JT Murphy

John Thomas Murphy , also known as JT Murphy ( December 9, 1888 - May 13, 1965 ) was a British trade unionist .

Life and activity

John Thomas Murphy was the son of John Murphy, a blacksmith in an iron foundry, and his wife Sarah Pratt. The father was an Irish Catholic, the mother an English Baptist. He grew up in poor conditions in Wincobank , a village outside of Sheffield . Even as a child he had to contribute to the family's livelihood. He attended Wincobank Council School, which he left at age 13 to work at the Vickers Brightside works in Brithside, Sheffield. He used his job there to go through all the departments of the factory one after the other and thus acquire an engineering apprenticeship that enabled him to work as an engineer from 1908. He worked in this profession until 1918 and again in the late 1930s.

Around 1910 Murphy became active in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers , one of the largest unions in Great Britain. In the following years he took on numerous representative and official functions, such as secretary of the Engineering Amalgamation Committee in Sheffield, representative on the district committee of the ASE, delegate in the Sheffield Trades and Labor Council and as assistant secretary of the National Administrative Council of the Shop Stewards' Movement. In 1916 he joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), in which he became a member of the executive committee.

In the British general election of December 1918, Murphy ran as a candidate for the SLP in the Gorton constituency for a seat in the House of Commons , but was defeated. In 1919 he turned away from the SLP in order to take part in the founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) instead . Since 1921 he was a member of the central committee of the party.

In 1920 Murphy took part in the International Conference of Revolutionary Parties and Organizations of Western Europe in Amsterdam. In July of the same year he traveled to Russia to take part in the 2nd Congress of the Communist International. In 1921 he was sent by the CPGB as a delegate to the conference of the Red International of Labor Unions, in whose provisional executive committee he was later elected. In the summer of 1921 and November / December 1922 he took part in the 3rd and 4th Congress of the Communist International in Moscow.

Murphy spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. This resulted in his arrest in October 1925 along with eleven other members of the CPGB under the Incitment to Mutiny Act of 1797 and sentenced to six months' imprisonment.

In the general election of 1929 Murphy ran as a Communist candidate in the constituency of Hackney South and in 1930 and 1931 in the constituency of Sheffiel Brightside without being elected.

In 1932 Murphy left the Communist Party. He subsequently declared the founding of this party to be a mistake. Instead, he joined the East Islington Labor Party, where he became a member of its executive committee.

From 1934 to 1936 Murphy then served as Secretary General of the Socialist League. In 1936 he became the organizer of the Propaganda Committee of the Popular Front: This body was dedicated to the aim of soliciting support for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War among the British population.

Since the 1920s, Murphy worked as a writer, lecturer and freelance journalist in addition to his political work. During this time he became editor of the magazines Communist International and Communist Review . The books he has published include a biography of Joseph Stalin and a study of British war production, in which, based on his own observations, he made recommendations for making it more effective.

In later years he was a member of the National Minority Movement , a communist united front within the trade unions that tried to gain influence over the Trade Union Council.

family

In January 1921, Murphy married Ethel Morris.

Fonts

• The Worker's Committee. An Outline of Its Principles and Structure , 1917.
• The Labor Government. An Examination of Its Record , 1930.
• Preparing for power. A Critical Study of the History of the British Working Class Movement , 1934. (Reprinted 1972)
• Facism! The Socialist Answer , 1936.
• Manual of Soviet Enterprise , 1940.
• New Horizons , 1941.
• Russia on the March. A Study of Soviet Foreign Policy , 1941.
• Victory Production !: A Personal Account of Seventeen Months Spent as a Worker in an Engineering and an Aircraft Factory; with a Criticism of Our Present Methods of Production and a Plan for Its Reorganization , 1942.
• Labor's Big Three. A Biographical Study of Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrisson, and Ernest Bevin , London 1948
• Stalin, 1979-1944 , 1945. (In German as Stalin. A biography by JT Murphy. With a foreword by Sir Stafford Cripps )

literature

• Ralph Darlington: The Political Trajectory of JT Murphy , 1998.
• David Mayfall: Murphy, John Thomas , in: AT Lane (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders , Vol. 2, pp. 683f.