James Connolly was born on June 5, 1868, to a working-class family in the Cowgate ghetto of Edinburgh. His father John was an unskilled laborer, working first collecting manure and then managing public toilets in the city. He and his wife Mary were Irish famine emigrants from Monaghan, moving to Scotland at a time when its slums were among the poorest and most destitute places on the island.

The Connollys were a political family. James’ father John was a labor militant, involved in numerous strike actions during his childrens’ youth. But perhaps more importantly, letters discovered in the Marx Memorial Library in London in recent years have established that James’s uncles were Fenians, revolutionary nationalists and supporters of the uprising that had taken place in Ireland a year before his birth.

Life was not easy for the young James Connolly. He started work at age nine, first in a bakery then as a courier for the local newspaper and finally in a tile factory. After this came a chapter that largely disappeared from later republican hagiographies: in 1882, aged fourteen, he followed his brother John into the British Army. The circumstances surrounding his enlistment are teased out in historian Donal Nevin’s biography, but much debate still remains as to his motivations. To some he was a young worker with limited job prospects trying to earn a wage, to others his possible presence in a regiment — the King’s Liverpool — that had been infiltrated by the Fenians less than two decades earlier suggested political aims. Whatever the case, in a fine irony of history, it was the British Army that first brought James Connolly to Ireland.