Thomas Alfred Jackson (21 August 1879 – 18 August 1955) was a founding member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and later the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was a leading communist activist and newspaper editor and worked variously as a party functionary and a freelance lecturer. Biography Early years Jackson was born in Clerkenwell, London on 21 August 1879. His father, Thomas Blackwell Jackson, was a compositor and a firm Gladstonian liberal and trade unionist with Fenian sympathies. A keen reader from an early age, Jackson's formal education was limited to his attendance at Duncombe Road School in Upper Holloway, a board school at which he was a pupil between the ages of seven and thirteen-and-a-half. Jackson was apprenticed in the printing trade as a compositor after leaving school, but soon after becoming a journeyman compositor became a full-time speaker and orator, and later a writer. Political career Jackson dated his political conversion to socialism to 1900, after he read a copy of Robert Blatchford's book Merrie England which had been given to him years earlier by an older colleague at the printworks where he had been apprenticed. That year he joined the Social Democratic Federation, where he developed his oratorical skills at open-air meetings, overcoming the shyness he had endured as a child. Whilst a member of the SDF, he attended party classes on Marx's Capital which were taught by Jack Fitzgerald, who Jackson described as "very nearly the best-read man I have ever met". He helped found the Socialist Party of Great Britain with the London-based part of the SDF's Impossibilist faction in 1904. Briefly General Secretary in 1906, he was a very active speaker but, perhaps oddly given his later career, wrote only two brief items for the Socialist Standard. He resigned on 9 March 1909 to become paid speaker for the Independent Labour Party in Bristol and South Wales, initially spending three months in Bristol before moving to Newport, where he stayed until the summer of 1911. He left the ILP in 1911, then becoming a speaker for the National Secular Society in Leeds and finally a freelance lecturer, after being the subject of complaints for discussing his atheism whilst speaking for the ILP and for promoting his socialist beliefs when speaking for the NSS. During the First World War he was arrested and charged under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914