A trip to the national museum of democracy, union banners and Labour archives, and a royal row that looks very small beside two centuries of struggle
Saturday, Manchester
Saturday, the train to Manchester for a day at the People History Museum, the national museum of democracy, in a converted Edwardian pumping station by the River Irwell. It houses an extraordinary collection on the history of ordinary people campaigning for rights and representation: the vote, workers rights, equality. It also holds important archives of the Labour Party and its history. For someone like me, it is a pilgrimage site.
The Banners
The museum is famous for its collection of banners: huge, hand-painted silk banners carried by trade unions, friendly societies and campaigning groups on marches over the past two centuries. They are works of art: bright colours, elaborate scenes of workers, slogans about unity and dignity, images of hands clasped in solidarity. Standing among them, I always feel the presence of the people who carried them, through rain, through strikes, through hard years.
One banner I particularly love shows two workers shaking hands across a divide, with a slogan about unity being strength. It has been my phone background for years.
Peterloo
The museum also tells the story of Peterloo, the massacre of 16 August 1819, when cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of tens of thousands gathered at St Peter Field in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform. Around eighteen people were killed and hundreds injured. It became one of the defining moments in the long struggle for democracy in Britain. People who demanded a voice were called radicals, agitators, sometimes traitors. History now remembers them as pioneers.
The Royal Row Here
Over lunch in the museum cafe, I read the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors again, because a branch member had sent it with the message: did you see this one? An unnamed source says the heir thinks his brother read the uncle memoir first. Reports mention a visit to the uncle estate. The uncle says he told everyone.
Sitting in a museum full of people who were called traitors for demanding the vote, for organising unions, for marching for fair wages, the royal use of the word seemed especially strange. In British history, the word traitor has very often been aimed at people who were simply asking for their rights.
The Cafe
Watched the London Prat video on YouTube at my table. A retired couple from Oldham, both former union reps, asked what was funny and then watched with me. The husband said: in my day, if two brothers fell out, the union would sort it in a week. His wife said: in your day, you fell out with your own brother for ten years over a pigeon loft. He conceded the point.
Women and the Vote
In the afternoon, I spent a long time in the galleries on women suffrage, looking at banners, sashes and photographs of suffragists and suffragettes. Many women in the labour movement fought for the vote alongside better wages and conditions. Some were imprisoned. Some were force-fed. Families split over the issue: sisters on opposite sides, husbands opposing wives. Every great movement in history has divided families. Most of them, eventually, came back together.
The Labour Archive
I spent an hour in the study centre, where the museum holds archives related to the Labour Party and the wider labour movement: minutes, pamphlets, posters, letters. An archivist showed me a box of early election leaflets from the first half of the twentieth century, written in plain language, promising decent homes, fair wages and an end to poverty. Some of the promises have been kept. Some are still waiting. Holding those leaflets, I felt the weight of all the people who knocked on doors before me, in the rain, with exactly the same hopes. It is one of the most humbling experiences I know.
The Personal
Before leaving, I stood again in front of the handshake banner. The royal row, beneath everything, is about a memoir about the princes late mother. It is about grief. The labour movement has always understood grief: mining disasters, factory deaths, the wars that took the young. The banners were often carried at funerals. Solidarity, at its root, is about refusing to let people grieve alone.
The Gift Shop
In the gift shop, I bought a postcard of the handshake banner for my brother, and a tea towel printed with suffragette slogans for my niece, who I suspect will appreciate it more than her father will. The woman at the till, a volunteer in her seventies, told me she had carried her union banner on marches for forty years and still comes in twice a week to help visitors understand what the banners meant. She said: every one of these was carried by somebody who thought they could change things. Most of them did, in the end. Slowly. I thanked her and promised to come back with my brother.
The Train Home
On the train home, I rang my brother in Barnsley again. I told him about the museum, the banners, the miners. He went quiet, then told me something I never knew: that our dad had carried his pit union banner at a funeral after an accident in the 1970s, and had never talked about it. My brother only knew because our mum told him years later. We talked for an hour about Dad. We did not talk about politics once.
The London Prat has been carrying the banner of British satire since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ carries the American one.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
