Hush-a-by Baby
On the tree-top,
When you grow up,
You can work in a shop;
When you get married
Your wife can work too,
So that the rich
Shall have nothing to do.
Hush-a-by Baby, on the tree-top,
When you grow up your wages will stop,
When you have spent the little you save,
It’s hush-by-Baby
Then off to your grave.
Charles Kitching
Charles Kitching, born in March 1853, was the son of a soldier, Thomas Kitching, who had died in the Crimean War when Charles was only two years old. Charles’ paternal family had cut themselves off from him as a result of his father marrying beneath himself. Was it this legacy of perceived inequality between his parents that led to Charles’s adherence to the Socialist cause? Or was it perhaps what he read of the ordinary soldiers’ suffering in his father’s letters from the Crimea?
By 1871, at the age of eighteen, Charles was living in London, employed as a clerk at a silversmith’s and lodging with the porter of that establishment. He was married three times, outliving all three wives. Charles seems to have continued to live in various parts of London for the rest of his life, usually recorded in censuses as a clerk and book-keeper to a watchmaker and jeweller. However, in 1907 he is recorded on his daughter’s marriage certificate as a shop assistant which can, perhaps, account for his being a founder member of the Shop Assistants’ Union. The National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks represented retail workers across the United Kingdom. It had been founded in 1891 after a merger between the East London Shop Assistants’ Union and the Warehouse Assistants’ Union. In 1893, the union’s membership was just under 1,300 but by 1900 it had reached 7,500. In 1910, the Union had more than 21,000 members, including 3,000 women, and was the second largest union of retail workers in the country.
By this point, Charles Kitching had, for some years, been involved with early Socialism in England. In a document dated Sunday, June 6th, 1886, at a meeting of the Hammersmith Socialist League, his name and those of two other members of the Hammersmith Liberal Club were put forward for election.[1]
The Democratic Federation evolved into the Social Democratic Federation, whose aims included ‘improved housing for urban and agricultural workers, free compulsory education for all classes, including school meals, an eight-hour working day.’[2] William Morris, the well-known poet, artist and designer, became a very active and prominent member. He wrote pamphlets and travelled the country, addressing public meetings which sometimes ended in disarray or even arrests by the police.
In June 1881 a radical movement called the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) had been founded in London.[3] The Chairman was Henry Mayers Hyndman and in 1883 William Morris became a member and Treasurer.
On 14th June 1884, the Hammersmith Branch of the Social Democratic Federation was inaugurated which held its meetings in Morris’s Hammersmith home, Kelmscott House.[4] This was considered ‘the most highly cultured Federation Branch’.[5] However, Morris disagreed on significant points with Hyndman and at the end of 1884 he split with Hyndman and the SDF to form the Hammersmith Socialist League, of which Charles Kitching was proposed a member on 6th June 1886 and elected on 20th June.[6] Charles chaired one of the weekly meetings of the League in August 1886, but his main role seems to have been that of public speaker. His name appears frequently in the British Library records as one of the League’s speakers and he was active in the League from his election in June 1886 until November of that year and then again from 20th July 1888 until the end of August 1888 when the records cease.
Charles Kitching’s upbringing had made him acutely aware of the disparities between rich and poor and through his work with the Social Democratic Federation, the Croydon Labour Party and the Shop Assistant’s Union, he was able to participate actively in the debates surrounding issues of inequality in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.
By Jane Page and Claire Kennan.
Jane is a U3A researcher for the Citizens 800 Project. Claire is a Citizens 800 Project Officer and PhD researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London.
[1] British Library Additional Manuscripts 45891 and 45892.
[2] Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 460.
[3] Ibid., p. 472.
[4] Ibid., p. 491.
[5] Ibid., p. 493.
[6] British Library Additional Manuscripts 45891 and 45892.
[7] MacCarthy, pp. 519-20.
