Author: EditorMC

I am a former journalist by trade, turned labour and family historian with a special interest in Chartism. I launched the Chartist Ancestors website since 2003, and am currently a member of the Society for the Study of Labour History executive committee, managing its website and social media in my free time.
Books etc

Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815-1870

Fabrice Bensimon, Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815-1870, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 304, h/b, £83, ISBN: 9780198835844. Between 1815 and 1870, when European industrialisation was in its infancy and Britain enjoyed a technological lead, thousands of British workers emigrated to the continent. They played a key role in sectors such as textiles, iron, mechanics, and the railways. These men and … Continue reading Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815-1870

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Labour history news

Cato Street: inside the building where London’s ultra radicals met their end

The picture above shows the former stable in which London’s ultra radicals met in 1820 to plan the murder of the Cabinet and the installation of a provisional government. From the outside, the building in Cato Street, now an expensive residential area close to the busy Edgware Road, appears much as it did two hundred years ago (see below). But behind the blue plaque on … Continue reading Cato Street: inside the building where London’s ultra radicals met their end

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Events, Grants

Finding the Funny: Sam Fitton and the Cotton Factory Times

Sam Fitton made his name as an insightful and funny cartoonist for the Cotton Factory Times, an immensely successful newspaper aimed at workers in Lancashire and Cheshire cotton mills which at its peak sold more than 50,000 copies a week. Beginning in 1907, Fitton would eventually contribute more than 400 cartoons for the paper, creating a unique visual record of the cotton industry, its workers … Continue reading Finding the Funny: Sam Fitton and the Cotton Factory Times

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Labour history news

Britain’s longest strike? How Silentnight bed makers held out for eighteen months

At any other time, a few hundred manufacturing workers calling a strike over pay would hardly merit much more than a footnote in the history books. But the dispute at Silentnight’s bed factories in the mid 1980s was a pivotal moment in industrial relations – and, for trade unions and their members at least, this was a clear warning of the difficult times to come. … Continue reading Britain’s longest strike? How Silentnight bed makers held out for eighteen months

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Labour history news

Box makers at bay: commemorating the Corruganza strike of 1908

As plans come together to unveil a blue plaque marking the Corruganza boxmakers’ strike of 1908, Geoff Simmons explores a dispute that helped Mary Macarthur hone the campaigning skills she would bring to future disputes. In the summer of 1908, 44 young women at the Corruganza box factory in Summerstown, south west London came out on strike in response to a pay cut in the firm’s … Continue reading Box makers at bay: commemorating the Corruganza strike of 1908

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Grants, SSLH news

BME small grants scheme backs six projects

Congratulations to this year’s successful applicants to the BME small grants funding scheme. The scheme provides small grants of up to £1,000 to support Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) historians working in the UK and/or on histories of BME people. The successful projects from the 2022 round are: The scheme is administered by the Social History Society in partnership with the Economic History Society, History … Continue reading BME small grants scheme backs six projects

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Advice & reference, Annual guides

Additions to labour history archive collections 2022

This has been a bumper year for new additions to labour history archives around the country. Almost certainly the largest collection to find a place in the archives during 2022 were administrative, financial, legal and other records of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its predecessors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that now occupy some 300 linear metres of shelf space, promising to … Continue reading Additions to labour history archive collections 2022

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Labour history news

Very nearly an armful… donating blood for Vietnam

Protests against the Vietnam War took many forms. But the most sanguine approach to solidarity work was surely that adopted by the Medical Aid Committee for Vietnam (MACV). In 1967, activists in London organised a blood donor session, collecting 56 pints with the help of workers from the blood transfusion service. Further donor sessions were organised, and the MACV developed a system for safely storing … Continue reading Very nearly an armful… donating blood for Vietnam

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Documents & objects

Who needs the ILP? How Labour’s 1918 constitution set it an existential challenge

In 1918, the Independent Labour Party faced the biggest question in its history to date: if the Labour Party, to which it had been affiliated from the start, was now an individual membership organisation with an avowedly socialist platform, what was the point of the ILP? The leaflet shown here was its first attempt to provide an answer to that far from trivial question. Formally … Continue reading Who needs the ILP? How Labour’s 1918 constitution set it an existential challenge

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Labour history news

Planes, trains and automobiles: rethinking Victorian union imagery in the 1930s

Untold thousands of trade union emblems were produced in the Victorian era, but by the twentieth century they looked out of date and their use was in decline. Mark Crail looks at a 1930s revival that briefly breathed new life into the genre. The trade union membership certificate shown here (Fig. 1) was based on an emblem adopted in the 1930s by the National Union … Continue reading Planes, trains and automobiles: rethinking Victorian union imagery in the 1930s

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