Manchester Trades Union Council

The Manchester Trades Union Council brings together trade union branches in Manchester in England.

Contents

• Presidents
• Secretaries
• Vice Presidents
• References

Efforts to bring trade unionists together across Manchester go back to the eighteenth century. In 1818 the cotton spinners persuaded other trades to join them in a successful but short lived Philanthropic Society. The first use of the name Trades Council was a meeting in 1837 of the United Trades Council of Manchester and Salford organising support for the Glasgow Cotton Spinners. A thousand people in the Corn Exchange listened to speakers including J.R. Richardson, author of ‘The Rights of Women’ and Joseph Rayner Stephens, both of whom went on to be active Chartists.

Following a trade union conference in Sheffield in July 1866 called to discuss the use of the lockout weapon by employers, two delegates from the Manchester Typographical Association, William Henry Wood and Samuel Caldwell Nicholson, convened the inaugural meeting of the Manchester and Salford Trades Union Council in October 1866. A month later Wood was elected secretary and Nicholson president. Wood and Nicholson were Conservative working men. Other members of the council included the radicals Peter Shorrocks of the Tailors, William MacDonald of the Operative Housepainters and Malcolm MacLeod, an engineer. When the Council decided to avoid identifying with any political movement, the radicals set up the Trade Unionists Political Association with MacDonald as president and MacLeod as secretary. One of the Trades Council's first decisions was the proposal to form a court of arbitration. Set up jointly with the Manchester Chamber of Commerce in 1868, it was short-lived, failing to arbitrate a single case. More significantly in February that year, the council called a national conference of trade unionists which met in June and agreed to form what became the Trades Union Congress. Woods was elected president and Shorrocks secretary. This soon became the leading national association of trade unions.

Peter Shorrocks played a leading role in establishing the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and was an active supporter of the International Workingmen's Association, the First International. He succeeded Wood to be secretary from 1877 to 1883. He was followed as secretary by George Davy Kelley, full time secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Lithographic Printers and a member of the General Council of the Manchester Liberal Association. Kelley helped to greatly increase affiliations to the council. Many of the new affiliations were general unions of unskilled workers, a development which Kelley opposed as he felt the organisations would not endure, but they soon came to dominate the council. Despite this, Kelley remained the council's most prominent figure, being elected to Manchester City Council in 1891 as a Liberal-Labour representative.

In 1902, the council convened a meeting of local trade unionists and members of the Independent Labour Party and Social Democratic Federation, which renamed the council as the Manchester Trades and Labour Council, becoming the local affiliate of the Labour Representation Committee. Two years later, Kelley broke his links with the Liberals, and in 1906 he was elected as a Labour Member of Parliament, standing down from his trades council posts.

In the 1920s, the council affiliated to the Communist Party of Great Britain-led National Minority Movement. Although the Labour Party set up its own Manchester Borough organisation, the council continued to campaign on a wide range of labour issues, remaining the leading labour movement organisation in the city into the 1930s, and attracted the support of John Maynard Keynes for its proposals on local industrial policy.

In 1974, Salford District Trades Council was created, and the Manchester Trades Union Council adopted its present name.