Our guest blogger, Andrew Redpath, is researching the North East Coast Tug-boatmen’s Association. In this post he describes the history of the Association, its rivals and potential merger partners of the TGWU. (All photo’s provided by Andrew).

One of the drivers of my research was a building in North Shields with the markings ‘Tyne Steam Packet Provident Society Established 1853 Built 1897 Diamond Jubilee.’ The building, now residential, was the head office of a union that at one time represented steam tug boat men and steam trawler men from Aberdeen to the Humber but is now largely forgotten.

During World War Two the head office was used as an ARP post and as it did not have a cellar for storage, all paperwork was ordered removed from the office and never returned, either lost or destroyed. Finding information on the union was difficult as there were no deposits in the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums. North Tyneside Discovery held a small amount of materiel as did the National Archives and local newspapers while some information was available in TGWU deposits at the Modern Records Centre and TUC Library.

Formed in 1853 as a friendly society, with 488 members, the organisation was registered under the name the Tyne Steam Packet Provident Society and restricted membership to time served steam tug boat men, steam trawler men and apprentices.

River trades on the Tyne had a long history of self-help organisations and the Tyne tug boat men and fishermen lived in close communities on the Tyne and had generations of the same families employed in the tug boat and trawler trades.

The Society described itself as “a society of good fellowship for the purpose of raising funds by voluntary contributions for mutual relief and maintenance of all members in old age, sickness and infirmity and care of the widows and children of members”. The Society provided its members with a large range of benefits including sickness benefit, accident benefit, a weekly payment to all members over seventy years of age, disabled members received a weekly payment which would continue as a life pension. The Society also held annual members excursions and sports days and provided a loan scheme to allow members to buy their own boat or share of a boat.

In 1866 the Society petitioned the steam tug owners for an increase in overtime rates and threatened a strike, however the Society failed to carry out the threat. After having taken the first steps to act as a trade union the Society registered as a trade union in 1895 with the registration number 845T.

In June 1897 the Society opened a new purpose built head office in North Shields. The substantial building had an ante room and two meeting rooms on the ground floor and General Secretary’s office and residential flat on the first floor. As well as an administrative centre the office also acted as a hub for social activities. The meeting room was open from eight in the morning with a selection of newspapers available for members, who could also hold birthday and wedding parties there. The rooms were also hired out to other trade unions and groups.

As well as being able to fund the building of its s own head office, the union must have accumulated a substantial amount of funds as it was able to produce 14 gold and silver medals for presentation to the crew of the Grimsby tug Copernicus who rescued Society members from their sinking tug Clarence in 1894.

The Society also bought a banner from Tutils in 1898. The banner was silk with a scarlet background and blue margins. The front of the banners depicts North Shields Fish Quay, the paddle trawler Flying Arrow and the paddle tug Warrior. The reverse shows Newcastle High Level and Swing bridges with the trawler Victorian Prince and the liner Orcadia.

The Society also obtained some regalia for its officers, collarettes in dark blue and gold fabric with a gold Maltese cross surrounded by a heraldic strap with buckle inscribed ‘United to Assist’ all surrounded by a wreath.

By 1914 branches were operating at Aberdeen, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Hull as well as the membership on the Tyne and at Blyth.

In 1921 the Dock, Wharf Riverside and General Workers Union, without consulting or informing the Society raided the Society’s Middlesbrough branch.
In 1922 the Society amalgamated with the South Shields Steam Tug Boat Men’s Provident Society to form the North East Coast Tug Boatmen and Fishermen’s Association, which was soon joined by the Newcastle Steam Tug Society.

The newly established Transport and General Workers Union approached the Association with a view to amalgamation, however after the incident with the Dock Wharf Riverside and General Workers Union (now part of the TGWU) the Association’s Executive decided they would rather remain independent. The TGWU responded by poaching the Association’s membership at Blyth, although some them later reapplied to rejoin the Association.

The TGWU began organising amongst North Shields fishermen as most of them were unorganised as the Association only accepted crews of steam fishing vessels who had practiced their craft for at least three years.

The TGWU offered the Association generous terms for amalgamation in 1937 but the membership voted to reject it.

By 1950 the Association had lost all it’s members in the Tyne Improvement Commission to the TGWU and it’s Sunderland Branch to the National Union of General and Municipal Workers leaving the Association representing tug boat men and some fishermen on the Tyne only. As steam trawlers were phased out the Association’s trawler membership disappeared and in 1955 the Association became the North East Coast Tug Boatmen’s Association with all it’s members on the Tyne.

An important dispute took place in September 1954 when the first two diesel tugs were introduced on the Tyne, more than 140 tug boatmen, operating 28 tugs stopped work. The Association was not against the introduction of the diesel tugs but the fact that the owners wanted to reduce the crew on each tug by one man. The Association agreed to return to work and continue negotiations with the issue going to an Industrial Disputes Tribunal which ruled in favour of the Association.

The Association applied to the TUC for affiliation in 1969 but was turned down due to its small membership, 120, and advised to merge with one of the general unions. The Association rejected the TUC advice as with one hundred percent membership amongst Tyne tug crews, recognition from the employers and a healthy bank balance the Association chose to remain independent.

The Association had won paid holidays and pensions for tug boat crews and had loyal membership but with the reduction of the number of tugs on the Tyne membership continued to fall.

In 1996 the Tyne tug company was taken over by Corey Towing who already recognised the TGWU. Rather than merge with the TGWU the Association dissolved itself. It is probable that the Association chose to dissolve rather than merge as it had a large amount of money in the bank from its sale of the head office and under Rule 20 of the Associations rules all funds and property would be divided equally between its membership of around 68.

Our guest blogger, Joe Duffy, is researching for a PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin on the internationalism of the Irish labour movement during the revolutionary period, 1900-1923. In this post he describes his project and how the TUC Library has helped in his research.

The objective of this PhD project is to explore the intersection of nationalism, internationalism, and anti-imperialism within the Irish labour movement during the island’s revolutionary period. The archival materials held at the Trade Union Congress Library Collections will be of great benefit to this project, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have visited this excellent archive.  

The Irish revolution has, rightfully, begun to be considered as a global event. The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed radical transformation in Ireland. In two decades, the nationalist movement shifted from demanding self-governance within the British Empire through ‘Home Rule’, to a militant push for full independence. This culminated in the Irish War for Independence (1919-1921), which led to the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, the island’s partition and the creation of Northern Ireland. The Irish revolutionary period was part of an intense era of global political upheaval that included WWI, the Bolshevik Revolution, an increase in anti-imperial nationalism and insurgency and a wave of labour militancy. In recent years, historians have begun to situate aspects of Ireland’s revolutionary period within this tumultuous global context and identify the interconnections between Britain’s closest colony and the rest of the world. 

From general strikes against British rule to James Connolly’s execution following the 1916 Easter Rising, the labour movement played a significant role during Ireland’s revolutionary period. Yet organised labour and the working class have been largely excluded from the increase in transnational and global histories of Ireland’s revolutionary period. This project seeks to fill this historiographical gap by exploring how members of the Irish trade union movement were considerably more enmeshed in global debates of working-class organisation, socialist internationalism, and anti-imperialism than has previously been acknowledged.

In the few instances that historians have explored the internationalism of the Irish labour movement, the focus has predominantly been on its most famous leader, James Connolly. This recognition of Connolly’s internationalism has not extended to other members of Irish labour. This project will examine in greater detail the global engagement of other labour leaders and will also include a consideration of whether union members shared their worldview. Building on this, this PhD intends to address the underexamined importance of women trade unionists during Ireland’s revolutionary period.

A final focus of this PhD is to examine how members of Ireland’s labour movement looked beyond Europe’s borders to draw connections between Ireland’s history of imperialism and that of other colonised nations. Historians have increasingly recognised that the Irish revolution was part of a global tumult alongside the Bolshevik uprising, Egyptian and Iraqi revolutions and growing anti-colonial consciousness across the globe. This project will explore how nationalist trade unionists were active participants in these global debates. A broader intention of this PhD is therefore to consider whether trade unions, in Ireland and around the world, should be included within accounts of burgeoning independence movements in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The vast array of illuminating documents at the Trade Union Congress Library are of great relevance for these research aims. Some selected highlights include a reprint of a lecture delivered in Belfast by prominent trade unionist William Walker, whose dispute with Dublin based James Connolly exposed fissures within the Irish labour movement along Catholic and Protestant lines. Reports of government commissions into labour disputes, notably the Dublin Lock Out of 1913-14, provide granular accounts of strikes from those who took part. Reports from the British Labour Party into ‘The Present Conditions in Ireland’ offer a window into understanding why the Irish labour movement splintered from their UK-based counterparts during the revolutionary period. British government reports into the conditions of working classes in Dublin demonstrate the widespread poverty that fuelled more militant labour organising during this period. Minutes from Irish trade union annual conferences are of great benefit to this project, as is the report of the Irish delegation to the International Labour and Socialist Conference in Switzerland in 1919.  A 1922 pamphlet on ‘The Influence of Women in Catholic Ireland’ issued by the Reverend J.S Sheeny provides an interesting example of the conventions and expectations that women trade unionists were breaking with during this period. The range of press clippings during this period, from the Daily News to labour papers such as The Irish Worker, will also be of great help to this project.

In summary, this PhD project intends to demonstrate that, during the febrile global context of Ireland’s revolutionary period, members of the Irish labour movement engaged with the world in a more extensive manner than has thus far been acknowledged. The excellent archives of the Trade Union Congress Library Collections will be crucial in telling this story.

Guest blogger, Dr Mary Edmondson, has been researching in the TUC Library, for an article on the 1975/76 junior doctors’ strike. Here she writes about the strike, her involvement as a junior doctor at the time, and relates it to the current disputes by health workers.

In August 1975 I started my first job as a qualified doctor. This was a period of economic and social crisis, and very high inflation which peaked at 25%in 1975.

 By October I was involved in the first industrial action ever taken by junior doctors. There had been statutory pay restraint in the 1970-74 Heath tory government and NHS staff pay at all levels had fallen behind workers in the private sector. Ancillary staff, nurses and ambulance workers had all flexed their industrial muscle and taken industrial action in the early 70’s. Junior doctors worked to a contract negotiated with the Secretary of State for Health, but pricing and pay was determined by the annual report of the Doctors and Dentists Pay Review body (DDRB) a supposedly independent body, but from the beginning, government constraints and interference were evident.

The April 1975 report of the DDRB was the first for three years not carried out under the constraint of a statutory policy and recommended a 30% uplift for doctors. The DDRB was unable to price the award as the Hospital Junior Staffs Group Council (HJSGC) was still in negotiations with the government over the contract although a basic agreement had been reached.

The HJSGC was a hybrid committee being a subcommittee of the BMA but recognised by the DoH as negotiating on behalf of all junior doctors, BMA members or not. There were in fact two other more militant organisations to which a minority of doctors belonged; the Junior Hospital Doctors Association, which was formed by junior doctors dissatisfied with the BMA, and the Medical Practitioners Union, which merged into the ASTMS union in 1970 and was affiliated to the TUC from the start.

So, the doctor’s dispute was about both the nature of the employment contract, and the rates of pay. Until 1970 junior doctor contracts were completely open- ended. Hours of work were at the behest of the consultant and usually meant 80-100+ hours on duty. After 1970, for hours over 102 per week an extra duty allowance (EDA) could be claimed. Subsequently, in 1974 EDA could be claimed after ‘only’ 80 hours. Claims had to be signed by the consultant and not all were happy to do it. Many were late or simply not claimed.

In January 1975 an agreement was announced between the HJSGC of the BMA, and the Department of Health, on a new contract for junior doctors although due to the complexities of the pay structure there were still areas of uncertainty. The important principle of the working week being 40 hrs was agreed and payment was to be made for additional hours, thus recognising the long working hours of junior doctors.

The then Health Secretary Barbara Castle, in a clever move, asked for a deferment of the start of the contract until October. In the interim, the voluntary pay restraint agreed with the TUC became a statutory pay policy limiting pay awards to no more than £6 per week thus trapping the pricing of the contract within this cap. In addition, government sent guidance to hospitals stating the basic salary hours were 44 not 40. The review body then priced the contract with the pay cap in mind. Using the figures available for doctors’ salaries plus EDA payments historically claimed, the result was that hours over 44 (not the previously agreed 40) would be paid at 1/3 of the basic hourly rate and hours on duty from home at 10%! In addition, some doctors would experience loss of pay.

The HJSGC accepted this ‘reluctantly’ but junior doctors across the country did not. Unofficial action began in October in a few hospitals such as Leicester. Portsmouth, Rochdale, and Northern Ireland, and spread. The action was short of full on strike action. In most hospitals doctors worked only 40hrs a week in shifts which affected the routine work especially routine surgery. After six weeks and a ballot in favour of industrial action the BMA finally moved to back the action which then continued until the end of December 1975. An independent audit of the money available for the pricing of the contract was agreed and action was called off meantime. Some further money was found for the pricing of the contract.

The dispute dragged on through 1976 over issues such as pay for covering absent colleagues and no detriment to any group of doctors. There were calls for further industrial action, but support was waning. The dispute finally came to an end in October 1976. The only obvious gain was that the government had been pressurised into finding a little more money for the pay settlement which was used to revert to the originally agreed 40 hr basic working week.

Was the dispute successful? Many junior doctors thought not as the rates of supplementary pay were not increased. However, in April 1976 David Ennals, then the Health Secretary reported to Parliament that the cost of the new contract which had been estimated using figures for previous supplementary pay, was more than double this amount as claims for the hours above 40 were claimed and administered within a more robust structure and contract. The £6 per week limit had been blown apart.

The dispute was complicated by the concurrent consultants’ dispute over their right to have pay beds in NHS hospitals. Many junior doctors supported the consultants fight with the government. As the consultants of the future, they expected to benefit from the ability to practice privately. But other juniors began to see themselves as part of the wider workforce and had learnt from the industrial action of other groups such as nurses and ambulance workers. There were other fault lines too. Much of the consultant body and some juniors were opposed in principle to doctors taking any action which might impinge on patient care, and this is a conflict still experienced by health workers today.  The BMA experienced the same ambivalence towards its dual role, both as professional organisation and as a negotiating organisation. The attitude of the public was mixed although I do not remember meeting any outright hostility from a public which is always inclined to be sympathetic to health workers.

In more recent disputes the BMA seems more comfortable with its Trade Union role than previously and has had the experience of several disputes since 1975. It remains however registered as an independent Trade Union, unaffiliated to the TUC.

The public has been reliably supportive of health workers in dispute as they see the action, like the health workers, as a fight for the survival of the NHS. Health workers and other public service workers have largely recognised that their fight for decent pay and working conditions is not in conflict with the fight for a better health service for everyone.

The junior doctors, at the moment, show no signs of discontinuing their action and have been joined by consultants.

Guest blogger Suzanne Jobling is a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast studying women’s employment and equal pay in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain and the impact of the European legislation in this area. In this post she writes about her research in the TUC Library. Suzanne’s research trip was assisted with funding from the Women’s History Association of Ireland (WHAI).

The groundbreaking nature of the equal pay and sex discrimination legislation introduced in the UK in the 1970s has largely been forgotten about in recent decades. However, while society has become accustomed to the concept of equal pay, and discrimination in the workplace is largely frowned upon, and prohibited in law, inequalities remain. In 2000 the TUC provided a reminder of the continuing importance of equal pay, declaring that ‘the idea of “equal pay for work of equal value”’ was ‘one of the most revolutionary concepts to emerge in recent times’1. Widespread application of the equal pay concept took many years to achieve, from the first motion in favour of equal pay at a TUC conference in 1888 by Clementina Black, to its introduction in the civil service in the 1950s and finally the introduction of the Equal Pay Act in the 1970s.2

While the introduction of the Equal Pay Act 1970 was a positive development for women workers, the legislation had significant shortcomings. Since the act stipulated that equal pay was dependent on a woman performing work comparable with that of a man in order to be eligible for equal pay, many women remained within the ranks of the lowest-paid since they performed work that was not performed by men and was not, therefore, comparable – e.g. hairdressers and typists. The Equal Pay Act also omitted pensions from its provisions, a significant deficiency allowing employers a means of continuing to pay male workers greater amounts than women workers whilst still complying with the law. There were many additional ways in which the act could be evaded by employers, such as segregating the workforce so that men and women workers worked in entirely different jobs, thus ensuring that their work could not be compared and that women could continue to be paid less than male workers.

In addition to these shortcomings, the Equal Pay Act addressed issues of remuneration only, and did not consider equality of opportunity or access to employment – without which true equality could not be achieved. The introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 addressed this deficit, however, like the Employment Equality Act, it also had limitations, particularly in its exemption of small businesses employing less than five employees from its provisions. This effectively placed a large number of women workers, such as those working in pubs and newsagents for example, outside the act’s remit. Workers employed in private households and residences were also exempt from the act’s provisions, leaving women employed in agriculture or domestic service unprotected.3

Despite the introduction of these laws, many employers were unwilling to make the changes necessary to create a more equal workplace, leaving individual employees in a position where they had to fight for their rights under the Industrial Tribunal system. Making an official complaint was a considerable undertaking. Tribunals were not always impartial – their composition represented the diversity of viewpoints and discriminatory views existing within society itself and therefore could not be infallible. Additionally, making an official complaint created a difficult relationship with an employer, who, in many cases the employee had worked with for many years and depended on for their livelihood. The narrative and stories revealed in the detail of such cases have received little attention, but provide an incredibly rich insight into workplace norms and societal attitudes in the second half of the twentieth century. While details of both equal pay and sex discrimination cases from the 1970s and 1980s can be found in the National Archives at Kew, the TUC Library at London Metropolitan University contains a series of pamphlets produced by the EOC (Equal Opportunities Commission) publicising the details of significant sex discrimination cases from the 1980s.

One pamphlet describes a 1985 case concerning sex discrimination in relation to promotion. A PE teacher (the complainant) brought a sex discrimination case against a regional council in relation to her failed application for the role of Principal PE teacher at the academy in which she worked. She had worked there since 1970 – for three years as an Assistant Teacher after which she progressed to the role of Assistant Principal Teacher in the school. This teacher was ‘highly regarded’ in the academy. She held a Diploma of Physical Education, but had developed her skills, attending a number of courses and achieving qualifications in areas such as first aid and volleyball. She was a qualified volleyball referee and coach to the Scottish National under-16 and under-19 teams and was regarded as ‘a hockey player of repute’. The complainant was an impressive individual, she had been invited to join the Scottish Central Committee on Physical Education to work on curriculum development by the Secretary of State to Scotland – ‘an opportunity given to only a very small proportion of teachers’.

Previous to the promotion application upon which the case was based, the teacher had applied unsuccessfully for a number of roles as Principal PE teacher while working at the academy. When an opportunity arose within the academy, she approached the headteacher for an application form. She asked the other female PE teacher in the school to accompany her due to previous experiences. When enquiring about promotion applications in the past the headteacher had been ‘extremely patronising’ and had once asked her ‘“is that post not for a man?”’. On this occasion the other female teacher described how the headteacher said “surely if it is a man leaving the post it will need to be a man to replace him”’.

Despite such opposition the complainant applied for the post and was ‘very disappointed’ when she was not called for interview. She was ‘particularly disappointed’ because the male applicant from the academy who had been interviewed had less teaching experience than her and not worked as an Assistant Principal PE teacher. The headteacher advised her that the role was ‘the last bastion of male supremacy and they won’t give up that easily’. A widespread belief existed among women PE teachers in the wider division (which the academy was part of) that they had little chance of promotion since ‘highly qualified’ women who applied had not been successful – a fact that discouraged others from applying.
Before 1975 the division to which the academy belonged had operated a policy whereby if a Principal PE teacher was male then the Assistant Principal teacher should be female and vice versa. As a result, at the time of the complaint the vast majority of principal PE teachers were male and their assistant principal PE teachers were female. Male teachers had expressed ‘disquiet’ that they could not be promoted to Principal PE teacher if they did not work as an Assistant Principal PE teacher, but they had been ‘reassured’ that they could still progress from Assistant teacher to Principal PE teacher. Such reassurance demonstrated that the needs of male PE teachers were prioritised above those of women teachers whose career paths were completely disregarded. It had been expected that this rule would change after the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act, however, this did not happen.

The council denied the allegations, asserting that the successful applicant was appointed on the basis of merit alone. The male candidate had been rated as ‘eminently suitable’ while the two women candidates were only rated as ‘suitable’. The complainant was judged to be unsuitable due to her ‘unassertive nature and relatively quiet style’ – a very typical and gendered criticism of female teaching styles. The Senior Education Officer for the division gave evidence that she had not been chosen for any of the Principle PE teacher posts that she had applied for ‘because in his opinion she was not the best of the candidates who applied’. The stark facts of this case and incontrovertible nature of the complainant’s qualifications ensured that the Industrial Tribunal upheld her claim, declaring that they ‘felt totally convinced that sexual bias was at work’ and that she would have been successful in her application ‘had it not been for the sex discrimination’. She was awarded two years earnings as compensation since it was unlikely that she would obtain a principle teacher role within the next two years.

The EOC concluded that a properly implemented equal opportunities policy would be particularly helpful in such cases and that ‘sensible monitoring’ of such a policy would serve to highlight similar situations.4 This case serves as a reminder of the behaviours and attitudes that went unquestioned in the working world before the introduction of employment equality legislation and to which there should be no return. A highly qualified and motivated candidate was required to expose the council’s discrimination. This was a significant achievement since making such a complaint was undoubtedly stressful and time-consuming. Cases such as this reveal the reality of women workers’ lives at the time, completely dispelling notions that women workers in the past had less agency than their male counterparts or were any less able or ambitious as comparable male workers.

1 TUC, ‘Campaigning to close the gap: Celebrating 30 years of The Equal Pay Act’ (2008), p.5.

2 ‘Women and Work in the 19th Century’ (https://www.striking-women.org/module/women-and-work/19th-and-early-20th-century)(Accessed 8 June 2023) & Hansard (Commons), dccxcv, 915 (9 Feb. 1970).

3 ‘Discrimination against applicants and employees’
(https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1975/65/section/6/enacted)(Accessed 7 February 2022).

4 London Metropolitan University, TUC Archive, HQ1201-1296, ‘Sex Discrimination Decisions, no. 15 – Teacher Promotion’, EOC.

The ‘Daily Herald’ instituted the Order of Industrial Heroism in 1923 to recognise the “deeds of valour” of those workers who had saved their fellow workers from danger or death and became known as the “Workers’ V.C.” The TUC Library holds records of all the awards and is filled with cases of acts of selflessness and sometimes sacrifice as workers attempted to rescue their comrades in peril.

It is also a record of employer and government failures to deal with the dangers that these workers have faced.

Many of the stories are about the coal industry, and there is a shocking detail in Case 22 “Miners ran tremendous risk every day. This was shown by the fact that one miner was killed every five hours.” The awards are filled with stories of collapsed mine-shafts, rooves caving in, falls down shafts when ladders broke, explosions from blastings, and cables bearing weights snapping. And the results – trapped, entombed, buried suffering terrible injuries, the pain, and the fear, with only basic facilities for relief and rescue.

Here to mark International Workers Memorial Day we look at just a few of the cases:

Case number 33 William Owen, Golborne, Lancashire, February 1926

A fall of roof, some 50 tons, which occurred in Seven Feet Mine of Golborne Colliery, buried a colliery dataller named Albert Bowles, aged 50. In jumping out of the way of the light Owen lost his light, but pluckily went to the rescue of his workmate. He groped his way over the fall in the darkness, and found Bowles under a stone that weighed about 10cwt (80 stone or 508kg). Bowles who was conscious pleaded “Get me out as soon as you can!” and Owen succeeded in moving the stone. Bowles, however died from his injuries.

Case 34. 35, 36, 37 Fred Fairbrother, Robert Davies, Ernest Bowkett and James Grimshaw, Radcliffe, Lancashire, March 1926

The four men, Messrs F Fairbrother, Robert Davies, Ernest Bowkett and James Grimshaw, went to the rescue of comrades buried by a fall of roof, and were themselves buried by a further fall. All four sustained injuries, Davies having a broken leg and Fairbrother a badly injured back. It is feared both these men will be permanently disabled. Davies is in hospital.

Case 42 William Lindon, miner Tyldesley, Lancashire, August 1927

…when a heavy fall occurred, Wright was pinned beneath a large stone. Both the men’s lamps were extinguished and although other falls were taking place and the darkness was complete, Linton, without a moment’s hesitation, worked desperately in trying to release his comrade. When he found this to be impossible he groped his way to other men who were at work and gave the alarm. When Wright was extricated he was dead.

Guest blogger Dr Paul Griffin from Northumbria University has written this post about Politicising unemployment – connecting workers and non-workers through the trade union movement (1978-)

Ours is a different army. The young unemployed now descending on London may not have starved. They have never tasted Army life. They have grown up against the background of the post-war consensus of economic policies which have had at their heart a commitment to full employment and the welfare state. Skinheads from Bolton, punks from Manchester, the mother and her unemployed son from Whaley Bridge, blacks from London and their older marching companions; what brings them together is the cry for work and dignity.

(People’s March Co-ordinators, Letter to the Editor, The Times, May 5^th 1981, p.13)

1980s Britain – responding to a crisis

On May 1^st 1981, over 250 unemployed people departed from Liverpool for London on the People’s March for Jobs. En route they were joined by parallel regional marchers from elsewhere across the UK and on their arrival into London a month later, became part of a crowd estimated to be over 100,000 people in Hyde Park for a rally. The over 200-mile march, and solidarity events across the country, reflected a community and trade union response to the challenges posed by unemployment. In Liverpool alone, redundancies and industrial closures caused 17.9% of the workforce to be unemployed in July 1981. Nationally the statistics were similarly increasing with 11.9% unemployed.

The march was a response from the trade union movement, with leadership from the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and wider political left organisers, to intervene in a crisis posed by industrial closures. Echoing some of the comments in the exert above, unemployed marcher Keith Mullin reflected on his experience of arriving in London in 1981:

Hundreds and hundreds of people who are just offering you support, putting money in the pockets because we all had collection buckets. We all had the green jackets, we all had the green tops, we were all kitted out with boots. All this stuff by the march which was all paid for by the trade union movement, the TUC, and donations of other people so, that particular day that was historical in my mind.

[Oral History with Keith Mullin, 2021]

Such campaigns sat alongside the opening of Unemployed Workers’ Centres (UWCs) in towns and cities across the UK. These centres were established by trades councils and viewed as a community response to the challenges of rising unemployment. Over the last few years, I have been working with UWC staff, volunteers and activists to uncover a history of struggle associated with unemployment. Their commitment, in some cases of over 40 years, reflects a little known history of organising and resistance in a time largely defined Thatcherism and neoliberalism. My work has looked to illuminate these actions to consider a further history of unemployed struggle, which might complement more familiar social struggles, such as the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement of the 1920s and 30s.

Unemployed Workers’ Centres

The first UWC officially launched in Newcastle in 1978, following a series of meetings and actions in 1977. The Newcastle Trades Council Centre for the Unemployed opened with the ambition to be a space where unemployed people could meet, access resources and support, as well as providing an organising resource for associated campaigns, connecting workers and non-workers. Reflecting on their second year, the centre’s annual report described their role as platforming a ‘voice for the unemployed’, blending together their campaigning efforts with the ‘mass of day to day issues and queries which crop up among working people, created by the variety of economic and social pressures arising under the present system’ and handling cases on behalf of ‘redundant workers or long term claimants; school leavers or young unemployed’. [i]

Unemployment was regularly discussed and debated at the annual conference of The Trades Union Congress (TUC) and this resulted in a consultative conference in November, 1980 to outline next steps in building a response to the crisis. The most significant outcome of this meeting was a clear instruction to trades councils for an expansion of UWCs based upon the experiences in Newcastle and to respond to the political challenges of the time. The TUC produced guidelines and resources, through regional trades councils, to help establish centres. The TUC President Lionel Murray pledged a commitment to the centres in a letter instructing all affiliated unions and trades councils:

–          [A]ffiliated unions should do all that they can to retain and recruit more of the unemployed, and to publicise union services available to unemployed members;

–          there should be an action programme for the development of unemployed workers’ centres throughout the country.[ii]

TUC support for the initiative was prominent within conferences yet wider calls for greater involvement, participation and membership of the unemployed within Congress remained a source of considerable tension. That said, the centres grew in number considerably and began to provide vital services across the country as well as providing organising spaces for the trade union movement. The potential here for collaboration between those in-work and those out-of-work was clear in the principles outlined by centres.

Activities varied between centres, with some prioritising welfare advice and others emphasising campaigning in their work, but successes were notable. Centres were notable for the large amounts of money returned to claimants through appeal processes. The very presence of centres within urban settings was also significant in itself. Centres offered a place of support, comfort and sociability for unemployed people to gather and share experiences. They could draw upon the expertise of welfare rights advisers and also lead as organisers of campaigns. In this regard, the centres should be considered as sites of care and campaigning. Such services were found at centres across the country, perhaps no more impressive than those found at the large (0.93 acres) Merseyside UWC at 24 Hardman Street in Liverpool. This centre had numerous resources, including a music venue (The Flying Picket) and recording studio, library, office space, and creche.

Image of mural in Newcastle Centre Against Unemployment (with permission from Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre)

Alongside smaller acts of listening and advice, the centres often held a strong political commitment to related campaigns. These active organising efforts can be broadly described across two perspectives, first campaign and organising work centred upon those issues faced most closely by the unemployed, and second those actions characteristic of a solidarity between workers and non-workers. Multiple actions were prominent throughout the 1980s across unemployed and employed struggles and there is not sufficient space to detail these in full here. Instead, two snapshots are introduced, in addition to earlier references to the People’s March for Jobs, to give an indication of the organising histories. During the 1984/85 miners’ strike, for example, UWC workers, volunteers and users were involved in substantial fund-raising efforts and picket line acts of solidarity. At the same time, centres were also prominent in organising against changes associated with social security, including a sustained campaign against ‘welfare snoopers’ and the surveillance of welfare claimants.

By 1982, the UWC Bulletin reported 150 centres had opened, increasing to 210 centres by 1985, before a significant number of closures in the latter period of the decade, primarily due to reductions in local authority funding and changes to the welfare system (including the closure of the Manpower Services Commission). Their history, though, is reflective of trade union efforts to connect employed and unemployed. This, of course, was not without its tensions and limits. The challenge of what Chesterfield centre co-ordinator Colin Hampton described as ‘organising the unorganisable’ was evident in many conversations through the research. Yet, the potential to extend the reach of trade union principles, beyond the workplace, was clear throughout interviews:

You can’t find out what the problems that people are facing who are out of work unless you offer advice. So you have to offer advice, but when they come in, we’re not just going to sit there in a bovine fashion and just say well, we can help with that, we can’t help with that, you can claim that, you can’t claim with that. If we saw that there was an injustice, then our job was to get people together to do something about that injustice.

(Oral History with Colin Hampton, 2021)

This sentiment is captured in the continued work of centres like those still active in Derbyshire and Tyne and Wear. At their best, Unemployed Workers’ Centres illustrate the transferability of trade union principles and practices. As spaces of care and support, listening and advice, as well as organising and expressing solidarity, Unemployed Workers’ Centres provide a lesser-known history of a sustained alternative vision during a period defined by economic crisis and widening inequality.

This project is funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (SRG1920\101292)

For more about the project, access to these publications or if you have a suggestion for the research:

Contact: Dr Paul Griffin – paul.griffin@northumbria.ac.uk

Follow publications from the project at: https://researchportal.northumbria.ac.uk/en/persons/paul-griffin  

For article versions of this research, see:

Griffin, P. (2021) Expanding labour geographies: resourcefulness and organising amongst ‘unemployed workers’. Geoforum, 118, 159-168.

Griffin, P. (forthcoming) Unemployed Workers’ Centres (1978-): spatial politics, ‘non-movement’ and the making of centres.  

Guest blogger author and historian Cathy Hunt has written this post about our recent acquisition of a minute book of the Newcastle upon Tyne Branch of the National Federation of Women Workers (thanks to the Hazlehurst family for the kind donation).

Winding down for the weekend and scrolling through Twitter last Friday afternoon, my attention was suddenly grabbed by a tweet from the TUC Library. It announced a brand-new acquisition to its Collections and was accompanied by two images which stopped me in my tracks. These were the opening pages of a hand-written minute book belonging to the pre-First World War Newcastle on Tyne branch of the National Federation of Women Workers. My heart skipped a beat, flipped over entirely and neither it nor my mind settled down until I had seen the document for myself a few days later.

I learned that the book was found by a daughter who was clearing her mother’s house after her death. I understand all too well what that this entails, having just finished sorting and emptying my own mum’s house. It seems likely that the book belonged to her grandmother. My thoughts and emotions are, then, not just ones of excitement but also of empathy and gratitude that this has now been passed to the TUC Library. Such finds are the very stuff of the history of working people’s lives and they are priceless.

I know there are hundreds of historians who long for such discoveries. It is rare occasions such as these that make searching for them so worthwhile, especially as there are inevitably so many garden paths to go up as well. I have been researching and writing about the extraordinary trade union that was the National Federation of Women Workers (Federation) for well over a decade. In 2014 Palgrave Macmillan published my history of the Federation, founded in 1906 by the charismatic Mary Macarthur (1880-1921). The research for the book was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and provided me with the funds to work with national collections and to travel (there were a lot of train journeys, a lot of meal deals in hotel rooms and a lot of soreness in my arms, back and neck from lugging laptop and books all over the place) to local archives and local studies’ libraries.

This small all-female trade union, which nonetheless punched well above its weight, existed for just 15 years, between 1906 and 1921, before merging with the larger and mixed gender National Union of General Workers. Thanks in large part to the endeavours of Gertrude Tuckwell of the Women’s Trade Union League, under whose guidance and protection the Federation operated, an extensive and valuable collection of annual reports, newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and notices relating to the union (and more broadly on women and work) is available for consultation at the TUC Library in London. What was harder to find – and of course what I then wanted so much to find – was detailed information about just how the union operated at the grassroots level. This I tried to knit together, albeit with many frustrating gaps, by looking at newspapers and at the records of other organisations, such as local Trades Councils, which supported the Federation in its attempts to protect women industrial workers and improve their often appalling pay and conditions.

How I longed to find more than a brief branch report submitted to and published by the Federation’s newspaper, Woman Worker, or included within its Annual Reports. At the end of my book, I included a substantial appendix giving brief outlines of all the branches I had managed to identify. My frustration at its almost certain incompleteness is there for all to see in the note I added at the start indicating that ‘this is not a comprehensive list but is included here to encourage and facilitate further research’ (my fervent hope). Here I included, where they emerged, the names of branch secretaries, treasurers and presidents and of the industries in which women in the different regions of Britain were employed. The book chapters also pay attention to the establishment of branches, the disputes that drew in members, the triumphs when disputes ended in improved conditions and the despair when at times organisation had little lasting success. There is detail but it is not always enough to tell stories in their entirety. When piecing together – often very small – snippets of information from a myriad sources, I was acutely aware of how much more there was out there, undiscovered and also of how difficult it can be to capture the grassroots history of a national union that existed over a hundred years ago.

And then, a decade after I started to write the book (and 8 years after its publication) came this amazing discovery of the first branch minute book of the Federation that I have ever seen. It is only a few pages long, from the inaugural meeting of the Newcastle upon Tyne branch on August 14th 1912, when 18 people were present, until July 1913 when just seven turned up. From the election of the branch officials (fabulous lists of names with which a local and/or family history researcher can do so much), including the secretary, E Howson, the formation of a social or dance committee, through to concerns over falling membership and pleas for members to stick together and to turn up to meetings, these few pages are of the utmost importance. They reveal the campaigning efforts of local activists, including Mrs Harrison Bell of the Women’s Labour League, in helping to form and sustain the branch which held its meetings in the Northern Independent Labour Party Club Room, at 18 Clayton Street. Laid out before me is evidence of so many challenges faced by local branches. Here is concern about paying the rent for the meeting room when attendance was so low (in early 1913 there were two consecutive months when numbers were too low for the meeting to go ahead). There is cheerful optimism at a two-shilling profit after the enjoyable and successful Christmas dance and appeals for an organiser to be sent from the Federation’s London HQ. There were always too few organisers and demand for their help was high because their presence was so helpful with campaigning and giving encouragement to new and fragile branches.

In the earliest meetings there is encouragement given to join and stay united within the union and discussion about the importance of combination. Resolutions passed included the need for women to be present on the newly established National Insurance Courts of Referees and for ‘intelligent working women’ to be involved in the planning and arrangement of workmen’s dwellings in Newcastle. There are summaries read out of the minutes of the Federation’s National Council.

There are just a few specific references to conditions at local firms; a mention, for example of improvements which would ‘add to the comfort of the girls’ at Messrs Armstrong & Whitworth. There is frustration at the branch members at Messrs Gleaves who ‘seemed to have forsaken the Union altogether’ (this is possibly the business of Henry Gleave, whose drapery sold underclothing, baby linen and fancy drapery made in his factory).

Having been to many such meetings at the end of my own working day, tired and wanting to put my feet up, I can’t help wondering if there was enough here (despite the enormous efforts of the branch officials) to keep members engaged and ready to come back each month. There were -and are – so many calls on women workers’ time and in addition, there was the hugely important issue of feeling secure and safe enough to attend a union meeting. In Newcastle, as in many other towns and cities where women worked across a broad range of industries, it was often too risky to openly form a works branch and instead – as in this case – one branch would seek to pull in workers from across the city to meet in a club room or hall. Men – employed in larger numbers – might hold their union meetings in the pub or union club, thus combining leisure time with union business. It was all so much trickier for women. There were a hundred and one domestic things to be done at home in the evening. On top of that, there was the ever-present risk of intimidation or victimization – would the boss find out about the meeting? Would he sack you? And then there was the cost of membership, out of an already low wage.

Being a branch official was hard and often dispiriting work. I am not in the least surprised to read that on a stormy night in January 1913, only the Secretary and one other woman attended and that the meeting did not go ahead. It was not a question of members’ commitment to the union but simply one of getting by – and of keeping warm (hopefully) and dry at home. Social events were often the glue that held a branch together, although even here it does not seem that the December dance in 1912 (despite being hailed as a decided success with its two-shilling profit) was able to do this.

The book ends with a meeting in July 1913. It is not clear if there were more meetings, although clearly membership was falling and the Federation’s Annual Report for 1914 reveals organisers’ frustration, asking why the women of Tyneside don’t ‘wake up to the fact that they will never get decent wages till they organise’. There were so many reasons why organisation was so difficult for women workers. I am (by complete and happy chance) currently writing an article for the North-East Labour History Society about the work of the Federation in the North-East of England, in which I explain just how hard it was for small branches to keep going, in the early years of the union. It was not until the First World War that membership soared, particularly in munitions centres like Newcastle. By early 1917, the Federation claimed it had nearly 9000 members in that city alone.  This short minute book adds detail, intimacy and vibrancy to research like mine into women’s work and trade union membership. I am delighted to know that it has survived and that it is there to refer to in the forthcoming article and much more besides. It is a tremendous addition to the Library’s collections.

I hope my excitement at the emergence of this new acquisition to the TUC Library is evident. If you want to know more about the National Federation of Women Workers, here is a link to an exhibition I worked on with the TUC Library to commemorate the 100th year of the death of Mary Macarthur:

The Life of Mary Macarthur – TUC Library exhibition | TUC

The Newcastle upon Tyne Branch of the National Federation of Women Workers

Cathy Hunt

Winding down for the weekend and scrolling through Twitter last Friday afternoon, my attention was suddenly grabbed by a tweet from the TUC Library. It announced a brand-new acquisition to its Collections and was accompanied by two images which stopped me in my tracks. These were the opening pages of a hand-written minute book belonging to the pre-First World War Newcastle on Tyne branch of the National Federation of Women Workers. My heart skipped a beat, flipped over entirely and neither it nor my mind settled down until I had seen the document for myself a few days later.

I learned that the book was found by a daughter who was clearing her mother’s house after her death. I understand all too well what that this entails, having just finished sorting and emptying my own mum’s house. It seems likely that the book belonged to her grandmother. My thoughts and emotions are, then, not just ones of excitement but also of empathy and gratitude that this has now been passed to the TUC Library. Such finds are the very stuff of the history of working people’s lives and they are priceless.

I know there are hundreds of historians who long for such discoveries. It is rare occasions such as these that make searching for them so worthwhile, especially as there are inevitably so many garden paths to go up as well. I have been researching and writing about the extraordinary trade union that was the National Federation of Women Workers (Federation) for well over a decade. In 2014 Palgrave Macmillan published my history of the Federation, founded in 1906 by the charismatic Mary Macarthur (1880-1921). The research for the book was funded by the Nuffield Foundation and provided me with the funds to work with national collections and to travel (there were a lot of train journeys, a lot of meal deals in hotel rooms and a lot of soreness in my arms, back and neck from lugging laptop and books all over the place) to local archives and local studies’ libraries.

This small all-female trade union, which nonetheless punched well above its weight, existed for just 15 years, between 1906 and 1921, before merging with the larger and mixed gender National Union of General Workers. Thanks in large part to the endeavours of Gertrude Tuckwell of the Women’s Trade Union League, under whose guidance and protection the Federation operated, an extensive and valuable collection of annual reports, newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and notices relating to the union (and more broadly on women and work) is available for consultation at the TUC Library in London. What was harder to find – and of course what I then wanted so much to find – was detailed information about just how the union operated at the grassroots level. This I tried to knit together, albeit with many frustrating gaps, by looking at newspapers and at the records of other organisations, such as local Trades Councils, which supported the Federation in its attempts to protect women industrial workers and improve their often appalling pay and conditions.

How I longed to find more than a brief branch report submitted to and published by the Federation’s newspaper, Woman Worker, or included within its Annual Reports. At the end of my book, I included a substantial appendix giving brief outlines of all the branches I had managed to identify. My frustration at its almost certain incompleteness is there for all to see in the note I added at the start indicating that ‘this is not a comprehensive list but is included here to encourage and facilitate further research’ (my fervent hope). Here I included, where they emerged, the names of branch secretaries, treasurers and presidents and of the industries in which women in the different regions of Britain were employed. The book chapters also pay attention to the establishment of branches, the disputes that drew in members, the triumphs when disputes ended in improved conditions and the despair when at times organisation had little lasting success. There is detail but it is not always enough to tell stories in their entirety. When piecing together – often very small – snippets of information from a myriad sources, I was acutely aware of how much more there was out there, undiscovered and also of how difficult it can be to capture the grassroots history of a national union that existed over a hundred years ago.

And then, a decade after I started to write the book (and 8 years after its publication) came this amazing discovery of the first branch minute book of the Federation that I have ever seen. It is only a few pages long, from the inaugural meeting of the Newcastle upon Tyne branch on August 14^th 1912, when 18 people were present, until July 1913 when just seven turned up. From the election of the branch officials (fabulous lists of names with which a local and/or family history researcher can do so much), including the secretary, E Howson, the formation of a social or dance committee, through to concerns over falling membership and pleas for members to stick together and to turn up to meetings, these few pages are of the utmost importance. They reveal the campaigning efforts of local activists, including Mrs Harrison Bell of the Women’s Labour League, in helping to form and sustain the branch which held its meetings in the Northern Independent Labour Party Club Room, at 18 Clayton Street. Laid out before me is evidence of so many challenges faced by local branches. Here is concern about paying the rent for the meeting room when attendance was so low (in early 1913 there were two consecutive months when numbers were too low for the meeting to go ahead). There is cheerful optimism at a two-shilling profit after the enjoyable and successful Christmas dance and appeals for an organiser to be sent from the Federation’s London HQ. There were always too few organisers and demand for their help was high because their presence was so helpful with campaigning and giving encouragement to new and fragile branches.

In the earliest meetings there is encouragement given to join and stay united within the union and discussion about the importance of combination. Resolutions passed included the need for women to be present on the newly established National Insurance Courts of Referees and for ‘intelligent working women’ to be involved in the planning and arrangement of workmen’s dwellings in Newcastle. There are summaries read out of the minutes of the Federation’s National Council.

There are just a few specific references to conditions at local firms; a mention, for example of improvements which would ‘add to the comfort of the girls’ at Messrs Armstrong & Whitworth. There is frustration at the branch members at Messrs Gleaves who ‘seemed to have forsaken the Union altogether’ (this is possibly the business of Henry Gleave, whose drapery sold underclothing, baby linen and fancy drapery made in his factory).  

Having been to many such meetings at the end of my own working day, tired and wanting to put my feet up, I can’t help wondering if there was enough here (despite the enormous efforts of the branch officials) to keep members engaged and ready to come back each month. There were -and are – so many calls on women workers’ time and in addition, there was the hugely important issue of feeling secure and safe enough to attend a union meeting. In Newcastle, as in many other towns and cities where women worked across a broad range of industries, it was often too risky to openly form a works branch and instead – as in this case – one branch would seek to pull in workers from across the city to meet in a club room or hall. Men – employed in larger numbers – might hold their union meetings in the pub or union club, thus combining leisure time with union business. It was all so much trickier for women. There were a hundred and one domestic things to be done at home in the evening. On top of that, there was the ever-present risk of intimidation or victimization – would the boss find out about the meeting? Would he sack you? And then there was the cost of membership, out of an already low wage.

Being a branch official was hard and often dispiriting work. I am not in the least surprised to read that on a stormy night in January 1913, only the Secretary and one other woman attended and that the meeting did not go ahead. It was not a question of members’ commitment to the union but simply one of getting by – and of keeping warm (hopefully) and dry at home. Social events were often the glue that held a branch together, although even here it does not seem that the December dance in 1912 (despite being hailed as a decided success with its two-shilling profit) was able to do this.

The book ends with a meeting in July 1913. It is not clear if there were more meetings, although clearly membership was falling and the Federation’s Annual Report for 1914 reveals organisers’ frustration, asking why the women of Tyneside don’t ‘wake up to the fact that they will never get decent wages till they organise’. There were so many reasons why organisation was so difficult for women workers. I am (by complete and happy chance) currently writing an article for the North-East Labour History Society about the work of the Federation in the North-East of England, in which I explain just how hard it was for small branches to keep going, in the early years of the union. It was not until the First World War that membership soared, particularly in munitions centres like Newcastle. By early 1917, the Federation claimed it had nearly 9000 members in that city alone.  This short minute book adds detail, intimacy and vibrancy to research like mine into women’s work and trade union membership. I am delighted to know that it has survived and that it is there to refer to in the forthcoming article and much more besides. It is a tremendous addition to the Library’s collections.

I hope my excitement at the emergence of this new acquisition to the TUC Library is evident. If you want to know more about the National Federation of Women Workers, here is a link to an exhibition I worked on with the TUC Library to commemorate the 100^th year of the death of Mary Macarthur:

The Life of Mary Macarthur – TUC Library exhibition | TUC

In this post guest blogger, Susan Zimmermann, historian and University Professor at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, describes completing the research for her  book  Frauenpolitik und Männergewerkschaft. Internationale Geschlechterpolitik, IGB-Gewerkschafterinnen und die Arbeiter- und Frauenbewegungen der Zwischenkriegszeit [Women’s politics and men’s trade unionism. International gender politics, female IFTU-trade unionists and the labor and women’s movements of the interwar period] recently published with Löcker Verlag, Vienna, in 2021.

In August 2019 I traveled to Warwick and London for a second time. I wanted to do concluding, complementary research on the Women’s International of the International Federation of Trade Unions, the IFTU, also known as the “Amsterdam International.” For decades, little has been written on the history of the women’s branch of the IFTU and the politics of women’s work the organization pursued. This has historical as well as historiographic reasons. Historically, in the male-dominated labor movement, female trade unionists had to grapple with the marginalization of the “women’s question;” in the world of the non-socialist women’s movements, they were faced with the marginalization of the “class question.” The documents and publications related to the British Trades Unions Council kept in the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick and in the TUC Library Collections at London Metropolitan University are an invaluable resource for bringing the IFTU women into the spotlight.

There is no genuine archive of the IFTU, largely because most material was confiscated during WWII by the Gestapo from the former premises of the IFTU in Paris, Rue de l’université 154. Yet rich portions of the genuinely international history of the IFTU can be retrieved through the archives and library of the TUC, which as British branch of the international federation duly documented its international activities. For many years Walter Citrine was the President of the IFTU, while from 1936 onwards Anne Loughlin, who later would become the chairman of the General Council of the TUC, served as one of the five members of the IFTU Women’s Committee. The TUC Library Collections keep all the conference proceedings, the full run of the IFTU journal The International Trade Union Movement, and other key materials. Women are at the very margins of this material, and yet it is this material that can guide us into exploring their contribution to trade union internationalism. When revisiting the Collections in August 2019, I had set aside sufficient time to go after more unlikely and sporadic documents. And indeed, the Collections helped me overcome additional marginalizations that have characterized the historiography, namely the lack of information on the involvement of women from Eastern Europe. Who would have thought that exactly a Souvenir Agenda memorializing the IFTU Congress assembled in Holborn Restaurant, London, from July 8th to 11th, 1936 would include the first and (to date) only photograph of Valerie Novotná, member of the IFTU Women’s Committee, representative of a trade union of domestic workers, and, as the Souvenir Agenda adds, “Chief Woman Officer in the Czecho-slovakian Joint National Trade Union Centre”.

Building on a large network of female socialist activists and functionaries, the IFTU Women’s International sought to strengthen the position of women workers, addressing wage policies, women’s unpaid family work, labour protection and social policy, the right to work, war and peace, and the unionization of women. It played an active role in shaping the international politics of women’s work and other elements of the emerging international gender politics of the interwar period.

Guest blogger, author and historian Jerry White has kindly written about his research into the Workers Educational Association archives, part of the TUC Library.

THE WEA ARCHIVE AT THE TUC LIBRARY

For the last five or six years I’ve been working on a history of London in the Second World War, published in November 2021 as The Battle of London 1939-45. Endurance, Heroism and Frailty under Fire. In the book I’ve tried to give an overview of all aspects of life in the capital and, in a final chapter, attempted to spell out the consequences of war for London and the Londoner. Many of these were disastrous, not least the impact of war on the education of schoolchildren, whose learning was not just interrupted but in many cases obstructed altogether.

But I didn’t have much space to write about adult education during the war, and here the story was very different. Adult education flourished and would never look back, at least for a generation and more to come. So the opportunity to give a public lecture in February 2022 at Birkbeck College – soon to celebrate its bicentenary – on adult education in London during the war sent me back to the archive. And the most useful archive for my purposes has proved to be the WEA archive at the TUC library.
The WEA was formed in 1903. It was firmly rooted in the trade union movement, providing evening classes for workers of all kinds. From the outset it capitalised on workers’ aspirations to understand better the world around them. Some of its courses were tutorial classes of university standard and delivered by lecturers of considerable renown – RH Tawney, the distinguished economic historian and Labour Party activist, was the WEA’s president for many years. It was organised on a local basis, often with branches related to individual boroughs or groups of boroughs. It was strong especially in the north of England but it had branches and voluntary organisers (some fulltime and salaried) everywhere in Great Britain.

I was interested mainly in the work of the WEA London District, though I gleaned useful context from the archive’s full run of WEA annual reports for Britain as a whole, and for London the archive is especially rich in material: the minute books, correspondence files, collections of ephemera and the London District’s printed annual reports for the war years were all of great interest.

The story they tell is of an organisation that was never dislocated by the declaration of war or by the Blitz or V-Weapons. Unlike London’s university colleges, which (apart from Birkbeck) were evacuated from London for the whole of the war, and unlike London’s schools (which operated only a sparse education for those children – a majority – who were not evacuated), the WEA continued to operate throughout the six years of war. At first, classes were reduced in number as lecturers were syphoned off into the services or other war work, and as the blackout discouraged many from attending evening classes; and the night-bombing from September 1940 to May 1941 drove many classes to open during the day and weekends. But from the summer of 1941 a rapid growth in demand for adult education across London fuelled the creation of new branches (especially in the London suburbs) and ever more classes. By 1942 the WEA in London was teaching more students in more localities than ever before in its history. In part this was due to what we might call ‘the democratic turn’ of 1941-2, in which sympathy for Soviet Russia, the feeling of community generated by local civil defence forces, the interest aroused by the Beveridge Report and the London Plans with their focus on what sort of London would emerge from the war, and educational reform nationwide, all played their part. We can see in this ever-growing interest in the WEA, and just where its local branches were formed, the key part that the London suburbs would play in voting to power a Labour government in 1945.

In sum, the WEA archive can tell us a great deal about aspects of working-class life and aspirations that are otherwise hidden from view. It is a treasure-trove for historians of the British working class in the twentieth century.

Jerry White
Emeritus Professor of London History, Birkbeck College