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Isaac Abbott

Born: 1817 Earl Shilton, died 13^th February 1892 (Liberal & Elastic Weavers’ Association)

For many years Isaac Abbott worked as a glove hand and later stocking maker in Earl Shilton. During the 1860s, he moved to Leicester and was involved in setting up a framework knitting co-operative which aimed to distribute its profits to its workers.

In 1869, he became the secretary of the forerunner of the Trades Council. It was a body which brought together the committees of the Labourers, Trimmers, Hose Shirt and Drawers and Sock And Top Union to discuss matters of common interest. In 1871, he was working as a commercial traveller which may have been for a co-operative enterprise. Soon after, he became secretary to the Elastic Weavers’ Association.

Abbott seems to have had a good turn of phrase, writing that “the restless spirit of competition must not forever go unchallenged, immolating its myriad victims like an insatiable Juggernaut.” He was also critical of the “spaniel breed who lick the hand that smites them by telling the overlooker if they know of anyone joining a union.” In 1873, he had the Trades Council’s support as a workingman candidate for the School Board, but stepped down before the election took place.

During the 1870s, Abbott became a member of the board of the Leicester Co-operative Society and was a keen supporter of co-operative production where there was greater worker participation. He was disparaging about the new West End works run by the Co-operative Wholesale Society and described it as being “hardly based on his ideas of the co-operative principle.”  In 1872, a group of Leicester Web Weavers formed the Co-operative Manufacturing Society of Leicester, a producers’ co-operative that manufactured webs for the local shoe trade. Abbott became a shareholder along with John Butcher of the Co-operative Union, who assisted with the co-op’s formation. Soon most of the society’s trade was with the C.W.S. factory, now managed by Butcher, who acted as the co-op’s agent. Abbott seems to have distanced himself from this enterprise and called for it to be re-established. After making substantial losses, a new co-op was registered in 1878.

On June 6th 1874, around 22 local employers (including prominent Liberals and Radicals like Michael Wright) locked out their workforce in the elastic web trade until the workers agreed to work on new terms and conditions. Whilst the employers’ association imported ‘knobsticks’ (blacklegs) in order to break the strike, the newly formed Trades Council made a levy to support the weavers. Abbott played a leading role in the dispute which affected around 1,000 local workers and lasted seven weeks.

As men drifted back to work, the Weavers’ Association conceded defeat and there was a return to work on July 24th. Two association men were sentenced to hard labour for assault on blacklegs and soon after the return to work, the employers cut wages. Three months after the dispute Abbott complained that the

“employers have adopted ‘blacklists’ with a vengeance-that men have been walking the streets for months, and are still doing so, for no other crime than for refusing to accept conditions which they thought would be injurious to them. There has been a ‘reign of terror’ instituted in their factories for the purpose of coercing them men into submission to a species of slavery which finds no parallel in the history of any trade union in Leicester.”

Following the strike, Abbott may have suffered victimisation himself since the 1881 census gives his occupation as a shoe dealer. Abbott was a teetotaller and a Liberal, but during the 1874 local elections he nominated a Tory (and ex publican), in protest at the prominence of employers within the Liberal Party. Despite this, he remained an active Liberal, though, by 1886, he was finding common ground with socialists like Tom Barclay. and chaired meetings of the Socialist League.

Sources: Nottingham Journal,13th August 1868, Midlands Free Press, 15th April 1871, 17th Oct 1874, 10th April 1875, 27^th March 1886, Benjamin Jones, Co-operative Production, 1894, Leicester Co-operative Society, (1898) Co-operation in Leicester  Census returns, 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871.

Alex Acheson

Born: 1^st June 1912, died: May 1996 (Labour Party & International Marxist Group)

Frank Acton

Born: 27^th Mar, 1876, died: December1952 (I.L.P.& Labour Party)

Frank Acton left St Leonard’s School and went to work at the age of 12 in a hosiery factory and joined the Hosiery Trimmers’ Society in 1890. However, ill health compelled him to leave factory work and he became a carter employed by Leicester Town Council. In 1913, he became secretary of Municipal Employees Association and later the district organiser of the N.U.G.M.W. In 1920, he was elected for Wyggeston ward to the Town Council by 60 votes in a bye-election. He was president of the Trades Council in 1920 and was also chairman of the Mental Health Hospital. He had the Labour whip withdrawn in Oct 1933, when he abstained on a vote on slum clearance. In 1937, he became Lord Mayor and an alderman in 1944. He retired from the Council in 1948.

Dorothy M. Adams

(Communist Party)

During the 1930s, Dorothy Adams was a teacher at Collegiate Girls Grammar School. She joined the Communist Party in 1935, but took a low profile because she was a teacher. She was still a member in the 1970s. She attended technical school to learn cobbling so she could teach her sixth form girls how to mend the shoes of the Basque refugees being housed at Evington Hall. In the late thirties she took in a refugee, ‘Ungar,’ a Jewish bank manager who had managed to get into Britain with a false passport. She was active in Leicester Peace Council, the Left Book Club and the Leicester British-Soviet Friendship Committee, during and after World War 2. 

Sources: Interview with author, Leicester Oral History Archive 1983

Sam N. Adams

Born: Hinton, Northamptonshire, 9^th January 1885 (Labour Party)

Sam Adams left school at the age of 13 and worked on a dairy farm before he started work on the Great Central Railway. In 1905, he joined the Slough branch of the A.S.R.S. and was active in the adult school movement. In 1911, he returned to Northamptonshire where he was a parish, rural district councillor and member of the Board of Guardians until 1920. He was the first workingman to be appointed as a J.P. in Daventry. He was a life long abstainer.

In 1920 he came to Leicester where he was employed on the Great Central as a railway carriage examiner or wheel tapper. He became president of No 3 branch of the N.U.R. and was elected president of the Labour Party in 1925. In 1927, he was elected to the board of the L.C.S. He believed that Co-operation, particularly productive Co-operation was the greatest practical challenge to capitalism. He became chairman of the Leicester Co-operative Printers during the 1920s.

In the 1930s he was elected to the City Council and following Amos Mann’s retirement, c.1936, he was elected as president of Leicester Co-operative Society. He was also active in the National Council of Labour Colleges and in the late 1930s he became a member of the Left Book Club. In 1939 he told a crowd of 5,000 at the De Montfort Hall Co-operative Day Celebrations:

“We would remind you of the Munich policy, of the betrayal of the League of Nations, of the Appeasement of Fascist aggressors, of the cold shoulder of peace loving nations and the consequent endangerment of world security. The National Government’s foreign policy record is a trail of defeat and disaster in Spain, Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania and the Far East. Peace and freedom have been betrayed and young men conscripted.”

Sources: Leicester Co-operative Magazine, August 1939, election address 1927

Thomas Adnitt

Born: 14^th June, 1868, Cold Ashby, Northants (I.L.P.& Labour Party)

Thomas Adnitt’s father was a farm labourer, earning 14/- a week and c1873, he and his family moved to Leicester. After leaving King Richards Board School, Thomas was apprenticed to a cigar maker. He had been told by the headmaster that he would “grow up to be a lounger and spend a great deal of his time standing on street corners smoking a clay pipe.”

Unable to find work in the cigar trade, he went into the boot and shoe trade in 1896 at the time of the great lock-out. He was later sacked as a result of trade union activity. In 1919, he was elected as a full-time union official and was elected onto the National Executive of N.U.B.S.O. in 1921. He was elected president of the Trades Council in 1919 and was a Labour Town Councillor for Belgrave from 1912-22 and for Latimer from 1923. Despite being crippled by an accident in early life, he was secretary of a swimming club. He was a Methodist and member of the Belgrave Adult School.

Sources: Leicester Pioneer, 23^rd May 1924

Mary Attenborough

Born: Sawley, Long Eaton, Derbyshire, 1896, died 1961

Mary was the oldest of five children. Her father Samuel Clegg was the head teacher of Long Eaton School. Frederick Attenborough worked in her father's school and although fifteen years older than Mary, they married in 1922. 

The couple moved to Leicester when Frederick became Principal of the University College in 1932. Mary became a founding member of Marriage Guidance Council and in 1934 she set up the Soroptimist Club in Leicester. She worked for the National Council of Women, Leicester branch, the Leicester Women’s luncheon club and set up the Leicester Women’s Peace committee.

Mary became an ardent supporter of the Republican cause in Spain and became secretary of the Leicester Committee for Basque Children. From July 1937, the committee ran a school and accommodation at Evington Hall which provided for 50 Basque refugee children. Many local people took the refugee children into their homes and the school was supported by donations from the Labour Movement. Despite letters to the press, usually from local fascists, Mary was adamant about not sending any children back to Spain until all danger was over.

"If we can send back children to parents with homes to receive them, then we think that they should go, whether the parents are in Nationalist or Government Spain – but we will not deliver the children up to their parents’ enemies"

Many of the children stayed until the end of the war and eventually Evington Hall closed down. (It later became a convent and is now the Krishna Avanti School)

In addition to her work with the Basques, Frederick and Mary Attenborough also took in two German Jewish girls, Helga and Irene Bejach, for nearly seven years. They came to England under the “Kindertransport” programme and went to the local girls’ grammar school. They became the much-loved “sisters” to Richard and David. Richard, said:

“It gave me an understanding of what it was to be Jewish, and taught me to loathe prejudice and persecution. Frankly, I would never have been interested in making both Gandhi and Cry Freedom without that experience of the girls.”

When Mary heard of the death of the Bejach girls’ parents, the Attenborough’s adopted them. Mary took such great care of their education and in a letter to the girls’ uncle on their return to Germany, she described in detail the decisions she had taken, recognising both the girls’ interests and wellbeing.

Mary Attenborough chaired the Board of the Leicester Little Theatre for many years (and in which the teenage Richard Attenborough made his first stage appearances). Mary Attenborough was tragically killed in a road accident in her sixties

Sources: Leicester Mercury, 3^rd August 1938, Richard Brooks, The Sunday Times, November 30, 2008, Richard Graves, The Life and Times of Mary Attenborough (1896 - 1961)

© Ned Newitt Last revised: September 13, 2024.