Hugh Delargy

Hugh Delargy was born in 1908 and, after going to an elementary school, won a scholarship to study in Paris and Rome. During the Depression he worked as a labourer and insurance agent. He was elected as a Labour Councillor in Manchester in 1937 and remained on the Council until 1946. He was an active [...]

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The Connolly Association in Manchester 1938-1962

The Connolly Association – originally the Connolly Club – was founded in 1938 from the ashes of two earlier Irish republican organisations. For nearly thirty years it campaigned from a left-wing perspective for Irish civil rights. The Connolly Association was originally called the Connolly Club. The organisation emerged from a merger of the London branch [...]

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The Irish Self Determination League in Manchester

The Irish Self Determination league was a national organisation set up to rally support in Britain amongst the Irish population for the struggle for Irish independence between 1919 and 1921. In December 1918 the nationalist party Sinn Fein won a majority of the seats in Ireland in the General Election (73 out of 105). They [...]

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Jim Larkin, James Connolly and the 1913 Free Trade Hall meeting

On 16 November 1913 a historic meeting took place at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in support of the Dublin Lockout, a huge industrial and social struggle which had brought the city of Dublin to a halt. The meeting was addressed by the leaders of the strike, Jim Larkin and James Connolly, and other trade unionists. [...]

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Robert Owen

Robert Owen was a manufacturer and social reformer whose ideas on mutuality and co-operation were very influential on the working class movement in the first half of the C19th and helped inspire the Co-operative Movement in the 1840s. Robert Owen is remembered in Manchester with a statue outside the Co-operative Bank on Corporation Street and [...]

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The Manchester Martyrs

The Manchester Martyrs were three innocent Irishmen hanged in public outside the New Bailey prison in Salford on 23 November 1867. They had been convicted of murdering a police sergeant, killed in the course of a successful raid on Hyde Road, Manchester to free two leading Fenians. The story of the Manchester Martyrs begins with [...]

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