A short biography of Tom Barclay, a founder of the Socialist League in Leicester
Thomas Patrick Barclay was born to an impoverished Irish immigrant family in Leicester in 1852. Tom’s parents from Limerick and Mayo had been forced to quit Ireland because of the potato famine. They lived in a two-room hovel. He never went to school and was taught to read by his mother. His father scraped a living as a rag and bone man.