The event kicked off with an introduction by the chair of the Manchester BME Network Atiha Chaudry who also gave some of the partners a chance to talk about their Defra-funded research and findings. This included Michelle Ayavoro from Creative Hands and Kate Damiral from NCVO. I sadly missed this but arrived in time to sample some the workshops.

After listening into the ‘understanding the impact of climate change’ presentation I wandered into the community involvement workshop run by Catrina Pickering from Afsl. All attendees were given some handouts about projects in Manchester and were told to discuss them in pairs and share back to the group. I happened to walk in just as the group were enthusing about how great Manchester Climate Monthly was (my work here is done!) so I was pretty impressed. All the attendees got to talk about projects they wanted to share with others and also ask for help. Pretty cool stuff but I’m clearly biased.

Talking to various people during lunchtime, it’s clear that whilst they were happy that the awareness-raising event (funded by Defra as part of the research) was happening, they were wondering ‘what next?’. I sat down with Atiha Chaudry and asked her that very question. Here’s what she said:

The final report with all the findings and also the toolkit will be available next month.

Manchester is one of over twenty cities which has made an official bid to host the Green Investment Bank (GIB) which will be government-funded to the tune of £3 billion. The bank is expected to funnel £15 billion of private finance into green projects over four years and employ up to 70 members of staff. Its main areas of work will be offshore wind, energy from waste, waste processing/recycling, non-domestic energy efficiency and supporting the Green Deal. The final decision on which city gets the bank will be made by Vince Cable, aided by an advisory panel, this February and the bank will be launched April 2012.

MCFly: Why do you want the Green Investment Bank to come to Manchester and what do you think will be the major benefits for the city?

Ashcroft: We see the Green Investment Bank as a key part of the low carbon agenda and we really want to be a success. We believe that the best to ensure that success is here in Manchester.

I think from a Manchester perspective we see three levels of benefits. Firstly, there is the installation cost of having the bank here which will bring in revenue in terms of rents rates and services – so there is a direct benefit in that respect. It will also bring 52,000 [UPDATE: should read "50 to 70" - transcription error on MCFly's part]  new jobs into Manchester which would be quite key and will mean new high profile jobs in the city. Thirdly, is the spin-off from 3 billion investment programme which could well spiral into 200 or 400 billion. So there are enormous benefits to the city and we also believe that we are the best place to guarantee its success.

MCFly: The government set out three criteria that each city or area making a bid had to fulfill. These are 1) the ability to recruit and retain staff with the necessary specialist expertise 2) presence of a specialist businesses ecosystem and 3) cost effectiveness. Do you feel Manchester meets these criteria?

Ashcroft: Manchester is well-placed both nationally as and regionally as well as internationally due to Manchester Airport to be able to make the most of the Green Investment Bank. In terms of the strength of the financial sector, we’ve got the strongest financial services sector outside of London, we have enormous private equity groups so in terms of the local ecosystem to support the Green Investment Bank, Manchester does very well. Another strength is that Manchester has quite a compact economy.

MCFly: London is clearly quite a serious contender due to the fact that it is already a strong financial hub. Can Manchester compete with the capital city?

Ashcroft: Based on the three criteria, I think Manchester can compete very well against London. And in terms of economics, Manchester offers a very compact economic solution which takes London out of the equation. But let’s face it, there are 22 cities and places which are competing for the Green Investment Bank so it’s a hot topic and there is a lot of interest from all types of places. You have interest from place like Scotland, Wales, Cardiff and Peterborough but nevertheless we feel that on all the criteria, Manchester comes on top in pretty much all of them.

MCFly: I understand that Manchester is offering low rates of rent to show the cost effectiveness of hosting the bank in the city. Is Manchester doing anything else to make sure its bid is successful?

Ashcroft: Technically, we didn’t lower the rents. There were some misquotes relating to how much it would cost to bring the Green Investment Bank to Manchester and so we want to say that you could bring in big banking projects and investment into the heart in Manchester, into Spinningfields which could be the equivalent of London’s Canary Wharf let’s say, and you could do that for less than £20 per square foot. It’s not that we are giving cut price deals, we are just offering attractive market rates which demonstrate how well Manchester competes with any other city in the UK.

MCFly: A blip saw Manchester’s Green Investment Bank website accidentally appear with text from the Leeds’ bid for the Bank. Do you think this may have damaged your campaign?

Ashcroft: There was no issue with regards to our website. I mean, we had a website under development through December and our final site was launched successfully. There was no issue as far as we were concerned- it was a blip, a fleeting moment which nobody saw apart from one journalist. It was a drop for 30 seconds and it was supposed to have lorem ipsom and latin text up there. If you look at the website now, it shows what we’ve been doing and the enormous commitment from key players from Manchester. All the big players have pulled together to support this bid and have committed to video content which is great. We are very proud of our website and the finished product.

MCFly: The Green Investment Bank won’t have full borrowing powers until 2016 at the earliest. Friends of the Earth have said that in order to avoid being a lame duck bank, GIB must be able to undertake independent borrowing from capital markets. Will this be a problem if the bank comes to Manchester?

Ashcroft: There are many ways that the fund can be amplified whether its through leverage borrowing or join venturing with partners. There are lots of ways that the issue of borrowing can be dealt with.

MCFly: The decision on which city will be chosen to host the Green Investment Bank is due in February 2012. What will happen between now and when the decision is made?

Ashcroft: We’re currently working with our parlimentary group of MP’s to make sure that they are fully briefed and we are going to be deciding with them over the coming week what the programme will be that we taking to the House of Commons.

The key date is the 30^th of January as documents have to be submitted by then and all our attention is focused on getting the final document together. In fact, we had a meeting just today to look at that and that document has to be submitted by 5pm on the 30th. After that, the the decision will take place pretty quickly we think and we expect a decision in February some time.

MCFly: As you mentioned before, there is a lot of competition to host the Green Investment Bank. What happens if Manchester isn’t chosen? Will the city still be able to take advantage of the opportunities it provides?

Ashcroft: We want the Green Investment Bank to be a success and we believe that the best place for it to succeed is in Manchester. We will be demonstrating the strengths of Manchester as a location for inwards investment and indeed for any financial banking proposition. However, the green investment agenda is enormous and the 3 billion kickstarter for the bank is essentially backing up what could be a 400 billion investment programme in terms of energy loans. It’s going to be a key component of the economy and so, yes, there will be benefits for everyone even if it is based in Manchester. There will be spin-offs nationally.

:: Green Bank Manchester.
:: John Ashcroft is the chief executive at pro.manchester which is a professional services group.

Arwa Aburawa
mcmonthly@gmail.com

: Originally published at Manchester Climate Monthly

Set up in 1999, the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Centre was named after a Bangladeshi boy murdered in a racially motivated attack in Burnage in 1986. It is a resource centre on everything from the criminal justice system in the United States to the history of the local Pakistani community of Manchester.

Louis Kushnick OBE is the driving force behind the centre and has been involved in race relation issues in Manchester since the late 1960s. It was his personal collection of books, journals, articles and news cuttings that formed the basis of the archive which is located in the University of Manchester campus today. Arwa Aburawa spoke to him about the history of the centre, the projects it has worked on, the changes he has witnessed in the education system and the impact of the recent government cuts on the centre’s future.

Louis Kushnick, who was born in Brooklyn and studied at Yale, came for a one-year scholarship at the University of Manchester in 1963 and decided to stay. Now a retired professor, he has worked as a senior lecturer at the university for forty years, alongside other responsibilities such as chairing the Research Institute for Race Relations and editing the quarterly journal ‘Race Relations Abstracts’. By 1998, he had acquired such a substantial amount of material on race relations issues that it required a separate office to house it.

“It was getting out of hand so the question was well what do we do with it?,” he recalls. “A group of us got together and decided that if we gave all this material to the University of Manchester John Rylands library it would continue to used by academics but that would be it. So what we wanted to do is create some sort of centre that anyone could access.” As there was no money available for a centre, the group approached Martin Harris, vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester at the time, to ask for financial assistance. Harris agreed to support the project as it would be located within the university and he hoped it would help encourage a greater diversity of people to attend the university, which had a reputation as a place for white, upper-middle class students.

The group was given a space behind the Blackwell’s bookshop on Oxford Road which had been empty for some time; the rent was paid by the University. Once the premises had been cleaned, the group bought some cheap shelving and started moving books into the archive, categorizing them with the support of MMU postgraduate students.

The Centre Opens & The Macpherson Report

The formal opening of the centre was on February 9th 1999 and in the same week, the Macpherson Report, which identified institutional racism not only in the Metropolitan police but also in the wider criminal justice system, was launched. “I remember that on Radio Manchester that morning, Selina (the oldest daughter of the Ullah family) said that for what it was worth, at least her family got some sort of closure as the boy who killed Ahmed was convicted. She thought the Steven Lawrence family would never get that and she was right.”

When the centre opened there were three people sharing a 0.5 post which was paid for by the University of Manchester. However, the money soon ran out and so the group began looking for more support which they soon found in the Progress Trust, which works to ensure that BME communities in Greater Manchester access urban regeneration funding. The funding allowed the centre to expand its activities beyond its focus on keeping the centre open for visitors, to creating outreach programmes for teachers and working with schools.

Murder and Racism in the Playground

Working in the the education sector, racism in education and the power of anti-racism education are issues close to Kushnick’s heart. It was one of the reasons why he decided to contact the family of Ahmed Iqbal Ullah to ask if they could name the centre in his memory. Ahmed Iqbal Ullah was a 13 year old boy of Bangladeshi origin who went to Burnage High School, where a fair amount of racist bullying went on. In 1986, a fight in the playground broke out and Ahmed came to the aid of some younger Asian boys when a 13-year old white pupil took out a knife, stabbed and killed him.

“The boy [who stabbed Ahmed] himself came from an extremely disturbed background and it was a tragedy all round,” states Kushnick. “but the incident did raise the issue of racism in schools, how whiteness becomes an identity. So we wanted to send a signal and use the material in outreach programmes to teachers in schools with limited resources, a narrow curriculum and encourage an environment where all children could flourish. We wanted to challenge stereotypes that Asians should be doctors or that you don’t expect anything from working class children – we wanted to encourage more inclusive ways of teaching and encourage teachers to expect all their pupils to succeed.”

Breaking Down The Stratified Education System

Armed with funding from the Progress Trust, the Millennium Awards and pro bono support of the University of Manchester (which allowed them to use the premises rent-free and also did their payroll), the centre began to put together materials for teachers.

“At the time, Britain had a highly stratified education system. Working class students were 8 times less likely to pass the 11+ exams than middle class ones,” says Kushnick. “Meanwhile teachers went to school everyday and very few of them woke up thinking ‘another day to mess over some working-class kids, another day to lessen their self-esteem and another day to convince them to have no or very limited aspirations.’ But everyday they went to school thinking that white working class parents didn’t care about education, that girls will go off and work in Woollies for a couple of years, get married and have kids. Meanwhile the lads could get an apprenticeship, settle down, marry the girl who used to work at Woollies and have kids…”

People from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities were also approaching the centre and them asking it about their history in the country and in Manchester. The team quickly realised that whilst they had lots of really great resources on race relations, there was very little primary information or secondary sources when it came to the local level. “The people’s stories about how they came to this country, their experiences, how they created their own religious and housing education, how they dealt with the education of young children – we had very little of that,” remarks Kushnick. The centre decided to tackle both these issues through their outreach work at schools by asking pupils to collect information and stories about their communities. Not only would this help fill a gap in the archive but it would also raise the confidence of BME pupils whilst educating others about the history of the wider BME community.

Collecting Stories from Manchester’s BME Communities

BME pupils interviewed their grandparents and found that some had great aunties who worked in the Land Army in World War Two or family who served in the British Army. The interviews – 144 of them – were transcribed, printed and kept in the archive alongside family photographs and heirlooms. Children from Sikh, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Chinese and Afro-Caribbean communities contributed interviews, and four girls from Levenshulme turned these interviews into a book called ‘Strength of Spirit’ which is full of interviews and photos from the Bangladeshi community. The centre also spent a year working with Refugee Action to put together an exhibition and teaching information pack on refugees in Manchester and the hardships they face on their journey to the UK.

Over the years, more and more of the centre’s projects consisted of producing material which would contribute to the archive and also help build a record of the local BME community which was later used for teaching materials, travelling exhibitions and the annual Black History Month. Working with primary schools in Rusholme, Moss Side and Whalley Range, the centre helped to put a book together retelling the story of Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century slave who was freed in London and became one of the leaders campaigning against the slave trade. A book was also published on the life of the former slave Mary Prince (c.1788- death date unknown), who presented her testimony about the horrible conditions endured by the enslaved in the Caribbean, and Noor Inayat Khan who was captured and imprisoned by the Gestapo and was executed at Dachau in 1944. Khan was posthumously awarded the French Croix de Guerre in 1946 and the British George Cross in 1949.

Kushnick says that the centre’s future projects will continue to focus on anti-racism education and adding material to the archive. Some of the projects currently underway include school schemes exploring international folk tales as well as a funded initiative looking into the Yemeni community in Salford and documenting its experience. However, the cuts in government funding are worrying for the centre, which will be looking to find new forms of financial support in March 2012. “In this crisis no one is sure how they are going to be affected,” says Kushnick. “Of course we hope everything will be okay and we can keep the centre open but, in all honesty, we have no idea what will happen.”

The Race Relations Archive is located near Manchester Piccadilly station and includes over 8,000 resources available for use by students, practitioners and the general public. For more information and visiting hours see the centre’s website.

Article by Arwa Aburawa.

Originally published at Manchester’s Radical History.

In 2011, Unicorn Grocery, based in Chorlton, is celebrating 15 years of trade in organic, fairtrade, low-carbon and ethical produce.

Set up in 1996 by a small group of people interested in sustainable food, Unicorn Grocery has flourished over the years and now has a turnover of almost £4 million. Selling everything from local vegetables to Palestinian olive oil, the grocery has become a sustainable alternative to supermarkets. “I think what we wanted to do was to run a shop that sold the kind of things we wanted to buy,” states Debbie Clarke, an environmental campaigner who has worked at Unicorn for 10 years. “[A shop] that had an ethical outlook, that was sourcing things carefully in terms of provenance and nutrition.”

Inspired by a co-operative wholefood shop called Daily Bread in Cambridge, which is run on an ethical and Christian ethos, one of the founders of Unicorn Grocery, Adam York, decided to establish a similar grocery in Manchester. “Although he wasn’t a Christian, he saw value in the way that they were running things and also that it was replicable,” explains Debbie. “He took it on with a secular perspective and looked around for people who were interested in the project in Manchester. There were two people originally, which grew to six, and it took a couple of years planning for it and finding premises, money as well a doing a bit of market research to see if there was an appetite for it.” Finally, in 1996, the Unicorn Grocery Co-operative opened its doors to the public.

As a co-operative, most of the people that work at Unicorn own and run the business – everyone has a flat pay and makes an equal contribution in the running of the business. “I suppose there are loads of reasons why you would want to run a business as a co-op, some are political reasons such as having control in the hands of the workers to more practical reasons because it’s a really good business model,” states Debbie. “For example, the people that are making the decisions are the people that have to put everything into practice- there isn’t that chain of command where you have a distant head office which is barking orders at you when they have no idea how things work on the ground.”

This means that those stacking the shelves aren’t poorly paid workers but rather well-informed members of the co-op who know and understand the policies and ethics of the grocery. Even so, Debbie explains that they do have casual staff to give them a buffer for the fluctuations in how busy they are during the day, week and also the year. “We did try for a little being fully mutual, which means that everyone that worked there was a member, but it left us vulnerable to fluctuations so we have between 5-10% of our hours from casual staff although it’s not something that we want the business to be based around.”

As with all co-operatives, a certain level of compromise and creative tension is also inevitable. Unicorn embraces lots of principles such as vegan and vegetarian lifestyles, a focus on local food, fairtrade and organic growing but sometimes priorities need to be set and difficult decisions made. For example, Unicorn has decided not to have any boycotts in place and they don’t refuse to stock products from any country. Therefore they sell products from China, they occasionally sell products from Israel and they sell some fairtrade products from Zimbabwe as well as products from Iran.

“The question is that if we start cutting out products from countries would we stop selling things from the US?,” asks Debbie. “We don’t think that whole-scale boycotts of countries are the way to deal with poor human rights records or political activity. What we would try and do is focus on the products from those countries that we know are well sourced. For example, we work with an organisation called Kitchen Garden, which consists of small-scale organic farmers from Zimbabwe which we try to promote as part of our recommended range.” Unicorn also sells Palestinian olive oil from Zaytoun, a UK-based not-for-profit company which imports certified Fairtrade olive oil from Palestinian farmers.

“I think the interesting thing is that although we all have different perspectives, we have these guiding principles which say what – fundamentally – the ethics of the business trades on. Everyone respects those and although there are sometimes discussions about what to prioritize, generally we all come to a compromise and use [the guiding principles] to make a decision without causing too much conflict.”

And it’s these guiding principles that have allowed Unicorn to grow over the years. Debbie states there is no way that the shop would have grown to the size it has or accessed the number of customers that it does if they only sold local produce or only fairtrade. “We do compete with supermarkets on price and that’s part of our business model, but to do that you have to work out where that balance is,” says Debbie. Whilst Unicorn Grocery doesn’t air freight any of its stock, they do buy bananas, pineapples, tomatoes and oranges all year round because they accept that it’s what people want and there’s only so much you can do before people just go to Tesco instead. “We do try to focus on local food and push it where possible and we try to educate our customers about seasonality so we can sell seasonal veg from local growers,” adds Debbie.

In 2008, Unicorn bought 21 acres of land to improve their local supply of veg and cut their food miles. They have tenant growers who work the land with the support from Moss Brook Growers and funding from Making Local Food Work. “We did some crop trials in the first year, last year we did more small-scale crops and this year is the first year that has made it into major production. They were funded for the first couple of years but now they have to make it work financially- I’m sure they’ll manage it!”

Unicorn also works with the Kindling Trust which is working to develop a group of veg buyers called Manchester’s Veg People as well as the Glebelands Trust which is an urban market garden based in Sale. They also contribute to the annual Chorlton Food & Drink Festival which promotes the independent food and drink sector.

Indeed, there is a growing appreciation of local, fairtrade and organic food with lots of supermarkets now stocking such products. When I ask Debbie if this means more competition for Unicorn or more customers, she replies that it’s a bit of both. “The supermarkets may sell organic and fairtrade but their business models are inherently unsustainable. A lot of it is based on unfair trade and intensive and unsustainable agriculture so people are aware that we are still a better option. The landscape has changed a lot but over that fifteen year period, the pattern [for Unicorn] has very much been growth. Our turnover started off as something like a couple of thousands and now it’s approaching four million.”

Looking ahead to the future, Unicorn is hoping to build a commercial kitchen to expand on the current small kitchen they have behind they deli where salads are prepared and baked goods are made. “The great thing about that is that it also cuts food miles,” says Debbie. “Instead of bringing in products we can make them ourselves and we can also use gluts to make value-added goods. So if we have too many courgettes in, we can make use of them to make a couple of things.” The grocery is also planning to double-glaze all the windows and is working with the Carbon Co-op to install solar panels which will then sell electricity back to the grid. Clearly, the radical roots of Unicorn are still alive and will continue in the future. As Debbie states, “I hope that we will continue to be challenged to become more sustainable and that we in turn can encourage our customers to become more radical.”

Article by Arwa Aburawa.

Originally published at Manchester’s Radical History.

The 84-foot long mural at Hulme Library is an impressive work of public art which chronicles the history of Hulme from Roman times up until the present. Capturing the constant battle for decent homes, immigration following World War Two and the tumultuous periods of regeneration, the mural is a reminder of the transformation of Hulme across the ages.

See the full article on the mural at Manchester’s Radical History.

:: Photo via Arwa Aburawa.

The UK's first birth control clinic in London

In 1926, the second birth control clinic outside of London opened its doors to women seeking free family planning advice. Located in the impoverished Greengate area of Salford, the clinic provided birth control information to working class women who weren’t able to pay for private advice from a doctor. The controversial clinic faced opposition from the Catholic Church and the medical profession but fought on and continued to offer its services to women until birth control advice was widely and freely available in the 1970s.

Unlike the suffragettes’ attention-grabbing campaigns to secure women’s rights to vote, the local-level and grinding work of women who worked to improve women’s right to birth control in the 1920s and 30s has gone somewhat unnoticed. Whilst they never marched on parliament, they worked day-in, day-out, through blitz, blackouts and at personal risk, to provide women with the knowledge to exercise control over their own bodies. For many of the women, providing birth control was an important factor for the improvements in women’s health and also the emancipation of women who had previously relied on men to limit the size of their family.

At the turn of the 19th/20th century, birth control was a very controversial issue to discuss in public although in private, many middle/upper-class women had access to such family planning information through their doctors. As such, it was working class women who couldn’t afford to pay for a private doctor who were denied birth control information and who were at the centre of the campaigns for free birth control advice. As Dr Clare Debenham, who has written a thesis entitled ‘Grassroots feminism: a study of the campaign of the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics, 1924-1938′ which forms the basis of this article, points out, many middle class women felt guilty about this inequality and went on to argue that all women should enjoy control over their own bodies no matter their place in society.

Contraception as Emancipation

The birth controller saw contraception as a form of emancipation for women and the clinics therefore focused on empowering the women by giving them the information, rather than men which was the normal practice at the time. “The clinics were really into female contraception and wanted to give the control to the women rather than having to rely on the men,” explains Clare Debenham. The shocking rate of maternal death also focused women’s minds on the more sinister aspects of withholding birth control information. Between 1911 and 1930, maternal death was second only to tuberculosis as a major cause of death amongst married women, and based on the death rate it was argued giving birth was more dangerous than working in the mines.

In 1924, the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics (SPBCC) was established to campaign for municipal birth control clinics that were free and easily accessible to working class women. In the mean time, voluntary clinics were set up across the country to bridge the gap until their goals were realised. Although the SPBCC and many birth controllers have been overshadowed in the history books by the flamboyant Marie Stopes of Married Love fame, the society was able to set up clinics across the country and provide women with birth control advice.

The SPBCC was also more autonomous and a lot less autocratic and confrontational when compared with Marie Stopes’ clinics. “A lot of the women involved in the birth control clinics, unlike say Marie Stopes, just worked hard with little drama. There was no dramatics,” says Debenham. “If someone had got thrown into jail than maybe we’d know more about it but it was all very low key.”

Manchester & Salford Mothers’ Clinic Opens in 1926

In 1926, the Manchester & Salford Mother Clinic located in Greengate opened and was run by Mary Stocks, Charis Frankenburg and Flora Blumberg. Mary Stocks was a Fabian who saw birth control as strongly linked to a women’s right to self-determination and she also campaigned for the removal of the marriage bar for female teachers in Manchester. Charis Frankenburg, a former midwife, was a Jewish Conservative whose respectable family ran a factory in the area. Flora Blumberg was also a Conservative, which was unusual as most of the support for birth control came from Labour supporters. Even so, motherhood was an inevitable aspect of many women’s experiences at the time so it was an important issue which united many women across political and class divisions.

As Debenham points out, “It was quite odd that there was such Conservative support as most of the people at the clinics would have been Labour supporters but there was a lot of diverse people involved in the birth control issue. I mean Mary Stocks was a Liberal, Charis Frankenburg was a Conservative and the receptionist at the clinic was a Communist! Of course there were occasions when people disagreed but on the local level there really was a cross-section of people involved.”

The clinic was ideally located above a pie-shop which provided an ideal cover for women who wanted to be discreet about their visit to the centre. The clinic was part of the Society for the Promotion of Birth Control and was rather successful – Charis Frankenburg calculated that in their first eight years they had seen over three thousand two hundred patients. In fact, gynaecologist Sir John Peel calculated that by the end of 1927 nine SPBCC birth control clinics had collectively seen 23,000 patients.

Local feminist councillors such as Shena Simon (Liberal) and Cllr Annie Lee (Labour) supported the clinic and there was significant support from the Women’s Co-op Guild, which was made up of a lot of working class women. For example, Mrs Hescott who was the secretary of the Manchester branch of the Women’s Co-op Guild was also a founding member of the clinic. In fact, the WCG overwhelmingly passed a resolution during the 1923 Annual Congress supporting the dissemination of birth control information, making it the first women’s organisation and the first working class organisation to formally support birth control.

“Cursed, Distrusted and Despised”

The clinic in Salford did, however, attract some opposition. As Clare Debenham has written, according to Mary Stocks, the birth controllers were “cursed by the Roman Catholic Church, distrusted by the Church of England and ignored by the medical profession.” In Salford, the clinic faced opposition from the local Catholic church which saw the clinic as a direct challenge to its authority. Dr Henshaw who was enthroned as Bishop in 1925 was quick to denounce the clinic and its methods in the Catholic press: “Horrible things, strange filthy things… The powers of evil have refined their methods and unsavoury subjects are clothed with scientific names… one of these centres had been opened up not far from the Cathedral.” (Article reproduced in the Manchester Guardian (22.3.1926) from the Catholic Federalist cited in Debenham, 2010, p125).

The following month Henshaw was quoted using equally colourful language about the clinic’s methods: ‘Birth control, an abomination in Catholic eyes is infinitely worse than the unnatural vices of Sodom and Gomorrah. Filthy knowledge is not less filthy because it is imparted in a “clinic”, or “centre” (Evening Chronicle (10.4.1926) cited in Debenham, 2010, p125).’

Furthermore, despite the initial support of the Women’s Guild after 1923, “the Guild leadership took no significant initiative on family endowment, birth control, or any other issues of concern to working class women that did not have prior approval of the Labour Party.” (cited in Debenham, 2010, p170). Some feminists were also opposed the birth control campaigns which they saw as a distraction to their cause and felt that talk about such matter involving sexual relations was not respectable.

The backing from the Labour party which the movement had expected or thought it would get also didn’t materialise. “Because it was a controversial topic, many regarded it as a vote loser and so didn’t they didn’t really give it any public support,” explains Debenham. “A lot of the Labour MPs relied on Catholic voters and so they were worried that showing support for birth control would lose them the Catholic vote.”

Legislation and the Future of Birth Control

Legislation was passed in 1930 in the form of a memorandum 153/MCW which allowed birth control advice to be transmitted to women via municipal clinics on the grounds of health. However, the birth controllers quickly realised that this memorandum was quite restrictive (and wasn’t mandatory) and so many continued to keep open their practices to serve women who were not accounted for under the new legislation.

Very few local authorities were willing to take on board the new legislation and by 1931, only 36 authorities had taken advantage of the provisions of the Memorandum. As Debenham states: “If the municipal clinics in 1930 were made compulsory than it would haven been job done for the birth controllers but the fact was that there were only voluntary and a lot of councils didn’t do a single thing to improve birth control after the bill was passed.”

By 1939, only 84 local authorities had taken any action to establish municipal birth control clinics – in other words, two thirds of all local authorities had taken no action at all. In contrast by 1939, the number of voluntary clinics had grown to 66 and so to some extent they were making up for the lack of progress by the local authorities. For example, the success of the Salford clinic meant that in 1933 it had to move to larger premises in Manchester. “I initially thought that after the legislation was passed that it would be the end of the birth control clinic but in fact many carried on and it wasn’t really until 1972 that the work of the clinics was taken on by the department. So until that time it was up to the voluntary sector to provide the service to the women…” remarked Debenham.

It took a long time for attitudes towards contraception and birth control to move on from connotations of being associated with dirty magazines to something which all couples had to deal with and it wasn’t until 1972 that birth control provision became part of the NHS. The early birth control clinics of 1920s and 1930 no doubt played an important role in making birth control more respectable and also bringing the debate into the public sphere. As Debenham declares, “It was local action empowering local people – what the women working in those early birth control clinics did really does deserve a lot more recognition.”

Article by Arwa Aburawa

The original article was published at Manchester’s Radical History.

:: Image via Wellcome Library

Here’s an article I wrote for the Big Issue North Mag a couple of weeks ago on the recent Manchester trial of climate activists…

Climate Activist Fail to Convince Juries of Their Case

The guilty verdict at the recent trial of six climate activists who broke into Manchester Airport and formed a human chain around a plane to highlight aviation emissions delivers another blow to environmental campaigners defending direct action.

On the November 1st 1933 Ellen Tooley made history by becoming the first woman councillor in Eccles. Although she wasn’t particularly fond of her new title as the first woman councillor in Eccles, she lived with it all her life and it no doubt it helped inspire many other women to play an active role in local politics.

Women in Eccles had been trying to get elected to the Eccles Town Hall without any success since 1919, yet in 1933 the town voted in two women councillors. Ellen Tooley was first to be announced as the winning candidate for the seat of Winton; literally minutes later, Mary Higgins was elected as the councillor for Barton. Veronica Trick, the granddaughter of Ellen Tooley, describes the night in an article titled The Power to get Things Changed! Ellen Tooley, Eccles’ First Woman Councillor….

Read the full piece here at Manchester’s Radical History.

Tell us a little about yourself and how the Salford Star started…
SK: Well, I’m not a trained journalist and I didn’t become a journalist till I was 28. For fifteen years I wrote for style and music magazines, in the Evening News, but you don’t get into journalism to interview Coronation Street stars and celebrities. That’s not why I got into it anyway. In the end, although I was getting very well paid to write for the national papers, I couldn’t get the real stories across which is housing, regeneration – things that mattered to people.

So I took a back step and started teaching journalism in the community and I did that for a few years, then I got offered the chance to help on a magazine called ‘Old Trafford News’ which is a community magazine which we revamped. So I did that and it was very successful. People saw the magazine that we were doing in Old Trafford and the community invited us to do one in Salford. But I said to them ‘hold on second, Salford is a city whereas Old Trafford is one square mile’. As Salford is a big city, we’ll need a big magazine to go with it! So Salford Star was born.

What was the initial reaction from locals. Was it positive or did they not really believe it was going to last?
SK: Well before we started, we went to a lot of public meetings and I went to one guy called Guy Griffiths who is notorious in Salford because he’s the only person to have been forcibly evicted from his house. I went to him with the idea for the magazine and I said ‘well, what do you think?’. He says ‘I don’t want anything to do with it. You budget journalists are all the same’ and this and that. But he did say ‘I’ll give you one bit of advice, if it looks anything like the council magazine everyone will put it in the bin.’ So I took that advice and ran with it.

The response to the first issue was phenomenal, I’ve never seen anything like it. What we first did was to take a copy to the town hall to Council Leader John Merry and within ten minutes he was on the phone screaming blue murder so we knew we’d got something right! The second call was from a women whose mother had a house about to be knocked down and needed some help. I mean the calls, the email that we got, I’ve not seen anything like it. Reactions were phenomenal and they are continuing to be. The only problem is that we only had the funds to print 15,000 copies but Salford has a population of around 300,000 people so there are people who have never heard of it. Out in Worsley, Walkden and Swinton they are not aware of it. What we do know is that each copy is read by about 100 people as it gets passed round.

With Salford Star now only being online it’s more complicated. We do get a lot of readers but we know that two thirds of those living in Salford don’t have the Internet so we’ve excluded a lot of people before we’ve even started. The advantage is that it is more accessible to those outside of Salford and we know that we get readers from all over like London and even Devon. The stories are getting out of Salford and that’s good – apart from when journalists nick my stories and then call them exclusives which I don’t like!

What have been some of the biggest campaigns that Salford Star has been involved in?
SK: There’s a lot. One of the first that we did was to take a group of normal kids from Salford to the Lowry Centre in their street gear. They said ‘no, we’ll be kicked out’ and we thought ‘get lost’. So we took them down there with hidden cameras and lo and behold two minutes later they were kicked out. It was shocking but what happened after that was that the Lowry realised that they weren’t reaching the local community and their policy changed, not a 100% percent but now they are aware. There were groups that wanted to use the space in the Lowry but they were charging eight thousands pounds. But after that people were getting in just by waving the Salford Star and saying ‘hey, come on’! They were giving it to them for nothing so that was a real benefit that we got.

In Langworthy, just opposite the Urban Splash development, people were being offered £52,000 for the houses whereas the ones on the other side of the street were going for £90,000. So we interviewed the leader of the council, John Merry, and we told him what was going on and he said that if it was true it would be illegal. And lo and behold they all got £90,000 so that was another result. Another one was keeping the Salford Film Festival going and also getting the Tree of Knowledge in Salford listed when it was due to be demolished. We don’t just write the stories like the Evening News or an Advertiser journalist, we jump in with two feet and give people in Salford the information to fight these battles.

Housing and regeneration have been huge problem areas in Salford, could you talk us through some of the major issues the Salford Star has been looking at?
SK: If you open your eyes and you walk round so-called ‘Langworthy Village,’ there are shutters on the newsagents. Another newsagents up the road shut down a few year ago- they couldn’t even sustain a corner shop. I mean when you consider that £88 million of private and public money (that was the last time we looked, it’s probably more now) has gone into this immediate area..Where’s it gone? There’s nothing here. A report has just come out from the Manchester Independent Economic Review and it say that nothing’s changed, so where has that money gone?

If you look at where the regeneration money is going, a hell of a lot of it – I’m not saying all of it by any stretch – is going into sweeteners for developers to keep their profits high and salaries for the regenerators who don’t even live here. I interviewed the chief executive for the URC which is the regeneration company responsible for Salford regeneration and I asked him how many in his office actually lived in Salford. There wasn’t one. They don’t have a stake in the plan, but we do and so do our readers and writers.

You have been quite dubious about the council magazine ‘LIFE in Salford’. Why is that?
It’s called accountability! At the end of the day, if you go through the Evening News and any other newspaper – I used to do that when I taught community journalism – and I can tell you that’s a press release, that’s another press release. It’s all press release journalism. The council or whoever will put out a press release and then people just cut and paste it and stick their name at the top, whereas I question it. Which is what you’re supposed to do as a journalist.

We’ve lost that community journalism. I mean there is virtually nothing in the country. There are things on-line and in print but a lot of things called community magazines are just shams. They just push the council line, or the housing association line because it brings advertising. I could water that [Salford Star] down tomorrow and say ‘isn’t it wonderful what Salix Homes are doing’, ‘isn’t Urban Splash great’ and they’d all advertise with us. They’ve millions of pounds in budgets and I could be a millionaire by now!

Talking of money and advertising, how do you fund the Salford Star?
SK: What happens is that the real community places in Salford like the Langworthy Cornerstone, The Angel and small community organisations that have a bit of money will advertise in it. Small businesses that can see the magazine flying out – I mean we get a thousand copies just on this road here in Langworthy- they know that the community is looking at it and they want to be a part of it. So we do get a bit of advertising but those organisations don’t have huge budgets and they can’t afford to take pages and pages out. But through those and donations we try to get half the printing costs covered and we think that we should get public funding for the other half to keep us going.

What’s in store for Salford Star and the future?
SK: Well, we want to get a printed issue before the next election but whether we’ll be able to do that I don’t know. We’re hoping to do that through donations but I guess we’ll see. My problem is that I don’t get paid to do any of this and it takes up so much time – my wife’s had enough! We keep putting in applications to all sorts of trust funds and grants but they get ripped up every time because people perceive us as being too controversial. Yet, I don’t see what’s controversial about asking where our money is going and we’re always professional, non-political and balanced.

We have no agenda whatsoever. What we do is also different to normal journalism, where they’d go to an area, dip their toe in, get the best story and then get out again. They’re not interested in the people. Well, we live in this community and we’re still talking to those people so it’s different. We’re not playing at this, we’re for real because at the end of the day it’s our community.

Article by Arwa Aburawa originally published in Manchester’s Radical History.