A-Infos (en) Britain, History, A short biography of early Scottish anarchist and tailor, James Tochatti, who was active in the Socialist League in London.

James Tochatti, whose real name was Moncure Douglas, was born in 1852 in 
Ballater, Scotland. Originally destined for a career in the kirk, 
Tochatti eventually became a merchant tailor. He was very active in the 
National Secular Society from the 1870s. He lectured on a number of 
topics, including various reforms and pseudo-scientific topics like 
phrenology (it may be hard to believe today that reading bumps on the 
head was taken seriously as a science, but that was the case in the 
Victorian period, and phrenology was seen as a legitimate science by 
people such as Karl Marx). -- He moved towards socialism and was elected 
a member of the Hammersmith Socialist League in January 1886. With 
William Morris and Bernard Shaw he was a frequent outdoor speaker for 
the branch, going to the usual League stands at Walham Green and 
Hammersmith Bridge, where crowds of up to 500 gathered to listen. He 
served as branch delegate to the 1886 League Conference, and wrote news 
items and articles for Commonweal, the League’s newspaper. He became an 
open supporter of anarchist communism within the League. In 1889 he 
helped organise a strike at Thorneycroft's engineering factory in West 
London, together with Lyne of the Fulham branch of the League and Jack 
Williams of the SDF. In 1891 he was arrested for causing a disturbance 
at a United Shop Assistants' Union picket on the Harrow Road and fined 
in October. As one of its anarchist members he continued in the League 
after Morris's departure.

He continued to speak frequently in the early 1890s as reported in 
anarchist newspaper Freedom. David Nicoll had been a picket in the 
Harrow Road agitation and had been sent down for a month. In his 
subsequent arrest and imprisonment as editor of Commonweal, Nicoll was 
strongly defended by Tochatti in 1892. Tochatti expressed total 
solidarity with Nicoll as an anarchist persecuted by the State. However 
he must have had grave doubts about Nicoll’s and others’ stance on 
‘propaganda by the deed’. January 1894, as Commonweal became 
increasingly inflammatory he founded the paper Liberty (subtitled A 
Journal of Anarchist Communism), together with Louisa Sarah Bevington. 
Tochatti had kept up friendly relations with the Hammersmith Socialist 
Society after it left the League over the question of revolutionary 
violence and in fact non-anarchist ex-members of the League like William 
Morris, as well as ex-League anarchists like 
[url="/history/mainwaring-sam-1841-1907]Sam Mainwaring[/url], 
contributed to the paper. The paper stated that ‘we believe that 
bombastic talk and glorifying the acts of men driven to desperation by 
circumstances can only serve to retard the progress of Anarchist ideas 
by alienating the sympathies of the mass of people’. It was this stance 
that made Morris agreeable to writing for the paper, providing two 
articles, 'Why I Am a Communist' and 'As to Bribing Excellence’. Liberty 
lists Tochatti's address as Carmagnole House, Beadon Road, Hammersmith, W5.

He and Bevington were among those who attempted to set up an 
organisation, the Anarchist Communist Alliance in May 1895, which was 
unfortunately stillborn.

Due to Tochatti’s ill health and the death of Bevington Liberty closed 
down in December 1896. John Quail (author of The Slow Burning Fuse) 
remarks that it was: “Excellently produced and devoted to maintaining a 
dialogue between Anarchists, anti-parliamentary socialists and 
libertarians of more statist inclinations in the I.L.P. and 
elsewhere…closely in touch with many facets of the socialist movement, 
it actually managed to have discussions rather than battles in its 
columns”.

With the revitalisation of the anarchist movement in the early 1900s, 
Tochatti was one of those old anarchists who returned to the movement as 
activists. He became an active speaker and George Cores refers to Mrs. 
Tochatti singing revolutionary songs at open-air meetings. His clothing 
shop near Hammersmith Broadway became an anarchist centre, with the 
‘book lined cellar under his shop… in which no daylight ever came’ (G. 
Slocombe, The Tumult and the Shouting, 1936). Cores says that: “He 
exercised a great influence with young men, gathering round him men like 
Percy and John Tanner”. John Tanner is the Jack Tanner who started out 
as a syndicalist and ended up as a union bureaucrat, President of the 
AUEW! He goes on to say that Tochatti circulated many thousands of 
pamphlets and that he was always on hand to keep the local meetings 
going. He contributed to Tanner’s paper Solidarity (organ of the 
Industrial Democracy League). Wartime issues include humorous 
“‘phrenological’ studies of prominent labour politicians… where 
particular attention was drawn to ‘bumps of ambition’ or ‘bumps of 
avarice’ (Quail).

Freedom reported his lectures in 1912 and on 12th October 1914 in 
Bristol on 'The Attitude of Revolutionists towards the War'. John Mahon 
the biographer of the Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt, (London 
1976) describes Pollitt's visits to the bookshop in 1918 and after, 
where Pollitt supposedly defended conscientious objectors on socialist 
grounds, arguing with Tochatti, who advocated folded arms and shooting 
the officers. Sometimes they had first-hand news from Russia by someone 
returning from there. It can be inferred that Pollitt, with his various 
anarchist acquaintances at the time, and his membership of Sylvia 
Pankhurst’s Workers Socialist Federation,had a far more libertarian 
outlook than later!

He died in Poole, Dorset on 22nd November 1928.

Nick Heath
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