ANNUAL REPORT APRIL 2018 - MARCH 2019
INTRODUCTION
During the year under review the Trustees have agreed works to the cellar to secure safe storage conditions for our precious archives. This has started with the installation of a new boiler, and, subject to listed building consent, there will be further work to install an appropriate dehumidification/air conditioning system. This should also have the advantage of providing more usable space in the cellar, by the installation of further racking.
FINANCE
We continue to be in a very stable financial position despite the economic climate. We are fortunate that Salford City Council have been able to continue their grant support for another year, despite the horrendous cuts they have been forced to make. Our thanks are due to the Mayor and councillors who recognise the significance of the Library.
Core income and expenditure has been in line with budget.
Donations were up on previous years. In fact, we received more in donations this year than any previous year, bucking the slowing down of previous years. Interest from our reserves was up on the previous year leaving us with a just under £6,000 overspend on the year. A very manageable amount.
The encouraging report on the core budget has to be tempered by expenditure on the cellar improvements to secure the safe storage of material. To date £83,000 has been spent, with more to come when (and if) listed building approval is given. This puts into perspective the apparent wealth of reserves and shows how quickly they can be eaten away when we start on major capital works. The work this year has turned a very manageable £6,000 dip into a deficit of £35,000.
USAGE OF THE LIBRARY
Compared with 2017, the number of Reading Room visitors in 2018 was up by more than a half, email enquiries were up nearly 15%, and event participant numbers went up by a similar percentage, with 30 different events over the year.
We were pleased to host two exhibitions, alongside our own home-produced ones.
The first was Guernica Remakings. Pablo Picasso’s famous oil painting Guernica (painted in 1937) expresses suffering – it travelled far and wide and was a rallying cry to raise awareness of the plight of men and women in the Spanish Civil War. Guernica Remakings explored the ongoing power of that work through a display of 21st century reworkings from across the world, including a centrepiece Guernica tapestry, which many from the Library community helped to stitch back in 2013 when it was first created as a collective activist and artist project.
The second was Sylvia and Silvio, an exhibition to illustrate the lifelong campaigning activities of Sylvia Pankhurst and her partner Silvio Corio for social justice, human rights and anti-fascism. The exhibition was launched with a talk by Kate Connelly, who has written a biography of Sylvia. The talk was a wonderful journey through their partnership.
WORKING IN PARTNERSHIP
We were very pleased to get a grant from the Salford University Advantage Fund to undertake a pilot digitisation project over the summer, working on our Spanish Civil War collection in partnership with Salford University. Outputs from students who were involved included poetry as well as assistance with digitisation processes. We are also grateful to the Edgar Lawley Foundation for a grant to undertake further work as part of this project.
Artist Aaron Guy used our collections to produce a site-specific piece for the Bound Art Book Fair at the Whitworth Art Gallery in October.
The inaugural Engels Memorial Lecture, a partnership between WCML and Marx Memorial Library, was held in London in November with Professor Terrell Carver speaking on ‘Engels Before Marx’. This joint endeavour will examine Engels, his work, and broader themes associated with his ideas and influence. The yearly event will alternate between the two libraries.
We were part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council and John Fell Fund-funded partnership involving the University of Oxford, MaD Theatre Company, Charlotte Delaney, the Guinness Partnership and Salford Women’s Aid, the outcome of which was a play, It’s the wrong way to tickle Mary, scenes of which were presented at the Library alongside the play’s performances at The Lowry.
NATIONAL LOTTERY HERITAGE FUND GRANTS
a) Voting for Change Project
Voting for Change, a joint project with the People’s History Museum running from 2014 to 2019, has enabled us to acquire materials relating to campaigns such as the one for women’s franchise. The gem is the bound volume of The Woman’s Dreadnought, Volume II covering 20 March 1915 – 18 March 1916, edited by Sylvia Pankhurst, successfully bid for at auction. (This was succeeded by The Workers’ Dreadnought in 1917 (also edited by Sylvia) of which we also have volumes). We have also been able to purchase a first edition of Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy.
The Votes for Women...or Votes for Ladies? exhibition in the Autumn celebrated the first step that parliament took, one hundred years ago, towards all adult women finally gaining the parliamentary franchise (right to vote), and allowed us the opportunity to show many of the objects that we had purchased with the grant. We also published an accompanying pamphlet to the exhibition, which has been very well received.
Accompanying events included students from St Ambrose Barlow in Swinton sharing creative reflections on the women’s suffrage movement in relation to contemporary female activism with their performance Forward, Sister Women!, facilitated by Enjoy Arts.
We had a precursor talk in June by Jill Liddington marking the 40th anniversary of suffrage classic One Hand Tied Behind Us, and in October there was a well-attended talk on The Art of Suffrage Propaganda given by Elizabeth Crawford.
Also in the Autumn we had a conference – More than Just the Pankhursts: the Wider Suffrage Movement, held at the Old Fire Station. Throughout the year the media had been concentrating on the Women’s Social and Political Union – the suffragettes. The conference remedied this by covering the much wider women’s suffrage movement.
Professor June Hannam covered women campaigning for suffrage, peace and socialism in Bristol, Ruth Cohen spoke on the Co-operative Women’s Guild and how its leader Margaret Llewellyn Davies came to support full adult suffrage, and Ali Ronan gave a talk on Margaret Ashton, Manchester’s first woman councillor, who campaigned for women’s rights and suffrage, and for municipal social reforms and peace. Then Kate Connelly spoke about the influence that tours of North America and especially the settlement movement had on Sylvia Pankhurst and on the East London Federation of Suffragettes.
The conference finished with a re-enactment by a local community group of the 1916 Burnage Milk Strike.
b) Resilient Heritage Grant “Skills for the Future”
The remainder of the Resilient Heritage Grant was used to facilitate a Strategic Planning Workshop at the beginning of July, run by Annie Mills (Leap Training) which three of the four new trustees were able to attend, as well as existing trustees.
This was particularly useful in recognising and highlighting the conflicting demands of urgent and important. For instance it is too easy to spend a lot of time on meetings at other people’s request, instead of working on long term goals.
VOLUNTEERS
We continue to have a full complement of skilled volunteers and a waiting list of people seeking work experience. Tasks undertaken by volunteers extend from front of house welcoming of visitors; cataloguing the range of the Library ‘s expanding collection; developing exhibitions for the NALGO Room, and writing and designing accompanying booklets; and looking after the garden, which is now in much better shape.
We are looking for more people to be involved in fundraising, and staffing events and stalls.
The monthly volunteer lunches followed by talks on the Library collections, and new acquisitions are a pleasant way to extend volunteers’ knowledge of the Library and develop their skills. The days are rotated each month to ensure as many volunteers as possible can participate.
STAFF
Lynette Cawthra and Jane Taylor, our Library Manager and Librarian continue to give an excellent service. Lynette manages the running of the Library building and its activities, acts as the first point of contact for enquiries, applies for grants and project monies and represents the Library widely, whilst Jane takes responsibility for cataloguing, overseeing the work of volunteers and acting as our IT troubleshooter. Lindsey Cole, our valued Library Assistant deals with readers’ requests for material, and is responsible for administrating our Friends and fundraising databases, and sets out equipment for talks.
Our other regular staff continue. Alain Kahan works one day a week giving us the benefit of his comprehensive knowledge, and now has a group of volunteers to assist in garden maintenance!
Jan Walker, our cleaner, keeps the premises to a high standard and Mike Carter, our graphic artist, ensures our exhibitions and printed material conform to an impressive ‘house style’.
EXHIBITIONS:
As well as Voting for Change, we had an exhibition - The Power of Unity: 150 years of the TUC. In 1868, at the Mechanics Institute in Manchester, a meeting took place that became the first successful attempt to bring together the trades unions. The exhibition celebrated 150 years of the TUC and looked at the continuing need for trades unions.
We hosted a celebratory event alongside the exhibition, with Clare Coatman from the North West TUC talking about the future of unions, and reaching out to young workers. We published an accompanying booklet for the exhibition.
EVENTS:
The Frow Lecture in May marked the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, and was given by Shirin Hirsch, a Research Fellow in History at Wolverhampton University. In her talk titled “In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Class and Resistance”, Shirin analysed not only the immediate response to the speech, but also the ongoing racism of such policies as “Hostile Environment “ affecting Windrush immigrants among others.
In July, as a precursor to the Royal Exchange production of Maxine Peake’s Queens of the Coal Age, we had the good fortune to be able to use a much larger space in Salford Museum than the annexe and over 100 people attended a conversation between Maxine and Anne Scargill on the Parkside Pit Occupation in 1993. Anne was accompanied by two of the other women who occupied the pit with her, and their families.
We started the autumn with a discussion meeting, How do we get radical change?, and then in October there was a very successful Walter Greenwood Day held in conjunction with Salford University. 2018 was the 85th anniversary of the publication of Love on the Dole and 115 years since Greenwood was born. There were a series of six academic talks in the afternoon, so well attended that people had to wait until there was room for them after original attendees left. In the evening we moved across to the University for the launch of a new book on Greenwood by Chris Hopkins.
In November the Townsend Productions version of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was sold out at both performances, and they have been booked for further performances this year.
In February, for LGBT History Month, there was a talk by Glyn Salton-Cox on Queer Communism.
In March, for International Women’s Day, we had an event titled Remembering Resistance: a Century of Women’s Protest in the North of England. First there was a talk by Dr Sarah Marsden on the project which is cataloguing and celebrating women’s effort to bring about political change over the last 100 years, and how different kinds of places shape how protest proceeds, such as where women mobilise to defend their communities as they did in the miners’ strike. After the talk there were then activities including a timeline of women’s protest movement over the years, and a memories booth, to record women’s own experiences in the movement.
Later in March, Kate Connelly gave a talk on Sylvia Pankhurst, and her many varied activities, including her work in Ethiopia. This linked in with the Sylvia and Sylvio exhibition.
In between, there were two well attended performances of Rouse, Ye Women! by Townsend Productions, a folk ballad about Mary Macarthur and the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath who went on strike to achieve a living wage for themselves and their families in 1910.The popular Wednesday afternoon series of Invisible Histories talks continued throughout the year, with 14 talks in total on topics ranging from the history of asbestos (to mark Workers’ Memorial Day) to the labour movement and home front during WW1.
SOCIAL MEDIA
The Library followers on Twitter have increased to nearly 6,200, and ‘likes’ on our Facebook page have increased to 5,500. Our Instagram account followers have more than doubled to over 1,000 since last year. Our Pinterest followers have also increased significantly.
There have been 22 new posts on the library blog during the year on a variety of subjects, including the Library’s Irish in Britain Representation Group collection and the story of a Spanish Civil War photo which was digitised as part of our Salford University Advantage Fund project.
CONCLUSION
The Trustees wish to record their gratitude to the staff, volunteers, friends and supporters for their invaluable contributions to the Library. They are also grateful to all who contribute either individually or through their organisations.
The Trustees wish to restate their determination to ensure the long-term future and continuing development of the Library in accordance with its values and principles and to spread the knowledge of working class struggle as an instrument of change.
