William Arthur Pritchard

William Arthur "Bill" Pritchard (1888-1981) was a pioneer Canadian socialist politician and publisher. Pritchard is best remembered as a principal defendant in a 1920 sedition prosecution of nine socialist leaders in connection with the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

Biography

Early years

William Arthur Pritchard, known to his friends by the nickname "Bill," was born in England in 1888. He attended school in Swinton, a town in the City of Salford, part of Greater Manchester.[1] His Welsh-born father James Pritchard emigrated to British Columbia, Canada in 1900, when Bill was 12 years old.[2] While working as a miner in Canada,[3] James Pritchard became a socialist activist, splitting from the reformist Socialist Party of British Columbia in 1902 to help found the short-lived and tiny Revolutionary Socialist Party of Canada before joining the broader movement again as a founding member of the impossibilist Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) in January 1905.[4]

Back home in England the Pritchard family's financial situation remained difficult. Bill Pritchard's conventional academic career came to an end shortly before his 13th birthday when he was apprenticed to a Lancashire building contractor so that he might help support his family while learning the construction trades.[1] Pritchard nevertheless attended night school over the next seven years at two technical institutes, where he gained formal training.[1]

In 1911 Pritchard's father returned home from Canada for a short visit.[1] The 23-year-old decided to join his father on the return trip to North America, sailing with him across the ocean before traversing the breadth of Canada by rail to Vancouver on Canada's Pacific coast.[1] The pair arrived in Vancouver on May 19, 1911, and immediately went to meet with party leader E. T. Kingsley at the office of the Western Clarion, the weekly newspaper of the SPC.[1] Two days later Bill Pritchard attended his first socialist meeting and before the month was out he was admitted as a card-carrying member of the SPC.[1]

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Harry Gutkin and Mildred Gutkin, Profiles in Dissent: The Shaping of Radical Though in the Canadian West. Edmonton, AB: NeWest Publishers, 1997; pg. 99.
  2. ↑ Gutkin and Gutkin, Profiles in Dissent, pg. 98.
  3. ↑ Peter E. Newell, The Impossibilists: A Brief Profile of the Socialist Party of Canada. London: Athena Press, 2008; pg. 64.
  4. ↑ Gutkin and Gutkin, Profiles in Dissent, pg. 97.

Further reading

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