There Is Power In A Union

Keeping me sane on a rather shit day has been this fantastic book by Tony Barnsley, Breaking Their Chains: The Story Of The 1910 Cradley Heath Chainmakers' Strike. It's thoroughly engaging, and explains the landmark strike in the context of industrial relations of the time.

"For two months in the autumn of 1910 hundreds of women chainmakers in the Black Country struck against their employers and won a minimum wage which doubled their incomes. Women who had no vote, who were largely illiterate, who worked 54-hour weeks for a pittance and had to take their children to work with them took on their bosses and proved their economic power.

But more than this, the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath returned to work confident in the knowledge that by sticking together in a union they could stand up to the chain masters. Delegations of strikers had visited places they had never been to before. They had seen more daylight than ever before. They experienced being at the centre of press interest, had been interviewed for the first time and perhaps photographed for the first time.

The events of the first day of the strike were witnessed by the novelist John Galsworthy (author of The Forsythe Saga), who happened to be in Cradley Heath. Galsworthy described the spirit and joy of the women when they began their strike. After working since 7am the forges of Cradley all stood still at 2pm. He described how the sun broke through the usually smoky air, and 1,000 women and children marched through the streets, faces full of the joy of rebellion, waving flags, chanting and laughing: 'For an hour the pageant wound through the dejected street...till it came to a deserted slag heap, selected for speech making...as I watched, a strong fancy visited on my brain. I seemed to see over every rugged head of these marching women a little yellow flame, a thin flickering gleam...a trick of the sunlight maybe? Or was it the life in their heads, the indistinguishable breath of happiness had for a moment escaped prison, and was fluttering at the pleasure of the breeze? It seemed to me that in these tattered, wistful figures, so still, so trustful, I was looking on such beauty as I had never beheld.'"