SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
WHAT would you do if a mysterious woman with hypnotic eyes told you to occupy a piano factory, a swimming baths or a public library? Well, what could you possibly do, other than obey?
Lillian Harris, born in London in 1887, was a shop assistant and suffragist who moved to Australia in her mid-twenties and there became involved with various revolutionary movements, notably the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”), earning a reputation as a fine public speaker.
She married a man named Thring, and the couple relocated first to Khartoum and then, with their young son, back to London, where Lillian joined Sylvia Pankhurst’s campaign for peace and universal suffrage.
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
While an as-yet-unnamed new left party struggles to be born, MAT COWARD looks at some of the wild and wonderful names of workers’ organisations past that have been lost to time



