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Forthcoming Events at the WCML

Mikron Theatre Company perform Fair Trade

Sunday 7th September 2pm
Entrance £4.00, payable on the door.

Mikron make a welcome return to the library with Fair Trade: Reaping the Dividends This new show tells the story of the Co-operative Movement from its roots in the early part of the 19th century when the Industrial Revolution resulted in exploitation and misery for many working people. Now the Co-op Group is one of the largest wholesale and retail companies in Britain whilst there are co-operative movements in over 100 countries. Did it all begin at Toad Lane in Rochdale in 1844? Take your basket and wander down the aisles of history as Mikron bring you the true story, told, of course, with their usual mixture of music, humour and sadness..

Heritage Open Days

Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th September 11am-4pm
Free. All welcome.

Once again the library will take part in the national scheme that encourages the public to visit buildings of cultural and historical significance. Guides will take visitors on tours of the library's extensive historical collections and see rooms not normally open to the public. Light refreshments will be available.


CLR James: a talk by David Renton
Saturday 4 October 2pm. Free. All welcome.
CLR James was one of the most influential writers on cricket and Marxism of the twentieth century. He was politically active in the West Indies, Britain and the United States, whilst his history of the slave uprising in Haiti The Black Jacobins and his autobiography Beyond a Boundary are classics.
David Renton is the author of CLR James: the enigma of cricket’s philosopher king. He has also written extensively on socialist history and anti-fascism.

Previous Events at the WCML

A Celebration of the life of Ruth Frow
co-founder of the Working Class Movement Library

We invite everyone who wishes to commemorate Ruth and the great contribution she made to join us in A Celebration of Ruth's Life on Saturday 5th April at 2pm at Peel Hall, University of Salford, The Crescent, Salford.  Tea, coffee and biscuits will be available.  (Peel Hall is virtually opposite the Library - but please use the crossing lower down as the road is lethal!).  

The speakers will be members of Ruth's family, the historian Dorothy Thompson, Alice Bates a political comrade of Ruth's, and Hilary Jones from the International Brigade Memorial Trust. Poems will be read by Maxine Peake and Eileen Murphy and songs will be performed by Aidan Jolly, Claire Mooney, Bernie Murphy and Francy Devine.

The most effective way we can commemorate Ruth is to ensure that the library she and Eddie founded to rescue and make available the history of working class people and their struggles for justice, equality and a better life continues, flourishes and reaches out more widely.  We know that Ruth would have wholeheartedly approved that we ask for donations in her memory to be made to the Working Class Movement Library.

'The Bold Fenian Men': Remembering the Manchester Martyrs

A one-day conference hosted jointly by the Working Class Movement Library and the University of Central Lancashire.
Saturday 24 November 2007
10.30am to 4.30pm

“All the Fenians lacked was martyrs. These they have been presented with. Through the execution of these men, the liberation of Kelley and Deasey has been made an act of heroism which will now be sung over the cradle of every Irish child. The Irish women will take care of that … The Fenians could not wish for a better precedent”. Frederick Engels to Karl Marx, 1867.

On 23 November 1867, three Irish nationalists were hanged in Manchester for their part in the accidental shooting of a policeman two months earlier. Although the three men were known to be Fenians, it was unlikely that any of them were responsible for the killing of P.C. Brent. Consequently, they became known as the 'Manchester Martyrs'. Their hanging brought thousands of people onto the streets of Manchester to protest about their sentence. Their deaths also had international repercussions, extending from North America to Australia. Arguably, the hanging of the Manchester Martyrs was the single most important incident that occurred during the Fenian uprisings in 1867.

This one-day conference, which coincides with the 140th anniversary of the hanging of William Phillip Allen, Michael Larkin, Michael O'Brien, explores the history and legacy of what happened in Manchester that year. It explores the background to the Fenian agitation in Manchester, while placing the Irish nationalist struggle in its international context. The cultural legacy of the Manchester Martyrs will also be examined, especially the way in which they have been remembered and memorialised – in music, literature and monuments.

Conference Chair: Bernadette Hyland

Speakers: Christine Kinealy, Eileen Murphy, Michael Herbert, Tristram Hunt and Roger Swift.

Songs from Bernie Murphy

Bernadette Hyland is a former national Chair of the Irish in Britain Representation Group and has been active in Irish campaigns on miscarriages of justice and in support of prisoners.

Christine Kinealy is a Professor of History at the University of Central Lancashire and Drew University, USA. She has written extensively on Irish history, specialising in the history of the Famine.

Eileen Murphy is a playwright and theatre director. Her work includes two plays on the Manchester Martyrs.

Bernie Murphy is a singer from Manchester and is active in campaigns in support of asylum seekers.

Michael Herbert is the author of The Wearing of the Green: a Political History of the Irish in Manchester.

Tristram Hunt is a lecturer in history at Queen Mary, University of London. He recently presented a TV series on Protestantism and is writing a biography of Frederick Engels.

Roger Swift is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Studies at the University of Chester and has written extensively on the Irish in Britain.

Entrance to the conference is free. Attendance should be pre-booked. A sandwich lunch will be provided for which tickets costing £6 must be bought in advance. Please send a cheque, made payable to Working Class Movement Library, to WCML, 51 The Crescent, Salford M5 4WX. Further details: 0161 736 3601 or email enquiries@wcml.org.uk

The conference has been organised jointly by the Working Class Movement Library and Dr Christine Kinealy. It has been sponsored by DION Fund through the Irish Embassy in Britain, and the University of Central Lancashire.

Past events

National Heritage Open day

Saturday 9 September 2006 commencing at 11.a.m.

The library will once again be taking part in the national Heritage Open days initiative on Saturday 9 September. It will be open 11am to 4pm for tours of the building, including rooms usually closed to the public. No booking neccessary. Light refreshments will be served. All welcome.

Mikron Theatre present Carrying On

Sunday 1 October 2006 starting at 2pm

Mikron Theatre will return to the library to perform their new show Carrying On. 2006 is Mikron's 35th anniversary and marks the 70th year of Mikron's narrowboat, Tyseley. The play will focus on WJ Yarwood and Sons Ltd, the Northwich-based shipyard, where Tyseley was built in the 1930s as part of the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company's fleet of boats.
Against the backdrop of the Great Depression a family firm tries to consolidate its position.
Mikron have performed several times previously at the library and have always gone down very well with the audience.
Admittance is free with a collection at the end to defray expenses.
Mikron Theatre website

International Women's Day 2006

Sunday 5th March,

Ruth Frow , co-founder of the library, will speak about the Socialist origins of IWD followed by Michael Herbert, chair of WCML Trust, who will talk about Mary Quaile, a leading trade unionist of the 1920s who was the only woman on the TUC General Council in 1926. The afternoon will be rounded off with songs from Bernie Murphy, an excellent singer from Manchester. The event is free. Light refreshments will be served.

A LIFE ON THE LEFT
2 p.m. to 5-30 p.m. on Saturday 8 October 2005

Salford celebration to mark life work of veteran Sheffield socialist, BIll Moore.

He took part in the famous Oxford students’ debate in 1933 that declared ‘in no circumstances would we fight for king and country’.
He drummed up support for the Republican forces fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
He welcomed Picasso to Sheffield for a 1950 peace conference cut short by the government, and worked with major historians such as E P Thompson and Christopher Hill in the early days of the Communist Party History Group.

Sheffield man Bill Moore might sound like a figure from another age, but it is only now – aged 94 - that he is standing down from a lifetime of activity on the left.

He can look back on pre-war engineering work, army life in the Second World War, decades of trade union activity, and a wide range of political work as an organiser, campaigner and historian.
His life’s work is now being celebrated by a conference in Salford organised by the Socialist History Society, on the occasion of his retirement from the Society’s national committee.
Professor Nina Fishman, of the University of Westminster, said
‘This is about marking Bill’s important contribution to left wing and democratic causes, and more generally to promoting the history of ordinary people and the working class movement. Bill himself is set to speak, and leading historians will also give talks on labour movement biographies, theories behind historical writing, and influential socialists who Bill knew, but whom many of his younger colleagues never met’.

All are welcome at the event. It takes place from 2 p.m. to 5-30 p.m. on Saturday 8 October at the Working Class Movement Library, 51 The Crescent, Salford.

Further details can be had from Professor Fishman on fishman@wmin.ac.uk. The Society is at www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk and www.socialist-history-journal.org.uk

International Womens Day 2005 at the WCML Ellen Tooley at Blackpool Conference

Sunday 6th March 2005 2.30pm - WCML Annex To mark International Women's  Day the Working Class Movement Library will be holding an event on Sunday 6 March 2005, beginning at 2.30pm in the Library Annexe.

There will 2 speakers - Veronica Trick and Clare Debenham - at the event, which is free. Light refreshments will be served.

Veronica Trick will discuss her grandmother Ellen Tooley, the first woman labour councillor in Eccles. Veronica said, "People love a ‘first’ so that when my grandmother Ellen Tooley became the first woman councillor for Eccles in 1933 it became her label for the rest of her life. Behind the label there was a long hard struggle by herself and her ‘sisters’ for  representation in local politics. At that time, in spite of their efforts, there were only 13 women recorded among the 455 councillors representing the 18 councils in the directory for Manchester and its suburbs. Every additional woman was a victory worth celebrating.


"Telling Ellen’s story will, I hope say something about the difficulties that all women had to overcome to make their voices heard; like many women of her time she had the labour intensive job of running a house and caring for a large family as well as working in a cotton mill. It should explain how her personal experiences must have motivated her to fight for social justice; she been in a workhouse, lived in appalling housing conditions and lost three of her nine children to poverty diseases. It should also highlight
some of the sources of her political education and inspiration; she came from an Irish republican background and was a member of the Co-operative Women’s Guild, the ILP and Eccles Trades and Labour Council.

In my search through journals and newspapers and documents I have found so many evidences of the splendid work that women like my grandmother women did during this period and would like the telling of her story, in a way, to be a tribute to all of them."



Clare Debenham will  discuss her research on the Manchester and Salford Mothers Clinic, established in 1925 in Greengate, Salford. This was a voluntary clinic established by a group of local women from  a variety of political organisations and backgrounds to give working class women advice on birth control and also to put pressure on the Labour government  to alter its policy and allow local council to establish municipal clinics. This was only the second  such voluntary clinic in Britain and they met fierce and concerted oppostion which only served to strengthen their resolve.  One of the women  Mary Stocks later wrote "what fun it was being in an unpopular movement which we knew was going to win." Finally in 1931 the second Labour
government reluctantly  changed its policy and Manchester was the first local authority in the country to set up municipal birth control clinics. Clare's rewsearch contradicts the often held view that after woman got the
vote in 1918 the feminist movement died out.


International Women's Day was started by Socialist women in the early 1900s
to celebrate working class women and rapidly became an internatonal event.
It was revived in the early 1970s by the second wave of feminism.

Link to International Womens Day website.
Click on the image above to link to www.internationalwomensday.com

Past Event - Sunday, 17th October 2004 2pm-5pm

Gerry Sables will give talk about the West Country poet John Gregory (1831-1922)

Gregory was born in Bideford and at the age of 11 apprenticed to a shoemaker. After 1856 he lived in Bristol.  He was a prolific writer and published 5 volumes of poetry, including Song Streams (1877) and  Idylls of Labour(1883). His last publication was Murmurs and Melodies, published in 1886. In addition to his writing he was active in the co-operative movement and Bristol Socialist Society.

Gerry Sables has made a  study of  the life and work of John Gregory.

Free entrance with a collection to defray expenses.

Past Event - Sunday 31st October 2004  2.30pm in the WCML Annex
Mikron Theatre presents
On the Line (200 years of British railways)

The age of the railways began in 1804, when the Cornish engineer, Richard Trevithick, ran a steam locomotive on the Penydarren Tramway. With its usual touch of humour and original songs and music, Mikron tracks down the real story of this important part of our heritage.

We've all been there. Travelling on a train which grinds to a halt.
What's happening? Will they tell us? Am I going to be late - again?
Four people are stuck in a cutting with no contact with the outside world. Faced with the reality of today, the past catches up with them - the early railway pioneers, the glory days of steam, the era of the Big Four.
They cross the points into nationalisation and electrification, get delayed by Dr Beeching and sidetracked by privatisation.
Will they end up speeding into a high-tech future?

Previously presented by Mikron at the WCML:

Pedal Power (the continuing journey of the National Clarion Cycling Club)
A Woman's Place (revival of the popular 1995/96 production was timed to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU))
Our Victor (The Story of Victor Grayson Independent Socialist M.P. for Colne Valley)

Click to visit Mikron's Website
Click on the logo above to link to www.mikron.org.uk/


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