George Odger was a pioneer British trade unionist and radical politician.
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17 Facts About George Odger
2.
George Odger is best remembered as the head of the London Trades Council during the period of formation of the Trades Union Congress and as the first President of the First International.
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4.
Odger's father was a miner from Cornwall and the family was an impoverished one, forcing George to be apprenticed as a shoemaker at about 10 years of age.
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5.
George Odger travelled the country in search of work as a shoemaker, eventually landing in London around the age of 20.
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6.
George Odger first came to public attention in 1859 when he served on a general committee to coordinate aid for striking workers in the London builders' strike of that year.
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7.
Also in 1862, George Odger became the Chairman of the Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association.
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8.
Shortly after the Reform League's Hyde Park demonstration in 1867, George Odger attended a private meeting of a dozen senior members of the league in which the French revolutionary Gustave Paul Cluseret proposed they start a civil war in England.
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9.
George Odger was in the minority of the league, which rejected the proposal overwhelmingly.
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10.
George Odger would be named to the governing General Council of this organisation, remaining in that position until his resignation in 1872.
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11.
George Odger put himself forward electorally for the first time in the new constituency of Chelsea in the 1868 General election – the first held since passage of the Reform Act 1867 that granted the right to vote to part of the male urban working class for the first time.
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12.
In June 1869 George Odger was one of four Liberal candidates to compete for two seats in the borough of Stafford.
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13.
George Odger stood as a Lib–Lab candidate in Southwark in the February 1870 by-election there, losing by about 300 votes out of more than 9,000 cast in a three-way race.
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14.
George Odger was not what is called 'eloquent, ' but he was better; he spoke with force, with effect, with a knowledge of his subject.
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15.
Mr George Odger, it will perhaps be remembered, was an English Radical agitator of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a perverse desire to get into Parliament.
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16.
George Odger exercised, I believe, the useful profession of a shoemaker, and he knocked in vain at the door that opens but to the refined.
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17.
George Odger is listed on the Reformers' Memorial in Kensal Green Cemetery in London.
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