IT’S YOUR HISTORY

RMT helpline 0800 3763706 :: july/august 2010 :: RMTnews 28 On a bright spring morning in 1913, some 50,000 rail workers marched on London’s Hyde Park – the biggest demonstration of rail workers ever held in Britain. They were celebrating the creation the day before, March 29, of the National Union of Railwaymen, an industrial union with 180,000 members, the result of the merger of three unions – the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the General Railway Workers’ Union and the United Pointsmens’ and Signallers’ Society. It was an historic day, not just for the industry, but for the whole labour movement, for it heralded a new model of industrial trade unionism – as relevant today as it was a century ago. The labour historian GDH Cole described the new union – whose seeds germinated in the great rail strike of 1911 – as “a new model as influential for the 20th century as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers had been for the Victorian age”. Labour movement pioneers Sidney and Beatrice Webb hailed the NUR’s rejection of localism and sectionalism and its aim “to enrol into one union ... all who are employed by any railway undertaking”. Our union has travelled a great distance since that great moment – not least the equally historic mergers between the NUR and the National Union of Seamen 20 years ago, and with the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee. To mark the 2013 centenary, RMT has commissioned a film project that will not only chronicle the union’s history, but build a wider archive of filmed interviews, artefacts and pictures. Platform Films, a labour- movement collective that has charted many of Britain’s industrial struggles over three decades, has been recruited to make the film and conduct interviews that will form a permanent archive. Director Chris Reeves has already made a number of films for RMT and has a back- catalogue that includes the great dockers’ dispute of the mid 1970s, the Shrewsbury Pickets, the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupation and the miners’ strike of 1984-85. The film will be called Pulling Together – the slogan of the NUS and the title of the popular history the union published last year. 2013 may seem a long way off, but it gives the union just two years to pull together the strands of a century of history. And that is where YOU come in. A key element of the project will be the input of RMT members and branches, and it is YOUR stories that will bring the project to life. In attics and albums and on bookshelves around the country there are books, documents, pictures and scraps of film that tell the NUR and NUS story. Artefacts from the union are being found all the time – from NUR branch sashes to the magnificent NUS London branch banner found in a cupboard only a few weeks ago, and it is these, together with branch histories, anecdotes and reminiscences that will bring the film to life. “The story of RMT and the NUR and the NUS is central to the history of the British labour movement, and this is an important film to make,” says Chris Reeves. “We have already begun IT’S YOUR HISTORY Film project will celebrate centenary of NUR and create a unique RMT archive for the future – and YOUR stories will make it happen