Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman, By Jim Moher

Abstract

Walter Citrine’s (1887–1983) career at the centre of the labour movement involved some crucial events such as the establishment of minority Labour governments, the General Strike, the development of the Labour Alliance, the purge of the Communist left in the trade unions and labour participation in the wartime coalition government. Jim Moher, in his recent biography of Citrine, attempts to reveal what other historians of the period have overlooked. Walter McClennan Citrine was born in Liverpool in 1887 the son of a seaman and a Scottish hospital nurse. His father was evidently a heavy drinker and the Presbyterian Protestantism of his mother was an early influence on him. Citrine, as was the norm at the time, left school at the age of twelve but with an ambitious desire for self-improvement. Moher devotes a section of the text to Citrine and shorthand (pp. 43–4) as it gave him the edge over other trade union activists. Many will recall that Citrine’s most influential publication was his ABC of Chairmanship (1920 and 1939). In 1906 he had joined the ILP which Moher describes as a ‘ginger group’ outside of the Labour party. There is little discussion of the political context in which Citrine grew up, for example, the term ‘syndicalist/syndicalism’ is introduced frequently in the text without the concept ever being explored. Differences are too often explained in terms of personality rather than politics.