Reviews
John Tully, Silvertown: The lost story of a strike that shook London and helped launch the modern labour movement, Lawrence & Wishart, 2014, 288 pages, paperback ISBN 9781907103995, £17.99 [published in the U.S. by Monthly Review Press]
When I saw Silvertown, the title of this book, and discovered that it was about industrial action in 1889, I immediately thought ‘great, I need to
know more about the London Dock strike’. How wrong was I! I live in the region where this major industrial battle was staged. I knew nothing of it, though I have travelled many times to Woolwich Arsenal and then linked onto the London Docklands Light Railway through the very area where this all took place. This story is about industrial unrest and then action against a commercial company that today would be described as a multinational…
…This is a detailed book written by an academic who not only knows his subject and how to gather his research in a coherent way, but who also writes with an empathy and clear grasp of the desperations of these supposedly ordinary people who determined to take on a multinational British-based company at the centre of the British Empire and its establishment. These workers were opposed by all the British industrialists for fear of what might happen if another group of supposedly ‘unskilled’ workers won their dispute. Tully lays out all of the arguments and often refers to the modern day, reflecting actual successes of trades unionists born out of this alleged defeat…
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