The creation of the World Federation of Trade Unions in October 1945 was intended as a major step towards international trade-union unity. Less than four years later, in January 1949, the secession of its British, American and Dutch affiliates, soon to be followed by the bulk of Western trade union centres, left the international labour movement more divided than ever. Narrative accounts of the WFTU's brief life as a united body and of the developments leading to the schism have long been available and are not matters of contention. As to the cause of the split, however, there is less agreement. The ostensible reason for the secession was the failure of the WFTU to reach agreement with the International Trade Secretariats (ITSs) on their relationship with one another. Those who split away always contended that disagreements over trade-union matters led to the rupture. In recent years, however, with the opening up of national archives, attention has turned to the influence of governments in the field of international trade unionism. In particular the interventionist role of the US State Department acting through the American Federation of Labour has been chronicled. However, as yet no full account of the activities of the British Foreign Office in this area is available. Given the fact that the British Trades Union Congress was the instigator of the schism and the single most influential union centre to leave the WFTU, an examination of Foreign Office relations with it would seem to be warranted. Equally the relationships between the Foreign Office and the State Department and between the TUC and the American Congress of Industrial Organisations, the two principal Western centres in the WFTU, are matters of considerable interest.

The Social Democratic Federation is usually regarded by historians as of only marginal importance to the working-class movement of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To support this view reference is often made to its naive and mechanistic interpretations of Marxist theory, its small membership and sectarian nature, and the futility of its concentration upon political activity amongst the unemployed at the expense of support for the industrial action of trade unionists and the Parliamentary representation of labour. The stereotype of a narrow, doctrinaire sect with incompetent leadership contains more than a grain of truth, but like most stereotypes conveys only a partial verity. Too often it is used as an excuse for neglecting the SDF on the precept that it was irrelevant and “misguided” in its conception of the right path for the working-class movement. The comparative failure of the SDF, however, owed at least as much to the deeply engrained reformist and trade-unionist tradition amongst the English working class as it did to the inadequacies of the SDF itself.

This paper is derived from a study of work and trade unionism in the British pottery industry in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to open up the history of pottery management's labour strategies for debate, given the relatively slight attention the subject has received in general or with regard to this important period. Ceramic historians, in common with labour and social history, have neglected the detailed study of management, while contemporary writers on the Potteries often lapsed into a “demonology” when dealing with pottery manufacturers. In contrast to the more famous volumes on social conditions in the Potteries by Shaw or Owen and Warburton's examination of trade unions, the early-twentieth-century pottery-owners have not been the subject of sustained analysis. Yet an orthodoxy of sorts has developed, which sees the industry's management as typically crude and unchanging in technique. Economists such as B. R. Williams or geographers like Yeaman have been unchallenged in their assertions that owners could almost dispense with labour-control strategies in the light of the workforce's passivity and the tranquility of industrial relations in the industry.