United Kingdom

Contributed by Doug Nicholls

The main source of biographical information about trade unionists over the centuries in Britain is the National Dictionary of Labour Biography, an essential source for labour history research. First appearing in 1972, it currently runs to 15 volumes containing detailed biographical entries for 1,090 individuals, constituting an essential guide to many of the key figures in the labour movement over the past two centuries. See the Society for the Study of Labour History website for details and links: https://sslh.org.uk/publications/

The idea for the dictionary originated with the historian G.D.H. Cole, who had for many years compiled manuscript volumes consisting of hundreds of names with brief biographical details. After his death in 1959, Dame Margaret Cole passed five volumes of entries to John Saville, who undertook to produce a dictionary of labour movement biography. The first mention of the proposed dictionary – then intended as a single Who’s Who style volume – appears in issue one of the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, published in Autumn 1960.

Together with Joyce M. Bellamy, Saville edited and oversaw publication of the first ten volumes of the DLB between 1972 and 1999. Responsibility for the eleventh volume then passed to Keith Gildart, David Howell and Neville Kirk, with Gildart and Howell continuing to oversee publication of volumes 12 to 15, the most recent of which was published in 2019. https://sslh.org.uk/publications/