May Day, 1963

May Day has long been tied to labour movements, trade unionism and public demonstrations for workers’ rights. In Britain, it became a key date for marches, rallies and processions that brought political demands into the street. That wider history is written all over these slides. Banners and floats carry clear messages: “British Coal is Britain’s wealth,” “Shopworkers advance with USDAW,” and pointed attacks on Conservative policy. Trade unions, industry and party politics are all present and named on Newcastle's streets.

These colour slides from May Day 1963 were taken by T. Dan Smith when he was Leader of Newcastle City Council. Born in Wallsend in 1915, Smith rose through the Labour Party and led the council from 1959 to 1965. He became closely associated with Newcastle’s post-war redevelopment, working with planning officer Wilfred Burns on large-scale schemes that reshaped the city centre through new roads, offices and civic buildings. But his legacy is not an easy one, his reputation shifted across the decades especially after his 1974 conviction for corruption, linked to the architect John Poulson.

The parade appears here as more than civic spectacle. It is a public display of solidarity, affiliation and political argument, staged in the centre of Newcastle and addressed to the city around it. Smith’s position behind the camera sharpens that. He is not documenting from a distance, but recording a city he is actively trying to reshape. The slides move between celebration, labour politics and urban change, showing how closely these things were bound together in Newcastle at the start of the 1960s.

Smith deposited this material with Amber in the 1980s as part of a broader collaboration that led to the film T. Dan Smith: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Utopia. Alongside the slides, he contributed photographs, recorded interviews and an unfinished autobiography. All of this now forms part of the AmberSide Collection, where the images remain as a first-person record of Newcastle at a point of rapid and contested change.