Back in the 1950s, two socialists, Ruth and Eddie Frow, began collecting books, banners, badges, leaflets, photos, records, pamphlets and postcards documenting working class activism which they originally stuffed into their small house in Stretford, before moving the museumic mountain into a former nurses home on the Crescent.
Now this politically sexy assemblage of artefacts dating back 200 years includes everything from the archive of anarchists punk band, Chumbawamba, to items relating to 1940s global film and music superstar and civil rights figurehead, Paul Robeson.
As actor Christopher Eccleston says: “There couldn’t be a better home for the Library than Salford…because Salford embodies the struggle of the working classes…”
Husband and wife, and folk power couple, Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, perform at Cora Hota in 1957.
Throughout his life, Salfordian legend Ewan MacColl, father of Kirsty MacColl, made theatre, poetry, writing, acting and folk singing dangerous. Born Jimmy Miller in 1915 in a two-up-two-down terrace in Lower Broughton, this extraordinary ordinary bloke penned the probably the greatest song to come out of Salford, Dirty Old Town, plus one of the most melting love songs ever, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
Ewan was beaten up by police on the hunger marches of the 1930s, trailed by MI5 for having communist views, banned from performing ‘subversive’ plays…and was still sharing the stage with John Cooper Clarke in the late Seventies for the Festival of Racial Equality. Top guy!
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