The Postcard
A postcard that was published by H. B. Ltd. of London E.C.1.
The card was posted in Lowestoft on Saturday the 3rd. August 1929 to:
Mr. & Mrs. Warnes,
10, The Vale,
Carrow Hill,
Norwich.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"Just a P.C.
Arrived safe.
Alice left some ham in
the pantry. You are quite
welcome to it rather than
let it spoil on the pantry
floor.
Love,
Charlie & Alice".
The Wailing Wall
So what else happened on the day that Charlie and Alice posted the card?
Well, on the 3rd. August 1929, the 16th. World Zionist Congress passed a resolution authorising a delegation to approach the British government on the matter of Jewish rights at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
Muslims had been erecting buildings near the sacred site, which Jewish organisations in the region held to be in disregard of guarantees made to the Jewish people by the British government.
The Trade Unionist Joe Williams
The 3rd. August 1929 was not a good day for Joe Williams, because he died on that day.
Joseph Bevir Williams, who was born on the 10th. August 1871, was a British trade union leader.
Born in the Hulme area of Manchester, Williams spent some time as a pupil-teacher before following his father by becoming a musician and finding work as a clarinetist at the Comedy Theatre.
Concerned about working conditions in the industry, in 1893, he founded the Amalgamated Musicians' Union (AMU).
The union's first members were Williams' own colleagues, with forty attending the first meeting. Shortly afterwards, Williams' mother, Kate, recruited a group of musicians in Birmingham and, within a year, branches had been set up in a large number of provincial cities.
As general secretary of the union, Joe successfully argued that part-time musicians should be permitted to join, but that members of military bands should not earn extra pay by working as civilian musicians in their spare time.
Williams became was elected to Manchester City Council in 1904 as the Labour Representation Committee candidate for Openshaw, with the backing of Manchester and Salford Trades Council.
However, two years later, he was declared bankrupt and therefore was excluded from the city council. In 1907, he was elected to the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), later serving on its successor, the General Council of the TUC. He was President of the TUC in 1923.
Williams' son, also Joe, served in the Great War and was killed aged just eighteen. Despite this, Joe supported the war and, frustrated with the Labour Party's anti-war stance, he was one of the proposers, in 1917, that a new trade union labour party should be created.
After many years of negotiations, in 1921, Williams persuaded the AMU's main rival, the National Orchestral Union of Professional Musicians, to merge into it. He remained general secretary of what was now renamed the Musicians' Union until he retired in 1924.
Although only in his early fifties, he was in poor health following years of extremely long hours of work. He moved to Veyrières in France, where he died in 1929.
