GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

Just a little bit about the union. We are not totally unique, but we are one of the

few unions that have not changed since we started. We were formed 1893 to

organise musicians and here we are in 2017 organising musicians. We have

not merged, we have had ups and downs, we have been quite political, but we

have been a craft union all that time. We were one of the early unions to join

the GFTU, but we did drop out of membership in the 1920s and this is to do

with the state of the union. We also dropped out of the TUC at the time,

because we had a real crisis because of technology and the history of the MU

is a battle against technology and us fighting things and losing nobly, I have to

say, and then adjusting and adapting and going forward, working with the new

technologies.

So what happened with the union? When we were formed there had been a

revolution in entertainment. People were listening to records, the old 78s, at

home. That was a brand new industry. The theatres were still the main part of

the thing. The cinemas were just coming in. Our main bulk of membership

were theatre musicians. The big cities, Birmingham, Manchester, London, had

a number of theatres and a lot of employment for musicians and they were

organised. It started in the northern towns, in Manchester, and quickly spread

across the country, so it was Manchester and then those big industrial towns,

Glasgow, and London was always separate, it was much more the base for

orchestral players, a kind of elitist thing that goes on in lots of industries.

Anyway, it all came together in the early 1920s and then the crisis hit, because

the main part of employment then for most working artisan musicians was in

cinemas. The silent films, you think of a piano playing in the corner. That is not

right. There were orchestras, big orchestras playing. There were two cinemas

in London that had over 100 musicians on contract just playing for the silent

movies and it changed overnight. Talking pictures came in and they were all

made out of work. It is wonderful, looking back at the union’s publicity from the

time, cartoons were done: “The public will soon come to its senses”, “Who

wants to listen to all the squalkies” and that is what they thought of the talkies.

It was one of the futile battles. But we lost about two thirds of our members at

that time. We were in serious trouble and dropped out, as I say, of the GFTU

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