From Cinderloo 1821 to Shrewsbury Pickets 1972 - Keith Flett

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 (Spring 2021)]

From Cinderloo 1821 to Shrewsbury Pickets 1972: Employers and the law in North Wales and Shropshire 

The first week of February 2021 saw a couple of labour movement occasions which were centred on Shropshire and North Wales. 

It was the 200th anniversary of the event known as Cinderloo, where miners protesting about wage cuts were attacked by the Shropshire Yeomanry. Several were killed and others put on trial at Shrewsbury.

 Over two days in the same week the long overdue appeal by building workers convicted as part of the 1972 national building strike, where the matters at issue also took place in the Shrewsbury area, took place.

The events of February 1821 whose anniversary was marked with a range of virtual activities took place at Cinderhill near Telford. Local ironmasters had been engaged in an attempt to cut the wages of workers. Fearing that the same would happen to them, miners called a protest which took place over two days on 1st and 2nd February 1821. The occasion was known as Cinderloo as a conscious echo of Peterloo in 1819. On both occasions local Yeomanry, armed men on horseback, were deployed and attacked protesters.

Several of the key figures in the Shropshire Yeomanry were ironmasters. A 2017 article by local historian Neil Clarke underlined this. The Yeomanry had been formed at a meeting in a Shrewsbury pub in 1785 by the then mayor, William Cludde. His son Edward Cludde was in charge at Cinderloo in 1821. They were landowners as were numbers of other members. Local ironmasters Henry Williams and Joseph Reynolds were also part of the armed troop as was wine merchant Thomas Jukes Collier. In short the Yeomanry were the armed force of the local ruling class. They were last used in the 1842 General Strike before the policing framework we know today developed. 

If we fast forward to the Shrewsbury Pickets’ arrests in 1972, which occurred in the same area of the country, we find some interesting parallels. Of course the local ruling class was no longer required to ride around armed on horseback cutting down any working class protests they found. They still maintained however a key interest in defending their wealth and using the law and its agents to do it. 

In 1972 it was the well-known construction family the McAlpines who exercised great influence in the area as the Shrewsbury 24 campaign website underlines. 

The website notes that McAlpines were the main contractor at the Brookside building site in Shrewsbury which was a focus of charges against pickets. The McAlpine family were a cornerstone of ruling class politics in North Wales. Prior to the events of 1972 the post of the most senior law officer in the area, the High Sheriff, had been held by members of the McAlpine family on nine consecutive occasions. Even when the succession was broken in 1974 the occupant, Peter Bell, was in fact a director of McAlpines and the son-in-law of Sir Alfred McAlpine. 

As the Shrewsbury pickets’ appeal underlined, there was probably more at play in the case than the McAlpines, with the direct influence of the security service and Heath’s Tory government suspected.

 Political influence also existed at Cinderloo with the home secretary, who had found nothing problematic about the Peterloo Massacre, Lord Sidmouth, writing to the Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire praising the ’exemplary forbearance’ of the Yeomanry. 

E P Thompson noted in The Making of the English Working Class that the state learnt from Peterloo that it could never use armed force against protesters again, but that the same did not apply to industrial disputes. Cinderloo underlined that and Orgreave in 1984 reminds us that it remains true. 

Keith Flett

Book Review - Before Windrush - West Indians in Britain

Before Windrush 

Asher & Martin Hoyles 

Hansib publications 2020 

156 pp ISBN 978-1912662296 

Black and Ethnic Minority people have been part of the British population since before the country was Britain (1707) yet traditional histories of the ‘our island story’ genre completely overlooked the point. Boris Johnson may not be quite on that page but he certainly is not keen on recognising the imperial and colonial framework that has made Britain what it is today. 

In recent times a good deal of work has been done to make sure that British histories are more inclusive, Peter Fryer’s Staying Power being one of the landmark volumes. It is though a work in perpetual progress. Black British history is there but it often requires significant research in the archives to review sources that others have looked at and never asked the question as to whether BAME people feature. 

This new book by Asher and Martin Hoyles adds to the history we do now have, and does so in interesting and innovative ways. Labour and socialist historians, aware that those who organised and represented working people are also often hidden from history, have in the post - 1945 period carried out significant research, a good deal of which can be found in successive volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography. No such resource for BAME people yet exists but the Hoyles’s book may be seen as a contribution towards it. 

Before Windrush focuses on immigrants of Caribbean origin to the UK reaching back to the eighteenth century - in other words the beginnings of modern society. It’s divided into various sections: slaves and servants, doctors and nurses, political activists, sportsmen and so on. Each section is proceeded by some lines of poetry from Asher and then gives succinct details of a range of people, some perhaps quite well known now, others less so. There are also pictures and photographs of some of those featured. This I think works well in bringing some of those covered to a more-than-one-dimensional existence on the written page, and of course such pictorial representations are very rarely seen. A figure who appears across the various sections of the book is the political activist, historian and cricketer CLR James, someone who made a major contribution to British life in the twentieth century, yet aside from a library named after him in Dalston remains comparatively unheralded. That in itself tells us why a book like Before Windrush is necessary and worth reading. 

Keith Flett

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 Spring 2021]

Ken Weller (1935-2021) and the socialist movement in Finsbury Park at the end of World War I

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 (Spring 2021)]

Ken Weller (1935-2021) and the socialist movement in Finsbury Park at the end of World War One

The libertarian socialist, activist and historian Ken Weller has died aged 85. An obituary is here .  It appears a collection of his writings will appear from PM Press, which will be welcome. One of his works is available online covering the anti-war network (1914-1918) in North London - see here 

 This brief extract on the socialist movement in Finsbury Park as World War One ended gives a flavour of this well researched and fascinating piece of socialist history 

“The scene at Finsbury Park after the War reflected the changed situation. Where previously the venue had been dominated by the Herald League, with the coming of peace out came all the groups and parties which had kept a low profile during the War. I. Renson, who was a teenager in that period, remembers Sunday mornings in the park: There were numerous platforms, sometimes up to 20 if one included the religious ones. I remember seeing the Herald League, the BSP, the National Socialist Party. the ILP and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. There was also the Labour Party and quite a few small organisations which folded up in a few years' time. some of them getting absorbed into other groups and parties like the Communist Party. Trade Unions also had platforms there.” 

I spoke with Ken Weller at his East London home on several occasions over the years about his historical researches. He was an activist writing above all histories of activism from below. Putting together such writing from fragmented sources requires a lot of work but also a deep understanding of how the left and its networks operated. It appears that Ken may have been another victim of the scourge of COVID, but his writings and life as an activist provide an admirable legacy. 

Keith Flett

Hywel Francis 1946-2021 - Socialist historian who chronicled the making of the twentieth century Welsh working class

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 (Spring 2021)]

Hywel Francis 1946-2021

Socialist historian who chronicled the making of the twentieth century Welsh working class. 

The historian and former Labour MP Hywel Francis has died at the age of 74. Wikipedia gives some idea of his life and works here. 

I didn’t know Hywel, although I heard him speak on occasion, and I, after all, convene the London Socialist Historians Group and the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research at London University. On the other hand I have lived partly in central Cardiff for over 25 years now. There is no doubt that Hywel Francis did a huge amount to chronicle the making of the Twentieth Century Welsh working class. Of course, its traditions and organisation were not hugely different to elsewhere in the UK. Wales-based landowners and businessmen made money out of the slave trade and imperialism, as their counterparts in England did. But on our side, to give one example, the great miners’ leader in the 1926 General Strike A.J. Cook, who was a Welsh miner, came from Somerset. 

My concern is how the history of the working class in Wales has been written or not. Both Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson had holiday homes in Wales but it was quite deliberately The Making of the English Working Class. It has fallen to others to write the history on (as the English see it) the far side of the Severn. Gwyn A. Williams wrote and spoke marvellously and invariably idiosyncratically on Welsh history, but when it came to the history of Welsh workers Hywel Francis was central. His book (with Dai Smith) The Fed: The History of the South Wales Miners in the Twentieth Century, is a fascinating piece of labour history and stands out as such. Likewise his Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War brought to life the input that Wales had to the International Brigades. 

Francis was key to setting up the South Wales Miners’ Library at Swansea University which is a great resource for historians. I researched there myself looking at the impact of the 1984/5 miners strike and its defeat. Somewhere in that one can find some of the seeds of what became New Labour (I making the point historically not as a political judgement) and Hywel Francis became a Labour MP from 2001-2015. I’m sure if you delve far enough you’ll find occasional chunterings from myself that he would do much more important work focusing on the history. However clearly he did a good deal in this time that was appreciated, although not support for the Iraq War. 

The Welsh working class of 2021 is not employed in mines (or in most cases steel works)but in quite different occupations from which develop different attitudes and traditions and ways of grappling with capital. At the same time the history remains a live presence and ideas of solidarity and working class organisation are just as important now as they were in 1926, 1948 and 1984. Hywel Francis did a huge amount to help our understanding of that.

Keith Flett

Stan Newens (1930-2021) - a socialist with a sense of internationalism and history

Stan Newens with Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, and Fenner Brockway, 1970

The London Socialist Historians Group was saddened to hear about the passing of the former socialist, internationalist and Labour MP and MEP Stan Newens who has died at the age of 91 - and our condolences go to his friends, family and comrades.  He had a long and varied life on the left and in his later years did much work on labour and socialist history - and was President of the Socialist History Society in his later years - and also spoke at events organised by the London Socialist Historians Group around 1956 - a memorable year about which he wrote an essay about fifty years on - and at a memorial meeting to his long standing friend and comrade Ray Challinor - who Newens recalled 'consistently mocked my abstemious attitude to alcohol and what he saw as a puritanical cast of mind. I was, he told me, the most conservative socialist he had ever known!'

There is a Guardian obituary here - which sadly if unsurprisingly has little sympathy for Newens's politics, particularly his anti-imperialism - Newens was a critical figure in the Movement for Colonial Freedom (later Liberation) and there is a nice tribute by his comrade on the Labour left Jeremy Corbyn in Tribune here.  Neither piece incidentally mention Newens's early membership of the Socialist Review Group around the revolutionary Marxist Tony Cliff in the 1950s (a group which at the time was inside the Labour Party, but in 1962 became the International Socialists and later the SWP outside of Labour) - and how Newens would travel around in the 1950s on a motorbike delivering copies of Socialist Review.  

Newens published his autobiography In Quest of a Fairer Society in 2013 - which Ian Birchall reviewed at the time for Review31.  The blurb to the autobiography gives a useful summary of his life and work.  RIP Stan. 

'In Quest of a Fairer Society: My Life and Politics' is the autobiography of Arthur Stanley Newens. Now in his eighties, Stan Newens was a Labour MP from 1964 to 1970, and again from 1974 to 1983. Subsequently he was for fifteen years a Member of the European Parliament. His aim has always been ‘to persuade the Labour Party to adopt socialist policies’. Beginning with his working-class upbringing in Bethnal Green, Stan Newens describes his education at state schools and University College London where he obtained a history degree. After working as a coal-miner for four years in lieu of national service he has spent his life in public service, as a teacher and parliamentarian. He describes his time in Parliament with a perceptive political commentary, recounting his relationships and views. He was always seen as a left-winger and was a founder member of the Tribune Group of Labour MPs. In 1956 he was active in the campaign against the Suez expedition and, in the House of Commons, he opposed supporting US involvement in Vietnam. Throughout his career he supported innumerable international causes and strongly opposed Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. "In Quest of a Fairer Society" is the account of a life dedicated to a cause but characterised by loyalty and commitment to family, friends and the community in general. 

New research on the Socialist Labour Party and the early British Communist Party

The second of two articles commemorating the centenary of the British Communist Party is now available and should be of interest to all socialist scholars:

John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Socialist Labour Party and the leadership of early British Communism’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 48, 4 (2020), pp. 609–659: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/Y2BHVVI5SXIJFQYYABRM/full?target=10.1080/03017605.2020.1850817

Starting from the work of Walter Kendall, Ray Challinor, James Hinton and Richard Hyman, the article addresses a long-standing historiographical issue: the role ex-members of its main constituent organisations, the BSP and SLP, played in the early Communist Party. It progresses past controversy by analysing the 19 former SLP activists who sat on the CPGB Executive in the 1920s. It compares their impact in the party with their comparators from the BSP. The article concludes that the idea of competing political identities based on earlier allegiance persisting into the 1920s has been exaggerated and fails to facilitate our understanding of the development of British Communism between 1920 and 1928.

See also John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, A. (2020b). The early British Communist leaders, 1920–1923: a prosopographical exploration. Labor History, 62, 5–6 (2020), pp. 423–465:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/DAMMVDTIMTIICD4XW7I6/full?target=10.1080/0023656X.2020.1818711

 

London Socialist Historians Group seminars Spring 2021

 London Socialist Historians Group seminars

Spring Term 2021

Resistance to the Nazis, Trump & the Christian Right, Memory & Hope in activist movements

Once again socialist history seminars will be via Zoom this term.

Given the amount of on-line events and meetings I’ve stuck to the 3 seminars a term model that worked very successfully in the autumn. That does mean there is a backlog of seminar papers to be presented but we will get round to it!

The link to register and join each seminar will be posted here once the Institute of Historical Research website has been updated

Monday 25^th January 5.30pm Merilyn Moos, German working class resistance to the Nazis

Monday 22^nd February 5.30pm John Newsinger, Trump and the Christian Right: A Dark Side of American Exceptionalism

Monday 15^th March 5.30pm Eibhlín Ní Chléirigh, Asking for the Moon: An investigation of memory and hope in activist movements

link to register

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/asking-moon-investigation-memory-and-hope-activist-movements

Keith Flett, London Socialist Historians Group Convenor

PS The Spring LSHG Newsletter should, hopefully, be out in early February. Contributions, comments and complaints are as ever most welcome - please contact at the address above