The Story of our Founders: Ruth and Eddie Frow
The Working Class Movement Library was founded by Ruth and Edmund Frow. It started as their own library collection which was created after they met and started a relationship in the 1950s. In a 1976 edition of History Workshop Journal they wrote,
“To give some idea of the progress of our bibliomania we have to go back to our courting days. We both had a small library of political and historical books, about a bookcase each. Unfortunately they were complementary and the temptation to put them together proved too strong to resist. Tokens of our mutual esteem began to swell the numbers…..”
They were motivated by their desire to create a long lasting, unique and important resource for the movement. When explaining why they continued to collect they said,
“The answer to that must lie in a deep conviction that there is a value in what you are trying to do. In our case the conviction is political. 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. Recognizing this we set out to gather a library of books and ephemera relating to the labour movement in its broadest aspects. To do so we have travelled the length and breadth of the country buying, taking into care and gathering together the history of the working class and its allies in the many struggles which have taken place over the past two hundred years since the developments associated with the industrial revolution”.
They spent their weekends travelling the country in their caravan, slowly adding to their collection. Their increasingly large book and archive collection began to take over their modest home on Kings Road in Stretford, Manchester, where they welcomed visitors who were able to browse and learn from their collection and to talk to them about politics and history.
In 1987 looking for a more appropriate home for their collection they came across Jubilee House, a building owned by Salford City Council. They came to an arrangement with the council who allowed them to use it as a public home for the collection and as a home for them to live in.
During their time at Jubilee House, Ruth and Eddie continued to add to the collection, increasingly focusing on the ephemera and unique material culture of the movement which they considered to be at risk if not cared for and kept as a resource for the future. This produced an unrivaled collection of books and periodicals, unique archival material and art that when explored together gives a powerful insight working class movement history. Since 1987 the library has opened its doors to all to encourage research into the archive and to provide a space for working class activism to flourish.
Ruth and Eddie were members of the Communist Party Great Britain but it was particularly important to them that the library remained independent and non-sectarian reflecting the breadth of debate and history on the Left. In a newspaper article in 1976 Eddie explained of the collection,
“We have tried to orientate it more to the Labour movement than to any particular aspect of it. Communism is a minority aspect – we go all the way from left to right from anarchism to Lib-Labism”.
The library is also the home of the Frow’s personal archive which includes over 160 boxes of their personal material such as letters, photographs, scrapbooks and details of own campaigning and writing.