James Keir Hardie (15 August 1856 – 26 September 1915) was a Scottish trade unionist and politician. He was a founder of the Labour Party, and was its first parliamentary leader from 1906 to 1908.
Hardie was born in Legbrannock, Newhouse, Lanarkshire. He started working at the age of seven, and from the age of ten worked in the Lanarkshire coal mines. With a background in preaching, he became known as a talented public speaker and was chosen as a spokesman for his fellow miners. In 1879, Hardie was elected leader of a miners' union in Hamilton and organised a National Conference of Miners in Dunfermline. He subsequently led miners' strikes in Lanarkshire (1880) and Ayrshire (1881). He turned to journalism to make ends meet, and from 1886 was a full-time union organiser as secretary of the Ayrshire Miners' Union.
Hardie initially supported William Gladstone's Liberal Party, but later concluded that the working-class needed its own party. He first stood for Parliament in 1888 as an independent, and later that year helped form the Scottish Labour Party. Hardie won the English seat of West Ham South as an independent candidate at the 1892 general election, and helped to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP) the following year. He lost his seat in 1895, but was re-elected to Parliament in 1900 for Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. During the same year, he helped to form the union-based Labour Representation Committee, which was later renamed the Labour Party.
After the 1906 general election, Hardie was chosen as the Labour Party's first parliamentary leader. He resigned in 1908 in favour of Arthur Henderson, and spent his remaining years campaigning for causes such as women's suffrage, self-rule for India, and opposition to World War I. He died in 1915 while attempting to organise a pacifist general strike. Hardie is seen as a key figure in the history of the Labour Party and has been the subject of multiple biographies. Kenneth O. Morgan has called him "Labour's greatest pioneer and its greatest hero".
James Keir Hardie was born on 15 August 1856 in a two-roomed cottage on the western edge of Newhouse, Lanarkshire near Holytown, a small town between Airdrie and Motherwell in Scotland. His mother, Mary Keir, was a domestic servant and his stepfather, David Hardie, was a ship's carpenter. Hardie had little or no contact with his biological father, a miner from Lanarkshire named William Aitken. The growing family soon moved to the shipbuilding burgh of Govan near Glasgow (which wasn't incorporated into the city until 1912), where they made a life in a very difficult financial situation, with his stepfather attempting to maintain continuous employment in the shipyards rather than practising his trade at sea – never an easy proposition given the boom-and-bust cycle of the industry.
Hardie's first job, when aged seven, was as a message boy for the Anchor Line Steamship Company. Formal schooling henceforth became impossible, but his parents spent evenings teaching him to read and write, skills which proved essential for future self-education. A series of low-paying entry-level jobs followed for the boy, including work as an apprentice in a brass-fitting shop, work for a lithographer, employment in the shipyards heating rivets, and time spent as a message boy for a baker for which he earned four shillings and sixpence a week.
A great lockout of the Clydeside shipworkers took place in which the unionised workers were sent home for six months. With their main source of income terminated, the family was forced to sell all their possessions to pay for food, with Hardie's meagre earnings the only remaining source of income for the household. One sibling took ill and died in the miserable conditions which followed, while the pregnancy of his mother limited her ability to work. Making matters worse, young James lost his job for turning up late on two occasions. In desperation, his stepfather returned to work at sea, while his mother moved from Glasgow to Newarthill, where his maternal grandmother still lived.
At the age of ten years old, Hardie went to work in the mines as a "trapper", opening and closing a door for a ten-hour shift to maintain the air supply for miners in a given section. Hardie also began to attend night school in Holytown at this time.
Hardie's stepfather returned from sea and went to work on a railway line being constructed between Edinburgh and Glasgow. When this job was completed, the family moved to the village of Quarter, Lanarkshire, where Hardie went to work as a pony driver at the mines, later working his way into the pits as a hewer. He also worked for two years above ground in the quarries. Around this time he encountered Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which he read until "the spirit of it somewhat entered into me". This was an early and enduring influence on his radicalism and pacifism. By the time he was twenty, he had become a skilled practical miner.
"Keir", as he was now called, longed for a life outside the mines. To that end, encouraged by his mother, he learned to read and write in shorthand. He also began to associate with the Evangelical Union becoming a member of the Evangelical Union Church, Park Street, Hamilton – now the United Reformed Church, Hamilton – and to participate in the Temperance movement. Hardie's avocation of preaching put him before crowds of his fellows, helping him to learn the art of public speaking. Before long, Hardie was looked to by other miners as a logical chairman for their meetings and spokesman for their grievances. Mine owners began to see him as an agitator and in fairly short order, he and two younger brothers were blacklisted from working in the local mining industry.
When he was 23 years old, Hardie moved from the coal mines to union organisation work. In May 1879, Scottish mine owners combined to force a reduction of wages, which had the effect of spurring the demand for unionisation. Huge meetings were held weekly at Hamilton as mine workers joined to vent their grievances. On 3 July 1879, Hardie was appointed Corresponding Secretary of the miners, a post which gave him opportunity to get in touch with other representatives of the mine workers throughout southern Scotland. Three weeks later, Hardie was chosen by the miners as their delegate to a National Conference of Miners to be held in Glasgow. He was appointed Miners' Agent in August 1879 and his new career as a trade union organiser and functionary was launched.
On 16 October 1879, Hardie attended a National Conference of miners at Dunfermline, at which he was selected as National Secretary, a high-sounding title which preceded the establishment of a coherent national organisation by several years. Hardie was active in the strike wave which swept the region in 1880, including a generalised strike of the mines of Lanarkshire that summer which lasted six weeks. The fledgling union had no money but worked to gather foodstuffs for striking mine families, as Hardie and other union agents got local merchants to supply goods upon promise of future payment. Hardie and his wife, Lillie Wilson, ran a soup kitchen from their home during the strike.
While the Lanarkshire mine strike was a failure, Hardie's energy and activity shone and he accepted a call from Ayrshire to relocate there to organise the local miners. The young couple moved to the town of Cumnock, where Keir set to work organising a union of local miners, a process which occupied nearly a year.
In August 1881, Ayrshire miners put forward the demand for a 10 per cent increase in wages, a proposition summarily refused by the region's mine owners. Despite the lack of funds for strike pay, a stoppage was called and a 10-week shutdown of the region's mines ensued. This strike also was formally a failure, with miners returning to work before their demands had been met, but not long after the return wages were escalated across the board by the mine owners, fearful of future labour actions. One of the other leaders of the strike was 19-year-old miner Andrew Fisher, who decades later would become leader of the Australian Labor Party and Prime Minister of Australia. He and Hardie met regularly to discuss politics when they both lived in Ayrshire and would renew their acquaintance on several occasions later in life.