18 Facts About Ben Tillett

1.

Benjamin Tillett was a British socialist, trade union leader and politician.

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2.

Ben Tillett was a leader of the "new unionism" of 1889 that focused on organizing unskilled workers.

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3.

Ben Tillett played a major role in founding the Dockers Union, and played a prominent role as a strike leader in dock strikes in 1911 and 1912.

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4.

Ben Tillett enthusiastically supported the war effort in the First World War.

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5.

Ben Tillett was pushed aside by Ernest Bevin during the consolidation that created the Transport and General Workers' Union in 1922, who gave Tillett a subordinate position.

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6.

Ben Tillett started work in a brickyard at eight years of age and was a "Risley" boy for two years.

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7.

Ben Tillett was invalided out of the navy and made several voyages in merchant ships.

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8.

Ben Tillett began his career as a trade union organiser in 1887 by forming the Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union at Tilbury docks.

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9.

Ben Tillett played a prominent role as a strike leader in dock strikes in 1911 and 1912.

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10.

Ben Tillett was instrumental in forming the National Transport Workers' Federation in 1910, along with Havelock Wilson of the Seamen's Union.

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11.

Bevin became the General Secretary of the new union, but Ben Tillett held the post of International and Political Secretary until 1931 and retained his seat on the General Council of the Trades Union Congress until 1932.

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12.

Ben Tillett was a member of the Fabian Society and a founding member of the Independent Labour Party, but subsequently joined the Social Democratic Federation instead.

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13.

Ben Tillett joined the Bristol Socialist Society in the 1880s, when he often travelled to that city.

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14.

Ben Tillett began a political career as an alderman on the London County Council from 1892 to 1898 and was a Labour Party Member of Parliament for Salford North from 1917 to 1924 and again from 1929 to 1931.

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15.

Ben Tillett often disagreed with the liberal tendencies of the Labour Party, claiming in 1918 that 'If the Labour Party could select a King, he would be a feminist, a Temperance crank, a Nonconformist charlatan.

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16.

Ben Tillett courted controversy with some of his supporters in the labour movement through his outspoken support of Britain's involvement in the First World War, an issue which split the Labour Party.

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17.

In 1891, Ben Tillett formulated what the historian Satnam Virdee has described as a "proto-fascist discourse" in a series of letters to the London Evening News.

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18.

Ben Tillett argued that Jewish workers should be removed from Britain and that British politicians were in thrall to Jewish financial power: 'Our leading statesmen do not care to offend the great banking houses or money kings.

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