Thompson, Phillips, 1843-1933 : Thomas Phillips Thompson was born in 1843 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England and with his family emigrated to Canada in 1857. Finally settling in St. Catharines, Thompson studied law and was admitted to practice. He later abandoned the law for a career as a journalist, first with the St. Catharines Post and later with the Toronto Daily Telegraph. Around 1870, he moved on to the Mail in Toronto and began writing a weekly political column under the pseudonym "Jimuel Briggs".
Thompson left the Mail in 1874 and began work for The National, which after 1875 became concerned with immigration and labour issues. Thompson, too, became involved in the labour movement and reform causes in general. The National ceased to publish shortly thereafter and Thompson moved on to the United States where he worked for a number of American journals. He returned to Toronto in 1879 and in 1881 was sent to Ireland by The Globe as a special correspondent to cover Charles Stuart Parnell's land campaign. It was here that he first met Henry George. His articles, published subsequently in The Globe, attracted a good deal of attention.
In 1883, Thompson joined the staff of The Toronto News, a reform newspaper. The paper, like Thompson, supported the Knights of Labor, which were then reaching the height of their popularity. Highly sympathetic to the goals of the Knights, Thompson wrote numerous articles for The Palladium of Labor, the organization's newspaper, joined a Toronto Local Assembly of the Knights in 1886, and attended the 1886 convention of the Canadian Trades and Labor Congress as an official delegate. The next year saw the publication of "The Politics of Labor", Thompson's major work. In December 1890, he became the editor of The Labor Advocate and through the paper, advocated a number of local reform causes, most notably public ownership of the Toronto street railway. The paper folded in 1891.
In 1892, Thompson unsuccessfully attempted to gain a seat in the Ontario provincial legislature as a labour candidate. The same year, he published the "Labor Reform Songster", a collection of labour songs. During the later nineties and early 1900s, Thompson worked as a writer for various departments of the provincial government, also performing this task for the legislature. Having gained a reputation as a spokesman for the labour movement, he was appointed in 1900 the Toronto correspondent for the Labour Gazette, published monthly by the Department of Labour in Ottawa. He continued in this function until the defeat of the Liberal government in the federal election of 1911, after which he retired. Throughout this time, he contributed to various labour and left-wing newspapers and journals, activities he continued until his death in 1933.
