Tom Brown, Tyneside syndicalist : a little more biographical info.

Home Office files in the National Archives (HO_45_25553) give Tom Brown’s address (in March 1945) as 10 Torquay St. W2. and report him telling ‘stories of his youth in Jarrow where he was an apprentice in a shipyard’. The 1939 national register records him (as ‘Thomas Brown’) living at 10 Torquay Street, that his date of birth was 01 Feb 1902; and that he was employed as ‘Aircraft Fitter Heavy Worker’. So, we can say that, despite the Home Office thinking Tom Brown ‘sounds like an alias’ it is his name.

In April 1944 in an ad for a meeting he was speaking at (‘Bevin declares war on miners, Anarchists reply’) he’s described as an A.E.U. Shop Steward. (War Commentary, mid-April 1944 page 11).

The attack on him for opposing a Paddington night club (mentioned in Chapter 25 of Albert Meltzer’s I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels) was reported as ‘Man coshed’ in the Daily Express (Tuesday 15 March 1966).