The labour is theirs, the produce ought to be theirs, and they alone ought to decide how much each deserves of the produce of all.
– Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended, 1825.
The repeal of the infamous Combination Acts led to an explosive growth of trade union organisation. It opened up a stormy and, one can say, revolutionary period for the infant labour movement. Many “Friendly Societies”, which acted as a cover for illegal activities since the Friendly Society Act of 1793, came out into the open for the first time as fully-fledged trade unions. District union organisations came into being, first of one trade, then of several trades. Then, with the new climate, unions were formed in great numbers across the trades.
This spread of organisation and growing confidence within the working class inevitably led to a strike wave in the mid and late-1820s, which developed into a series of ferocious battles against wage cuts. For instance, the carpet makers of Kidderminster in the Midlands struck for six months against a 17 per cent wage cut, but eventually went down to defeat. In Lancashire, miners and textile workers brought their industries to a complete standstill. After a prolonged strike in Yorkshire, the Bradford Woolcombers and Weavers faced cuts in pay, and in Stockport the spinners fought a rearguard battle against wage cuts. These struggles were followed by the strikes of fine spinners in April 1829, and in July the rest of Manchester’s spinners took action, but were eventually forced back to work. “The history of these unions”, noted Engels, “is a long series of defeats of the working men, interrupted by a few isolated victories.”[1] Yet, these battles provided the working class with a vital education in the class struggle, which was to lay the basis for the establishment of large-scale national trade unions, such as the Spinners’ union in 1829, followed by the Potters’ union in 1831, and the Builders’ in 1831-2.
Under the brutal conditions of open class warfare, where the government acted as the naked instrument of the employers, many strikes took on an extremely violent character. In 1831-32, the cavalry was used to break strikes in the Durham coalfield, led by the legendary Tommy Hepburn. This involved the union in pitched battles with soldiers and blacklegs. Again government troops were used to assist the Welsh Ironmasters in 1831 against the Union Club led by Dick Penderyn. This famous leader of the Welsh miners and ironworkers was an insurrectionary fighter, who led the workers of Merthyr and Dowlais with arms in hand against the yeomanry called in by Crawshay, Guest and the ironmasters. Penderyn was subsequently captured by the authorities and executed in 1831. The Union Club was forced underground by the ironmasters and took the form of a ruthless clandestine organisation, known as the “Scotch Cattle”. This used the bull’s head and horns as a symbol to hunt down and deal with “traitors, turn-coats and others” throughout the industrial valleys of South Wales. The “Cattle” were organised into “herds” and, disguised in animal skins, confronted all those who dared oppose them. In their struggle with blacklegs, they did not mince their words or deeds:
We hereby warn you the second and last time. We are determined to draw the hearts out of all the men above-named, and fix two hearts upon the horns of the Bull; so that everyone may see what is the fate of every traitor – and we know them all. So we testify with our blood.
Similar bodies sprung up elsewhere, such as the secret Glasgow cotton-spinners’ union that organised the “disposal” of scabs, known at the time as “knobsticks”. Thomas Hunter and his comrades replied to the tyranny of the masters with counter-terror, setting fire to the mills of hated owners and killing blacklegs. In 1838, the leaders of the organisation were caught and Hunter and four fellow leaders were tried for conspiracy. According to the Webbs, “the whole body of working class opinion was on their side, and the sentence of seven years’ transportation was received with as much indignation as that upon the Dorchester labourers.”
“Hatred…. of the general oppression by the dominant classes blazes out in the trade union records of the time”, noted the Webbs in their classic History of Trade Unionism. This was the hatred of a working class becoming conscious of its position in capitalist society. For those who lacked formal schooling, the class struggle was the greatest teacher of all. According to a trade unionist at the time, quoted in the Poor Man’s Guardian:
The great advantage of a strike is that it increases the enmity between labourer and capitalists, and compels workmen to reflect and investigate the causes of their suffering… The fruit of such reflections would be a violent hostility against the capitalist class; and the new converts would be prepared to second the efforts of emancipation made by labourers in other quarters of England.
Frederick Engels expressed a similar view about the development of class-consciousness. Strikes, wrote Engels, “are the military school of the workingmen, in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided… As schools of war, the unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English.”[2] It was this experience of the struggle that served to transform the working class into a “class for-itself”. The main lesson derived from this “school of war” was the need to organise not simply on a local scale, but on an industry-wide basis. The working class required maximum unity to face the united front of the employers; from trade unions, workers moved towards trades unions. These movements, continued Engels, were regarded as “the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition”, and exert control over their lives.[3]