David Shackleton, like so many raised in the valleys of north-east Lancashire in the 1860s, seemed destined for a life of labour in a cotton mill. That was the implication of his parentage and birthplace.

Number 20 Alma Terrace was part of a grim, cramped row of stone houses known locally as the Alma Cottages. They stood in Cloughfold, slanting across a hillside overlooking the river Irwell. Cloughfold was one of a closeknit cluster of villages populating the Rossendale valley and tributaries, which were collectively defined by their centre, Rawtenstall. Rawtenstall was a cotton town: by 1867 it boasted 145...

There were 24 applications for the vacant position of secretary to the Ramsbottom Weavers, Winders and Warpers’ Association. Five of the applicants, chosen by the union’s executive committee, then took an examination set by W. H. Wilkinson of Haslingden, and Ernest Holmes of Burnley. The result was a shortlist of two: Shackleton and John Farron, a former president of the Ramsbottom union. The committee selected Shackleton.¹ In March 1893, he moved himself into the union’s office and his family into the house connected with it.

His departure from Accrington was marked by a formal farewell at the Liberal Club, and...

The parliamentary constituency of Clitheroe was in 1902 a Liberal stronghold, an oddity in east Lancashire. Following its creation in 1885, Sir Ughtred Kay-Shuttleworth had held it through five elections, either unopposed or with majorities of 2,000 and more. It was based on a group of towns, ‘all of them populous, flourishing … full of intelligent life’, and boasting ‘twelve miles of continuous street lamps’.¹ Colne and the larger Nelson contained about half the division’s voters, with most of the remainder in the towns of Clitheroe, Padiham, Brierfield and Barrowford.² Cotton weaving was the main source of employment.³ Since weaving...

On 25 April 1903, nine months to the week after Shackleton won Clitheroe, his wife, Sarah, at the age of 38, bore him a son. The boy, unlike either of his two dead brothers, was given Shackleton’s first name, David. This suggests a certain sense of self-importance on the part of a man who had lately acquired what Will Crooks, his new parliamentary colleague, described as ‘the privilege of being able to attach the magic letters “M.P.”’ to his name.¹

The ‘magic’ lay in the effect of those letters on the public standing of their possessor. True, as a raw...

The general election produced a Liberal government with a massive majority in the House of Commons. It also produced an independent Labour party of some parliamentary substance. Over the five following years, Shackleton was a towering presence in the labour movement. Initially, he owed this ascendancy largely to his parliamentary role. Two events in 1906 saw him emerge as a clearly major figure in this respect. One was the election of officers by the LRC-endorsed parliamentarians. The other was the passage of the Trade Disputes Act.

Before the general election, Shackleton had been one of a four-man ‘Labour group’ – as...

When Keir Hardie snatched the parliamentary party’s chairmanship from him, in February 1906, Shackleton was acting as both president and secretary of the Weavers’ Amalgamation, and had just negotiated an agreement with cotton employers securing the second part of the 7½ per cent wage increase won the previous year (see Chapter 4). His load lightened a month later, when Joseph Cross was appointed secretary after the ailing Wilkinson finally resigned. Then, in May, the amalgamation’s annual meeting formally elected him president in place of the late David Holmes.

He remained secretary of the Darwen Weavers’ Association for another year, before...

Shackleton probably meant what he said when he assured the Nelson crowd, cheering his re-election in January 1910, that as ‘only a young “lad” yet … he was looking forward to a renewal again of their confidence’.¹ Nevertheless, before the year was out, he had become a permanent civil servant and Clitheroe was being contested by a new Labour candidate in the next general election.

For a time, following his re-election, it was business much as before. A fortnight afterwards, he was in Newport for the Labour party’s annual conference. From there he wrote words of comfort to a grieving...

The post of Senior Labour Adviser, which Shackleton took up in December 1910, was formally concerned with the administration of the Factory Acts. A Junior Labour Adviser position, concerned with mines, was created at the same time, and was variously reported as having been offered to William (‘Mabon’) Abraham, William Brace and Thomas Richards, all both MPs and Welsh mining union officials; but no appointment was ever made.¹ As it happened, the investigation of a mine explosion which killed 350 men in Christmas week, at the Pretoria pit outside Bolton, was one of Shackleton’s earliest official tasks. Otherwise, his Home...

Shackleton’s wife, Sarah, was described in her forties as ‘a woman below the medium height, but with plenty of timber about her … a “gradely” [true] Lancashire lass … who sets to and does her own housework’.¹ At the time that description was published, the house she took care of was the one that she and Shackleton had occupied since he entered parliament some five years earlier. A ‘house of the better working classes’,² two-storeyed, narrow and one of a long row, it stood at 51 London Terrace, Darwen – ‘an ordinary street … dimly lighted, with the grocer’s shop in...

At the age of 39, Shackleton was described as ‘a big, burly fellow, with kindly brown eyes, and … 6 feet 11⁄2 inches’ in height.¹ He was thought to weigh ‘somewhere about 17 or 18 stone’.² Ernest Wilkinson, his nephew, recalled his heavy tread. His size, the first thing to be mentioned in the recollections of slighter colleagues (‘a genial giant’; ‘over six feet’),³ was frequently referred to by parliamentary observers. Thus, when he first entered the House of Commons after the Clitheroe by-election: ‘In contrast with Mr Bell and Mr Hardie [his formal sponsors], Mr Shackleton seemed some Gulliver...