Abstract
One of the most striking features of the League is its longevity. As a radical poor people’s movement founded in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the League’s odds of surviving as an independent organisation for more than a hundred years had been slim. By their very definition poor people’s movements are unstable and the League was no exception. Yet the organisation was able to overcome sectional differences, internal power struggles and programmatic disputes as well as an almost constant scarcity of resources to emerge with a stable, sustainable and effective structure in the mid-1930s. By that time the League had managed to see off all its major rivals and could legitimately claim to be the most representative voice of sightless workers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Members of the League were given seats on committees dealing with the welfare of blind people, employers accepted the organisation as a collective bargaining partner, and the TUC as well as the Labour Party had made the League’s key political demands their own.
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Notes
Clare Griffiths, ‘Remembering Tolpuddle: Rural History and Commemoration in the Inter-War Labour Movement’, History Workshop Journal Vol. 44 (Autumn 1997): 144–69.
W. H. Oliver, ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs and Trade Union Oaths’, Labour History 10 (May 1966), p. 5; http://www.tuc.org.uk/the_tuc/index.cfm?mins=49& minors=45&majorsubjectlD=19 [last accessed 17 April 2013]. In a similar fashion, the Cooperative Movement kept the memory of the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’ alive to remind its members what their movement was all about.
NLB, Handbook (London, 1932), p. 2. TUCL, HV1744.
Hamish W. Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism 1700–1998 (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 79
Hugh Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, Vol. I: 1889–1910 (Oxford, 1964), pp. 66–87.
Kenneth D. Brown, Labour and Unemployment 1900–1914 (Newton Abbot, 1971), especially pp. 18–19 and 62–7.
Ross M. Martin, TUC: The Growth of a Pressure Group 1868–1976 (Oxford, 1980), pp. 75–6.
Peter Grant, ‘Voluntarism and the Impact of the First World War’, in Matthew Hilton and James McKay (eds), The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society (Oxford, 2011), pp. 27–46.
Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism, pp. 152–76; Hugh Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, Vol. II: 1911–1933 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 449–51.
Ben Purse, The British Blind: A Revolution in Thought and Action (London, 1928), p. 1; Smith (ed.), Golden Jubilee Brochure, p. 8.
Mary G. Thomas, The Royal National Institute for the Blind, 1868–1956 (Brighton, 1957), pp. 112–13.
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© 2015 Matthias Reiss
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Reiss, M. (2015). New Union or Poor People’s Movement? Building the National League of the Blind. In: Blind Workers against Charity. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364470_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364470_2
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