In the 1890s British socialists affiliated with the Clarion movement launched the Clarion caravan to travel the country and spread the word of socialism. The first 13-week tour started in June of 1896. Women socialists would travel in pairs and carry with them a tent for a local boy (‘somebody’s younger brother perhaps’) who had ‘volunteer[ed] to look after the horse, make fires and wash up dishes.’ The vans were equipped with a bed, a table, and a fold out speaking platform, so lectures could be given just about anywhere.
 
Travelling Clarion lecturers were on the front line of cross-cultural clashes across rural and urban Britain. Intimacy, forms of hospitality, and the embodiment of fellowship were key in attempting to counter prejudices, and connect with new people and places. Travelling activists force us to contend with the face-to-face elements of radical politics, the atmospheres of connection – short-sighted, fraught, and frustrating though these connections often were. Here the feeling of a common cause was vital in creating an imagined community that could (at times) counter both local protectionism and national chauvinism.
 
For travelling socialists in late nineteenth-century Britain friendship and fellowship was part of a repertoire of affective gesture that had revolutionary potential precisely because it was both a connective charge and a political demand. This paper uses Satnam Virdee’s concept of the ‘racialized outsiders,’ and Leela Gandhi’s ‘trope of friendship’ to show how cross-cultural connections and affinities born of intimacies developed on the road, were key in developing an embodied sense of socialist internationalism in Britain before the First World War.

First published: 2 January 2025

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