A few feet from the walls of Walton Jail, Liverpool, in a pauper’s grave, is the last resting place of Robert Noonan, better known as Robert Tressell, author of the socialist classic, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.The firebrand painter and decorator who inspired generations of trade unionists with his bitter novel of working-class life in Mugsborough (his home town of Hastings) was born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of a Protestant Irish magistrate in Dublin in April 1870. At one week old, he was baptised in St Kevin’s Church, though his father, unlike his mother, Mary, was not a Catholic, and the priest, observes Tressell’s new biographer, “tactfully did not dispute the marital status of the infant’s parents”. Thus began a tumultuous, self