Statue of Bishop Gore, St Philip's Cathedral

Description:Bishop Gore, Sweated Labour and Workers’ Education

This photograph was taken by the City Council’s Information Department in the 1950s for inclusion in an official guide and it celebrates Birmingham’s status as a ‘cathedral city’. It shows Thomas Stirling Lee’s bronze statue of Charles Gore outside St Philip’s Cathedral. Erected in 1914, the sculpture was commissioned to reflect Gore’s time as the first Anglican Bishop of Birmingham (1905-1911). The statue shows him in traditional robes with a Bishop’s staff. Yet, Gore was not the conservative cleric this portrayal might suggest, being described variously as 'Episcopal Radical',¹ ‘Socialist Bishop’² and the spiritual progenitor of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA).³

As Bishop of Birmingham, Charles Gore had an official residence in Edgbaston and was actively involved in many aspects of civic life, often working in conjunction with the City Council, the University of Birmingham and religious leaders. He strongly advocated social reforms and promoted economic and educational improvement for working people. He also had a national standing in the Church, social establishment and labour movement and some of his major initiatives were developed during his time in Birmingham. Gore’s status provided opportunities to raise issues of social concern and he used the 1906 Convocation of the Church of England to highlight the distress of workers in ‘sweated industries’.⁴ This supported the work of Mary Macarthur (founder of the National Federation of Women Workers) and of George and Edward Cadbury, who had earlier in 1906 organised a series of ‘Sweated Industries Exhibitions’ in Birmingham and around the country. These focused on the exploitation of mainly female workers in industries such as chain making and lace making in which low wages, long hours and dangerous, unsanitary conditions were prevalent.⁵ Gore’s entitlement to a seat in the House of Lords gave him a further avenue of influence and he supported the passage of the 1909 Trades Board Act through Parliament, which took initial steps towards eradicating sweated labour. In 1907, Gore’s concern with workers’ rights and support for the principle of collective bargaining saw him launch a campaign to mobilise shareholder pressure against railway company directors who were refusing to negotiate with workers’ representatives.⁶ This assisted Lloyd George’s efforts at the Board of Trade and drew the dispute to a peaceful conclusion (unlike its 1911 counterpart).⁷

Bishop Gore strove to ensure that educational improvements for working people kept pace with economic developments and his support for the joint university/WEA tutorial class system was highly significant, and indeed the tutorial system came to be regarded as one of the great English contributions to adult education.⁸ Gore worked with national figures in the WEA, such as Albert Mansbridge and Richard Tawney, to rectify a perceived separation of the existing university extension movement from the people it aimed to engage.⁹ In 1907, Gore chaired a landmark conference and supported a proposal by Mansbridge that led to a joint committee between Oxford University and the WEA to support tutorial classes for students identified through the WEA.¹⁰ This provided a model that was rapidly adopted by universities across England, with Birmingham forming a joint committee in 1909 and taking responsibility for providing tutorial classes in the Midlands (<a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1927">see Worker's Education at the University</a>). Gore was a member of the Birmingham Joint Board until appointed Bishop of Oxford in 1911.¹¹


<font color="#666633"><small>¹ G.L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore, a Great Englishman (1935), p.278
² A.J. Corfield, Epoch in Workers’ Education (1969), p.163
³ G.L. Prestige records that Gore’s sermons in Westminster Abbey before 1903 inspired Albert Mansbridge to found the WEA, The Life of Charles Gore (1935), p.282
⁴ Prestige, p.278
⁵ Black Country Living Museum, Mary Reid Macarthur 1880–1921 (2010), p.3. TASCoS was also involved in a 1906 exhibition against sweated industries.
⁶ Prestige, p.278
⁷ B. Curtis, Llafur the Welsh People’s History Society Newsletter (Winter/Spring 2010), p.5, reviewing R. Griffiths, ‘Killing No Murder: South Wales and the Great Railway Strike of 1911’ (2009)
⁸ T. Kelly, A History of Adult Education in Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (1962), p.252
⁹ Black County Living Museum, Women Chain Makers (2009), p.9. Tawney also campaigned vigorously against sweated labour.
¹⁰ The conference was called ‘What Oxford can do for Work People’. S. Marriott, ‘Adult Education in England: the history of an administrative contrivance’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, vol.32:1, (2000), p.24
¹¹ Minutes of the Joint Board of the Birmingham University and the WEA, p.7 [BA&H: AQ374.9424]