Labour history societies in the North West and North East of England and in Australia have published the 2023 issues of their journals (in the case of Australia’s Labour History, the second issue of the year) with articles looking back to the general election of 1923 that produced the 1924 Labour government, and beyond to the growth of the co-operative movement in the North East.

The North West Labour History Society marked its fiftieth anniversary with an issue of North West History that ‘reflects on injustice, inequality and heroic resistance’.

In a personal recollection of the organisation’s early days, chair Alan Fowler recalls joining the North West Labour History Society in 1974, a year after its foundation. ‘I was teaching at the Manchester Polytechnic and had begun to teach a course on trade union history which was popular amongst students.’ He remembers that the society had four influential founder members, among them Eddie and Ruth Frow, who had already created the Working Class Movement Library, then based in their own home at King’s Road, Stretford, and the committee always met there.

Elsewhere in the issue, in an article titled ‘Who killed Cock Robin’, Keith Laybourn looks back on the first Labour government of 1924: ‘On leaving his Whitehall office on a cold January evening in 1924, Thomas Jones, Assistant Cabinet Secretary, saw the newspaper placards announcing “Lenin Dead (official), Ramsay MacDonald, Premier”. This juxtaposition of two monumentally important headlines was unfortunate but remarkably apposite in the nine-month history of the first Labour government, whose fortunes depended upon the support of Liberal Party and was defined by its relationship to the Soviet Union.’

In ‘Mary Bamber and the Liverpool Laundry Workers Strike of 1914’, James Rees tells how in 1914, more than 6,000 workers, overwhelmingly women and girls walked out from laundries, big and small, across Merseyside. Demonstrations paraded to the pier head to come together for a rally by the Customs House. He continues: ‘The meeting was “bubbling with enthusiasm”. Mary Bamber of the Warehouse Workers Union, climbed onto a chair and was greeted with excited cheers. For the next week, the women workers paraded and picketed, argued with strike breakers and the police and did all they could to make the strike a success. The strike ended with substantial gains for the women workers.’

Other articles include: ‘A Transatlantic Friendship: William Edward Armytage Axon (1846-1913) and William Sanders Scarborough (1852-1926)’, by Lucy Evans; and ‘The Times and the Great Hunger of 1847’, by David Hargreaves.

North West History Journal 48, 2023-24. Find out more.

The North East Labour History Society has as the cover photograph of North East History an image of Jennie Shearan who led the campaign against pollution from Monkton coke works.

Articles in the issue include: ‘Ragamuffins and Sons of Liberty; the 1774 General Election in Morpeth and Newcastle upon Tyne’; ‘Clerical Exactions from the Poor, William Parker, Ballast Hills, and Affordable Burials for the Working Poor, 1800-1857’; ‘Socialists and Speculators: the Walker Estate as a Battleground of Housing Ideologies 1902-1919’; ‘Pneumocoiosis and Social Class in Twentieth-Century County Durham Mining Communities’; and ‘The Growth of the Co-operative Movement in North East England’.

North East History 54, 2023. Find out more.

Published by the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Labour History focuses in its October 2023 issue on carceral labour – the work done by prisoners.

Research articles include ‘Carceral Frontiers: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand’s Pacific’, by Jared Davidson; ‘Forced Labour, Indenture and Convict Transportation: A Case Study of the Western Australian Pastoral Industry, 1830–50’, by Jeremy Martens; and ‘The Colonial Ambiguities of Military Labour on the Penal Frontier: The Newcastle Penal Station 1804–24’, by Tamsin O’Connor. It also  an obituary of the historian Dr Peter Love, who had been involved in the Australian Society for fifty years, and was president of its Melbourne Branch for thirty-five.

Labour History 125(1), October 2023. Find out more.

Find out more about recent issues of Labour History Review, published by the Society for the Study of Labour History, here. The next issue of Labour History Review will be published in January 2024.