Tom Bell (socialist)

Thomas Bell (20 September 1882 – 19 April 1944) was a Scottish socialist politician and trade unionist. He is best remembered as a founding member of both the Socialist Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain and as the editor of Communist Review, the official monthly magazine of the latter.

Thomas "Tom" Bell was born in Parkhead on the east end of Glasgow, Scotland, which was at that time still a semi-rural village. His father was a stonemason who was frequently unemployed, while his mother came from a family of coal miners and worked at home spinning cotton and silk. Young Tom enrolled in school in the spring of 1889 and left in the spring of 1894, at the age of 11, going to work first as a milk delivery boy and then as an employee at a soft drink bottling plant to help support his impoverished family.

While an employee at the bottling shop, Bell became interested in atheism and labour politics. He read rationalist works by Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley as well as works on evolution by Charles Darwin and gradually became acquainted with socialist ideas. Together with two companions, Bell joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1900.

The young "socialist idealist and enthusiast" Bell found the rather mild and ameliorative program of the ILP insufficient and in 1902 he began to attend economics classes conducted by the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), headed by Henry Hyndman, which introduced Bell to the literature of Marxism. In February 1903, Bell left the ILP and enrolled as a member of the SDF.

...
Wikipedia