Reflections on the Labour Network's Launch

The launch event of the TORCH Labour Network took place in the Massey Room at Balliol College at the end of Hilary Term on the afternoon of Thursday 13th March. Local historian, Maurice East, explored in an engaging and wide-ranging talk how Oxford became that unlikeliest of things: “Detroit-on-Thames”. East traced the life and career of William Morris, born in Cowley when it was a collection of villages, two years before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Morris left school aged 14 without formal qualifications and initially began repairing bicycles—a disruptive technology Maurice compared to the Internet—in his parents’ front room. Eventually, Morris Motors became a centre for labour and cutting-edge industrial practices, drawing in workers from across the country and transforming traditional patterns of employment. 

Maurice’s talk de-familiarised and re-enchanted some of the familiar fabric and background of Oxford. I had no idea that the Crown Court on St Aldate’s was formerly a glamorous Morris car show room (still hinted at by the dipped curves in the footpath outside). Nor did I appreciate that Historic England considers the Morris garage on Longwall Street—where the iconic Morris Oxford was assembled in 1912—as one of the nation’s ten most significant examples of industrial history.  

In 2025, British hopes for future economic growth have been linked to an “arc” connecting Oxford and Cambridge. East reminded listeners that Oxford, despite passing for a location in the South East of England, is “closer to Coventry than London”. He evoked how an up-and-coming William Morris would think nothing of cycling to Coventry, or Birmingham, in a day to collect the most advanced parts to assemble into motor vehicles on Oxford’s High Street.  

Maurice noted that both “townies”, of which he is one, and “gownies” are today all-too-often unaware of Oxford’s rich industrial legacy. Fittingly for the first event run under a Labour Network which aims to foster connections in all directions with those working on the problem of labour and working-class history, he observed how an influx of class-conscious workers from the Rhondda valley in South-West Wales during the Depression years in the 1930s contributed to a period where middle-class Oxford students made common cause with workers in Cowley challenging low wages and high rents, as well as contesting the arrival of Mosley’s Blackshirts.  

The talk revealed how Oxford is an interesting and counter-intuitive case study to think about some of the conventional narratives in modern British history, from deindustrialisation to the Windrush generation. The prominence of women’s activism in the 1930s compliments the recent work by Natalie Thomlinson and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite nuancing and enriching our understanding of the activism of women during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, for example. The Morris Pressed Steel and car assembly in Cowley was compared by Maurice to a “sponge” soaking up all available labour. The Oxford Bus Company was, accordingly, one of the first employers actively to recruit workers from the British Caribbean in the 1950s. At its peak, the car industry in Oxford employed some 20,000 workers – compared to 3000 today. Yet, as Matt Myers, historian and Labour Network lead pointed out, if one takes a longer view, thanks to higher productivity and a regional cluster of manufacturing and integrated supply chains, more cars are produced in this part of the country than ever before. Maurice also noted that the expansion of the University of Oxford, a building boom, and the expansion of the city’s hospitals coincided with, and helped to offset, the effects of drastic job losses in the car industry in Oxford from the late twentieth century. He asked, pointedly, what might have happened had Morris’s “Motorpolis” been located in the North-East of England.  

At the same time, he noted that real deprivation does exist in some of the city’s outlying suburbs which were rural communities until barely a century ago (a point he illustrated by vivid and evocative photographs). The University of Oxford geographer, Danny Dorling—like Maurice East born and brought up in the city—noted in a talk at Blackwell’s Bookshop at the start of the academic year that Oxford is both representative and almost unique. The city’s distribution of inequality almost exactly maps the UK average. Roughly 10% of the city’s population belong to each national decile of income distribution. Dorling also pointed to the University’s hugely significant role in the city as an employer, making the reductive distinction between “town” and “gown” misleading today.  

Maurice’s talk was an invitation to think again about how we place Oxford in modern British history. It centred the plumbers, electricians, and bricklayers who worked “on the line” alongside the historian’s own father in the car industry’s heyday, as well as the women married to car workers who led rent strikes in the 1930s. It invited the students in the audience to explore the city’s heritage in places such as Barton, Blackbird Leys, and Florence Park. In sparking connections with the many themes touched on above, it highlighted why the work of the new TORCH Labour Network seeks to begin ‘from Oxford as a centre of labour and use this history as a platform for opening debate and discussion […] and to build community’. This aim is both necessary, urgent, and will be richly rewarding for years to come.  

Works referenced 

D. Dorling, Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation (London, 2024). Link on SOLO. 

F. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and N. Thomlinson, Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984-1984 (Oxford, 2023). Link on SOLO.