The High Wycombe and District Furniture Manufacturers' Federation Minutes 1913 to 1933 Volumes 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6

An interesting recent auction purchase: the minute books of The High Wycombe and District Furniture Manufacturers' Federation, a trade union for the employers, founded in 1913.  I have scanned Volume 1 (which covers 6 October 1913 to 8 June 1914),  Volume 3 (5 February 1917 to 8 October 1919), Volume 4 (21 October 1919 to 21 June 1923), Volume 5 (21 June 1923 to 8 April 1929) and Volume 6 (17 June 1929 to 5 December 1933 with some cuttings from 5 January 1934) and made them available for viewing. Volume 2 is, alas, missing from the set. 

Topics discussed include the 1913 strike, the manufacture of aircraft frames during WWI, the increasing employment of women in the workforce, the General Strike of 1926, and the hardships of the early 1930s. Successive negotiations between the employers and the trade unions are minuted. There is a wealth of data on daily wage rates for the different classes of work over more than 20 years. A goldmine for social historians of the period.

Including covers, endpapers, interleaved correspondence and newspaper articles the images amount to 1,523 pages in total. Where correspondence and cuttings are interleaved I have scanned both pages of the minute book first and then scanned whatever material is interleaved. I have scanned the newspaper articles in sequential sections so that the reader sees everything in the correct order. As not all segments are the same shape, size or length, this leads to some variations in the sizes of contiguous scanned images. 

© Julian Parker 2020