Jim Larkin

James (Big Jim) Larkin (Irish: Séamas Ó Lorcáin)(1874-1947), an Irish trade union leader and socialist activist, was born in Liverpool, England on 28 January 1874, of Irish parents. Growing up in poverty, he had little formal education and began working in a variety of jobs while still a child before becoming a full-time trade union organiser in 1905. He moved to Ireland in 1907, where he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the Irish Labour Party, and later the Workers' Union of Ireland. Perhaps best known for his role in the 1913 Dublin Lockout, "Big Jim" continues to occupy a significant place in the collective memory of Dublin. Larkin's family lived in the slums in Liverpool during the early years of his life, and from the age of seven he attended school in the mornings and worked in the afternoons to supplement the family income - a common arrangement in working-class families at the time. At the age of fourteen, after the death of his father, he was apprenticed to the firm his father had worked for, but was dismissed after two years. He was unemployed for a while and then worked as a seaman and docker. By 1903 he was a dock foreman, and on 8 September that year he married Elizabeth Brown. From 1893 Larkin had developed an interest in socialism, and he became a member of the Independent Labour Party. In 1905 he was one of the few foremen to take part in a strike on the Liverpool docks. He was elected to the strike committee, and although he lost his foreman's job as a result, his performance had so impressed the National Dock Labourers' Union (NDLU) that it appointed him a temporary organiser. He later gained a permanent position with the union, and in 1906 it sent him to Scotland, where he successfully organised workers in Preston and Glasgow.