Thomas Glynn

Tom Glynn was an active organizer for the I. W. W. and a fighter against racism on two continents. Tom Barker recalls that Glynn was an Irishman from Galway, but by the turn of the 20th Century he was in South Africa. After serving as a soldier in the Boer War, he worked as a tramway motorman in Johannesburg, South Africa, and participated in the I. W. W. tramway workers' strike. He was fired, which prompted another strike that was put down by military force. Glynn was arrested and sentenced to three months' hard labor, but won an appeal.

He emigrated to Australia in 1911, where he became editor of Direct Action, the Australian I. W. W.'s official organ, and was a leader in the fight against the racist "White Australia" policy. In 1916 he was framed on charges of treason and arson with eleven other Australian Wobblies, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. When the verdict came down, he told the court,

Politicians have been responsible for us being where we are today, but so far as I'm concerned, I know that this verdict and the sentences that are to follow will help the working class to understand, better than years of talk would do, the ideas for which we fight.

Australian labor rallied to the cause of the Sydney 12, and in 1920 a new Labor government ordered an inquiry into the case with the result that Glynn and most of his co-defendants were freed immediately--though of course the government rejected any possibility of corruption.

Glynn was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920, after the I. W. W. had been crushed in Australia, but he left the CPA the following year ("drifted away" according to the Encyclopedia of Marxism), rejecting the Stalinist "United Front" policy.

I have not been able to find any information about his later life.

Sources:

Jack and Ray Simons, Class & Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950 (1968)

Lucien van der Walt, "A History of the IWW in South Africa", Bread & Roses #7

----------, "Bakunin’s Heirs in South Africa: Race and Revolutionary Syndicalism from the IWW to the International Socialist League, 1910-1921" (2003)

Issy Wyner, "My Union Right or Wrong: A history of the Ship Painters and Dockers Union 1900-1932" (2003), on the web at Takver's invaluable Australian history site.

Further reading:

Ian Turner, "Sydney's Burning: The Real Conspiracy" (Excerpt) (1967, Alpha Books)