The trade union story: 1851-1900 – From New Model unions to the New Unionism

With the formation of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in 1851, a new force emerged in trade unionism which would reshape the labour movement. Created through the amalgamation of a number of smaller engineering unions, the ASE (or Amalgamated Society of Engineers, Machinists, Millwrights, Smiths and Pattern Makers, to give the union its full name) could within a matter of months claim a membership of 11,000 – more than double that of the next largest unions – and an annual income of £500 a week. The ASE’s size and wealth alone would have made it a significant body, but it was the adoption of a ‘New Model’ of organisation that would transform trade unionism.

Under the guidance of William Allan, a railway engineer and general secretary of the Journeymen Steam-Engine and Machine Makers’ Society who took on the leadership of the new union, extensive power was centralised in a national executive and at the union’s head office in London. Union branches, which had traditionally been almost completely independent of central control, now administered benefit funds in accordance with strict rules, and could dispense strike pay only with the authorisation of the centre. The new society also abandoned the tradition of secrecy that had hung over trade unions in the era of illegality, and almost all circulars and reports were published.

Almost immediately, the ASE was plunged into a struggle with engineering employers which would have destroyed many lesser organisations. In April 1851, engineers at the Oldham firm of Hibbert and Platt had successfully demanded the end of systematic overtime and piecework. Following a vote by the ASE’s entire membership, the society put similar demands to other employers. Their response, on 1 January 1851, was to lock out 3,500 engineers and nearly 10,000 labourers until such time as they signed a document pledging that they would neither join nor support any trade union.

Over three months, the ASE paid out £35,792 in benefits to its members and a further £7.767 to non-members who had also been locked out. Eventually, however, with the society’s funds exhausted and unable to borrow enough money to keep the fight going, the ASE executive authorised a return to work and agreed that members who signed ‘the Document’ under duress would not be excluded from membership. It was a heavy defeat, but one from which the ASE made a swift recovery, building both its membership and funds to create a powerful and wealthy union.

Within a few years of the creation of the ASE, this New Model of trade union organisation – centralised, disciplined, and reliant on a cadre of full-time officials who saw themselves as organizers rather than as agitators – had been adopted by other unions. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, founded in 1860 through the merger of a number of small London-based clubs was initially just 1,000 strong. Under its second general secretary, Robert Applegarth, who took over in 1862, membership grew to 10,000 in the space of just eight years.

The emergence of these New Model unions is as significant from family historians as it is for trade union historians, as their centralised structures required the creation and maintenance of proper records and the new full-time officials were generally just the sort of people to excel at such administrative tasks. As a result, the volume of surviving records is far more substantial from this era onwards, and the chances of being able to identify individual members and activists is all the greater.

MODERATION AND LEGAL RECOGNITION

With unions increasingly becoming centralised, national organisations with head offices near to the centres of power in London, it was natural that their full-time officials would come into close and regular contact. During the 1860s, a cluster of like-minded officials grew up around Allan of the ASE and Applegarth of the ASC&J. These included Daniel Guile, general secretary of the ironfounders, Edwin Coulson of the bricklayers, and George Odger, who though leader of a small union of shoemakers was also an important figure in London radicalism. With its shared caution in matters of industrial relations and commitment to lobbying for political reform, this group – known as the Junta – became a dominant force in trade unionism. In time it also attracted support from outside London, including George Howell and Henry Broadhurst from the younger generation of building trade union leaders, the miners’ leader Alexander Macdonald and Alexander Campbell, a prominent figure among Glasgow trade unionists. Both Howell and Broadhurst would go on to prominence in the trade union movement before serving as Liberal Members of Parliament.

A significant development dating from the 1850s onwards was the development of trades councils, which sought to provide a forum and centre of organisation for trade unions at a local level. Among the first were in Edinburgh (1853), Glasgow (1858), Sheffield (1858) Liverpool (1860) and London (1861). These were to prove particularly important in Scotland, where trade union membership throughout the nineteenth century was lower than in England and the focus of most industrial disputes was local rather than national. However, it was through the London Trades Council that the Junta exercised its influence. With Howell as its secretary, by 1864 the engineers and carpenters provided half its income, and as the trade union historians Sidney and Beatrice Webb noted:

‘In the meetings at the old Bell Inn, under the shadow of Newgate, we have the beginnings of an informal Cabinet of the Trade Union world.’

Out of these local trades councils also emerged the most important new trade union organisation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Trades Union Congress or TUC. There had been numerous attempts to form a central, coordinating body for trade union activities at a national level – including the shortlived United Kingdom Alliance of Organized Trades as recently as 1866. But it was on the initiative of Manchester and Salford Trades Council (formed in 1864) that the first meeting of the Trades Union Congress was held in the Mechanics Institute in Manchester from 2 to 6 June 1868. Just thirty-four delegates, representing some 118,000 trade union members, attended this first Congress. London Trades Council and the Junta initially stood aloof. However, by the end of the century, the TUC was the undisputed national voice of trade unionism.

With trade union illegality now apparently a thing of the past, the unions began to be able to focus their political lobbying on securing their own position and improving the lot of their members. From 1855 unions were able to register as friendly societies, protecting at least their social benefit funds. In 1859 the Combinations of Workmen Act legalised peaceful picketing in pursuit of disputes over pay and working hours. Finally, in 1867 the Master and Servant Acts which it made it a criminal offence for an employee to leave work unfinished – in other words, to go on strike – were made less severe. This was no minor matter: figures obtained by Glasgow Trades Council showed there to be more than 10,000 such cases coming before the courts each year.

Two developments in 1867, however, threatened to set back all the progress made to date. A series of violent attacks by trade unionists on non-union members in Sheffield culminated in the blowing up of a workman’s house, provoking the setting up of a royal commission on trade unions. More prosaically but no less seriously, when the treasurer of the Bradford branch of the boilermakers’ society stole £24 from union funds, the courts ruled that union funds were not protected by law and could not be recovered. The decision was upheld on appeal, where it was also held that though trade unions had ceased to be criminal organisations, they remained illegal associations because they acted in ‘restraint of trade’. The implication was that their funds could be embezzled with impunity.

Applegarth of the Association of Carpenters and Joiners worked ceaselessly in briefing friendly members of the royal commission and himself gave evidence before it. Although the majority report proved hostile, a minority report signed by four members recommended the repeal of legislation preventing unions from carrying out their jobs and giving full protection for union funds. With the election of a new Liberal government under William Gladstone, these measures now became law in the Trade Union Act of 1871.

The cautious leadership of the Junta and its emphasis on legal reform was not universally popular, however, and throughout the 1860s opposition centred around The Beehive, a newspaper established by George Potter, the leader of a small London carpenters’ union. An 1864 strike by the General Union of Operative Carpenters was condemned by the London Trades Council under Applegarth’s influence, alienating many building trade workers. The Junta was also highly critical of other groups of trade unionists it thought unreasonable. Nor did their approach guarantee industrial harmony, and employers increasingly turned to the use of the lock-out to enforce their will. Staffordshire ironworkers, Clyde shipbuilders and South Yorkshire miners all fell foul of the tactic.

THE BENEFITS OF MEMBERSHIP

The well-run New Model unions of this era were generous in supporting their own members in hard times, and this required sound financial management. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners on its formation in 1860 was prepared to bring existing unions into the amalgamation in only if they could prove that their reserves averaged at least 10s a member. Members of these existing societies could then join the ASC&J on payment of 5s entrance fee and 3d a week contributions.

As a result, the union was able to offer its members up to £15 compensation in the event of a potentially catastrophic loss of their workman’s tools, and in addition to the usual sickness and unemployment benefits, a funeral benefit of £7 in the event of the member’s death and £3 in the event that his wife should die. When funds were sufficient, the union was also prepared to pay unemployed members with five years’ standing a grant of £6 to help them begin a new life in the colonies. Payments of this sort remained in the union’s rule book until as late as 1892.

The ASC&J also made provision for those who worked for it. Branch secretaries would receive 6s 3d a quarter for a branch of ten members and £1 6s 3d for 100. However, in keeping with the unions’ new-found respectability, the rules stated that: ‘He must not keep a beerhouse.’ The general secretary, a full-time post, was paid 33s a week and 7s 6d for office assistance, with an extra allowance of 2s for each council meeting. Had the general secretary continued to work at his trade he could have expected to earn something very similar.

Well-run and financially astute as they were, however, the New Model unions did not see it as their role to organize or fight for less skilled workers. Rather, a main focus of their activity was centred on keeping wages high by reducing and controlling the supply of labour – insisting that no journeyman should have more than one apprentice, and that only those who completed their apprenticeship should be allowed to carry out skilled work.

UNIONS AND THE LIBERAL PARTY

The trade union leadership of the 1870s was overwhelmingly cautious in its industrial policy and focused instead on its influence in Whitehall and Westminster by lobbying MPs and Ministers, and giving expert evidence on issues affecting working men. So standing trade union-backed candidates in parliamentary elections came as a logical next step.

Within a few years, union leadership and Liberalism would come to be the norm. The first tentative steps in parliamentary politics, however, were provoked by dissatisfaction with the Liberal government’s failure to support a Nine Hours Bill limiting the working day. In 1869 and 1870 a Labour Representation League composed of prominent trade unionists ran George Odger as an independent Labour candidate, and in 1874, backed for the first time with union money, thirteen ‘Labour’ candidates went to the poll. Accepting what would otherwise have been the inevitable loss of their seats at Stafford and Morpeth, the Liberals stood down, allowing Alexander Macdonald and Thomas Burt of the miners’ union to become the first ‘Labour members’ of the House of Commons.

From this date, the Labour Representation League and the Liberal Party worked together to support the election of workingmen to Parliament as ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs. One of the first to be elected in this way was Henry Broadhurst of the Operative Society of Stonemasons, who both served on the TUC’s parliamentary committee and was secretary to the Labour Representation League. With Liberal backing, Broadhurst became MP for Stoke in 1880, and subsequently represented the Bordesley seat in Birmingham from 1885. In the same year, Lib-Lab politics reached a high point, with 12 working men elected.

Unfortunately, Broadhurst’s subsequent parliamentary career reflected growing tensions between the Liberal Party and trade unionists which would eventually lead to the emergence of the Labour Party. Offered a junior minister’s job at the Home Office, Broadhurst soon found himself arguing against the introduction of an eight-hour day. Broadhurst’s own union joined the revolt against him when in 1890 the TUC reaffirmed its support for just such legislation, and in 1892 he lost his seat in Parliament when working men refused to back him. Although Broadhurst returned to Parliament two years later and remained an MP until 1906, he had cut his ties with the trade union movement.

NEW UNIONISM

If the trade union movement had grown staid and even complacent, the events of 1888 and 1889 were to shake it to its roots and provide a much-needed infusion of new blood.

There had been earlier attempts to organize unskilled workers. Joseph Arch’s National Agricultural Labourers’ Union, formed in 1872, had rapidly recruited thousands of members in the countryside before the combination of poor harvests and a concerted lockout by employers forced a return to work and led to the union’s collapse. Similarly, a Miners Association of Great Britain, founded in 1842, led a five-month strike before being driven out of existence. Its successor, the Miners National Union of 1863, was a more moderate body which concentrated on legal and political representation for its members.

However, an article about the plight of matchgirls employed by Bryant & May at its factory in Bow in the East End of London, written by the journalist Annie Besant for The Link newspaper, provided a focus both for simmering discontent in the East End and for the new socialist groups now springing up among London’s middle-class radicals. Besant had a long record of political activism and, in 1887, had been a principal speaker at a rally of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square. When police tried to break up the assembly, there was fighting in which one man died and hundreds were arrested.

The following year, through a young socialist called Herbert Burroughs she came into contact with workers at Bryant & May. It was a mostly young and female workforce, poorly paid and subject to terrible industrial diseases, including ‘phossy jaw’, which caused the girls’ bones to rot. After Besant’s article appeared under the headline ‘White slavery in London’ the girls sought her help in setting up a trade union. The resulting strike was to last three weeks and win enormous support among the public and in Parliament. Eventually, with the help of London Trades Council, the newly formed Union of Women Match Makers won all its demands and returned to work.

The effects were two-fold. First, the small Women’s Trade Union League, led by Clementina Black, Mona Wilson and Gertrude Tuckwell, began to grow in strength as more women flocked to the trade union movement. First set up in 1874, the League had grown only slowly over the previous decade. The Bryant & May strike, however, gave it a much-needed boost. In 1888, Clementina Black was able to move the first successful resolution at a TUC conference calling for equal pay, and by the 1890s ten London unions, and over thirty provincial unions were affiliated.

The second effect was to give a focus to other groups of unskilled workers suffering the effects of an economic depression. Most famously, the creation of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers Union in 1889 and the subsequent London dock strike in support of the ‘dockers’ tanner’ – their demand for 6d an hour for their work – proved to be both successful in its own right and the catalyst for an explosion in trade union membership among unskilled workers.

As John Burns, one of the leading figures in the dock strike put it:

‘The labourer has learned that combination can lead him to anything and everything. He has tasted success as the immediate fruit of combination, and he knows that the harvest he has just reaped is not the utmost he can look to gain. Conquering himself, he has learned that he can conquer the world of capital whose generals have been the most ruthless of his oppressors.’

The sudden infusion of unskilled workers into the trade union movement effectively spelled the end of the alliance with Liberalism and a turn towards independent labour representation with more than a flavour of socialism. The New Unionism, as it was known, also laid the foundations for two of the twentieth century’s biggest unions – the Transport and General Workers Union and the General and Municipal Workers Union.

Although the initial excitement did not last, and union membership dropped back considerably by 1900, a fundamental change had taken place and the TUC was no longer the preserve of the relatively well and highly skilled labour aristocrats of the craft unions. Over the next few years new unions emerged for transport workers, gas workers, warehousemen, postmen and others who had hitherto defied union organisation. Trade unionism also began to win converts among what were called ‘black-coated’ workers – shop assistants, railway clerks and others in clerical jobs. Their story, however, is mostly a twentieth century one.