WHITE COLLAR UNION, SIXTY YEARS OF NALGO

 Alec Spoor

 Heinemann 1^st edition 1967.

This book was to have been published in 1955, to mark NALGO’s Silver Jubilee. A late start, the choice as author of one already stretched in a dual post, successive staffing crises, and, above all, the immensity of the task of extracting the essence of the story from the mountains of paper and multitude of memories in which it lay buried, combined to extend what had been thought of as a twelve months’ part-time assignment over as many years.

This delay has not been all loss. NALGO itself has evolved since 1955. Then, it was still held by the chains of its municipal and friendly-society origins, insular, proud, and reluctant to launch it into the mainstream of trade union and national life.

By 1965, it had cast off those chains and was in the centre of the current, moving strongly in the TUC convoy and even venturing opinions on the direction of the voyage and the kind of cargo it expected to embark on the way. Though the voyage must continue, at accelerating pace and through seas yet unexplored, the developments of 1955-65 give better clues to its course than could have done the events of the first five decades alone.

This copy, bound is in red leather, and contained in a slip-case. There is a NALGO retirement presentation label on the inside front cover, signed by the Chairman and the Hon. Secretary.

There is a horizontal tear across two thirds of the ‘Contents page’, which is in the blank part and does not encroach on the actual listing. There is very slight (almost unnoticeable) fading to the spine, and the outer edges of the slip case which has also got some slight shelf rub to the extremes (thereby doing it’s job!). The closed top pages of the book are gold edged.

The book is in very good condition, with nice clean and tightly bound pages. Both a presentation and anniversary edition, it must have been treasured by it’s former owner. The book has been scanned without it’s slipcase.