THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
[1799-1825]
The traditional history of the Trade Union Movement represents the
period prior to 1824 as one of unmitigated persecution and continuous
repression. Every Union that can nowadays claim an existence of
over a century possesses a romantic legend of its early years. The
midnight meeting of patriots in the corner of a field, the buried box
of records, the secret oath, the terms of imprisonment of the leading
officials--all these are in the sagas of the older Unions, and form
material out of which, in an age untroubled by historical criticism, a
semi-mythical origin might easily have been created. That the legend is
not without a basis of fact, we shall see in tracing the actual effect
upon the Trade Union Movement of the legal prohibitions of combinations
of wage-earners which prevailed throughout the United Kingdom up
to 1824. But we shall find that some combinations of journeymen
were at all times recognised by the law, that many others were only
spasmodically interfered with, and that the utmost rigour of the
Combination Laws was not felt until the far-reaching change of policy
marked by the severe Acts of 1799-1800, which applied to all industries
whatsoever. This will lead us naturally to the story of the repeal of
the whole series of Combination Laws in 1824-5, the most impressive
event in the early history of the movement.
There is a clear distinction--at any rate, as regards England--between
the various statutes which forbade combination prior to the end of the
eighteenth century, and the general Combination Acts of 1799-1800. In
the numerous earlier Acts recited and repealed in 1824 the prohibition
of combination was in all cases incidental to the regulation of the
industry. It was assumed to be the business of Parliament and the law
courts to regulate the conditions of labour; and combinations could,
no more than individuals, be permitted to interfere in disputes for
which a legal remedy was provided. The object primarily aimed at by
the statutes was not the prohibition of combinations, but the fixing
of wages, the prevention of embezzlement or damage, the enforcement of
the contract of service or the proper arrangements for apprenticeship.
And although combinations to interfere with these statutory aims were
obviously illegal, and were usually expressly prohibited, it was an
incidental result that combinations formed to promote the objects of
the legislation, however objectionable they might be to employers, were
apparently not regarded as unlawful.[111]
Thus one of the earliest types of combination among journeymen--the
society to enforce the law--seems always to have been tacitly accepted
as permissible. Although it is probable that such associations came
technically within the definitions of combination and conspiracy,
whether under the common law or the early statutes, we know of
no case in which they were indicted as illegal. We have already
described, for instance, how, in 1726, the woollen weavers of
Wiltshire and Somersetshire openly combined to present a petition to
the King in Council against their masters, the broad clothiers. The
Privy Council, far from deeming the action of the weavers illegal,
considered and dealt with their complaint. And when the employers
persisted in disobeying the law, we have seen how, in 1756, the
Fraternity of Woollen Clothweavers petitioned the House of Commons
to make more effectual the power of the justices to fix wages, and
obtained a new Act of Parliament in accordance with their desires.
The almost perpetual combinations of the framework knitters between
1710 and 1800 were never made the subject of legal proceedings. The
combinations of the London silkweavers obtained a virtual sanction
by the Spitalfields Acts, under which the delegates of the workmen’s
organisations regularly appeared before the justices, who fixed and
revised the piecework prices. Even in 1808, after the stringency of
the law against combinations had been greatly increased, the Glasgow
and Lancashire cotton-weavers were permitted openly to combine for the
purpose of seeking a legal fixing of wages, with the results already
described. Nor was it only the combination to obtain a legally fixed
rate of wages that was left unmolested by the law. Combinations to
put in force the sections of the Statute of Apprentices (5 Eliz. c.
4), or other prohibitions of the employment of “illegal workmen,”
occurred at intervals down to 1813. In 1749 a club of journeymen
painters of the City of London proceeded against a master painter
for employing a non-freeman; and the proceedings led, in 1750, to
a conference of thirty journeymen and thirty masters with the City
Corporation, at which the regulations were altered.[112] No one seems
to have questioned the legality of the 1811-13 outburst of combinations
to prosecute masters who had not served an apprenticeship, or who
were employing unapprenticed workmen. One reason, doubtless, for the
immunity of combinations to enforce the law was that they included
employers and sympathisers of all ranks. For instance, the combinations
in 1811-13 to enforce the apprenticeship laws comprised both masters
and journeymen, who were equally aggrieved by the competition of the
new capitalist and his “hirelings.”[113] The Yorkshire Clothiers’
Community, or “Brief Institution,” to which reference has already been
made, included, in some of its ramifications, the “domestic” master
manufacturers, who fought side by side with the journeymen against the
new factory system.
On the other hand, combinations of journeymen to regulate for
themselves their wages and conditions of employment stood, from
the first, on a different footing. The common law doctrine of the
illegality of proceedings “in restraint of trade,” as subsequently
interpreted by the judges, of itself made illegal all combinations
whatsoever of journeymen to regulate the conditions of their work.
Moreover, with the regulation by law of wages and the conditions of
employment, any combination to resist the order of the justices on
these matters was obviously of the nature of rebellion, and was, in
fact, put down like any individual disobedience of the law. Nor was
express statute law against combinations wanting. The statute of 1305,
entitled, “Who be Conspirators and who be Champertors” (33 Edw. I.
st. 2), was in 1818 held to apply to a combination to raise wages
among cotton-spinners, whose leaders were sentenced to two years’
imprisonment under this Act. The “Bill of Conspiracies of Victuallers
and Craftsmen” of 1549 (2 and 3 Edw. VI. c. 15), though aimed primarily
at combinations to keep up the prices charged to consumers, clearly
includes within its prohibitions any combinations of journeymen
craftsmen to keep up wages or reduce hours.
It is some proof of the novelty of the workmen’s combinations in the
early part of the eighteenth century, that neither the employers nor
the authorities thought at first of resorting to the very sufficient
powers of the existing law against them. When, in 1720, the master
tailors of London found themselves confronted with an organised
body of journeymen claiming to make a collective bargain, seriously
“in restraint of trade,” they turned, not to the law courts, but to
Parliament for protection, and obtained, as we have seen, the Act “for
regulating the Journeymen Tailors within the bills of mortality” (7
Geo. I. st. 1, c. 13, amended by 8 Geo. III. c. 17).[114] Similarly,
when the clothiers of the West of England began between 1717 and
1725 to be inconvenienced by the “riotous and tumultuous clubs and
societies” of woolcombers and weavers, who made bye-laws and maintained
a Standard Rate,[115] they did not put in force the existing law, but
successfully petitioned Parliament for the Act “to prevent unlawful
combinations of workmen employed in the Woollen Manufactures” (12 Geo.
I. c. 34). Indeed, prior to the general Acts of 1799 and 1800 against
all combinations of journeymen, Parliament was, from the beginning
of the eighteenth century, perpetually enacting statutes forbidding
combinations in particular trades.[116]
In the English statutes this prohibition of combination was, as we have
seen, only a secondary feature, incidental to the main purpose of the
law. The case is different with regard to the early Irish Acts, the
terms of which point to a much sharper cleavage between masters and
men, due, perhaps, to difference of religion and race. The very first
statute against combinations which was passed by the Irish Parliament,
the Act of 1729 (3 Geo. II. c. 14), contained no provisions protecting
the wage-earner, and prohibited combinations in all trades whatsoever.
The Act of 1743 (17 Geo. II. c. 8), called forth by the failure of
the previous prohibition, equally confined itself to drastic penal
measures, including the punishment of the keepers of the public-houses
which were used for meetings. But in later years the English practice
seems to have been followed; for the laws of 1758 (31 Geo. II. c.
17), 1763 (3 Geo. III. 34, sec. 23), 1771 (11 and 12 Geo. III. c. 18,
sec. 40, and c. 33), and 1779 (19 and 20 Geo. III. c. 19, c. 24, and
c. 36) provide for the fixing of wages, and contain other regulations
of industry, amongst which the prohibition of combinations comes as a
matter of course.
By the end of the century, at any rate, the common law, both in England
and in Ireland, had been brought to the aid of the special statutes,
and the judges were ruling that any conspiracy to do an act which
they considered unlawful in a combination, even if not criminal in an
individual, was against the common law. Soon the legislature followed
suit. In 1799 the Act 39 Geo. III. c. 81 expressly penalised all
combinations whatsoever.
The grounds for this drastic measure appear to have been found in the
marked increase of Trade Unionism among workers of various kinds. The
operatives’ combinations were regarded as being in the nature of mutiny
against their employers and masters; destructive of the “discipline”
necessary to the expansion of trade; and interfering with the right of
the employer to “do what he liked with his own.” The immediate occasion
was a petition from London engineering employers, complaining of an
alarming strike of the millwrights. This led to a Bill suppressing
combination in the engineering trade, which was passed by the House of
Commons, in spite of the protests of Sir Francis Burdett and Benjamin
Hobhouse. The measure was, however, dropped in the House of Lords in
favour of a more comprehensive Bill, applicable to all trades, which
Whitbread had suggested. This was introduced on June 17, 1799, by
William Pitt himself, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, who referred
to the alarming growth of combination, not merely in the Metropolis but
also in the north of England. Subsequent stages of the Bill were moved
by George Rose, another member of the Administration; and the measure
was hurried through all its stages in both Houses with great rapidity,
receiving the Royal Assent only twenty-four days after its introduction
into the House of Commons. There was therefore little opportunity for
any effective demonstration against its provisions, but the Journeymen
Calico-printers’ Society of London petitioned against the measure, and
instructed counsel to put forward their objections. They represented
that, although the Bill professed merely “to prevent unlawful
combinations,” it created “new crimes of so indefinite a nature that no
one journeyman or workman will be safe in holding any conversation with
another on the subject of his trade or employment.” Only a few other
petitions were presented, and, though Benjamin Hobhouse opposed it in
the Commons and Lord Holland in the Lords, the Bill passed unaltered
into law.[117]
But the struggle was not yet over. The employers were not satisfied
with the 1799 Act; and _The Times_ announced in January 1800 that “one
of the first Acts of the Imperial Parliament [of the United Kingdom]
will be for the prevention of conspiracies among journeymen tradesmen
to raise their wages. All benefit clubs and societies are to be
immediately suppressed.”[118] On the other hand, the trade clubs in
all parts of the country poured in petitions of protest; and the Whig
and Tory members for Liverpool, General Tarleton and Colonel Gascoyne,
among whose constituents were the strongly combined shipwrights, who
were freemen and Parliamentary electors, united to bring in an amending
Bill. This was supported in a series of brilliant speeches by Sheridan,
whose attempts to reduce to a minimum the mischief of the 1799 Act were
strenuously resisted by Pitt and the Law Officers of the Crown. The
petitions were considered by a Committee, which recommended certain
amendments. Two justices were substituted for one as the tribunal;
no justice engaged in the same trade as the defendant could act;
the qualifying words “wilfully and maliciously” were introduced in
the description of the offences. A clause protecting trade friendly
societies was proposed but eventually rejected. A particularly odious
feature of the 1799 Act, under which defendants were required to give
evidence against themselves under severe penalties for refusal, was
left unaltered. A series of interesting clauses providing for the
reference of wage disputes to arbitration--copied from the contemporary
Act relating to the cotton trade[119]--aroused great opposition, as
tending “to fix wages” and as involving the recognition of the Trade
Union representative, but they were finally adopted; without, so far as
we are aware, ever being put in force.[120]
The general Combination Act of 1800 was not merely the codification
of existing laws, or their extension from particular trades to the
whole field of industry. It represented a new and momentous departure.
Hitherto the central or local authority had acted as a court of appeal
on all questions affecting the work and wages of the citizen. If the
master and journeyman failed to agree as to what constituted a fair
day’s wage for a fair day’s work, the higgling of the market was
peremptorily superseded by the authoritative determination, presumably
on grounds of social expediency, of the standard of remuneration.
Probably the actual fixing of wages by justices of the peace fell very
rapidly into disuse as regards the majority of industries, although
formal orders are found in the minutes of Quarter Sessions during
the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and deep traces of the
practice long survived in the customary rates of hiring. Towards the
end of the eighteenth century, at any rate, free bargaining between the
capitalist and his workmen became practically the sole method of fixing
wages. Then it was that the gross injustice of prohibiting combinations
of journeymen became apparent. “A single master,” said Lord Jeffrey,
“was at liberty at any time to turn off the whole of his workmen at
once--100 or 1000 in number--if they would not accept of the wages he
chose to offer. But it was made an offence for the whole of the workmen
to leave that master at once if he refused to give the wages they
chose to require.”[121] What was even more oppressive in practice was
the employers’ use of the threat of prosecution to prevent even the
beginnings of resistance among the workmen to any reduction of wages or
worsening of conditions.
It is true that the law forbade combinations of employers as well as
combinations of journeymen. Even if it had been impartially carried
out, there would still have remained the inequality due to the fact
that, in the new system of industry, a single employer was himself
equivalent to a very numerous combination. But the hand of justice
was not impartial. The “tacit, but constant” combination of employers
to depress wages, to which Adam Smith refers, could not be reached by
the law. Nor was there any disposition on the part of the magistrates
or the judges to find the masters guilty, even in cases of flagrant or
avowed combination. No one prosecuted the master cutlers who, in 1814,
openly formed the Sheffield Mercantile and Manufacturing Union, having
for its main rule that no merchant or manufacturer should pay higher
prices for any article of Sheffield make than were current in the
preceding year, with a penalty of £100 for each contravention of this
illegal agreement.[122] During the whole epoch of repression, whilst
thousands of journeymen suffered for the crime of combination, there
is no case on record in which an employer was punished for the same
offence.
To the ordinary politician a combination of employers and a combination
of workmen seemed in no way comparable. The former was, at most, an
industrial misdemeanour: the latter was in all cases a political crime.
Under the shadow of the French Revolution, the English governing
classes regarded all associations of the common people with the utmost
alarm. In this general terror lest insubordination should develop into
rebellion were merged both the capitalist’s objection to high wages and
the politician’s dislike of Democratic institutions. The Combination
Laws, as Francis Place tells us, “were considered as absolutely
necessary to prevent ruinous extortions of workmen, which, if not
thus restrained, would destroy the whole of the Trade, Manufactures,
Commerce, and Agriculture of the nation.... This led to the conclusion
that the workmen were the most unprincipled of mankind. Hence the
continued ill-will, suspicion, and in almost every possible way the
bad conduct of workmen and their employers towards one another. So
thoroughly was this false notion entertained that whenever men were
prosecuted to conviction for having combined to regulate their wages
or the hours of working, however heavy the sentence passed on them was,
and however rigorously it was inflicted, not the slightest feeling of
compassion was manifested by anybody for the unfortunate sufferers.
Justice was entirely out of the question: they could seldom obtain a
hearing before a magistrate, never without impatience or insult; and
never could they calculate on even an approximation to a rational
conclusion.... Could an accurate account be given of proceedings, of
hearings before magistrates, trials at sessions and in the Court of
King’s Bench, the gross injustice, the foul invective, and terrible
punishments inflicted would not, after a few years have passed away, be
credited on any but the best evidence.”[123]
It must not, however, be supposed that every combination was made the
subject of prosecution, or that the Trade Union leader of the period
passed his whole life in gaol. Owing to the extremely inefficient
organisation of the English police, and the absence of any public
prosecutor, a combination was usually let alone until some employer
was sufficiently inconvenienced by its operations to be willing
himself to set the law in motion. In many cases we find employers
apparently accepting or conniving at their men’s combinations.[124]
The master printers in London not only recognised the very ancient
institution of the “chapel,” but evidently found it convenient, at
any rate from 1785 onwards, to receive and consider proposals from
the journeymen as an organised body. In 1804 we even hear of a joint
committee consisting of an equal number of masters and journeymen,
authorised by their respective bodies to frame regulations for the
future payment of labour, and resulting in the elaborate “scale” of
1805, signed by both masters and men.[125] The London coopers had
a recognised organisation in 1813, in which year a list of prices
was agreed upon by representatives of the masters and men. This
list was revised in 1816 and 1819, without any one thinking of a
prosecution.[126] The Trade Union was openly reformed in 1821 as the
Philanthropic Society of Coopers. The London brushmakers in 1805 had “A
List of Prices agreed upon between the Masters and Journeymen,” which
is still extant. The framework knitters, and also the tailors of the
various villages in Nottinghamshire, were, from 1794 to 1810, in the
habit of freely meeting together, both masters and men, “to consider
of matters relative to the trade,” the conferences being convened by
public advertisement.[127] The minute books of the local Trade Union
of the carpenters of Preston for the years 1807 to 1824 chronicle an
apparently unconcealed and unmolested existence, in correspondence
with other carpenters’ societies throughout Lancashire. The accounts
contain no items for the expense of defending their officers against
prosecutions, whereas there are several payments for advertisements
and public meetings, and, be it added, a very large expenditure in
beer. And there is a lively tradition among the aged block printers
of Glasgow that, in their fathers’ time, when their very active Trade
Union exacted a fee of seven guineas from each new apprentice, this
money was always straightway drunk by the men of the print-field, the
employer taking his seat at the head of the table, and no work being
done by any one until the fund was exhausted. The calico-printers’
organisation appears, at the early part of the nineteenth century, to
have been one of the strongest and most complete of the Unions. In
an impressive pamphlet of 1815 the men are thus appealed to by the
employers: “We have by turns conceded what we ought all manfully to
have resisted, and you, elated with success, have been led on from
one extravagant demand to another, till the burden is become too
intolerable to be borne. You fix the number of our apprentices, and
oftentimes even the number of our journeymen. You dismiss certain
proportions of our hands, and will not allow others to come in their
stead. You stop all Surface Machines, and go the length even to destroy
the rollers before our face. You restrict the Cylinder Machine, and
even dictate the kind of pattern it is to print. You refuse, on urgent
occasions, to work by candlelight, and even compel our apprentices
to do the same. You dismiss our overlookers when they don’t suit
you; and force obnoxious servants into our employ. Lastly, you set
all subordination and good order at defiance, and instead of showing
deference and respect to your employers, treat them with personal
insult and contempt.”[128] Notwithstanding all this, no systematic
attempt appears to have been made to put down the calico-printers’
combination, and only one or two isolated prosecutions can be traced.
In Dublin, too, the cabinetmakers in the early part of the present
century were combined in a strong union called the Samaritan Society,
exclusively for trade purposes; “but though illegal, the employers
do not seem to have looked upon it with any great aversion; and when
on one occasion the chief constable had the men attending a meeting
arrested, the employers came forward to bail them. Indeed, they
professed that their object, though primarily to defend their own
interests against the masters, was also to defend the interests of
the masters against unprincipled journeymen. Many of the masters on
receiving the bill of a journeyman were in the habit of sending it
to the trades’ society committee to be taxed, after which the word
Committee was stamped upon it. One case was mentioned, when between
two and three pounds were knocked off a bill of about eight pounds
by the trade committee.”[129] And both in London and Edinburgh the
journeymen openly published, without fear of prosecution, elaborate
printed lists of piecework prices, compiled sometimes by a committee
of the men’s Trade Union, sometimes by a joint committee of employers
and employed.[130] “The London Cabinetmakers’ Union Book of Prices,”
of which editions were published in 1811 and 1824, was a costly
and elaborate work, with many plates, published “by a Committee of
Masters and Journeymen ... to prevent those litigations which have too
frequently existed in the trade.” Various supplements and “index keys”
to this work were published; and other similar lists exist. So lax was
the administration of the law that George White, the energetic clerk to
Hume’s Committee, asserted that the Act of 1800 had “been in general a
dead letter upon those artisans upon whom it was intended to have an
effect--namely, the shoemakers, printers, papermakers, shipbuilders,
tailors, etc., who have had their regular societies and houses of call,
as though no such Act was in existence; and in fact it would be almost
impossible for many of those trades to be carried on without such
societies, who are in general sick and travelling relief societies; and
the roads and parishes would be much pestered with these travelling
trades, who travel from want of employment, were it not for their
societies who relieve what they call tramps.”[131]
But although clubs of journeymen might be allowed to take, like the
London bookbinders, “a social pint of porter together,” and even, in
times of industrial peace, to provide for their tramps and perform all
the functions of a Trade Union, the employers had always the power of
meeting any demands by a prosecution. Even those trades in which we
have discovered evidence of the unmolested existence of combinations
furnish examples of the rigorous application of the law. In 1819 we
read of numerous prosecutions of cabinetmakers, hatters, ironfounders,
and other journeymen, nominally for leaving their work unfinished,
but really for the crime of combination.[132] In 1798 five journeymen
printers were indicted at the Old Bailey for conspiracy. The employers
had sent for the men’s leaders to discuss their proposals, when, as
it was complained, “the five defendants came, clothed as delegates,
representing themselves as the head of a Parliament as we may call it.”
The men were in fact members of a trade friendly society of pressmen
“held at the Crown, near St. Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street,” which, as
the prosecuting counsel declared, “from its appearance certainly bore
no reproachable mark upon it. It was called a friendly society, but
by means of some wicked men among them this society degenerated into
a most abominable meeting for the purpose of a conspiracy; those of
the trade who did not join their society were summoned, and even the
apprentices, and were told unless they conformed to the practices of
these journeymen, when they came out of their times they should not be
employed.” Notwithstanding the fact that the employers had themselves
recognised and negotiated with the society, the Recorder sentenced all
the defendants to two years’ imprisonment.[133]
Twelve years later it was the brutality of another prosecution of
the compositors that impressed Francis Place with the necessity of
an alteration in the law. “The cruel persecutions,” he writes, “of
the Journeymen Printers employed in _The Times_ newspaper in 1810
were carried to an almost incredible extent. The judge who tried and
sentenced some of them was the Common Sergeant of London, Sir John
Sylvester, commonly known by the cognomen of ‘Bloody Black Jack.’... No
judge took more pains than did this judge on the unfortunate printers,
to make it appear that their offence was one of great enormity, to
beat down and alarm the really respectable men who had fallen into his
clutches, and on whom he inflicted scandalously severe sentences.”[134]
Nor did prosecution always depend on the caprice of an employer. In
December 1817 the Bolton constables, accidentally getting to know
that ten delegates of the calico-printers from the various districts
of the kingdom were to meet on New Year’s Day, arranged to arrest the
whole body and seize all their papers. The ten delegates suffered
three months’ imprisonment, although no dispute with their employers
was in progress.[135] But the main use of the law to the employers
was to checkmate strikes, and ward off demands for better conditions
of labour. Already, in 1786, the law of conspiracy had been strained
to convict, and punish with two years’ imprisonment, the five London
bookbinders who were leading a strike to reduce hours from twelve to
eleven.[136] When, at the Aberdeen Master Tailors’ Gild, in 1797, “it
was represented to the trade that their journeymen had entered into
an illegal combination for the purpose of raising their wages,” the
masters unanimously “agreed not to give any additional wages to their
servants,” and backed up this resolution of their own combination
by getting twelve journeymen prosecuted and fined for the crime of
combining.[137] In 1799 the success of the London shoemakers in
picketing obnoxious employers led to the prosecution of two of them,
which was made the means of inducing the men to consent to dissolve
their society, then seven years old, and return to work at once.[138]
Two other shoemakers of York were convicted in the same year for the
crime of “combining to raise the price of their labour in making
shoes, and refusing to make shoes under a certain price,” and counsel
said that “in every great town in the North combinations of this sort
existed.”[139] The coach-makers’ strike of 1819 was similarly stopped,
and the “Benevolent Society of Coachmakers” broken up by the conviction
of the general secretary and twenty other members, who were, upon
this condition, released on their own recognisances.[140] In 1819
some calico-engravers in the service of a Manchester firm protested
against the undue multiplication of apprentices by their employers,
and enforced their protest by declining to work. For this “conspiracy”
they were fined and imprisoned.[141] And though the master cutlers
were allowed, with impunity, to subscribe to the Sheffield Mercantile
and Manufacturing Union, which fixed the rates of wages, and brought
pressure to bear on recalcitrant employers, the numerous trade clubs of
the operatives were not left unmolested. In 1816 seven scissor-grinders
were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for belonging to what
they called the “Misfortune Club,” which paid out-of-work benefit, and
sought to maintain the customary rates.[142]
But it was in the new textile industries that the weight of the
Combination Laws was chiefly felt. White and Henson describe the Act of
1800 as being in these trades “a tremendous millstone round the neck of
the local artisan, which has depressed and debased him to the earth:
every act which he has attempted, every measure that he has devised to
keep up or raise his wages, he has been told was illegal: the whole
force of the civil power and influence of the district has been exerted
against him because he was acting illegally: the magistrates, acting,
as they believed, in unison with the views of the legislature, to
check and keep down wages and combination, regarded, in almost every
instance, every attempt on the part of the artisan to ameliorate his
situation or support his station in society as a species of sedition
and resistance of the Government: every committee or active man among
them was regarded as a turbulent, dangerous instigator, whom it was
necessary to watch and crush if possible.”[143] To cite one only of
the instances, it was given in evidence before Hume’s Committee that
in 1818 certain Bolton millowners suggested to the operative weavers
that they should concert together to leave the employment of those who
paid below the current rate. Acting on this hint a meeting of forty
delegates took place, at which it was resolved to ask for the advance
agreed to by the good employers. A fortnight later the president
and the two secretaries were arrested, convicted of conspiracy,
and imprisoned for one and two years respectively, although their
employers gave evidence on the prisoners’ behalf to the effect that
they had themselves requested the men to attend the meeting, and had
approved the resolutions passed.[144] In the following year fifteen
cotton-spinners of Manchester, who had met “to receive contributions to
bury their dead,” under “Articles” sanctioned by Quarter Sessions in
1795, were seized in the committee-room by the police, and committed to
trial for conspiracy, bail being refused. After three or four months’
imprisonment they were brought to trial, the whole local bar--seven in
number--being briefed against them. Collections were made in London and
elsewhere (including the town of Lynn in Norfolk) for their defence.
The enrolment of their club as a friendly society availed little. It
was urged in court that “all societies, whether benefit societies or
otherwise, were only cloaks for the people of England to conspire
against the State,” and most of the defendants were sentenced to
varying terms of imprisonment.[145]
But the Scottish Weavers’ Strike of 1812, described in the preceding
chapter, is the most striking case of all. In the previous year certain
cotton-spinners had been convicted of combination and imprisoned,
the judge observing that there was a clear remedy in law, as the
magistrates had full power and authority to fix rates of wages or
settle disputes. In 1812 many of the employers refused to accept the
rates which the justices had declared as fair for weaving; and all
the weavers at the forty thousand looms between Aberdeen and Carlisle
struck to enforce the justices’ rates. The employers had already
made overtures through the sheriff of the county for a satisfactory
settlement when the Government arrested the central committee of
five, who were directing the proceedings. These men were sentenced
to periods of imprisonment varying from four to eighteen months; the
strike failed, and the association broke up.[146] The student of the
newspapers between 1800 and 1824 will find abundant record of judicial
barbarities, of which the cases cited above may be taken as samples.
No statistics exist as to the frequency of the prosecutions or the
severity of the sentences; but it is easy to understand, from such
reports as are available, the sullen resentment which the working class
suffered under these laws. Their repeal was a necessary preliminary
to the growth among the most oppressed sections of the workers of any
real power of protecting themselves, by Trade Union effort, against the
degradation of their Standard of Life.
The failure of the Combination Laws to suppress the somewhat
dictatorial Trade Unionism of the skilled handicraftsmen, and their
efficacy in preventing the growth of permanent Unions among other
sections of the workers, is explained by class distinctions, now
passed away or greatly modified, which prevailed at the beginning of
the present century. To-day, when we speak of “the aristocracy of
labour” we include under that heading the organised miners and factory
operatives of the North on the same superior footing as the skilled
handicraftsman. In 1800 they were at opposite extremes of the social
scale in the wage-earning class, the weaver and the miner being then
further removed from the handicraftsman than the docker or general
labourer is from the Lancashire cotton-spinner or Northumberland
hewer of to-day. The skilled artisans formed, at any rate in London,
an intermediate class between the shopkeeper and the great mass of
unorganised labourers or operatives in the new machine industries.
The substantial fees demanded all through the eighteenth century for
apprenticeship to the “crafts” had secured to the members and their
eldest sons a virtual monopoly.[147] Even after the repeal of the laws
requiring a formal apprenticeship some time had to elapse before the
supply of this class of handicraftsmen overtook the growing demand.
Thus we gather from the surviving records that these trades have
never been more completely organised in London than between 1800 and
1820.[148] We find the London hatters, coopers, curriers, compositors,
millwrights, and shipwrights maintaining earnings which, upon their
own showing, amounted to the comparatively large sum of thirty to
fifty shillings per week. At the same period the Lancashire weaver
or the Leicester hosier, in full competition with steam-power and
its accompaniment of female and child labour, could, even when fully
employed, earn barely ten shillings. We see this difference in the
Standard of Life reflected in the characters of the combinations formed
by the two classes.
In the skilled handicrafts, long accustomed to corporate government,
we find, even under repressive laws, no unlawful oaths, seditious
emblems, or other common paraphernalia of secret societies. The
London Brushmakers, whose Union apparently dates from the early
part of the eighteenth century, expressly insisted “that no person
shall be admitted a member who is not well affected to his present
Majesty and the Protestant Succession, and in good health and of a
respectable character.” But this loyalty was not inconsistent with
their subscribing to the funds of the 1831 agitation for the Reform
Bill.[149] The prevailing tone of the superior workmen down to 1848
was, in fact, strongly Radical; and their leaders took a prominent part
in all the working-class politics of the time. From their ranks came
such organisers as Place, Lovett, and Gast.[150] But wherever we have
been able to gain any idea of their proceedings, their trade clubs were
free from anything that could now be conceived as political sedition.
It was these clubs of handicraftsmen that formed the backbone of the
various “central committees” which dealt with the main topics of Trade
Unionism during the next thirty years. They it was who furnished such
assistance as was given by working men to the movement for the repeal
of the Combination Laws. And their influence gave a certain dignity and
stability to the Trade Union Movement, without which, under hostile
governments, it could never have emerged from the petulant rebellions
of hunger-strikes and machine-breaking.
The principal effect of the Combination Laws on these well-organised
handicrafts in London, Liverpool, Dublin, and perhaps other towns,
was to make the internal discipline more rigid and the treatment of
non-unionists more arbitrary. Place describes how “in these societies
there are some few individuals who possess the confidence of their
fellows, and when any matter relating to the trade has been talked
over, either at the club or in a separate room, or in a workshop or a
yard, and the matter has become notorious, these men are expected to
direct what shall be done, and they do direct--simply by a hint. On
this the men act; and one and all support those who may be thrown out
of work or otherwise inconvenienced. If matters were to be discussed
as gentlemen seem to suppose they must be, no resolution would ever be
come to. The influence of the men alluded to would soon cease if the
law were repealed. It is the law and the law alone which causes the
confidence of the men to be given to their leaders. Those who direct
are not known to the body, and not one man in twenty, perhaps, knows
the person of any one who directs. It is a rule among them to ask no
questions, and another rule among them who know most, either to give no
answer if questioned, or an answer to mislead.”[151]
In the new machine industries, on the other hand, the repeated
reductions of wages, the rapid alterations of processes, and the
substitution of women and children for adult male workers, had
gradually reduced the workers to a condition of miserable poverty.
The reports of Parliamentary committees, from 1800 onward, contain a
dreary record of the steady degradation of the Standard of Life in the
textile industries. “The sufferings of persons employed in the cotton
manufacture,” Place writes of this period, “were beyond credibility:
they were drawn into combinations, betrayed, prosecuted, convicted,
sentenced, and monstrously severe punishments inflicted on them: they
were reduced to and kept in the most wretched state of existence.”[152]
Their employers, instead of being, as in the older handicrafts, little
more than master workmen, recognising the customary Standard of Life
of their journeymen, were often capitalist _entrepreneurs_, devoting
their whole energies to the commercial side of the business, and
leaving their managers to buy labour in the market at the cheapest
possible rate. This labour was recruited from all localities and many
different occupations. It was brigaded and controlled by despotic
laws, enforced by numerous fines and disciplinary deductions. Cases of
gross tyranny and heartless cruelty are not wanting. Without a common
standard, a common tradition, or mutual confidence, the workers in
the new mills were helpless against their masters. Their ephemeral
combinations and frequent strikes were, as a rule, only passionate
struggles to maintain a bare subsistence wage. In place of the steady
organised resistance to encroachments maintained by the handicraftsmen,
we watch, in the machine industries, the alternation of outbursts of
machine-breaking and outrages, with intervals of abject submission and
reckless competition with each other for employment. In the conduct
of such organisation as there was, repressive laws had, with the
operatives as with the London artisans, the effect of throwing great
power into the hands of a few men. These leaders were implicitly obeyed
in times of industrial conflict, but the repeated defeats which they
were unable to avert prevented that growth of confidence which is
indispensable for permanent organisation.[153] Both leaders and rank
and file, too, were largely implicated in political seditions, and were
the victims of spies and Ministerial emissaries of all sorts. All these
circumstances led to the prevalence among them of fearful oaths, mystic
initiation rites, and other manifestations of a sensationalism which
was sometimes puerile and sometimes criminal.
The most notorious of these “seditions,” about which little is really
known, was the “Luddite” upheaval of 1811-12, when riotous mobs of
manual workers, acting under some sort of organisation, went about
destroying textile machinery and sometimes wrecking factories. To what
extent this had any direct connection with the Trade Union Movement
seems to us, pending more penetrating investigation of the unpublished
evidence, somewhat uncertain. That the operatives very generally
sympathised with the most violent protest against the displacement
of hand labour by machinery, and the extreme distress which it was
causing, is clear. The Luddite movement apparently began among the
Framework-knitters, who had long been organised in local clubs, with
some rudimentary federal bond; and the whole direction of the Luddites
was often ascribed, as by the Mayor of Leicester in 1812, to “the
Committee of Framework-knitters, who have as complete an organisation
of the whole body as you could have of a regiment.”[154] But money
was collected from men of other trades, notably bricklayers, masons,
spinners, weavers, and colliers, as well as from the soldiers in some
of the regiments stationed at provincial centres; and such evidence
as we have found points rather to a widespread secret oath-bound
conspiracy, not of the men of any one trade, but of wage-earners of all
kinds. We find an informer stating (June 22, 1812), with what truth
we know not, “that the Union extends from London to Nottingham, and
from thence to Manchester and Carlisle. Small towns lying between the
principal places are not yet organised, such as Garstang and Burton.
Only some of the trades have taken the first oath. He says there is a
second oath taken by suspicious persons.”[155] On the other hand, it
looks as if the various local Trade Clubs were made use of, in some
cases informally, as agents or branches of the conspiracy.
General Maitland, writing from Buxton (June 22, 1812) to the Home
Secretary, says that, in his opinion, “the whole of this business ...
originated in those constant efforts made by these associations for
many years past to keep up the price of the manufacturers’ wages; that
finding their efforts for this unavailing, both from the circumstances
of the trade and the high price of provisions, they in a moment of
irritation, for which it is but just to say they had considerable
ground from the real state of distress in which they were placed ...
began to think of effecting that by force which they had ever been
trying to do by other means; and that in this state the oath was
introduced.... I believe the whole to be, certainly a most mischievous,
but undefined and indistinct attempt to be in a state of preparation to
do that by force which they had not succeeded in carrying into effect
as they usually did by other means.” The whole episode has been too
much ignored, even by social historians; and “Byron’s famous speech and
Charlotte Brontë’s more famous novel give to most people their idea
of the misery of the time, and of its cause, the displacement of hand
labour by machinery.”[156]
The coal-miners were in many respects even worse off than the hosiery
workers and the cotton weavers. In Scotland they had been but lately
freed from actual serfdom, the final act of emancipation not having
been passed until 1799. In Monmouthshire and South Wales the oppression
of the “tommy shops” of the small employers was extreme. In the North
of England the “yearly bond,” the truck system, and the arbitrary
fines kept the underground workers in complete subjection. The result
is seen in the turbulence of their frequent “sticks” or strikes, during
which troops were often required to quell their violence. The great
strike of 1810 was carried on by an oath-bound confederacy recruited
by the practice of “brothering,” “so named because the members of the
union bound themselves by a most solemn oath to obey the orders of the
brotherhood, under the penalty of being stabbed through the heart or of
having their bowels ripped up.”[157]
Notwithstanding these differences between various classes of workers,
the growing sense of solidarity among the whole body of wage-earners
rises into special prominence during this period of tyranny and
repression. The trades in which it was usual for men to tramp from
place to place in search of employment had long possessed, as we have
seen, some kind of loose federal organisation extending throughout
the country. In spite of the law of 1797 forbidding the existence
of “corresponding societies,” the various federal organisations of
Curriers, Hatters, Calico-printers, Woolcombers, Woolstaplers, and
other handicraftsmen kept up constant correspondence on trade matters,
and raised money for common trade purposes. In some cases there existed
an elaborate national organisation, with geographical districts
and annual delegate meetings; like that of the Calico-printers who
were arrested by the Bolton constables in 1818. The rules of the
Papermakers,[158] which certainly date from 1803, provide for the
division of England into five districts, with detailed arrangements
for representation and collective action. This national organisation
was, notwithstanding repressive laws, occasionally very effective. We
need cite only one instance, furnished by the Liverpool Ropemakers in
1823. When a certain firm attempted to put labourers to the work, the
local society of ropespinners informed it that this was “contrary to
the regulations of the trade,” and withdrew all their members. The
employers, failing to get men in Liverpool, sent to Hull and Newcastle,
but found that the Ropespinners’ Society had already apprised the local
trade clubs at those towns. The firm then imported “blacklegs” from
Glasgow, who were met on arrival by the local unionists, inveigled
to a “trade club-house,” and alternately threatened and cajoled out
of their engagements. Finally the head of the firm went to London to
purchase yarn; but the London workmen, finding that the yarn was for
a “struck shop,” refused to complete the order. The last resource of
the employers was an indictment at the Sessions for combination, but a
Liverpool jury, in the teeth of the evidence and the judge’s summing
up, gave a verdict of acquittal.[159]
This solidarity was not confined to the members of a particular
trade. The masters are always complaining that one trade supports
another, and old account books of Trade Unions for this period abound
with entries of sums contributed in aid of disputes in other trades,
either in the same town or elsewhere. Thus the small society of London
Goldbeaters, during the three years 1810-12, lent or gave substantial
sums, amounting in all to £200, to fourteen other trades.[160] The Home
Secretary was informed in 1823 that a combination of cotton-spinners
at Bolton, whose books had been seized, had received donations,
not only from twenty-eight cotton-spinners’ committees in as many
Lancashire towns, but also from fourteen other trades, from coal-miners
to butchers.[161] A picturesque illustration of this brotherly help
in need occurs in the account of an appeal to the Pontefract Quarter
Sessions by certain Sheffield cutlers against their conviction for
combination: “The appellants were in court, but hour after hour passed,
and no counsel moved the case. The reason was a want of funds for the
purpose. At last, whilst in court, a remittance from the clubs in
Manchester, to the amount of one hundred pounds, arrived, and then the
counsel was fee’d, and the case, which, but for the arrival of the
money from this town, must have dropped in that stage, was proceeded
with.”[162] And although the day of Trades Councils had not yet come,
it was a common thing for the various trade societies of a particular
town to unite in sending witnesses to Parliamentary Committees,
preparing petitions to the House of Commons and paying counsel to
support their case, engaging solicitors to prosecute offending
employers, and collecting subscriptions for strikes.[163] This tendency
to form joint committees of local trades was, as we shall see, greatly
strengthened in the agitation against the Combination Laws from
1823-25. With the final abandonment of all legislative protection of
the Standard of Life, and the complete divorce of the worker from the
instruments of production, the wage-earners in the various industrial
centres became indeed ever more conscious of the widening of the old
separate trade disputes into “the class war” which has characterised
the past century.
It is difficult to-day to realise the naïve surprise with which
the employers of that time regarded the practical development of
working-class solidarity. The master witnesses before Parliamentary
Committees, and the judges in sentencing workmen for combination,
are constantly found reciting instances of mutual help to prove the
existence of a widespread “conspiracy” against the dominant classes.
That the London Tailors should send money to the Glasgow Weavers, or
the Goldbeaters to the Ropespinners, seemed to the middle and upper
classes little short of a crime.
The movement for a repeal of the Combination Laws began in a period of
industrial dislocation and severe political repression. The economic
results of the long war, culminating in the comparatively low prices
of the peace for most manufactured products, though not for wheat,
led in 1816 to an almost universal reduction of wages throughout the
country. In open defiance of the law the masters, in many instances,
deliberately combined in agreements to pay lower rates. This agreement
was not confined to the employers in a particular trade, who may have
been confronted by organised bodies of journeymen, but extended, in
some cases, to all employers of labour in a particular locality. The
landowners and farmers of Tiverton, for instance, at a “numerous and
respectable meeting at the Town Hall” in 1816, resolved “that, in
consequence of the low price of provisions,” not more than certain
specified wages should be given to smiths, carpenters, masons,
thatchers, or masons’ labourers.[164] The Compositors, Coopers,
Shoemakers, Carpenters, and many other trades record serious reductions
of wages at this period. In these cases the masters justified their
action on the ground that, owing to the fall of prices, the Standard
of Life of the journeymen would not be depressed. But in the great
staple industries there ensued a cutting competition between employers
to secure orders in a falling market, their method being to undersell
each other by beating down wages below subsistence level--an operation
often aided by the practice, then common, of supplementing insufficient
earnings out of the Poor Rate. This produced such ruinous results that
local protests were soon made. At Leicester the authorities decided
to maintain the men’s “Statement Price” by agreeing to wholly support
out of a voluntary fund those who could not get work at the full
rates. This was bitterly resented by the neighbouring employers, who
seriously contemplated indicting the lord-lieutenant, mayor, alder-men,
clergy, and other subscribers for criminal conspiracy to keep up
wages.[165] And in 1820 a public meeting of the ratepayers of Sheffield
protested against the “evil of parish pay to supplement earnings,” and
recommended employers to revert to the uniform price list which the
men had gained in 1810.[166] Finally we have the employers themselves
publicly denouncing the ruinous extent to which the cutting of wages
had been carried. A declaration dated June 16, 1819, and signed by
fourteen Lancashire manufacturers, regrets that they have been
compelled by the action of a few competitors to lower wages to the
present rates, and strongly condemns any further reduction; whilst
twenty-five of the most eminent calico-printing firms append an
emphatic approval of the protest, and state “that the system of paying
such extremely low wages for manufacturing labour is injurious to the
trade at large.”[167] At Coventry the ribbon manufacturers combined
with the Weavers’ Provident Union to maintain a general adherence to
the agreed list of prices, and in 1819 subscribed together no less
than £16,000 to cover the cost of proceedings with this object. This
combination formed the subject of an indictment at Warwick Assizes,
which put an end to the association, the remaining funds being handed
over to the local “Streets Commissioners” for paving the city. These
protests and struggles of the better employers were in vain. Rates
were reduced and strikes occurred all over the country, and were met,
not by redress or sympathy, but by an outburst of prosecutions and
sentences of more than the usual ferocity. The common law and ancient
statutes were ruthlessly used to supplement the Combination Acts,
often by strained constructions. The Scotch judges in particular, as
an eminent Scotch jurist declared to the Parliamentary Committee in
1824, applied the criminal procedure of Scotland to cases of simple
combination, from 1813-19, in a way that he, on becoming Lord Advocate,
refused to countenance.[168] The workers, on attempting some spasmodic
preparations for organised political agitation, were further coerced,
in 1819, by the infamous “Six Acts,” which at one blow suppressed
practically all public meetings, enabled the magistrate to search
for arms, subjected all working-class publications to the crushing
stamp duty, and rendered more stringent the law relating to seditious
libels. The whole system of repression which had characterised the
statesmanship of the Regency culminated at this period in a tyranny
not exceeded by any of the monarchs of the “Holy Alliance.” The effect
of this tyranny was actually to shield the Combination Laws by turning
the more energetic and enlightened working-class leaders away from
all specific reforms to a thorough revolution of the whole system of
Parliamentary representation. Hence there was no popular movement
whatever for the repeal of the Combination Laws. If we were writing
the history of the English working class instead of that of the Trade
Union Movement, we should find in William Cobbett or “Orator” Hunt, in
Samuel Bamford or William Lovett, a truer representative of the current
aspirations of the English artisan at this time than in the man who
now came unexpectedly on the scene to devise and carry into effect the
Trade Union Emancipation of 1824.
Francis Place was a master tailor who had created a successful business
in a shop at Charing Cross. Before setting up for himself he had worked
as a journeyman breeches-maker, and had organised combinations in his
own and other trades. After 1818 he left the conduct of the business to
his son, and devoted his keenly practical intellect and extraordinary
persistency first to the repeal of the Combination Laws, and next to
the Reform Movement. In social theory he was a pupil of Bentham and
James Mill, and his ideal may be summed up as political Democracy
with industrial liberty, or, as we should now say, thoroughgoing
Radical Individualism. No one who has closely studied his life and
work will doubt that, within the narrow sphere to which his unswerving
practicality confined him, he was the most remarkable politician of
his age. His chief merit lay in his thorough understanding of the
art of getting things done. In agitation, permeation, wire-pulling,
Parliamentary lobbying, the drafting of resolutions, petitions, and
bills--in short, of all those artifices by which a popular movement is
first created and then made effective on the Parliamentary system--he
was an inventor and tactician of the first order. Above all, he
possessed in perfection the rare quality of permitting other people to
carry off the credit of his work, and thus secured for his proposals
willing promoters and supporters, some of the leading Parliamentary
figures of the time owing all their knowledge on his questions to
the briefs with which he supplied them. The invaluable collection of
manuscript records left by him, now in the British Museum, prove that
modesty had nothing to do with his contemptuous readiness to leave the
trophies of victory to his pawns provided his end was attained. He was
thoroughly appreciative of the fact that in every progressive movement
his shop at Charing Cross was the real centre of power when the
Parliamentary stage of a progressive movement was reached. It remained,
from 1807 down to about 1834, the recognised meeting-place of all the
agitators of the time.[169]
It was in watching the effect of the Combination Laws in his own
trade that Place became converted to their repeal. The special laws
of 1720 and 1767, fixing the wages of journeymen tailors, as well
as the general law of 1800 against all combinations, had failed to
regulate wages, to prevent strikes, or to hinder those masters who
wished in times of pressure to engage skilled men, from offering the
bribe of high piecework rates, or even time wages in excess of the
legal limit. Place gave evidence as a master tailor before the Select
Committee of the House of Commons which inquired into the subject in
1810; and it was chiefly his weighty testimony in favour of freedom of
contract that averted the fresh legal restrictions which a combination
of employers was then openly promoting.[170] This experience of the
practical freedom of employers to combine intensified Place’s sense
of the injustice of denying a like freedom to the journeymen, whilst
the brutal prosecution of the compositors of the _Times_ in the same
year brought home to his mind the severity of the law. Four years
later (1814), as he himself tells us, he “began to work seriously to
procure a repeal of the laws against combinations of workmen, but
for a long time made no visible progress.” The employers were firmly
convinced that combinations of wage-earners would succeed in securing
a great rise of wages, to the serious detriment of profits. Far from
contemplating a repeal of the Act of 1800, they were in 1814 and 1816
pestering the Home Secretary for legislation of greater stringency
as the only safeguard for their “freedom of enterprise.”[171] The
politicians were equally certain that Trade Union action would
raise prices, and thus undermine the foreign trade upon which the
prosperity and international influence of England depended. The
working men themselves afforded in the first instance no assistance.
Those who had suffered legal prosecution were hopeless of redress
from an unreformed Parliament, and offered no support. One trade,
the Spitalfields silk-weavers, supported the Government because they
enjoyed what they deemed to be the advantage of legal protection from
the lowering of wages by competition.[172] Others were suspicious of
the intervention of one who was himself an employer, and who had not
yet gained recognition as a friend to labour. But Place was undismayed
by hostility and indifference. Knowing that with an English public
the strength of his cause would lie, not in any abstract reasoning
or appeal to natural rights, but in an enumeration of actual cases
of injustice, he made a point of obtaining the particulars of every
trade dispute. He intervened, as he says, in every strike, sometimes
as a mediator, sometimes as an ally of the journeymen. He opened up a
voluminous correspondence with Trade Unions throughout the kingdom,
and wrote innumerable letters to the newspapers. In 1818 he secured a
useful medium in the _Gorgon_,[173] a little working-class political
newspaper, started by one Wade, a woolcomber, and subsidised by Bentham
and Place himself. This gained him his two most important disciples,
eventually the chief instruments of his work, J. R. McCulloch and
Joseph Hume. McCulloch, afterwards to gain fame as an economist, was
at that time the editor of the _Scotsman_, perhaps the most important
of the provincial newspapers. A powerful article based on Place’s
facts which he contributed to the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1823 secured
many converts; and his constant advocacy gave Place’s idea a weight
and notoriety which it had hitherto lacked. Joseph Hume was an even
more important ally. His acknowledged position in the House of Commons
as one of the leaders of the growing party of Philosophic Radicalism
gained for the repeal movement a steadily increasing support with
advanced members of Parliament. Among a certain section in the House
the desirability of freedom of combination began to be discussed;
presently it was considered practicable; and soon many came to regard
it as an inevitable outcome of their political creed. In 1822 Place
thought the time ripe for action; and Hume accordingly gave notice
of his intention to bring in a Bill to repeal all the laws against
combinations.
Place’s manuscripts and letters contain a graphic account of the
wire-pullings and manipulations of the next two years.[174] In these
contemporary pictures of the inner workings of the Parliamentary
system we watch Hume cajoling Huskisson and Peel into granting him a
Select Committee, staving off the less tactful proposals of a rival
M.P.,[175] and finally, in February 1824, packing the Committee of
Inquiry at length appointed. Hume, with some art, had included in
his motion three distinct subjects--the emigration of artisans, the
exportation of machinery and combinations of workmen, all of which were
forbidden by law. To Place and Hume the repeal of the Combination Laws
was the main object; but Huskisson and his colleagues regarded the
Committee as primarily charged with an inquiry into the possibility of
encouraging the rising manufacture of machinery, which was seriously
hampered by the prohibition of sales to foreign countries. Huskisson
tried to induce Hume to omit from the Committee’s reference all mention
of the Combination Laws, evidently regarding them as only a minor and
unimportant part of the inquiry. But Place and Hume were now masters
of the situation; and for the next few months they devoted their whole
time to the management of the Committee. At first no one seems to have
had any idea that its proceedings were going to be of any moment; and
no trouble was taken by the Ministry with regard to its composition.
“It was with difficulty,” writes Place, “that Mr. Hume could obtain
the names of twenty-one members to compose the Committee; but when it
had sat three days, and had become both popular and amusing, members
contrived to be put upon it; and at length it consisted of forty-eight
members.”[176] Hume, who was appointed chairman, appears to have
taken into his own hands the entire management of the proceedings. A
circular explaining the objects of the inquiry was sent to the mayor
or other public officer of forty provincial towns, and appeared in the
principal local newspapers. Public meetings were held at Stockport
and other towns to depute witnesses to attend the Committee.[177]
Meanwhile Place, who had by this time acquired the confidence of the
chief leaders of the working class, secured the attendance of artisan
witnesses from all parts of the kingdom. Read in the light of Place’s
private records and daily correspondence with Hume, the proceedings of
this “Committee on Artisans and Machinery” reveal an almost perfect
example of political manipulation. Although no hostile witness was
denied a hearing, it was evidently arranged that the employers who
were favourable to repeal should be examined first, and that the
preponderance of evidence should be on their side. And whilst those
interests which would have been antagonistic to the repeal were neither
professionally represented nor deliberately organised, the men’s case
was marshalled with admirable skill by Place, and fully brought out
by Hume’s examination. Thus the one acted as the Trade Unionists’
Parliamentary solicitor, and the other as their unpaid counsel.[178]
Place himself tells us how he proceeded: “The delegates from the
working people had reference to me, and I opened my house to them.
Thus I had all the town and country delegates under my care. I heard
the story which every one of these men had to tell, I examined and
cross-examined them, took down the leading particulars of each case,
and then arranged the matter as briefs for Mr. Hume, and as a rule, for
the guidance of the witnesses, a copy was given to each.... Each brief
contained the principal questions and answers.... That for Mr. Hume was
generally accompanied by an appendix of documents arranged in order,
with a short account of such proceedings as were necessary to put Mr.
Hume in possession of the whole case. Thus he was enabled to go on with
considerable ease, and to anticipate or rebut objections.”[179]
The Committee sat in private; but Hume’s numerous letters to Place show
how carefully the latter was kept posted up in all the proceedings:
“As the proceedings of the Committee were printed from day to day
for the use of the members, I had a copy sent to me by Mr. Hume,
which I indexed on paper ruled in many columns, each column having an
appropriate head or number. I also wrote remarks on the margins of the
printed evidence; this was copied daily by Mr. Hume’s secretary, and
then returned to me. This consumed much time, but enabled Mr. Hume to
have the whole mass constantly under his view; and I am very certain
that less pains and care would not have been sufficient to have carried
the business through.”[180]
From Westminster Hall we are transported, by these private notes for
Hume’s use, all now preserved in the British Museum, into the back
parlour of the Charing Cross shop, where the London and provincial
artisan witnesses came for their instructions. “The workmen,” as
Place tells us, “were not easily managed. It required great care and
pains not to shock their prejudices so as to prevent them doing
their duty before the Committee. They were filled with false notions,
all attributing their distresses to wrong causes, which I, in this
state of the business, dared not attempt to remove. Taxes, machinery,
laws against combinations, the will of the masters, the conduct of
magistrates--these were the fundamental causes of all their sorrows and
privations.... I had to discuss everything with them most carefully,
to arrange and prepare everything, and so completely did these things
occupy my time that for more than three months I had hardly any
rest.”[181]
The result of the inquiry was as Hume and Place had ordained. A series
of resolutions in favour of complete freedom of combination and liberty
of emigration was adopted by the Committee, apparently without dissent.
A Bill to repeal all the Combination Laws and to legalise trade
societies was passed through both Houses, within less than a week, at
the close of the session, without either debate or division. Place and
Hume contrived privately to talk over and to silence the few members
who were alive to the situation; and the measure passed, as Place
remarks, “almost without the notice of members within or newspapers
without.”[182] So quietly was the Bill smuggled through Parliament that
the magistrates at a Lancashire town unwittingly sentenced certain
cotton-weavers to imprisonment for combination some weeks after the
laws against that crime had been repealed.[183]
Place and Hume had, however, been rather too clever. Whilst the
governing classes were quite unconscious that any important alteration
of law or policy had taken place, the unlooked-for success of Place’s
agitation produced, as Nassau Senior describes, “a great moral effect”
in all the industrial centres. “It confirmed in the minds of the
operatives the conviction of the justice of their cause, tardily and
reluctantly, but at last fully, conceded by the Legislature. That
which was morally right in 1824 must have been so, they would reason,
for fifty years before.... They conceived that they had extorted from
the Legislature an admission that their masters must always be their
rivals, and had hitherto been their oppressors, and that combinations
to raise wages, and shorten the time or diminish the severity of
labour, were not only innocent, but meritorious.”[184] Trade Societies
accordingly sprang into existence or emerged into aggressive publicity
on all sides. A period of trade inflation, together with a rapid rise
in the price of provisions, favoured a general increase of wages. For
the next six months the newspapers are full of strikes and rumours of
strikes. Serious disturbances occurred at Glasgow, where the employers
had been exceptionally oppressive, where the cotton operatives
committed several outrages, and where a general lock-out took place.
The cotton-spinners were once more striking in the Manchester district.
The shipping trade of the North-East Coast was temporarily paralysed by
a strong combination of the seamen on the Tyne and Wear, who refused
to sail except with Unionist seamen and Unionist officers. The Dublin
trades, then the best organised in the kingdom, ruthlessly enforced
their bye-laws for the regulation of their respective industries, and
formed a joint committee, the so-called “Board of Green Cloth,” whose
dictates became the terror of the employers. The Sheffield operatives
have to be warned that, if they persist in demanding double the former
wages for only three days a week work, the whole industry of the town
will be ruined.[185] The London shipwrights insisted on what their
employers considered the preposterous demand for a “book of rates”
for piecework. The London coopers demanded a revision of their wages,
which led to a long-sustained conflict. In fact, as a provincial
newspaper remarked a little later, “it is no longer a particular class
of journeymen at some single point that have been induced to commence
a strike for an advance of wages, but almost the whole body of the
mechanics in the kingdom are combined in the general resolution to
impose terms on their employers.”[186]
The opening of the session of 1825 found the employers throughout
the country thoroughly aroused. Hume and Place had in vain preached
moderation, and warned the Unions of the danger of a reaction. The
great shipowning and shipbuilding interest, which had throughout the
century preserved intact its reputation for unswerving hostility to
Trade Unionism, had possession of the ear of Huskisson, then President
of the Board of Trade and member for Liverpool. Early in the session he
moved for a committee of inquiry into the conduct of the workmen and
the effect of the recent Act, which, he complained, had been smuggled
through the House without his attention having been called to the fact
that it went far beyond the mere repeal of the special statutes against
combinations.[187] This time the composition of the committee was not
left to chance, or to Hume’s manipulation. The members were, as Place
complains, selected almost exclusively from the Ministerial benches,
twelve out of the thirty being placemen, and many being representatives
of rotten boroughs. Huskisson,[188] Peel, and the Attorney-General
themselves took part in its proceedings; Wallace, the Master of the
Mint, was made chairman, and Hume alone represented the workmen.
Huskisson regarded the Committee as merely a formal preliminary to the
introduction of the Bill which the shipping interest had drafted,[189]
under which Trade Unions, and even Friendly Societies, would have been
impossible. For the inner history of this Committee we have to rely on
Place’s voluminous memoranda, and Hume’s brief notes to him. According
to these, the original intention was to call only a few employers as
witnesses, to exclude all testimony on the other side, and promptly to
report in favour of the repressive measure already prepared. Place,
himself an expert in such tactics, met them by again supplying Hume
daily with detailed information which enabled him to cross-examine the
masters and expose their exaggerations. And, if Place’s account of the
animus of the Committee and the Ministers against himself be somewhat
highly coloured, we have ample evidence of the success with which he
guided the alarmed Trade Unions to take effectual action in their own
defence. His friend John Gast, secretary to the London Shipwrights,
called for two delegates from each trade in the metropolis, and
formed a committee which kept up a persistent agitation against any
re-enactment of the Combination Laws. Similar committees were formed
at Manchester and Glasgow by the cotton operatives, at Sheffield
by the cutlers, and at Newcastle by the seamen and shipwrights.
Petitions, the draft of which appears in Place’s manuscripts, poured
in to the Select Committee and to both Houses. If we are to believe
Place, the passages leading to the committee-room were carefully kept
thronged by crowds of workmen insisting on being examined to rebut the
accusations of the employers, and waylaying individual members to whom
they explained their grievances. All this energy on the part of the
Unions was, as Place observes, in marked contrast with their apathy
the year before. The workmen, though they had done nothing to gain
their freedom of association, were determined to maintain it. Doherty,
the leader of the Lancashire Cotton-spinners, writing to Place in the
heat of the agitation, declared that any attempt at a re-enactment
of the Combination Laws would result in a widespread revolutionary
movement.[190] The net result of the inquiry was, on the whole,
satisfactory. The Select Committee found themselves compelled to hear
a certain number of workmen witnesses, who testified to the good
results of the Act of the previous year. The ship-owners’ Bill was
abandoned, and the House of Commons was recommended to pass a measure
which nominally re-established the general common-law prohibition of
combinations, but specifically excepted from prosecution associations
for the purpose of regulating wages or hours of labour. The master
shipbuilders were furious at this virtual defeat. The handbill is still
extant which they distributed at the doors of the House of Commons
on the day of the second reading of the emasculated Bill.[191] They
declared that its provisions were quite insufficient to save their
industry from destruction. If Trade Unions were to be allowed to exist
at all, they demanded that these bodies should be compelled to render
full accounts of their expenditure to the justices in Quarter Sessions,
and that any diversion of monies raised for friendly society purposes
should be severely punished. They pleaded, moreover, that at any rate
all federal or combined action among trade clubs should be prohibited.
Place and Hume, on the other hand, were afraid, and subsequent events
proved with what good grounds, that the narrow limits of the trade
combinations allowed by the Bill, and still more the vague terms
“molest” and “obstruct,” which it contained, would be used as weapons
against Trade Unionism. The Government, however, held to the draft
of the Committee. The shipbuilders secured nothing. Hume induced
Ministers to give way on some verbal points, and took three divisions
in vain protest against the measure. Place carried on the agitation to
the House of Lords, where Lord Rosslyn extracted the concession of a
right of appeal to Quarter Sessions, which was afterwards to prove of
some practical value.
The Act of 1825 (6 Geo. IV. c. 129)[192]--which became known among the
manufacturers as “Peel’s Act”--though it fell short of the measure
which Place and Hume had so skilfully piloted through Parliament the
year before, effected a real emancipation. The right of collective
bargaining, involving the power to withhold labour from the market by
concerted action, was for the first time expressly established. And
although many struggles remained to be fought before the legal freedom
of Trade Unionism was fully secured, no overt attempt has since been
made to render illegal this first condition of Trade Union action.[193]
It is a suggestive feature of this, as of other great reforms, that
the men whose faith in its principle, and whose indefatigable industry
and resolution carried it through, were the only ones who proved
altogether mistaken as to its practical consequences. If we read the
lesson of the century aright, the manufacturer was not wholly wrong
when he protested that liberty of combination must make the workers
the ultimate authority in industry, although his narrow fear as to the
driving away of capital and commercial skill and the reduction of the
nation to a dead level of anarchic pauperism were entirely contradicted
by subsequent developments. And the workman, to whom liberty to combine
opened up vistas of indefinite advancement of his class at the expense
of his oppressors, was, we now see, looking rightly forward, though he,
too, greatly miscalculated the distance before him, and overlooked many
arduous stages of the journey. But what is to be said of the forecasts
of Place and the Philosophic Radicals? “Combinations,” writes Place to
Sir Francis Burdett in 1825, “will soon cease to exist. Men have been
kept together for long periods only by the oppressions of the laws;
these being repealed, combinations will lose the matter which cements
them into masses, and they will fall to pieces. All will be as orderly
as even a Quaker could desire.... He knows nothing of the working
people who can suppose that, when left at liberty to act for themselves
without being driven into permanent associations by the oppression
of the laws, they will continue to contribute money for distant and
doubtful experiments, for uncertain and precarious benefits. If let
alone, combinations--excepting now and then, and for particular
purposes under peculiar circumstances--will cease to exist.”[194]
It is pleasant to feel that Place was right in regarding the repeal as
beneficial and worthy of his best efforts in its support; but in every
less general respect he and his allies were as wrong as it was possible
for them to be. The first disappointment, however, came to the workmen.
Over and over again they had found their demands for higher wages
parried only by the employers’ resort to the law, and they now saw
the way clear before them for an organised attack upon their masters’
profits. Trades which had not yet enjoyed permanent combinations began
to organise in the expectation of raising their wages to the level of
those of their more fortunate brethren. The Sheffield shop-assistants
combined to petition for early closing.[195] The cotton-weavers of
Lancashire met in delegate meeting at Manchester in August 1824 to
establish a permanent organisation to prevent reductions in prices
and to secure a uniform wage, the notice stating that it was by
their secret combinations that the tailors, joiners, and spinners had
succeeded in keeping up wages.[196] In the same month the Manchester
dyers turned out for an advance, and paraded the streets, which they
had placarded with their proposals.[197] The Glasgow calender-men
struck for a regular twelve hours’ day, and carried their point. The
success of the shipwrights on the north-east coast[198] induced the
London shipwrights to convert their “Committee for conducting the
Business in the North” into the “Shipwrights’ Provident Union of the
Port of London,” which existed continuously until its absorption in the
twentieth century by the national society dominating the trade.
“Such is the rage for union societies,” reports the _Sheffield Iris_ of
July 12, 1825, “that the sea apprentices in Sunderland have actually
had regular meetings every day last week on the moor, and have
resolved not to go on board their ships unless the owners will allow
them tea and sugar.” Local trade clubs expanded, like the Manchester
Steam-Engine Makers’ Society, into national organisations. In other
cases corresponding clubs developed into federal bodies. The object in
all these cases was the same. The preamble to the first rules of the
Friendly Society of Operative House Carpenters and Joiners of Great
Britain, which was established by a delegate meeting in London in
1827, states that, “for the amelioration of the evils attendant on our
trade, and the advancement of the rights and privileges of labour,” it
was considered “absolutely necessary that a firm compact of interests
should exist between the whole of the operative carpenters and joiners
throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain.”[199]
Nor was it only in the multiplication of trade societies that the
expansion showed itself. A committee of delegates from the London
trades meeting during the summer of 1825 set on foot the _Trades
Newspaper and Mechanics’ Weekly Journal_, a sevenpenny stamped paper,
with the motto, “They helped every one his neighbour, and every one
said to his brother, ‘Be of good cheer.’”[200] A vigorous attempt
was made to promote Trade Union organisation in all industries, and
to bring to bear a body of instructed working-class opinion upon the
political situation of the day.[201]
The high hopes of which all this exultant activity was the symptom
were soon rudely dashed. The year 1825 closed with a financial panic
and widespread commercial disaster. The four years that followed were
years of contraction and distress. Hundreds of thousands of workmen in
all trades lost their employment, and wages were reduced all round. In
many manufacturing districts the operatives were kept from starvation
only by public subscriptions.[202] Strikes under these circumstances
ended invariably in disaster. A notable stand made by the Bradford
woolcombers and weavers in 1825 resulted in complete defeat and the
break-up of the Union.[203]
During the greater part of the following year all Lancashire was
convulsed by incessant strikes of coal-miners and textile workers
against the repeated reductions of wages to which the employers
resorted--strikes which were marred by serious disorder, the
destruction of many hundreds of looms, and severe repression by the
troops.[204]
At Kidderminster, three years later, practically the whole trade
of the town was brought to a standstill by the carpet-weavers’ six
months’ resistance to a reduction of 17 per cent in their wages[205]--a
resistance in which the operatives received the sympathy and support
of many who did not belong to their class. In the same year the
silk-weavers of London and other towns maintained an embittered
resistance to a further cut at wages.[206] The emancipated combinations
were no more able to resist reductions than the secret ones had been,
and in some instances the workmen again resorted to violence and
machine-breaking.
For a moment the repeal seemed, after all, to have done nothing but
prove the futility of mere sectional combination, and the working men
turned back again from Trade Union action to the larger aims and wider
character of the Radical and Socialistic agitations of the time, with
which, from 1829 to 1842, the Trade Union Movement became inextricably
entangled. This is the phase which furnishes the theme of the following
chapter.
FOOTNOTES:
[111] An elaborate account of this legislation will be found in _Labour
Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders_, by G. Howell, 1902,
pp. 21-42.
[112] Act of Common Council, November 22, 1750: Hughson’s _London_,
p. 422. There is evidence of at least one other club of painters in
London dating back to the eighteenth century, the “Original Society of
Painters and Glaziers” existing in 1779, which afterwards became the
St. Martin’s Society of Painters and Glaziers (_Beehive_, October 24,
1863).
[113] This term was used to denote men who had not served a legal
apprenticeship. See “Rules and Regulations of the Journeymen Weavers,”
reprinted in Appendix No. 10 to Report on Combination Laws, 1825.
[114] The case of R. _v._ the Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge in 1721
(8 Mod. 10) is obscurely reported; and it is uncertain under what law
the men were convicted. See Wright’s _Law of Criminal Conspiracies and
Agreements_, p. 53.
[115] See the petitions from Devonshire towns, House of Commons
Journals, 1717, vol. xviii. p. 715, which, with others in subsequent
years, led to a Select Committee in 1726 (Journals, vol. xx. p. 648,
March 31, 1726).
[116] See, for instance, the Acts regulating the woollen industry, 12
Geo. I. c. 34 (1725); against embezzlement or fraud by shoemakers, 9
Geo. I. c. 27 (1729); relating to hatters, 22 Geo. II. c. 27 (1749);
to silkweavers, 17 Geo. III. c. 55 (1777); and to papermaking, 36 Geo.
III. c. 111 (1795). Whitbread declared in the House of Commons that
there were in 1800 no fewer than forty such statutes.
[117] _A Full and Accurate Report of the Proceedings of the
Petitioners, etc._ By One of the Petitioners (London, January 1800,
19 pp.). A rare pamphlet in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University
of London. “It is remarkable,” says Mr. Justice Stephen, “that in the
parliamentary history for 1799 and 1800 there is no account of any
debate on these Acts, nor are they referred to in the Annual Register
for those years” (_History of the Criminal Law_, vol. iii. p. 208).
That the measure excited some interest in the textile districts may
be inferred from the publication at Leeds of a pamphlet entitled an
_Abstract of an Act to prevent Unlawful Combinations among Journeymen
to raise Wages, etc._ (Leeds, 1799), which is in the Manchester Public
Library (P. 1735). Lord Holland’s speeches against it are said to have
been reprinted for distribution in Manchester and Liverpool (Lady
Holland’s _Journal_, vol. ii. p. 102).
Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have now traced fairly full accounts of the
proceedings, elucidating the scanty references in the Journals of the
House of Commons and House of Lords for 1799-1800 by quotations from
the _Parliamentary Register_, the _Senator_, _The Times_, _London
Chronicle_, _True Briton_, and _Morning Post_. See _The Town Labourer_,
1917, ch. vii. pp. 111-42; also Cunningham, _Growth, etc._, 1903, pp.
732-7.
[118] _Times_, January 7, 1800; _Labour Legislation, Labour Movements,
and Labour Leaders_, by George Howell, 1902, p. 23.
[119] 39 and 40 George III. c. 90; see _Cunningham_, 1903, p. 634.
[120] 39 and 40 George III. c. 60; see, for all this, _The Town
Labourer, 1760-1832_, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917, ch. vii. A case in
which an attempt to put the arbitration clauses in force was baulked by
the employers was mentioned to the Committee on Artisans and Machinery,
1824, p. 603.
[121] _Combinations of Workmen: Substance of the Speech of Francis
Jeffrey at the Dinner to Joseph Hume, M.P., at Edinburgh, November 18,
1825_ (Edinburgh, 1825).
[122] _Sheffield Iris_, March 23, 1814.
[123] Place MSS. 27798--7. The Act of 1800 was scathingly denounced by
Cobbett in the _Political Register_, August 30, 1823.
[124] This is a constant subject of complaint by other employers.
[125] Introduction to the London Scale of Prices (in London Society of
Compositors’ volume).
[126] House of Commons Return, No. 135, of 1834.
[127] Advertisements in _Nottingham Journal_, 1794-1810.
[128] _Considerations addressed to the Journeymen Calico-Printers by
one of their Masters_ (Manchester, 1815); see also the Report of House
of Commons Committee on the Case of the Calico-Printers, 1806.
[129] Evidence before Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, as
summarised in the _Report on Trade Societies_ (1860) of the Social
Science Association: see also _A Digest of the Evidence before the
Committee on Artizans and Machinery_, by George White, 1824.
[130] _The Edinburgh Book of Prices for Manufacturing Cabinet Work_
(Edinburgh, 1805, 126 pp.), “as mutually agreed upon by the Masters
and Journeymen.” In 1825 the journeymen prepared a _Supplement_,
which, after the masters had concurred in it, was published by the men
(Edinburgh, 1825). Both these are in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the
University of London.
[131] _A Few Remarks on the State of the Laws at present in Existence
for regulating Masters and Workpeople_, 1823 (142 pp.), p. 84.
Anonymous, but evidently by George White and Gravener Henson.
[132] See, for instance, _The Times_ from 17th to 25th of June 1819.
[133] _An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Dispute between the
Masters and Journeymen Printers exemplified in the Trial at large, with
Remarks Thereon_, 1799, a rare pamphlet, in the Goldsmiths’ Library at
the University of London.
[134] Place MSS. 27798--8; _Times_, November 9, 1810.
[135] Report in _Manchester Exchange Herald_, preserved in Place MSS.
27799--156.
[136] _Bookfinishers’ Friendly Circular_, 1845-51, pp. 5, 21.
[137] Bain’s _Merchant and Craft Gilds of Aberdeen_, p. 261. An earlier
combination of 1768 is also mentioned.
[138] R. _v._ Hammond and Webb, 2 Esp. 719; see the _Morning Chronicle_
report, preserved in Place MSS. 27799--29.
[139] _Star_, November 26, 1799.
[140] R. _v._ Connell and others, _Times_, July 10, 1819.
[141] R. _v._ Ferguson and Edge, 2 St. 489.
[142] _Sheffield Iris_, December 17, 1816. The men’s clubs often
existed under the cloak of friendly societies. In the overseers’ return
of sick clubs, made to Parliament in 1815, the following trade friendly
societies are included, many of these, at any rate, being essentially
Trade Unions:
Tailors, with 360 members, and £740 Braziers, with 664 members,
and 1768 Masons, with 693 members, and 1852 Scissorsmiths, with
550 members, and 1309 Filesmiths, with 260 members, and 600 United
Silversmiths, with 240 members, and 299 Cutlers, with 65 members, and
450 Grinders, with 283 members _Sheffield Iris_, 1851.
[143] _A Few Remarks, etc._, p. 86.
[144] Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 395.
[145] See the _Gorgon_ for January and February 1819.
[146] Second Report of Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p.
62. For other cases, see _The Town Labourer_, by J. L. and B. Hammond,
1917, pp. 130-33.
[147] Throughout the century it seems to have been customary in
most handicrafts for the artisan to be allowed the privilege of
apprenticing one son, usually, the eldest, free of charge. For other
boys, especially for the sons of parents not belonging to the trade, a
fee of £5 to £20 was exacted by the employer. The secretary of the Old
Amicable Society of Woolstaplers thirty years ago informed us that, as
his brother had already entered the trade, his father had to pay £100
for his indentures.
[148] To take, for instance, the cabinetmakers and millwrights. When
Lovett came to London in 1819 he found that he could not get employment
without joining the Union (_Life of William Lovett_, by himself).
The millwrights at the beginning of the century were so strongly
organised--this probably led to the engineering employers’ petition
in 1799 out of which the Combination Acts sprang--that when Fairbairn
(after being actually engaged at Rennie’s works) was refused admission
into their society, he was driven to tramp out of London in search
of work in a non-union district (_Life of Sir William Fairbairn_, by
himself, 1877, pp. 89, 92). For the last three-quarters of the century
a considerable proportion of the cabinetmakers and engineers employed
in London have been outside the Trade Union ranks.
[149] _Articles of the Society of Journeymen Brushmakers, held at the
sign of the Craven Head, Drury Lane_, 1806; Minutes, April 27, 1831.
[150] John Gast, a shipwright of Deptford, was evidently one of the
ablest Trade Unionists of his time. We first hear of him in 1802, when
there was a serious strike in London that attracted the attention
of the Government (Home Office Papers in Record Office, 65--1, July
and August 1802), as the author of a striking pamphlet entitled _A
Vindication of the Conduct of the Shipwrights during the late disputes
with their Employers_ (1802, 38 pp.). In 1818 he is found advocating
the first recorded proposal for a general workmen’s organisation,
as distinguished from separate trade clubs--to be described in our
next chapter; and his _Articles of the Philanthropic Hercules for
the Mutual Support of the Labouring Mechanics_, which were printed
in the _Gorgon_, attracted the attention of Francis Place, who
described him (Place MSS, 27819--23) as having “long been secretary
to the Shipwrights’ Club: he was a steady, respectable man. He had
formed several associations of working men, but had been unable
to keep up any one of them.” He became one of Place’s most useful
allies in the agitation for a repeal of the Combination Laws, and
when, in 1825, their re-enactment was threatened, his “committee of
trades delegates” was Place’s strongest support. Gast was the leading
spirit in the establishment of the _Trades Newspaper_ in July 1825,
and became chairman of the committee of management, as well as a
frequent contributor. In the same year he was actively engaged in
the shipwrights’ struggle for a “Book of Rates,” or definite list of
piecework prices, and the energy with which he counteracted the design
of the Board of Admiralty, of allowing the London shipbuilders to
borrow men from the Portsmouth Navy Yard, contributed mainly to the
success of the fight.
[151] Place MSS. 27800--195.
[152] Place MSS. 27798--11; and _The Town Labourer, 1760-1832_, by J.
L. and B. Hammond, 1917. Between 1798-1803 and 1804-16 the piecework
wages for handloom cotton weaving were reduced in some cases by 80 per
cent at a time of war prices (_Geschichte der englischen Lohnarbeit_,
by Gustav Steffen, Stuttgart, 1900, vol. ii. pp. 19-20). See _History
of Wages in the Cotton Trade during the Past Hundred Years_, by G. H.
Wood, 1910; and Cunningham, _Growth, etc._, 1903, p. 634.
[153] See on all these points the evidence given before the Committee
on Artisans and Machinery, 1824; especially that of Richmond.
[154] Letter to the local Major-General, June 15, 1812, in Home Office
Papers, 40--1.
[155] _Ibid._
[156] _The Town Labourer, 1760-1832_, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917,
p. 15. Whether Gravener Henson, the bobbin-net maker of Nottingham,
subsequently author of a _History of the Framework-Knitters_ (1831),
who had long been a leader of the Framework-knitters, was the “King
Lud” under whose orders the machine-breakers often purported to act,
is yet unproven (_Life of Francis Place_, by Prof. Graham Wallas,
revised edition, 1918). The Report of the House of Commons Committee
on the Framework-knitters’ petitions (1812) affords evidence of the
all-pervading misery of the time. For other glimpses of the Luddite
organisation, see _An Appeal to the Public, containing an account of
services rendered during the disturbances in the North of England in
the year 1812_, by Francis Raynes, 1817 (in Home Office Papers, 40);
_Report of Proceedings under Commission of Oyer and Terminer, January
2 to 12, 1813, at York_, by J. and W. B. Gurney, 1813; _Digest of
Evidence of Committee on Artizans and Machinery_, by George White, 1824
(see p. 36, Richmond’s evidence as to the appeals of the Luddites to
the Glasgow cotton-spinners); and _Annual Register_, 1812.
[157] Evidence of a colliery engineer in the Newcastle district before
Committee on Combination Laws, 1825; summarised in _Report on Trade
Societies_, 1860, by Social Science Association. See also _A Voice from
the Coalmines_, 1825; _A Candid Appeal to the Coalowners and Viewers
of Collieries on the Tyne and Wear, including a copy of the Collier’s
Bond, with Animadversions thereon and a series of proposed Amendments,
from the Committee of the Colliers’ United Association_, 1826 (in Home
Office Papers, H.O. 40 (19), with Lord Londonderry’s letter of February
28, 1826); _The Miners of Northumberland and Durham_, by Richard Fynes,
pp. 12-16 (1873); _An Earnest Address ... on behalf of the Pitmen_, by
W. Scott, 1831.
[158] See Appendix to Report of Select Committee on Combinations, 1825.
[159] R. _v._ Yates and Others, Liverpool Sessions, August 10, 1823.
See newspaper report preserved in Place MSS. 27804--154.
[160] The entries in this old cash-book are of some interest:
May 29, 1810 Paid ye Brushmakers £15 0 0 Lent ye Brushmakers 10 0 0
Paid ye Friziers 20 0 0 June 26, 1810 Paid ye Silversmiths 10 0 0
Expenses to Pipemakers 0 4 10 July 24, 1810 Paid ye Braziers 10 10
0 Paid ye Bookbinders 10 0 0 Paid ye Curriers 10 0 0 Aug. 21, 1810
Lent ye Bit and Spurmakers 5 0 0 Lent ye Scalemakers 5 0 0 Paid ye
Leathergrounders 5 0 0 Oct. 26, 1810 Paid ye Tinplate Workers 30 0 0
Dec. 11, 1810 Lent ye Ropemakers 10 0 0 May 30, 1811 Received of Scale
Beam-makers 5 0 0 June 25, 1811 Expenses with Papermakers 0 12 6 July
20, 1812 Lent ye Sadlers 10 0 0 Oct. 12, 1812 Paid to Millwrights 50 0
0 Dec. 7, 1812 Borrowed from the Musical Instrument-makers 2 0 0
[161] Home Office Papers, 40--18, March 31, 1823.
[162] See report in the _Manchester Exchange Herald_, about 1818,
preserved in Place MSS. 27799--156.
[163] See, for instance, the witnesses delegated by the Glasgow and
Manchester trades to the Select Committee on Petitions of Artisans,
etc., report of June 13, 1811; or the joint action of the Yorkshire and
West of England Woollen-workers given in evidence before the Select
Committee of 1806. These cases are typical of many others.
[164] Printed handbill signed by thirty-two persons, issued in the
summer of 1816, preserved in Place MSS. 27799--141. Place has also
preserved the rejoinder of the workmen, which is unsigned, as he notes,
for fear of prosecution.
[165] _The Stocking Makers’ Monitor_, January 1818; _A few Remarks on
the State of the Law, etc._, by White and Henson, p. 88; _An Appeal
to the Public on the subject of the Framework-Knitters’ Fund_, by the
Rev. Robert Hall (Leicester, 1819); Cobbett’s _Weekly Register_, vol.
xxxix.; _A Reply to the Principal Objections advanced by Cobbett and
Others_, by the Rev. Robert Hall (Leicester, 1821); _Digest of Evidence
before the Committee on Artizans and Machinery_, by George White, 1824.
[166] _Proceedings at a public Meeting of the Inhabitants of the
Township of Sheffield, held at the Town Hall, March 15, 1820_
(Sheffield, 1820, 16 pp.).
[167] _Times_, August 5, 1819.
[168] Evidence of Sir William Rae, Bart., before Select Committee on
Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 486.
[169] An admirable biography has now been written, _The Life of Francis
Place, 1771-1854_, by Prof. Graham Wallas; first edition, 1898; revised
edition, 1918.
[170] Place MSS. 27798--8, 12, etc.; _Times_, November 9, 1810; _The
Tailoring Trade_, by F. W. Galton, 1896, pp. 110-11.
[171] See the petitions of the Master Manufacturers of Glasgow,
Lancashire, and Nottinghamshire, in the Home Office Papers (42--141,
149, 150, 195, etc.).
[172] When Place in 1824 urged the “Committee of Engine Silk-weavers”
of Spitalfields to petition for a repeal of the Combination Laws, the
meeting “Resolved, that protected as we have been for years under the
salutary laws and wisdom of the Legislature, and being completely
unapprehensive of any sort of combination on our part, we cannot
therefore take any sort of notice of the invitation held out by Mr.
Place.” When this resolution was put by the chairman, “an unanimous
burst of applause followed, with a multitude of voices exclaiming, ‘The
law, cling to the law, it will protect us!’” Place MSS. 27800--52;
_Morning Chronicle_, February 9, 1824.
[173] The volumes for 1818-19 are in the British Museum.
[174] The story has now been well told in _The Life of Francis Place_,
by Prof. Graham Wallas, revised edition, 1918, ch. viii.; and in _The
Town Labourer_, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917, ch. vii. A few other
details will be found in _Digest of Evidence before the Committee
on Artisans and Machinery_, by George White, 1824, and in _Labour
Legislation, Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders_, by G. Howell, 1902,
pp. 43-57.
[175] In 1823 George White, a “clerk of committees” of the House
of Commons, had formed an alliance with Gravener Henson, the
bobbin-net maker of Nottingham, who had long been a leader of the
framework-knitters’ combinations, to whom reference has been made in
preceding pages. Together they prepared an elaborate Bill repealing
all the Combination Acts, and substituting a complicated machinery
for regulating piecework and settling industrial disputes. Some of
these proposals were meritorious anticipations of subsequent factory
legislation; but the time was not ripe for such measures. This Bill,
promptly introduced by Peter Moore, the member for Coventry, had the
effect of scaring some timid legislators, and especially alarming the
Front Bench. Hume was at a loss to know how to act; but Place, in
a letter displaying great political sagacity, advised him to baulk
the rival Bill by putting its author on the Committee of Inquiry,
explaining that “Moore is not a man to be put aside. The only way to
put him down is to let him talk his nonsense in the Committee, where,
being outvoted, he will be less of an annoyance in the House.” See
Place MSS. 27798--12.
[176] Place MSS. 27798--30.
[177] This attracted the attention of the Home Secretary (Home Office
Papers, 40--18).
[178] Place offered to act as Hume’s “assistant”; but the members of
the Committee, whose suspicions had been aroused, refused to permit him
to remain in the room, on the double ground that he was not a member of
the House, nor even a gentleman!
[179] Place MSS. 27798--22.
[180] _Ibid._ 27798--23.
[181] Place MS. 27798--22.
[182] The Act was 5 George IV. c. 95. The question of the exportation
of machinery was deferred until the next session.
[183] Letter in the _Manchester Gazette_, preserved in the Place MSS.
27801--214.
[184] MS. Report of Nassau Senior to Lord Melbourne on Trade
Combinations (1831; unpublished; in Home Office Library).
[185] _Sheffield Iris_, April 2, 1825.
[186] _Sheffield Mercury_, October 8, 1825; see the _Manchester
Guardian_ for August 1824 to a similar effect.
[187] Later in the year Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, and Lord
Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, protested in debate that they had been
quite unaware of the passing of the Act, and that they would never have
assented to it.
[188] The _Annual Register_ for 1825 gives a fuller report of
Huskisson’s speech than Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. Further
particulars are supplied in George White’s _Abstract of the Act
repealing the Laws against Combinations of Workmen_ (1824); in Place’s
_Observations on Mr. Huskisson’s Speech on the Law relating to
Combinations of Workmen_, by F. P. (1825, 32 pp.); in Wallas’s _Life
of Francis Place_, revised edition, 1918, ch. viii.; in Hammond’s _The
Town Labourer_, ch. vii.; and in Howell’s _Labour Legislation, Labour
Movements, and Labour Leaders_, pp. 51-7.
[189] This included a provision to forbid the subscription of any funds
to a trade or other association, unless some magistrate approved its
objects and became its treasurer.
[190] Place MSS. 27803--299.
[191] _Ibid._ 27803--212.
[192] Home Office Papers, letter of January 3, 1832 (H.O. 40--30).
[193] It is pleasant to record that some of the workmen expressed their
gratitude for Francis Place’s indefatigable services. “Soon after the
proceedings in 1825 were closed,” he writes, “the seamen of the Tyne
and Wear sent me a handsome silver vase, paid for by a penny-a-week
subscription; and the cutlers of Sheffield sent me an incomparable set
of knives and forks in a case” (Place MSS. 27798--66).
[194] June 25, 1825. _Ibid._ 27798--57.
[195] _Sheffield Iris_, September 27, 1825.
[196] Handbill preserved in Place MSS. 27803--255.
[197] _Manchester Guardian_, August 7, 1824; see also _On Combinations
of Trades_ (1830).
[198] This is expressly stated in the preamble to the rules adopted at
the meeting on August 16, 1824, and recorded in the first minute-book.
[199] This society afterwards developed into the existing General Union
of Carpenters and Joiners of Great Britain.
[200] Two rival journals, _The Journeyman’s and Artisan’s London
and Provincial Chronicle_, and _The Mechanic’s Newspaper and Trade
Journal_, were also started, but soon expired.
[201] The _Trades Newspaper_ was managed by a committee of eleven
delegates from different trades, of which John Gast was chairman, and
was edited, at first by Mr. Baines, son of the proprietor of the _Leeds
Mercury_, and afterwards by a Mr. Anderson. _The Laws and Regulations
of the Trades Newspaper_ (1825, 12 pp.) are preserved in the Place MSS.
27803--414. The issues from July 17, 1825, to its amalgamation with
_The Trades Free Press_ in 1828, are in the British Museum.
[202] £232,000 was raised by one committee alone between 1826 and 1829.
See _Report of the Committee appointed at a Public Meeting at the City
of London Tavern. May 2, 1826, to relieve the Manufacturers_, by W. H.
Hyett, 1829.
[203] _Wool and Wool-combing_, by Burnley, p. 169.
[204] Home Office Papers, 40--20, 21, etc.; _Annual Register_, 1826,
pp. 63, 70, 111, 128; Walpole’s _History of England_, vol. ii. p. 141.
[205] _A Letter to the Carpet Manufacturers of Kidderminster_, by the
Rev. H. Price (1828, 16 pp.); _A Letter to the Rev. H. Price, upon the
Tendency of Certain Publications of his_, by Oppidanus, 1828; and _A
Verbatim Report of the Trial of the Rev. Humphrey Price upon a Criminal
Information by the Kidderminster Carpet Manufacturers for Alleged
Inflammatory Publications during the Turn-out of the Weavers_, 1829.
[206] _Resolutions of the Meeting of Journeymen Broad Silk Weavers at
Spitalfields, April 16, 1829_; in Home Office Papers, 40--23, 24. See,
for this period, Cunningham’s _Growth of English Industry and Commerce
in Modern Times_, 1903, pp. 759-762; and also _The Skilled Labourer_,
by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1919, published too late for us to make use of
its interesting descriptions of the principal trades.