Family Connections

Workers’ Educationist, Political Activist and Esperanto Advocate, Mark Starr was born on 27 April 1894 at Shoscombe, Wellow, Somerset, England the fourth of seven children of William Starr, a coal-miner, and his second wife Susanna Padfield, formerly a domestic servant. William’s first wife had been Susanna’s cousin, Mary Ann Padfield, who died in 1885, from which Mark had a half sister. From 1899 Mark attended St Julian’s National School, Shoscombe, until he left to start work in 1907. 

The Starr family were staunch Nonconformists, his father being a leading figure in the local Free Methodist chapel. In spite of having no formal education, William Starr had taught himself to read and write and became the superintendent of the Free Methodist Sunday School in Shoscombe. Mark himself became a teacher in the Sunday School before growing doubt about religion caused him to break with the creed of his father. This was not a sudden process but the product of a sustained intellectual search among the popular classics of his age. It was a process of reassessment that was also assisted by the debate within the ranks of the Edwardian Nonconformist churches between those such as the Revd R. J. Campbell who argued that the chapels should project a social dimension to their ministry, and those who wished to stick to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and an individualistic notion of salvation. As was often the case in the Edwardian era, Starr came into conflict with the more conservative elements in the chapel when he tried to propagate Campbell’s ideas through his Sunday School class.

At the age of thirteen Mark Starr took a job as a mortar boy and hod-carrier for a local builder. He earned 4s for a fifty-six and a half hour week. Later he went to work in Writhlington pit, where his father worked as a hitcher, the working man in charge of the cage at the bottom of the shaft. Conditions in the narrow Somersetshire seams were bad. His first job as a carting boy involved hauling trams full of coal using the gus and crook, a process that he felt reduced him to the level of a beast of burden.

Mark Starr’s rejection of religion as a solution to the ills of humanity was marked by a growing interest in the labour movement. His uncle was a leading figure in the Radstock lodge of the Miners’ Federation and Mark Starr became active himself. He was now a regular reader of The Clarion and he joined the local branch of the Independent Labour Party. He helped to organise public meetings for the ILP, including one addressed by Margaret Bondfield.

In 1912 Mark Starr went to work alongside his elder brother Fred at Mynachdy, a coal mine near Ynysybwl in South Wales. He subsequently worked at several pits in the Rhondda and Aberdare valleys. He served on the lodge committee for Penrhiwceiber and while there came under the influence of the bold political spirits of the Unofficial Reform Committee, the militant leadership of the rank and file movement in the South Wales coalfield. It was not, however, as a political or trade union activist that Mark Starr was to make his contribution to the labour movement, but as an organiser and promoter of workers’ education.

Starr’s intellectual potential was noticed by John Thomas, the first full-time district secretary of the Workers’ Educational Association in South Wales. Thomas ran a class in Industrial History in Ynysybwl and Starr was one of Thomas’s brightest pupils. John Thomas provided Mark Starr with a favourable testimonial when in 1915 he applied for a scholarship from the Rhondda No. I District of the South Wales Miners’ Federation to the Central Labour College (CLC) in London. Starr gained the scholarship after submitting an essay on the Osborne judgment.

Starr went to the CLC just as it was passing through one of its periodic crises and his education was disrupted following the temporary closure of the college in 1916 when the teaching staff were made liable for military service. Yet in spite of this short stay at a ‘barely functioning’ institution, the experience was a profound one for Starr. While at the CLC Starr took some classes in the East End of London at Walthamstow and wrote articles for the labour press; his skills in both activities were soon widely recognised.

In common with many other former Labour College students, he found that victimisation dogged him on his return to the coalfield in 1916, and his time was almost entirely devoted to the ‘Social Science’ classes being run by the Aberdare District Miners’ Federation. Along with another former CLC student, Wil John Edwards, who took a class in Marxist economics, Mark Starr taught a course of twenty classes in Industrial History. These classes became the basis of a series of articles in the Merthyr Pioneer, the leading Socialist journal in South Wales at the time. The classes and the articles provoked an immense response and they were reprinted by the Plebs League as A Worker looks at History in November 1917. It soon became a best seller among the students of the growing number of classes in the movement for independent working-class education.

Mark Starr’s writing and educational work was disrupted in the summer of 1918 when he was called up for military service. At first he tried to evade enlistment, when apprehended he refused to serve and was brought before a court martial. He stated clearly at his trial that his objection to fighting was not based on religious scruples but on political convictions. His defence consisted of a lecture on the imperialist nature of the war and of his desire, as he put it,  ‘not to blow heads off but to put new ideas into them’. The court martial responded by sending him to Wormwood Scrubs.

While in prison Mark Starr was sent, by one of his sisters, a copy of the New Testament in Esperanto. It was to be the start of a commitment to this international language that was to match in passion his commitment to workers’ education. Concern about his son’s well-being in prison caused Mark’s father to write to his MP, the Liberal Sir John Barlow, whose good offices secured Mark’s transfer to farm work in Northumberland, Here Starr met up with Plebs League activists in the north-east coalfields, including Will Lawther and Ebby Edwards.

Following his release, Mark Starr returned to South Wales where he was able to secure a further scholarship from the Aberdare District of the SWMF for one year at the CLC. He returned to South Wales for a brief period in 1921 as full-time tutor in Industrial History and Economics for the National Union of Railwaymen, based in Cardiff. Later that year he became one of the first full-time organisers of the newly formed National Council of Labour Colleges.

Mark Starr now became the full-time NCLC organiser for the eastern counties of England. He was based in London and was an active member of the Plebs League, the main propaganda organisation for independent working-class education. Starr represented the League on the executive committee of the NCLC. The Plebs League was still responsible for the publication of the magazine and the Plebs textbooks. Organisationally it was dominated by the Horrabins with whom Starr became closely connected in the early 1920s. J. F. Horrabin, journalist and cartoonist, edited the Plebs magazine, his wife Winifred was national secretary of the Plebs League and his sister Kathleen acted as a clerk in the Plebs office. Starr, who assisted J. F. Horrabin in the production of the magazine, contributing many articles and reviews, became more closely associated with the Horrabins when, in July 1921, he married Kathleen.

Along with the Horrabins, Starr joined the Communist Party of Great Britain following its foundation, but found it uncongenial and soon left. He visited the Soviet Union in 1926 to attend an Esperanto conference in Leningrad: it was an experience that served to reinforce his reservations about the Russian regime. He joined the Labour Party after leaving the CP and stood as the Labour candidate for the Wimbledon constituency in the general elections of 1923 and 1924, making little impact on the solid Tory majority, though he obtained 6717 votes in 1923 (30 per cent) and 7386 in 1924 (26 per cent). Mark Starr, however, was never particularly interested in a political career and his energies continued to be directed towards teaching and writing.

In 1925 the NCLC published Starr’s A Worker looks at Economics, which attempted to explain in clear everyday language the basic Marxist critique of the capitalist system. It never quite had the impact of A Worker looks at History.  From the time of his first period at the CLC, Starr had become interested in the way that these forces of prejudice were reinforced by national educational systems. Through his contacts with the Esperanto movement and the Teachers’ Labour League, Starr collected the evidence to prove his point. Starr’s Lies and Hate in Education (1929) was his most remarkable book, a withering indictment of the way that governments sought to use education to maintain the status quo by filling the minds of the rising generation with capitalist distortion and nationalistic myths. By the time that Lies and Hate was published Starr had already left Britain for the USA and a new career in American workers’ education.

The reasons for his departure were personal. Although the NCLC was in many ways Starr’s brain-child, the development of the organisation had been mainly in the hands of its formidable general secretary, J. P. M. Millar. There were serious tensions in the relationship between Starr and Millar. Starr admired Millar’s organisational talent, but felt that these skills often triumphed over improvements in the educational service offered by the NCLC. Millar sustained a relentless campaign to win trade union affiliations and finance for the NCLC, but in the process became locked into conflicts with the WEA and anyone else Millar believed was threatening the success of the NCLC as the sole provider of workers’ education to the British labour movement. Starr felt these tactics alienated many from the Labour Colleges and killed enthusiasm for the cause.

Following the General Strike, in which Starr played an important role by carrying proofs of the British Worker by road from London to the printers in Manchester, the Plebs League sank into deep financial trouble. In 1927 the NCLC absorbed the Plebs League and its publishing activities. A power struggle between Millar (and his wife Christine, who ran the NCLC postal courses) and the Horrabins, which had begun in the early 1920s, was now resolved in Millar’s favour. Starr was seen by Millar not only as an ally of the Horrabins but more particularly as a rival for his own job as general secretary. Starr realised that his position within the NCLC was now very difficult and as his relationship with his first wife Kathleen was also deteriorating (the marriage was later dissolved), an offer of a temporary teaching post at Brookwood College in New York State seemed very attractive. Starr left Britain in the summer of 1928, announcing that he wished to study a capitalist society that appeared to have arrived on a plateau of permanent prosperity. His temporary appointment at Brookwood was made permanent. Starr remained at Brookwood College until 1935, when he became educational director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, a post he held until retirement in 1960.

In 1932 Mark Starr married Helen Grosvenor Norton, a fellow lecturer at Brookwood College and He took American citizenship in 1937 so that he could take a full part in American political life. He was active in the New York-based American Labor Party until it split, in 1944, into Communist and non-Communist wings. Between 1940 and 1942 he was vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Starr’s political views had begun to change before he left Britain, his radical instincts giving way, more and more, to the pragmatic side of his nature. In 1943, when seeking a senior appointment with the New York City Board of Education, he was accused of being an advocate of extreme left-wing ideas partly on the basis of his authorship of A Worker looks at History. In response he denied that he, any longer, held such revolutionary views stating: ‘Judge me by what I think in 1943 not what I wrote in 1917′. His reformist credentials were confirmed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a report on Starr to the Board of Education, which then accepted that he was ‘certainly no Communist’.

Shortly after this incident he became a prominent member of the New York-based Liberal Party, effectively a ginger group on the left of the Democratic Party, chairing its Queens County branch from 1945 until 1959. He stood for election to New York City Council in the Queens district on a Liberal ticket in 1945 but without success. His programme of civic improvement, public ownership of utilities and social welfare schemes put him firmly in the reformist camp. Yet, by American standards, Mark Starr remained on the left of the political spectrum, and he continued to acknowledge an intellectual debt to Karl Marx, remaining a critic of the capitalist system until his death. However, as in Britain, it was as a writer and educationist that Starr is remembered in the USA.

He was a member of the US delegation to the first UNESCO Conference in London in 1945. He believed in mass education and was a director of the American National Educational TV and Radio Center from 1958 to 1961. He held a number of advisory posts for the International Labour Organisation in Singapore (1960-1) and East Africa (1961-3). He maintained his passion for Esperanto, being the United Nations representative for the New York-based, Universala Esperanto-Asocio and chairman of the Esperanto Information Center, New York, 1965-72. He taught evening classes in Esperanto for the City of New York until shortly before major heart surgery in 1983. , and president of the USA United Nations Association, 1970-1.

Mark Starr died on 24 April 1985. He was cremated, in accordance with his wishes, and on 30 May 1985 a memorial service was held at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York. Representatives of the various bodies with which Starr was associated spoke, including the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Helen Starr read one of her late husband’s favourite poems, Arthur Dough’s ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’. Mrs. Starr died on 25 November 1986. There were two children of the marriage, John who died in infancy, and Emily who survived both parents.