Labour History Archive and Study Centre Information Guide No. 8 World War I Sources  War Emergency Workers National Committee (WNC) - This committee was formed the day war broke by the Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and the Co-operative movement, plus a number of other affiliated organisations such as the Fabian Society. The main concern of the WNC was to defend the interests of organised working people. The size of the collection goes some way toward showing the impact of the war on people’s lives. With over 20,000 pages of correspondence on all domestic matters relating to the war including: rents, food, employment, agriculture, pensions, railways, war babies, air raids and women’s war service etc. It is a large collection of papers that relates very closely to the day to day domestic environment during the war. Importantly it depended on the actions of what used to be called the “rank and file” of the labour/trade union movement for its running, it was far from a “top down” committee. There was significant involvement of women at both a national and local level. Perhaps the best quote regarding the WNC comes from the historian Royden Harrison when he wrote of the WNC that, “no...social history of Britain between 1914 and 1918 can be adequate if it ignores its activities”. As a compliment to the activities of the WNC, we also hold the minutes of the Labour Party National Executive Committee, (NEC), the organisation that runs the Labour Party nationally, there are also the minutes of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the committee responsible for running the Labour Party in the House of Commons. Also of       importance are the conference reports of both the Labour Party and the TUC, we hold a full set of Labour Party conference reports and almost a full set of TUC reports. Newspapers and Journals - There is a full set of the Daily Herald for the war years as well as some more obscure newspapers and journals. We have copies of the Labour Leader, The Call, The Clarion, The British Citizen & Empire Worker, and Labour Woman, and while there is not a full set of each publication covering the whole of the war years, taken together they add up to a pretty good impression of the number and variety of different political opinions to be found during the war. Personal papers – Arthur Henderson (1863-1935), the first Labour MP in government, Secretary of the Board of Education in 1915. However in his personal papers there are a series of letters from June and July 1917. Henderson had been sent to St Petersburg, then called Petrograd, in Russia by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, to report on the events taking place. His letters, which he writes whilst staying at the British Embassy, offer a fascinating glimpse of not only the Russia of the time, but the mindset and outlook of a leading British labour politician. John Ward (1866-1934) - Trade union leader, MP, British Army Officer. A leading member of the British force into Russia in 1919 to fight the Bolsheviks. Ward’s papers contain the manuscript copy of his book, With the Diehards in Siberia, plus other war related correspondence and material. Ward was from a poor background but was patriotic, so much so that when the war broke out he set about the task of raising his own “Navvies” battalion. He was given the rank of Captain and later became a Lieutenant-Colonel. Duncan Whiteman - Conscientious Objector. Whiteman was a Christian who refused to fight in the war. There were degrees of objection to the war, there were CO’s who were happy to drive ambulances in France and other theatres of war, but Whiteman was a “full” objector and wanted nothing to do with any aspect of the war at all. His letters from prison, Dartmoor in this case, fully reflect this. Douglas Houghton (1898-1996) - Labour politician, trade union leader, RSPCA trustee, MP and the last Victorian to serve in a British government. Houghton went to war in 1917 alongside his friend the sculptor Henry Moore, they were both bayonet instructors in the Artists Rifles, he survived the battle of Passchendaele. The letters that survive in his papers are mainly to his parents and offer an insight into the everyday, often mundane life, in the army coupled with some quite graphic details of some of the death and destruction he witnessed. Pamphlet collection – four boxes of pamphlets relating to the war including the causes of war, domestic policy, anti-war literature and the Treaty of Versailles.