They came, that none should trample Labor’s right
To speak, and voice her centuries of pain.
Bare hands against the master’s armored might!-
A dream to match the tolls of sordid gain!
-Charles Ashleigh
Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday April 18, 1917
From The Tacoma Times: An Interview with Charles Ashleigh
POET-TRAMP-JOURNALIST A CLOSE OBSERVER
OF BIG SEATTLE TRIALBy Mabel Abbott
SEATTLE, Wash, April 17.-A poet, a tramp, a newspaper man and an I. W. W. sit each day at the press table in Judge Ronald’s courtroom, where a great class struggle is being fought around the stocky figure of Tom Tracy, I. W. W.
They are Charles Ashleigh.
He is in charge of publicity for the Everett Prisoners’ Defense league, and he is a radical of the radicals; so revolutionary that he even dares to defy the tradition that a revolutionist shall be a sinister and mysterious-looking person.
He is young, small, mild-mannered, and speaks literary English with a fine British accent.
He was born in London. As a boy he was for a time an assistant secretary in the Fabian society of socialists and free-thinkers, and saw and heard Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and other famous members.
A little later, he tramped through England with the army of the unemployed, haranguing the crowds and stirring the miners of South Wales to organization.
Loves Adventure.
Ordinary life was tame, naturally, after that, and Ashleigh, went to South America.
In Buenos Ayres he was for a little while in the accounting department of a railway; then he took a contract to string telegraph wires along the right of way.
He had never strung a wire in his life, or seen it done, but he hired a foreman who did know how, assembled a gang of Guarani Indians, and started out.
It was a colorful experience. “The Indians aren’t really a bad sort at all, you know,” Ashleigh explains, “but they do drink. One night the cook shot his brother, in my tent. They were all rioting around so it was hard to tell anything about it, and the authorities got hold of me, as being the handiest person, I suppose, and put me in jail, until the British consul came and cleared things up.” Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: An Interview with “Poet-Tramp” and I. W. W. Journalist, Charles Ashleigh”
