Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/265

 Cowley Grange, the home he built for himself on the banks of the Cherwell, many of his old Oxford pupils have borne testimony.

 HARDIE, JAMES KEIR (1856–1915), socialist and labour leader, was born in a one-roomed cottage at Legbrannock, near Holytown, Lanarkshire, 15 August 1856. His father was a ship's carpenter and trade unionist, and his mother, Mary Keir, had been a domestic servant. His youth was passed in extreme poverty. At seven he became a messenger boy, then he worked for a time in a ship-yard, and afterwards as a baker's errand boy. His parents having moved back from Glasgow into the coal district, he went to work at ten years of age as trapper in a Lanarkshire mine, remaining for twelve years in the pits, and rising to be a skilled hewer. During these years he attended evening school, and became an active worker in the temperance movement, in which he met his wife, Lillie, daughter of Duncan Wilson, collier, whom he married in 1879. In the later 'seventies he began to agitate among the miners, then very badly paid and practically unorganized. His activity cost both him and his two younger brothers their jobs; and Hardie was black-listed by the coal-owners.

In 1878 Hardie opened a stationer's shop at Low Waters, and began journalistic work as local correspondent for the Glasgow Weekly Mail. He had now set to work in good earnest to get the miners organized, and for many years he acted as an unpaid official of various new miners' associations. Thus in 1879 the Hamilton miners made him their correspondence secretary, and he used this position to get into touch with the miners in other parts of the country, with a view to forming a national union. Later in that year he was appointed miners' county agent for Lanarkshire, and a conference of miners from the various Scottish coal-fields gave him the title of national secretary, though no national organization yet existed. In 1880, still practically without organization, the Lanarkshire miners struck against a wage reduction, and, though they were defeated, the struggle prepared the way for a county union. After leading the men in this dispute, Hardie accepted an invitation from the Ayrshire miners to become their county secretary, and took up his quarters at Cumnock, where his home remained for the rest of his life. In 1881 the Ayrshire miners struck and were defeated; but Hardie continued the work of organization until, in 1886, the Ayrshire miners' union was at length formed on a stable basis, with himself as secretary. In the same year he was made secretary of the Scottish miners' federation, formed by the various county unions which he had helped to create. Hardie was paid either nothing at all or only small honoraria for his services with these bodies. He supported himself mainly by journalism, joining the staff of two local newspapers in 1882. During these years he was still a liberal; but in 1887 he was already mooting the idea of a distinct labour party, and proposing to stand for North Ayrshire as an independent labour candidate. In 1888 his rupture with the liberals was complete, and he stood as a labour candidate against both liberal and conservative at the Mid-Lanark by-election, sometimes described as the first independent labour contest. He polled only 617 votes out of 7,381. During the contest unsuccessful attempts were made by the liberals to buy him off. He was offered a safe liberal seat at the next general election and an income of £300 a year. This, as well as subsequent offers of money from several sources, he refused. The year of this election is also notable for the formation, under Hardie's chairmanship, of the Scottish labour party, the first independent labour political party in Great Britain, subsequently merged in the Independent Labour Party.

Before the Mid-Lanark election, at the beginning of 1887, Hardie started a paper of his own, The Miner, which was continued for two years. In 1889, the year of the great dock strike in London, generally regarded as the beginning of a new epoch in British labour history, this was succeeded by the Labour Leader, published monthly till 1894, and thereafter weekly. This paper, which became the principal mouthpiece of the new political socialist movement and the ‘new unionism’, greatly increased Hardie's influence; and in 1892 he was elected as independent labour member of parliament for South West Ham, the death of the liberal candidate shortly before the election giving him a straight fight with a unionist. At the same election John Burns was returned for Battersea. Hardie's election undoubtedly helped forward the movement for an independent working-class party, and early in 1893 the various local and sectional bodies united to form the Independent 239