Chapter II: The Struggle for Existence (2)

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.