The Working Class Movement Library
The Working Class Movement Library records over 200 years of organising and campaigning by ordinary men and women for social and political progress.
Our collections provide rich insights into working people's daily lives as well as their thoughts, hopes, fears and the roles they played in the significant events of their time, including:
- Politics (of all shades) and momentous campaigns, from Chartism to the General Strike and more recent protests such as the Grunwick strike.
- Trade unions, where people have banded together to improve their working conditions, including brushmakers, boilermakers, shipwrights, tailors, gasworkers, engineers and clerks.
- Important people who have led activist lives - such as the papers of Benny Rothman who helped lead the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass.
- Creativity and culture - the archive of Manchester-born playwright Jim Allen, records of the Clarion movement and the Ancoats Brotherhood.
- Notable international events such as the Spanish Civil War, and aspects of Irish history.
The library is built on the personal collection of Ruth and Edmund Frow and now holds tens of thousands of books, archives and pamphlets, as well as posters, banners, newspapers, prints, photographs and more.
The Library is currently working on a Heritage Lottery Fund project ‘The Past meets the Present’. This includes the cataloguing of our archive collections, which have never been catalogued before. We are planning to have descriptions of most of our archive collections available on the Archives Hub.
Address: Working Class Movement Library, 51 The Crescent, Salford, M5 4WX
Telephone: +44 (0) 161 736 3601 Fax: +44 (0) 161 737 4115
Email: enquiries@wcml.org.uk Web: www.wcml.org.uk
Browse the Working Class Movement Library's descriptions
Show list of the Working Class Movement Library's descriptions
- Alliance Cabinet Makers Association
- Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Shipwrights, Blacksmiths and Structural Workers
- Amalgamated Society of Gilders
- Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers
- Amalgamated Union of Upholsterers
- Associated Blacksmiths', Forge and Smithy Workers' Society
- Bakers' Union
- Brushmakers' Unions
- Ceramic and Allied Trades Union (CATU)
- Electrical Trades Union
- Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union
- Greater Manchester and District Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (GMD CND)
- Jim Allen collection
- National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association
- National Association of Operative Plasterers
- National Union of Furniture Trade Operatives
- National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers
- National Union of Musical Instrument Makers and Organ Builders Trade Society
- National Union of the Footwear, Leather and Allied Trades
- No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF)
- Plumbing Trades Union
- Silk Workers' Unions
- Spanish Civil War and International Brigades
- United French Polishers Society
