Thomas Thompson

Thomas Thompson (1880–1951) was a Lancashire writer and broadcaster, whose work generally appeared under the name of T. Thompson. He lived all his life in Bury, an industrial town some ten miles north of Manchester. Early life Thomas Thompson was born in Bury on 14 January 1880 to Thomas Thompson, a clog maker, and Ellen Greenhalgh, a cotton mill worker. By his eleventh birthday, the young Thompson was a ‘half-timer’, working half the day in the mill as a warehouse boy, and the other half at school. He once called his education “a poor do”. He left both school and mill as soon as he could. He worked as an errand runner and then as a printer's apprentice, gaining a silver medal for book-binding in 1898 from the Skinners’ Company. He continued to work as a book-binder until 1946. He married Ethel Heapy in 1911, and they had one child, Herbert. Thomas Thompson's early years in Bury's Victorian slums are described in his autobiography, Lancashire for Me. Further discussion of Thompson's escape from slum and mill is provided in Rose's book on British working class intellectuals. Writing Thompson drifted into writing at an early age, with articles on the countryside for his local newspaper, and a piece in the Sunday Chronicle. These were noticed by Gordon Phillips ("Lucio") at The Guardian, who invited him to write something longer. It turned into a regular column, the Plum Street Memoirs, based largely on the people in and around Wood Street in Bury, where he had spent most of his childhood.