Strike Archives - Bristol Radical History Group

Reflections on the General Strike

What should we learn from the 1926 General Strike and what might the 2026 General Strike look like? Were the TUC fully to blame for the failure of the strike? Why does the labour movement memorialise our failures rather than our victories? What is the relevance of 1926 today? Chairing this discussion and Q&A is Chris Bowkett, a trade union activist, USDAW Bristol branch chair and contributor to the Bristol Radical History Group. Chris has recently written a pamphlet on the relationship […]

‘Stopping business as usual’

The Dunnes anti-apartheid strike within a wider political environment

The three-year strike which followed the July 1984 refusal of eleven workers at Dunnes' Stores Henry Street branch in Dublin to handle South African goods is perhaps the most celebrated episode of anti-apartheid activism outside Southern Africa, yielding memoirs, academic scholarship, radio and television documentaries and even a play. While still recounting the essential narrative of the strike for those unfamiliar with it, Padraig Durnin's talk will explore what made it exceptional in […]

Wapping – the workers’ story

70 mins – 2020 (Dir. Christopher Reeves) Introduced and Q&A with Ann Field (SOGAT official during the strike). A film about the momentous year-long industrial dispute which began in 1986 when Rupert Murdoch plotted to move production of his papers overnight from central London’s Fleet Street to a secretly equipped and heavily guarded plant at Wapping, a docklands district in east London. 5,500 men and women lost their jobs and centuries of tradition in one of London’s last manufacturing […]

‘Returning the favour’

Irish trade unions' support for the striking miners in 1984

During the strike, in response to the horrific images of miners and their supporters being battered by the police, donations of cash were received from around the world, More money was raised in Ireland per head of population than anywhere else, Britain included, with many support groups being set up to 'adopt' individual mining communities. The story is told of one elderly woman in Dublin putting a £10 note, a large proportion of her pension, into a collection tin. She said it was to repay the […]

Trouble on the Trams

By Rob Whitfield

The fight for union rights. In the early twentieth century, workers could be sacked by their employer with impunity simply because they had joined a trade union. Such was the situation for those who worked on Bristol’s trams. In Trouble on the Trams, Rob Whitfield recounts how the drivers and conductors fought back when nearly one hundred of their number were dismissed in 1901. Using contemporary newspaper reports and the company’s own records, he details this dispute and those that were to […]

Bristol dockers strike of 1949 in support of Canadian Seaman

M Shed 10th anniversary series

The 1949 Docks Strike involving Bristol dockers was notable as an international solidarity action in support of strike action by the Canadian Seamen’s Union. Canadian employers had used ‘scab crews’ to load ships. One of these, the SS Gulfside, had remained strike bound in Avonmouth from 1st April. A second ship, the SS Montreal City arrived with a cargo of tomatoes and bananas. As tugmen and dockers refused to work the so called ‘blacked’ ships, the Labour Government brought in troops to unload […]

“With all the resources at the disposal of the State”

The ‘Industrial Unrest Committee’ and Industrial Legality during the 1919 Railway Strike

This talk will explore the various tensions that existed within the Cabinet’s Industrial Unrest Committee, and its various sub-committees, as government officials sought to confront the different challenges thrown up by the national Railway strike of late September 1919. Reading the files and documents from the National Archives reveals the extent to which Government departments and quasi governmental agencies struggled to contain the strike within its original industrial bounds. In an age when […]