Was a family member a British merchant mariner? My father was for a while.
The National Sailors and Firemen’s Union (NSFU), founded in 1893 and renamed the National Union of Seamen (NUS) in 1926 published The Seaman. It records the activities and decisions of the Union, the Merchant Navy and its workforce. The Modern Records Centre of the University of Warwick has issues of The Seaman as part of its digitized collections of Labour movement newspapers and journals.
The June 1942 issue has a table showing wages of deck and engine room mariners had more than doubled from pre-war. My father would have appreciated that!
Read about the collection, with links to the digitized issues, at https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/archives_online/digital/unionjournals/seaman/. The corpus is not full-text searchable, so you must know the approximate year of interest.
A tip of the hat to Penny Allen, who mentioned this during Tuesday’s OGS Ottawa Branch drop-in.
Find many other Labour movement newspapers and journals in the University of Warwick collection at https://warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/archives_online/digital/unionjournals/.
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