The Red Flag makes comeback

It was last sung at the Labour Party Conference three years ago.

Today, as a gesture to its socialist roots, the party will again sing The Red Flag, one of the most recognisable political anthems.

But few people know the words to the stirring song - or indeed its troubled history.

Junior farms minister Ben Bradshaw, one of Tony Blair's biggest supporters, spoke for many of his colleagues when he admitted: "I can struggle through the first verse but after that I really don't know the rest of the words."

Another Blairite, Yvette Cooper, a minister in the Deputy Prime Minister's department, smiled and said nothing when asked if she could recite a few of the verses.

If few know the words to The Red Flag, even fewer will know its origin. Its writer was an Irish Republican, outraged at the injustice toward industrial workers.

Jim Connell, who wrote the song in London in 1889 at the height of the London dockers' strike, was largely motivated by his own experience working on the docks in Dublin.

Connell wrote the lyrics on a train from Charing Cross to New Cross as he travelled home from a lecture on socialism.

He planned that his words should be sung to the tune of an Irish folk song called The White Cockade and was never able to forgive the man who fitted them to the more familiar tune of O Tannenbaum, a popular German Christmas carol.

A trade union official, AS Headingly, set his words to the seasonal tune and the song immediately became an international anthem for the Labour movement.

Connell was born in Kilskyre in County Meath in 1852. He became involved in politics before he was out of his teens and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

At 18, he moved to Dublin where he worked as a casual docker - one of the reasons he was so moved by the strike at the time he wrote The Red Flag - but he was blacklisted for his attempts to unionise the docks and soon found himself unemployed and unemployable.

In 1875, failing to find any other work, he left for London where he spent the rest of his life, working as a staff journalist on Keir Hardie's newspaper, The Labour Leader, and then as secretary of the Workingmen's Legal Aid Society during the last 20 years of his life.

Connell was obviously proud of the success of his song - he even wrote a book called How I Wrote The Red Flag - but he was never able to get over the change of tune. Before his death in 1929, he said: "The only tune that ever has or ever will suit The Red Flag is the one I hummed as I wrote it. I mean The White Cockade.

"AS Headingly took it on himself to change the tune. May God forgive him, for I never shall." The song became the official Labour anthem in 1925 and even survived Peter Mandelson's attempts to try to kill it off.

However, he finally got his way and in 2000, the song was replaced with Canned Heat's Let's Work Together at the Labour party conference.

Today, Kath Brown, 49, a Teesside delegate for the steelworkers union, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, said she was pleased the anthem was making a comeback.

"Of course I'm glad they are bringing it back - they should never have stopped it," she added. "I don't know all the verses but as long as everybody else is singing along, I will be fine."