14 Facts About Sam Mainwaring

Samuel Mainwaring was a Welsh machinist and socialist political activist who was a founding member and key leader of the Socialist League, one of the first socialist political parties in Britain.

Sam Mainwaring is best remembered as the father of the term "anarcho-syndicalism".

Sam Mainwaring was a native speaker of Welsh and retained an affinity for the tongue throughout his life.

Sam Mainwaring developed into a quiet yet persuasive public speaker and a tireless worker for activities which he believed important.

Late in the 1870s, Sam Mainwaring joined the East London Labour Emancipation League and was an early member of the Social Democratic Federation.

In 1885, there came a split in which Sam Mainwaring joined with Eleanor Marx, Ernest Belfort Bax and his friend William Morris in forming the Socialist League.

In 1891, Sam Mainwaring moved to Swansea and there started the Swansea Socialist Society.

Sam Mainwaring became associated with the fledgling anarchist newspaper Liberty, edited by James Tochatti, formerly of the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League.

In September 1903 and March 1904, Sam Mainwaring published two issues of a short-lived newspaper called The General Strike, a publication which made detailed criticisms of the "officialism" of union bureaucracy and which publicised strikes in Europe making use of syndicalist tactics.

On Sunday, 29 September 1907, while addressing a meeting on Parliament Hill Fields, Sam Mainwaring was stricken by faintness and subsequently died.

Sam Mainwaring was 65 years old at the time of his death.

Sam Mainwaring is credited with coining the phrase "anarcho-syndicalism" and it is for this he is best remembered.

Sam Mainwaring was cited as a major intellectual inspiration by the radical British labour leader Tom Mann.

Mann had met Sam Mainwaring when the latter was a foreman of a shop which employed him.