Coalminer and Privy Counsellor "Tmomas Bust, str, De, Prax Axo Pave "CouNcrivons" An Auto:
biography." 'T. Pisher Unwin. Uoe.
'Thomas Burt had. a romantic career, but he remained an unromantic man. His spare mouselike figure astonished people who expected to find in a miners' leader at least a man of bulk. In his youth he had been overgrown, but overwork and lack of food as a growing boy dwarfed his stature, and perhaps may account for the lack of fire with which he described conditions which made Lord Shaftesbury cry to Heaven, His autobiography stops short with his election for Norpeth as one of the first two working-men's representatives in Parliament. He meant to finish it in a time of leisure which never came, he lived to be 85. He tells his story with a restraint that is almost unnatural. The spoonful of egg given him by an aunt and remembered for years, is described with the same detachment as the way in which he was snatched back from being ground to death in the dark by a descending "cage."
It was not until he was 17 that he first began to walk the 18 miles to Newcastle and back to buy cheap classics in order to extend the ing offered by his father's remarkable library of sermons and biblical commentaries. He used to go home too tired to eat, fall asleep en the floor and plead not to be awakened; but when the call came to be secretary of the trade union he had to be forced into the job. It was no sinecure, and the salary was 27s. 6d. a week.
Burt grew up among strikes which proved almost uniformly disastrous to the men, and partly on this account, no doubt, regarded al-must with horror the militant policy. introduced by Keir Hardie.
An old friend, Mr. Aaron Watson, has supplied chapters dealing with his life as a national figure.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.