Philip Snowden (1864-1937), was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first two Labour
governments of Great Britain. He was a fine orator, apparently second only to Keir Hardie
and toured the country making speeches for the ILP. He served on Keighley Town Council in
1899 and Keighley’s School Board. He married Ethel Annakin in 1905 and it was she who
converted him to the cause of votes for women. He also became a member of the Men’s
League for Women’s Suffrage.

Ethel Annakin (1881-1951), a teacher from Harrogate, was likewise interested in
temperance and socialism. In 1903 she moved to Leeds and became a member of the
Independent Labour Party (ILP) and also the Leeds Women’s Suffrage Society. Her very first
socialist lecture was given at the Keighley Labour Institute. As a member of the executive
committee of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, she lectured and attended
conferences at home and abroad, working with the International Women’s Suffrage
Alliance. Beyond the vote, she also promoted state assisted childcare, wages for mothers
and easier divorce. She wrote a number of books and pamphlets, including The Woman
Socialist (1907), Women and the State (1907) and The Feminist Movement (1913). Later she
did much to advance the peace movement.

This library of course is one that reflects its times in terms of political, social and economic
thought. There are studies of class and social mobility, contemporary interpretations of
economic history and of war and peace, there is an abridged contemporary Dictionary of
National Biography but there are also histories of Yorkshire, of countries and states from
Florence across to Russia and the Holy Land shelved alongside books of philosophy, poetry,
and classics such as Rabelais and Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Lord and Lady Snowden met at the Leeds Art Club and their interest in arts and crafts is
noted in books on William Morris and a 5 volume edition of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters,
especially useful in 2019 as the only copy in Bradford Libraries in this, John Ruskin’s
bicentenary year and in consideration of his great influence to this day on Yorkshire arts and
crafts. Philip Snowden himself was the subject of many artful cartoon studies and these
were collected and deposited with the Library and are a suitable companion to the more
humorous Snowden library tomes – Mr Punch’s History of Modern England and the Punch
Library of Humour. For those with a Socialist bent, there are of course the standards such as
the Socialist Review, Socialist Pamphlets and The Labour Leader, much in demand by
students of politics and importantly reflecting Bradford’s own heritage as the birthplace of
the Independent Labour Party.

This fabulous library is on open access throughout the year, though reference only, and
there are catalogues available. We also have a fantastic collection of political cartoons that Lord Snowden collected himself.