Clarion Fellowship Badge - 1900s

A beautifully crafted Clarion Fellowship badge, which reproduces the original design from the early 1900s.

The Clarion Fellowship

Clarion readers did not have to be keen on cycling, singing, rambling, or any of the other specific leisure interest clubs or groups, in order to meet up with others who shared their Socialist faith. Clarion Fellowship Clubs existed in many towns and cities in the early 1900s, and the Fellowship held its own separate conferences at the National Clarion Cycling Club’s Easter Meet.

The movement had its own social centres, usually called clubrooms, which complemented the cyclists’ country clubhouses. These were to be found in a number of places by 1900, including Derby, Leeds, Glasgow and North London. A Clarion Cafe, run by the Lone Scout, Bob Manson, opened before the turn of the century in Williamson Street, Liverpool. This did not remain in business as long as the one in Market Street, Manchester, which started in 1908 and was notable for its William Morris and Walter Crane furnishings and decor. It was still in existence in the 1940s.

A national constitution for the Fellowship was adopted at the Bakewell Easter Meet in 1901. Members wore a distinctive badge: a small red enamel crescent (or ‘C’ for Clarion) on a silver pin or trumpet. Groups of this “comradely confraternity”, as one member described the Fellowship, continued to meet until well after the end of the second world war. From the beginning the main purposes were social: eating, drinking, but above all, talking. The Clarion Fellowship’s slogan was once given as: “The propagation of the principles of Socialism – and leave politics to them as likes ‘em!”