Tom Bell

Thomas Hargrave Bell (20 September 1882 – 19 April 1944) was a Scottish socialist politician and trade unionist. He is best remembered as a founding member of both the Socialist Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain and as the editor of Communist Review, the official monthly magazine of the latter. Biography Early years Thomas Bell was born in Parkhead on the east end of Glasgow, Scotland, which was at that time still a semi-rural village. His father was a stonemason who was frequently unemployed, while his mother came from a family of coal miners and worked at home spinning cotton and silk. Young Tom enrolled in school in the spring of 1889 and left in the spring of 1894, at the age of 11, going to work first as a milk delivery boy and then as an employee at a soft drink bottling plant to help support his impoverished family.