Margaret McMillan, originally from Inverness, began her work for the fledgling Labour movement in the early 1890s. She was employed by them in 1893 to deliver an extensive programme of Socialist lectures to a wide variety of audiences across Yorkshire and Lancashire. This was a time when the membership of the Independent Labour Party was growing enormously.
McMillan was described as purveying a message of ‘a vision of health, joy and beauty in working lives to be demanded by the people themselves’ (Yeo 1977, p.17). It has been widely proposed that the socialism arising in England in the late nineteenth century was of a singular construction: ‘more to do with the ideas of Robert Owen than those of Marx.... that in everyone there was an innate wish to do good and this innermost inclination could be harnessed by socialists’ (McPhillips 2005, p.59). This so-called ‘one nation’ culture of British Socialism had a wide populist appeal. In early 1894 the ‘Spectator’ reported that at least a thousand men were present at a Labour meeting addressed by McMillan in Manchester ‘every variety of type represented, the shrewd stunted weaver, the powerful labourer.... dapper intelligent men who might be clerks and shop-men... Steady attention, riveted on the speaker was common to all alike’ (Yeo 1977, p.29).
McMillan also served as an Independent Labour Party representative on the Bradford School Board, campaigning tirelessly for school reform. Her core message was packaged in a dogged insistence that that it was impossible to educate a tired, dirty, infested, diseased and hungry child, and the height of adult cruelty to insist against such odds that poor children entered a public education system that did not concern itself with their physical welfare. In her eight years in Bradford, McMillan introduced an impressive range of reforms to the schools in the area; her first offensive in what she deemed ‘the battle of the slum child’ (McMillan 1927, p.88).
The McMillan sisters’ campaign to introduce compulsory, state funded school medicals met with success in the Education (Administrative Procedures) Bill of 1907, five years after they had moved their campaign to Deptford on the South Eastern bank of the Thames. They subsequently opened a children’s clinic, school and nursery school whose policies and practices reflected their convictions. Deptford was also the area in which my Great Grandparents were living at that time, with their four, soon to be six small children.
My Great Grandfather John Watts was born in 1869 in Deptford, then at the northern edges of Kent. He was a lifelong socialist and trade unionist, working as a brass founder for many years around the Deptford Docks. However, his grandchildren, on whose memories of him my research relied, remembered him the Brass Founders Union Secretary in New Cross. The role that he had previously been employed within, and in which his members still laboured was a very tough occupation. Charles Booth interviewed an unidentified brass foundry shop steward at Manganese Bronze and Brass Company, St George's Wharf, Deptford in 1893 for his ‘Lives and Labour in London’ study. The interviewee reported:
*Men work at lowest rate 8d per hour, 54 hours per week, mostly day work.
*Men at 55 years of age can do the work but the employers do not like them; there is a prejudice against old men, which begins to manifest itself with workers aged over approximately 45.
*A busy season September to March, and a slack season over the summer months.
*Many firms make stock work during the slack season and put the men on short time.
*Trade is very precarious, men are often in and out of employment, especially in foundries that do outdoor jobbing work.
Two of John Watts' son-in-laws died at a very young age from tuberculosis and his daughters subsequently returned to the family home with their four young children. These were my mother’s cousins, for whom ‘Granddad’ served as the only father figure they remembered. They described him as a warm, feisty, public-spirited character, with a fierce dedication to the well- being of 'the men'. He was well known for wearing his suit and wing collar when he went to negotiate with ‘the bosses’ because he was determined that the conversations should be between equals. One of his sayings that my mother would repeat to us as children was ‘you are as good as everyone else and everyone else is as good as you’.
As luck would have it, someone once took a picture of John Watts in his negotiating suit (above). Our cousins propose that it was taken on the steps of what they remember as ‘the union building’ in New Cross. One of them told me that he had once written in her autograph book ‘Do the job that’s nearest, though it’s dull at whiles; helping when they need it lame dogs over stiles’. He was far from a radical or ideologue, but similarly to his better-connected neighbours the McMillans, he was a passionate, outspoken advocate of social justice and social equality.
All of this happened so long ago; how is it relevant to the present? It seems to me that from its very inception, the Labour movement in the UK was not so much an ideologically or radically driven phenomenon as it was a movement for social equality, social justice, and the welfare and dignity of the working population. The fact that huge numbers in this demography are no longer voting for the contemporary Labour party is a sign that people feel that Labour policies no longer effectively meet these objectives. I suspect that many of the disjunctions that have emerged are due to the cloistered Westminster Bubble orientation of too many politicians on all sides of the House, alongside the huge changes wrought upon modes of employment over the last forty years.
At the heart of the issue is the question about what the current Labour movement has to say that is relevant to (for example) the electrician, plumber or hairdresser who views him/ herself as a self-employed business person, moving from ‘gig’ to ‘gig’, managing household expenses on a variable income, struggling with the responsibility of calculating income tax and national insurance contributions alongside the household budget. Additionally, how does the Labour message ‘speak to’ contemporary warehouse or phone farm workers under thirty-five (under forty by the next General Election), who have no personal memory of UK-based mass industrial production, or of mass unionised workforces, or even of the destructive impetus of Margaret Thatcher’s industrial policies?
The current leading candidate for the Labour leadership, Rebecca Long Bailey proposes that:
'Working with campaigners, trade unions and experts, I have been proud to champion our party’s plans for a green industrial revolution to tackle the climate crisis through investment in good, unionised jobs and the reindustrialisation of our regions and nations. It will spark the growth of new industries…’
While this is all certainly worthy stuff, sadly I can’t see it firing the imaginations of the zero hours, gig economy, frequently self-employed workforce of the 2020s. It is too far removed from their everyday reality.
However, basic human aspirations do not change greatly. People yearn to hear from leaders at all levels, from national innovators such as the McMillans to local activists such as John Watts, who are able to offer nurturance, solidarity and practical support carefully mapped onto the day-to-day challenges that are commonly experienced in everyday working lives. The hard working, frequently highly stressed population that Theresa May once dubbed ‘JAMs’ (the ‘just about managing’) are however likely to have little appetite for being lectured about past socialist glories or lofty ideas for the future that they fear may never come to pass. In order to survive and thrive, the contemporary Labour Party must regain its platform by convincing ordinary people across the nation that they are able to outline policy that will bring stability and dignity to real, twenty first century working lives in the present, rather than presenting vague messages steeped in historical nostalgia and lofty ambitions for a distant future.
References
Charles Booth Archive B89: Interview with Amalgamated Brass Workers London Society Representative, Manganese Bronze and Brass Company, St George’s Wharf Deptford, ND, pp.46-48.
Yeo, S. (1977) ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain’ History Workshop No 4, pp.5-56.
Kevin McPhillips (2005) Joseph Burgess 1833-1934 and the founding of the Independent Labour Party (Studies in British History Vol. 78). Lampeter: Edward Mellen Press.
McMillan, M. The Life of Rachel McMillan (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1927).
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