Ruth and Edmund Frow – founders of Salford’s Working Class Movement Library – were heroes, not just to the city of Salford, but to an entire movement of working people.
The red-bricked building that we all pass along the A6 by the University of Salford campus is home to the impressive archive of books and memorabilia collected by the pair. But Salford has long been a hub for the labour movement. Just down the same stretch of Chapel Street, the Crescent Pub, formerly named The Red Dragon, saw Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels forming the basis of The Communist Manifesto.
After the Frows met in the 1950s at a Communist Party day school in Sussex, they travelled the British Isles in their Morris van for 25 years, collecting anything related to the labour and communist movements.
The pair were an inspiration in a romantic and political sense. They wrote in an edition of History Workshop Journal from 1976 that their separate bookshelves during their time of courting were “complementary and the temptation to put them together proved too strong to resist. Tokens of our mutual esteem began to swell the numbers”.
However, the pair’s love was put to the test because they had both been previously married. As a result they were encouraged to spend a year living apart in order to avoid any scandal for the Communist Party. During this time, Ruth worked in Liverpool, but after a couple of years apart, they decided to cohabit and ultimately marry in 1961.
Eventually, their collection became too extensive to store in their caravan any longer. The pair moved the archives to their house on King’s Road in Stretford. Here they held open days to the public for people to study and share thoughts on things such as trade unionism, the labour party, the communist movement and the history of Manchester.
In 1987, when looking for a bigger and better space to share their books, Salford City Council provided them with the former nurses’ home, Jubilee House (now known as the Working Class Movement Library), as a place to store and share their multitudes of books, pamphlets and photographs.
Ruth was a trailblazing woman in many respects. At the time of their meeting, Ruth had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain for eight years, and had taken on many roles within the party. She also joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1940, despite being underage and sat on the committee of both the British Peace Movement and the Manchester Peace Movement.
She was later elected as vice-chairman of the Manchester Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament when the group was formed in 1958.
Her teaching career eventually led to her becoming Deputy Head of Parrs Wood Comprehensive in Didsbury and President of Altrincham National Union of Teachers in 1970.
Ruth lived an active life, remaining present in the WCML in Salford long after Edmund’s death in 1997, up until two days before her own passing in 2008.
Their legacy is perhaps best reflected in their own words as to why they collected and shared their books and collections
“The answer to that must lie in a deep conviction that there is a value in what you are trying to do. In our case the conviction is political.
“We know that eventually there will be a change in our social system; that the country will be governed by those who produce the wealth; that there will be a need and a longing to know what preceded these changes.
“Recognising this we set out to gather a library of books and ephemera relating to the labour movement in its broadest aspects.
“To do so we have travelled the length and breadth of the country buying, taking into care and gathering together the history of the working class and its allies in the many struggles which have taken place over the past two hundred years since the developments associated with the industrial revolution”.
