Ewan MacColl (Jimmy Miller) sold factory papers and copies of the Communist Party newspaper at factory gates in the 1930s, and remembered that time thus:
"The Party was growing, slowly, but nevertheless it was growing. It had premises in Great Ducie Street, Manchester, near the old London Road station. The party premises were old when Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844. We had one room on the top of a four-storey flight of rickety stairs, and in this room there was a duplicating machine, a rickety desk, a wastepaper basket and a typewriter.
It was a poky little room, but all the work of the Party was done there and the work seemed to be endless. We were running factory newspapers, like the Salford Docker, for example, a duplicated news-sheet - one, two, three, four pages, sold outside the docks to blokes as they went on. At this time dockers went to work on spec. You stood in the quays which was just like a cattle market. And there were catwalks between the quays, and a ganger or 'bummer' would come out and say, 'You, you, you and you!' . And there'd be five, ten or fifteen men selected out of several hundred, and the rest would go home. And it was like that every day. A number of strikes had developed, and one in Salford itself, a very successful strike, against this system. The demand was that men should be guaranteed work for a certain number of days each week.
During this period I used to be out at the docks maybe twice a week at the early morning shift - the 6 o'clock shift - and we'd sell papers there until they went in. And then I'd go off to the labour exchange, sign on, leave the exchange, and I'd meet Bob, my mate, and we'd maybe go to the party offices, and help with producing the Crossley Motor, which was the organ of the Crossley motor works. Sometimes I'd write little rhymed squibs about an unpopular foreman. Several of these would dot the page in between the more serious articles. I'd do the same for the Ward and Goldstone's Spark that was another duplicated news-sheet that was sold outside an electrical component factory in Lower Broughton. I used to write editorials for that as well, because it was reckoned that I lived near there and should therefore have contact with the workers inside. But as almost all the workers were girls, and mostly girls who were older than me, well, the chances of getting to know any of them weren't very good. So I used to go up and hang around outside the factory and chat girls up - and get them to tell me things about which department they worked in, what was the foreman's name, what were the management like, what was the grub like in the canteen; then I'd write an article and maybe make up a song and maybe three or four little lampoons, in rhyming couplets or in Alexandrines sometimes! I'd just learned about Alexandrine verse so I thought, 'Ah right, get the factory newspaper to print those!'
I must have written hundreds of these things, because I was writing for the Salford Docker, the Ward and Goldstone's Spark, the Crossley Motor. What else was I writing for? The British Dyestuffs Corporation factory at Blackley.
The Blackley division of the British Dyestuffs Corporation was the result of a takeover. It had previously been known as Levensteins, though the change of management didn't affect the hellish smells given off by the place. As a source of pollution, the place was hard to beat. The local kids had a rhyme about it:
Down in Blackley stands the Dyestuffs
Better known as Levensteins;
O, it smells just like a carsey,
Worse than working down a mine.
Go to buggery, go to buggery,
Go to buggery Levenstein!
O, it smells just like a carsey,
Worse than working down a mine.
I was doing about five factory papers every week, and helping to duplicate them, and sometimes helping to type them. We had a party typist, but she couldn't keep pace with all the things that had to be done.
In the factory papers there'd be a leading article written about, say, the state of the engineering industry, or some specific struggle that was going on inside the industry. And then the leader writer, if he was good, would relate this not only to the factory but to specific departments inside the factory. Some of this information he would arrive at intuitively or through his knowledge of the politics of the whole industry, some he would arrive at through consultation with whoever had been brought into the branch. Occasionally it would be someone from within the plant that happened with the Salford Docker, where you got actual dockers writing the editorials. But at first it would be a party member who might be unemployed, who'd make it his business to find out as much as he could about that factory and to interpret it politically. Usually there was an attempt to write some kind of objective analysis of a specific situation. But there'd be all kinds of other pieces, of course, little satiric squibs, lampoons and verses and all the rest of it. These would deal with a little comer of the political picture. A foreman, for example, at Ward and Goldstone's, had a reputation for trying 'to have it off' with the girls who worked under him - well, he was lampooned fantastically, and his position would be made very difficult. Suppose his missus got to hear of it! Well, you can imagine. And there were letters of course m the papers, usually phoney ones ... not the information, just the signatures. You must remember you could be expelled from the AEU [Amalgamated Engineering Union] for being a Red at this time. The selling of the paper had to be done by people outside the factory, at the factory gate. I must have spent a fair amount of time selling at least half a dozen different factory newspapers, outside half a dozen different places of employment.
Now you can't write a four-line squib in formal English to workers who never use formal English; you have to use exactly their terms. Not just an approximation of their terms, but exactly their terms". (Theatres of the Left, 1880-1935: workers' theatre movements in Britain and America, by Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stuart Cosgrove. 1985, pages 219-21)