Anne Loughlin

Dame Anne Loughlin, DBE (28 June 1894 – 14 July 1979) was a British labour activist and organiser.

Loughlin was born in Leeds, England. Her father, Thomas, was a boot and shoe operative of Irish descent. When Anne was 12 her mother died, and she had to care for her four sisters (two of whom were to go on to marry trade union officials). When she was 16 her father died, and Anne became the family breadwinner, starting work in a Leeds clothing factory for 3 pence an hour.

In 1915, aged 21, she became a full-time organiser for the National Union of Tailor and Garment Workers (NUTGW) – the union to which she was to devote her whole career. The following year, she took charge of a strike of 6,000 clothing workers in Hebden Bridge. She showed a talent for journalism, and a recognition of the sorts of things that would make young women read the union paper, The Garment Worker. She penned a series of articles in the late 1920s entitled The Woman Worker at Home, in which she instructed 'bachelor girls' on diet (tips on various ways to cook eggs), exercise and make-up. However, clothing workers, especially in London, were confronted with increased use of lower-paid workers; earnings remained low, and there was a growing discontent among the workforce in general.

The NUTGW was based in Leeds, and most full-time officials came from the Leeds region; the London membership felt divorced from the centre of union power. There were also religious differences that heightened the tensions. The London membership was mainly Jewish and Protestant, while the Catholic minority in Leeds provided most of the leading officials: the National Secretary (Andrew Conley) was a Catholic, as was the London District Secretary (Bernard Sullivan), and there was Anne herself.

The London organiser of the NUTGW was Sam Elsbury, founder member of the Communist Party and as combative a personality as Andrew Conley. The United Clothing Workers at first recruited rapidly in London, with quite substantial minorities in Leeds and Glasgow. However it ran into serious difficulties over strike action within two months of its formation. Apart from bitter hostility from Conley, backed by the TUC, there were growing problems with strategy and tactics within the Communist Party, which led ultimately to Elsbury's expulsion. By 1933 the United Clothing Workers was a small group in the East End of London with about two hundred members, and it was finally disbanded in 1935.

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