Martha’s Story: The Girl Who Broke Her Chains by Tony Barnsley (Grosvenor House, £6.99)

ON HER 11th birthday Martha Wood receives paper and pens as a present and, from that moment on, keeps a diary about her life as the daughter of a chain-making family at the beginning of the 20th century.

Author Tony Barnsley has chosen this fictional diary form to provide us with a vivid picture of life in a working-class household in the Black Country at the time. It was an area renowned for its metal-working factories and notorious for the way families were exploited by the chain-making companies. Often most of them, including wives and daughters, would be involved in the back-breaking work of chain-making in their own homes and backyards for appallingly low wages.

The Cradley Heath chain-makers’ strike of 1910, lasting 10 weeks, became a milestone in working-class struggle and the campaign for women’s rights.

Gaining popular support, it culminated in victory for the strikers, winning their right to a minimum wage.

Mary Macarthur, founder of the National Federation of Women Workers, gave the strikers full support, using mass meetings and the media — including the new medium of cinema — to bring the situation of the striking women to a wider audience and the strike became an international cause celebre.

Barnsley’s book gives the background to that struggle through the eyes of the young Martha and if the book’s intended primarily as an educational tool — it’s sponsored by the NASUWT teachers’ union — then it will certainly serve its purpose well in bringing that era to life for contemporary schoolchildren.

The diary form and the rather didactic narrative may hinder its wider popularity as a young person’s novel but both author and union should be congratulated for making this creditable attempt at bringing working-class history alive at a time when the Tory government is hell-bent on regressing to a “kings, queens and great generals” historical narrative.

John Green