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
The books listed below are reviewed in Labour History Review (2023), 88, (1), 323-337. Read more. Edda Nicolson reviews Matthew Roberts, Democratic Passions: The Politics of Feeling in British Popular Radicalism, 1809–48, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022, pp. vi + 262, h/b, £80, ISBN 978 15261 37043 Colin Heywood reviews Elisabeth Anderson, Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, … Continue reading Book reviews in Labour History Review Volume 88 (2023), Issue 1
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
Labour History Review Volume 87 (2022), Issue 2 has now been published. Contemporary images of the 1926 General Strike often show smiling volunteers good-naturedly going about the business of keeping the country running. In this issue of Labour History Review, Liam Ryan explores the involvement of often middle-class strike breakers in the period 1911-1926 and lifts the lid on the unexplored darker and often violent … Continue reading Labour History Review Volume 87 (2022), Issue 2
The books listed below are reviewed in Labour History Review (2022), 87, (2), 213-225. Find out more. Peter Gurney reviews Ian Gasse, Something to Build On: The Co-operative Movement in Dumfries, 1847-1914, Dumfries: the author, in association with the Scottish Labour History Society, 2021, pp. xvi + 240, h/b, £18, ISBN 978 19163 05021 Quentin Outram reviews Laura Humphreys, Globalising Housework: Domestic Labour in Middle-Class London Homes, 1850-1914, … Continue reading Book reviews in Labour History Review Volume 87 (2022), Issue 2
By the early twentieth century, an increasingly confident trade union movement was building statement ‘castles’ in which to house their headquarters. Mark Crail looks at what came close to being a trade union quarter in central London. As trade unions grew in size and complexity in the 1920s, so increasingly they moved into larger, more imposing, and often purpose-built headquarters – some leaving their original … Continue reading Castles of the labour movement: inside the trade union head office building boom
This rather beautiful badge is a reminder that the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) was not just about trains. From the 1920s onwards, the union actively recruited and organised bus workers, and by 1950 had nearly 14,500 ‘busmen’, as they were styled, in membership – a small but significant group among the NUR’s total membership of more than 400,000 transport workers. The badge itself is … Continue reading On the buses: how the National Union of Railwaymen organised bus workers
Society for the Study of Labour History 