LOUGHLIN, Anne (Dame) (1894-1979)

TRADE UNION LEADER

Anne Loughlin was born on 28 June 1894 in Leeds. Her father, Thomas, was a boot and shoe operative of Irish descent. Her childhood was a short one since the death of her mother when Anne was twelve imposed on her the adult task of caring for her four sisters (two of whom were to go on to marry trade union officials). When she was sixteen her father died and Anne became the family breadwinner, starting work in a Leeds clothing factory for 3d an hour. Despite, or perhaps because of, this early hardship Anne developed a strong sense of the importance of glamour to the young working women she was to represent.

Anne’s progression from factory girl to full-time union worker is not recorded. However in 1915, at the age of twenty one, she became a full-time organiser for the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers (NUTGW) – the union to which she was to devote her whole career. The following year she took charge of a strike of 6000 clothing workers in Hebden Bridge. Anne soon showed a talent for journalism, and a recognition of the sorts of things that would make young women read the union paper, The Garment Worker. She penned a series of articles in the late 1920s entitled ‘The Woman Worker At Home’, in which she instructed ‘bachelor girls’ on diet (tips on various ways to cook eggs), exercise and make-up. Throughout the 1920s the clothing workers, especially in London, were confronted with increased rationalisation and the growing use of lower-paid female workers. In spite of what was assumed to be increased productivity, earnings remained low and there was a growing discontent among the workforce in general. This was exacerbated by the feeling that the union was doing little to defend their interests. The NUTGW was based in Leeds and most full-time officials came from the Leeds region; the London membership felt divorced from the centre of union power. There was also religious differences that heightened the tensions. The London membership was mainly Jewish and Protestant while the Catholic minority in Leeds provided most of the leading officials: the National Secretary (Andrew Conley) was a Catholic, as was the London District Secretary (Bernard Sullivan), and there was Anne herself.

The London organiser of the NUTGW was Sam Elsbury, founder member of the Communist Party and as combative a personality as Andrew Conley. In October 1928 the London Rego factory dispute began what was to be a bitter struggle within the union and led to the establishment of a breakaway union in early March 1929. The story is told in detail in Lerner [(1961) 94-143], and summarised in Martin [(1969) 136-42] and Branson [(1985) 42-3]. The political background of the breakaway union was shaped by the ‘class against class’ policies elaborated during the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928. Elsbury was a vigorous supporter of the new line. The United Clothing Workers at first recruited rapidly in London, with quite substantial minorities in Leeds and Glasgow. However it ran into serious difficulties over strike action within two months of its formation. Apart from bitter hostility from Andrew Conley, backed by the TUC, there were growing problems with strategy and tactics within the Communist Party, which led ultimately to Elsbury’s expulsion. By 1933 the United Clothing Workers was a small group in the East End of London with about two hundred members, and it was finally disbanded in 1935.

Anne Loughlin moved into the top leadership of the union during the 1930s. This was a period of constant technological change, and in assimilating these changes and their implications she developed skills that would be put to great use during the Second World War. In December 1939 she was appointed to the advisory panel for the production of army clothing. She also served on the Ministry of Labour and National Service subcommittee on the wholesale clothing trade, and she was a valued member of the Bevin-created board dealing with industrial welfare. The challenges for the union were great during the war and its aftermath – acute labour shortages (with the loss of over a third of its workers to the forces and urgent war work), concentration of the industry and the rationing of materials. But wartime brought personal fulfilment for Anne. In 1942 she was elected as chairman of the General Council of the TUC (upon which she had served since 1929). She was only the second woman, after Margaret Bondfield, to hold this post and the first to preside at the annual conference (Bondfield missed out on this, having been called on to serve in the Ministry of Labour early in her year as Chairman). Profiles of Anne at the time made much of her broad organising experience and her foreign travel – to the United States (to look at methods of clothing production), Russia (soon after the revolution), Czechoslovakia and Switzerland.

In 1943 Anne was made a Dame, an honour she accepted in the belief that it would open doors for the union. She went on to serve on the Royal Commission on Equal Pay (1944-46) and was one of its honourable dissenting voices. She felt strongly that there was no justification for paying women less than men for the same job and argued that the introduction of equal pay would not have the destabilising effects prophesised in the main report by the Commission. In 1947 Anne was a much quoted opponent of Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ – a fashion whose long, full skirts raised much concern not just about fabric usage, but also about its impracticality for the modern emancipated woman.

In 1948 Anne took over from her mentor and close friend Andrew Conley as union General Secretary. Her election was by no means a foregone conclusion since there were several strong candidates. In particular it was thought that the communist Mick Mindel stood some chance (in the atmosphere of 1947) and the anticommunist cause was represented by the long-serving (since 1905), devoutly Catholic Bernard Sullivan. Anne undoubtedly benefited from Conley’s recognition of her talents. The historians of the union described his ability, via ‘a mixture of Irish blarney, charm and sheer inspiration’, to persuade young women in the NUTGW that not only were they up to the job of union organiser but that they could do it better than most men [Stewart and Hunter, (1964) 169]. Conley made special efforts to press the case for Anne’s election as General Secretary, canvassing the support of key members of the executive. This was motivated not just by his admiration for her, but also by his fear of what factionalism could to a union which had won its unity only with great effort (after a complicated amalgamation and the earlier attempt at a breakaway by the communist-led National Minority Movement).

The union did in fact utilise the skills of a number of talented women, notably the pioneering Leeds organiser Bertha Quinn and Edith Maycock (the union’s first woman chairman, elected to the post in 1945) but Anne stood out with her much remarked upon oratorical skills. Those who knew her have commented on her ability to express complex arguments lucidly and in terms that everyone could understand (she had a pronounced West Riding accent). Employers respected this barely five foot tall woman and she could gain concessions that others could not. She was not afraid to speak out about the injustices she found – whether these were in small, back-street clothing workshops or in large public companies employing thousands of clothing workers. But she was equally quick to laud those firms which introduced welfare facilities. What the union’s historians called her dynamic personality stood Anne in good stead on the public occasions for which she was a popular choice. Whether it was laying the foundation stone for a new factory, speaking at a professional association dinner or prize giving at a technical college (she believed passionately in the need for a well-skilled work-force), this ‘sensible, fine-featured woman’dressed ‘as neatly as the women in her union…would desire’ [Glasgow Citizen, 15 Sep 1942] would rise to the occasion. Her verbal skills could sometimes be used less positively, however, and she was known to have a rough tongue when dealing with some of her colleagues.

Her great professional disappointment came in this postwar period with the dissolution of the Clothing Industry Development Council (CIDC). There had been calls for something of this nature in the deliberations of the Heavy Clothing Working Party (published in 1947), upon which Anne had served, along with other union representatives and employers. What was proposed was a central body that would, among other things, carry out scientific research, promote training and improve marketing and design. Anne keenly felt the need for this. In her speech to the 1943 TUC Annual Conference she stressed that the way to ‘produce conditions of social justice, equality and well being’ was through planning and regulation. In clothing there was a particular need to make the industry attractive to the many skilled clothing workers who had discovered during the war that other industries offered better wages, conditions and stability, and were therefore refusing to return to tailoring. Plans for the CIDC were announced by the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, in March 1948. Employers, to Anne’s distress, were unhappy about the proposals – in particular, the compulsory levy and the almost equal representation offered to unions as to employers’ organisations. However the orchestrated protest by the employers was not enough to stop parliamentary approval of the establishment of the CIDC in November 1949. But in late 1952, shortly after Anne had announced her retirement from the post of General Secretary due to ill-health, the council was dissolved and replaced by an equally short-lived, and less effective, voluntary body. Anne was also distressed at the ending of the utility scheme in the same year.

Anne’s retirement was a long one. Despite the ill-health that had dogged her working years she lived on until 1979. She had always maintained a private life separate from the union (she loved to spend time at her riverside cottage and turned down many invitations to conferences and functions). On retirement she made a clean break with the union and there appear to be no records of what she did during her remaining years. In 1975 the NUTGW marked International Women’s Year with a plaque in the executive boardroom (renamed the Anne Loughlin room) marking her achievements. It was unveiled by the TUC General Secretary, Len Murray. Anne herself was too ill to attend but was represented by one of her sisters, Agnes McLaughlin. Four years later, on 15 July 1979 she died intestate, leaving £33 419 net (34 159 gross).

Sources: (1) 75^th Annual Trades Union Congress (1943); Royal Commission on Equal Pay, Cmd 6937 (144-46); Board of Trade Working Party Reports: Heavy Clothing (1947); NUTGW, The Garment Worker (1926-79); NUTGW, Executive Board Minutes and Circulars (1927-52); archives, Working Class Movement Library, Salford, and Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. (2) Other: ‘Sex War at TUC. Dancing a Way into the Unions’, Daily Chronicle, 2 Sep 1934; ‘Leeds Woman TUC chairman’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 11 Sep 1942, and News Chronicle, 12 Sep 1942, Daily Mirror, 12 Sep 1942, Glasgow Citizen, 15 Sep 1942; R. Butterworth, ‘The Structure and Organisation of some Catholic lay organisations in Australia and Great Britain’ (University of Oxford D.Phil thesis, 1959); S. Lerner, ‘The United Clothing Workers’ Union’, in Breakaway Unions and the Small Trade Union (1961); M. Stewart and L. Hunter, The Needle is Threaded (1964); P. Phillips, ‘The New Look’, in M. Sissons and P. French (eds), Age of Austerity (Oxford University Press, 1986); R. Martin, Communism and the British Trade Unions, 1924-1933. A Study of the National Minority Movement (Oxford University Press, 1969); N. Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1927-1941 (1985). Personal Information, Mr Jack Macgougan. Obit. Guardian, 16 July 1979; Daily Telegraph, 19 July 1979; The Garment Worker, Aug 1979; 111^th Annual Trades Union Congress (1979).

JOAN KEATING