| AdminHistory | On 7 Feb 1880 William Ullyott of Leeds and 55 colleagues formed the first registered lodge of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) in Sheffield. The founding delegate conference of the new Society was held in the Falstaff Hotel, Market Place, Manchester on 3 Jan 1881. It was set up as craft union, one in which workers were organised according to the particular craft or trade in which they worked. It contrasted with industrial unionism, in which all workers in the same industry were organised into the same union, regardless of differences in skills.
Within a year, ASLEF had established a central executive - based for convenience on the Leeds branch - and had registered under the Trade Union Acts, its head office being the Commercial Inn, Sweet Street, Holbeck, Leeds. The first general secretary was Joseph Brooke. By 1884, membership exceeded 1,000.
In the course of the next two decades, the union’s membership grew from hundreds to thousands. ASLEF held its first strike on the Midland Railways in 1887. Its first monthly magazine was published in 1888.
By 1904, when the union had 12,000 members, train drivers and firemen had mostly achieved a ten-hour day everywhere except Scotland and Ireland, where shifts of 12 hours remained common. ASLEF took part in many strikes, including the national rail strike of 1911, the 1919 strike to help the National Union of Railwaymen win standardised pay, 1924 strike against the new large regional railway companies, the 1926 General Strike, and the 1955 strike against British Railways regarding a pay dispute.
Administrative history based on the History of ASLEF taken from the ASLEF website http://www.aslef.org.uk/history.html [accessed 13 Jun 2017]. |
| Description | Branch meeting minutes, payments, 1880 - 1961 (ASLEF/1)
Branch contribution ledgers, 1915 - 1959 (ASLEF/2)
Check stewards' ledgers, 1919 - 1928 (ASLEF/3)
Quarterly returns of contributions to head office, 1914 - 1958 (ASLEF/4)
London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) sectional council No. 2 Minutes, 1924 - 1950 (ASLEF/5)
Neepsend Locomotive depot minutes May, 1922 - 1941 (ASLEF/6) |
| CustodialHistory | The first minute book was deposited at Sheffield City Libraries on behalf of ASLEF by the Sheffield Trades and Labour Council in 1959; the remainder of this collection was deposited by ASLEF in 1964. |