A letter in a Prime Minister’s file
Three handwritten pages filed inside a Prime Minister’s Office record, cataloged as PREM 13/2412 at The National Archives, carry a date of June 1968 and signatures collected under a single collective name: “Women Workers at Fords of Dagenham.” The document is addressed to Harold Wilson. The National Archives designated it a featured record on August 2, 2026.
The file covers a date range of June to July 1968. Within the same collection sit additional letters and telegrams from the same period, which the archival record characterizes as “fraught.” That word is the only qualitative description applied to the accompanying materials in the available source; their specific contents are not disclosed beyond it.
The letter itself can be read. The rest of the correspondence in PREM 13/2412 has not, so far, been described in any detail in the available record.
The specific terms of the letter
The signatories were sewing machinists who had walked out of Ford’s Dagenham plant on June 7, 1968. Their letter makes several distinct claims, each worth holding separately from what was said about the dispute afterwards.
The workers stated that their unions were providing financial backing and that accumulating funds would sustain the strike. They also argued that most signatories had employed husbands, which they offered as evidence that financial hardship would not force them back. Named Members of Parliament, they wrote, were already aligned with their position.
On the question of government intervention, the letter is direct: no action by Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, or Jack Scamp would compel the women to return to work. The letter closes with a specific instruction addressed to the Prime Minister: he was to show it to Barbara Castle. Castle is referred to throughout the letter by her first name only.
The core demand recorded in the letter was not, in the first instance, a general claim for equal pay. It was a demand that the machinists’ sewing and seat-cover work be reclassified to the same technical grade as equivalent male roles. The distinction matters, and the record supports it: the grading question, not a wage question, is what the workers placed at the center of their letter.
What happened in June 1968
Five women are named in the archival record as leaders of the walkout: Rose Boland, Eileen Pullen, Vera Sime, Gwen Davis, and Sheila Douglass. Women machinists at Ford’s Halewood Body and Assembly plant on Merseyside also joined the action. Before the strike, the machinists were paid at 85% of the male Category B rate. A Court of Inquiry under Sir Jack Scamp was appointed on June 25, 1968, and reported on August 14, 1968.
The inquiry did not find in the machinists’ favor on regrading. What the 1968 settlement delivered was a pay increase: the women’s rate rose from 85% to 92% of the male Category B rate, with a commitment to reach the full Category B rate the following year. The reclassification the letter to Wilson had demanded was not granted.
The Equal Pay Act received Royal Assent on May 29, 1970, and came into force on December 29, 1975. Barbara Castle, who served as Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity from April 6, 1968 to June 19, 1970, introduced the legislation. The National Archives, in its 2026 article featuring the letter, characterizes Castle as having worked to pass the Act “on the back of the dispute.” That framing belongs to the article’s editorial assessment; it is not language drawn from the contemporaneous record held in PREM 13/2412.
As for the grading question specifically: in a 2013 interview with academic researcher Jonathan Moss, Gwen Davis said that the 1968 outcome had not delivered what the women sought. The grading question was not resolved in 1968. Full reclassification came only after a second strike in 1984 and an evaluation by ACAS, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, that found in the machinists’ favor.
What PREM 13/2412 does not say
The record is silent on how Wilson’s office received this letter internally. No account exists, in the available material, of who read it, whether any reply was sent, or what official action, if any, it prompted. The letter’s path from the striking machinists into a Prime Minister’s Office file is not described anywhere in the available source.
Sir Jack Scamp is named directly in the letter as someone whose intervention the women would resist. Whether any response by Scamp to this letter exists, or whether such a response is held elsewhere in PREM 13/2412 or in a separate file, is not addressed in the available material.
The accompanying letters and telegrams in the same file set are described only as “fraught.” No specific claim from those materials, and no official reply to any of them, appears in the available record. What those documents contain, who sent them, and what response, if any, they received is simply not disclosed.
What the record leaves unresolved
Several things about this letter and its file remain genuinely open.
The gap between what the women demanded and what the 1968 settlement delivered is documented. Nothing within PREM 13/2412, as currently available, explains the mechanism of that outcome: what role, if any, the letter played in government deliberations, whose decision it was to offer a pay increase rather than regrading, or whether the letter was acted upon, forwarded to Castle as instructed, or simply filed.
The “fraught” correspondence that surrounds the letter in the same catalog entry remains opaque. Whether it records exchanges that bear directly on the workers’ demands, or whether it consists of parallel communications unconnected to this letter, cannot be established from the available source.
None of these silences point in any particular direction. A government file absorbs correspondence for many reasons, and a letter reaching a Prime Minister’s Office does not, by itself, establish that anyone there read it, acted on it, or replied. The record shows 187 names on three handwritten pages, a file that received the letter, and nothing further on what happened inside those offices.