Ruth Frow (1922-2008)

Many History Workshop Journal readers will have read of the death of Ruth Frow, cofounder with her husband Edmund (Eddie) of the Working Class Movement Library (WCML).1 Active in the trade-union and peace movements and the Communist Party they were ‘obsessive’ collectors of pamphlets, books, leaflets and documents of class struggle, and their personal collection formed the basis of the Working Class Movement Library. Like many Communists Ruth and Eddie Frow were traumatized by Krushchev's 1956 speech at the Twentieth Congress distancing the Soviet regime from its Stalinist past. As Communists they drew the conclusion that they needed to relate more directly to the British tradition of trade unionism and socialism and less to the Soviet experience. With this determination – and with Communist and avid bibliophile James Klugmann serving as something of a model – they turned their attention to British labour history and their book collecting began in earnest. (It is vividly and amusingly described in their ‘Travels with a Caravan’.)2 They turned their home at Kings Road, Manchester, into a library with free access to any scholar or student of labour history. The story of the collection's eventual transformation into the Working Class Movement Library, currently housed in Salford, is well documented in Ruth's biography of Eddie.3 The Library was at the heart of their political activity, especially as they wanted it to be available to all those interested in the history of class struggle.

Art history · Library science · Spring (device) · Australian History and Society · Computer Science · Engineering · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

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  K G J C Knowles, Kim Knowles et al.•The Economic History Review•1972

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