Alice Foley, A Bolton Childhood

Abstract

The paucity of personal narratives by second-generation Irish women in Britain makes the autobiography of the trade unionist Alice Foley (1891–1974) a precious source for diaspora scholars, not least because it bears witness to the considerable social achievements of a female working-class activist who struggled to realise her potential against the impediments of birth, education and poverty. Born in Bolton to an illiterate Lancashire washerwoman and a ‘big, intelligent but unruly’ Irish labourer, Foley’s domestic politicisation — her father was a Fenian sympathiser, her sister an active suffragette -meant that she was already attuned to agitation and dissent by the time she started working in the local cotton mill in 1905. The factors that led to her becoming a ‘critical spokeswoman’ for her fellow millworkers are sketched in the following extract from her short autobiography, in which she exposes the human costs of industrial capitalism, displaying a keen eye for social detail. Foley was appointed to a full-time trade union post in 1912 and during the following decades rose steadily through the ranks to become the first female secretary of the Bolton and District Weavers’ and Winders’ Association (1949–61) and president of Bolton Trades’ Council (1956–57). She also had a lifelong dedication to the cause of adult education and was for many years a leading member of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), an involvement that may well have spurred her to produce her own life-story¹ Certainly, her eloquently descriptive autobiography reveals the centrality of autodidact culture to her evolution from ‘pious little Catholic’ into committed socialist, propelled by a desire ‘to transform an inborn humility into some kind of achievement, however insignificant it might prove, in the all pervading glow of socialistic idealism’.²

(Manchester: Manchester University Extra-Mural Department, 1973). 92pp.; pp. 57–61.