Heritage Quay’s Lonely Hearts Club

Welcome to the Heritage Quay Lonely Hearts Club!

Here you can find information about some of the collections that are rarely seen in our Research Room that are just waiting for someone to fall in love with them.

These special collections can be big or small, they just haven’t been used as much as we know they deserve.

So if you’re looking for new sources or fresh perspectives, this is the place…

Robert Blatchford Collection

Robert Blatchford was a key part of the Victorian and Edwardian socialist movement in. Despite the influence of his social network, and his newspaper The Clarion, his name is not as well known as many others. Whilst his friends and co-campaigners for social justice and suffrage rightly feature in histories of the period, we think that Robert’s place is important too as an ally and organiser to ignore.

Blatchford’s story is intertwined with the birth of the socialist movement, and his thoughts and life experiences can help us unpick the ideas and concepts of the broader Labour movement, of which he was not a devoted member. As the modern Labour Party tussles with what kind of party it wants to be, and how it expresses national pride and interational cooperation at the same time, there is much to glean from Robert Blatchford’s experiences and writings.

This small collection is only 3 boxes, but they are full of handwritten and published copies of his poems, articles and other writings. It also includes a large amount of correspondence written by Blatchford to his daughters, his personal accounts, records of his war service, newspaper cuttings and scrapbooks of his career.

The collection came to us from Lord David Clark, and of course contains material about Victor Grayson.

You can browse at the catalogue here www.heritagequay.org/archives/BLA and then of course you should book to come and take a look yourself.