The Courtaulds Strike of 1965: Black and Asian Workers in Preston

The afternoon the workers stopped

On 24 May 1965, workers on the afternoon shift at Courtaulds’ Red Scar mill in Preston were told that their responsibilities were increasing. Their response began as a sit-down protest and developed into a strike lasting about three weeks. The dispute centred on how much work each employee could be required to perform and who had the authority to agree to it. Yet it soon became a public argument about race, migration and the obligations of trade unionism. ¹

The workforce involved was more complicated than a simple division between British workers and migrants. In his contemporary report for Tribune, Hamza Alavi described the spinning department as employing predominantly Indian and Pakistani workers, some Caribbean workers and a substantial group of European migrants, especially Italians and Poles. He reported that Europeans initially joined the stoppage before returning to work. The Black and Asian workers who continued therefore did so in a workplace where migrants themselves occupied different positions and faced different pressures. Alavi’s account is a reminder to distinguish the opening protest from the strike as it subsequently developed. ¹

A modern Lancashire factory

Red Scar belonged to the world of manufactured fibres. Rayon production transformed wood pulp into viscose and then into yarn through chemical processing. Courtaulds presented this technology as a story of scientific achievement. In 1965, the same year as the strike, it sponsored the film Rayon First among Fibres, preserved by the British Film Institute. The BFI’s catalogue describes a production combining the history and chemistry of rayon with elaborate colour photography by Wolfgang Suschitzky. ²

That industrial setting matters. The dispute occurred inside a business promoting modern materials and technical sophistication. Decisions about machinery were also decisions about the people required to operate it. A production system could be ingenious without distributing its advantages fairly. The film’s existence helps locate Courtaulds in the technological ambitions of its period; it cannot by itself tell us what a shift felt like to the workers whose labour made the finished fibre possible. ²

Why workers came to Red Scar

Later community research helps explain why difficult factory jobs remained attractive. The Cotton Connects project interviewed a hundred people about migration and textile work. Most participants were from minority ethnic communities, and many had been born overseas. Its findings identified Courtaulds’ comparatively high wages as a reason workers sought employment there. Respondents described shift patterns running through the day and night, commonly in eight-hour blocks, and working weeks of forty to fifty hours. Chemical smells, machinery noise and unsocial hours featured among their complaints. ³

Those interviews concern working lives extending beyond the 1965 dispute, and should not be mistaken for a survey of its strikers. They nevertheless preserve a useful complexity. Many respondents remembered strong friendships with fellow workers and were saddened when factories closed, despite the physical demands of the job. A workplace could offer earnings, companionship and an established place in a town while also containing inequalities. The workers’ willingness to defend their conditions should be understood within that combination of dependence on the factory and dissatisfaction with aspects of it. ³

The proposed increase in work

In the tyre-cord spinning department, the immediate proposal required each operator to supervise one and a half machines instead of one. Historian Ron Ramdin describes an agreement negotiated between management and a regional organiser of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, or TGWU, without properly consulting the workers affected. The offered reward was ten shillings a week. Against a fifty per cent increase in the production norm, the additional payment amounted to only a small percentage of wages. Workers rejected the arrangement at a meeting. Implementation was postponed, but the disagreement remained. ⁴

Ramdin records a particularly tangible act of management: new painted lines divided the machinery into the portions each worker was expected to handle. A dispute discussed in meetings had become a physical instruction on the factory floor. Refusing that instruction meant challenging both the employer and union representatives who regarded the arrangement as settled. Only one of the shop stewards was Asian. The issue of consultation was consequently inseparable from the question of whose experience was represented when changes to the job were negotiated. ⁴

Conditions and the meaning of solidarity

The contemporary syndicalist newspaper Direct Action described the spinning department’s chemical-laden air and intense noise. Its July 1965 report also recorded a central grievance: workers believed the union had failed to consult them adequately before endorsing the extra work. Union officials refused to sanction the strike and maintained that the agreement was satisfactory. From the strikers’ perspective, the organisation expected to protect them had instead become an obstacle to challenging the arrangement. ⁵

The report set the workers’ expectation of collective support against the officials’ insistence on union procedure. This was a dispute about representation as well as wages. The newspaper itself was openly critical of union bureaucracy, so its account should be read with that position in mind. Nevertheless, the disagreement it documented was concrete: membership had not brought the backing the workers sought. The practical strength of a stoppage depended on colleagues joining it, and continued production by others reduced the pressure the strikers could exert. The principle of solidarity mattered because it could change the balance inside the factory. ⁵

The workers and their supporters

The strikers organised their own action committee under A. A. Chaudhry. Later suggestions that outside activists simply took control obscure the experience of its leadership. Drawing on contemporary documents, historian Ian Birchall describes Chaudhry’s military and administrative background and his training as a textile technician at Blackburn Technical College. His qualifications did not correspond to the limited prospects available to him at Courtaulds. The committee was capable of speaking for workers whose abilities were not recognised by their position in the factory. ⁶

Ray Challinor, a socialist associated with the Westhoughton Labour Party, sought practical support through labour movement contacts. He approached trade unionists, universities and MPs and worked to raise money. Alavi’s report, reproduced in Birchall’s account, described the warm reception Challinor received at a strikers’ meeting. This support did not overcome the absence of an effective wider stoppage. It does, however, prevent an inaccurate picture of every white worker or socialist standing against the men. The relevant distinction was between professions of solidarity, efforts to organise it and the support actually available at Red Scar. ⁶

Different arguments about Black organisation

The dispute attracted members of the Racial Adjustment Action Society, known as RAAS, including Roy Sawh and Michael de Freitas, also known as Michael X. Their involvement brought publicity and arguments about Black self-organisation. These positions were not identical to the strike committee’s priorities, and RAAS speakers themselves did not agree on every tactic. Sue Sparks’ history of the dispute emphasises that the workers wanted their union to represent them; organising an independent committee did not necessarily mean wanting permanently separate unions. ⁷

Interventions also pulled workers towards ending the strike. Sparks records the return of approximately 120 Caribbean workers after representatives of the High Commission urged them back. Meanwhile, roughly 2,000 white employees continued working. The strikers faced pressures arising from national connections, union authority and the immediate need to sustain the stoppage. Their situation cannot be explained merely by calling the action racial or industrial. Unequal treatment helped shape an industrial grievance, while the pattern of support and withdrawal influenced whether that grievance could be pursued successfully. ⁷

Negotiations and the return to work

The strike committee pursued several routes to a settlement, including an appeal to Frank Cousins, the TGWU general secretary then serving as Minister of Technology. Its breach with union officials was therefore not a rejection of every possible union connection. Historian Jack Hepworth also records a proposed hunger strike outside Downing Street, announced as the stoppage weakened. A threatened action should not be confused with an action known to have taken place. ⁸

On 11 June, a settlement emerged from negotiations between management and TGWU officials in which the strike leadership had not been fully involved. Hepworth reports a proposed thirty per cent increase in workload for an additional three old pence an hour. At the final meeting in the Continental Cinema, approximately 218 of the 240 workers present accepted the deal. Supporter Malik Khaliq encouraged them to become more active within the union and elect new shop stewards. The proposed increase was lower than the original demand, but higher workloads remained part of the settlement. Effective representation inside the union remained an immediate task. ⁸

What other workers recognised

The dispute also prompted testimony from another Courtaulds workplace. In a letter published by Tribune on 16 July 1965, a correspondent identifying himself as an employee at Trafford Park supported Challinor’s criticism of the company. He alleged that none of the factory’s many Black and Asian workers had become even a chargehand, a basic supervisory position. He described the resentment and assumptions of superiority that unequal opportunities could encourage, and connected Preston with pressure for greater output elsewhere in the company. ⁹

This is an individual worker’s accusation, rather than a complete company promotion record. Its value lies in showing what a contemporary employee recognised in the Preston dispute: a relationship between managerial hierarchy, racial inequality and the distribution of authority at work. The letter also challenges an easy separation between supposedly personal prejudice and ordinary factory organisation. Decisions about who supervised whom, whose experience counted and who could advance were part of the working environment in which a demand for extra output was received. ⁹

A strike before employment protection

The timing places limits on assumptions about what remedies were available. Britain’s Race Relations Act received royal assent in November 1965, several months after the Preston dispute, and came into force in December. It prohibited racial discrimination in specified public places and created an offence concerning incitement to racial hatred. Employment discrimination was outside its scope. Protection was extended to employment and housing through the Race Relations Act 1968. ¹⁰

The men at Red Scar could not have brought their grievances under provisions introduced three years later. Their immediate options depended heavily on workplace organisation, negotiation, publicity and political pressure. That does not mean later legislation automatically resolved comparable disputes. It explains why the conduct of a recognised union carried such weight in this one. A worker challenging unequal treatment needed a means of turning a complaint into effective action. When the organisation negotiating with management did not support the challenge, the existence of union membership alone offered little reassurance. ¹⁰

The factory and its later closure

Red Scar remained a major workplace after the strike. Its importance appeared starkly in the Commons debate following the announcement of closure in November 1979. Preston North MP Robert Atkins told Parliament that around 2,600 jobs were at risk and that approximately thirty-two per cent of the affected workers were of Asian origin. He discussed the manufacture of industrial yarn for tyres alongside textile yarn, and the difficulties caused by changes in tyre construction and markets. ¹¹

The debate also recorded disagreements about whether viable production could be retained. Workers, trade unions and local representatives were confronting a different threat from the one faced in 1965: the loss of the workplace itself. The closure announcement should not be used retrospectively to suggest that the earlier demand for fair conditions was mistaken. The two episodes concern different decisions, separated by fourteen years. Together they show how strongly migrant workers’ livelihoods had become bound up with Preston’s industrial economy, through the work they performed and the jobs they subsequently stood to lose. ¹¹

Remembering the people inside the mill

In 2018, the Harris museum recorded former Courtaulds employees’ oral histories as part of its collaboration with the Courtauld. These accounts placed working lives alongside the company’s artistic and industrial legacy. The recordings also became material for later work with local schools. Such projects preserve experiences that cannot be recovered from a production figure or the architectural remains of a factory alone. ¹²

A 2022 mural developed by artist Gavin Renshaw, with pupils from Penwortham Priory Academy and Christ the King Catholic High School, incorporated portraits of former workers and themes of migration. The Harris described the project as a way of connecting a younger generation with the people who had worked in Preston’s textile industry. ¹³

The strike belongs within that local history. Its contested agreement makes the organisation of work visible alongside the machinery and buildings. It asks us to consider who could influence a factory decision, whose objections carried weight and what happened when workers insisted that their experience of the job should count.

Sources

[1] Hamza Alavi, Tribune; publicly accessible opening excerpt. What Happened at Preston; 18 June 1965.

[2] British Film Institute Replay; film catalogue entry. Rayon First among Fibres; Film 1965; catalogue text undated.

[3] Kreative Solutions Group. Cotton Connects Research Findings.

[4] Ron Ramdin, extract from The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain, hosted by libcom. The Courtaulds Red Scar Mill strike 1965; Book 1987; extract posted 17 January 2019.

[5] Syndicalist Workers Federation. One Out All Out Direct Action volume 6 number 7 page 8; July 1965.

[6] Ian Birchall, London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 42. Ray Challinor and the 1965 Courtauld Strike; 15 May 2011.

[7] Sue Sparks, rs21 and IS History Project. The Courtaulds strike of 1965 Black workers fighting back; 12 March 2024.

[8] Jack Hepworth, North West Labour History 45 pages 15 to 20; Newcastle University repository. Britain’s first migrant strike Labour militancy and racial politics at Courtaulds Preston 1965; 2020.

[9] Tribune; publicly accessible excerpt of a letter from a correspondent identifying as a Courtaulds Trafford Park worker. Courtaulds strike; 16 July 1965.

[10] UK Parliament. Race Relations Act 1965; Undated historical guide.

[11] UK Parliament Hansard. Courtaulds Preston Mill Closure Commons debate volume 974 columns 1446 to 1456; 28 November 1979.

[12] Courtauld National Partners. Histories of Courtaulds Ltd; Programme 2018 to 2022.

[13] The Harris. The Links of the Chain are of Equal Strength; 2022.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.