Ruth Frow (1922–2008)

Ruth Frow c. 2005

Many History Workshop Journal readers will have read of the death of Ruth Frow, cofounder with her husband Edmund (Eddie) of the Working Class Movement Library (WCML).¹ Active in the trade-union and peace movements and the Communist Party they were 'obsessive' collectors of pamphlets, books, leaflets and documents of class struggle, and their personal collection formed the basis of the Working Class Movement Library.

Like many Communists Ruth and Eddie Frow were traumatized by Krushchev's 1956 speech at the Twentieth Congress distancing the Soviet regime from its Stalinist past. As Communists they drew the conclusion that they needed to relate more directly to the British tradition of trade unionism and socialism and less to the Soviet experience. With this determination – and with Communist and avid bibliophile James Klugmann serving as something of a model – they turned their attention to British labour history and their book collecting began in earnest. (It is vividly and amusingly described in their 'Travels with a Caravan'.)² They turned their home at Kings Road, Manchester, into a library with free access to any scholar or student of labour history. The story of the collection's eventual transformation into the Working Class Movement Library, currently housed in Salford, is well documented in Ruth's biography of Eddie.³ The Library was at the heart of their political activity, especially as they wanted it to be available to all those interested in the history of class struggle.

Alongside the collection were the numerous books and articles which Ruth and Eddie themselves produced. These, like the Library, were aimed at a wide audience and were also part of their agitational activity. Eddie published 1868, Year of the Unions: a Documentary Survey in collaboration with the bookseller, Michael Katanka, in 1968.⁴ Influenced by the women's movement and aware of the contribution Ruth made to the writing, they made a decision that thenceforth all work would be jointly accredited.⁵ Their next work was Strikes: a Documentary History (1971).⁶ Both books had a Manchester connection, giving prominence to early strikes there and to the founding of the TUC in 1868 at the Mechanics Institute in the city. The three authors also produced a further publication, The History of British Trade Unionism – a Select Bibliography.⁷ Published by the Historical Association in 1969, this was more than a list of books. Pamphlets and journals were included, as well as reports of trials and a listing of key collections of trade-union records in the public domain. It was an invaluable guide to the study of labour history as the subject went from strength to strength; as a bibliography it was well ahead of its time and benefited from the collecting activities of Ruth and Eddie.

A Survey of the Half Time System in Education (1970) examined the opposition of the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, trade unionists and teachers to child labour in the cotton industry, and covered the debates at the TUC at which the cotton unions continued to defend the half time system.⁸ It drew on autobiographies of some leading trade unionists of the time, including Ben Turner and J. R. Clynes, as well as helping to rescue the socialist dialect writer Alan Clarke, whose neglected classic The Effects of the Factory System (1899) had contained a searing criticism of child labour.⁹

The Battle of Bexley Square (1994) dealt with the National Unemployed Workers' Union demonstration in Salford against the introduction of the means test by the National Government.¹⁰ That demonstration was also an important set piece in Walter Greenwood's novel, Love on the Dole (1933), which took Eddie as the model for the character of a young agitator.¹¹Engineering Struggles: Episodes in the Story of the Shop Stewards Movement (1982) charted the unofficial movements in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) from the time of the 1914–18 War to the 1960s, and drew on Eddie's background as an activist and fulltime trade-union official in the AEU, when the couple developed...