When Nick Mansfield joined the People’s History Museum in 1989 it was struggling for survival and the Tory Party would have been quite happy to have seen the back of it.
But fast forward more than 20 years and the museum, which used to be known as the National Museum of Labour History, is now so much part of the establishment that last year it hosted an evening event for the Conservative Party conference, with shadow foreign secretary William Hague as the guest of honour.
And this month, there will be tangible evidence of the museum’s progress with the opening of a £12.5m redevelopment.
“Twenty years ago the museum was in bits,” Mansfield says. “The collection had been severely abused and it had been run by these people who saw themselves as part of the labour movement; these weren’t museum people, but minor politicians. And they were scoundrels, it’s the only word for them.”
This all happened when the museum was still in London and was run by Trade Union, Labour and Co-operative History Society. After a series of difficulties that led to a Trade Union Congress (TUC) investigation and the sacking of all the staff, the collection ended up in storage.
It was rescued when Manchester City Council asked the trustees if they would like the collection to come north. The trustees said yes and the museum reopened in 1990 at the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute building, which was the birthplace of the TUC.
Mansfield came on board after being persuaded by the-then director of Manchester Art Gallery, Julian Spalding, that it was a good opportunity. And despite the troubled history of the collection, he says the decision to join was not a difficult one.
“There was clearly a big commitment from the city council, there was some money there and I’m a labour historian and there aren’t that many vacancies for labour historians,” Mansfield says
“But for the first 18 months, I’d moved my family up, and I thought, blooming heck, what am I doing here? I had given up a steady job.”
That steady job was as the head of the museum service for Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales. Before that he had worked for the Museum of Rural Life in Norfolk, the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire and Wisbech Museum in Cambridgeshire.
He first got interested in museums through adult education and becoming involved in the History Workshop Movement, which was founded by the historian Raphael Samuel in the 1960s and pioneered “history from below”.
Mansfield is originally from Cambridge (his dad played football for Cambridge United) but did his first degree at Manchester, so knew the city well when he arrived at the People’s History Museum.
He joined the university again in 1999 when he took a year off to do a PHD in trade union banners, which is one of the areas that the museum is well-known for. He also used the time to write a book about farmworkers (English Farmworkers and Local Patriotism, 1900–1930), which is another of his interests.
“I have been here 21 years, even though I had a year off for good behaviour when I joined Manchester University between 1999 and 2000,” Mansfield says. “I’ve always had a strong academic parallel career and have worked for several local universities supervising PHDs.”
The early days at the People’s History Museum were a hard slog, but he is pleased with its progress since then. One of the ways the museum has improved is through the acquisition of some important collections.
These include the Labour Party collection, which Mansfield says is the most complete of any political party in the world.
There is also the Communist Party of Great Britain collection, which includes important material that the organisation gathered from other political parties. And there are collections from trade unions, the Co-operative Society and even the Professional Footballers’ Association.
Charting the history of democracy
Many artefacts from these collections will be on show in the museum’s new galleries, which have been created by Headland Design. The displays chart the history of democracy from the early 19th century to the present day.
Mansfield says that while there is a lot of social history material, the museum’s real subject is politics, something he thinks most museums shy away from.
The main galleries open with the story of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, a meeting held on St Peter’s Field in Manchester calling for the reform of parliamentary representation.
The event turned to tragedy when magistrates tried to bring the 60,000 crowd under control – a cavalry charge led to 15 deaths and up to 700 injuries.
“The museum being based in Manchester is very important to the story,” says Mansfield. “The exhibition starts at Peterloo 200 years ago when there was no democracy.
"We thought it was important to show visitors, particularly younger ones, that the right to vote was a relatively recent thing. We want to show the importance of active citizenship in the political health of the country. We see an important social role for the museum.”
Marching through history
The exhibition ends with a large display of the banners that the museum is famous for. “You’ve had your march through history then you have your rally in the Banner gallery,” says Mansfield.
The collection includes the world’s oldest trade union banner (Tinplate Workers, 1821) and the oldest miners’ banner (Ashover Miners, c1825).
The museum will also stage temporary exhibitions, and reopens with Carried Away, a photography show documenting more than 100 years of protest across the UK.
The new museum is now surrounded by the ambitious Spinningfields regeneration scheme, although Mansfield says the area was slightly dodgy when the museum first moved into the Pump House building in 1994.
It closed in 2007 for the redevelopment to begin and funding has come from a range of sources, including the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Northwest Regional Development Agency and Manchester City Council.
Mansfield’s ambitions for the museum have been helped by some influential supporters, many of them brought on board by the trustees.
“Even though we are entirely non-political, we have been able to derive a lot of support from the current government, particularly some individuals within it, because our trustees knew a lot of these politicians on the way up, so we could get them all here,” Mansfield says.
“We have had most of them here: Prescott and Straw. Brown has been twice, and he hosted a reception for us at number 11. He is our celebrity user as he used the archive when he was a PHD student long ago.”
The current chairman of trustees is John Monks, the former head of the TUC, who Mansfield describes as “shrewd, approachable and flexible”. But he reserves a real debt of gratitude to another chairman of trustees, Jack Jones, a former head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union who died last year aged 96.
“Jack Jones got us through some difficult times,” Mansfield says. “He was as tough as old boots, he copped a bullet during the Spanish civil war, was an ex-docker, but was an extraordinarily wise man.”
Having been on this long road to where the museum is now, you would have thought it would be the ideal time for Mansfield to sit back and admire his work. But instead, he is leaving the museum. He won’t say what is he doing, although it is something in the academic world.
“I’m 57, coming to the end of my career, and it is important for younger people with new ideas to be able to come in,” Mansfield says.
He’ll spend a few months passing on his knowledge to the new director, which will at least give him the chance to have a bit of time enjoying the redeveloped museum.
It’s been a long haul for Mansfield, but one that has transformed an unloved and homeless collection in London into a museum of national and international importance that has a venue to be proud of.
Nick Mansfield at a glance
Nick Mansfield joined the People’s History Museum in 1989 when it was called the National Museum of Labour History.
He arrived from Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales where he was head of the local authority’s museum service. Before that he had worked for the Gressenhall Museum of Rural Life in Norfolk, the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire and Wisbech Museum in Cambridgeshire.
Before working in museums he was involved in a number of professions, including the building trade and social work.
He has a degree in politics and modern history from Manchester University and was awarded a Simon Fellow at the university’s department of history and classics in 1999-2000.
Mansfield was born in Cambridge in 1952.
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