Crooks, Ellen Wilkinson, Ernest Bevin and George Lansbury. At eighteen he became a putter and began speaking and working for the union. With five members of the family now working at the colliery, the Lawsons had a higher status and moved into a house closer to the pit, with a front room. Throughout this period he gambled frequently and read a lot: Eventually, reading won over gambling. He had read nothing of economics or politics yet, but had developed a strong sense of injustice, firmly believing that manual workers were under-paid and under-valued. These ideas generally seemed strange to his colleagues and family and he kept them to himself. He joined the Methodist Society, and found his ideas more accepted there. Through reading the Labour Leader and The Clarion, Lawson realised he was a socialist. At the age of 21 he met Isabella Graham Scott, a domestic servant from Sunderland who was staying with friends at Boldon. They were married in February 1906. Trade Unionist In 1904, Lawson joined the newly founded branch of the Independent Labour Party at Boldon. He was invited to be a speaker, but initially refused, unsure of his own ability. He discovered a socialist bookshop in Newcastle, where he met many like-minded people, and read books on economics and society, including those of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. He became a hewer that year, working at the coal-face, and within a few months was elected as an assistant checkweighman. He had no ambition for work beyond being a hewer, but he did want to continue his education. He began teaching boys who worked at the colliery and then helped to set up a school for adults in two disused colliery houses. In 1905 Lawson became an active speaker for the ILP, expounding socialism and the Labour Representation Committee to the miners of Durham, who had traditionally supported the Liberal Party. Later that year, Lawson joined a correspondence class with Ruskin College, Oxford. The following spring, Lawson received a letter from the college offering him six months' scholarship if he could find the money to pay for the other six months. This was a significant expense that would be compounded by living costs, and as Lawson was determined that he would only ever work as a miner there was no obvious advantage to university study. Canon William Moore Ede, a county councillor and later Dean of