The Red Flag How many of us who have probably sung the Red Flag countless times know of Jim Connell? Yet he was the author of the words, written in 1889 during the London Dock Strike. He was a member of the Marxist, Social Democratic Federation (SDF), although he eventually left that in 1890 and joined the ILP. It is said he composed the lyrics whilst travelling home after an SDF meeting on the Dock Strike. The SDF was the first socialist organisation in this country to be formed during the socialist revival of the 1880s and outlasted all its rivals. But that’s another story. Jim Connell was born in 1852 in County Meath, Ireland and as a teenager became involved in land agitation and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Aged 18 and a signatory to the Fenian Oath, he moved to Dublin where he worked as a docker until he became blacklisted for attempting to unionise the workers. In 1875, he moved to London. He held a variety of jobs, including time as a staff journalist on Keir Hardie's newspaper The Labour Leader, and was secretary of the Workingmen's Legal Aid Society during the last 20 years of his life. Lenin awarded Connell the Red Star Medal in 1922. He died in 1929. The Red Flag is normally sung to the German hymn "Oh Tannenbaum” though Connell had wanted it sung to "The White Cockade", an old Scottish Jacobite song. Connell disapproved of the new rendition of it calling it “church music… composed to remind people of their sins and frighten them into repentance.” In 1920 in How I Wrote "The Red Flag" he commented: "Did I think that the song would live? Yes, the last line shows I did: "This song shall be our parting hymn". I hesitated a considerable time over this last line. I asked myself whether I was not assuming too much. I reflected, however, that in writing the song I gave expression to not only my own best thoughts and feelings, but the best thoughts and feelings of every genuine socialist I knew... I decided that the last line should stand." Notes on Labour History by Derek Gunby .