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Jessie Eden
Jessie Eden (née Shrimpton; 24 February 1902 – 27 September 1986) was a British trade union leader and communist activist, most famous for leading between 40,000 to 50,000 households during the Birmingham rent-strike of 1939. She was also involved in the construction of the Soviet Union's Moscow Metro, convincing women at Birmingham's Joseph Lucas motor factory to join the 1926 UK General Strike, and leading an unprecedented and successful strike of 10,000 factory worker women in 1931. For her commitment to helping improve the working conditions of English factory workers, she was awarded the T&G gold medal from Ernest Bevin. Later in life, she served for three decades as Birmingham city's federation of council house tenants. Her involvement in the trade unions of the English Midlands led to a massive increase in women joining British trade unions. She was a lifelong supporter of both the Transport and General Workers' Union (T&G), and of the Communist Party of Great Britain ...
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Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West Midlands metropolitan county, and approximately 4.3 million in the wider metropolitan area. It is the largest UK metropolitan area outside of London. Birmingham is known as the second city of the United Kingdom. Located in the West Midlands region of England, approximately from London, Birmingham is considered to be the social, cultural, financial and commercial centre of the Midlands. Distinctively, Birmingham only has small rivers flowing through it, mainly the River Tame and its tributaries River Rea and River Cole – one of the closest main rivers is the Severn, approximately west of the city centre. Historically a market town in Warwickshire in the medieval period, Birmingham grew during the 18th century during the Midla ...
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Trades Union Congress
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is a national trade union centre A national trade union center (or national center or central) is a federation or confederation of trade unions in a country. Nearly every country in the world has a national trade union center, and many have more than one. In some regions, such a ..., a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, representing the majority of trade unions. There are 48 affiliated unions, with a total of about 5.5 million members. Frances O'Grady, Baroness O'Grady of Upper Holloway, Frances O'Grady became General Secretary of the TUC, General Secretary in 2013 and presented her resignation in 2022, with Paul Nowak (trade unionist), Paul Nowak becoming the next General Secretary in January 2023. Organisation The TUC's decision-making body is the Annual Congress, which takes place in September. Between congresses decisions are made by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, General Council, which meets every two mont ...
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Alan Winnington
Alan Winnington (16 March 1910 – 26 November 1983) was a British journalist, war correspondent, and Communist activist most famous for his coverage of the Korean War and the Chinese revolution. He is most well-known as the author of ''I Saw Truth in Korea'' (1950), an anti-war pamphlet containing photographic evidence of the mass graves of civilians executed by the South Korean police. The publishing of this leaflet led to the British government debating whether to have Winnington tried for treason, a charge which carried the death penalty, though it was decided instead to make him stateless by refusing to renew his passport. As a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and an Asian correspondent for the ''Daily Worker'', Winnington travelled to China and witnessed the defeat of the KMT by the Chinese Communist Party. During his life in China he became closely acquainted with many leading Chinese communist leaders including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, a ...
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Shapurji Saklatvala
Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala (28 March 1874 – 16 January 1936) was a communist activist and British politician of Indian Parsi heritage. Saklatvala is notable for being the first person of Indian heritage to become a British Member of Parliament (MP) for the UK Labour Party, and was also among the few members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) to serve as an MP. Early years Shapurji Saklatvala was born on 28 March 1874 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, the son of a merchant, Dorabji Saklatvala, and his wife Jerbai, a sister of Jamsetji (aka J.N.) Tata, the owner of India's largest commercial and industrial empire.Article by Mike Squires. He was educated at St. Xavier's School in Bombay before moving to St. Xavier's College for his collegiate education.Colin Holmes, "Shapurgi Dorabji Saklatvala," in A. Thomas Lane (ed.), ''Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders: M-Z.'' Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995; p. 835. He worked briefly as an iron and coal prosp ...
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Harry Pollitt
Harry Pollitt (22 November 1890 – 27 June 1960) was a British communist who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from 1929 to September 1939 and again from 1941 until his death in 1960. Pollitt spent most of his life advocating communism. Ideologically a Marxist-Leninist, Pollitt was an adherent particularly of Joseph Stalin even after Stalin's death and disavowal by Nikita Khrushchev. Pollitt's acts included opposition to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and Polish–Soviet War, support for the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, both support and opposition to the war against Nazi Germany, defence of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and support for the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. He contested a number of parliamentary elections, but never won, despite coming close in 1945. Throughout his time as leader of CPGB, he was in direct secret radio contact with Moscow as CPGB's "Code Holder", and wa ...
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Mark Ashton
Mark may refer to: Currency * Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina * East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic * Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927 * Finnish markka ( sv, finsk mark, links=no), the currency of Finland from 1860 until 28 February 2002 * Mark (currency), a currency or unit of account in many nations * Polish mark ( pl, marka polska, links=no), the currency of the Kingdom of Poland and of the Republic of Poland between 1917 and 1924 German * Deutsche Mark, the official currency of West Germany from 1948 until 1990 and later the unified Germany from 1990 until 2002 * German gold mark, the currency used in the German Empire from 1873 to 1914 * German Papiermark, the German currency from 4 August 1914 * German rentenmark, a currency issued on 15 November 1923 to stop the hyperinflation of 1922 and 1923 in Weimar Germany * Lodz Ghetto mark, a special currency for Lodz Ghetto. * ...
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Dorothy Kuya
Dorothy Kuya (April 1932 – 23 December 2013) was a leading British communist and human rights activist from Liverpool, the co-founder of Teachers Against Racism, and the general secretary of the National Assembly of Women (NAW). She was a life-long member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and was most famous for being Liverpool's first community relations officer, and for leading a successful campaign to establish Liverpool's International Slavery Museum. During the mid-1980s, Kuya served as the chair of the London housing association Ujima, and built the organisation into the largest black-led social enterprise in Europe. She was described by the Director of National Museums Liverpool as "Liverpool's greatest fighter against racism and racial intolerance" and "one of the country's leading figures in combating inequality." Early life Dorothy Kuya was born in Liverpool in April 1932; her father was a black man from Sierra Leone and her mother was a white Britis ...
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Claudia Jones
Claudia Vera Jones (; 21 February 1915 – 24 December 1964) was a Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated with her family to the US, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and black nationalist, adopting the name Jones as "self-protective disinformation". Due to the political persecution of Communists in the US, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she immediately joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and would remain a member for the rest of her life. She then founded Britain's first major black newspaper, the '' West Indian Gazette'', in 1958, and played a central role in founding the Notting Hill Carnival, the second-largest annual carnival in the world. Early life Claudia Vera Cumberbatch was born in Trinidad, then a colony of the British Empire, on 21 February 1915. When she was eight years old, her family emigrated to New York City following the post-war ...
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Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against France. The modern Royal Navy traces its origins to the early 16th century; the oldest of the UK's armed services, it is consequently known as the Senior Service. From the middle decades of the 17th century, and through the 18th century, the Royal Navy vied with the Dutch Navy and later with the French Navy for maritime supremacy. From the mid 18th century, it was the world's most powerful navy until the Second World War. The Royal Navy played a key part in establishing and defending the British Empire, and four Imperial fortress colonies and a string of imperial bases and coaling stations secured the Royal Navy's ability to assert naval superiority globally. Owing to this historical prominence, it is common, even among non-Britons, to ref ...
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Graham Stevenson (historian)
Graham Stevenson (28 October 1950 – 1 May 2020) was a British communist, trade union leader, and historian who specialised in the history of British socialist and labour activist biographies. He led a career as one of the most influential trade union leaders in Britain, becoming the national secretary of the TGWU IN 1999, and as a founder and later president in 2009 of the European Transport Union Federation, he helped organise strikes across European docks in 2003, forcing the European Union to stall privatisation plans. Between 2007 and 2008, Stevenson played a key part in the negotiations that formed Unite the Union, the largest trade union in the United Kingdom. He also served on the Executive and Political Committee of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), and served as the treasurer of the Marx Memorial Library from 2013 to 2019. He is also the biographer of Jessie Eden, among many other British communist icons. Early life Graham Stevenson was born on 28 October 1950 ...
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Birmingham Handsworth (UK Parliament Constituency)
Birmingham Handsworth was a parliamentary constituency centred on the Handsworth district of Birmingham. It returned one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was abolished in 1983. Boundaries 1885–1918: The Sessional Divisions of Rushall Tipton, Wednesbury, and West Bromwich, and the Municipal Borough of Walsall. The constituency was created, as a county constituency, for the 1885 general election when it was the Handsworth division of Staffordshire. In 1885 the area was to the north of the parliamentary borough of Birmingham and was the south-eastern county division of Staffordshire. Birmingham, which from 1889 was a county borough, with city status, was mostly located in the geographic county of Warwickshire, but gradually expanded into adjacent areas of Staffordshire and Worcestershire. The constituency bordered to the west West Bromwich, Wednesbury and Walsall; to the north Lichfield; to the east Tamworth and ...
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Rent Strike
A rent strike is a method of protest commonly employed against large landlords. In a rent strike, a group of tenants come together and agree to refuse to pay their rent ''en masse'' until a specific list of demands is met by the landlord. This can be a useful tactic of final resort for use against intransigent landlords, but carries the obvious risk of eviction and bad credit history in some cases. Historically, rent strikes have often been used in response to problems such as high rents, poor conditions in the property, or unreasonable tenancy demands; however, there have been situations where wider issues have led to such action. Notable rent strikes Europe ;Glasgow :During the Irish Land War of the 1880s and during World War I when the landlords of tenement buildings in Glasgow sought to take advantage of the influx of shipbuilders coming into the city and the absence of many local men to raise rents on the tenements' remaining residents. These women left behind were seen as ...
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