Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford (17 March 1851 – 17 December 1943) was an English socialist campaigner, journalist, and author in the United Kingdom.

His parents, John Glanville Blatchford, a strolling comedian, and Georgina Louisa nee Corri 1821–1890), an actress – named him after the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel who died the year before.

His maternal great-grandfather, Domenico Corri, (1746–1825), was an Italian musician and publisher who, in the late 18th century, moved from Rome to Edinburgh to teach music.

Blatchford was first employed as an odd job boy in a lithographic printing works, for which he earned a salary of eighteen pence a week.

Though lacking a formal education, Blatchford taught himself from the age of eight, reading the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and the works of Charles Dickens.

Around 1864, Georgina secured full-time employment as a dressmaker and immediately apprenticed both her sons, sending Montagu to a lithographic printer and Robert to a brush maker.

Laurence Thompson argues that the departure was due to a quarrel with his mother, but Blatchford's daughter Dorothea maintains that his decision to leave was caused by the difficulty of his life in Halifax.

At this time he had not begun to espouse socialist views, but the societal reactions to the competitiveness of industrial society in Northern England began affecting his sentiments.

Reflecting back on this period, Blatchford stated in the Fortnightly Review in 1907 that "Dr. Cozier is mistaken if he thinks I took my Socialism from Marx, or that it depends upon the Marxian theory of value.

Having left the newspaper on 12 December 1891, Blatchford set up The Clarion, but a printing error made its first edition almost completely illegible[citation needed].

[2] By 1892 Blatchford had removed himself from the candidature in Bradford East and began siding with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) against the Fabians' policy of "permeation."

The Clarion movement also supported many industrial disputes at this time, including the three-year lockout of the slateworkers of the Penrhyn slate quarry in North Wales.

He was critical of the Labour Party, which was founded in 1900, for what he perceived as its complete subservience to Liberalism, especially in its Cobdenite internationalist views on foreign policy.

He did not formally endorse Chamberlain's campaign, but The Clarion praised his aims—the revival of British agriculture, a self-sufficient Empire, and producer-focused instead of consumer-focused economic system.

[9] A further development in Blatchford's thinking cost him further readers, when he began denouncing organised religion in such works as God and My Neighbour (1903) and Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog (1905).

In the opinion of Robert Ensor, the book "helped to make socialism really well known in England for the first time...It was Blatchford's highest flight as a propagandist; he never surpassed it, and through it mainly he left his mark upon history".

[13][14] Dr Horton the Congregationalist minister compared Blatchford to Isaiah, Amos and Micah and said that "if Jesus Christ were a man on earth today, He would read the book not only with interest but with approval, and He would say to any officious disciples who took exception to parts of it, “Forbid him not; he that is not against Me is for Me".

[16] At the end of the second week of December 1909, Blatchford wrote ten daily articles for the Daily Mail warning of the German menace: I write these articles because I believe that Germany is deliberately preparing to destroy the British Empire; and because I know that we are not ready or able to defend ourselves against a sudden and formidable attack...At the present moment the whole country is in a ferment about the Budget and the Peers and the Election.

[19] Sir Charles Ottley, the Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, wrote to Lord Esher that Blatchford's appeal was not based on a partisan, political basis as he had said that the country did not want a Liberal or Unionist government but a MAN: "His strength is that he knows what he wants and is not afraid to ask for it in plain language...The burthen of the song is—compulsory service, a strong navy and a general raising of the standard of education and living of the masses of the British people".

[25] The Daily Mail′s Berlin correspondent told Lord Northcliffe: "In a long experience...I do not recall a foreign journalistic event which so focused the attention of the German press and public".

[20] Shortly before the general election of December 1910, the Daily Mail published Blatchford's series of articles on ‘The Greatest Issue of All’, the German threat.

[26] In 1909 he began advocating conscription but in 1912 troops were used for strike breaking and Blatchford turned against it: "Universal military service under the (present) ruling classes would result in slavery.

[31] In his first article for that paper, Blatchford correctly predicted that the German Army would not reach Paris and of General Joffre's flank along the Marne.

He wrote to Thompson in 1933: "In the early days of the war the movement howled with indignation about the lying charges brought against the German General Staff and troops.

But careful observation of the facts of for the last twelve years or so has convinced me that Socialism will not work, and a study of Mr. Ford's methods has provided what seems to me as good a substitute as we may hope in this imperfect world.

Socialism as I knew it in past years was an excellent, almost a perfect, theory...The golden rule will not work in international politics, because the nations are not good enough to live up to it.

I loathe the "top-hatted, frock-coated magnolia-scented" snobocracy as much as you do; but I cannot away with the Keir Hardies and Arthur Hendersons and Ramsay MacDonalds and Bernard Shaws and Maxtons.

Nor do I like the Trade Union bigots who have cheated J. H. Thomas of his pension...I am glad the Labour Party is defeated because I believe they would have disrupted the British Empire.

Socialism as he taught it was not a cold, materialistic theory, but the promise of a new life as full, sweet and noble as the world can give...Mr. Blatchford is still living, hale and hearty, his mental powers undiminished aged 83.

Only the men who were in the Socialist movement in those days can know the great part Robert Blatchford took in making it popular, and of the personal devotion he inspired by his writings.