GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

place are still really strongly with me, but also what an education I had there.

Not only did they have their own staff who were fantastic in terms of their

knowledge and their contribution to disciplines like history and sociology, but

you were actively meeting guest speakers such as sociologists like Huw

Beynon, labour historians like Royden Harrison and some of the big figures

within the labour movement and the Labour Party – Tony Benn, Dennis Skinner

and a range of others. So the foundation that that gave me really transformed

my life going from a coalminer and then becoming a Professor of Labour

History in my current employment at the University of Wolverhampton. So I

would just like to echo what has been said about some of the institutions that

the trade union movement have used and benefitted from over the last century.

I just want to update you more specifically on two of the big projects that we

have been involved in, the GFTU and also myself as a labour historian and

some of the researchers that have been working on the history of the

movement. The first one and the ongoing one is the Dictionary of Labour

Biography which I co-edit. The Dictionary of Labour Biography started as an

idea developed by the socialist theoretician G. D. H. Cole in the 1950s, then

was taken over by John Saville. John Saville was one of the founding

members of the Communist Party Historians Group and was committed to

socialist education and really developing a broad based labour history that

would be inclusive, not just an academic history, but also getting trade

unionists and socialist activists to develop their own histories and curate their

own histories. The first volume was published in 1971. The current volume is

volume 15 and just looking at the back here and some of the organisations that

you have listed, we have got a lot of figures in here that played a key role in

building some of these organisations. A lot of the early leaders of the General

Federation of Trade Unions you will find in some of the volumes. In the next

volume which is currently in press and will be published next year we have

Mary Quaile who I think Doug mentioned earlier. So the dictionary is an

ongoing project.

The next phase, what we are trying to do is to get the whole collection digitised,

because obviously it is 15 volumes. If we could get an online version of this, it

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