Class Cohesion and Trade-Union Internationalism: Fred Bramley, the British TUC, and the Anglo-Russian Advisory Council

Abstract

AbstractA prevailing image of the British trade-union movement is that it was insular and slow-moving. The Anglo-Russian Advisory Council of the mid-1920s is an episode apparently difficult to reconcile with this view. In the absence to date of any fully adequate explanation of its gestation, this article approaches the issue biographically, through the TUC's first full-time secretary, Fred Bramley (1874–1925). Themes emerging strongly from Bramley's longer history as a labour activist are, first, a pronouncedly latitudinarian conception of the Labour movement and, second, a forthright labour internationalism deeply rooted in Bramley's trade-union experience. In combining these commitments in the form of an inclusive trade-union internationalism, Bramley in 1924–1925 had the indispensable support of the TUC chairman, A.A. Purcell who, like him, was a former organizer in the small but militantly internationalist Furnishing Trades’ Association. With Bramley's early death and Purcell's marginalization, the Anglo-Russian Committee was to remain a largely anomalous episode in the interwar history of the TUC.