RMT’s Annual General Meeting this year meets in Bournemouth, Dorset, one of the birthplaces of the trade union movement.
 
Any RMT delegates who needs a reminder this week of the great radical heritage of our movement can visit the Shelley family tomb in St Peter’s churchyard in Bournemouth.
 
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was born in Somers Town, St Pancras in London in 1797, near where RMT’s head office, Unity House now stands. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to her and was buried in St Pancras Old Churchyard where her tomb remains, although she was later reinterred alongside her daughter in Bournemouth.
 
Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a founder of feminism in Britain, was a revolutionary advocate for free education for working-class girls and boys.

She wrote: “Day schools, for particular ages, should be established by government, in which boys and girls might be educated together. The school for the younger children, from five to nine years of age, ought to be absolutely free and open to all classes.”
 
Her daughter Mary Shelley was buried in Bournemouth, alongside the heart of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

It is Percy’s words — written after hearing of the 1819 massacre of workers by armed cavalry at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester — that feature on so many trade union banners today:

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.”
 
Shelley’s words comforted and inspired generations of workers facing powerful class enemies and repressive forces of the state.
 
RMT stands in solidarity to all those fighting for justice, from the Tolpuddle Martyrs (six agricultural labourers deported to Australia in 1834 for swearing an oath not to undercut each other’s wages) to the Windrush survivors in 2018 (wrongfully detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported).