The following review appeared in the October 2014 issue of CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries
Tully, John. Silvertown: the lost story of a strike that shook London and helped launch the modern labor movement. Monthly Review, 2014. 267p bibl index ISBN 9781583674345, $28.95.
Tully (politics and history, Victoria Univ., Australia) is a committed author with a fine ear for the apt and evocative phrase, whether it be from Bertolt Brecht, Jack London, or Karl Marx. The story he has to tell is that of an unsuccessful strike that took place at London’s massive Silvertown works in the wake of the more famous match girls strike of 1888 and the London dock strike of 1889. Situated in West Ham, Silvertown employed more than 2,000 men and women in the production of an array of rubber and gutta-percha products, undoubtedly the most important of which was undersea cables for the electric telegraph. The story itself is a disheartening one of low wages, long hours, dangerous working conditions, and an employer’s determination to resist, supported by police action. If this sounds depressingly familiar to those acquainted with British history of the last 30 years, it is intended to be so. Tully does a fine job of making the issues accessible to non-experts on both sides of the Atlantic, and situating the strike within the context of the political struggles of the day.
–J. A. Jaffe, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater
Summing Up: Highly recommended. General, public, and undergraduate libraries.
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