Searching the archives - A day with Bill, Jack and Bick

One of the most surprising personal revelations during the work on this book is how much I love archives. Each are different—its own rules, its own quirks (including the possibility of dehydration)—but they share a great deal. First, the people. The archivists I’ve met have, without exception, been incredibly kind and helpful. Then there’s the wonder: touching, reading or seeing an artefact that instantly connects you to a moment in time.

Warwick University’s Modern Records Centre is the archive I’ve visited the most. It’s local(ish) and hosts a huge amount of trade union records. Cursing the café’s term-time closure, which meant missing out on the 5-items breakfast+coffee I was looking forward to, I moved straight to the records and then spent the day in the world of the ‘big beasts’ of the post-war trade union movement.

An interview with former TUC General Secretary, Frances O’Grady, had prompted a search for the T&G’s Jack Jones’ 1977 David Dimbleby lecture entitled, The Human Face of Labour. Frances brought it up when we discussed trade union values and how this informs our campaigns around education. In his lecture, Jones stated, “trade unions today concern themselves not only with wages but with the quality of life at work and, indeed, in society as a whole. I think we have shown our social responsibility through the campaigns we have run on pensions and the interest we take in the disabled. Unions are developing fellowship and friendship at work and that is a contribution to an improved society”

I also came across a speech by Bill Morris, another T&G figure, delivered in support of the TUC’s ‘Bargaining for Skills’ campaign on 30 Jan 1997—just months before Labour’s victory. The speech was typed, but covered in notes and crossings-out, almost certainly in Bill’s own hand. He concludes, “It is no longer a question of ‘can we afford to train?’ It is a question of ‘can we afford not to’. Bill underlines ‘not’ and adds a good line noting that if education of expensive, wait ‘till you see the bill for ignorance.

Finally, it was more Rodney Bickerstaff, as I looked for photos of NUPE/UNISON’s Return to Learn programme. The collection included photos of ‘Bick’ with Return to Learn students, a brilliant photo of him presenting Tony Blair with an AA roadsign warning of traffic due to the Living Wage event, with Paul Robeson Jr, and another at the 1994 Durham Gala. Different materials, different origins—but with a common theme: a passion for the values that make us human.