A builder’s son from Wantage
John Hobbis Harris was born in Wantage on 29 July 1874. His father, also John Hobbis Harris, was a plumber and later a builder. As a young man John worked in the City of London for a firm of gentlemen’s outfitters and became involved in evangelical social work, which led him to train as a missionary.
The Congo
On 6 May 1898 he married Alice Seeley of Frome, and soon afterwards the couple sailed for the Congo Free State, then the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium. At their mission station they saw at first hand the violence used to force local people to collect wild rubber and ivory: killings, hostage-taking and mutilation. Alice’s photographs, and the evidence the couple gathered, became some of the most powerful material used by the Congo Reform Association, founded by E. D. Morel. Back in Britain, John and Alice lectured widely and spoke at many public meetings, putting pressure on the British government to act. International outrage helped force Leopold to hand the Congo over to the Belgian state in 1908.
Anti-Slavery Society and Parliament
From 1910 Harris was organising secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, later its secretary, and spent the rest of his career campaigning against forced labour and slavery across the British Empire and beyond. He wrote several books and pamphlets on these subjects.
He stood for Parliament as a Liberal, was elected for Hackney North in 1923 and lost the seat in 1924; later attempts in 1929 and 1931 were unsuccessful. He was knighted in the 1933 New Year Honours for his work with the society. He died at Frome, his wife’s home town, on 30 April 1940.
Remembering him locally
Harris’s birth in Wantage is recorded in his biographies, but no plaque or memorial to him in the town has been found. His papers and those of the society are held in national archives, and Alice Seeley Harris’s Congo photographs are now widely exhibited. He is a strong candidate for a future town plaque.