The Sheffield-based co-operative resource centre, Principle 5, has published its seventh pamphlet in a series highlighting the work of radical writers and co-operative groups from the South Yorkshire city.
The Battle of Walkley and Other Working Class Impositions follows last year’s title, Co-operators, Radicals, Workers, which presented a selection of five essays from the bulletin of the Holberry Society for the Study of Sheffield Labour History, a group formed in 1978 to examine “history from below” and “rediscover the radicals who had fought for democracy and workers’ rights from the 18th century to the present day”.
The new publication reprints a further four articles, including John Baxter’s title piece, ‘Battle of Walkley’, which examines “the explosion of popular anger” that followed the eviction of a local unemployed man and his family in 1922. According to the Preface, Baxter “reconstructs a pivotal moment in Sheffield’s social history”, using oral histories and documentary sources to re-imagine a spontaneous protest that led to the imprisonment of two councillors.
The other three items focus on the experiences of a Sheffield volunteer during the Spanish Civil War; a 1930s protest against benefit cuts; and a “stream of consciousness” memoir of growing up among a community of women in the Big Yard on Thomas Street.
Baxter, who also writes an Introduction to this collection, was a leading local exponent of oral history in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has helped uncover the story of Samuel Holberry, a Sheffield-based Chartist leader of the 19th century who died in prison at the age of 27.
The Society named after him brought members of the Labour Party together with Communists, International Socialists and socialist feminists from Big Flame, in “a collaborative venture to examine and reclaim Sheffield’s radical working-class history”.
Eight editions of the group’s bulletin were published between 1978 and 1984, while the Society enjoyed what Baxter calls “some real achievements” – getting streets renamed, renovating a bust of Holberry, which now sits in Weston Park, and ensuring his name lives on via the Holberry Cascades water feature in the city’s Peace Gardens.
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The Battle of Walkley and Other Working Class Impositions is available for £5 from Principle 5, Yorkshire Co-operative Resource Centre, Aizlewood’s Mill, Nursery Street, Sheffield S3 8GG.
It is the seventh in Principle 5’s series of re-publications. The first six P5 pamphlets are available here.
P5’s sixth pamphlet, Co-operators, Radicals, Workers, includes five articles from the Holberry Society – covering Sheffield’s ‘Peterloo’ in 1795, local co-operative schemes of the early 19th century, unemployment in the 1880s, and an industrial dispute in the 1890s. More details here.
Samuel Holberry – Revolutionary Democrat 1814-1842, by John Baxter and Steven Kay, is available here from 1889 Books.
