ABSTRACT
Speaking at a rally in London in July 1920 W.J. Brown of the Assistant Clerks’ Association painted a picture of trade unionism within the Civil Service: ‘There are over 250 organisations in the Service and hardly one of them pays a decent subscription. Strength means numbers. Do you wonder that these people (the Treasury) are not impressed when they know that there is one organisation for every thousand civil servants?’ Brown went on to devote his efforts to changing this picture and although Humphreys challenged the number that Brown used,1 it remains a useful description of civil service trade unionism up until that time.
