James Tochatti

James Tochatti (1852 – 22 November 1928), was a Scottish socialist and anarchist agitator, merchant tailor, trade unionist, newspaper editor and public speaker. From 1894 to 1896, he was editor of the monthly anarcho-communist paper Liberty.

Biography James Tochatti was born in 1852 in Ballater, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, to police constable Joseph Tochatti and his wife Jane Cormack. In the 1860s the family moved to Leeds. Tochatti began studying medicine as well as working as a stationer before becoming a merchant tailor. In the mid-1870s he moved to London and became active in the National Secular Society.

Tochatti was active in the Hammersmith Radical Club, and in 1885 he was a founding member of the Hammersmith branch of the Socialist League.

In 1890 the Socialist League split, with the Hammersmith branch leaving the League to become the Hammersmith Socialist Society. Tochatti remained a member of the League and of the Hammersmith society despite the society adopting an anti-anarchist stance. On May Day 1894 Tochatti was attacked while speaking on anarchism.

Liberty

In January 1894 Tochatti started the anarchist monthly newspaper Liberty: A Journal of Anarchist Communism in response to the violent rhetoric being used in the newspaper Commonweal. Liberty was to be avowedly against political violence and "bombastic talk", with Tochatti arguing that it only served to alienate people from the anarchist cause. Tochatti produced the periodical in the book-lined basement of his shop on Beadon Road in Hammersmith, London, with help from regular contributor Louisa Sarah Bevington. Though the paper was explicitly anarcho-communist it facilitated conversation between anarchists and anti-parliamentary socialists following the split of the Socialist League. In December 1896 he announced that he was suspending publication of the paper due to ill health, though finances were likely also a contributing factor.