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He was an active anti-fascist in the
1930s. Secretary of Secular Society 1937 and member of Co-op party
Sources: Leicester Evening Mail, July
9th 1935
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Born: Newcastle under Lyme, Staffs c1862 died 1937 (L.L.W.S.S. & National
Union of Women Workers)
Evelyn Carryer’s parents were in
business, which gave her financial independence. In 1893, she was elected
as a Liberal candidate for the Board of Guardians, though she seemed to
have changed her political allegiances in later years. She was the
secretary of the Leicester and Leicestershire Women’s Suffrage Society and
wrote for the Leicester Pioneer under the sobriquet of ‘Some
Women.’ In her column in 1906, she promoted the Labour League of Women and
suggested the revival of the old Leicestershire custom of leaving a bale
of chaff outside the house of a wife beater to show where thrashing took
place.
In 1907, the Leicester Pioneer noted
that she was now unable to work with the Liberals and backed her decision
to run for the Guardians as an independent woman candidate. She is at
once sympathetic and clever and in her own quiet way has done much
valuable work in the past three years.
Due to a quirk in the Franchise Act,
some women were allowed to vote and stand as councillors. She was duly
nominated, in the same year, as a non party candidate for Wycliffe ward,
under the auspices of the National Union of Women Workers for the Town
Council and supported by the WSPU. This time she was in competition with
the Labour candidate, Harry Woolley. In a temperance influenced programme,
she advocated the municipalisation of the milk trade, better housing
standards and municipal lodging houses for women. She came third.
Evelyn was a founder member of the
WSPU in Leicester, but came to disapprove of the lack of democratic
procedures within the organisation. Within a year, she had broken with the
WSPU, though she still gave it financial support and approved of its
radicalism. She was elected to the Board of Guardians again in 1910 and
served until 1913.
Sources: Richard Whitmore, Alice
Hawkins and the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian Leicester, Shirley
Aucott, Women of Courage, Vision and Talent, 2008
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Born: c1862 (I.L.P.&
Labour Party)
 Tom
Carter was a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and secretary
of the local branch. He was a founding member of the I.L.P. and later
became treasurer and minute secretary of I.L.P. After being out of work,
he helped found the Leicester Co-operative Engineers' Society in 1894
which became profitable in 1897. He was appointed a delegate to Trades
Council in 1895 and became its president in 1899 and its secretary in
1903.
“The
Secretary of the Leicester Trades Council has one fault he is too modest.
When it's a case of some work to be done, Mr. Carter is there: but if he
is required to present himself much before the public eye, he would very
much prefer to step on one side and allow others to take his place. When,
thirty-nine years ago, he lived in rural seclusion in a little village
near Bradgate Park, his farmer parents and friends hardly expected that he
would leave an agricultural life to take up the more strenuous life of
tile city, yet, like millions of other young men, town life attracted him.
In 1886, he went to Birmingham to work in the engineering trade, migrating
again to Leicester a few years later…”
“Mr.
Carter has made several plucky but unsuccessful fights to obtain a seat on
one or the other of our municipal councils. When he ran for the Board of
Guardians in 1898, he only lost the seat by one vote, and the next year
was but thirty-five votes behind in a contest for a seat on the Town
Council. ….Mr. Carter is not a man who makes much outward show, but all
those who come in contact with him recognise in the Secretary of the
Trades Council a man of sterling worth and unflinching integrity.”
Sources: Leicester Trades Council, Trade Union Congress
Leicester, Official Souvenir,
1903, Bill Lancaster, Radicalism Co-operation and
Socialism
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Born: 20th
Feb, 1860, died: Sept. 3rd 1927 (I.L.P, Labour Party & T.U.L.P)
Jabez  Chaplin
was born into a family numbering many
generations of framework knitters. His grandfather had given evidence to
the Royal Commission on the Condition of Framework Knitters (1845).
However, Chaplin’s father was crippled and earned a precarious living in
Hinckley playing
the violin and later as boot and shoe-maker. He did not attend school and
his only education came from his well-read father. He was sent out to work
at the age of 8 as a winder. At the age of 13, Jabez Chaplin walked to
Leicester with all his belongings wrapped in a red bandana where he found
work in a hosiery factory, joining the old Framework Knitters’ Union in
the late 1870s. Whilst he was a lad, he spent
his evenings at the Vaughan Working Men’s College, Union Street. In 1885,
he joined the new Leicester Amalgamated Hosiery Union and within a year he
was a member of the executive, playing an active role in the strike of
February
1886. In 1887 he became president and in 1893, he became Joint Secretary
with Holmes which was a full-time position. With Holmes’ disgrace and
death in 1911, he became secretary and continued in that position until
his own death.
Chaplin was apparently a seemingly
gentle and quiet man, but was also extremely strong willed and had a
forceful and compelling personality. Once he had made up his mind to serve
a cause he would give everything to it. He was strongly opposed to
compulsory smallpox vaccinations and stumped the city in opposition. He
held street corner meetings, wrote and handed out leaflets denouncing the
idea until it was eventually scrapped. He was not a man afraid of
unpopularity or criticism. He was a complete individualist, both in his
public and private life. When his wife died, he married her
sister-something almost unknown then and to many quite immoral. He lived
an extremely austere life-he neither smoked nor drank, had little interest
in material possessions and, until he was Mayor, had never attended a
cricket or football match in his life. This tended to irritate those who
worked with him. He was a leading member of the circle at Silver Street
Spiritualist Hall. He was also a temperance supporter, though he favoured
persuasion rather than prohibition.
He became known as ‘a great platform
man.’ He had a resounding, clarion voice and it was said that no one was
ever heard to complain that they could not hear him. According to one
newspaper “his blend of rich humour in his practical, homely talks made
him one of the most popular speakers.” He was able to make his
arguments simple and lucid and could speak easily and fluently. Up until
1893, he was also the Liberal general committee member for Latimer ward.
However, he left the Liberal Party to become one of the founders of the
I.L.P. in Leicester. He was the fourth I.L.P. candidate to be elected to
the Town Council and he represented Aylestone from 1898 until he lost the
seat in 1901, possibly as a result of his support of the Boers during the
South African war. He soon retook the seat and was made an alderman in
1909.
However his support for the First
World War led him to break with the party. His enthusiasm for the war
effort went so far as to allow the Leicester Hosiery Union’s offices to be
used by the local recruiting sergeant. He told a public meeting in 1918,
that he wanted to show his disgust at the methods now being practised by
the so-called leaders of the so-called Labour Party. Speaking of the men
the seamen on the platform, he said:
“there were certain men and women who had
eaten the bread those men had fetched across the seas, but did not have
a good word for their action. (shame). He spurned such men. He hated the
man who loved the German and hated the Englishman…”
As a result of his support for J.F.
Green and the National Democratic Party in opposition to Ramsay MacDonald,
he was expelled from the Independent Labour Party in February 1919, along
with Cllr J.S. Salt. Jabez Chaplin was made Mayor in 1919 in preference to
Amos Sherriff who was deemed to be too ‘unpatriotic’ for the Council at
that time. Chaplin died as a result of a car accident in 1927.
Sources: Leicester Pioneer, 4th
October 1902, Leicester Evening Mail, Aug 13, 1918, Richard Gurnham,
The Hosiery Unions 1776-1976, Howes, C. (ed), Leicester: Its Civic,
Industrial, Institutional and Social Life, Leicester 1927, Leicester
Trades Council, Trade Union Congress Leicester, Official
Souvenir, 1903. The Labour Party Conference 1911, Official
Souvenir, Leicester 1911, Bill Lancaster, Radicalism Co-operation
and Socialism,
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Born: circa 1812, St
Mary, Leicestershire, died 1879
In 1844, William Chawner brought a
test case against his employer Cummings, claiming that sums deducted for
frame rent had been illegally withheld. A verdict in favour of the
plaintiff (Chawner) was given at the Leicester Assizes, but was reversed
on appeal to the Queen’s Bench. He subsequently became a marked man and
was frequently deprived of his employment.
Sources: R. Bindley, The History of
the Struggle for the Abolition of Frame Rents & Charges, 1875, A. Temple
Patterson, Radical Leicester
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Born: Leicester 1870, died 1965 (I.L,P & WSPU)
Agnes Clarke was a Suffragette and a
novelist. Her mother was a straw bonnet maker and her father was a staff
sergeant in the Leicester militia. Agnes began wok in the hosiery trade,
though in 1907, Sylvia Pankhurst, describes Agnes as supporting her family
by collecting laundry accounts. However, she also worked as a proof
reader, probably for the Leicester Guardian. In 1901, she described
herself as an author, having had her first novel, Glenroyst: A Story of
Old Time Leicestershire published in 1898.
A year later her second novel,
Seven Girls appeared. This was about girls working in a laundry. Her
third novel, First Women Minister’ was a thinly veiled account of
Unitarian pioneer, the Rev. Gertrude von Petzold of whom she was a
follower. Gertrude von Petzold was appointed minister of Narborough Road
Free Christian Church (Unitarian) in 1904, thus becoming Britain’s first
woman minister.
Agnes Clarke contributed stories to
the Leicester Guardian and wrote regularly for the Midlands Free Press.
From 1902, she probably wrote under the sobriquet ‘Lydia’ for the
Leicester Pioneer.
Although, Agnes Clarke was involved
in the Suffragette movement, she escaped arrest. She recalled “being
taken in charge by a tall policeman with red hair for the heinous crime of
attempting to speak to Winston Churchill. Thanks to his kindly
interposition on by behalf, I was released and felt very sorry for the
abashed policeman”. She was critical of suffragists as “women who
wanted the vote but would risk nothing for it-they preferred the safe
policy of conciliation.” In later life, Agnes became a staunch
Conservative
Sources: Jess Jenkins, Burning
Passions, The Story of the Fight for Women’s Suffrage in Leicestershire
1866-1918, Record Office Exhibition 2007, A Reconstructed World: A
Feminist Biography of Gertrude Richardson, Barbara Roberts, Census
returns, Shirley Aucott, Women of Courage, Vision and Talent, 2008
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Born
Leicester August 1874 died 1962 (I.L.P. & WSPU)
Bertha was a boot machinist and
sister of Agnes. She was a founding member of the local WSPU and was
active until 1914. She was a colleague of Alice Hawkins in the break away
Independent Women’s Boot & Shoe Trade Union and was a delegate to the
Trades Council. Unlike her sister, she remained a committed socialist. In
1948, she married Albert Stoney.
Sources: Sources: Richard Whitmore,
Alice Hawkins and the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian Leicester,
Shirley Aucott, Women of Courage, Vision and Talent, 2008
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Born: circa 1860 Longton, Staffordshire, died: 1895 (I.L.P)
By trade E. Clarkmead was a laster.
In 1890, he became the first socialist to be elected to a trade union
office, when he was elected as the town’s full-time agent for the NUBSO.
In 1894, he attempted to persuade NUBSO to commit central funds to
co-operative production, as it would “ultimately lead to the
Union getting the benefit of the whole of
their industry.”
Sources: Bill Lancaster,
Radicalism Co-operation and Socialism
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Born: Romford, Essex March 12th
1926, died: 6th December 2001
She was born Betty Smith and her
childhood was indelibly marked by her mother’s death from breast cancer in
1937, when Betty was just eleven years old. She was a bright pupil,
receiving eight O level passes from her grammar school, but she couldn’t
wait to leave school and went to work as a short hand secretary at the age
of sixteen. In 1944, she moved to London together with her friend Audrey
and joined ‘the war effort,’ working at the meteorological office, part of
the Air Ministry.
The post-war teaching shortage gave
her the chance to enlist for a one-year teacher-training course outside
London and then to Nottingham, where teachers were in huge demand. Here
she discovered the works of D H Lawrence, and socialist politics. She
first joined the Labour League of Youth but soon met, and was won over by,
activists in the Young Communist League which had many more active
members. She met her husband-to-be, Ken Coates, on a ramble organised by
the YCL in the Peak district, near Chesterfield. Following the Hungarian
uprising she left the Communist party and returned to political activity
joining the Labour Party, of which she remained a member until her death.
Betty, now a single mother with two
toddlers, returned to teaching with her characteristic vigour. By 1965 she
had landed her first headship, at the newly opened Abbey Primary School in
Bloxwich, near Walsall. In 1967 she moved to a new posting as headmistress
of the Bell St Infants School in Wigston. Betty played an active part in
the 1969 national teachers’ strike, an event which had a big effect on her
politically. Betty became secretary of the Harborough Constituency Labour
Party
In 1975 Betty was elected divisional
secretary of the Leicestershire NUT, and a year or two later of the City
of Leicester NUT as well. Having risen to the top of her profession and
having become one of the most prominent women trade unionists in the area,
it took a lot of courage to start a new life. But that's what Betty did at
the age of 55 when she emigrated to Australia in 1981 She made a clean
break of it, starting work in Melbourne’s taxation office rather than
going back to teaching –She joined the Australian Labour Party and became
active again.
Sources: Laurence Coates, author’s
personal knowledge
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Born:
Leicester c1857
Job Cobley worked as an iron founder
for Gimsons, eventually being made a foreman. In 1889, wages in the trade
had been static for 20 years and a long strike ensued. In August of that
year, he became secretary of the local branch of the Leicester Society of
Ironfounders. In the following decade, he was responsible for negotiating
a three weekly increases of 2/-, 1/- and 1/-. In 1892, he became a
delegate to the Trades Council and its president in 1900. In 1898, he was
elected as Trades Council nominee, to the Board of Guardians. He was a
member of the I.L.P. and an Oddfellow
Sources: The Leicester Guardian, 28th July
1900, census
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Born: Leicestershire c1823
During the 1840s, Thomas Coltman was
an active supporter of the Anti Persecution League, a local group set up
to defend freethinkers from the blasphemy laws. He became a successful
hosiery machine manufacturer, employing 48 people in 1881. He was a
shareholder in the Leicester Secular Hall and President of the Secular
Society. He was in partnership with the Gimson family until 1883, when he
continued in business on his own.
Sources: Leicester Secular Society minutes, census
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Don Connolly
Born: Thorne, 29th March 1926, died
Leicester 15th January 2012 (Communist Party of Great Britain &
Communist Party of Britain)
Don Connolly came from
a mining family. His father was a politically active miner who moved
between coalfields in order to find work. His younger brother was killed
in a pit accident. Don was borne and grew up in Thorne in South
Yorkshire. His elder brother fought in Spain. He started work in the
Desford Colliery in 1943, where he joined his father working the 'butty
system' of sub contracted labour. He worked at Desford for nearly 40
years. He married Doris in 1945 and they lived on Brunswick Street in the
Wharf Street area. They were rehoused to the newly built New Parks estate,
where Don became a activist in the tenants movement. For many years he was
a stalwart of the Leicester Federation of Tenants Associations. Despite
having eight children, Don and Doris were active campaigners. Don was
active in the Peace movement even before the advent of C.N.D.
Don was an active
Communist all his life. In the 1970s, he contested local council elections
and was a candidate for the area secretary of the National Union of
Mineworkers. Despite his lack of votes in local elections, he was held in
greater esteem by local people of New Parks than the candidates that they
actually elected. Such was the stigma of Communism.
Although Don had retired from the pit by the time of the 1984 miner’s
strike, he was active in support of the ‘Dirty 30,’ the Leicestershire
miners who stayed out on strike. Don assembled a Leicester support group
to collect food and money. This was so successful that they soon had two
garages full of tinned food and were then able to take van loads on a
regular basis to areas such as the North East, Yorkshire and Wales.
Don and Doris also
worked for Progressive Tours which specialized in holidays to countries
which were then part of the ‘Eastern Bloc.’ Don was not a Euro-communist
and was always loyal to the Soviet Union. When the CPGB dissolved itself
in 1989, he joined the CPB which had retained control of the Morning Star.
He was chair of the local branch for many years.
He was chairman of the
New Parks Community Project, which helped turn New Parks Community Adult
Education Centre into a college. In the late 1980s, Don chaired the
Leicester Committee Against the Poll Tax. He was also a delegate and
executive member of Leicester Trades Council.
Sources: author’s personal knowledge.
Interview with the author, (Leicester Oral History Archive.)
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Born: Great Yarmouth, died: November 2009, aged 85
(Communist Party)
Doris Connolly was community stalwart
on the New Parks estate and along with her husband Don, was a founder
member of New Parks Residents' Association. They were instrumental in
securing the New Parks Community Centre, in Oswalds Road, for the estate,
and New Parks Adventure Playground, in Glenfield Road. Connolly Close, off
Birkenshaw Road and named after the couple, includes eight council houses
and two council flats, created as part of the city council's first
new-build council house project in decades.
The pair were committed social
campaigners and lifelong members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Mrs Connolly volunteered behind the bar at New Parks Community Centre and
organised an annual Christmas toy collection for youngsters on the estate.
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Born: 22nd November 1808, Melbourne, Derbyshire, died:18th
July 1892
In addition to Thomas Cook’s well-documented activities
as a pioneer travel agent and teetotaler, Cook also was a pioneer of
co-operation in Leicester (see entries for Merrick & Hemmings). In the
1840s, he was briefly involved with Chartism, he was a committee member of
the Leicester Democratic Hall of Science before becoming a Biggsite
radical in the early 1850s.
Sources: A. Temple Patterson,
Radical Leicester,
Chartist Pilot 24th July 1843
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Born: Northamptonshire (Labour Party), died: 16th
Nov 1981, aged 93
Sam Cooper came to Leicester in 1914
and worked as a ticket collector on the railways. He was an active member
of the NUR and was elected to the Board of Guardians in 1925. In 1930, he
was elected from Charnwood ward to the City Council, becoming an alderman
in 1952 and Lord Mayor in 1955. He took a great interest in welfare work,
in particular the establishment of old peoples homes and the provision of
services for the sick and disabled. He is commemorated by Sam Cooper House
opened in 1957.
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Born: Leicester 20th March 1805, died: 1892
(Chartist leader)
 The
Chartist agitation in Leicester lasted for almost 15 years. Although,
Thomas Cooper had a great impact on local Chartism, he was active as a
Chartist in the town for only two years and was the only Leicester
Chartist to attain anything like a national reputation His powerful
speeches, his energy and drive and colourful personality left an indelible
impression of his contemporaries. However he was also an egotist,
self-opinionated and difficult to work with. He left no permanent mark on
the local organisation, but his lasting influence was as an individual
inspiration in the lives of other workingmen.
Cooper had little formal education
and began work as a shoemaker, whilst continuing to educate himself at
home. He had an insatiable appetite for all kinds of reading. In 1828
opened his own school in Gainsborough where at one time he had over a
hundred pupils. However, his decision to provide lessons in Latin and
Greek rather than concentrating on the basic subjects was unpopular with
the parents and the school was eventually forced to close. Cooper then
moved to Lincoln where he started another school for children. For five
years he was a Weslyian preacher. He also taught in the Mechanics
Institute in Lincoln and wrote articles for the local newspaper, the
Lincoln Mercury and in time became a full-time journalist. Cooper’s
articles for the Stamford, Lincoln and
Rutland Mercury, criticising the some of the
Anglican clergy in Lincoln, plus his friendship with J.F. Winks resulted
in him being offered a post with the Non-conformist supporting
Leicestershire Mercury.
Aged 35, he arrived back in Leicester
in 1840, virtually a stranger in his native town. In November 1840 he was
sent to report on a Chartist meeting. Cooper was impressed with the
speaker, John Mason, a Tyneside shoemaker and also shocked by the accounts
that people in the audience gave about their working and living
conditions. As Cooper wrote in his article: “I had never, till now, had
any experience of the condition of a great part of the manufacturing
population.” After the meeting, Cooper decided to become a Chartist.
He contributed articles anonymously to the Leicester Chartist paper the
Midland Counties Illuminator, but he was soon found out and was given
the sack by the Mercury. He had apparently written an article in which he
denounced the greed and hardness of heart of the local hosiery employers
as being responsible for the distress of the working class.
He then became the Illuminator’s
editor in 1840, at 30 shillings a week. Eventually, he took the paper
over, but it failed. For two years he ran a succession of other
unsuccessful Chartist newspapers including: the Chartists’ Rushlight,
The Extinguisher, Commonwealthian and the Chartist Pioneer. In
April 1841, he was elected secretary of the local Chartist association and
began to conduct open-air preaching, lecturing on a variety of subjects
using the revivalist methods of his Weslyian days. He championed and
idolised Fergus O’Connor the advocate of physical force Chartism.
Under Cooper’s leadership, there was
a marked increase in Chartist membership from 460 in October 1841 to c
3,000 at the end of 1842. He split with Markham and other Chartists and
set up the Shakespearean Brigade of Leicester Chartists, which met in the
Shakespeare Rooms of the Amphitheatre in Humberstone Gate. Cooper’s
Shakespearean Adult Sunday School was attended by ‘many scores’ of men and
boys during the winter of 1841-42 and Cooper encouraged other would-be
Chartist poets. Together with Jones and Bramwich he wrote ‘the
Leicester Shakespearean Chartist Hymnbook.’
Cooper was described as having the power of a king over the starving
multitude of the ‘Shaksperian Brigade’ and as their ‘General’ was not
afraid to use his power to undermine the meetings of other Chartist
leaders, complete suffragists and Corn Law repealers.
In August, 1842, Cooper attended the
National Charter Association Conference in Manchester which was followed
by strikes and riots. Cooper was arrested while visiting Burslem and was
accused of inciting arson. He was found not guilty, but was charged with
sedition and released on bail. He then returned to Leicester; where he
made peace with Markham. In order to raise funds for the defence, he
staged two performances of Hamlet with himself in the title role. At his
second trial he was found guilty and was sentenced to two years in
Stafford prison. He was released in 1845, by which time his local Chartist
organisation had crumbled and it is probable that his £200 debts prevented
him from returning to Leicester. Whilst in prison, his wife, Susanna
Cooper, edited and published the first edition of the Chartist Pilot,
the only such Chartist journal with a woman in such a leading role.
During his incarceration, Cooper had
written his epic Chartist poem: ‘The Purgatories of Suicide.’ and
on his release he broke with O’Connor over O’Connor’s refusal to commit
himself to a republican agenda. He subsequently made amends with the other
moral force Chartist leaders and gradually withdrew from the Chartist
movement. He continued to lecture, write poetry as well as novels and
foster new radical publications. In 1856, he dramatically abandoned his
religious scepticism and became a Baptist convert, thereafter spending
most of his time as a travelling preacher. When he was in his sixties, he
wrote his autobiography: The Life of Thomas Cooper (1872)
Sources: Northern Star, 6th
September 1845, A. Temple Patterson, Radical Leicester, Thomas
Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper, 1872, J.F.C. Harrison,
Chartism in Leicester,
published in Chartist Studies Asa Briggs (ed) 1959
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Born: St Georges, London 1869, died: 1949 (Socialist
League, Anarchist-Communist Group)
George Cores was a fiery anarchist
shoemaker. (1901 census gives his place of birth as St Georges in the East
End of London) By 1887, he was secretary of the Hackney branch of the
Socialist League and then moved to Leicester c1890 where he combined his
brief stay as a laster in Leicester with his activities as occasional
editor of the Commonweal. (he became the editor when David Nichol
was arrested for incitement to murder) He then moved to Walsall
where he co-ordinated support of the imprisoned Walsall anarchists.
In February 1893, he got work again
in Leicester and was active in the unofficial strikes in the boot and shoe
trade. He was a member of the Leicester branch executive, where he and T.F.
Richards fought against the domination of William Inskip. Cores was a
staunch member of the Freedom circle, but was at odds with his fellow
anarchists over his support and belief in trade union organisation. He was
a delegate to the Trades Council and was secretary of the organising
committee of Leicester’s first May Day demonstration in 1893. Thereafter,
the Trades Council took over the organisation of these events. He was also
involved in the establishment of the Leicester Labour Club in May 1893.
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Born: 1858 (Liberal)
Richard Cort joined NUBSO, when it
was formed, at the age of 17. By 1903, he had served thirteen years as a
full-time official, eight years as president and five years as secretary
of Leicester No 1 branch. He was also a delegate to the Trades Council.
During the strike of 1895, which lasted six weeks, practically the whole
of the local control of the strike was in his hands. He was a strong
supporter of local arbitration. For nine years he served on the Board of
Guardians.
However, Leicester No 1 branch was by
far the largest and wealthy in the union, having paid for the building of
the Trades Hall. In 1905, it was discovered that about £600 had been
embezzled. Although nothing was ever proved in the courts, since the union
was advised that proof would be difficult, the suspicion fell upon Cort.
Both he and the branch treasurer were suspended.
Sources: Leicester Pioneer 28th
June 1902, Alan Fox, A History of the National
Union of Boot and Shoe Workers,
1958
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Born: Stafford, 1858 (I.L.P.& Labour Party)
 Martin
Curley’s parents came from Ireland at the time of the famine in 1847. His
father died when he was only 16 months old, leaving his mother alone to
battle for four young children. At eight years of age he worked on a
shoemaker's bench for a few weeks. but then went back again to school
where he remained for two years. In 1870 he left Stafford for Chester, and
after varied ramblings found himself in London, where he stayed nine
months. At this time there was a severe epidemic of small-pox raging in
London, and Curley fell a victim to it. All the hospitals were full of
patients, and barges were requisitioned down the Thames for the reception
of sufferers. Having already been vaccinated, his experience convinced him
that vaccination was a failure, and he remained strongly opposed to it.
In 1880, he joined the National Union
of Boot and Shoe Operatives, and had just come into benefit at the time of
his illness. He was thus able to practically feel the benefits of the
Union in the shape of sick pay. From London he found his way to Leicester.
In Leicester he worked as a shoe riveter and soon took an active part in
the doings of Branch (No. 1) of the Union. He became one of T.F. Richards’
staunch lieutenants. In 1892, at one of the largest ever meetings of the
No 1. Branch, he carried a resolution in favour of all work being done
inside factories, aiming to counter the predilection for ‘sweating,’ that
was then rife. It was claimed that this had a remarkable effect upon the
industry, since by 1903 very little work was being given out to be done at
home.
He was a founder member of the I.L.P.
branch and was secretary of the Labour Club in the 1890s, being
responsible for reducing the influence of the Anarchists in the club. With
Richards, he was selected as a candidate for Latimer ward in the 1894
local elections, but did not win. (This was the first time the I.L.P. had
contested a local election in Leicester.) At this time he worked at Stead
and Simpsons and was an ardent supporter of co-operative production.
Following the success of Equity shoes, he believed union funds should be
used to start co-operatives.
He was been on the Executive Council
of his union branch and was a delegate to the National Union Biennial
Conferences a number of times. He was a member of the Board of Arbitration
during the time of the 1896 strike. He became president of the Trades
Council 1903 and was first president of the Labour Representation
Committee in 1903-1904. From February 1910, he was secretary of the Trades
Council and was thus described:
There is little doubt Mr.
Curley, being still in the Prime of life and full of ‘go’ and
enthusiasm, will be heard of frequently in the future annals of his
adopted town.
Sources:
Leicester Trades Council,
T.U.C. Leicester Official Souvenir, 1903, Bill
Lancaster, Radicalism Co-operation and Socialism, Alan Fox, A
History of the National Union of Boot and
Shoe Workers, 1958
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