Engine cleaner James Thomas arrived in the GWR fortress of Swindon after the company moved him sideways to a position in the marshalling yards to keep an eye on him.

Jobs were hard to come by and, being a married man with two young children, he had no choice but to accept the move.

Once in Swindon the company rostered him to work between 60 and 84-hour weeks to keep him occupied.

But why had the GWR done this to a engine cleaner? Thomas had come to notice of the GWR and all the other railway companies as an organiser of railway workers and he had been involved in local disputes outside the GWR.

Thomas had the temerity to be dabbling in politics as well.

Politics in the latter part of the 19th century, was a very different mix to those of today.

His grandmother Ann, a laundress who had brought him up, was a true blue Conservative who would even wear all blue clothing on election day to show her loyalty. Which is rather odd as, being a woman, she could not vote.

Up until the mid 19th century Swindon was an oligarchy in which only a small number of men were allowed to vote, and no women.

Between 1868 and 1884 the Liberals had introduced a reform act extending the vote to 5.5 million men, which still left 40 per cent of working men without a vote due to their status and poverty.

However, as the earnings of working men in the industrialised areas increased this slowly brought more men into suffrage.

This actually helped the Conservatives and it was only in 1874, the year that Thomas was born,that the first working class MPs returned to Parliament.

Thomas was a Liberal, like a lot of working men at that time – a time when to be classed as middle class you had to have at least one servant.

When Thomas was 21, just a few years before he arrived in Swindon, he found out that the person he thought of as his eldest sister was in fact his mother.

She was now married with a family and would have nothing to do with him.

This period of insecurity must have driven even more for within two years he was the chairman of his local union branch, and president of the Newport Trades Council. He married Agnes Hill in 1898 and shortly after he attended the Leeds conference on the day after his 24th birthday, spoken of in national newspapers as the “Boy of Leeds.” Now brought to the attention of his employers Thomas made a commitment to elect Labour MPs to the next Parliament.

It is no coincidence that in 1899 Thomas found himself in Swindon. Thomas arrived in Swindon, from Wales, feeling like a fish out of water.

It was not a hotbed of union activity and Labour politics were virtually non existent. Forty per cent of the town worked for the GWR, so were alert to the possibilities of dismissal.

The GWR may have removed him from his power base in Newport, but once here he wasted no time, he was elected to be the delegate to the 1899 Annual Union Conference.

Swindon did not realise it, but it was about to get the first dose of Jimmy Thomas the politician.