That bye-election and a defeat for the Government, ....... Farnworth January 1938

Rally for George Tomlinson on the day of the election on Bridgewater Street

Here is another from the Bolton series which for various reasons I am re-posting.

They are  a wonderful collection of images of life in Bolton in the 1930s.

Secondly I have found my copy of the photographs that Humphrey Spender took* and finally because they feed my own interest in all things to do with elections.

The entire collection can be viewed at BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION  http://boltonworktown.co.uk/ and range from people on trams, out shopping and relaxing in pubs to children paying in the park and just images of street life.

For me though it is those pictures which cover the Farnworth by-election which I find fascinating.  They include photographs of the election posters, the public meetings as well as campaigning on the streets and voting day.

It was an industrial seat dominated by coal mining, textiles and the railway works and from 1922 with the exception of 1931 had returned Labour MPs.

The sudden death of Guy Rowson who had represented Farnworth since 1935 occasioned the by-election.**

It was a contest between George Tomlinson for Labour and Herbert Ryan standing as a National Government candidate.

Mr Tomlinson had started work at the age of 11 as a half-timer in a weaving shed, and “when he stood for election his job was selling home brewed beer.  He used to go round Farnworth with a cart and everybody loved him.  He wasn’t a very well-educated fellow, but crikey, when he spoke he was the best speaker I heard of all the lot.”

The issues ranged from the economy to the prospects for peace and the threat of another European war, so while posters for the National Government emphasised the low levels of unemployment in Farnworth, Labour ran the slogan LABOUR AND PEACE which echoed its General Election poster of three years earlier.

In the event, George Tomlinson defeated the National Government candidate, Herbert Ryan by 24,298 votes to 16,835.

This was an old fashioned election campaign with well attended public meetings, Heath Robinson style posters on horse drawn carts, and legions of children dressed out with hand held banners and paper hats processing around the constituency.

And at the heart of it all were Humphrey Spender’s photographs.

At a National Government election meeting at the Co-op Hall

Some capture the intense concentration of the audience listening to the political points being made at meetings, the gaggle of children following the novelty of the speaker car or the election conversation over the garden gate between party activist and voter.

All of them are vivid and immediate and have a directness which belies the fact that this election was held eighty-one years ago and the style of electioneering he recorded has all but vanished.

So I recommend the election photographs at the Bolton site

*Worktown People, Humphrey Spender, Falling Wall Press, 1982

**Local Elections Archive, 2012.proboards.com/thread/1363/farnworth-election-1938

Election cart on Mount Street on the day of the election

***Harry Gordon, quoted from Worktown People.  Before his election George Tomlinson had been a local councillor and went on to be Minister of Education in the Labour Government after the war.

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, from the collections 1993.83.26.27, 1993.83.16.31, 1993.83.29.17, and poster from the 1935 General Election, from Labour Party Archives

At Burndon Park in the September of 1937 with the Wanderers 4 goals up.

I have been rediscovering the photographs of Humphrey Spender.

During 1937-38 he recorded the lives of working people in Bolton as part of the mass observation project.

It is something I wrote about recently when I featured BOLTON WORKTOWN, Photography and Archives from the Mass Observation*

I first came across Humphrey Spender in 1982 when someone bought me a book of his pictures.**

It is a book I never tired of looking at and it was one that I thought I had lost.  Well perhaps put away safely, so safe that I had no idea where.

This loss was not helped by colleagues at Bolton Library and Museum Service who said it was difficult now to obtain a copy.  An observation confirmed by a glance at Amazon where it was being offered  at anything between £30 and £60.  All of which made me even more gloomy given that mine was a first edition.

All however is now sunny because after an evening of hunting it turned up on a bookshelf.

And I have decided I shall feature another of the pictures from their online collection.

It is one I like.

According to the caption it was taken on September 25th 1937 when Bolton Wanderers reserves took on Wolverhampton reserves at Burndon Park in Bolton, and Bolton won 4-0.

I would like to know at what moment Mr Spender took the picture. Perhaps at the point that the home team were cruising to their final goal, and the smiles of the spectators say it all especially that of the man who has turned his back and shares the happiness of the moment.

Picture, courtesy of Bolton Library and Museum Service, who hold the copyright for this image, 1993.83.08.07

BOLTON WORKTOWN, Photography and Archives from the Mass Observation*, http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

***Worktown People, Photographs from Northern England, 1937-38, Humphrey Spender, Falling Wall Press

Reading the newspaper in Bolton in 1938

It is odd to think that in some ways the world I grew up in is far closer to that of my parents than the one I have shared with my children.

My parents and I belong to the wireless generation, remember ice on the inside of windows in the winter and accepted that public transport was the way you got around.

Now I could go on but there is always that danger that it becomes a bout of nostalgic tosh or becomes a political statement of the passage from a collectivist society to one where the overwhelming measure of success is wealth and fame.

So instead I shall reflect on these  pictures of the Reading Room from the Work Town collection.*

And before anyone accuses me of being either a tad reactionary or just dead old I am the first to enjoy visiting our local library. It is bright, light and unlike that blanket of serious silence you used to endure it is a place where children are encouraged to enjoy books, act out the stories they have read and want to come back to.

It’s also where the traditional book of reference sits beside a bank of computers offering a link to the world.

Now back in 1937 the Bolton Public Library did offer that all encompassing experience it is just not one that most people would feel comfortable in today.

It is all very spartan which may be because this was temporary reading room while the new one was being built in the Civic Centre.

This new library along with a museum and art gallery opened in 1939 and was designed by local architects, Bradshaw Gass & Hope.

But I remember something similar in our own Public Libray in New Cross in the 1950s.  The rows of newspapers and the big wooden tables and above all that powerful smell of disinfectant which I am convinced was also sprayed on the books.

It had a slightly sweet smell and so permeated the books that it still lingers on the odd copy sixty years after mother borrowed and forgot to return them. To open these volumes of the Deptford Public Library is to be transported back.

It is a feeling reinforced by the sharp lighting and above all by the fact that no one seems to take their hat or coat off.  They have wandered into a place which seems to be saying “by all means come in, do what you have to do but by golly don’t get comfortable.”

And under those stern notices to refrain from smoking and above all to be silent you can hear the pages turn and that resounding noise as a book is dropped onto a table or a chair is scraped across the wooden floor.

It is not a library that my children would recognise but it is familiar enough to me and no doubt to my parents.

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, 1993.83.19.22, 1993.83.12.21 & 1993.83.12.20

*The pictures are from Work Town which were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s and can be seen online at http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

In Queens Park Bolton in September 1937 during the National Apprentices’ Strike

You might be forgiven for passing over the picture of these policemen standing in Queens Park Bolton in the September of 1937.

And yet there is a story here and its one that connects my mother who had been working in Derby with the young men and women in Bolton.

The caption with the image provides part of the answer for this was the “Apprentices’ Strike meeting in Queen’s Park. 

The national strike by apprentices was to demand fair wages, the right to union representation and an end to victimisation. 

Apprentices’ wages were extremely low, despite them often been asked to do jobs for which adult workers were paid danger money.  

It was also standard practice for companies to sack them when they became fully qualified and replace them with new apprentices who were much cheaper. 

The apprentices’ slogan was `All out together, all back together’ and they were successful in gaining union representation and fairer wages.”

My mother always spoke with some bitterness at the practice in the silk mill in Derby where she worked which as in Bolton took on young people as apprentices, on low wages only to finish them when they qualified.

Apprentices were 'bound' to their employers for several years by indentures, which strictly forbade any indiscipline, including strike action.

By the mid-1930s, young workers in engineering and shipbuilding were complaining at the lack of adequate structured training and the low wages. Under the slogan 'all for one and one for all', a strike started on Clydeside, Scotland in spring 1937 and by April, there were 3700 apprentices out.

The strike was ended after national negotiations started between the unions and employers, only to break out again in Salford in September, when talks were seen to be non-productive. The strikes spread to Yorkshire, the Midlands and London and only ended in October, when the Amalgamated Engineering Union secured the right to negotiate on behalf of all apprentices. Many local agreements gave boys large increases, and their wage rates were tied into advances won by adult skilled men.”

The photograph was part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."*

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s.

*BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION,
http://boltonworktown.co.uk/photo-collection/

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, from the collections, Apprentices’ Strike meeting in Queen’s Park, September 21st 1937, 1993.83.25.37

In Bolton in 1937, before the National Health Service

Before the NHS, The Working Man's Hair Specialist, Bolton, 1937

Now the National Health Service has always been  controversial.  

Even before its inception there were those who branded it as an opportunity for the workshy, and opportunist elements in society to take advantage of a service free at the point of need which would be funded through national taxation.

And in its first full year there was a huge demand seen in the number of free prescriptions issued for medicine and spectacles and in the rise in the cost of the NHS from £327.8 million in 1948-49 to £430.3 million by 1953-54.*

But that I suspect indicated just how much of a need there was from people who had not been able to afford even basic health care.

Moreover when the figures were adjusted for inflation the cost was less alarming and when judged as a % of GNP spending actually fell from 3.51% in 1948-49 to 3.24% in 1953-54

And set against this was the clear improvement in the nation’s health and a reduction in the levels of everyday pain as well as deaths from infectious diseases.  So deaths from TB were down from 25,649 in 1943 to 4,480 in 1958, diptheria from 1,371 to 8, whooping cough from 1,114 to 27 and measles from 773 to 49.

Only polio of these five diseases, was killing more in 1958 than it had done at the inception of the NHS but even here it was much lower than it had been.

Of course our standard of living had been steadily rising during the post war period while many of the worst slums had been demolished, but there is no doubting the impact on the population of the NHS.


More so because there are still those who can remember the time before it was created in 1948.  Theirs are stories of doctor’s fees which were beyond the reach of many working families, and of teeth being extracted in the market for a few pennies, and worst of all the do it yourself eye test where you tried different spectacles in the local store till you found one that suited.

The Pulsometer stall, Bolton OPen Market, 1937

And it is these pictures which bring that world back to us.

Like the Working Man’s Hair Specialist who operated in Bolton Open Market who claimed he could cure any ailment of the head.

Or the ‘stoutish woman dressed as a nurse’ who is selling coloured liquids in bottles to enthusiastic customers, and using a stethoscope and pulsometer to diagnose their ailments.”**

Such quack stalls were common and these were caught on camera in the September of 1937 in Bolton Open Market but could have been seen at markets and fairs as well as street corners throughout the century before.

The pictures are from WorkTown which were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."

Detail from The Working Man's Hair Specialist, Bolton, 1937

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s and can be seen online at http://boltonworktown.co.uk/ ***

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, working Man’s hair Specialist, 1993.83.01.24 & Pulsometer 1993.83.0139

*Source Report of the Guillebaud Committee Parliament. Report of the committee of enquiry into the cost of the national health service. (Chairman: CW Guillebaud.) Cmd 9663. London: HMSO,  1956, quoted from National Health Service History, Geoffrey Rivett, http://www.nhshistory.net/Chapter%201.htm#Reviewing_the_NHS

**Humphrey Spender

***BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION

http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

At the factory gates in Bolton in 1937

Outside the Flash Mill Street compound in 1937

I am back with that wonderful collection of images from Worktown.

And today I have been drawn to these two pictures of Bolton at work in 1937.  It is a world that has all but gone, but one that says much about how we made our wealth from the early 19th century through to the 1960s.

They are of course iconic pictures which are what many people associate with the North and of course this was how it was.

When we first moved to east Manchester in the early 70s there was still much heavy industry most of which disappeared during the following decade.

Cycling home

For most of us looking at the picture, the first thing that you notice are the bikes, and in other pictures particularly of Trafford Park what amazes you is the number of people leaving work on a bicycle.

And then I suppose it is the preponderance of woman workers and lastly the tram lines.

The photographs were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

Unknown Bolton Mill, 1937

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."*

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s.

*BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION
http://boltonworktown.co.uk/photo-collection/

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, from the collections, Workers leaving the Flash Street Mills compound, 1937, image ref 1998.83.12.15 and a Bolton Mill, image ref, 1993.83.0120

Bolton in 1937 a unique online exhibition of the pictures of Humphrey Spender

I first came across the photographs of Humphrey Spender about two decades ago when somebody gave me a collection of his pictures about Bolton in 1937.

The book like the project was called Worktown and it remains a treasured possession, if one I have temporarily lost in the piles of books stored in our cellar.

The photographs were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s.

Now given I cannot easily lay my hands on my collection I was very pleased to see that large numbers of them are now online at http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

The images will be linked to maps of Bolton and visitors to the site will be encouraged to help identify places and people.

*BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, from the collections in the pub 1993.83.17.08
 and elections 1993.83.16.34, 

More from Worktown, Bolton in 1937, a new online exhibition

I hadn’t planned on going back to Bolton and the Worktown exhibition, but the images of working class life are so compelling that I am drawn back to them.

BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

Having said that, the real difficulty comes in choosing an image, so I have selected two and that will be it, otherwise you might not go to the site, and that would be a shame.

The caption reads Woman wearing a shawl leaves the polling station at St Thomas School, Bentinck Street, on the day of the 1938 Farnworth by-election.

I rather think it speaks for itself and is a vivid reminder that a woman in a shawl was still a common sight and would remain so till after the last word war.

And in the same vein the picture of a woman cleaning the stone in front of a house is iconic



Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services,  1993.83.06.20 and  1993.83.19.03,