A short history of the York and West Riding Socialist League

In the summer of 1937, as the King and Prime Minister Moseley’s grip on power seemed to grow ever stronger, workers' organisations across the West Riding of Yorkshire began to coalesce into true opposition groups. Many grew out of brass bands and local working men’s clubs and initially served only to formalise the loose groupings of workers in individual collieries and factories. By August 1st, many of these groups began to coordinate devastating strike actions that shut down almost all industrial output of the entire Riding for weeks at a time. Though the government had many crises to deal with, their attention soon turned to Yorkshire, and divisions of Blackshirts were sent north to deal with the strikers.


On the 29th August, a meeting was called at the Crigglestone Colliery, outside of Wakefield. Delegates from workers’ groups across the region were invited to the meeting to discuss greater and more formal union between the disparate groups. At first, talks were slow, as the groups, running the gamut from white-collar railway unionists to Bakuninist anarchists, had little in common. After a few notable walk-outs, a broad consensus of the remaining groups was reached. The group would be a democratic socialist umbrella dedicated to revolutionary opposition of both the King and the BUF, as well as any others who upheld bourgeois Toryism and Liberalism. To reflect the broad spectrum of views and the regionalist focus of the group, they named themselves the West Riding Socialist League. As the meeting concluded with a chorus of The Red Flag, shots rang out as BUF troopers stormed the meeting hall. Though many of the delegates were armed and over half managed a fighting retreat, twelve organisers were gunned down, including the newly-elected chair of the League.


Rather than smother the league in its cradle, the massacre proved something of a baptism of fire for the WRSL. The members of the League were steeled by the shocking events and became all the more vociferous in their attacks on the Blackshirts. Teams of militiamen carried out late-night raids on the homes of suspected Fascist sympathisers, returning their bullet-riddled corpses to their doorsteps by dawn. Though forces of the Anglican League held large swaths of the North Riding, by late September, workers in the railway yards and confectionaries of York voted to join the WRSL, rather than trust in the more traditionalist social reform of the Archbishop of York. An uneasy peace was brokered between the workers and the church, with both sides tolerating the presence of the other in the face of Royalists and the BUF. In November, the Socialist League held most of the industrial towns strongly enough to allow parades in celebration of the October Revolution, and alongside the usual Trade Union banners and portraits of Marx and Lenin, the red banners that flew overhead also bore the names of their own new pantheon of martyrs.