We need to commemorate the first English communists

MARK JONES recounts the remarkable revolutionary pioneers Goodwyn Barmby and Catherine Watkins, who brought the term communist into the British labour movement.

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ON October 13 1841, in London, Goodwyn Barmby founded the Communist Propaganda Society. He had married Catherine Watkins at Marylebone nine days earlier. 

He called 1841 Year 1 of a new communist calendar. The office was at 77 Norton Street, off Portland Place. 

That is not a curiosity for the footnotes. It is the first time an organisation in Britain put the word communist on its own name. Seven years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto, an East Anglian Chartist and his wife, taking a French word and hanging it on an English door.

If the left can mark 1848, it can mark this.

Barmby was baptised at Yoxford in November 1820. He was a solicitor’s son who would not take the safe road. By the age of 16, he was speaking to farm labourers on the lanes, the village greens and the commons around home. 

In 1839 he helped raise the East Suffolk and Yarmouth Chartist Council and spent that year on horseback across the county, taking the Charter to men who worked the harvest and went hungry when the flail stopped. 

In 1840 he went to Paris with an introduction from Robert Owen and sat with Equalitarians who still spoke of the revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf. 

Barmby came home claiming he had first used the word communism in that room. Whether the French already had the noun is a scholar’s argument. What he did with it is ours. 

The New Moral World, a newspaper founded by Owen, printed his letters from Paris that year. Those pages are still treated as the first systematic appearance of the words in the English political press.

He did not leave the word in a Paris room. He brought it home, founded a society, printed tracts, pushed a handcart through the streets, opened a Communist Temple at the Circus in Great Marylebone, and tried to live the thing with Kate at Hanwell. 

That is why October 13 is worth a date in the calendar. Not because the house succeeded — it did not — but because someone here had already named the work and started it.

AL Morton, the Communist Party historian, was also a Suffolk man. He put the organisational claim in a sentence I have not seen improved: there is no doubt that Barmby was the first to adopt the name communist for any organisation in England. 

Friedrich Engels, writing in the New Moral World in January and February 1844, pointed English readers toward Barmby and thanked him for a reference. The English name was already on a society, on tracts, and out in the street.

Kate was never a wife in the wings. She had been writing as Kate since the mid-1830s. In 1843 she published The Demand for the Emancipation of Woman, Politically and Socially, and together they argued for what they called unsexual Chartism — the vote for women inside the Charter, not as a favour afterwards. 

The journals did not last. The house they took at Hanwell, Moreville, was a leased villa. Barmby joked that it was the first asylum for the sane. It was not the county asylum next door. Most of those houses failed. Failure does not unmake the man who tried, and it does not unmake the date.

I live in East Suffolk. I was looking for this county’s Chartists when his name kept turning up — a boy from Yoxford talking to farm labourers, then Paris, then a society that dared to call itself communist. What caught me was the energy of it. He did not wait for permission. He rode out, founded things, put the word on a door. That enthusiasm — the old sense of the word as well as the ordinary one — is what pushed me to organise a talk.

In the weeks before it, I was in Framlingham cemetery on Fore Street with shears and a brush. The red granite had gone under grass and brambles. I cut it back and cleaned the stone. In October 2023, this paper printed what I had then. Not long after, the Norfolk and Suffolk Morning Star Readers filled the Unitarian Meeting House on Bridge Street. We laid a wreath at the grave we could now read. After the talk, people in the room told me to write the book. I am writing it now.

An East Anglian put the English name on a society, pushed the tracts, tried the house, and then spent 20 years in a Yorkshire pulpit saying the same thing in another key. Marx and Engels did not invent the concept and then allow the English a footnote. They walked into a language that was already being spoken.

The British left has a habit of beginning the story in 1848, or in 1917, or with a handful of northern names, as if the word arrived with a manifesto and a foreign accent. Commemorating October 13 is how we stop that habit. It is how we put a Suffolk speaker from the greens and the commons back where he belongs: not as a quaint forerunner, but as the man who first gave an English organisation the name we still use. He stood up in front of labourers. He crossed to Paris. He came home and founded something. Kate stood in that founding with him.

That is worth marking every year. 

If the stone and the book do their job, the next person who stands in Framlingham cemetery will not have to ask who he was. And when October 13 comes around, we might mark it for what it is: the founding, in England, of the first organisation to call itself communist — and the man from Yoxford who made it happen.

Mark Jones lives in Felixstowe. He works in the electricity industry and sits on Unite’s executive council for energy and utilities. He is writing a book on Goodwyn Barmby.

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