Articles

Communist Women Leaders

Two articles by John McIlroy & Alan Campbell
John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Comintern, Communist women leaders and the struggle for women’s liberation in Britain between the wars: a political and prosopographical investigation, Part 1’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 50 (1), pp ...

Something to Build On

Co-operation in C19 Dumfries
In conjunction with SLHS, committee member and website administrator Ian Gasse has published a history of the co-operative movement in Dumfries from the mid-nineteenth century down to the First World War. Here he provides an outline of the growth of ...

Alexander Sloan (1879-1945), MP for South Ayrshire

Memories of a Great-Grandfather by Esther Davies
Alexander (“Sanny”) Sloan is best known as the former Labour MP for South Ayrshire, a position he held following a 1939 by-election until his death in November 1945. Below we feature a recollection of him, written in 2014, by his great-granddaughter ...

The Labour History of Dumfries

Uncovering Working Lives: A Dumfries Labour History Trail, 1771-1914
SLHS committee member Ian Gasse has produced a booklet about labour history in Dumfries, in the form of a ‘labour history trail'. This was to have been launched, in conjunction with Dumfries Trades Union Council, with a guided walk around the town on ...

Women, the War, Rent Strikes and Revolution

Glasgow, Saturday 15 September 2019
Dr Valerie Wright, Research Associate: 'Employment, Politics & Culture in Scotland, 1955-2015', in the Economic & Social History Department of the School of Social & Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow), reports on a successful SLHS Doors ...

Glasgow May Day 1919

An article from the April 2019 edition of 'The Irish Voice'
Below we reproduce an article, written by Stephen Coyle, Secretary of the 1916 Rising Centenary Committee (Scotland), which was first published in the April 2019 edition of The Irish Voice. Stephen is a member of SLHS and also the Scottish ...

Scotland and the Russian Revolution

SLHS Annual Conference 2017
The 2017 conference, held in the “penthouse” conference suite at the Glasgow offices of Unite, formed the Scottish Labour History Society’s contribution to the centenary commemorations of the Russian Revolution. Despite an unfortunate series of late ...

Images of Scottish labour

Banners, prints and photographs of Scottish working-class struggle over two centuries – strikes, marches, demonstrations, campaigns and conferences – all from the SCRAN Collection of Historic Environment Scotland, which comprises images brought ...

The Art of Scottish labour

Writing in the late 1950s, Raymond Williams (then an adult education tutor) suggested that the culture of the working class since the Industrial Revolution had been 'primarily social' rather than 'individual', typically creating 'the collective ...