the badly printed booklets in all sorts of places, even in church; they gave us glimpses of freedom, abandon, and romance, heroism and defiance of fate, whilst we chafed at restrictions and shut doors. True, our heroes … were outlaws. But what boy is not a bandit, a rebel, a pirate at heart!⁸

It was not long before Grayson’s imagination and sense of adventure would come together in a plan to meet his hero Deadwood Dick. The six-yearold Grayson and schoolfriend Billy Adams attempted to walk to the Wild West to do just that. Not knowing which way was West they made their way to the local church to consult the weathercock. From there they headed West in high spirits with Billy tucking his father’s revolver – stolen for the adventure – into his belt. The two child adventurers remained in high spirits until sunset ushered in the darkness of night. Under hazy moonlight the two boys’ bravery evaporated and they quickly decided to return home to their parents. Grayson returned full of guilt for any worry he had caused his mother and father. The parents were pleased to have their tired, untidy boy back, though his handkerchief, stained with crushed blackberries foraged for the journey West, looked for a moment like blood.

A second and more dramatic incident happened when Grayson was 14 and about to finish school. It is a story that became a legend and Grayson frequently repeated it in later life. As a young teenager he regularly wandered around the Liverpool docks, just a short walk from the family home and where his older brother William worked. Like many teenagers he dreamed of adventure and escaping a certain life of servitude in the factory. Although both his older brothers had joined the army in their youth, Victor was considered sickly and suffered from epilepsy. Perhaps because of this stigma and the lack of understanding towards it, he felt this option was not open to him. Liverpool was awash with tales of the adventures of stowaways and in later years the historian Emmet O’Connor noted that ‘[d]aring tramps and salty tales were not unusual among waterfront socialists of the time. The best of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword by Jeremy Corbyn
• Introduction
• 1 The Boy from Liverpool
• 2 The Student Revolutionary
• 3 The By-Election
• 4 ‘The Boy Who Paralysed Parliament’
• 5 Member for the Unemployed
• Plates
• 6 ‘England’s Greatest Mob Orator’
• 7 Revolution Delayed
• 8 The Battle for a Socialist Party
• 9 More Than Just a ‘Cheap Orator’
• 10 A Taste of War
• 11 To Passchendaele
• 12 On Lloyd George’s Service
• 13 Towards the Truth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index