May Hobbs
May Hobbs was born in Hoxton, London in 1938 into a working-class family and community: her father was a foreman in a brewery in Moorgate, and her mother was a machinist in a men’s suit factory by City Road. At the age of two, Hobbs was evacuated from London during the Second World War, and sent to live in Somerset. Hobbs’s early life was spent in various foster families around the UK. After Somerset she lived in Slough, before eventually returning to Hoxton under the care of Jenny Balby, a family relation and “one of the greatest women that ever walked down Hoxton Street”, according to Hobbs’s autobiography, Born to Struggle.
Hobbs describes the working-class “spirit of friendship and community” in the streets of Hoxton. She paints an animated and vibrant image of Hoxton Market, of Saturday evenings spent waiting outside pubs with other children while the adults drank inside, and of the ever-classic East London pie-and-mash shops which were “like dining at Claridge’s – only better”. In the last section of Born to Struggle, titled “The Arts and Crafts Department”, Hobbs shrewdly describes several different ways of making money in the East End – including street bookmaking and shoplifting.
As a young woman, Hobbs held a range of factory and industrial jobs. Her first experience of unfair wages and poor working conditions was at a box-making factory in Shoreditch. Barely out of school, Hobbs recognised the need for fair wages and unionisation and organised a strike within the factory to demand for higher pay – which worked. From this point on, Hobbs organised, campaigned and struck for better wages and more favourable conditions, especially for working-class women.
By the mid-1960s, Hobbs was living with her husband Chris and their young children. They had gone through years of living in poverty, with temporary jobs and housing arrangements. They had been evicted unfairly. Hobbs remained socially and politically active throughout: she organised rent strikes in poorly built flats, and in the early 1960s, joined the local Labour party in Harringay. Towards the late 1960s, Hobbs found work as a night cleaner supervisor at Hornsey College of Art. The wages were still as low as when she had first started night cleaning, several years before. Her job ended and she struggled to find more work due to her “photograph and bits about what [she] was up to … appearing in the papers.” Her political and social activism had led her to be blacklisted.
She decided to set up a union for the night cleaners with her friend Ann and formed the Cleaners’ Action Group (CAG). They marched, printed leaflets, canvassed for support, organised strikes and spread their aims and message to other night cleaners. Although the CAG originated in London, the campaign spread to Birmingham, Manchester and Norwich. The CAG also had the involvement and help of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), a large second-wave feminist organisation, which originated and organised at the National Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970.
Feminist press, such as Spare Rib and Shrew, began to report on Hobbs and her campaign in the early 1970s. A special edition of Shrew, from December 1971, dedicated the whole newsletter to the campaign, for example, featuring timelines of the movement, interviews with CAG members and detailed descriptions of the poor working conditions of the night cleaners.
Trade unions and labour activism no longer represent or cater to only men. May Hobbs militantly and successfully created spaces for working-class women in labour and social activism, and encouraged the need for working-class women to organise and unionise. Hobbs also bridged a gap between two worlds: the traditionally male working-class unions, and the (generally) middle-class WLM. Even in historiography, there is a neglect to focus on working-class women. As Sheila Rowbotham writes, “the mobilisation of working-class women has been neglected in the histories of the sixties and of the women’s movement.”
May Hobbs’ achievements for cleaning campaigns, night cleaning unions and her position as the working-class heroine of Hoxton cannot be understated. She remained an activist, feminist and campaigner throughout – whether in the name of rent, wages, the homeless, young mothers and children, or “anything else where justice needs to be fought for in the face of reactionary governments, big business [and] bureaucracy.”
From: Sarah Taylor ‘May Hobbs and the Nightcleaners Campaign’
November 2020.