Reports

Keep the Flame Burning

Alana Madden reports from the Working Class Movement Library in Salford

‘Keep the Flame Burning’ leaflet

‘We know that eventually there will be a change in our social system; that the country will be governed by those who produce the wealth; that there will be a need and a longing to know what preceded these changes. Recognising this, we set out to gather a library of books and ephemera relating to the labour movement in its broadest aspects.’ The joint mission statement of Ruth and Eddie Frow, founders of the Working Class Movement Library (WCML), is as radical now as it was when first published in 1976, in the second volume of History Workshop Journal, an influential publication that platforms and advocates ‘history from below’.

As committed trade unionists, Communist Party members, and collectors and distributors of labour history, the Frows’s initially domestic project grew from a shared ‘book addiction’ to include a myriad of related leftist paraphernalia. After several decades amassing the contents, a charitable trust was created in 1971, taking ownership of the growing collection still stored in their home. By the next decade, and with their relentless seeking out of new and undiscovered items, the couple’s Manchester semi was bursting at the seams. Luckily, by 1987 the pair had secured a tenancy, through Salford City Council, of the current WCML premises.

Housed in a spectacular turn-of-the-century building, situated on a busy road in Salford, the WCML today is a living, breathing, public institution, open and accessi- ble to everyone. Fittingly housed in the city’s iconic bright-red brick, symbolic of the area’s rapid industri- alisation, the building holds the only dedicated working class public library in the UK. The space has a comfort- able, inviting, down-at-heel atmosphere from years of active use, so it is easy to picture the countless hours of study and dreams of revolutions here. Spacious landings are lined with cosy, compact rooms, built to the measurements of the brief Edwardian era now clad with the strangely reassuring additions from the 1970s, clumsily shoe-horned around them. Librarians and volunteers fight against the book-dissolving humidity, already coaxing the original layers of wallpaper off the walls. Tall stained-glass windows stretch up alongside the staircase, refracting muted colours and lending a sanctified air to the protest banners on display and the Rock Against Racism T-shirts that hang from the balustrade.

Elsewhere, letters, minute books, artwork, banners, ceramics, textiles, badges, even the finely crafted and practically designed Arts and Crafts furniture in use around the building, donated by a socialist cycling club, make up just part of the dizzying array of materi- als on display here. But it is the extensive library of over 50,000 books that forms the backbone of the WCML’s vast and unique collection. In this space, devised in the spirit of true horizontal organising, nearly everything is open access, with exceptions given to delicate rarities such as smuggled letters written by Irish political prisoners held in Long Kesh (notori- ously also known as the Maze Prison) during the hunger strikes of 1981. Written on pieces of disinte- grating toilet and cigarette paper are the coherent and practical requests from prisoners requesting intellec- tual exchange, guidance for politically aligned books for study and urgent advocacy from MPs for the lives of those on hunger strike. There is a stark resonance with today’s struggle for a free Palestine and the hunger strikers known as the Filton 24.

Utilising one of the library’s many collections, the current exhibition, ‘Keep the Flame Burning’, docu- ments the revolutionary socialist feminist group known as Big Flame. Co-produced with a group of local, working-class 16- to 25-year-olds who call themselves the ‘Little Flames’, the exhibition features ephemera in a range of media including video, oral histories, publi- cations, letters and artworks, all selected and organised by the Little Flames group in relation to their own biographies and concerns. This archive was specifically selected by the library for the radically intersectional politics that was already defining it back in the 1970s. Fleshing out the era Big Flame operated in, the text- heavy displays are helpfully broken up with more immediate visual cues, including a poster for the Jaswinder Kaur anti-deportation demonstration, delightfully scrappy collages and archival footage showing various marches and demonstrations from the diverse population of 1970s Yorkshire and Gateshead.

For the majority unfamiliar with Big Flame, the show also includes easy-to-digest dives on the original group’s ideology, practical applications, influences and legacy. It is evident that the curatorial intention is not to venerate the past but to educate and to empower visitors in the present. This is achieved, in part, through clear and decisive panels breaking the group’s many activities into key themes, including: Socialist Feminism, Organising Tactics and Daily Operations, Internationalism and Youth Empowerment.

Evidenced by the display, Big Flame’s main activities focused on linking up rank-and-file workers’ move- ments, such as health workers unions and the Ford Halewood strikers, with autonomous struggles, like that of the women’s movement and anti-racism initia- tives. The exhibition foregrounds the group’s revolutionary approach, which identified solidarity across different oppressed groups as being crucial to anti-capitalist organising ‘with, not for, the working class’.

There is a focus on the strategies and theories of socialist feminism organising, positioned as an integral part of Big Flame’s successful structure, as well as providing part of the critical analysis of how and where the group failed. Hung on one wall is a copy of Achilles Heel, a publication produced by Big Flame’s feminist men’s group, which was specifically created to examine how patriarchy is propagated and how learnt behav- iours can be challenged. It is unclear how this was received and what kind of impact it had on addressing inherent gender bias within the group, but the inten- tion was to cultivate accountability, and clearly ahead of its time. Yet the reality of enacting these ideals, both on an interpersonal as well as the organisational level, demonstrates how power imbalances were covertly ingrained at Big Flame. The contradictions of the group’s intentions are found in items such as the resignation letter of Big Flame’s newspaper editor, Majorie Plummer – the team’s only female member – who describes chronic overwork and gender imbal- ance as her reasons for departure, as well as a printed graphic that tracks the decline of female membership from 1974 onwards.

These strategies of organising and reflective critique were directly connected with the prominent second- wave feminist text, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, a publication comprising three essays written in 1979 by sociologist feminists Sheila Rowbotham, Hilary Wainwright and Big Flame member, Lynne Segal. Each of these essays reflect on and critique the traditional Marxist/Leninist organising strategies that are particularly prevalent in traditional labour movements. Within such groups, as now, it is common to find endless references to ‘the fragmentation of the left’ or ‘the need for a unified movement in this crucial moment’. While valid in some respects, such discursive deadlocks can tend to exclude certain groups, dismissing all other struggles and movements as secondary – rather than intrinsic – elements of the same movement. What is incisive about ‘Keep the Flame Burning’, and the library that holds the archive, is the important presentation of ‘the left’ as a large multifaceted movement that is fluid, growing and adaptive to the socio-political climate. The library presents itself as a tangible vault of ideas and information, a world away from dogma or didacticism.

In post-Brexit austerity Britain, public libraries are one of the few places left in our communities premised on offering a wealth of access to culture, knowledge and the possibility of finding community, all for free. With underpaid staff working zero-hours contracts and organisations struggling to manage brutal funding cuts and library closures, they are an indispensable public resource worth fighting for. Other cultural and educa- tional organisations’ declarations of inclusion as an institutional priority so often ring hollow; the pairing of accessibility with the type of vital and dynamic politics of the WCML’s is rarely seen. Built from an authentic and active history, the founders’ experiences set them apart from other British public cultural institutions. Eddie understood the realities of the frontline from his constant dedication to union organis- ing in the workplace, not to mention having spent time in Strangeways prison after the Battle of Bexley Square in 1931. Ruth initially trained as a nurse in the 1930s, but during the Second World War joined fighter com- mand as part of the Women’s Royal Air force. Her postwar ambitions were shaped by teaching, balanced with active roles in the Communist Party, trade unions and the peace movement, consistently taking on various organisational posts, such as vice president of Manchester’s CND branch.

The example of the Frows’s legacy (Ruth died in 2008 and Eddie in 1997) ensures the WCML keeps its rooms active and in regular use, embodying the impor- tance of real public space; warm, free and safe. Across the year the WMCL provides a busy calendar of events, including courses in trade unionism, talks and exhibi- tions. All items in the collection have been painstak- ingly catalogued and are fully accessible online and onsite with no membership, justification or application needed. The WCML’s example reminds us that when it comes to resistance, solidarity and progress, we do it best from the ground up. ‘Big Flame’, the organisers state, ‘taught us that socialism isn’t a dusty theory in a seminar room – it’s lived, local and loud.’

Alana Madden is a writer, oral historian and artist.

First published in Art Monthly 494: March 2026.