DAVID ROLINSON
Play for Today Writer: Colin Welland; Producer: Kenith Trodd; Director: Roy Battersby
“When a woman looks at her wages and thinks of the hours she works and the conditions, she knows she is a slave…”
Leeds United! dramatises the 1970 dispute in which over 25,000 clothing workers, the majority of them women, went on strike across Leeds, other parts of Yorkshire and the North East.1 Katrina Honeyman, in her history of the Leeds clothing industry, argued that the strike symbolised “the response of women workers to several decades of oppression by both employers and the male union hierarchy” and showed the “talent of women for political organization, [which is] so often overlooked in labour history”.2 Leeds United! reflects this talent in its methods of retelling, and reconstructing, the strike. According to director Roy Battersby in 2009, the play’s “ambition was to try to understand” how their “courageous” action took them to “the verge of winning” and how “within a few days that was turned into […] a miserable, heartbreaking compromise”.3
Continue reading “Women and Work: Leeds United! (1974) Part 1 of 3″
Play for Today: Leeds United!, tx. BBC1, 31 October 1974. ↩
Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 209. ↩
Roy Battersby, in Q&A with John Hill and Kenith Trodd at BFI Southbank on 25 November 2009, in the Radical Television Drama season. Available to view here. ↩