A poster from the Great Strike of London Tailors, © Moving Here project

Wednesday May 23rd 7pm – 9pm
Library, Bishopsgate Institute
230 Bishopsgate EC2M 4QH
(Liverpool Street tube)

Organised by the Jewish Socialists’ Group

In April 1912 a strike started among West End tailors and soon afterwards, in May, thousands of immigrant Jewish East End tailors came out to support them and to challenge the whole sweatshop system. Dockers in the East End were on strike too for better conditions, and tailors and dockers held joint strike meetings. How did the strike begin and end? Who organised it and how? What was the role of Rudolph Rocker and the anarchists? How did they maximise wider community support? What can we learn from this strike that is relevant to today’s struggles 100 years on?

Speakers:
Ben Gidley: senior researcher at Compas at Oxford University working on East End Jewish radical history
Donnacha DeLong: President of the National Union of Journalists

For more information, please visit the Jewish Socialists’ Group website

This conference seeks to explore ideas of opposition through the full range of disciplines in the arts, media, and social sciences.

In the context of the current crisis of capitalism, there are many examples of the forms ‘opposition’ can take: the Tea Party in the United States, the rise of fascist groups, campaigns run via new technologies and social media, religious fundamentalisms, and general strikes in Greece. Though it carries radical overtones, ‘opposition’ in itself is not tied to any particular dogma, left or right.  Papers are invited that explore the value and values of opposition as a position to be adopted by individuals or groups.

Proposals are welcome for papers from postgraduates that engage with any aspect of opposition. These could include, but are by no means limited to: the ‘culture industry’ and alternative youth cultures; opposition parties within parliamentary politics; grass-roots activism; the history and future of the labour movement; hegemony; Foucauldian ‘resistance’ and its limits; radical pedagogies and the role of the University; community and class; the aesthetic value of non-mainstream or outsider art; aesthetic oppositions such as contrapuntal music or bricolage; and the formation of creole or pidgin languages.

Papers are welcome from fields such as politics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, religions and theology, geography, sociology, history, classics, translation studies, linguistics and social linguistics, visual and screen studies, new media and communication studies, and the performing arts. Interdisciplinary papers are very welcome.

Keynote speakers TBC.

Abstracts of 250 words are invited for presentations of 20 minutes. Proposals for performances, screenings etc. are also accepted. The conference intends to publish an edited volume of the best papers presented. 
Send abstracts to oppositionsconference[at]gmail.com by 6 July 2012.

Whether you’re discovering children’s forgotten street games, finding out about stadium architecture, or learning about Nazi board games, Games Week has something for every age and interest!

Run by the History and Heritage Adult Learning London network and convened by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, Games Week will be bringing together some of London’s top museums, archives and galleries, as well as some of its smaller gems. Games Week Events include:

• Geffrye Museum, Game On! Over 55s reminiscence session around games played within the home, 10th July

• Sir John Soane’s Museum, Stadia: Sporting Architecture through History, 10th July

• London Metropolitan Archives, Sporting London talk on 10th July and 11th July and This Sporting Life conference, Friday 13th July (plus other events later in the year

• Wiener Library, Playing at war: an up-close look at games and childhood in times of conflict, 12th July

• Bishopsgate Institute, Parlour Games and Street Play, Friday 13th July

• Wellcome Collection, From Games of Goose to Snakes and Ladders, Saturday 14th July

• Freud Museum, conference on the psychology of sport and the nature of competition, 30th June

New for this year are a series of follow-on events: from September 2012 to July 2013 there will be monthly ‘behind the scenes’ tours and events at each of the venues giving people the chance to understand more about how some of London’s top archives and museums work and to see things that aren’t normally on display.

Booking for all events should be made at the host venue; booking details and the full programme is below:

Mick Hodgkin (@Mickhodgkin) has been marking both events by a wonderful year long Limerickiad – here’s the link, do take a look:

http://twitmericks.com/2012/05/11/a-year-of-twitmericks/

And here’s a taste of what you’ll find there:

There was an old fellow named Lear/

Now marking his 200th year/

And so, since last May/

I have tweeted, each day/

A series of limericks here.

The Making of the English Working Class has also been subject to extensive critique and commentary, not least in the pages of History Workshop Journal. Among other flaws, critics have focused on its gendering of its subject as male (the Preface describes the book’s project as a ‘biography of the English working class from its adolescence to its early manhood’); its failure to consider the significance of Empire, race, or the world beyond England’s shores; and its hostile approach to Methodism as ‘the chiliasm of despair’. Despite or because of these critiques, readers often return again and again to their battered and much-annotated copies of the book, which continues to provoke and inspire, not least because of the extraordinary power of Thompson’s prose.

A conference at the People’s History Museum in Manchester is already planned. History Workshop Journal plans to publish a forum on The Making at Fifty, including contributions by historians on their experience of reading and re-reading the book. In anticipation of that forum, we invite readers of the journal and this website to contribute their own reflections on and memories of reading, teaching and studying The Making of the English Working Class. When and why did you first read it? Do you re-read it, and under what circumstances? What aspects of it do you remember most vividly? What about it inspires, what provokes? If you teach, do you ask students to read it, and how do they respond? How has your reading of Thompson changed since you first read The Making? Please add your recollections below.

Huddersfield this last weekend (27-29 April) was celebrating its own very specific 200th anniversary of the Luddites’ actions there. Organising group Luddites 200 co-ordinated events including a play ‘Among Those Dark Satanic Mills’, a concert by Red Sky Coven, a full talks programme, a poetry reading, and ’The Noisy Frame’, a compilation of song and testimony telling the lives of cloth makers 1780-1840 who fought against what was ‘hurtful to commonality’.

At least 100 people were involved in each of the main days, in the august Town Hall, the atmospheric Albert Pub and in Bar 1:22. Incongruously they sang of justice and rights just off that major site of alienated consumption, a shopping precinct beset by bleak squalls. It was all the more potent because so many of the places named were familiar to everyone. Indeed, the ‘Enochs’ mentioned were the sledgehammers made by Enoch Taylor, a blacksmith in nearby Marsden. He also built the first automatic croppers. Luddites’ slogan as they smashed them was ‘Enoch made them, and Enoch shall break them’

In Hammer and Shear's production of Among Those Dark Satanic Mills , 'Luddite' Geoff Twentyman wields his Enoch sledgehammer to smash the new technology that's wrecked his life. Image courtesy of Dr Jo Stanley

Two re-enactments had been initially planned: Frame smashing in the Piazza and a military re-enactment by the 33rd Foot. Although some very interesting characters with antique pistols and dashing cloaks were hanging round, there was no actual re-enactment due to administrative problems coupled with council concern for safety.

Wearing badges such as ‘Off your computer and onto the streets’ (which refers to the planned October 10 Computer-Free Day) participants repeatedly connected Luddites critiques of new technology with issues caused by today’s innovations. They discussed GM food, nuclear power, drones, paper-free offices, reproductive technology, nanotechnology and ‘geoengineering’. Participants were only too aware of the ensuing problems such as ill-health (RSI, stress), wage inequalities, deskilling, dependence on mobile phones, and worsened personal communication.

A key topic was how to make the transition from the injustices brought by the industrial society that the Luddites sought to oppose, towards an economically just society with appropriate technology.

Despite gale force winds and rain on Sunday Kirklees Countryside Volunteers led a guided walk of the Spen valley. Participants saw where the Luddites planned and attacked Cartwright’s Mill on April 11 1812, and where retribution followed. Just a few miles away in Golcar at the Colne Valley Museum, on Saturday 28 April the Luddite Re-enactment Weekend included a play, ‘Last Rites of the Luddites’, performed by the ten-strong side of Morris Dancers, the Slubbing Billys.

The Cause of the Commemoration

The Luddite Rebellion of 1811-13 began in Arnold, near Nottingham, with the sabotage of stocking –making machines. Many areas followed suit, including Leeds and Manchester.  Reactionary technophobic vandals? No, far-seeing workers were protesting at being dispossessed by the mechanising of what were once skilled jobs that, as one song said, paid so well that every home could have a clock in mahogany case and every woman go happily to church in the dresses her heart desired.

It was in early Spring 1812 that unrest emerged in West Yorkshire. Wool shearers started attacking the new shearing machines in the wool industry. Weavers opposed the steam looms that wove cotton, replaced the cottage-based hand-loom lifestyle. Their revolt could be seen as one by privileged craft workers attacking changes that would enable lower-paid workers to get jobs. But the many participants at last weekend’s events seemed to regard Luddites as broadly inspiring figures who understood that quality of life mattered, for example, to enjoy three hours a day gardening, not standing endlessly in a factory.

Certainly government retribution had been fierce. In Yorkshire and Lancashire more troops were standing by to crush the protests than were stationed in Spain and Portugal. They arrested 64 people. Seventeen were hanged and many transported to Australia.

Huddersfield 'Luddites' are hanged, as over a dozen were: Hammer and Shear's production of Among Those Dark Satanic Mills. Image courtesy of Dr Jo Stanley

Following a week of phone-hacking revelations and protests against bankers’ pay rises, the weekend’s participants weren’t only thinking of history when they sang the very triumphant chorus of a song Luddites had sung: ‘You tyrants of England/Your race may soon be run/ You may be brought into account / for what you’ve surely done.’

Future Events:

• May 11-12: Huddersfield University Saturday 12 May 2012, ‘Enoch’s Hammer: the Luddites and other early 19th century protest movements’ one- day seminar

• April-Sept: ‘Last Rites of the Luddites’ drama, touring Yorkshire.

• April-Sept: Mikron Theatre company’s touring play (April – September): ‘Can You Keep A Secret?  The Rise & Fall of the Yorkshire Luddites’

• Touring: ‘Among Those Dark Satanic Mills’, play by Hammer & Shears Company, touring.

Links

· Luddites events:

· Background history of Luddites in West Yorkshire

· Were the Luddites Right? BBC debate from 2011

You may also like to visit the Luddite handbill in the History Workshop Online ‘Radical Objects’ section