Fabian Society

Founders of the Fabian Society are depicted in the famous stained-glass Fabian Window designed by George Bernard Shaw.

14/12/2024

Fabian Society

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George Cunningham

Politician and Labour Party Commonwealth officer. In 1981, resigned from the Labour Party and sat as an independent Labour MP, ex-Labour defector to recently founded Social Democratic Party, June 1982.

Hugh Dalton

Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established the Special Operations Executive.

Arthur Davidson

Labour Party politician. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Called to the bar by Middle Temple in 1953, appointed a QC in 1978. Legal director of Associated Newspapers 1985-1991 and Mirror Group Newspapers 1991-1993.

Albert Emil Davies

During World War II, Davies undertook a lengthy speaking tour of North America, on behalf of the Ministry of Information. Honorary treasurer of Fabian Society from 1936 - 1947.

Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.

Ernest Davies

British journalist, author and Labour Party politician. Editor of The Clarion, a weekly socialist newspaper. Governor for the National Froebel Foundation. BBC North American Service Organiser.

W. S. De Mattos

Socialist activist. Graduated in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. Founder of many local Fabian societies. Launched "red van" campaigns, groups of socialist lecturers toured rural areas, giving speeches from a van painted red.

Percy Dearmer

English priest and liturgist best known as the author of The Parson's Handbook. Active in the burgeoning Alcuin Club. Instrumental in founding the Warham Guild. Canon of Westminster Abbey.

Charles Delacourt-Smith

British trade unionist and Labour Party politician. Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations 1950. In 1960, he was nominated a Justice of the Peace, assigned to the County of London.

Socialised Medicine is the Cornerstone of Communism, If you control a person's health you control the person.

Robert Dell

British journalist and socialist activist. Joined the Fabian Society in 1889, and served on its executive from 1890. In 1918, Dell became the Paris correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, but he was expelled from the country, and moved to Geneva.

John Denham

Labour Party politician and director of the English Labour Network. Professorial Fellow on English Identity and Politics at Southampton University. Chair and co-Founder of the Southern Policy Centre.

Jack Diamond

British Labour Party politician. Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1964, a cabinet position from 1968. In 1981 he left the Labour Party for the new Social Democratic Party. He led the SDP in the House of Lords from 1982 to 1988.

F. Lawson Dodd

Fabian dentist and author. First proposed the establishment of the Fabian Summer Schools in 1907. Some of the students slept outside in the open air. In 1908 an additional house was rented. 2000 people attended in the first four years.

Bernard Donoughue

British Labour Party politician, academic, businessman and author. Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Reader at London School of Economics 1963–1974. Trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Member of Labour Friends of Israel.

Barbara Drake

Trade unionist. Her 1920 book, Women in Trade Unions was an influential work produced by her under auspices of Labour Research Department / Fabian Women's Group. Member of the London County Council Education Committee from 1925.

Evan Durbin

British economist and Labour Party politician. Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Economics, London School of Economics, 1930–1945. Personal Assistant to Clement Attlee, Deputy Prime Minister, 1942–1945.

Clement Edwards

Welsh lawyer, journalist, trade union activist and Liberal Party politician. Edwards expanded into political activity, including radical journalism, becoming labour editor of the London newspaper The Sun in 1893 and then The Echo in 1894.

John Edwards

British university lecturer, trade union leader and Labour Party politician. President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and president of the Consultative Assembly 1955 - 1959 onwards.

Robert Ensor

British writer, poet, journalist, liberal intellectual and historian. President of the Oxford Union in 1900. Leader writer for The Manchester Guardian 1902. Published a selection of writings of leading socialist theorists as Modern Socialism in 1903.

John Greer Ervine

Irish biographer, novelist, critic, dramatist, and theatre manager. By the 1940s St John Ervine was Northern Ireland's leading writer but also a controversial figure with “a remarkable antipathy to southern Ireland".

Letitia Fairfield

Doctor, a lawyer, a war-worker, and the first ever female Chief Medical Officer for London. Feminist and a Fabian, and during her later life became a convert to Roman Catholicism and a believer in witchcraft.

Herman Finer

Romanian-born British political scientist and Fabian socialist. taught for many years at the University of Chicago. He was the eldest brother of Samuel Finer.

Eric Fletcher

Labour Party politician. Solicitor, specialising in international law. Deputy chairman of the Associated British Picture Corporation. Governor of Birkbeck College and the London School of Economics.

Montague Fordham

English agriculturalist, historian, barrister and advocate of rural reform. He belonged to the Religious Society of Friends. Formed the Land Club Union in 1908 and established the Rural Reconstruction Association in 1926.

Hugh Franklin

Suffragist and politician. Born into wealthy Anglo-Jewish family, rejected both his religious and social upbringing to protest for women's suffrage. Joined the Labour Party in 1931 and became member of Labour Party National Executive Committee.

Donald M Fraser

Scottish socialist activist. Joined the Independent Labour Party, serving as vice-chair of its Scottish area. Secretary of the 1936 Fabian Group, and organised a conference on socialism and non-manual workers. Joined the Common Wealth Party.

Arnold Freeman

British writer, philosopher, anthroposophist, adult educator, actor, director, Fabian Socialist, Labour Party candidate and co-founder of the anthroposophical magazine, The Golden Blade. Co-organiser of a conference that established Steiner-Waldorf education in the UK.

Hugh Gaitskell

British politician who served as Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 until his death in 1963, head of the Department of Political Economy at UCL, all was appointed Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in 1938.

Frank Wallace Galton

English political writer and journalist who was secretary to Sidney and Beatrice Webb and later to the Fabian Society. In 1929, he was appointed to the Royal Commission on Transport.

Gerald Gardiner

British Labour politician, who served as Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain from 1964 to 1970. Chancellor of the Open University from 1973 to 1978. Lord Gardiner published the Minority Report in March 1972 as part of the Parker Report.

Edward Garnett

English writer, critic and literary editor, who was instrumental in the publication of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Editor and reader for the London publishing houses of T. Fisher Unwin, Gerald Duckworth and Company, and then Jonathan Cape.

H. J. Gillespie

British socialist activist, prominent in the women's suffrage movement. Joined the Fabian Society in 1911. Founder member of the United Suffragists. 1930's secretary of the Mining Association of Great Britain.

Victor Gollancz

British publisher and humanitarian. His loyalties shifted between liberalism and communism, defining himself as a Christian socialist and internationalist. Used his publishing house chiefly to promote pacifist and socialist non-fiction, and also launched the Left Book Club.

Patrick Gordon Walker

British Labour politician. Assistant Director of BBC's German Service working from Radio Luxembourg, travelling with the British forces. Chairman of the British Film Institute 1946 to 1948.

Alban Gordon

Political activist. Founded the University of Birmingham Fabian Society. Founded the Wolverhampton Trades Counci, lecturer at the Working Men's College and the Fabian Society, and also for the National Health Insurance Commission.

F. H. Gorle

Social democratic activist. Joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and by 1910 was serving as its treasurer. Prominent in the Labour Church movement, serving a term as president of the Labour Church Union.

Harley Granville-Barker

English actor, director, playwright, manager, critic, and theorist. Granville-Barker wrote The Voysey Inheritance. In America he lectured at Harvard and was also employed by British Information Services.

Hugh Gray

British Labour Party politician and lecturer at the University of London. Defeated Conservative incumbent Anthony Fell to become the Member of Parliament (MP) for Yarmouth until 1970. Gray died on 1 April 2002, aged 85.

Frederick Ernest Green

British farmer and political activist. Wrote widely on agricultural topics, publishing The Awakening of England in 1912, The Tyranny of the Countryside in 1913, and The History of the Agricultural Labourer: 1870-1920, in 1920.

Jim Griffiths

Welsh Labour Party politician, trade union leader and the first Secretary of State for Wales. One of the chief architects of the Welfare State introducing Family Allowances Act 1945, National Insurance Act 1946 and National Assistance and Industrial Injuries Act 1948.

Leslie Haden-Guest

Author, journalist, doctor and Labour Party politician. Founder of the Anglo-French Committee of the Red Cross. Founded the Labour Party Commonwealth Group.

Graeme Haldane

Scottish engineer. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory under Rutherford. He helped establish the National Grid. President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 1948.

Basil Hall

British Labour Party activist and lifeboat sailor. Chair of the 1917 Club. Through the Fabian Society, Hall became active in the Labour Party.

Fred Hammill

British trade union activist, and a co-founder of the Independent Labour Party. Full-time organiser for the Fabian Society in Durham 1894. Member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE).

Henry Harben

Pioneer of industrial life assurance. Chairmam and leading member of the Hampstead vestry. President of the Prudential company 1907.

Henry Devenish Harben

British barrister and Liberal Party politician who later joined the Labour Party. Supporter of women's suffrage. Harben had joined the Fabian Society, which published his pamphlet, "The Endowment of Motherhood".

Toby Harris

Labour Party politician in the House of Lords. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, reading Natural Sciences then Ecconomics. Chair of the Cambridge Fabians and Chair of the Cambridge University Labour Club, before becoming President of the Cambridge Union.

Roy Hattersley

British Labour politician, author and journalist. Deputy Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992. Hattersley supports a British republic, but took a seat in the House of Lords from 1997 to 2017.

Stewart Headlam

English Anglican priest who was involved in frequent controversy in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Pioneer and publicist of Christian socialism, on which he wrote a pamphlet for the Fabian Society, and a supporter of Georgism.

Denis Healey

British Labour Party politician. Joined Communist Party in 1937. Agent for the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret branch of the UK Foreign Office dedicated to spreading weaponised disinformation, anti-communism, and pro-colonial propaganda.

Polly Hill

British social anthropologist of West Africa, and an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Research assistant at the Fabian Society, publishing a book on British unemployment 1938. Honorary doctorate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1996.

Rita Hinden

South African social democratic activist. Educated in Jewish culture and faith by her father. Family migrated to Palestine, the first South African Jews to do so. Active in the Labour Zionist movement. Founded the Fabian Colonial Bureau to research and campaign on anti-colonialism.

Samuel George Hobson

Theorist of guild socialism. Founder member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and writer for the ILP newspaper, Labour Leader, and in 1900 was elected to the Fabian Society's executive. Member of the Bristol Socialist Society. Helped found the National Guilds League.

H. B. Holding

British politician, who was prominent in the Fabian Society. Holding worked in the life assurance business for many years, becoming an inspector. Joined the Fabian Society in 1890, and served on its executive committee from 1894 until 1896. Came to prominence when living in Wood Green.

John Horam

Member of three different political parties. Features writer for the Financial Times and The Economist, and a founder of CRU Group. First Chairman of the Circle Thirty Three Housing Association, now part of the Circle Group. Elected a Fellow Commoner of St Catharine's College 2010.

J. F. Horrabin

Socialist / Communist radical writer and cartoonist attempting to construct a socialist geography. 1 of 17 Labour MPs to sign the "Mosley Memorandum", drawn up by Oswald Mosley. Supported British Provisional Committee for Defence of Leon Trotsky. Co-founded Fabian Colonial Bureau.

Douglas Houghton

British Labour politician. General Council of the Trades Union Congress from 1952 to 1960. Panel member of a BBC radio programme Can I help You? between 1941 and 1964. Connections with London Labour Party gave him Alderman of London County Council - the forerunner of Greater London Council.

John Hughes

Labour Member of Parliament, House of Commons speaker ordered him out of the chamber, when during prayers he asked the clergyman not to bless the house in protest at the social impact of the government's policies. Labour Chief Whip, Derek Foster went on to endorse the protest by Mr Hughes as "utterly sincere.".

Violet Hunt

British author and literary hostess. She wrote feminist novels. She founded the Women Writers' Suffrage League in 1908 and participated in the founding of International PEN. Brought up in the Pre-Raphaelite group, knowing John Ruskin and William Morris. Her novels were works of the New Woman genre.

Elizabeth Leigh Hutchins

British social researcher and socialist activist, one of the first students at the LSE. Wrote more than twenty works on matters relating to women's work, including History of Factory Legislation, and Women in Modern Industry. Lectured at King's College on behalf of the Women's Industrial Council.

Sara Ibrahim

Former Chair of the Young Fabians, Barrister and British Labour Party activist. As Chair she oversaw the expansion of the Young Fabian Networks, with the formation of the Health Network and published the Young Fabian Pamphlet, Ambitions for Britain's Future. Served the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Colin Jackson

British Labour Party politician, barrister, lecturer and writer.

Douglas Jay

British Labour Party politician and senior figure in the XYZ Club, a clandestine organisation in the City of London dedicated to supplying Labour with financial intelligence. Served as Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Financial Secretary to the Treasury and President of the Board of Trade.

Peggy Jay

English Labour member of London County Council and the Greater London Council. Chaired the Heath and Old Hampstead Society. Member of the Royal Commission on Population through which she knew Eva Hubback. Her niece is Virginia Bottomley and nephew is Lord Hunt of Chesterton.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Barrister, politician, and the founder of Pakistan; served as the leader of the All-India Muslim League. Several universities and public buildings in Pakistan bear Jinnah's name. He is revered in Pakistan as the "Great Leader" and "Father of the Nation". His birthday is also observed as a national holiday in the country.

James Johnson

British Labour Party politician and Member of Parliament (MP). Johnson was a lecturer in social studies at Coventry Technical College and an official for the National Union of General and Municipal Workers in Kenya. He served as a councillor on Coventry City Council. Served as a parliamentary private secretary.

J. L. Joynes Jr

English journalist, writer, poet, vegetarian and socialist activist. Convicted and imprisoned under the Coercion Act in Ireland. He was educated at Eton and matriculated at King's College, Cambridge. He was the son of Rev. J. L. Joynes Sr., Lower Master of Eton College.

Nicholas Kaldor

Hungarian-born economist. Developed "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons, derived the cobweb model, argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Invited by then Prime Minister of India—Jawaharlal Nehru to design an expenditure tax system for India.

Roy Kennedy

British politician and life peer serving as Chief Whip of the House of Lords since 2024. He is a member of the Labour and Co-operative Parties. Kennedy is married to Alicia Kennedy, former Deputy General Secretary of the Labour Party, who sits alongside him as a life peer in the Lords. Kennedy held the title of Honorary President of the National Pubwatch.

Helen Keynes

British political activist and author. Her first novel, The Spanish Marriage, was written before she turned twenty. Served on the executive of the Fabian Society, chaired the Fabian Women's Group, and also served on the executive of the Rural Reconstruction Association.

Gavin Kitching

Author and professor of social sciences and international relations, and fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Since the early 1990s he moved to analysing post-soviet Russia during the process of de-collectivisation of land. Won the Herskovitz Prize for research and published work focussed on development in Africa.

Brian Lapping

Journalist, television producer and historian. Lapping is also the chairman and founding member of Brook Lapping, a television and radio production company focused on the production of historical documentaries. Editor of Venture, the Fabian Society's monthly journal, and deputy editor of the influential social science magazine New Society.

Susan Lawrence

Labour Party politician, one of the earliest female Labour MPs. Joined the Fabian Society, becoming close to Sidney Webb, and especially to his wife Beatrice Webb. In 1924, Lawrence visited Soviet Russia and spent six months travelling widely. Unlike the Webbs and other Fabians who went to Russia she did not believe everything the Bolsheviks alleged to foreign visitors.

Julian Le Grand

Academic specialising in public policy. He is the Richard Titmuss Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE) and was a senior policy advisor to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Le Grand is the author, co-author or editor of seventeen books and over ninety articles on economics, philosophy and public policy.

Joan Lestor

Labour politician. She was MP for Eton and Slough and MP for Eccles. Member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Lestor was one of the founding editors of anti-fascist monthly, Searchlight, though that magazine had only a tenuous connection to the current publication. No longer an MP, Lestor worked for the World Development Movement.

Ellie Levenson

Freelance journalist and author for The Guardian, New Statesman among and occasional columnist for The Independent, writing opinion pieces and topical features on social policy and cultural theory. Editor of Fabian Review for the Fabian Society, where she edited Fabian Thinkers: 120 years of progressive thought. Wrote "The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism".

Arthur Lewis

Labour Party politician. In 1981, after 36 years as an MP, Lewis was deselected as Labour candidate by his local constituency Labour Party, which he said had become "100 per cent Trotskyist, Militant Tendency, Communist and IRA supporters". By this time he was refusing to attend local party meetings or hold "advice surgeries" for his constituents.

Charles Mostyn Lloyd

Academic, magazine editor, and socialist activist active in the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party. Covered the Versailles Peace Conference for the Manchester Guardian, and then began lecturing at the London School of Economics. Heavily involved with the production of the New Statesman.

Oliver Lodge

English physicist, inventor and Christian Spiritualist. As a pioneer of spiritualism Lodge persued his pseudoscientific research into life after death becoming a topic on which he wrote many books. He was a member of The Ghost Club, and served as president of the London-based Society for Psychical Research.

Frank Pakenham

Politician and social reformer famed for championing social outcasts and unpopular causes. His ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the release of Moors murderer Myra Hindley attracted much media and public controversy. A member of the Labour Party, he was one of its longest-serving politicians.

Alex Lyon

Labour politician introduced the United Reformed Church Bill, which became the act which created the United Reformed Church from a union of Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches in England and Wales. Lyon married Clare Short a civil servant who later became a Labour MP and cabinet minister.

James MacColl

Labour politician and active "High Anglican" member of the Church of England, and was a member of the church's Board for Social Responsibility. MacColl believed in the importance of local government and co-authored two books on the subject.