Robert Tressell

Irish · 1870 to 1911

Born Robert Croker on April 17, 1870, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin, the illegitimate son of Samuel Croker, a retired Resident Magistrate of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and Mary Noonan, an Irish Catholic woman who raised him in her faith and gave him her surname, Robert Tressell received what his daughter would later call a very good education and spoke several languages. By sixteen he had broken with his family, declaring he would not live on income derived from absentee landlordism. Between 1890 and 1901 he lived in South Africa, working as a sign-writer and house-painter in Cape Town and then Johannesburg, where he was drawn into trade-union organising, joined the International Independent Labour Party, sat on committees alongside the future Sinn Féin founder Arthur Griffith, and was granted custody of his daughter Kathleen after a divorce in 1897. He returned to England before the Boer War, settled in Hastings, and worked as a journeyman painter and decorator on terms far worse than he had known in South Africa. He chose the pen name Tressell, a play on the trestle table he carried to work each day, because he feared his socialist views would have him blacklisted. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written by night between 1906 and 1910, follows a group of house-painters in the fictional town of Mugsborough through a year of work and want. All three publishers he sent it to rejected it; Kathleen rescued the 1,600-page manuscript from her father's planned bonfire and hid it under her bed. Tubercular and bound for Canada, he got only as far as Liverpool. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis on February 3, 1911, aged forty, and was buried in a pauper's grave with twelve others; the site was rediscovered in 1970.