Tom Barker and the IWW in New Zealand
Martin Crick provides an insight into the politics and activity of early 20th Century socialist Tom Barker. First published in volume 3 of The Commonweal in May 2023.
Tom Barker was of that generation of socialists who were internationalists in practice as well as conviction, moving around the world as workers and agitators. As a young man in New Zealand he became a union militant and a leading member of the Industrial Workers of the World, playing a key role in the great strike of 1913. As Labour historian Eric Fry has commented, Tom ‘retained an abiding conviction that the working class movement rely fundamentally on the strength of its industrial organisations to defend and advance its interests.’
Barker was born at Crosthwaite, Westmorland, England on 3 June 1887. As a boy and young man he worked on farms, but then joined the army, although still under age. Because of scarlet and then rheumatic fever he was discharged as medically unfit in 1909, and then worked as a tram conductor in Liverpool. One day, according to his memoirs, he stuck his money bag over the head of an autocratic inspector, saying ‘You take the bloody thing. I’m going to New Zealand…and you can go to hell and so can the trams too.’
He arrived in Wellington in 1909, then moved North to Auckland, where he again got a job on the trams and joined the Auckland Electric Tramways Union. ‘That was the day’, he said, ‘from which you can say my part in the labour movement began. The first thing that I had always in my mind there was the necessity for unions and for means of protecting the working people against their employers.’ At that time he was still a practising Christian, although ironically he said later that ‘of course I wasn’t indoctrinated in anything’, and he was Liberal in his politics, believing that it was possible to improve the capitalist system. However, Auckland, ‘being so far away from anywhere, had very little entertainment’ but ‘it was a very active place politically.’ And so Tom attended meetings of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Socialist Party. Its organiser at that time was Australian Harry Scott Bennett, a brilliant propagandist and an advocate of industrial unionism, and Tom was persuaded to join the Party. Its chairman was a brewery worker and miner from Victoria in Australia, Michael Joseph Savage, and its Vice-Chair the Scot Peter Fraser.
The Auckland branch held weekly meetings in John Fuller’s Opera House at the bottom of Wellesley Street, and in the Federal Hall at the other end of the same street. Open air meetings were held on Sundays at Queen’s Wharf. Attendances were good, collections excellent and they sold large quantities of literature, particularly from Charles Kerr and Co. in Chicago, who still proudly proclaim that they have been ‘publishing subversive literature for the whole family since 1886.’ Popular newspapers included The Appeal to Reason (Kansas) and The Call (New York), and it is striking how US influence predominated, the British Socialist movement having little impact in Auckland. Tom attended economics classes run by Scott Bennett, studying Marxist texts such as Wage Labour and Capital, Value Price and Profit, Bebel’s Woman and Socialism etc. He later commented that ‘I don’t know in my experience since, wherever I have been, where this brand of education was so consistently and regularly done as it was in Auckland in those days.’ However, he said, ‘The trouble was that Scott was suffering from that famous Australian complaint of being boozed’, on one occasion hugging the lectern and falling flat on his face.
The Tramways Union was a small organisation dominated by the highly skilled motormen, but in 1910 Tom organised the unskilled workers and agitated for the union to adopt more militant attitudes. There was a growing feeling against the Conciliation and Arbitration system and the following year the union seceded from the craft-dominated Auckland Trades and Labour Council and affiliated with the ‘Red Feds’, the New Zealand Federation of Labour, whose organiser was Australian Bob Semple. Tom had persuaded them that ‘an ounce of Direct Action is worth a ton of Parliamentary string-pulling and Trade Council chin-wag’. At this time the ideas of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), were beginning to enter New Zealand. The IWW had been founded in June 1905 in Chicago. One of its founders was New Zealand born William Trautmann. The Wobblies were a syndicalist class-struggle organisation which rejected parliamentary politics in favour of industrial unionism, organising industrially rather than by trade, ‘one big union’. The organisation split in 1908, a minority Detroit-based group following Daniel de Leon in arguing for a combination of industrial and political action through his Socialist Labour Party.
The first New Zealand branch of the Wobblies, albeit short-lived, was formed in Wellington in 1908. It was followed by Christchurch in 1910. Bert Roth has suggested that IWW material was first imported into New Zealand by this group. One incident certainly supports this theory. The Christchurch branch of the Socialist Party had no funds to support its election campaigns, but the literature committee did. When the branch decided to use the literary fund to support electioneering its organisers, largely anarchists, immediately spent the money on a large order for books and pamphlets. They were duly expelled , and then formed an IWW club. Leading lights were Syd Kingsford and anarchist watchmaker Wyatt E. Jones. Some months later over 100,000 pamphlets arrived in large wicker baskets, mostly from Charles Kerr and Co.
The Auckland socialists also veered left, repudiating all forms of political action. There was a strong feeling that if anything was to be done in New Zealand then it had to be done through the industrial working class, rather than the electoral system. In November 1911 a group of Canadian syndicalists, including J B King, arrived in the city, and an I.W.W club was formed in April 1912. In May 1912 Tom Barker announced that he had joined the Industrial Workers of the World, regarding the NZSP as reformist and the FOL as craft and sectional in character. ‘I joined the I.W.W.’, he said, ‘because it supported industrial unionism…one union on one job…In order to get the best out of the power you have , you must be united.’ The I.W.W. was particularly vocal in support of the Waihi strike, advocating a general strike in solidarity, and many of the Auckland members went there to participate , but King was forced to leave New Zealand for Australia when threatened with prosecution for incitement to sabotage. Nonetheless, Wobbly influence was demonstrated when the FOL adopted its syndicalist preamble and announced its intention to re-model itself along syndicalist lines. Barker now wrote ‘Auckland Notes’ for the FOL’s weekly paper the Maoriland Worker, under the pseudonym ‘Spanwire’. The editor of the paper was Harry Holland, who had arrived in the country from Australia the previous year. Harry, said Tom, ‘was one of the great gladiators of the working-class movement…He was anti-militarist and far to the left…he had a wonderful speaking voice and an immense range of knowledge.’ However, I.W.W. members disliked the paper as it was full of advertisements, ‘sporting and society sections’, and not supportive of industrial unionism.
In 1913 Tom became New Zealand organiser for the I.W.W. In February they launched a monthly newspaper, the Industrial Unionist. One striking difference between this and the Maoriland Worker is that it made an effort to reach out to Maori workers. Despite its name the Maoriland Worker did not have much to do with tangata whenua, nor did they see Maori people as being oppressed by colonialist capitalism. The Industrial Unionist however published its first article in te reo Maori in July 1913, and seven in total. During the first half of the year over 100 outdoor meetings were held in Auckland. Tom then embarked on a tour of the country, first visiting Wellington, and then propagandising in Christchurch and Lyttelton in September. Local 2, as they called themselves, ‘though small, is active’, reported Kingsford. They were printing 4,000 copies of the I.W.W. preamble and sold four dozen copies of the paper at an SDP meeting. They would, therefore, have spread their syndicalist ideas to many workplaces in Christchurch. Barker and Kingsford were arrested for obstructing traffic at the Clock Tower and selling literature without a permit, and fined ten shillings. Tom never paid, instead leaving for a tour of the West Coast mining camps. When the 1913 waterfront strike began he arranged relays of speakers for Post Office Square in Wellington, organised pickets, and ensured Wobbly songs were sung. Strike leaders from outside Wellington were accommodated at the Arcadia Hotel and most, including Peter Fraser, slept on the floor, but Tom was given a bed. ‘I don’t know why’, he said, humorously suggesting that it was ‘possibly because I wasn’t going to be a future Prime Minister.’ He returned to Auckland to edit the Industrial Unionist, now appearing three times weekly, and on one afternoon alone he sold 700 copies on Queen Street. Circulation reached 4,000, an enormous achievement for a small organisation with limited funds and such radical ideas.
Barker was arrested for sedition in November and remanded to the Supreme Court in Wellington for sentencing. Because the police were fully extended dealing with the strike they refused to provide an armed escort, and so he persuaded the magistrate to trust him to make his own way to court. On arriving in Wellington he addressed a large crowd of strikers in Post Office Square before going to court. Crown Prosecutor Ostler said that his speech was ‘one of the most dangerous speeches made in the history of the industrial trouble and probably in New Zealand.’ He was convicted on 5th December and sentenced to three months imprisonment, serving time alongside Fraser, Semple, Holland and others. Released on bond and bound over for 12 months in January he returned to Auckland but, worried for his bondsman and for his own bond, he left for Australia the following month.
The defeat of the strike and the subsequent state repression led many Wobblies to leave New Zealand. The Auckland branch alone lost 15 key members in this way. In effect the end of the I.W.W. in New Zealand occurred at the same time as the end of the 1913 strike. There is no evidence of it continuing after the last Industrial Unionist was published on 29th November 1913.
The dominant Labour historiography of ‘the forward march of labour’ has seen the I.W.W., along with other left-wing groups, as having its ultimate victory with the election of a Labour government in 1935. This view is erroneous, it downplays the radicalism of the pre-war struggles, and misrepresents the politics and goals of the I.W.W. Tom Barker parted ways politically with all those future leaders of the Labour Party mentioned here, Semple, Fraser, Savage and Holland, although he remained on friendly terms with them. The I.W.W. was syndicalist, influenced by both Marxism and anarchism. Peter Steiner has suggested that ‘some wobbly activists’ ideas were actually very close to anarcho-syndicalism’. Philip Josephs, co-founder of the anarchist Freedom Group in Wellington, helped Tom organise his meetings there, and British syndicalist E.J.B.Allen wrote a series of articles in the Industrial Unionist where he discussed syndicalism and anarchism, and referred to anarchists as ‘Direct Actionists’, the same term used by Tom Barker to describe the I.W.W. in Aotearoa. Steiner also notes that a number of Wobblies were in favour of de-centralisation.
What is evident is that New Zealand Wobblies, with Tom Barker very much the driving force, made a major contribution to the rising tide of industrial militancy in pre-WW1 New Zealand, and raised the class-consciousness of many workers here. Barker continued to agitate for the I.W.W. in Sydney, editing its paper Direct Action. The Wobblies were vociferous in their opposition to the First World War, and were in the vanguard of the campaign against conscription. Tom was imprisoned from March-August 1916, 12 others arrested and incarcerated on charges of treason, and the organisation was declared illegal in December 1916. His most famous anti-conscription poster read ‘TO ARMS!! Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians, Landlords, Newspaper Editors and Other Stay-at-Home Patriots. Your country needs you in the Trenches! Workers, Follow Your Masters.’ Arrested again before the second conscription referendum in December 1917 he was held in gaol and then deported to Chile in 1918. He organised waterfront workers there and in Argentina. Returning to Europe he met Lenin in Moscow and agreed to work for the Kuzbas industrialisation project, his role to recruit technicians in the United States. It is worth noting that he refused to join the Communist Party but was nonetheless highly regarded by Lenin. In July 1931 and early 1932 he returned to New Zealand to negotiate an oil contract between the Soviet government and the Associated Motorists Petrol Company of New Zealand and in 1933 travelled to Wellington for the arrival of the first shipment of Soviet oil. He then settled back in England, in London. When Peter Fraser was Prime Minister of New Zealand he always invited Tom to official receptions there. He became a Labour councillor in St.Pancras, and its Mayor from 1958-1959. Tom Barker died on 2 April 1970.
Eric Fry describes him thus: ‘Tom Barker was a self-taught man of great talent who made himself a master of speaking and writing, politics and culture. Completely sincere and self-sacrificing in his principles, he accepted the hardships and welcomed the freedom of being a citizen of the world. He loved humanity and enjoyed life, bearing no malice even against those who persecuted him, and leaving behind him a multitude of friends wherever he went. He saw himself modestly as taking part in a movement for the betterment of mankind, a movement which had already taken many forms and would be unending. In old age he was still alert and busy, living for the present and the future to the end.’
Further reading:
E.C.Fry (ed) Tom Barker and the I.W.W. (1965)
Erik Olssen Barker, Tom: Tram conductor, trade unionist, socialist (Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, 1996)
Peter Steiner The Industrial Workers of the World in Aotearoa (2006)