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Raphael Samuel, who was a professor at Ruskin College, pictured at Oxford in 1993 [Alison Light and the Raphael Samuel Estate]

THERE was always excitement in the air as May Day approached and the scale of those who were planning to join in the annual workers festivities was such that marches from the four compass points in London were arranged, with people meeting in their hundreds of thousands in Hyde Park.

The May Day rallies of the early and mid-20th century were a huge show of force for working people, a day for hope and for solidarity.

For historian Raphael Samuel it was a key date both personally and in terms of the history of a global workers movement.

A professor at Ruskin College, Oxford, and the University of East London, through his long career Samuel played a key role in re-evaluating the study of history and promoting a more holistic, people-led approach.

Samuel was born in the East End in 1934 and would later move to Camden, living for periods in St Pancras, Belsize Park and Hampstead before settling in Spitalfields.

Along with the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall, he helped spearhead interest in working class history, urban and rural labourers, and the successes and failures of progressive politics.

He promoted a new kind of popular history, commonplace today a democratic approach that considered the roles people played in shaping Britain, not just the politicians, generals and aristocrats.

Dubbing his work with fellow socialist historians, the History Workshop charted the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the people whose sweat and toil it was built on, while rooting his narratives in an understanding of what came before.

As a young activist, he recalled knocking on doors to discuss politics with possible supporters he recalled in a essay printed posthumously in the collection The Lost World of British Communism how it meant going down to the slums a descent in my case from the airy heights of Parliament Hill Fields to the basements of Kentish Town.

His mother, Minna Nirenstein, was a well-known activist and politics seeped through his family. My grandmother, a religious woman, was tolerant of this family communism and the passover which we held out of respect for her would begin with Hebrew prayers and end with Soviet songs, he would recall.

After a lifetime of research and political thought, in the 1980s he was interviewed for the BBC World Service programme, Postmark Africa, by reporter Shen Liknaitzky.

He was asked about the background to May Day, as well as his own memories of the importance the date meant for working-class people in the early and mid-20th century.

Its origin was a meeting of international socialists in July 1889, made up of people from the US, France, Britain, Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia and Belgium on the occasion of the anniversary of the French Revolution, he responded.

They came together and decided May 1890 would be observed as an international demonstration in favour of the eight-hour day.The importance of the meeting, held in Paris, has reverberated down the decades, as Samuel explained.

It was the birth of the modern socialist movement and would become the Second International that linked socialists in all countries, he added.

And the May Day of 1890 left a huge impact on the rapidly politicised urban working class.

But it also drew in Europes landworkers, too, the descendants of peasants and tied labourers.

Because of the astonishing response of workers, farming people and peasants in Europe to that May Day and remember, May Day had simply been one demonstration it then became this annual festival. It was a discovery by the working class movement of different countries own collective resistance.

Its impact across nations was keenly felt.

In Vienna, 300,000 came out and from there a working class movement arose, he said. It saw small farmers in Finland link with meat packers in Chicago.

So why was May Day chosen to become a symbol of international workers? In the months running up to 1890, the American Federation of Labour had called on May Day to be used to campaign for shorter working hours.

The socialists calendar had other key dates March 18 marked the outbreak of the Paris Commune of 1871, while July 14 was celebrated annually as the start of the French Revolution.

But May Day had resonance and the idea stuck. Samuels theory as to why links to both a socialism that looked back to the pre-industrial age and the festivals that welcomed spring.

It was almost arrived at by accident, he said.

Firstly, it was a non-Christian holiday. There was a strong element of anti-clericalism, particularly in European working class movements.

In the UK, early socialists often had roots in non-conformist faiths such as Quakers and Methodists. Choosing a non-Christian holiday spoke to them. It was not a holiday, so in some ways it had a feel of an international strike. It was seen as our day.

As a child, growing up in a socialist household, May Day was a landmark event for Samuel.

When I came to London aged 10, having refused to go back to boarding school, I found myself in a completely communist environment. he wrote.

Our little corner of St Pancras seemed full of communist homes, and my aunts house was a hub of local activity with an unending stream of visitors. Our branch was a strong one and remained more or less intact through the years of the Cold War. In 1954, when we joined up with Kentish Town and took some part in the tenants movement, it began to expand.

Raphael Samuels book The Lost World of British Communism

His first May Day march was in 1942.

There were four large columns from different parts of London, he said.

If you understand what it meant in England, you have to go back to a long vanished English collective culture and the idea of a one-day holiday.

It was a party of people, a one-day festival, and the festival aspect is very important.

And perhaps surprisingly, considering how deeply ingrained the idea of May Day and the workers movement was, it only became an official holiday in recent times.

It only became an official holiday in 1977 when it had lost any collective meaning at all, he added.

And May Day also offered a chance to imagine a world made for workers not bosses.

It could be a declaration of opposition to an industrial society, added Samuels.

The early May Day banners saw people turning their backs on the factories and marching off into the countryside. They had bucolic and rustic images of escaping the city, no longer being factory workers. It was very Utopian.

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May Day: A day of hope and solidarity - Camden New Journal