Heywood & Hopwood May 2016

Rochdale’s Pioneers
of Worker Education
At the beginning of the 20th century, many workingmen and women in
Rochdale, as in so many industrial towns across the United Kingdom, were
eager to build on the knowledge they had of the world. ey wanted to learn, not
just about science or literature but about their own industrial experience and
their social and political place in it. ey wanted higher education and their
experiences in organised schooling had given them a taste for it!
Soon, their appeals for knowledge
were heard, and men of learning
from the Co-operative Movement
and from the universities came
forward to help them with
educational courses that met their
intellectual, spiritual and political
needs. At the forefront of this
e Rochdale WEA Tutorial Class of 1908
support rose the Workers
Educational Association (the WEA) and its leader Albert Mansbridge but it needed a town
and a group of students to carry out its great ‘experiment’ in worker education.
Rochdale was chosen, for its radical history, its network of educational organisations, its
nonconformist energies and its commitment to learning. In 1908 the town hosted the first
WEA tutorial class in the country and recruited one of the great socialist thinkers of the
day in R H Tawney to lead, and in the end to be led by, its worker students
is important but somewhat forgotten story has now been turned into a book by local
historian Gary Heywood-Everett who stumbled across a photograph of the first tutorial
class of 1908 in the library at Lancaster University and recognised his old school – Rochdale
Tech’ – as the venue for this historic experiment. Determined to recover details of this lost
but important event, Gary interviewed relatives of some of the first students, sought out
the existing literature and, after conducting extensive research in the archives was able to
34