(Dublin, 1870, Liverpool, 1911) It was the pseudonym used by Robert Noonan for fear of being blacklisted for his political views. The name refers to the paper table of his trade.

There is little certainty about the first two decades of Tressell's life. He was the illegitimate son of Robert Crooker (police officer) and Mary Noonan, in the late 1880s he emigrated to South Africa, where he married and had a daughter, and was noted for his skill as a painter and decorator. But he also forged his political radicalism at the dawn of the union movement. Separated from his wife, he returned to England with his daughter in 1901, settling in Hastings, where he lived and continued to exercise his trade and actively participate in the labor movement.

He worked for different companies and wrote his work between 1906 and 1908, although it was not published for the first time, and only in an abbreviated form, until three years after his death from tuberculosis.