‘Please, Sir, he called me “Jimmy!”’ Political Cartooning before the Law: ‘Black Friday’, J.H. Thomas, and the Communist Libel Trial of 1921

Abstract

In April 1921, J.H. Thomas, the Labour Party MP and National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) leader, initiated libel proceedings against the Communist—journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He cited defamation in the form of cartoons and words depicting the events of ‘Black Friday’—when he allegedly betrayed the locked-out Miners' Federation by leading the withdrawal of NUR solidarity. To Thomas, the framing of his image by indigenous Bolsheviks threatened to fatally define his character and career within popular imagination, and undermine Labour's rise. In this paper, I argue that during the domestic and international crises surrounding the First World War, innovative left-wing editors and cartoonists tested the boundaries of newspaper cartooning, and gave dissident cartoons renewed menace before the Law. The case was the first for over a century in which graphic satires of a national political figure were successfully prosecuted.