Francis Platt

Frank Kitz (1849 – 8 January 1923) was an English anarchist.

Born in the Kentish Town area of London as Francis Platt, he was illegitimate and grew up in poverty. He later claimed that his father was a German refugee from the revolutions of 1848, although his biological father was asserted by Florence Boos to have been John Lewis, an English watchmaker. He supported the ideals of the French Revolution in his youth, and attended radical meetings, such as those of the Reform League, participating in the Hyde Park riot of 1867.

Platt completed an apprenticeship as a dyer, and travelled extensively looking for, being particularly impressed by the poverty he saw in the industrial cities of northern England. On several occasions, he supported himself by enlisting in the British Army and then absconding.

Around 1874, he took the surname "Kitz", and settled in Soho. There, he joined the Democratic and Trades Alliance Association, soon renamed as the Manhood Suffrage League. In this organisation, he met veterans of the Chartist movement, and also of the International Workingmen's Association, and served for a time as the league's secretary. By 1877, the league was in decline, and Kitz, fluent in both English and German, founded the English Revolutionary Society, which brought together league members and recent German immigrants. This moved into premises on Rose Street, and became widely known as the Rose Street Club. In 1879, he set up a printing shop on Boundary Street in Shoreditch, and began putting out propaganda, particularly focusing on supporting rent strikes.

Johann Most, a former German parliamentarian, and the editor of Freiheit, became prominent in the Rose Street Club. In 1881, he was sentenced to hard labour for publishing an article calling for assassinations of rulers; Kitz then took over the editorship for a short time.

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