Liverpool University Press and the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School have been trying to make trade union history accessible again with a history of UNITE published in six cheap paperback volumes (each retails at £6.99) from 2022 onwards. We reviewed the first two volumes which covered the history of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the core of UNITE, from 1880 to 1931 in … Continue reading UNITE the Union: a history in six volumes
Do you have memories of the New Left? Andrew Whitehead would like to hear from you. The New Left was a strand in British radicalism which distanced itself from both Stalinism and social democracy and proved to be an enduring and influential part of the left. It emerged in 1956, the year of Khruschev’s ‘secret’ speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, as well as of the … Continue reading Researching an oral history of the New Left
Continuing our series of songs in labour history, Keith Laybourn discusses a protest ballad performed throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first by some of the biggest names in American music. ‘I Dreamed, I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’ is often known as ‘The Ballad of Joe Hill’. I first came across this ballad in the 1960s through a combination of events. From the … Continue reading In tune: The Ballad of Joe Hill
This year sees the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of E.P. Thompson’s influential and much admired The Making of the English Working Class (Victor Gollancz, 1963). BBC Radio Three’s The Essay this week marks the event with a series of five programmes under the title ‘The Enormous Condescension of Posterity’ – a phrase taken from Thompson’s preface. The series runs nightly at 22:45 for 15 minutes from Monday … Continue reading The Making of the English Working Class: sixtieth anniversary broadcasts
Opening a website series on songs associated with labour history, John McIlroy looks at ‘The Working Class in Twentieth-Century Song: A Fan’s Notes[1]’ arguing that researching the genealogy of songs, finding new ones, rediscovering old ones, exploring the cultural ambience in which they were created and performed is part of the folklorist’s mission and the historian’s brief. Find out more about this series. IntroductionThe Great … Continue reading The Working Class in Twentieth-Century Song: A Fan’s Notes
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
Richard Croucher, who died aged 73 on 16 December 2022, was a versatile scholar and talented labour historian who became well-known as a teacher and researcher in the field of employment relations and management studies. He played a prominent part in the field of labour history from the mid-1970s into the 1990s. His books Engineers at War and We Refuse to Starve in Silence constituted … Continue reading Richard Croucher (1949 – 2022)
The Labour Research Department has been at the forefront of an information war against the far right for the past hundred years. Jeff Howarth tells the story of this century-long struggle through the LRD publications to be found in the TUC Library. Throughout the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first, the trade union movement has monitored the activities of far-right groups in an attempt … Continue reading Tracing the Labour Research Department’s struggle against fascism in the archives of the TUC Library
The Society for the Study of Labour History was launched on 6 May 1960 in a meeting room at Birkbeck College, University of London. Those present included many of the big names of what was then a rapidly rising specialist area of historical study, including Raymond Postgate and Henry Pelling. Others, among them Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband, were yet to publish much of the … Continue reading Classics of labour history: a research programme for the 1960s and beyond
Author: Mark HurstThis is the abstract of an article published in Labour History Review (2021), 86, (3), 313-337. Find out more. The inclusion of the British trade union leader Frank Chapple on the panel of the 1985 Sakharov hearings, an event designed to hold the Soviet authorities to account for their violation of human rights, raises questions about the workings of the broader network of activists … Continue reading ‘Gamekeeper Turned Poacher’: Frank Chapple, Anti-Communism and Soviet Human Rights Violations
Society for the Study of Labour History 