What started as a personal collection of labour movement papers has grown into a substantial archive for local, national and inter-national working-class history. Now it has found a home and work is under way to catalogue its contents, writes Peter Higgins.
THE BIRMINGHAM People’s History Archive (BPHA) has been a project long in the planning stage. When Paul Cooper, the archive’s creator, was a student of history at the University of Liverpool, he began buying up labour movement periodicals and never stopped. For the next twenty years friends, family and colleagues left materials with him, or he bought them from sales, often from individuals departing the labour movement after long service. Along the way a serious collection of material was built up, thanks to the combined work and care of many different people.
When Covid struck and access to archives was restricted, a chance request from a Masters student looking for materials took the project to the next level. Gill Binnie, now the archive’s lead volunteer, was completing her MA in unprecedented times for research students. A retired teacher of many years’ experience, Gill was impressed with the range of materials that had been gathered together and came out of lockdown determined to help the materials find a wider audience. Both Paul and Gill are active in local history societies in Birmingham and they decided to draw on the advice of leading local history enthusiasts and Professor Kevin Morgan at the University of Manchester, whose books Paul had read as a student. The end product was the Birmingham People’s History Archive.
Over the past year a group of volunteers from diverse backgrounds have moved the materials to their new home in the Birmingham and Midland Institute.
The collection of local, national, and international working-class history materials has far too many books to fit into the modest room at the BMI, so with many of these in storage the archive concentrates on papers which are archival. One end of the room has folders containing unseen and unpublished papers of leading Fabians, and at the other end a collection of books on the social, political and economic history of the West Midlands which belonged to the late George Barnsby, a noted historian of working class movements in the Black Country. The collection is diverse but includes a wide array of newspapers, minute papers, leaflets, adverts and calls to action from a myriad of anti-colonial groups active from the 1960s through to the 1980s, including major organisations such as Swapo, the ANC and Zanu, and their support groups in Britain.
There are the periodicals and papers of dozens of groups which split from the Communist Party of Great Britain, trade unions, women’s liberation and anti-racist organisations as well as the largest collection of material relating to the Indian Workers Association known to be publicly available.
The BPHA spent much of 2021-22 working with the National Archives to develop the records and catalogue (which has some considerable way still to go). In late 2022, Historic England awarded the BPHA one of fifty-seven grants to gather stories of working-class heritage. Birmingham, like many cities, has changed so much in the past 50 years; the BPHA project will collect and preserve workers’ experiences of the city’s recent industrial past.
Looking to the future, the BPHA, with its focus on anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist topics, has partnered with the Birmingham Race Impact Group to support a project in 2024 to uncover the history of Birmingham’s civil rights movement and would like to secure funding to open its doors to students and researchers on a more permanent basis.
Peter Higgins is a volunteer and director of the Birmingham People’s History Archive.
Using the archive
Access to the archive is currently by appointment only. Please email moseleyroadclub@gmail.com if you have a research query or would like to visit.
Find out more from the BPHA website
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