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Report: NELH Tuesday Meeting, 13 May 2025: Dr Katherine Connelly presented: ‘Who stopped the War? Women and the Jolly George
This is a brief report of Dr Connelly’s vivid account of the events surrounding the dockers refusal to load the Jolly George. Her talk led to a lively and enthusiastic discussion.
Dr Katherine Connelly, Tyneside Irish Centre, 13 May 2025
On 10 May 1920, East London dockers made history when they refused to load the Jolly George ship with munitions that were intended to be used against the Bolsheviks in Russia. Their action precipitated a wave of working-class support that effectively forced the British government to abandon their war plans. It has remained a beacon of inspiration to anti-war activists and internationalists ever since.
But what persuaded the dockers to take this stance in the first place? In this talk, Dr Katherine Connelly explored the overlooked, but vital, contribution of former suffragettes in East London who drew on years of campaigning experience, close connections with dockers and their extraordinary ability to smuggle revolutionary literature in a tireless effort to bring about the strike. It is an inspiring story that is urgently relevant today when we face questions about how we can stop genocide and the drive to war.
Dr Katherine Connelly is a historian, writer and activist. She is a lecturer at New York University London and Boston University’s London centre. She is the author of the biography ‘Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire’ which was published by Pluto Press in 2013. In 2019, she edited and introduced Pankhurst’s hitherto unpublished manuscript about race, gender and class in the United States, now published by Pluto Press under the title ‘A Suffragette in America: Reflections on Prisoners, Pickets and Political Change.’ She is the editor of the forthcoming ‘Cambridge Companion to Women’s Suffrage in Britain’.
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Article: The Wor Bella Schools Project, Peter Sagar. Bella Reay was the star goal-scorer in the WW1 Blyth Spartans Munitionettes football team. In the 1917-18 season she scored a remarkable 133 goals. Despite the enormous popularity of the women’s game, it was banned by the FA in 1921.
Peter Sagar’s article recounts his fascinating experience of delivering a two-day project for North East schools based on Bella’s life and time. The project explores the context of WW1, the dialect as spoken at the time. the life of the mining communities, songs, play writing and research.
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Report: Annual Chartism Day Conference, In Honour of Professor Malcolm Chase, Leeds 19 March 2022. Mike Greatbach
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Report: From the Crowd: Remembering Peterloo, Manchester, 6th August 2019. Peter Sagar
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Report: The Road to Peterloo, Tyneside Irish Centre, 18 August 2019. Peter Sagar
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Article: The Wind from Peterloo – Newcastle’s great reform demonstration 1819. John Charlton describes the situation on Tyne and Wear which led to this enormous demonstration in October 1819 two months after Peterloo. He raises a number of questions including why there was no massacre, how people communicated, how many attended, the part played by women, arms or no arms and the aftermath.
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Article: From Jarrow to Orgreave. In this excellent piece from the 2017 Gala Brochure, Dave Temple traces the history of the miners from the 1830s struggle against the bond and the hanging of William Jobling to the state-police tactics of the Thatcher government during the 1984 miners’ strike.
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Article: So Much has been Lost; Change and Continuity; the NUT in 1970 and the NEU in 2020. Peter Sagar contrasts the state of the education system in the 1970s to the current commodification and rigid control of the curriculum. He discusses the perversions caused by the league tables such as exclusions of weaker pupils to improve exam grade averages. The late 19th century serves as a benchmark for a narrow, arid view of the role of public education, a place we are being taken back to.
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Article: In The Newcastle Sailor Who Ended Up An American War Hero Thomas Bagnall tells the story of Sunderland born George H. Bell who served in the US Navy during the American Civil War and, injured in the line of duty, was awarded the United States of America’s highest military honour.
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Article: The Roma on Tyneside. Peter Sagar discusses what has happened to the Roma since they came to Europe and how the are faring today by the banks of the River Tyne.
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Article: From Tuzla to Tyneside: Remembering the 25th Anniversary of the Genocide at Srebrenica – a Northeast perspective. Peter Sagar writes about the numerous strong links between Northeast England and Bosnia which were forged in the crucible of the war in Bosnia in the 1990’s.
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The Cohen Report, Newcastle North in the 1983 General Election. In the 1983 General Election the candidate was Nigel Todd and his agent was Steve Cohen and Labour was confident of winning this seat. Along with many other results that year Newcastle North was a big disappointment with the Tories winning the seat. Undeterred, Steve wrote a report on the campaign, outlining its strengths, weaknesses and lessons learned. It is now thirty seven years since Steve made his recommendations and some make interesting reading: better knowledge of the voting intentions in different areas, training for canvassers, avoidence of assumptions about which areas would vote in particular ways etc. Thanks to Nigel Todd who provided us with this scan of the report.
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Article: Why the Northeast is a Prime Location for a Green New Deal. Peter Sagar recounts Tyneside’s history of industrial innovation and working class solidarity and cooperation as a platform for Newcastle to become a pioneering Green New Deal city.
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Article: Using the National Curriculum . Peter Sagar has done a trawl of the National Curriculum and identified areas in a number of subjects where teachers could find ways in to teach pupils about their local history and culture.