“Oh mad, foolish Grayson!” Editorial in the socialist magazine The Clarion, August 1907 In the aftermath of the general election of February 1974, the mood in Marsden socialist club in west Yorkshire was grim. David Clark, the young Labour MP for Colne Valley, in which the former mill town of Marsden sits, had lost his seat. Clark gamely attempted to lift his activists’ spirits with a rousing speech. But one elderly stalwart remained unmoved: “Old Harry was sitting at the bar nursing a pint,” recalls Clark, who is now 80 and a Labour peer. “He said: ‘All due respect to master Dave, but we’ve only ever had one true socialist MP around here. And that was Victor Grayson.’” Clark had heard this name many times before, always pronounced with a special reverence and a wistful sense of what might have been. With more time on his hands, he began to look into the story of the predecessor who inspired so much affection and emotion. What he discovered, and recorded in a recently updated biography, remains one of the most remarkable stories in the history of British politics and one of its biggest unsolved mysteries. For a brief period at the start of the last century, while still in his twenties, Victor Grayson became the most famous socialist in England and a potential Labour leader. Then, 100 years ago this September, he vanished without trace. As Clark puts it: “One day in 1920, he walked out of his apartment accompanied by two men and was never conclusively seen again. What happened has fascinated me for half a century.” Precocious radicalism Grayson made his name in the Colne Valley by-election of 1907. At the age of 26, fresh out of theological college in Manchester, he became the first avowedly socialist candidate to win a seat in parliament. It was a sensational victory. The Labour party, seven years old and led by Keir Hardie, had made its first major breakthroughs at the previous year’s general election. But this had been achieved through becoming, in effect, a junior partner to the Liberals, who stood aside in selected constituencies. Feeling their way, Labour’s first great leaders – Hardie, Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald – were sticking to a mild programme of incremental reform to working conditions. Grayson’s precocious radicalism flamed across this horizon like a red comet. Colne Valley constituency, a mill-owners’ fiefdom, was a Liberal bastion that was believed to be unconquerable. Ignoring the reservations of the Labour leadership, Grayson took on the local political establishment, advocating revolutionary socialism and female suffrage. In his manifesto, he told the textile workers of the valley: “I do not believe that we are divinely destined to be drudges … the time for our emancipation has come.” Unbelievably, he won.
The result was national news. On the evening of Grayson’s victory, a special correspondent for the Daily Express wrote: “The Red Flag waves over Colne Valley today. The fever of Socialism has infected thousands of workers.” But it was the manner and style of Grayson’s campaign, as much as his politics, that made him, in the words of one of his supporters, “the darling of the socialist movement”. Handsome, genial and eloquent, Grayson seemed to be blessed with every political gift. An Irish priest who followed Grayson’s campaign wrote: “Never have I seen people so moved; least of all these Yorkshire people, whose main interest I always thought to be ‘t’brass’ – never have I seen crowds so swept by the Holy Spirit.” The evangelical zeal was supplemented with quicksilver repartee and jokes: “Any great orator needs humour and warmth,” says Clark. “Much of Grayson’s style was about making people laugh. There was a famous occasion when he stopped halfway through a speech and said to the women in this working-class audience, ‘Ladies, what do you think of my hair today?’” At dizzying pace, such playfulness could give way to withering denunciations. Grayson could be funny or he could be excoriating, as when telling one Yorkshire rally: “We count it not only unjust, but undignified, for able-bodied persons to eat luxurious food [and] wear extravagant clothes, live in many and princely houses, all produced by others who grovel on the margin of existence.” ‘Traitors to your class’ According to Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham, Grayson was a shining light in an almost forgotten Labour tradition. “He was a kind of political preacher,” says Cruddas. “He came from the pulpit tradition and embodied a radical humanism that staked everything on a moral critique of early-20th-century capitalism. There was nothing doctrinaire or pseudo-scientific about his socialism, in contrast to some of the Marxist currents around at the time. It was a battle about dignity and ethics. But, of course, it became very sad, what happened.”
Grayson was an inspirational figure, but he was also flawed and vulnerable. An adopted child, there were persistent rumours that he was the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, which may have fuelled an insecurity that led to a growing alcohol problem. In London, he acquired a reputation for fine living which raised eyebrows in the non-conformist Pennines communities that had elected him. In parliament, he picked unwise fights with Labour colleagues. Six months after entering the House of Commons, Grayson was ordered from the chamber by the speaker after repeatedly disrupting a debate on temperance to talk about the plight of the unemployed. At the third time of asking he finally left, telling fellow Labour MPs: “I leave the House with pleasure. You are traitors to your class. You will not stand up for your class, you traitors.” It was the beginning of the end of a dazzling but short-lived parliamentary career. In the election of 1910, Grayson narrowly lost his seat in Colne Valley and his love of whisky was becoming a serious problem. He suffered nervous breakdowns. When, in 1914, he was found incapable of delivering a speech to a packed hall in Bradford, his loyal Yorkshire backers reluctantly cut their losses. As Clark writes in his biography: “A link which had lasted for ten years was severed – broken with regrets, for the Colne Valley activists had expected much, perhaps too much, from Victor Grayson. He had … given them their finest hour [but] the pressure was too great; his love of the good things of life proved too distracting. The whisky which had acted as his stimulant became his master.”
The first world war led to a wider and more acrimonious parting of the ways with old allies. The vast majority of Grayson’s radical supporters within Labour were passionately anti-war, although the party itself was split. Grayson, who had railed against Prussian militarism, backed the conflict, in which he would fight and be wounded. He became a poster boy of the government’s recruitment campaign, addressing rallies throughout Britain, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. In newspapers, he wrote fulsome appreciations of the then first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. An army medical report recorded that he was drinking a bottle of whisky a day while at the front. As support for the war drew him into new circles of influence, he was making dangerous but lucrative liaisons with such unlikely bedfellows as the newspaper proprietor, fraudster and populist patriot Horatio Bottomley. Beaten up on the Strand In 1920, the year he disappeared, Grayson was living in London, occupying an expensive suite of rooms in Piccadilly. Although he wrote occasional pieces of journalism, the income they generated would hardly have financed such lavish accommodation. Instead, Clark believes, after the war the former MP had turned to some form of blackmail. The natural generosity of spirit and joie de vivre had turned into something darker. “In political terms, he’d lost almost everything. He’d alienated the unions by calling their MPs traitors and he’d outraged the socialist left by backing the war. I think, when he came back, he must have calculated that the only way of maintaining his lifestyle was by exploiting the contacts he made with powerful establishment figures.” One of the regular visitors to Grayson’s apartment was a colourful and corrupt Whitehall fixer named Maundy Gregory. A peacock figure given to ostentatious displays of wealth, Gregory was said by a contemporary to habitually carry round “a wad of banknotes the size of a newly born baby’s head”. He had carved a postwar niche for himself illegally selling knighthoods, baronetcies and peerages on behalf of David Lloyd George’s government. In a public meeting of the time, Grayson summoned up some of the old fire: “The sale of honours,” he told his audience, “is a national scandal. It can be traced right down to 10 Downing Street, and to a monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall. I know this man and one day I will name him.” But Grayson never carried out the threat. “He was probably being paid, on the authority of Lloyd George, to shut his mouth,” says Clark. In mid-September 1920, Grayson was beaten up in the Strand. Then, at the end of the month, the young manageress of his apartment block, Hilda Porter, saw Grayson leave accompanied by two men with whom he had been in discussions all afternoon. Porter later said his last words were: “I’ll be in touch soon.” Was he murdered? For decades, that was the common assumption. But Clark now believes that Grayson was paid off for good and told to adopt a new identity. “Remember there was no television. It was possible even for well-known people to go unrecognised in a way that couldn’t happen now. I think, in 1920, Victor had tired of his superstar status. He had been terribly affected by the recent death of his wife, Ruth. Lloyd George may have got fed up paying him and Grayson was presented with an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
The theory is supported by an intriguing piece of testimony from a former Colne Valley comrade. In the 1930s, a veteran of the famous by-election of 1907 claimed to have tracked Grayson down to a furniture shop in London, which he said he owned. Ernest Marklew had himself become the Colne Valley MP in 1935. Shortly before his death, he told a Labour colleague that, after Grayson confirmed his identity, he begged Marklew to say nothing, as he had left public life. The exact details of the encounter, Clark thinks, were changed to protect him. Clark originally called his book about Grayson Labour’s Lost Leader. But, in truth, he says, the mercurial hero of Colne Valley would not have been right for that role. “The Labour party had opted against the revolutionary road to socialism and they were working at what they had to do – become an official opposition and start to appeal to people who hadn’t made the jump to socialist thinking. Gifted as he was, Grayson would not have had the temperament to deal with that.” But there can be no doubt that, in the unforgiving hills of the Pennines, he achieved something remarkable. Cruddas believes there are lessons to learn from Grayson’s astonishing ability to connect. “The modern left is in danger, at times, of looking soulless,” he says. “A mixture of doctrinaire edicts and liberal neutrality. The early Grayson came from a different, warmer tradition. His kind of radical humanism is exactly what the left needs today.” Soon after the triumph of 1907, when Grayson was still at the height of his powers, a fellow socialist tried to capture the impact he was making. “The children in the Colne Valley learn to pronounce his name,” wrote Wilfred Thompson in an early biography, “almost before they begin to say ‘Father’. Some are christened after him. It is a very common thing to see them sitting upon the edge of the platform at his meetings, almost before they can walk. Every Colne Valley child knows ‘Vitter Gayson’.” The memories were to remain long after the man had gone.