The Central Labour College, also known as The Labour College, was a British higher education institution supported by trade unions. It functioned from 1909 to 1929. [1] [2] It was established on the basis of independent working class education.
The college was formed as a result of the Ruskin College strike of 1909. The Plebs' League, which had been formed around a core of Marxist students and former students of Ruskin, held a meeting at Oxford on 2 August 1909. A resolution was passed calling for the establishment of a Central Labour College to provide independent working class education, outside of the control of the University of Oxford. The provisional committee controlling the new college was to consist of representatives of Labour, Co-Operative and Socialist societies, following the model of the Labour Representation League. [2]
The college was supported financially by the National Union of Railwaymen and the South Wales Miners' Federation. [1] The college was headed by James Dennis Hird, who had been dismissed as principal of Ruskin for supporting the striking students. In 1911 the college moved to Earl's Court, London. [3]
In 1915 the college was officially recognised by the Trades Union Congress. In 1921 it became the centre of the National Council of Labour Colleges. [3] In 1926 it was proposed to merge the CLC and Ruskin College into a new Labour College based at Easton Lodge near Great Dunmow, Essex. However, the move was opposed by a number of large unions, and on 7 September the proposal by the General Council of the TUC to proceed was defeated on a card vote. [4]
By 1929 the mining industry was in severe decline due to the Great Depression. In April a conference of the South Wales Miners' Federation voted to discontinue funding of the college unless additional levies could be raised from members. [5] No such funding was forthcoming, and attempts to transfer the ownership of the college to the wider trade union movement were unsuccessful. By July it was clear that the college could not continue to operate, and it closed at the end of the month. [6]
The 1926 General Strike in the United Kingdom was a general strike that lasted nine days, from 4 to 12 May 1926. It was called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British government to act to prevent wage reductions and worsening conditions for 1.2 million locked-out coal miners. Some 1.7 million workers went out, especially in transport and heavy industry.
Ruskin College, originally known as Ruskin Hall, Oxford, is a higher education institution and part of the University of West London, in Oxford, England. It is not a college of Oxford University. Named after the essayist, art and social critic John Ruskin, it specialises in providing educational opportunities for adults with few or no qualifications. Degrees taught at Ruskin were formerly awarded by the Open University. The college joined the University of West London in 2021.
The Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) is the national trade union centre in Scotland. With 40 affiliated unions as of 2020, the STUC represents over 540,000 trade unionists.
James Francis "Frank" Horrabin was an English socialist and for some time Communist radical writer and cartoonist. For two years he was Labour Member of Parliament for Peterborough. He attempted to construct a socialist geography and was an associate of David Low and George Orwell.
Alfred Onions was a Welsh trade unionist, a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party, a Wesleyan Methodist and a very longstanding local preacher. He was born in St George's, Shropshire, the son of a collier. He died at an early age in Tredegar following a sudden and unexpected serious breakdown in health.
Thomas Alfred Jackson was a founding member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and later the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was a leading communist activist and newspaper editor and worked variously as a party functionary and a freelance lecturer.
Ebenezer Edwards was a trade unionist and politician in Britain.
The Plebs' League was a British educational and political organisation which originated around a Marxist way of thinking in 1908 and was active until 1926.
Noah Ablett was a Welsh trade unionist and political theorist who is most noted for contributing to 'The Miners' Next Step', a Syndicalist treatise which Ablett described as 'scientific trade unionism.
Frank Hodges was an English trade union leader, who became General Secretary of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain. A Member of Parliament (MP) for one year, he was Civil Lord of the Admiralty in the first Labour Government.
Robert "Robin" Page Arnot, best known as R. Page Arnot, was a British Communist journalist and politician.
James Dennis Hird was a British clergyman, educator and author.
Idris Cox was a Welsh communist activist and newspaper editor.
Harold Heslop was an English writer, left-wing political activist, and coalminer, from near Bishop Auckland, County Durham. Heslop's first novel Goaf was published in 1926, but it was in a Russian translation as Pod vlastu uglya and did not appear in England until 1934. In 1929, he also published his first novel in England, The Gate of a Strange Field, about the 1926 United Kingdom general strike. His last novel, The Earth Beneath, was published in 1946.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is a national trade union centre, a federation of trade unions that collectively represent most unionised workers in England and Wales. There are 48 affiliated unions with a total of about 5.5 million members. Paul Nowak is the TUC's current General Secretary, serving from January 2023.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB founded the Daily Worker. In 1936, members of the party were present at the Battle of Cable Street, helping organise resistance against the British Union of Fascists. In the Spanish Civil War, the CPGB worked with the USSR to create the British Battalion of the International Brigades, which party activist Bill Alexander commanded.
Winifred Horrabin, née Batho, was a British socialist activist and journalist.
The National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) was an organisation set up in the United Kingdom to foster independent working class education.
William White Craik was a Scottish educationalist who was a promoter and practitioner of Independent working class education (IWCE). He participated in the strike at Ruskin College in 1909. Following the failure of the strike, he then played a major role alongside former carpenter George Sims in the use of the Plebs Magazine in advocating the foundation of the Central Labour College as an educational establishment which saw workers education as a political process.
Independent working class education is an approach to education, particularly adult education, developed by labour activists, whereby the education of working-class people is seen as a specifically political process linked to other aspects of class struggle. The term, abbreviated to (IWCE), is particularly linked to the Plebs' League.
