The trade union story: 1800-1850 – From illegality to uneasy acceptance

On a cold night in February 1809, a group of working men in the fast-growing industrial Lancashire town of Bolton agreed to form what they would call a Friendly Iron Moulders Society. These were bad years for the iron industry, and in the wake of a slump in business employers were cutting wages and putting men out of work. But with far-reaching laws in force to ban combinations ‘in restraint of trade’, the foundrymen had to take great care with their new endeavour.

Their objective, the men claimed, was to pursue the ‘ancient and most laudable custom’ common among working men of all types to form societies ‘for the sole purpose of assisting each other in case of Sickness, Old Age, and other Infirmities, and for the Burial of the Dead’. Their true purpose was to go much further than this. But to state their real aims would have been to court prosecution and imprisonment. So cautious were they that it took until 19 June before a set of rules was drawn up, signed by 23 moulders (seven of whom witnessed with a cross) and submitted to a broader meeting before then being taken before Salford magistrates for their approval.  With their legal fees of £21 19s 8d paid, and a declaration from the magistrates that the rules were within the law, the new society could now go about its business. From 7 August 1809, the Friendly Iron Moulders Society began to hold regular monthly meetings at the ‘Sign of the Hand and Banner’, a Bolton public house run by James Isherwood, who would also act as treasurer.

Within a year, there were new branches of the society in Butterley, Manchester and Sheffield. They were followed by Burnley and Leeds (1811), Preston, St Helens and even London (1813), and by a total of 29 other towns and cities by the time of the legal ban on combinations was repealed in 1824.

The Bolton men were not, of course, the first to band together for protection against powerful employers or to seek better pay and conditions. Rather, they were part of a tide of trade unionism that swept across the industrial landscape of the nineteenth century to establish independent and enduring organisations, many of whose trade union descendants can still be found in operation today.

THE PRE-HISTORY OF TRADE UNIONS

Trade union historians often point to antecedents among the medieval guilds as evidence of the movement’s long past. Certainly, men and women have been combining at work for many centuries in search of better pay and conditions. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the first historians of the trade union movement, cite disputes involving journeymen cordwainers, saddlers and tailors as far back as the fourteenth century.

But there is no real evidence that these ‘Bachelor Companies’ through which the journeymen and apprentices organized themselves were in any real sense forerunners of today’s unions. Where there is any evidence at all that these were more than ephemeral ad hoc groups, it appears that they were merely junior branches of the masters’ guilds, with funds allocated and officers appointed by the masters.

The first trade unions as we would now understand them did not emerge until the later years of the eighteenth century, with the growth of large-scale employers and the end for most workers of any prospect that they would one day become a master themselves. At this time trade unionism was also closely intertwined with the newly emerging friendly societies, and usually performed the same social support function for their own members. As in the case of the iron founders, many of the new trade unions certainly saw enormous benefit in being able to meet legally for these important purposes, no matter how much more widely their discussions and activities may have ranged.

TRADES CLUBS

Skilled journeymen had first begun to form friendly societies and box clubs to safeguard themselves against the financial calamities of sickness, accidents and old age as far back as the seventeenth century. These were almost always very small clubs, operating along democratic lines with a chairman and committee, which met regularly at a local public house (one of the few public meeting places available to working men) to regulate their affairs.

Such clubs were exclusive in their membership. Few would accept members over the age of forty or those in the most noxious trades since such individuals were more likely to draw on the club’s limited resources. Some, such as the Bristol Union of Carpenters, formed in 1768, refused admission to those earning less than 10s 6d a week – and in any event, the requirement to maintain regular contribution payments effectively excluded the great bulk of workers whose incomes were too low and too erratic to make this a realistic prospect. Given the tight social networks associated with the skilled artisan trades able to maintain these clubs – such as the printers, shipbuilders and tailors – they also tended to become single-trade bodies, mostly associated with a handful of small workplaces. It was among men such as these – skilled artisan journeymen, often working in traditional industries – that benefits clubs became trades societies and laid the foundations of modern trade unions.

In parallel with the benefits club, three other institutions formed the basis of trades organisation at the end of the eighteenth century and into the early years of the nineteenth: the decaying though still important apprenticeship system, the tradition of ‘tramping’, and the ‘house of call’. Each of these was crucial to the journeymen’s ability to protect their wages and to prevent the dilution of their craft by less skilled workers. By putting pressure on master craftsmen to restrict the number of apprentices they would take on, and seeking to ensure that only ‘legal’ men – those who had served their full apprenticeship – were given work, journeymen could hope to restrict the supply of labour which maintained wages. At times when work was short, younger journeymen would also be encouraged to go ‘on tramp’ – travelling the country in search of towns where there was greater demand for labour. These travelling members were supplied with a ‘blank’, in effect the earliest form of trade union membership card, which proved their credentials to the journeymen clubs of other towns and guaranteed them a meal and bed for the night at the ‘house of call’ – often the public house at which the club held its regular meetings. Through these means, trades societies were able to establish friendly relationships and effective networks. The era of national trade unions, however, remained some way in the future.

THE ERA OF THE COMBINATION ACTS

The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 did not make unions illegal. There were already laws to prevent workers ‘combining’ against their employers dating back to at least the early 1300s, and during the eighteenth century alone there were more than 40 Acts of Parliament forbidding combinations in various trades. But by making it easier to bring a prosecution before the justices rather than in a jury court, the Combination Acts certainly made it more difficult for working men to organize and act collectively in their own interests, and brought a bitterness to industrial relations that would not be easily forgotten.

In the final years of the eighteenth century, war with France had led to high inflation – and in turn to an unprecedented level of wage demands and industrial unrest. With skilled labour in short supply, few employers were able to hold out against the journeymen, and trades clubs were becoming increasingly organized and effective in presenting their demands. It was against this background and as part of a wider crackdown on radical activity that the Combination Act of 1799 – originally intended as a limited measure aimed at millwrights – entered the statute book. The measure was a tremendous shock to the trades societies and petitions poured in to Parliament from the trades of London, Manchester, Bristol, Plymouth, Liverpool, Newcastle and elsewhere seeking its repeal. But to little avail.

The new law apparently failed to check the growth of trade unionism. The London tailors, who had established a highly disciplined and effective union in the 1790s, managed to gain pay rises in 1795, and again following the passing of the Combination Acts in 1801, 1807, 1810 and 1813. London’s shoemakers, carpenters, brushmakers, compositors, silk weavers and tin-plate workers all managed during these years to establish means of wage bargaining with their masters.

But the law did place trade unionists in a precarious position and there were numerous prosecutions – even if there are few recorded examples of the Combination Acts themselves being used. In 1810, for example, 19 printworkers on The Times were convicted at the Old Bailey for combining to demand a pay rise. They were fined and sent to prison for two years. There would be further prosecutions in 1823 when weavers and spinners at Tyldesley New Mills in Bolton went on strike in pursuit of an increase in their wages. When the weavers’ books were seized, the iron founders were discovered to have been among the most generous donors to the cause.

Sadly, little documentation of use to the family historian survives from this era. Printers have always been among the best organized trades, and a London society of compositors existed as early as 1785. Yet the first records date from 1826. The earliest useful records for family historians are the minutes of the London General Trade Society of Compositors for 1827-34, now in the modern records centre at Warwick University. Similarly, while a brushmakers’ society was formed as early as 1747, the earliest union records are those of the London Journeymen Brushmakers, whose minute books dating back to the 1820s are in the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester.

REPEAL AND UNEASY LEGALITY

The dating of the earliest surviving trade union records to the second half of the 1820s is significant. In 1824, thanks to a brilliant lobbying campaign led by the leading London radical Francis Place which caught almost everyone by surprise the Combination Acts were repealed, and trade union activity ceased to be a criminal offence. What followed was – almost inevitably – a year of trade union activity and strikes on a previously unseen scale. Big new unions appeared among cotton-weavers in Glasgow, Manchester and Bolton. Coopers, bricklayers, sawyers, seamen and silk-weavers all formed their own unions. There were strikes by tin-plate workers, cabinet-makers, ladies’ shoe-makers and rope-makers. When carpenters working on the extension of rebuilding of Buckingham Palace went on strike, the Coldstream Guards were called in to restore order.

The excitement did not last. The combination of a sudden slump in trade in the second half of 1825 and new legislation to restore some control over trade union activity the same year once again made life harder for trade unionists. And even though they were no longer regarded as criminal conspiracies, unions were viewed with intense suspicion.John White, a founder of the Journeymen Steam Engine and Machine Makers’ Friendly Society in 1826, later recalled that he was constantly harassed by the police. As treasurer, he sometimes had as much as £16,000 hidden in the chimney or cellar of his house as the union did not dare to keep its funds in a bank.

Throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s, unions occupied an ambiguous legal position. With the continuing persecution and need to impress on new members the seriousness of their commitment in joining, secret passwords and bloodcurdling initiation rites flourished. When the Huddersfield Branch of the steam engine makers’ society was formed in 1831, its first purchases were curtains to keep prying eyes from seeing into the clubhouse, a bible on which members could swear the oath, and a pistol to ensure the oath was kept. It was hardly alone in this.

Among the ceremonial wear acquired by the Preston joiners when their society affiliated to the Operative Builders Union in 1833 were a topcoat, ‘coct hat’ and false moustache for the tyler or doorkeeper, while the Warrington society invested 2s 6d in painting and gilding the axe used in its admission ceremonies. The sums involved could be substantial. In 1833, the Warrington masons spent £5 2s on regalia, out of a total income for the previous two years of just £17 4s.

Later in the century, trade unionists would look back on such activity as somewhat embarrassing, but when unions lacked even basic legal protection for their funds against dishonest officials and members could face imprisonment for their trade union activities, bloodthirsty oaths and fearful ceremonies were often the only means they had to try to instil in new recruits the seriousness of their commitments to the union and their comrades.

GENERAL UNIONS AND UNITY

Although the first attempt to form a coordinating body for trade union activities had taken place as early as 1818 when the Philanthropic Hercules briefly brought together activists from as many as 30 or 40 London trade societies, there was little real prospect of success while the Combination Acts remained in place. In fact, it was the campaign against moves to reintroduce repressive anti-union legislation during 1824 and 1825 which gave the initiative an early boost, bringing together a London trades committee, the Manchester Artizans’ General Committee and similar bodies in Birmingham, Sheffield and Sunderland.

It was the same recognition of the need for unity and cooperation which also led to the launch of The Trades Newspaper in 1825. Owned and funded by the London trades societies, the paper carried regular news on wages and combinations, reports on the activities of the societies which owned it, and news of union activities in the provinces. Despite the best efforts of London trade union leaders, including John Gast of the shipwrights (see box), the paper failed to establish a general readership and its distribution outside the capital was at best spasmodic.

Outside London, some of the most important areas of trade union activity in the late 1820s were around the cotton towns of Lancashire. There was a long tradition of spinners’ societies being formed in Preston, Manchester, Oldham and elsewhere dating back to the 1790s, but after the repeal of the Combination Acts and the failure of a six-month strike by Manchester spinners, John Doherty, the Irish-born leader of the Manchester Spinners Society convened a meeting which led to the creation of a Grand General Union of Operative Spinners of the United Kingdom. This was followed a few weeks later by the setting up of a Manchester-based General Union of Trades, which for a time attracted around 150 separate unions into membership, and the launch of the United Trades’ Co-operative Journal.

Though neither the General Union nor the newspaper lasted long, the scene was now set for the emergence of the most significant move in the direction of general trade unionism, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.

THE GRAND NATIONAL AND THE TOPLUDDLE MARTYRS

The growth of larger regional and even national trade union bodies at the beginning of the 1830s coincided with a growing interest among union activists in co-operative ideals, and attracted the interest of Robert Owen, whose utopian factory communities had made him a highly influential figure in the co-operative movement. Towards the end of 1833, Owen outlined proposals for both a national union representing all trades and for the formation of ‘National Companies’ which would eventually take control of manufacturing.

Practical steps to turn the plan into reality took place at a conference in London in February 1834 at which it was agreed that the new body – to be called the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union – would take the form of a federation of separate trade lodges, each made up of the members of one trade. Each lodge would hold its own funds, but there would be levies to support strikes. The conference also adopted a common initiate rite and solemn oath.

Within a few weeks the new union had signed up at least half a million members, both by signing up existing union lodges and by establishing new ones. Among those adhering to the union were the Belfast cabinetmakers, Perthshire ploughmen, and the ‘agricultural and other labourers’ of Kensington, Fulham and Hammersmith. Women were also permitted to join, with the Grand Lodge of Operative Bonnet Makers and the Lodge of Female Tailors among those affiliating to the GNCTU.

The weaknesses of the new organisation quickly became apparent. The Leicester hosiers’ decision to affiliate to the union led to a disastrous dispute in which more than 1,300 men had to be supported, and in Glasgow a further 1,500 men, women and children were locked out for refusing to abandon the union. Despite a levy of one shilling a head, the GNCTU’s efforts to support the ‘Derby turn-outs’ proved inadequate and they were forced back to work after four months. The union lost further public sympathy when London gas-stokers were discovered to be planning a strike which would leave the capital in darkness. They were dismissed and replaced with non-union men.

The most crushing blow, however, came in the village of Tolpuddle. When their already low wages were cut from nine to seven shillings, and with the threat of a further cut ahead, a small group of agricultural labourers agreed on their plan of action. As George Loveless, a Methodist preacher and the leader of the group later recalled:

‘It was resolved to form a friendly society among the labourers, having sufficiently learned that it would be vain to seek redress either of employers, magistrates, or parsons. I inquired of a brother to get information how to proceed, and shortly after, two delegates from a Trade Society paid us a visit, formed a Friendly Society among the labourers, and gave us directions how to proceed.’

The ‘trade society’ was, of course, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, and it was to be the initiation rite agreed at the union’s founding conference which proved to be its downfall. Soon after the Dorset labourers met for the first time, six of their number were arrested and put on trial at Dorchester Crown Court, accused of administering illegal oaths under the Mutiny Act. In March 1834, they were found guilty and sentenced to be transported to Australia for seven years.

The sentence and its execution sparked an enormous outcry, with tens of thousands marching through London to demand a pardon and extensive lobbying by Radical MPs within Parliament. The setting up of a London Dorchester Committee of prominent trade union members ensured that funds were raised and the pressure to release the ‘Tolpuddle martyrs’ maintained. But by the time the campaign eventually succeeded and pardons were granted in 1836, the GNCTU had already disappeared. Lockouts and strikes involving London building workers, Leeds clothiers, Oldham cotton spinners and others during the summer of 1834 utterly exhausted the GNCTU’s ability to provide financial support, and – not for the last time – employers were able to demand a written renunciation of trade union membership as the price of a return to work.

TOWARDS CHARTISM

With national organisation now in tatters, trade union membership went into decline in the latter half of the 1830s as conditions of trade worsened. Even the strongest of the surviving unions, the Operative Stone Masons, were reduced to near bankruptcy by an ill-advised strike involving masons working on the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament and the construction of Nelson’s Column. Other unions were crippled by the heavy demands on their funds made by unemployed members.

The most significant movement to arise from these desperate times, however, would never enjoy anything more than an uneasy relationship with trade unions. Chartism certainly drew its supporters from much the same milieu as the unions: the London Working Men’s Association, which originated the People’s Charter, was a continuation of the radical artisan movement in the capital, while the great mass of supporters drawn to Chartism across much of the North of England and in the central belt of Scotland were the industrial workers who had made the spinners’ and weavers’ unions powerful in more prosperous times. It is also true that many prominent Chartists both at local and national levels were also well known trade unionists. But with union leaders cautious of any involvement with political causes, and leading Chartists equally cautious of anything which might divert energy from their objectives, the organisational links remained at best loose.

During the summer of 1842, however, the two causes came together in a most spectacular way. In the wake of a round of wage cuts, a series of strikes broke out in the collieries of Staffordshire and the cotton mills of Lancashire and Cheshire. As the strike wave grew and spread as far north as Scotland and down into South Wales, mass meetings were held and huge groups of factory workers walked from town to town to ‘turn out’ those still working. By accident or design, in August 1842 the main Chartist organisation was holding a delegate conference in Ashton-under-Lyne at which all its principal national leaders were present. With striking workers now setting up ‘committees of public safety’ to decide which factories should continue to operate, and even for a time taking control of the centre of Manchester from the authorities, the Chartist conference came under pressure to put itself and its demands at the head of the strike movement. Reluctantly, fearing that it was being set up, the conference finally did so, and the demand for the Charter became a prominent part of the strikers’ rhetoric. As the authorities regained control at the point of fixed bayonets, and with many of the strike’s leading figures under arrest, the strike rapidly came to an end. In its aftermath, the strike was largely presented as an episode of mob violence and criminality – and dubbed the ‘plug plot’, after the practice of stopping factory boilers by removing the plug. With hindsight, it was the first general strike to hit Britain.

As Chartism developed over the years and became a more consciously working-class movement, its leaders worked hard to establish good working links with trade unionists. In 1845, Chartists were prominent in the National Conference of Trades which for a time succeeded in establishing an umbrella body for many smaller unions but failed to attract the bigger union organisations. But as the decade ended and the economic picture brightened, Chartism ceased to be a mass organisation and the unions returned to their usual preoccupations of wages, terms and conditions.