Constellation Similarity Assertions

Glasier, Katherine Bruce

Katharine St John Bruce Glasier[née Katharine St John Conway] (1867–1950), socialist and politician, was born on 25 September 1867 in Stoke Newington, London. She was the second of seven children of Samuel Conway, a Congregationalist minister based at Ongar, Essex, and his wife, Amy (née Curling), of a well-to-do Stoke Newington family. The classical scholar Robert Seymour Conway was her elder brother. She was christened Katharine St John (pronounced ‘Saint John’) Conway. The family moved to the Congregationalist manse in Walthamstow when Katharine was young. Although by middle-class standards her father's income was low, she and her brother and sisters were brought up with the assistance of servants. She was taught by her mother until ten, when she went to Hackney High School for Girls. In 1886 she went to Newnham College, Cambridge, with a clothworkers' scholarship in classics. There she was influenced by Helen Gladstone, who held strong high-church and feminist views. In 1889 she was placed in the second class of the classical tripos. Although Cambridge University refused to award degrees to women, Conway thereafter usually listed BA after her name in defiance of this sexual discrimination. Conway went to Bristol to teach at Redland high school. While senior classics mistress there, she became a socialist after witnessing striking female cottonworkers demonstrating during a service in All Saints, Clifton, in November 1890. She was briefly a member of the Bristol Socialist Society, an offshoot of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF). After leaving Redland high school, having either resigned or been sacked for attending a socialist meeting, she taught briefly, from autumn 1891, at a board school in the working-class St Phillips area of Bristol. That autumn she went to live with Dan Irving, a leading Bristol socialist, his invalid wife, and their children. Conway joined the Clifton and Bristol branch of the Fabian Society, a branch which before 1891 had been a Christian socialist society. As a daughter of Congregationalist manses, she found the views of this group more congenial than the class-war beliefs of the SDF. Conway was soon put on the national panel of Fabian lecturers by W. S. De Mattos, the society's lecture secretary. She lectured for the Fabians from the autumn of 1891, and did so on a regular basis from April 1892; she received 5s. a lecture plus travel and other expenses. She was a Bristol delegate at the Fabian Society's first annual conference in February 1892. Afterwards she became a member of a group of provincial Fabians, who were among the founders of the Independent Labour Party, a group started by S. G. Hobson, a fellow member of the Bristol Socialist Society. Conway's speaking engagements in 1892 included general election meetings in support of Ben Tillett in Bradford, the Manchester Labour church, and fringe meetings at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) held in September in Glasgow (where she first met John Bruce Glasier). At a separate meeting held during the TUC, she was one of six appointed to an arrangements committee to organize a conference to found a national Independent Labour Party (ILP). At the resulting conference held in Bradford in January 1893 she was one of fifteen elected to the ILP's first national administrative council. Although she did not stand for re-election, she remained a leading figure. Of the ILP's early days, Henry Pelling has observed that 'the “new woman” was almost as important an element in the leadership as the new unionist' (Pelling, 164). Katharine Conway, like Caroline Martyn, Enid Stacy, Isabella Ford, and Emmeline Pankhurst, was an able middle-class propagandist for the party. Her speeches were highly emotional, preaching an ethical ‘Come-unto-Jesus’ style of socialism. She was much influenced by Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Of the former she wrote that 'he gave me Jesus Christ's teaching in its wholeness and truth for the first time'. She continued making lengthy speaking tours after her marriage on 21 June 1893 to John Bruce Glasier. Both she and her husband were great favourites of socialists in west Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and elsewhere. She also campaigned for nursery schools, pithead baths, poor-law reform, and, later, the Save the Children Fund. Katharine Glasier edited the Labour Leader from mid-1916, after Fenner Brockway left to oppose conscription, until April 1921. She took over when its anti-war stance had reduced its circulation. Under her editorship it reached a new peak of 51,000 in 1917 and by early 1918 its circulation was over 62,000, but from 1920 it fell steeply. Her editorship was notable for a clash with Philip Snowden, with Glasier dissociating herself from his anti-Bolshevik writings. The strains of the editorship plus the delayed stress of nursing her terminally ill husband led to a nervous breakdown in April 1921. After her recovery she was appointed national ILP propagandist. When the ILP disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932, she left it and continued her propaganda work for the Labour Party. Katharine Glasier combined her activities as socialist propagandist with family life. She had three children: Jeannie, Malcolm, and John Glendower (Glen). She was much hurt by the deaths of her mother (1881), her husband (1920), and her younger son, Glen (1928). Like her husband, she aspired to be a poet. As well as socialist pamphlets she published three novels (Husband and Brother, 1894; Aimee Furniss, Scholar, 1896; and Marget, 1902–3) and a collection of short stories (Tales from the Derbyshire Hills, 1907). In later life she found support not only in her socialist faith but in her memberships of the Society of Friends and the Theosophical Society. Her home, Glen Cottage, Earby by Colne, Lancashire, where she lived from 1922 until her death on 14 June 1950, was preserved in her memory by the labour movement.

View Constellation