Stop,Look,Listen…my weekly selection of favourite films, books and events to get you out of the house

Watch…….films about Iceland and hear some short stories from author Agust Borgpor Sverrisson. Agust has worked as a journalist, copywriter and translator and is a well-known blogger and commentator in Iceland on literature and politics.
He is an acclaimed Icelandic author and the two films are based on short stories by Jon Atli Jonasson and Agust’s own short story Disappearing into the World. See them on 24 January at 7-9pm at Madlab. Further info see

Look…….new exhibition by Maurice Carlin First… Next… Then… Finally... Castlefield Gallery solo show, Preview 6 – 8pm on Thur 7th February. The show continues until 17th February. Maurice says….This is my first solo exhibition in Manchester. I’ll be showing a series of new work consisting of print, performance and film works plus a specially commissioned essay by Philip Auslander. More info about the exhibition is available on Castlefield gallerys website. I’m really excited about this show, it would be great if you can make it along!

Read…. about the history of the cooperative movement in a fabulous graphic novel The Co-operative Revolution. The movement started in Rochdale in 1844 and has now spread across the world making a real difference in countries such as Argentina during their economic crisis in the 90s. People took over bankrupted businesses and ran them as co-ops. An important lesson for us at the present time. The story in the book continues and takes us to Rochdale in 2044 where co-ops are now an important part of the economy of the country. The illustrations by Polyp are beautiful and engaging and certainly turn an important story to an inspiring one.

Join the campaign to sack Nick Griffin…….In 2009 Griffin won his seat in the European Parliament by a whisker – under 5,000 votes. Hope Not Hate want to ensure that in 2014 Griffin and the BNP in the north-west are ejected from the parliament once and for all. They say Sack Nick Griffin will be a positive and exciting campaign spread across the region. It will bring together a broad progressive coalition of trade unionists, faith and community groups and individuals all with the one aim of unseating Nick Griffin. Also, with the BNP in major financial trouble and Griffin funnelling money to the party from his post in the EU, when we take him out in 2014 we remove one of the BNP’s last major sources of income. This could be the campaign to bankrupt the BNP. Now that’s worth signing up for! See

Sign the petition…to get Amazon to pay their taxes…independent booksellers Frances and Keith of Kenilworth & Warwick Bookshops are asking people to sign the petition: In our book, that is not a level playing field and leaves independent retailers like us struggling to compete just because we do the right thing. And that is why we’ve started a petition see a petition on Change.org calling on Amazon to pay their corporation tax in the UK. Click here to join us. see

Celebrate…. LGBT month at the Working Class Movement Library on Saturday 9 February as they mark both National Libraries Day and LGBT History Month with a talk on Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper by Sonja Tiernan, who used the Library for her research. See my review of Sonja’s book The talk begins at 2pm, it’s free, and everyone is welcome. Further details see

Challenge the cuts….Greater Manchester Community Union have organised a meeting on THE CUTS, HOW THEY AFFECT YOU AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
Tuesday 12th Feb Tuesday, 7.30pm, Friends Meeting House, Manchester.

Book review: At the Coalface; My life as a Miner’s Wife by Catherine Paton Black

At the Coal Face; My life as a Miner’s Wife by Catherine Paton Black ISBN 978 -0-7553-6325-4 Headline publishers.

Many books have been written about the Miners’ Strike 1984-85, but few have been written by the wives of the miners. Catherine Paton Black’s book is important, not just because of her husband taking part in the strike but because she was one of the few women who were NUM members and became official pickets during the strike. It is also the story of why those mining communities had such a sense of solidarity during the strike; they realised that, without those jobs and their union, their lives would be one of poverty and instability. This is why they put up such as fight for their jobs and communities and why they were such an inspiration to people in Britain and across the world. It was also the reason why they were dubbed “the enemy within” and why Thatcher was determined to destroy them.

Catherine was born in 1946 in Hamilton, near Glasgow. She came from a poor background:

My father,George was a drunk gambler, always looking for a quick buck to pour down his throat, and my mum suffered a heart condition all her life and struggled to cope. Luckily my grandparents stepped into the breach and became my heroes.

At an early age she was aware of her future:

from a young age us girls knew our fates. We’d grow up to be wives and mothers like our mums and maybe get a job in a factory if we had to. That was our lot in lives and we didn’t know any different.

Catherine left school at 15, got a job in a factory and spoke out when she realised that they were earning very little in comparison to the profits the company was making:

The strike never happened, but the seed had been planted. Even the lowliest paid worker had a voice if they wanted to use it. Little did I know that was a principle I’d stick to much later in life.

Tradition in those small communities wasn’t just about what women did and what men did, it was also about who you married. Catherine meets Doug and when he comes to meet her granddad asks him straightaway What colour are you?, referring to religion. Catholics and Protestants did not mix, so her granddad was relieved when he found out Doug was “blue” ie Protestant.

Through her relationship with Doug she gives the reader an insight into the horrors that his father and brothers experienced as miners;

Working conditions in the pits in the 40s and 50s were primitive. Before the modern machines arrived Doug’s father and brothers were at times quite literally going at parts of it with a pick axe…They were all injured at some point.

If young men didn’t want to go down the coalmines they had few other choices and for Doug that meant going in the Army. In 1968, when she had their first child, he left the Army and took the only other alternative, a job in a pit in Nottingham in England, but as a surface worker. There were other advantages, as Catherine says, after living in a tenement in Glasgow they now were given:

A smart new Coal Board house, with clean red bricks, it really did feel like a piece of heaven after where we had been living. The village, pronounced “Renoth” by locals, had been built especially for the pit and had some lovely rolling green fields, farmland and lake areas nearby.

Catherine was also now living near her Mum and sister, who had moved south several years previously. Catherine and Doug had five children. His work on the surface did not pay enough to keep the family so she went back to work. Eventually Doug went down the mine to improve his wages while Catherine joined him in the colliery canteen (and joined the union). Unfortunately he had an accident in the pit, injured his back and could not go back underground, so the Coal Board found him another job at the pit;

So Doug started a new role on the surface in an office alongside two poor fellas who’d lost their legs in terrible accidents.

During the Miners Strike of 84-85 the Nottinghamshire coal field had many miners who did not support the strike and Catherine believes that this was because :

the mines in Notts employed lots of people from all parts of the country so fewer people felt a sense of loyalty to the area.

Controversially pickets from Yorkshire visited their area to try and get them to join the strike. Catherine did not support this;

As much as I supported the strike, I resented this. We didn’t want or need people from another county telling us what to do, but I did just wish more Nottingham communities were joining in.

Like many people from the coalfields she could see the government’s strategy of provoking the miners into striking at a time when they had been stockpiling coal at the power stations. As she puts it:

It all seemed terribly cynical, like open war had been declared on miners. Yet they were decent, hard- working people who just wanted to protect their jobs and communities.

Many miners wives got involved with the strike, but Catherine was different because she was an NUM member and she could officially join the picket line. Her husband didn’t want her to so she went one morning with her daughter;

After shinning down the drainpipe, we walked into the street, where we spotted other people coming down the road.
The other women commented;
We’re off to find a demonstration. We can’t just sit at home cooking and cleaning while all this is kicking off.

Catherine throws herself completely into political activity. She organises the soup kitchen and attends pickets, demos, travels around the country and comes across other peoples ways of life that she never knew existed. But she wasn’t interested in the bigger politics of the strike as she comments:

We had them all up here, including Scargill, but I never took time to listen. I wasn’t interested. …I was too busy to think or consider any further issues or the politics of it all

For many miners’ wives (and miners) the strike showed them different ways of life and some of them took the opportunity to get an education and jobs and move away from the coal mining communities. Catherine was happy with the life she had, and after the strike ended she returned to her husband and family. And her feelings today about the strike?

Echoes of its legacy lives on. We’ll bear both the scars and the memories forever.

National Women Against Pit Closures 2012

In 2012 with growing dissent about energy costs it is even clearer that the demise of the coal mining industry was not just a defeat for the NUM and its members, but has left this country now hostage to large energy companies with a government that has no sympathy or concern for poor families.

At the Coalface is a reminder that communities and trade unions can work together to campaign for a better society and we need to remember those lessons now.

Stop, Look,Listen…my weekly selection of favourite films, books and events to get you out of the house..

Watch...Nostalgia for the Light a new film by Chilean director Patricio Guzman. He contrasts the beauty of his home countrys’ Atacama desert and its hidden history of concentration camps and Pinochets’ regime. The desert has some of the most wonderful landscapes and the world’s largest telescopes but also women who are now in the 70s trying to locate the bodies of their families who were tortured, killed and buried somewhere under the ground. Guzman, who left Chile in the 70s, in the film shows us not just the terrible history of his country but how astronomy can, like the political prisoners in the desert, confirm our humanity against a political landscape of terror. See Guardian Chile through the Landscape

Read..Hannah Maria Mitchell;Radical Suffragist by Bill Johnson. Hannah was an extraordinary woman who was born in Derbyshire in 1871. Her education only lasted a week, she left a violent home in her mid-teens and worked in sweatshops most of her life. Her biography, now out of print, sums up her life “The Hard Way Up”. But she was a suffragist and rebel who took part in the campaign for the vote, was a socialist and member of the radical,grassroots organisation, the Independant Labour Party. Bill Johnson wrote this pamphlet because he could not get Hannah’s biography republished. Hannah’s secret ambition was to be a writer and here we can read some of her own stories and articles as well as look at photographs of where she was born and of her husband and son. The pamphlet is a bargain at only £4, available from Tameside Local Studies and Archive.

Listen...Nimissa(regrets) by Ba Cissoko. Ba is originally from Guinea but now lives in Marseilles. He uses the kora as a basis for his afro beat sound. His fourth album is a mixture of funk and groove, melodic and rhythmic. It tells us stories about his home, in Loumo of the weekly African market and in Politiki he lambasts Guinean politicians who are destroying the country.Ba is a skilled songwriter and in his latest album has produced a fascinating mixture of Mandingo tunes with salsa, rumba etc.etc.

Visit...the idiosyncratic Portico Library on Moseley St. in Manchester. Opened in 1806 it is a private, subscription based library but it is open to the public to view its 19 Century collection. There is a wide selection of travel literature. novels,biographies and history with a number of first editions. To celebrate Dickens year it has an exhibition called “Charles Dickens;Children and Childhood in His Life and Works”. It features a number of first editions of the author’s novels as well as illustrated children’s adaptation, graphic novels and translations. Its worth just going to look at the Library and a wonderful “oasis of calm in the heart of the city”.

Eva Gore- Booth: Irish feminist, political activist, poet..

Eva Gore- Booth An Image of such politics by Sonja Tiernan (Manchester University Press) ISBN 978-0-7190-8232-0

Ruth and Eddie Frow were the first people to tell me about Eva Gore- Booth and her companion and fellow activist Esther Roper. They had researched and written about them in the 1980s and felt that, because I was involved in trade union and Irish politics, I should know about two women who had played a significant, if forgotten, role in the history of working class and the Irish on both sides of the Irish sea.

They would be very pleased with Sonja’s book. Not only is it well researched but it is written in an interesting and accessible way. The story of Eva is not just her own history, but also that of her lifetime companion, Esther Roper, and Eva’s sister, Constance Markievicz. Her life was played out in an era that was exciting and a time of massive changes: historically, economically and politically.

Eva was born in Sligo, Ireland on 22 May 1870. Her family were landowning aristocrats and she enjoyed an idyllic life as a child, for her and her sister, spending their time reading, writing poetry and painting, and, like many young women of her class they travelled extensively. However on reaching young adultdood it was a stultifying and limited future that was on offer for her. It was when she was in Italy, in 1896, recuperating from an illness that she met Esther Roper, a meeting that would complete change her life. Esther commented that Eva “..seems to have been haunted by the suffering of the world, and to have had a curious feeling of responsibility for its inequalities and injustices”.

Esther Roper was of Irish descent, born in Chorley Lancashire in 1868. Her parents were working class. “Roper held a unique insight into class structure. She was an educated woman named after an aunt who had worked as a cotton weaver from the age of twelve”. Her parents were missionaries abroad which meant that Esther was one of the first women to get access to an education. By the time she was 20 both her parents were dead and she was responsible for her 13 year old brother. A year later she gained a first class degree at the University of Manchester, and decided to campaign for womens’ equality. In 1893 Esther became the paid secretary of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage.

Esther told Eva of her work and she moved to Manchester in 1897. It must have been a shock to go from the beauty of rural Ireland, and a rich lifestyle, to a smokey, overpopulated city. Ironically there were more Irish people living there than in Sligo. “In the early 1860s 860,000 Irish were living in England and over half of this population were living in Lancashire and Cheshire”.

Manchester was the first industrial city and was also the cradle of the women’s movement. Thousands of women worked in the mills and factories. Esther and Eva decided to campaign to ensure that these women who were affected most by the industial in which world they lived and worked would gain representation and equality. Influenced by ideas from the French Revolution, they sought equality for women in all areas of their lives. Crucially they saw that thousands of women workers were paying taxes but had no political representation. They also believed that it was the organisation of women into trade unions that would lead to them gaining the vote. Their work in the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Union Council led to the creation of many unions specifically for women. By 1904 the labour movement officially supported suffrage for working class women.

Eva shared her love of poetry and drama with working class women in inner city Manchester. Unknown to them she was a talented poet and dramatist and part of the Celtic revival of the early 1900s.

Eva was a pacifist but, being Irish, she was aware of the injustices going on in Ireland. Ireland was still occupied by the British, and from the 1890s to 1920s her sister, Constance Markievicz, was involved in the political and military campaign to gain independence. Eva, whilst opposing physical force politics, supported her sister and her comrades, not just in publicising the barbarity of the British response to the Easter Rising of 1916, but in providing material support to the families of whose husbands had been executed or imprisoned.

During the First World War Eva opposed the war, a stance which was very unpopular to begin with, and worked tirelessly to support conscientious objectors and their families.

Eva and Esther lived during a period of history that saw massive changes in this country. They were active in many of the campaigns that led to the growth of democracy in Britain. For Eva it meant she went against her upbringing and family, but with Esther she found a relationship that allowed her to flourish as a woman and political activist. As Sonja says “Roper was a remarkable character and was clearly the greatest influence on Gore-Booth’s personal, literary and political life.”

Sonja’s book is important in profiling two significant women who understood clearly that class matters. They were at the forefront of not just the women’s campaign for the vote but understood that working class women could be significant figures in their own struggle. Eva and Esther, from their own personal experience, saw that women needed practical support to become political activists. I think there are still lessons today that we can learn from women such as Eva and Esther and that is why this is an important and interesting book for all political activists; women and men. As Sonja says “The story of her (Eva) revolutionary life shows a person devoted to the ideal of a free and independent Ireland and a woman with a deep sense of how class and gender equality can transform lives and legislation”.

Stop! Look! Listen! a weekly selection of some of my favourite films/books/people…

Watch…Caramel, (2007) set in Beirut in a beauty salon, this film concentrates on women’s lives, rather than the politics of the Middle East. In beauty salons across the world women gather together to chat, exchange secrets and seek support from one’s sisters. (My sister was a hairdresser in a salon (or “shop” as they said in East Manchester) and the only man allowed across the threshold during opening times was the gay bartender and he was there to get his hair dyed!) The director of Caramel, Nadine Labaki, also starred in the film. Her latest film, Where Do We Go Now?, will be shown at the Cornerhouse next month as part of their Arab and Lebanese film season.

Read….Resolution (1986) Maeve Kelly is not just an incredible writer of fiction, but also a poet who directly addresses the politics of being a woman. In this collection she takes on many issues; love for a man, love for her children,  as well as the bigger issues of the war in Ireland. She has written three poems about being a feminist and looking back (she is now aged 82) at her life as an activist she says ; Lucky to have made that leap/out of the dark of youth’s complacence (from Feminist I). I had to buy this from a secondhand book website,  it’s a shame that Maeve Kelly isn’t up there with the likes of Seamus Heaney.

Listen to….The Liberty Tree (CD) by Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson. Originally a show commissioned by the Labour Party (that won’t happen again!) in 1987 to commemorate the 250th birthday of Thomas Paine. It tells the story of an incredible man, a radical, who didn’t just write about what was wrong with the world, but went out there and did something about it! Leon and Robb have used Tom’s words and their music to show how important he is to us today. To quote the man, “My country is the world, my religion is to do good.” Buy it from Fuse Records

follow ….new blog and a fun way of learning about the radical history of Manchester in the places where it happened, Red Flag Walks