Born in 1888, the son of an Irish Catholic father and an English Baptist mother, John Thomas Murphy was brought up with an older and a younger sister in a ‘back-to-back’ terraced house in Wincobank, a small village on the outskirts of Sheffield, The family was poor, not least because of his father’s drinking bouts and habit of leaving his work as a blacksmith’s striker to take an alcoholic tramping holiday for several weeks each spring. To supplement the family income, Murphy’s mother took in lodgers and baked and sold bread and cakes, which, from the age of seven, young...

Significantly, as the historian of the movement has pointed out, the tenor of the wartime shop stewards’ thinking was organisational and its innovations lay in the field of industrial tactics, not of political strategy as such.¹ By and large, its leaders were practical figures whose thinking, so far as it rose above everyday matters, was more concerned with elaborating tactics than debating the long-term strategy or ultimate goals of the class struggle. Even Murphy, probably the most intellectually able of them, did not, at least during the war years, progress beyond tactical thinking, important and often original though that was....

After the war Murphy was only just able to survive on the meagre unemployment benefit he received by selling some furniture and books and with financial support from his mother. However, freed from the constraints of work, he was able to throw himself into fulltime activity as chair of the Sheffield Workers’ Committee and assistant secretary of the National Administrative Council of the SS&WCM. He also became active in the Sheffield branch of the Plebs League, which organised study classes among trade unionists, and gave two weekly Labour College lectures on Marxist economics and industrial history. In addition, after being...

On his return to Britain in December 1920 from the Second Congress of the Comintern, Murphy immediately went to visit his ex-girlfriend Ethel (‘Molly’) Morris in London. Molly had been active in the pre-war suffragette campaign as the organiser of the Sheffield branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), involved in distributing leaflets, organising meetings and putting firecrackers into letter boxes. In 1913 she had sold Murphy a copy of the newspaperThe Suffragetteat an open-air meeting near Sheffield Town Hall, a regular meeting place for radical protest groups. Whilst Murphy was sympathetic to the suffragette cause,...

As we have seen, a crucial factor influencing Murphy’s, and the Communist Party’s, political development was the role of the Comintern based in Moscow. In turn, underlying the Comintern’s role was the changing nature of the Russian workers’ state in the first few years after the 1917 revolution. Indeed, it is impossible to fully understand the way in which Murphy and the CP operated inside Britain without placing their activities within the much broader context of the rise to power of the Stalinist bureaucracy inside the Russian state.

From the moment of its victory the Russian revolution had faced severe...

During the period that Murphy was based in Moscow as the CPGB representative on the ECCI, his relationship with the British Communist Party leadership, already tense in the wake of the post-General Strike debate, continued to be very strained. Involved in monitoring the political situation in Britain and advising the CPGB on strategy and tactics, he gradually became embroiled in major arguments concerning a contrasting assessment of the political situation inside the British labour movement in the wake of the General Strike and the attitude communists should adopt towards the Labour Party, as well as over the question of the...

As we have seen, there was a very strained relationship between Murphy and other leaders of the CPGB from the mid-1920s onwards. There had been the major argument immediately after the General Strike, with Murphy’s polemical article inCommunist International(with Page Arnot) attacking the party’s failure to criticise the ‘left’ trade union leaders. Then there had been Murphy’s critique of the party’s acceptance of the TUC’s instruction to trades councils to disaffiliate from the Minority Movement. This was followed by the bitter and protracted battle to gain the party’s acceptance of the need for a sharp leftward turn towards...

A noticeable feature of Murphy’s political trajectory after his expulsion from the Communist Party was his growing distance from the working-class movement in which he had earlier played such a prominent role. Thus, as a member of the Socialist League’s national leadership, he found himself amidst a predominantly public school and university educated group of people. Amongst the 23 people who served as national council members between 1932 and 1937 there were two Etonians, three Wykchamists, and one old Harrovian. At least nine had been at Oxford or Cambridge, and four at London University. The formal education of only two,...

Aged 76, Murphy died on 13 May 1965 of a cerebral haemorrhage.¹ Whilst he had been only one of a generation of autodidact British Marxists of the early years of the twentieth century, J. T. Murphy was a worker-intellectualpar excellence. Possessing a distinctive political analysis he wrote down his reflections in the most graphic, concise and lucid form, and combined an avid theoretical enquiry with a long-standing commitment to the working-class movement and the struggle against capitalism in which he played such a prominent role. Moving from syndicalism to communism to left reformism to popular frontism to anti-Marxism, Murphy’s...