Portrait of a Labour Spy: The Case of Robert Raglan Gosden, 1882-1961.

Mark Leier, "Portrait of a Labour Spy: The Case of Robert Raglan Gosden, 1882-1961," Labour/Le Travail, 42 (Fall 1998), 55-84. WE DO NOT KNOW much about labour spies, especially those who were paid informers rather than undercover police agents. Their reports are frequently used by historians, who rarely are able to explore their motives and the conditions that led them to their actions. This paper will examine the case of Robert Raglan Gosden and his life as an unskilled worker, revolutionary, mystic, and labour spy. He was an atypical member of the working class: relatively few workers became Wobblies and few Wobblies became spies. But his story reveals a class experience and consciousness that has not been much explored by labour historians. For Gosden inhabited a world very different from that of the artisans, unionists, socialists, and politicans that are more often studied. It was the world of the blanket stiff, the migrant worker, the rough, not the respectable, and it proved a fertile ground for radicalism, intrigue, and sometimes, treachery.