Preparing food for the communal feeding centre during the Dawdon dispute

Preparing food for the communal feeding centre during the Dawdon dispute. Money
and food were collected through Workers’ International Relief, a Communist-inspired international organisation that tried to prevent workers losing strikes through hunger and hardship. A committee of striking miners and their wives from Dawdon village, led by Jim Ancrum, raised money and organised donations of food through Co-operative Societies, trades unions and working class organisations.

The women in the background seem to be looking with some amusement at the men peeling potatoes; men doing the cooking would have been an unusual sight in a colliery village. Some men in Dawdon had been in the Army Catering Corps during the First World War had were able to use this experience of cooking for hundreds of people. During the fifteen weeks of the dispute almost 15,000 meals were prepared and over 1,000 food parcels were distributed.