The Red Flag
The people’s flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their hearts’ blood dyed to every fold
Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath it’s folds we’ll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here
It waved above our infant might
When all ahead seemed dark as night
It witnessed many a deed and vow
We must not change it’s colour now
Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath it’s folds we’ll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here
It well recalls the triumphs past
It gives the hope of peace at last
The banner bright the symbol plain
Of human right and human gain
Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath it’s folds we’ll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here
It suits today the meek and base
Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place
To cringe beneath the rich man’s frown
And haul that sacred emblem down
Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath it’s folds we’ll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here
With heads uncovered swear we all
To bare it onward till we fall
Come dungeons dark or gallows grim
This song shall be our parting hymn
Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath it’s folds we’ll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here
To those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, children of leftwing Labour folk, but drifted into the more narky waters of anarchism, labour anthem The Red Flag used seem a bit representative of the staid and empty claim of Labour to represent the workers, while merrily implementing capitalism, cuts and social control.
But it was once a vital and angry hymn to working class power, that actually meant something…
On 9th February 1929, Jim Connell, socialist and trade unionist, died in Lewisham Hospital. He had suffered a stroke on the steps of the Chancery Lane office of the Workmen’s Legal Friendly Society, where he had worked for nearly 3 decades, a few days before.
Jim Connell had been involved in the socialist movement in Ireland and England for nearly 60 years, from his youth as a dock labourer in Dublin, to his consistent opposition to World War 1 on internationalist grounds.
He is best remembered today for writing The Red Flag, a socialist anthem once sung across many countries in Europe and beyond, and hummed and lipsync-ed by many a rightwing Labour party bigwig, if unwillingly, until nearly twenty years ago…
Jim Connell’s life spans the almost mythological. Born in 1952 in County Meath, in what’s now the Irish republic, to a farming family, he moved with his parents to Dublin in 1867, where he worked at many menial jobs, including on the city’s docks. He had begun to write songs in these days , and continued to do so for most of his life. Although he had briefly flirted with Irish republicanism and claimed to have been a sworn member of the Fenian Brotherhood, Connell soon parted company with nationalism, and became a socialist. This was partly from contact with John Landye, an Irish member of the International Workingmen’s Association, a self-taught lecturer and centre of a group of young activists who went on to form the early Irish socialist movement. Connell was greatly influenced by Landye, and along with other socialists often accompanied him on rambles through the nearby countryside, walks on which politics, religion and science were discussed. These were far from Connell’s only trips to rural areas, for he had learned the art of poaching as a young man, and continued to thieve game from the lands of the rich into his middle age, even when living in London travelling out to the Surrey Hills to bag birds and beasts from posh estates. Why should any unemployed man’s children go hungry, he asked, when game preserves of the rich were all well stocked with hares, pheasants, rabbits, salmon and trout…
Dock work was casual, and known radicals were often shunned by the foremen who gave work out at the start of each day. Connell was blacked in this way, having been marked out by the authorities first as a Fenian. Unable to get regular work, he upped sticks to London in 1875, where he again earned money at many and varying trades.
Connell was not completely self-taught; he had had some schooling in Ireland. But he read vociferously and acquired knowledge all his life, and learned immense amounts about many subjects, which eventually enabled him to make a less manual living.
In London he again became involved in radical meetings, and began to lecture on various subjects, soon becoming well known as a speaker on the game laws, socialism, evolution and Darwinism… He joined the Democratic Federation when it was formed as an alliance of radical clubs, and remained in the renamed Social Democratic Federation for ten years, despite being regarded as ‘very much an individualist’ who chafed under the bizarre autocratic leadership of socialist/jingoist HM Hyndman. Connell also became an Executive member or the Land League of Great Britain, set up to agitate for democratic re-distribution of the land, and was secretary of the Poplar branch for a number of years.
It was in this period that Connell wroteThe Red Flag, in December 1889. Although it was later rumoured that he wrote the song on the overnight train from Glasgow to London, Connell in fact said that he wrote at least the first two verses on a train from Charing Cross to New Cross, in southeast London, near where he lived for many years, after attending a lecture by SDF member Herbert Burrows.
“As I sat down in the train for New Cross something urged me to write a song embodying the spirit of that lecture.”
Connell was immediately inspired by the great London dock strike of 1889, but on a wider level by the struggles of the working class all over the world:
“One thousand eight hundred and eighty nine was the year of the London dock strike. It was the biggest thing of its kind that had occurred up to that date and its leaders: HH Champion, Tom Mann and John Burns aroused the whole of England by the work they did and the victory they won. Not many years previously the Irish Land League aroused the democracy of all countries. I am proud to be able to say that I found the first branch of the Land league that was established in England. This was the Poplar branch and I remained its secretary until the league was suppressed, and was a member of the Executive during the whole of the time. About the same time the Russian Nihilists, the parents of the Bosheviks, won the applause of all overs of liberty and admirers of heroism. Under the rule of the Czar… the best men and women of Russia were reported to Siberia at the rate of 20,000 a year. Young lady students were sent from their classrooms and sent to work in horrible mines, where their teeth fell out and the hair fell off their heads in a few months. Nobody could fight this hellish rule with more undaunted courage than did the Nihilists, men and women. There happened also, in 1887, the hanging of the Chicago anarchists. Their innocence was afterwards admitted by the Governor of the State of Illinois. The widow of one of them, Mrs Parsons, herself more than half a Red Indian, made a lecturing tour of this country soon afterwards. On one occasion I heard her telling a large audience that when she contemplated the service rendered to humanity she was glad her husband had died as he did, the reader may now understand how I got into the mood which enabled me to write The Red Flag.”
Connell finished off the song when he got home, and sent it to Harry Quelch, the editor of the SDF paper Justice, the next day! A few days later, on December 21st, it was published in Justice, under the heading, ‘A Christmas Carol’ (ironic, give the tune it ended up being always sung to…) Within a few days, apparently, socialists in Liverpool and Glasgow were singing the song at meetings, and it has remained a firm favourite of the left ever since.
Interestingly, though, the tune that The Red Flag is sung to is not the one Connell originally wrote the words to. He set the words he wrote on the New Cross train to the tune of The White Cockade, an old air from Ireland, but one AS Headingley, publishing a new version in 1895, changed this, re-setting it to the tune known as O Tannenbaum on Germany, or Maryland in the USA. This is slower than the ‘brisk, martial’ air Connell had in mind, and Connell was understandably a bit grumpy about this:
“There is only one air that suits The Red Flag and that is the one which I hummed as I wrote it. I mean The White Cockade. I mean moreover the original version known to everybody in Ireland fifty years ago. Since then some fool has altered it by introducing minor notes until it is now nearly a jig. This later version is the one on sale in music shops today and it does not, of course, suit my words. I suppose this explains why Adolphe Smythe Headingley induced people to sing The Red Flag to Maryland. Maryland acquired that name during the American War of Secession. It is church music and was no doubt composed, and is certainly calculated, to remind people of their sins and to frighten them into repentance. I daresay it is very good music for the purpose for which it was composed but that purpose was widely different from mine when I wrote The Red Flag. Every time the tune is sung to Maryland the words are murdered… the words are robbed of their proper emphasis and true value and meaning when sung to that air. The meaning of the music is different from the meaning of the words. Headingley may as well have set the song to The Dead March In Saul.”
Despite Connell’s objections, The Red Flag, as sung to Maryland/Tannenbaum, became well known as a socialist anthem across Europe and in many other countries.
It became the unofficial anthem of the Labour Party, sung after every Labour Party Conference, and famously, sung by Labour MPs in the House of Commons in the first session of Parliament after the Labour landslide of 1945. Of course, singing about the triumph of the working class and exalting them in speeches while using the army to break strikes, evicting squatters trying to house themselves, administering capitalism, launching colonial wars, or signing up to the nuclear arms race, seemingly held no contradiction for many of the Labour 1945 contingent, or indeed from Connell’s last days when Labour were already becoming a safe party to entrust capital to – and yea into our own day… ‘Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place’ indeed. (‘pelf’ means money, especially when ‘obtained dishonourably’, apparently!)
In subsequent years, Jim Connell left the SDF and joined the newly formed Independent Labour Party, and became the longtime secretary of the Workmen’s Legal Friendly Society, which he may have helped found . The Society was set up to give legal advice and aid to injured workers in the wake of the 1896 Workmens Compensation Act, which allowed legal claims from employees injured on the job for compensation from employers. Connell held this position for over twenty years, though he gradually became less involved in left politics.
………………
A few days after Jim Connell died in 1929, his funeral was held at Golders Green Crematorium. A number of people followed the hearse as it left his house, singing The Red Flag. At Golders Green, several hundred people gathered, many carrying red flags. Among the mourners were old friends of Connell, including veteran communist Tom Mann, as well as Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala, representatives of the TUC General Council, the Irish TUC and many more. Tom Mann read several of Connell’s songs, and the crowd again sang The Red Flag.
‘It was a very impressive occasion. Just as Jim was no ordinary man this was no ordinary funeral. The service opened in the lofty, ice-cold, red-bricked chapel with The Red Flag. First it was played to the tune of the White Cockade and then to Tannenbaum. A red flag draped the coffin bearing the words Socialism Advances. The chapel was filled. There were bearded stalwarts who had fought many a brave fight. There were frail-looking women with red rosettes. When they were offered song sheets they said: We know The Red Flag, of course we do.” (Daily Herald, 1929)
…………………..
Several years before this, the Labour Party hierarchy had attempted to get rid of the Red Flag. Labour leader and sometime Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald hated the song, and had disliked its author too (Connell apparently felt the same about Ramsay Mac). His and other objections actually led to a competition in 1925, when socialist songwriters were invited to submit more appropriate songs to replace it as the Labour’s official ditty. To the great chagrin of Connell, who waited angrily and upset – only to be cheered up immensely when the two judges appointed to read and give a verdict on the resulting songs submitted ruled that nothing in any way suitable had been handed in. Given the dire state of much lefty songwriting in any age, you can only imagine the quality of the intake… In any case, The Red Flag held its own, to Connell’s delight.
It wasn’t until the sparkly days of 2000 under Blair’s New Labour that the singing of The Red Flag at Labour conference was finally dropped. It did return a decade later.
Does it mean much today? After so many sellouts, imperialist wars, enthusiastic forays into privatisation and so much more?
Perhaps it’s appropriate here to also reprint the words to Leon Rosselson’s Battle Hymn of the New Socialist Party (written in 1962)
The cloth cap and the working class, as images are dated.
For we are Labour’s avante-garde, and we were educated.
By tax adjustments we have planned to institute the Promised Land
And just to show we’re still sincere, we sing The Red Flag once a year.
Firm principles and policies are open to objections;
And a streamlined party image is the way to win elections.
So raise the umbrella high, the bowler hat, the college tie
We’ll stand united, raise a cheer. And sing The Red Flag once a year.
It’s one step forward, one step back. Our dance is devilish daring
A leftward shuffle, a rightward tack, then pause to take our bearings.
We’ll reform the country bit by bit, so nobody will notice it
Then ever after, never fear, we’ll sing The Red Flag once a year.
We will not cease from mental fight till every wrong is righted,
And all men are equal quite, and all our leaders knighted.
For we are sure if we persist to make the New Year’s Honours list.
Then every loyal labour peer will sing The Red Flag once a Year.
So vote for us, and not for them, we’re just as true to NATO,
And we’ll be calm and British when we steer the ship of state-O.
We’ll stand as firm as them *
To show we’re patriotic gentlemen *
Though man to man shall brothers be, deterence is our policy.
So raise the mushroom cloud on high, within their shades we’ll live and die.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll sing The Red Flag once a year.
* these two lines sung to tune of “send her [or him, now] victorious, happy and glorious” from ‘God Save the King/Queen’
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An entry in the
2018 London Rebel History Calendar
LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES 
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