Agnes 'Aggie' Hughes Papers

This is a collection of correspondence, newspapers and miscellaneous items that were collected by Agnes 'Aggie' Hughes and on her death in 1954, passed to her husband Hedley Dennis (which explains the items in the collection that were produced after her death). Her papers largely concern J. Keir Hardie - their correspondence and newspaper articles written about his death - but there is evidence of a wider socialist interest, with political correspondence from other prominent figures at the time and a range of Labour Party and socialist newspaper articles and pamphlets.

Agnes 'Aggie' Hughes (1887-1954) was the sister of Emrys Hughes M.P. and married Hedley Dennis, a member of the Abercynon Ward Labour Party, in 1925. She was a teacher and a member of the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF), a pacifist organisation that opposed the First World War. She and Keir Hardie corresponded regularly, as well as visited each other as regularly as Hardie's schedule would permit, as he was a close friend of the Hughes family; the family were heavily involved in Hardie's 1910 M.P. election campaign in Merthyr Tydfil and they grew close. Aggie was also a member of the Abercynon Ward Labour Party and was very concerned with the needs of Abercynon's miners, a subject that Hardie consistently updated her on in their correspondence.

This collection is separated into 3 Series: Correspondence, Newspapers and Miscellaneous. The correspondence has been separated into Sub-Series sorted by recipient and within each Sub-Series the items are in chronological order. The Newspaper Series has been sorted into Sub-Series of Newspaper Articles and Pamphlets and within each of these Sub-Series the items are ordered chronologically. Within the Miscellaneous Series, the items are in no particular order.

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These papers were collected by Agnes Hughes and after her death, were kept by her husband, Hedley Dennis. After Dennis' death in 1984, the collection was given to Tony Benn; it was this collection that Caroline Benn was inspired by and used to write her 1992 biography of Keir Hardie. The collection was then donated to the Labour History Archive and Study Centre in 2018, after the deaths of Tony and Caroline Benn, by a relative.