The pioneers of trade unionism faced terrible penalties for their activities and made superhuman sacrifices in order to sustain their organisations. Despite these terrible odds, these unsung heroes led a whole series of strikes and battles in the new industries; outstanding amongst them were those of the Scottish weavers (1812), the Lancashire spinners (1818, 1826, 1830), the miners on the North East coast (1810, 1831-2), Scotland (1818) and in South Wales (1816, 1831). The latter also included a successful strike of ironworkers against the imposition of wage cuts.
Under the whip of the employers, the workers groped their way towards wider organisation. In Manchester in 1818, under the shadow of the Combination Acts, representatives of fourteen trades came together to form a General Union of Trades. It was alternatively referred to as the Philanthropic Society or Philanthropic Hercules, both names intended to camouflage and protect the union’s legality. In these precarious times, despite these precautions, its existence proved fleeting.
Despite the dangers of underground activities, communication between several unions and between different districts was further enhanced. Trade union activists from different parts of the country corresponded with each other concerning their activities, plans and needs. In the boot makers’ strikes of 1802 and 1804, links were opened up between unions in London, Wakefield, York, Bath, Portsmouth and Liverpool. In one of these documents intercepted by the authorities was contained the definition of a blackleg or scab:
And what is a Scab? – He is to his trade what a traitor is to his country: though both may be useful to one party in troublesome times, when peace returns they are detested alike by all. When help is wanted he is the last to contribute assistance and the first to grasp a benefit he never laboured to produce. He cares but for himself, but he sees not beyond the extent of a day, and for a momentary and worthless approbation would betray friends, family and country. In short he is a traitor on a small scale.[19]
At this time, party politics began to take a more recognisable and modern form with the establishment of the Tories and Liberals, two parties based on different sections of the ruling class. During the eighteenth century the Whigs, the forerunner of the Liberal Party, had rested on commercial and aristocratic interests. By the time of the nineteenth century, they had increasingly become a party of the industrial capitalists and the urban middle classes. On the other hand, the Tories came to represent the interests of the landed aristocracy. But as time went on, the class basis of these parties would change dramatically. The Tory party was transformed from the party of landowners into the political representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. Under Benjamin Disraeli the Tory Party became the most consistent champion of British imperialism and the rule of Capital.
These political representatives of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, like the rest of their kind, had nothing but contempt for the working class. They faithfully followed the bidding of their masters. As a consequence, all the Elizabethan legislation fixing the wages and conditions of apprentices was swiftly repealed in 1813, and the following year the apprenticeship clauses were also abrogated. In 1808, the proposed Minimum Wage Bill was thrown out. Laissez-faire economics became the new orthodoxy. The position of the artisan and journeyman weaver was systematically driven down to the destitute levels of the handloom weaver, as their wages were repeatedly cut to the bone. The employing class justified the workers’ slide into absolute poverty with such sobering arguments as “destitution was an essential route to all-round prosperity”!
“It is a fact well known…” stated the author of Memoirs of Wool, “that scarcity, to a certain degree, promotes industry, and that the manufacturer who can subsist on three days work will idle and drunken the remainder of the week… The poor in the manufacturing counties will never work any more time in general than is necessary just to live and support their weekly debauches… We can fairly aver that a reduction of wages in the woollen manufacture would be a national blessing and advantage, and no real injury to the poor. By this means we might keep our trade, uphold our rents, and reform the people into the bargain.”[20]
However, reality was very different. Francis Place, the radical reformer with strong laissez-faire convictions, relates that
“the suffering of persons employed in the cotton manufacture 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.”
The working class would not tolerate this inhuman treatment without a struggle. Despite the threat of imprisonment, deportation or death on the gallows, they had no choice but to resist these attempts to grind them down. Bitterness and anger exploded in periodic rioting, machine breaking and violence against landlords and owners alike. This came to a head particularly in the years 1812-1814 in the Luddite riots centred round the Nottingham hosiery area. Here the introduction of stocking frames had dramatically cut prices, forcing workers into destitution. Machine wrecking became also widespread in the West Riding of Yorkshire and other districts. The introduction of the Corn Laws, which kept bread prices artificially high, added to the bitterness that was sweeping the country. After Waterloo, the transition from war to peace brought with it a period of increased unemployment, misery and starvation. “… the use of the potato… did, in fact, enable the workers to survive on the lowest possible wage… but what was the alternative, surely nothing but bloody revolution,” wrote Jacques Halévy.
The period 1800 to 1815 represented a period of intensified government repression against the working class. There were some 220 offences for which the death penalty could be imposed, including housebreaking, sheep stealing and forgery. Poachers who were caught could be transported for seven years. Machine-breakers were hanged or deported. It was a capital offence to “preach reform to a soldier or to smash a frame.” Although “Luddism ended on the scaffold”, to quote EP Thompson, the social and economic conditions that produced Luddism remained, producing social unrest of equal measure.[21]
Following the death of William Pitt in 1806, the government fell under the domination of a group of reactionary upstarts: Sidmouth, Castlereagh, Eldon and Liverpool. Their policy was based upon repression and the mailed fist. Habeas Corpus was again suspended, followed by a whole series of arbitrary arrests and imprisonments. Class war was very much on the order of the day. The aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars from 1815 onwards was characterised by a series of riots and social unrest on a much higher scale than ever before. Tens of thousands of demobbed soldiers and sailors who returned home from the war faced terrible unemployment and profound distress. As a consequence, as the Corn Laws were being introduced through Parliament, troops with fixed bayonets were forced to defend the Commons from enraged London crowds.
In May 1816 agricultural Luddism broke out in the Eastern Counties and then spread rapidly to neighbouring counties. In December the Spencean Riots in the Spa Fields, London, turned into a desperate attempt to seize the reins of government. This danger of revolution, so prevalent in these years, gave rise to an orgy of state repression. Finally, under the hammer blows of the government, the Reform movement collapsed. William Cobbett, the writer who had played the greatest single part in organising a revolt against the aristocracy, was forced to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Paine and flee to America.
In March 1817, a mass march from Manchester to London of “Blanketeers” – named after the blankets they carried – was undertaken to present a petition appealing for relief to the Prince Regent. But frightened by the growing unrest, the marchers were arrested before they got anywhere near London. In June of that year, the Derbyshire Insurrection, provoked by government agent provocateurs, was put down by a score of dragoons. On 7 November, their leaders, Brandreth, Turner, Ludlam, “were drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, and were hanged and decapitated in the presence of an excited and horror-stricken crowd.”[22] Talk of insurrection was widespread in every industrial town of Britain. At this time the activities of many illegal trade union centred round mass drilling with pikes and staves in preparation, according to the authorities, for rebellion and revolution.