WCML and the People's History Museum/Labour History Archive have been successful as a partnership in getting a ‘Collecting Cultures’ grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). This gives five years of funding, from October 2014, towards new acquisitions (and accompanying audience engagement work). Voting for Change - 150 years of radical movements, 1819 to 1969 builds upon the complementary strengths of both collections to acquire material related to movements and campaigns for the franchise, from the build-up to the Peterloo protest in 1819 to the lowering of the voting age in 1969.
Voting for Change aims to fill specific gaps within the collections of both organisations and to strengthen elements of collections development through targeted acquisitions. The acquisitions, alongside activities and events that will highlight and contextualise them, will sit inside existing collections development plans for both partners. The two organisations will focus on campaigns to broaden the right to vote from the time of Peterloo to the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, 1872, 1884, 1918 and 1928 and on up to the Representation of the People Act 1969, which lowered the voting age to 18.
Both organisations will also work jointly to make the most of the complementarity of our collections exploring the development of democracy and political ideas. We will develop thematic links between the two collections, involving visitors in finding new ways to highlight those links.
WCML collection areas to develop:
The Library has particularly strong holdings in respect of early radical history, leading up to the first Reform Act and Chartism, and in the development of the modern labour movement from the late nineteenth century. Proud as the Library is of these strengths, HLF-funded cataloguing work has highlighted gaps in the collections relating to the suffrage movement, parliamentary reforms etc which the project will allow it to tackle.
Summer 2016 update
The Library blog has highlighted various items purchased with project money:
- 1830s reports from the Birmingham Political Union, which was one of the principal organisations involved in the agitation for the reform of Parliament which culminated in the Representation of the People Act 1832, known as the first Reform Act or Great Reform Act;
- a caricature of George Odger, a significant labour leader and campaigner on suffrage issues;
- a broadside, clearly of a liberal reforming bent, chronicling the 1835 General Election in Manchester;
- an 1866 pamphlet in which the author is very exercised by the number of working class men who will potentially get the vote if a proposed Reform Bill goes through...;
- Reverend Charles Kingsley, Women and politics, a pamphlet from 1869 that is not as progressive as it first seems;
- Charles Anthony, The social and political dependence of women, one of the earliest British tracts supporting the concept of women’s right to vote.
And we have put on a display another purchase, a rare and most unusual archive of election material - from 1835.
Associated project events include a Democracy Drop In reading day on 2 July and a day researching and editing Wikipedia entries on 20 November. Sign up to our newsletter (see panel on right) to keep abreast of more.
Purchased with Voting for Change money, June 2016