Party News: Romford Division Branch Report

Not having taken any space with a report of oar branch’s work daring 1908, it is well to briefly review the years efforts in the Romford Division. We now, unfortunately, have only two speakers—Kennett and Dawkins—but, and it is a tremendous but, these irresistable and irrepressible comrades have thrown themselves whole-heartedly into the task of dispelling working-class ignorance whenever and wherever an opportunity arose, or one could be snatched from rolling time—to the dismay of the gimbal-eyed shufflers who infest the district, especially East Ham and Manor Park. Although we ware greatly handicapped in the early part of the year by the rainy weather and the loss of our best pitch owing to an extension of “our trams,” yet the year has been a successful one. We have had large audiences who now quite understand the fundamental distinction between Socialism and reform, and in consequence the local reformers have dropped (when on the stump) the municipal milk-shop fooling like a hot cinder. We have opened up a new pitch at East Ham, have also had several debates at Manor Park. Our comrades have, in sledge-hammer style, exposed the fraudulent nature of the I.L.P. and S.D.P., and challenged the locals to bring along any of their tin gods to defend in debate their respective organisations, but they resort to Fabian methods when they are sure of being flattened out—they live to fight another day. The distress hereabout is acute, yet this has not prevented our audiences from extensively purchasing our literature and equipping us with the “sinews of war”—a gratifying and significant recognition of the fact that the fight is theirs. We have not enrolled many new comrades, but we are effecting the mental revolution—it can be felt. Now is the seed time ; the harvest is not yet.

CA IRA.