Introduction
The Who Led Leeds? collaboration was a public engagement project that began life as a pragmatic solution to my own struggle to find any easily accessible biographical information about past city councillors in Leeds, Sheffield and York, despite having scoured those cities’ own local and family history libraries. This arose directly from the experience of researching my Ph.D. thesis, ‘Working class adult education in Yorkshire 1918–1939’, and took place from September 2016 to June 2017. As such, the Who Led Leeds? collaboration is a case-study example of university-based research with an urban governance theme moving beyond the academy into the contemporary life of Leeds.
This article will communicate four key elements of the project. First, it will reflect on why local government matters and explain the relevance of the project in terms of the historiography of local government. Second, it will place the project in the context of my thesis, explain the relevance of the biographical information being studied and outline how the project worked in practical terms. Third, this article will explain the successes and challenges of collaboration between the academy and external partners. Fourth, it will reflect on the value of the project in terms of public engagement and the historiography of citizenship. My conclusion will propose that projects such as Who Led Leeds?, to which the general public can contribute, shape and access, allow historians to move beyond the academy and engage constructively with the general public and the work of local government.
Historiography and methodological context
The Who Led Leeds? project with its focus on long-forgotten councillors who served on Leeds City Council between the wars is a remote topic for many. It is intriguing, given the achievements of these long-forgotten councillors in improving life for the many, that in general the public tend not to engage deeply with the work of local government. However, present-day councillors on local authorities across the nation continue to carry out the day-to-day governance of our cities in similar fashion to past and pioneering councillors. James Moore and Richard Rodger, acknowledging the raft of public services that local councils are responsible for, state that ‘local government mattered’.Footnote 1 This prompts the question of why local government matters in a political environment where there seems to be little public engagement in the work of local government nationwide on behalf of citizens.
Local government matters in two important areas – economic and political. It contributes to local economies by taking responsibility for large budgets and employing sizeable workforces to provide and oversee services in housing, infrastructure, education, utilities and health often to very large populations. For example, the population of Leeds in the 2011 census was recorded as 751,485.Footnote 2 In effect, Leeds City Council is responsible for providing social, economic and political services to a population and electorate that exceeds that of some small countries. Local government in this respect is embedded in our immediate communities as part of the administrative and democratic machinery of central government.
In the political sphere, an example of how local government remains relevant today can be seen in the pattern of voting in the 2016 referendum on Brexit. Here, significant division in attitudes to the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union were uncovered at a regional and local level. In this area, local government has the potential to fulfil its democratic purpose by engaging constructively with citizens on the local and national issues that concern them most in a climate of austerity. Elected local and regional councillors are key to this process in first understanding, and then representing and communicating, the political wishes of citizens to Westminster. The result of the Brexit referendum came as a surprise to many of the political elite. What the outcome highlights is the gap in communication between Westminster and the different and diverse regions of Britain – a gap that local government has significant potential to bridge.
The relevance of Leeds as a leading regional centre of politics, commerce and industry during the 1920s and 1930s must also be recognized. Tom Hulme uses Manchester as a case-study to highlight the wide range of municipal activities that Manchester City Council led.Footnote 3 In a similar way, Leeds City Council was also at the forefront of delivering key services to an expanding city during the inter-war period.
The population of Leeds increased from 83,000 in 1821 to 457,168 in 1921.Footnote 4 During the industrial revolution, coal, engineering and tanning industries flourished in Leeds. What further distinguished Leeds as a leading city of Yorkshire (one of the most populated regions of the United Kingdom) has been its ability to diversify into other economic activities.Footnote 5 For example, Leeds until the 1960s was a leading centre of British tailoring.Footnote 6 It was also the hub of a vibrant and thriving printing industryFootnote 7 while latterly in the 1990s the ‘Leeds initiative’ restyled Leeds as a ‘corporate city’.Footnote 8
Local government played a major role in supporting and developing the economy of Leeds by using its ‘own Acts to extend its power’.Footnote 9 Key among the achievements of Leeds City Council were slum clearances, provision of municipal housing, extending the provision of education, public health reform in connection with improving the water and sewage systems, public transport in the form of trams and power supply of gas and electricity.
In this respect, local governance in Leeds fitted in to the wider municipal movement of the pre- and inter-war period. John Davis draws attention to the workings and achievements of devolved local governments in Britain from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.Footnote 10 Davis identifies the zenith of municipal governance as 1888. Thereafter, he charts the decline of local government with the movement to centralize and nationalize public services. Barry M. Doyle studies the phenomenon by taking account of the personnel who shaped and applied local government policies such as councillors, council employees and pressure groups who campaigned for improvements in municipal services.Footnote 11 Doyle's work highlights the inter-play between the different groups, irrespective of political ideology, in working together and negotiating local solutions to local problems.Footnote 12 This way of working points to a democratic system exemplified by local government that allowed space for a plurality of political views to co-exist.
The Leeds Corporation is a good example of a city council that embraced its duties and took firm leadership of the city, especially during the inter-war period. The Leeds Tercentenary Official Handbook, in a chapter entitled ‘The “do-it-all” corporation’, states that as well as providing and running basic services such as gas, electricity and water, the Leeds Corporation ‘nurses and shields the inhabitants from the cradle to the grave’.Footnote 13
Graham Haughton identifies that Leeds was never dominated, as local government in Sheffield and Bradford was, by Labour during the inter-war period. Instead, there was a tension and balance between the Conservative and Labour parts of Leeds City Council with the Conservatives dominant for the most part. Haughton draws attention here to charismatic leaders of Leeds such as Sir Charles Wilson, famous for his ‘I am Leeds’ statement. These personalities shaped the city in how it evolved to become a significant regional urban city. Though the municipal pride expressed in the Leeds Tercentenary Handbook has dissipated, Leeds City Council in 1995 controlled an ‘annual budget of around £1 billion…, assets of £3 billion and a workforce of 34,000’ making the city council the ‘single largest employer in the city’.Footnote 14 Given the history behind Leeds City Council, it is relevant to study the different and diverse biographies of local councillors (Labour, Conservative and Liberal) elected to Leeds City Council and to question why they chose a life of public service and how they participated in the work of local government.
A solution to engaging in a real and significant way with the wider public about the value of local government may be to bridge the divide between the history of past and present urban governance. Who Led Leeds? was an attempt to gain a greater understanding of who councillors were, from a biographical and historical perspective as done in the past by historians such as E.P. Hennock and Patricia Hollis.Footnote 15 Another study that addresses the significance of the work and political outlook of municipal councillors in Leeds is Brenda Powell who devised her own biographical card index that provided detailed statistical information about councillors serving on Leeds City Council between 1888 and 1953.Footnote 16 Michael Meadowcroft's study of Leeds City Council provides a wealth of information about the political shift in the political constitution of the Leeds City Council from Liberal and Conservative to Conservative and Labour during the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote 17
Though not conceived of in an urban history framework, Who Led Leeds? offers a potential insight into the field in Leeds on levels such as citizenship, democracy and the work and development of councils over time. In contrast to biographical studies and information about national political leaders, such as The Dictionary of Labour Biography, there is a dearth of information about lesser known but equally important, and locally, perhaps, much more relevant, local politicians and leaders.Footnote 18 This is an area of study across historical disciplines that has been neglected, and as such our understanding of how democracy operated at a local and regional level is patchy. One of the aims of the Who Led Leeds? project was to commemorate forgotten councillors who became local leaders, often against extreme adversity, in a very different time and reality. Such studies may bridge the gap between the history of our urban spaces and our contemporary lived experience of them. They may also expand and enhance our understanding of what it means to be a citizen, and perhaps what it means to be a councillor.
Unlike previous studies undertaken by professional academics such as Hennock and Richard Trainor, this project breaks the academic mould and attempts to combine traditional scholarship with modern public engagement strategies.Footnote 19 By doing so, it creates an interactive space where academics and non-academics with an interest in local government can co-exist. Through this process, the history of urban governance has the potential to move beyond the academy and become more inclusive of diverse perspectives of the work and relevance of local government officials and public servants.
Origins
The idea of building a biographical library came from my doctoral experience of gathering biographical information about Leeds, Sheffield and York city councillors. My research in this area was based on a pamphlet entitled The Adult Student as Citizen. A Record of Service by WEA Students Past and Present published by the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) in 1938.Footnote 20 The WEA, an organization that disseminated adult education in the liberal arts, via the universities, to working-class students, sought to promote adult education as the basis of active citizenship and participatory democracy by celebrating their current and former students who undertook public service at a national, municipal and local level.Footnote 21 In this way, the WEA as part of the associational culture of the inter-war period represented a voluntary organization that sought to contribute to the public good via education.Footnote 22 In the 1938 pamphlet, the WEA listed by district the names, position and location of past and present adult students who were involved in public service in some capacity. The total number of individuals listed in the pamphlet is 2,174, with the total number of positions being 2,342 (as some individuals served on more than one public body).Footnote 23 ‘Public servants’ were broadly defined to include MPs, county, city and parish councillors, magistrates, urban and rural district councillors and public committee members. My focus was on councillors listed who served on the city councils of Leeds, Sheffield and York, a total of 26, 11 of whom were Leeds city councillors. The method I used to gather biographical information about each councillor was identical and time-consuming. I referred first to the biographical card index in the Local and Family History department of Leeds Central Library for each individual, took note of the references listed and then located each reference in the library. Biographical information came in several forms, the most useful being newspaper microfilm references and obituaries. Following this process, I was able to devise thumbnail biographies, some more detailed than others, of my sample.Footnote 24 As described, the process was laborious and at times labyrinthine. At none of the libraries I visited was there a single file that contained all the printed sources made reference to in the biographical card indexes. This inspired my project's primary, and pragmatic, aim – to gather printed copies of all biographical material about Leeds city councillors held in Leeds Central Library, whatever their political affiliation, into a single file that was as useful to academics as to non-academics.
Partnership, practice and public engagement
With this clear aim established, the next part of the project involved taking the initial proposal to the Local and Family History librarians of Leeds Central Library – Ross Horsley and Antony Ramm – who both fully supported the project (and gave much of their time to developing it). The basis of a successful collaboration between the University of Leeds and a non-academic partner was thus established. The University of Leeds Faculty of Art impact fund and the School of History public engagement fund gave the project a total award of £600. With this foundation of goodwill from the academy and beyond, together with financial and moral support, the project began. The key tasks in setting up a system for the collection of biographical material began with the adaptation of a master list of councillors who served on Leeds City Council between 1918 and 1939. We then recruited and trained volunteers in collecting, printing out and storing the information gathered. We did so by devising a form for the collection of biographical information. And finally, we publicized the project. These tasks were carried out in partnership with Leeds Central Library as well as with other individuals and organizations. The next section will outline some of the working partnerships that emerged from the project.
The most important element of the system was producing a master list of councillors because this was what volunteers and contributors would have to refer to in order to build the collection. Luckily, this list existed as part of painstaking research already undertaken by Meadowcroft.Footnote 25 As part of his research method, Meadowcroft compiled a list of all council candidates from 1880 to 1929, by using council election polling results from the regional newspapers. With his permission, this list was adapted to name all the councillors under their political affiliation – Liberal, Labour, Conservative and others – who served on the council between 1918 and 1929. The number of councillors on the adapted list was 175 – 36 Liberal, 66 Labour, 70 Conservative and 3 independent councillors. One of the volunteers – Mrs Ann Lightman – taking the initiative, enhanced the master list by matching the names on the list with the library's biographical card index. This task, once completed, clarified which councillors had biographical cards and which did not. This made the system much more efficient, as it meant that volunteers would not have to search for cards that did not exist. By making use of Meadowcroft's master list in this way, it was possible to get easy access to critical information, the names of councillors. This approach has been effective as a way of taking urban history beyond the academy and into the public sphere. Once those involved in the project had the information in a list format, they were able to enhance it as the example above shows.
The library staff and I then devised a form to collect biographical information about each councillor that could be used by those who contributed to the project. This form gave contributors the option to record basic biographical details about each councillor such as name, date of birth and death, occupation and parent's occupation as well as the option to record details of the sources of information about the councillor. A feedback section was included in the form. The main aim of the biography form was to produce a record of biographical information that had the potential to be used to develop a statistical profile of city councillors.
At this point, the system was ready to be used by volunteers and other contributors. Volunteers were recruited by advertising on the University of Leeds volunteer hub website, the Thoresby Society newsletter and website and Leeds Central Library's own website.Footnote 26 In all, we received 30 expressions of interest from a mixture of students, Thoresby Society members and independent volunteers. Two volunteer workshops were held at the Library with about ten volunteers in attendance at each. The idea and rationale behind the project was explained and a demonstration of the system for collection of biographical information was given to the volunteers.
In summary, the system required volunteers to refer to the master list and choose a councillor. They then referred to that councillor's biographical card in the card index. Using the card references, volunteers located information about the councillor on microfilm or in paper records. They then printed out or photocopied the material and filed it in the biography file under the councillor's surname. Volunteers completed as much of the biography form as possible, using the information they had found in the reference material. The final step of the process was to indicate on the master list whether the councillor's biography was ‘complete’, ‘incomplete’ or ‘in progress’.
Volunteers were invited to do as much or as little as they felt able to. They were also encouraged to contact the project team and library staff with any queries, comments, observations or feedback about the project as they experienced it. The library covered all the printing and photocopying costs incurred in printing out reference material.
Other non-academics involved with the project included Leeds City Council, who were invited to participate. The council expressed support and enthusiasm for the project but were unable to participate due to time and work restrictions. The relatives of some of the councillors, and Mr Bernard Atha, a recently retired, long-standing member of the council, gave speeches at the launch event in May 2017. The process of moving beyond the academy to attract public interest in the project was, unsurprisingly, effective in local history circles, because these groups were already engaged in the topic. On a wider level, it proved to be more difficult. The project was publicized at the ‘Be Curious’ exhibition run by the University of Leeds, at a local history fair and at an open day for secondary school students. People expressed a general interest in the project but often did not engage any further than this. A lesson learned was that to move beyond the academy, and to engage with the wider public, more work needed to be done to establish working relationships between the academy and different civic organizations such as schools, the council itself, democratic associations and trade unions to promote and support civic education.
Some contact and public engagement was serendipitous. For example, the descendants of two of the councillors featured in the publicity posters made their own personal contributions to the collection. In the case of Maud Dightam (1876–1932) – one of the first female Labour councillors elected to Leeds City Council – her grandson provided the library with correspondence and copies of old photographs of Dightam and her family. In the case of David Beevers (1890–1957), his grandson presented the library with an album of photographs chronicling Beevers’ year as mayor of Leeds in 1945.
With the key tasks of collecting and storing of information complete, a working system is now in place to allow easier and wider access to biographical material held in Leeds Central Library about the city councillors from 1918 to 1929.
Successes, challenges and reflections on civic education
The project's successes and challenges will be evaluated here in three ways: as a partnership between the academy and an urban institution; as a public engagement initiative that invited the public to contribute to the collection; and as an exercise in creating an easily accessible biographical collection to support the development of more sophisticated urban, political and social history studies of the work and evolution of city councils.
As a partnership, the project was a great success. It was an example of research that began in the academy and was transferred into the public realm with the full support of Leeds Central Library, a non-academic partner. The Library and staff immediately welcomed the idea of making their collections more accessible to their membership, the general public, academic and non-academic researchers and students. In particular, making the library's wealth of biographical information (all publicly accessible and located on open shelves) more accessible and manageable supported the genealogical and local history research being carried out in Leeds and surrounding areas by a diverse group of people. The idea of the project in this respect was a firm foundation for a successful partnership between the academy and beyond. Leeds City Council, local historians, the Thoresby Society and a diverse group of interested volunteers also supported the concept of the project. Some of that support may have been more moral than practical, but this goodwill, invested in the project, in itself is important to acknowledge.
Key to the further success of the project was the task of engaging with and capturing the public's imagination, as discussed above. However, the practical aspect of actually building the biographical library required individuals to contribute to the collection. While the project was live, between September 2016 and June 2017, the drive to recruit volunteers to assemble and organize the biographical data that would form the collection was reasonably successful, as were the training workshops. Some volunteers completed biographies for some of the councillors, and in all there are now 27 biographies available in different states of completeness in paper form in the Who Led Leeds? biography file located in Leeds Central Library.
Another aspect of the project as an information-gathering exercise is the role that descendants of councillors might play in the project. In Who Led Leeds?, two relatives made significant contributions, as mentioned earlier. Were this project to be revisited, there is greater scope to make more systematic contact with the descendants of past councillors, and invite them to contribute to the project. This task of identifying and locating relatives would be time-consuming but might produce unexpected results and impacts. It would be a direct form of public engagement that placed the family and local history aspect of the project centre stage.
Unfortunately, as the project and funding ended, it was not possible to sustain the publicity and general work of maintaining, encouraging and nurturing the volunteer group. Interest generated in the project over the course of six months slowly ebbed away. The idea that individuals would spontaneously and naturally continue to contribute biographies to the collection independently, as it was set up, did not materialize. Several reasons for this come to mind. The first reason is a practical one; that to maintain and develop a project such as Who Led Leeds?, a hands-on approach needs to be taken. A project leader needs to monitor all aspects of the project and maintain interest by having regular briefing sessions with volunteers and other parties. This was not something that the project, with its remit and limited time frame, could achieve because of a lack of continuing funding, labour and resources. The project in this form had a temporary rather than a permanent nature. Had it been possible to run the project as a permanent properly funded part of the work of the Central Library, it may have become possible for it to grow and develop into an organic part of the cultural and historical life of the living city.
A more complex reason that may explain why the project did not grow beyond itself, quite apart from the lack of funds, resources and time to develop it, is the general lack of public engagement with the life and history of cities. Although the Who Led Leeds? project held great appeal and made sense to local and academic historians, genealogical and family history researchers, the library staff and the volunteer cohort, it cannot be assumed that it made sense to the wider public. Why is this the case and what is it about the inter-war period that nurtured civic participation in local government? In this area, historians have space to move beyond the academy and to engage with these questions to understand how the history of local government may have potential to reignite interest in civic education and democratic participation.
The biographical element of this small public engagement project complements the wider historiography on local government, civic education and citizenship that has emerged in recent years. Hulme draws attention to the influence of idealism, conceived of by T.H. Green, on how and why local government functioned to deliver a range of public services in health, education, housing and infrastructure during the inter-war period.Footnote 27 His research detects a strong relationship between disseminating civic education and the role of local government during the inter-war period. Hulme argues, that an important relationship existed ‘between local state, the city, liberty and active citizenship’.Footnote 28 To support his argument, he uses evidence from an abundance of educational textbooks published on citizenship during the 1920s and 1930s, all supporting a model of national and more significantly ‘local’ active citizenship inspired by the ancient Athenian city-state.Footnote 29
Hulme's larger point, relevant to this study, is that citizenship at a local and regional level co-existed with citizenship at a national level. This aspect of Hulme's analysis is intriguing because it confers dual harmonious political identities – local and national – on citizens. Active citizenship was aligned with an individual's civic responsibilities to their community and immediate locality as well as to the nation. Following World War II, the role of local government as the heart of the city-state was eroded by nationalization and centralization represented as the welfare state.Footnote 30
Hulme has developed an elegant and convincing argument that investigates the meaning of active citizenship in terms of idealism, civic education and participation in and the achievements of local government. In view of the decline of the inter-war city-state, projects such as Who Led Leeds? bring to light further evidence of the strong sense of citizenship and activism among municipal councillors of all political backgrounds that flourished in local governments across the country, all striving to improve and enhance their city-states as integral parts of the nation. These aspects of the history of our cities and urban spaces should not be overlooked and present a case for civic education that engages with our civic responsibilities at a local and national level.
Conclusion – the future
The future of the Who Led Leeds? project depends on the opportunity to fund and revive it, so it may be some time before it can realize its potential and have an impact on the study of urban history. For now, the project is dormant. The broader implications of taking history beyond the academy point to the need for academics to develop and establish strong working relationships with non-academic partners, institutions and volunteer groups. Such relationships take time to establish and develop and are subject to variations such as changes in administration and employees. Who Led Leeds? demonstrates the possibilities of forming such relationships and making them successful on a small scale in a short time frame.
On a larger scale, it is unclear how well this process would work. In theory, it should be possible to use a similar system to gather biographical information about local councillors using similar holdings held by public libraries across the United Kingdom. There may, however, be restrictions and limitations. In the case of this project, we were very fortunate to have a master list of elected councillors to hand. However, other public libraries may not have such resources available, adding an essential and time-consuming task, devising an accurate master list of all elected councillors in a specific time frame, to setting up the information-gathering system. In the broader national context, a project such as this lends itself in theory to digitization. However, this would be a costly and complex process that requires considerable funding and expertise. Once digitized, the information could be very easily accessed and used for a variety of different studies and projects that serve both academic and non-academic purposes. Such a resource might also facilitate large interdisciplinary projects that focus on the evolution of urban local government over time.
Irrespective of the challenges that may be encountered, an initiative to roll out such a project on a larger scale may succeed in catching the public imagination and generate a variety of contributions from diverse sections of the population. Such a phenomenon might have a variety of results, and enable urban historians to understand the history of urban communities from different perspectives. To produce renewed histories that approach this area in an innovative and inclusive way by engaging with the public and generate new questions, we may simply need easier access to raw materials, of which there are an untapped abundance in our public libraries and wider communities.
Partnership projects such as Who Led Leeds? offer new opportunities to academics from different disciplines and non-academics alike to understand urban history from a plurality of perspectives. By taking an inclusive approach, Who Led Leeds? tapped into a cache of sources that would otherwise have remained under-recognized and under-used by academics. Who Led Leeds? has opened up the theme of urban governance in Leeds during the inter-war period from the perspective of elected city councillors of all political persuasions. As a democratic local authority, Leeds City Council during this period functioned as a fluctuating partnership, depending on which party was dominant, between the Labour and Conservative party. What we can learn from the biographical information gathered by Who Led Leeds? is how individuals worked in partnership rather than in opposition to deliver key public services in Leeds.
Ultimately, what this pilot project demonstrates is that by using public engagement strategies to gather and archive information about local councillors systematically, it becomes possible to move beyond the confines of academia and to explore ways of engaging with the wider public on the issue of local governance.
Example of master list content and layout
LEEDS CITY COUNCIL
Elected Councillors, Aldermen, Lord Mayors & MPs 1918–1929
(Adapted from Michael Meadowcroft's Central List (1978) – ‘Candidates 1880–1929. Councillors, Aldermen, Lord Mayors & MPs 1880–1929’)
BIOGRAPHY FORM
Name of Public Servant:- DAVID BEEVERS (OBE)
Date Record Created: 25 November 2016
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If you have and you would like to record it please use the attached sheet for ‘extra biographical information’.
NAME OF PUBLIC SERVANT:
EXTRA BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
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