The Irishman who wrote socialist anthem The Red Flag

Did you know that Jim Connell, an Irishman born in Rathnisca near Kilskyre in Kells, Co Meath, wrote the words to the socialist anthem The Red Flag?

Taking a train from Charing Cross to Honor Oak in south London in 1889, Connell was returning home from a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation when he saw a train guard waving his red flag on the railway platforms and was inspired.

Connell was the eldest of 13 children and had become politically active from a young age. Born in 1852, at 18 he had joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. His family moved to Dublin in 1875 and he worked as a docker and was an active trade unionist, eventually sacked for his activism.

In 1875 Connell emigrated to London where he continued to engage in radical politics, including as a member of the Social Democratic Federation, which supported Irish land reform, and as a member of the executive of the National Land League of Great Britain.

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He eventually joined the Independent Labour Party in the 1890s and retained a commitment to left-wing politics throughout his life. He wrote and composed several socialist songs, but it is for The Red Flag that he is chiefly remembered. It begins:

The People's flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead.
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold
Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold
So raise the scarlet banner high
Beneath its shade we'll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer…
We'll keep the red flag flying here

The Red Flag was published in Justice, the weekly paper of the SDF, in December 1889 and within a week was being sung at gatherings in Liverpool and Glasgow.

The Red Flag continues to be sung at socialist gatherings in many places, most notably at the close of the annual conference of the British Labour Party. There have been sporadic unsuccessful attempts to tone down its rhetoric, but the words remain as Connell wrote them.

The same is not true of the tune. The Red Flag is generally sung to the tune of Tannenbaum (fir tree), which is based on an old German folk song and is rendered O Christmas Tree in the US (where it is also O Maryland, the official state song of the US state).

Connell's original idea was that the Red Flag should be sung to the tune of The White Cockade, a Jacobite song composed by Robert Burns in 1790. The version using the Tannenbaum tune quickly prevailed and is still sung widely to this day.

In addition to its role for the British Labour Party, it marks the conclusion of the annual conference of the Irish Labour Party and was also adopted as the anthem of the Social Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland.

Jim Connell visited his native Ireland on occasions. His last visit was to address a gathering in Crossakiel, Co Meath in 1921. He died in 1929. A monument to him was erected there in the 1990s.

The 24th Jim Connell Commemoration will be held in Kells and Crossakiel from May 20th to My 22nd, 2022.

This Extraordinary Emigrants article was written by Dr J Patrick Greene, CEO and Museum Director of EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin’s Docklands, an interactive museum that tells the story of how the Irish shaped and influenced the world