Find out more: Grunwick Strike

Over the next ten weeks I will share resources to find out more about each of the movements I discuss in The Shoulders We Stand On: How Black and Brown people fought for change in the UK.

The resources will mostly be free, and will cover a range of mediums including articles, videos, podcasts and radio programmes. Follow me on Twitter to be the first to know when a new list has been posted.

Grunwick strikers on the picket line

The epic Grunwick Strike is the subject of this week’s (mostly) free resource list. It’s one of the first movements I learnt about and it’s one close to my heart. Read the story in Chapter 8 of The Shoulders We Stand On and find out more here:

This website, Striking Women, and accompanying book is a fantastic project documenting the Grunwick Strike. They also created a very cool comic telling the story.

Activist and journalist Amrit Wilson spent time with the strikers and has written lots about it, such as this article - Revisiting the Great Grunwick Strike - for Ceasefire Magazine reflecting on the strike in 2016, 40 years on.

And you can hear Wilson on the fantastic Working Class History podcast in a special double episode.

Dr Evans Smith runs the excellent blog New Historical Express (formerly Hatful of History) and has written fantastic pieces on Grunwick.

It will come as no surprise to those of you who have read The Shoulders We Stand On that Special Branch were surveilling strikers. Following that link you can see some of their files obtained via Freedom of Information. They make for fascinating reading.

Here are some examples of newsletters and pamphlets created by organisations around the UK in support of the Grunwick Strike, like from the Indian Workers’ Association GB.

If you want to listen to some first-hand accounts from Brown women, check out this great BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Grunwick Changed Me’ and here is Ayesha Hazarika speaking about Jayaben Desai.

For the visually inclined among you, here’s a 20 minute documentary on Jayaben Desai, leader of the Grunwick Strike.

There are some great video clips from the Associated Press from various days of picketing, showing throngs of police officers and crowds of protestors, such as this one, this clip, and this one here.

And the University of Warwick has a fantastic Grunwick collection and some videos are digitised. Check out two documentaries here and here, and there are unedited interviews for the latter documentary here.

Here’s a bit of a different one, but the Grunwick Strike inspired a song called ‘Hold The Line Again’ by Jack Warshaw.

And if you are seeing this but haven’t read the book I’m referring to, then what are you waiting for?! Get your copy of The Shoulders We Stand On now.