Ben Tillett

Ben Tillett

Benjamin Tillett (born September 11, 1860 in Bristol , † January 27, 1943 ) was a British trade unionist and politician.

Life and activity

Tillett started working in a brick factory when he was eight. At the age of twelve, he went to sea on a fishing cutter for six months, before completing an apprenticeship as a boot maker. He then hired first with the Royal Navy and then with the Merchant Navy, and finally settled down as a loading worker in the port of London in the mid-1880s.

In 1887 Tillett began to work as a union organizer by forming the Tea Operatives and General Laborers Union in the Tilbury docks. After being renamed Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Laborers 'Union , it soon developed into a well-known union that gained national fame when it took part in the London dockers' strike of 1889. During the port workers' strikes of 1911 and 1912, he reappeared as a strike leader.

As a prominent trade unionist, Tillett helped found the Independent Labor Party , but soon after joined the Social Democratic Federation instead. He was also a member of the Fabian Society and the Bristol Socialist Society. A first political election office held Tillett from 1892 to 1898 as a member of the London City Council (London County Council).

In 1910, Tillett was instrumental in founding the British National Transport Workers' Federation, which brought together Tillett's Tea Operatives and General Laborers Union and the Seamen's Union , led by Havelock Wilson . Since that time he sat (until 1932) in the General Council of the British Trade Union Congress (General Council of the Trades Union Congress).

While Tillett advocated pacifist views in the years up to the First World War and demanded that in the event of a European war the workers of all European states should refuse to fight each other and instead transform the war into an international war of the working class against the ruling classes of all countries , after the outbreak of the First World War he stood behind the British government and its war aims, as he saw this war as a struggle for the preservation of freedom and liberalism. In 1917 he even published a pamphlet in which he presented corresponding views.

In a by-election for the British Parliament in 1917, Tillett was elected as a candidate for the Labor Party in the constituency of Salford North in this. He was then a member of parliament until 1924. After he succeeded in returning to parliament after five years of absence on the occasion of the election in 1929, he belonged to it again for two years, until 1931. So Tillett sat for nine years between 1917 and 1931, for a period of fourteen years. He had previously run for parliament four times in 1892, 1895, 1906 and 1910: the first two times in the Bradford West constituency, in 1906 in Eccles and most recently in Swansea.

When the National Transport Workers' Federation merged with several other unions in 1922 to form the enlarged Transport and General Workers Union, Tillett - although his union was the largest union to become part of the transport union - lost his position as leader of the British dockworkers his previous deputy, Ernest Bevin , who became General Secretary at the head of the new large union. But Tillett was given a leading position in the new body as its International and Political Secretary, a position he retained until 1931.

Fonts

• A Brief History of the Dockers 'Union, commemorating the 1889 Dockers' strike , 1910.
• A History of the London Transport Workers' Strike , 1911.
• "Who was Responsible for the War and why?" , 1917.
• Some Russian Impressions , 1925.
• Memories and Reflections, an Autobiography , 1931.

literature

• "Ben Tillett" in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 1941-1950 , 1949, pp. 883-886.
• Jonathan Schneer: Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labor Leader , Croom Helm, 1982.

Web links

Commons : Ben Tillett  - collection of images, videos and audio files