Composer of The Red Flag

A Red Flag has been a symbol of left-wing politics and of socialism for almost 200 years. It had been used during the French Revolution but was possibly used as a symbol of the working class for the first time in Wales in 1831 when oppressed miners took over their mine and town.

Many Communist countries used it, as did some European Labour/Socialist Political Parties. It was never used that much in this country, where to be seen as too much to the left was often the kiss of death to a political movement in the last century. It inspired the song The Red Flag, which became the anthem for the British Labour Party and was written by an Irishman.
Jim Connell was born in County Meath in 1852. From a nationalist background, he became involved in the land agitation, which was rife at the time and from that he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 1870 he moved to Dublin, where he worked as a docker.
All dockers at that time were casual labour and never guaranteed regular work. Here again, Connell became involved in agitation and attempted to unionise the dockers.
This resulted in him being blacklisted in Dublin and he emigrated to England. He worked at a variety of jobs in London and became a staff journalist on The Labour Leader, the newspaper founded by Keir Hardie, the great early labour organiser.
In the late-1880s, the Paris Commune was active and there was a major London Dock Strike. Inspired by these, Connell wrote The Red Flag one evening as he travelled home by train from a lecture on socialism.
The people’s flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood dyed its ev’ry fold.
Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we’ll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.
He originally wrote the song to the air of The White Cockade. It was usual practise for songs which needed to be sung in public and by groups to be written to a popular air but The White Cockade was deemed too slow and it is more commonly sung to the German air, Tannenbaum.”
Connell himself was said to have preferred the original setting but George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as “ the funeral march of a dead eel”.
Its popularity spread worldwide and in England, it was adopted as the anthem of the fledgling British Labour Party. An effort was made to replace it in 1925 but all the submissions were rejected.
It has been sung twice in the House of Commons – in 1945 when the new ­Labour MPs took their seats after Labour ­defeated the Conservatives in the ­General Election and again in 2006 to mark the centenary of the founding of the party.
In spite of attempts to downplay its role during the Blair years, it is still sung at the end of every Labour Party Conference.
As a final tribute, the song was sung to both airs when he was buried in Golders Green.
Jim Connell, the Meath man who wrote The Red Flag, died in London on February 8, 1929 – 82 years ago this week.