of Chairmanship by Walter Citrine is considered by many in the Labour and Union movements of the UK to be the definitive book on how meetings should be run and how committees should be managed.

[1][2][3][4] It originated as notes for Electrical Trades Union (ETU) activists in the Merseyside area of the UK – they had Liverpool, Birkenhead and Bootle branches – in the 1910s by Citrine who was then chairman of their district committee.

It was to guide these activist electricians – a very intelligent but sometimes fractious community who tended to be critical of their ETU headquarters officials in Manchester – that Citrine devised the notes, based on parliamentary rules of debate, to ensure the efficient and orderly conduct of the business.

It had considerable influence and became an authoritative source of rulings on all procedural aspects of the conduct of meetings from branch to national levels.

New editions were published regularly until the 1980s and all those whose duty it fell to chair or manage meetings (not just by union and Labour Party officers), saw their well-thumbed copies as ‘their bible’.