THE SKILLED LABOURER
1760-1832
BY THE SAME AUTHORS
THE TOWN LABOURER 1760-1832
The New Civilisation. Svo.
THE VILLAGE LABOURER 1760-1832
A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill. 8vo.
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
Ex Librlg C. K. OGDEN
THE SKILLED LABOURER
1760-1832
BY
J. L. HAMMOND AND BARBARA HAMMOND
AUTHORS OF
'THE TOWN LABOURER, 1760-1832' AND 'THE VILLAGE LABOURER, 1760-1832'
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE AND SOra STREET, NEW YORK BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1919
Hb 8389
_ -
TO
ARTHUR AND DOROTHEA PONSONBY
PREFACE
IN the Town Labourer the writers tried to give a picture of the social conditions created by the great changes of the Industrial Revolution. They described the general character of the new life of town and factory, the ideas and difficulties of the class in power and the outlook and the temper of the workers. This book treats the same period from a different aspect. Its aim is to present the detailed history of particular bodies of skilled workers during those changes. It would be impossible to cover all industries in a book planned on the scale of this volume : the industries chosen are those for which the fullest records were available.
The writers owe a substantial debt to Professor George Unwin, who has helped them liberally from his large store of special knowledge of industrial history. They are under obligations to other friends, notably Mr. A. Glutton Brock, Mr. G. D. H. Cole, Professor L. T. Hobhouse, Mr. R. H. Tawney, and Professor Graham Wallas. Mr. G. W. Daniels has been kind enough to make some valuable suggestions on the subject of the early history of the cotton trade, on which he speaks with special authority, and Mr. T. W. Hanson of Halifax, who is steeped in the exciting history of the West Riding, has given important help for the chapter on the Yorkshire Luddites. The Appendix is due to Mr. A. G. C. Lloyd of Capetown.
The writers published in the Town Labourer a list of their principal authorities. It seems unnecessary to reproduce that list, but a few books on which they have drawn more specially for this volume should be mentioned. They are : Annals of Coal Mining, by R. L. Galloway; History of the
viii THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
Cotton Manufacture, by Edward Baines ; The Lancashire Cotton Industry, by Professor S. J. Chapman; Yorkshire Past and Present, by Thomas Baines ; The History of Wool and Wool- combing, by James Burnley ; History of the Worsted Manufacture in England, by John James ; A History of Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures, by William Felkin ; and The Risings of the Luddites, by Frank Peel.
I ! KMKL HKMPSTEAD, November 1919.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PACE
i. INTRODUCTION ........ 1
ii. THE MINERS OF THE TVNE AND THE WEAR . . 12
in. THE MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR . . 31
iv. THE COTTON WORKERS, 1760-1818 .... 47
v. THE COTTON WORKERS, 1818-1832 .... 94
vi. THE WOOLLEN AND WORSTED WORKERS :
I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . .136
II. THE SPINNERS . . . . . . .143
III. THE WOOLLEN WEAVERS . . . . .156
IV. THE SHEARMEN OR CROPPERS . . . . l67 V. THE WORSTED WEAVERS . . . . .190
VI. THE WOOLCOMBERS ...... 195
vii. THE SPITALFIELDS SILKWEAVERS .... 205
VHI. THE FRAME-WORK KNITTERS . . . . .221
ix. THE NOTTINGHAM LUDDITES ..... 257
x. THE LANCASHIRE LUDDITES . . . . .271
xi. THE YORKSHIRE LUDDITES ..... 301
xn. THE ADVENTURES OF OLIVER THE SPY . . . 341
APPENDIX . . . . . . . . . 377
INDEX ... . 379
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
THE history of England at the time discussed in these pages reads like a history of civil war. This is the impression pro- duced by the speeches and the policy of Ministers, the letters and the conduct of magistrates, the records of the Courts of Justice, the system on which our military forces were organised and the purposes they were designed to serve. Critics and partisans of the established order alike take this war for granted. It produces an atmosphere more intense and more absorbing than the great war that was raging from one end of Europe to the other, and it persists long after that war is over.
What was this civil war about ? It was not a quarrel over religion nor a quarrel over rival claims of Parliament and Crown. The issue that now divided the English people was in one sense less simple, in another sense it was simpler than the issue that had provoked the better known civil wars of the seventeenth century. It was less simple because it assumed various and changing aspects and one side in the struggle was not always articulate. Yet it was simpler because it arose from the fundamental instincts of human nature, for the question that it put was this, whether the mass of the English people were to lose the last vestige of initiative and choice in their daily lives.
The last vestige ; for so much had been lost already that the upper classes came readily to think of the surviving ele- ments as an anachronism. For two centuries there had been a steady concentration of economic power in the hands of a small class. The historian traces the growth of this power through its different stages : the appropriation of the monastic lands, the decay and disappearance of the guilds, the en- closures, the changes in school and university, the rise in one trade after another of capitalism in a form that enables the few to control the productive energy of the many. In the
A
2 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
medieval village all over Europe, here as elsewhere, the normal man had certain rights. On the dissolution of that old village society in England these rights were lost, and the peasant disappeared in a social revolution that created a proletariate ready for the service of the owners of capital, whether they employed their capital in agriculture or in one of the new industries.1
So much attention has been bestowed on the development of capitalism before the Industrial Revolution, that there is perhaps a tendency to underestimate the importance of the changes that accompanied the Revolution. * Long before 1776 by far the greater part of Englishindustry had become dependent on capitalistic enterprise in the two important respects that a commercial capitalist provided the actual workmen with their materials, and found a market for the finished goods.' 2 This is true, though readers of these pages will do well to note that among the exceptions Professor Ashley names the Yorkshire Woollen Industry. The men whom Arthur Young described as working on their little farms round Leeds bought their own wool and sold the cloth that they made to merchants in the Cloth Hall. But if it is true that the majority of domestic workers were dependent on capitalist enterprise, it does not follow that the changes the Industrial Revolution produced were unimportant in their consequences to the worker. They were so important that when the weaver in Oldham or the cropper in Halifax or the woolcomber in Bradford looked back in 1820 or 1830 to the beginning of his life, he thought he could remember a time when the worker was in all senses a free man.8 We can see that the fate of the worker at the Industrial Revolution was predetermined — unless some miracle had happened to change the temper of English society — by the social changes that preceded the Revolution, for those changes had made it difficult for the workers, deprived of all the machinery and traditions of co-operation, to obtain a share in the control of the new power.4 But it would
1 For an excellent account of the fate of the peasant in the different countries, see Professor Ashley's address to the International Congress of Historical Studies, 1913, Comparative Economic History and the English Landlord.
2 Ashley, Economic Organisation of England ', p. 141.
3 The cotton handloom weaver often preferred famine to the discipline of the mill. — Chapman, Lancashire Cotton Industry, p. 46.
4 Mr. Belloc goes too far surely in suggesting in his book The Servile State that the capital for the new industries came exclusively from the rich, for Gaskell (The Manufacturing Population of England, 1833) tells us that the most sue-
INTRODUCTION 3
be wrong to conclude that their fate was any the less terrible on that account.
Within certain limits the ordinary workman had still a large margin of freedom in his daily life at the beginning of the period discussed in this volume. We have Felkin's picture of the Frame-work Knitters of Leicester : * Each had a garden, a barrel of home-brewed ale, a week-day suit of clothes and one for Sundays, and plenty of leisure.' We have Bamford's agreeable picture of the Lancashire weaver at the end of the eighteenth century drawn from his uncle's home at Middleton. The domestic worker was not like the modern domestic worker who usually supplies the worst examples of sweated con- ditions. He was not hopelessly and despairingly poor. He had some say in his own life : he could go out and dig in his garden or smoke as he pleased : he was in some cases a farmer as well as a weaver or a spinner : he was in short not quite disinherited from the old village economy in which a man did not merely sell his labour but had some kind of holding and independence of his own.
The industrial changes that occurred at this time destroyed this social economy with its margin of freedom and choice for the worker. To the upper-class observer those changes seemed to promise a great saving of human labour. To the worker they seemed to threaten a great degradation of human life. And the worker was right, because the saving of human labour did not mean that the worker worked less or received greater compensation for his toil, but that the capitalist could draw greater profits from the labour of the workers he employed. What happened during this period was that the power of the owners of capital to control the energy of mankind was so immensely increased by the industrial changes that in many parts of England it spread over the entire life of a society. The worker had to surrender his freedom to this power: he had to surrender his home as well. His wife who in the old days brewed the ale, cleaned and cooked, and helped with the loom, had now to spend the day in the mill : the child had to be sent or carried to the mill as soon as it could walk. Robert Owen told Peel's Committee in 1816 that he could remember in the days before the advent of factories that the
cessful were men who started from very small beginnings. Robert Owen was in this sense no exception. But Mr. Belloc seems to us to be perfectly right in his conclusion that the disastrous form that the new society took was determined by the moral atmosphere of the time.
4 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
children looked as well fed as at that time, though few of them were employed before they were twelve or thirteen. A few years' experience of the new system made this seem in- credible, for it was supposed that no home could be kept going unless the children of five or six went to the mill. Under that system the owners of capital could decide not only how the worker spent his life, but how he brought up his children. In other words the weaver or spinner or carder could call less of his life or his time his own than the hum- blest peasant in the old village, who worked so many days for his lord and so many days as farmer or as weaver for himself.
The workers were in the main ignorant men, but they were not so perverse or so foolish as they appeared to the philo- sophers who wrote The Results of Machinery. They felt that the grasp of the new power was closing on them, and they resisted instinctively every change that could hasten that process. They considered about each invention not whether it meant that a piece of work could be done in one hour instead of ten — the only consideration for the reasonable and en- lightened people of the time — but whether it brought their final enslavement a day nearer. They were fighting as literally as ever men have fought * pro aris et focis.' Something of the atmosphere of a tragedy — the tragedy that seemed to set science in the lists against happiness, and knowledge against freedom — clings to the villages and the grey hills of the West Riding. The bleak and sombre landscape that gives its sad tone to the life and the art of the Brontes seems to speak of the destinies of that world of combers and croppers and spinners and weavers on whom the Industrial Revolution fell like a war or a plague. For of all these classes of workers it is true that they were more their own masters, that they had a wider range of initiative, that their homes and their children were happier in 1760 than they were in 1830. Surely never since the days when populations were sold into slavery did a fate more sweeping overtake a people than the fate that covered the hills and valleys of Lancashire and the West Riding with the factory towns that were to introduce a new social type for the world to follow.
It was not only those workers whose art or skill was super- seded by the developments of the factory system that suffered in these changes. The strengthening of the power of capital which followed the introduction of machinery told disastrously
INTRODUCTION 5
on the position of those home workers whose industry remained a domestic industry. The hand-loom weaver sank steadily more and more as the power-looms increased, until, as one of them said to Oastler, they were reduced to living on their children. The Frame- work Knitters were in a different case, in the sense that no factories were started until after our time to do the work that was done in their homes, but as we shall see, their fortunes declined almost as tragically as those of the hand-loom weaver. Felkin gives a most interesting review of the changes in their conditions as recalled by an old man who had been apprenticed in 1755 : l ' When a lad, the work- people laboured ordinarily ten hours a day, five days a week, the Saturday being always left open for taking in work to Nottingham, gardening, etc. : through the middle of his life they worked about twelve hours a day ; but of late years they work by necessity fourteen to sixteen hours a day. . . . For the first thirty years or thereabouts of his being in the trade, or from 1755 to 1785, fluctuation in wages was almost unknown ; taking work in, he describes as being as regular and well under- stood in the general rate of wages, as to be like going and paying Id. for a penny loaf.' It is interesting to note that a Leicester witness, speaking of the conditions of this trade in 1833, said, ' We have no factory bell : it is our only blessing.' 2
The new industrial system which robbed this society of its freedom robbed it also of its pleasures. If the introduction of machinery had taken place under a system that allowed the workers to control it, that system would have increased leisure and so made the life of man happier : it would in fact have done what the philosophers claimed for it. But machinery was introduced under a system that placed the workers at the disposal of the owners of capital, who valued machinery as a means, not to a larger and richer life for the workers, but to greater and quicker profits for their enterprise.3 There were of course many thinkers, politicians, and magistrates before the Industrial Revolution who thought that the mass of men and women ought to spend their lives in hard toil without relief or distraction. But the Industrial Revolution gave a great momentum to this view and increased the power of
1 Factories Inquiry Commission, 1833, c. i. p. 1 80. 1 Op. cit., c. ii. p. 10.
See William. Morris, by A. Clutton-Brock, pp. 226 f., for an admirable discussion of this aspect of the industrial system.
6 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
those who held it. Take for example the way in which the average manufacturer regarded the introduction of labour- saving machinery. He never thought of it as a means to increasing leisure. On the contrary ; if one machine could do ten men's work, there was all the more reason for not allowing so valuable an instrument to be idle a moment longer than was necessary : in other words, the machine was an argu- ment for lengthening rather than shortening the working day. There were honourable employers, chief among them the illustrious John Fielden, who contended as ardently as any workmen's leader against this vicious monomania, but the spectacle of the immense and sudden expansion of trade was so intoxicating that the educated classes were led to forget every other side of life.
This aspect of industry, as an unrelenting and slave-driving master, was emphasised by the general atmosphere of com- petition that dominated this new world. During a war a nation is obliged to concentrate all its resources on one aim, to regard everything in its bearing on the efficiency of a society for one particular purpose. Everything is seen in a special perspective which is false if once you take your eyes off that exclusive end. The Industrial Revolution had an effect like this on the imagination of England, for it made people think that their society was to be judged solely by its commercial success in a struggle of which the whole world was now the arena. The test of success was the test of profits : if a society could make its social and political conditions favourable to the earning of high profits that society was prosperous.
Under this influence there grew up the idea which more than any other branded the workers as servile : the idea that they were to be treated as the instruments of this power, and not as citizens with faculties and interests of their own for which society should make some provision. This fixed idea rules the outlook of the age on religion, politics, philosophy, and all the arts and pleasures of social life. The optimism created by the new discoveries mingled with as dark a disbelief in a wide range of happiness and freedom as the world had ever known. The majority of educated men renounced the hope of adapting human life and human power to their new surroundings in such a way as to satisfy the nobler instincts of human character, content to think of the mass of their fellow-countrymen as concerned only with a routine of working, eating, and sleeping. It was as if men
INTRODUCTION 7
had deliberately turned their backs on * the master task of civilised mankind.' *
The towns that belonged to this age are steeped in its character : they are one aspect of an industrial system that refused to recognise that the mass of mankind had any business with education, recreation, or the wide and spiritual interests and purposes of life. The age that regarded men, women, and children as hands for feeding the machines of the new industry had no use for libraries, galleries, playgrounds, or any of the forms in which space and beauty can bring comfort or nourishment to the human mind. The new towns were built for a race that was allowed no leisure. Education, it was believed, would make the workers less passive and therefore less useful instruments : therefore they were not to be educated, or to be educated only within the narrowest limits. Recreation was waste : the man who was kicking a football or playing a fiddle might be wield- ing a hammer at a forge or superintending a spinning machine. In some parts of Lancashire it was the custom to forbid music in the public-houses, and parsons and magistrates were found who thought that the worker would be demoralised by hearing an oratorio in a church on a Sunday. A witness before the Factory Commission gave his impressions of the factory system in a vivid phrase : ' Thinks they are not much better than the Israelites in Egypt and their life is no pleasure to them.' It is significant that we find in the pages of Crabbe, of Cobbett, and of Bamford the same lament that the games and happiness of life are disappearing. The rich might win their Waterloos on the playing-fields of Eton, but the rivals who were trying to shake our grasp of the new wealth could only be conquered by a nation that shut up its workers in mill or mine or workshop from the rising to the setting of the sun.
For with the Industrial Revolution the long working day becomes the rule in all industries, factory or domestic, old or new. We have an example of a new domestic industry in the case of lace-running, which employed over 180,000 women and children at the time of the Reform Bill. In this industry the worker paid the penalty of these hours in blindness. A girl worker before the Factory Commission, who worked from six in the morning to ten at night, with two hours off for
1 See Graham Wallas's powerful chapter on ' Disposition and Environment n The Great Society.
8 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
meals, described the trade as one that made you subject to headache, and said in contrast to another witness who was no longer able to see the clock at all, that she could see the clock but could not distinguish the figures from the hands. She added a grim touch from the manners of the time : * I went a long way to see a man hanged t'other day, and couldn't see him a bit after all. I heard folks talking: that was some- thing. I got very near at last. A man asked me couldn't I see him now. I said I could, I was so ashamed, but I could not.' 1
For workers and rulers alike the harsh dilemmas of the new world were sharpened and embittered by the Great War. Some historians think that England found in that war the golden opportunity for her new industries, and that while the armies of the Continent were tramping to and fro over Europe, and Napoleon was allowing her peoples no respite from his rapid stratagems in politics and war, she was laying the foundations of her commercial supremacy. There is a contrary view that the artificial conditions created by the war encouraged a premature expansion of the cotton industry, and that it would have been better for that industry had it developed more slowly and more naturally. The advocates of a minimum wage for weaving were on this view recom- mending a measure that would have been a public benefit, apart from its effects on the social life of Lancashire, because it would have steadied the wild speculation of the early years. At any rate it is certain that the war aggravated every problem that the Industrial Revolution presented to the age.
It is a commonplace that that Revolution introduced pro- foundly disturbing elements into the economic world from the scale on which trade was now conducted : a development that made nations and industries dependent on a series of delicate relationships spreading like a net all over the globe.2 The war added a new and terrible element of disorder to the uncertainty and caprice of demand which marked the intro- duction of ' great industry ' with its world-wide markets. At times it was conducted directly by economic weapons : the spinners and weavers suffered grimly in the great duel between the Berlin Decrees and the Orders in Council. Nobody can read the evidence given before the Committee on the Orders in Council in 1812 without appreciating the difficulties of an employer who suddenly found himself denuded of orders for
1 Factories Inquiry Commission, 1833, c. ii. p. 18.
* See for a full discussion, Smart, Economic Annals , vol. i. p. 606.
INTRODUCTION 9
his five or six hundred workers.1 And the cause that increased the miseries of the workers and brought serious embarrassments to the traders hardened the mind of the ruling class against all liberal ideas by making them more afraid than ever of the very name of reform. Thus it came to increase not only the distress but the discord of the time, for it was now, as the industrial changes pressed more and more on their habits and daily life, that the workers became conscious of their wrongs as citizens.
In the early days of this period there was no general sense of grievance in the industrial districts on the subject of political disabilities, for at that time there was no sharp conflict in political ideas between the workers and their rulers. So long as the politics of the Birmingham workers took the form of a strong desire to pull Dr. Priestley's house to pieces, their rulers had no undue inclination to bridle their energy. Barn- ford gives an amusing account of the experience of the unhappy reformers who tried to hold a meeting at Thorpe, near Royton in Lancashire, in 1794. The reformers had assembled in a public-house and the mob attacked it with great violence ; the housi was wrecked and the reformers very savagely handled. ' The constables of the place had been called upon by the peaceably disposed inhabitants to act but they declined to inter- fere and the mob had their own way. Mr. Pickford, of Royton Hall, a magistrate, never made his appearance, though he lived within a few score yards of the scene of the riot, and was supposed to have been at home all the time during which the outrage was perpetrated. He was afterwards known as Sir Joseph Ratcliffe, of Mimes Brig, in Yorkshire. Such of the reformers as had the good fortune to escape out of the house ran for their lives, and sought hiding places wherever they could be found ; whilst the parson of the place, whose name was Berry, standing on an elevated situation, pointed them out to the mob, saying, " There goes one : and there goes one ! That's a Jacobin, that 's another! " and so continued till his services were no longer effectual.' Twenty years later the
1 Sadler pointed out in the House of Commons that so long as there was no regulation of industry the fluctuations to which trade and manufactures are subject fell on the workers. ' Thus if the demand and profit of the employer increase, the labour of the operatives, most of whom are children, augments till many of them are literally worked to death ; if that demand diminish, the children are thrown partially or wholly out of work and left to beggary and the parish.' — House of Commons, March 16, 1832.
10 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
magistrates took a very different view of popular demonstra- tions, because popular demonstrations were now directed not against reformers but against the conduct and the privileges of the class in power. If Lancashire had sent 80,000 people to St. Peter's Fields to demand the suppression of the Radicals, or to support the Combination Laws or the Corn Laws, there would have been no Peterloo. As the working classes came to want things that the ruling class had no mind to give them, they became acutely sensible of political disabilities which had formerly seemed of no account, and the more they felt those disabilities, the more harshly did the ruling class enforce them.
Thus there is a growing strain and tension, the workers finding their lives more and more hemmed in, their surround- ings more and more forbidding, their place in the society that regulated their arrangements more and more insignificant. Their rulers were becoming at the same time more and more preoccupied with the danger of yielding any point to their impatience. They sought to maintain every monopoly, to keep Manchester under the rule of the county magistrates, to preserve a system which gave two members to a ditch in Wiltshire and left the large industrial towns unrepresented, to strengthen and perpetuate by every device the control of the new world and the new wealth by a small class. They seemed bent on withholding from the workers all initiative in every direction, politics, industry, education, pleasure, social life. For they had come to look on civilisation as depend- ing on the undisputed leadership of this small class and on the bondage of the workers in the service of the new power by means of which they hoped to make and keep England the mistress of the commerce of the world. A jingle put into the mouth of Wellington at the time of the Reform struggle summed up the philosophy of this class :
If I say A I must say B, And so go on to C and D ; And so no end I see there '11 be If I but once say A B C.1
Here were all the elements of a mortal struggle. And so we see on one side strikes, outbursts of violence, agitations, now for a minimum wage, now for the right to combine, attempts, sometimes ambitious and far-sighted, to co-operate for mutual
1 Wallas's Life of Place, p. 246.
INTRODUCTION 11
aid and mutual education, the pursuit from time to time of projects for the reform of Parliament : on the other, Ministers and magistrates replying with the unhesitating and unscrupu- lous use of every weapon they can find : spies, agents pro- vocateurs, military occupation, courts of justice used deliberately for the purposes of a class war, all the features of armed government where a garrison is holding its own in the midst of a hostile people. It is not surprising that a civil war in which such issues were disputed and such methods were employed was fierce and bitter at the time or that it left behind it implacable memories.
CHAPTER II
THE MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR
THE miners of the Tyne and the Wear are a specially interest- ing study, because it is possible to collect from local papers and pamphlets a fairly consecutive history of the workmen's point of view. For a study of the history of the mining in- dustry in general, it would be necessary to examine the various experiments of the time in organisation : such as the system of letting mines to small labour contractors that prevailed in Derbyshire, or the leasing of mines to groups of workmen. But the miners of the Tyne and the Wear represent the normal mining society, and the struggle in these districts is a good example of the efforts of the workmen to secure by combination some share in the profits of the industry, and some degree of independence and assurance.
The degrading serf system by which the mining population in Scotland l was bound to the soil had not obtained in England for several centuries,2 but in Northumberland and Durham a system of yearly bond was customary down to 1844, and was a constant source of disputes between the binders and the bound. By this bond the men bound themselves to serve for the coming year at a certain rate of pay. The masters were not bound to provide them with constant work, but the men were bound to descend into the pit when required. The usual time for this ' binding ' was October, but in early days, at any rate, the masters were careful not to bind all the men at one time ' lest it should be in their power to distress the trade, by refusing to work till their demands were satisfied.' 8
In 1765 a combination of masters endeavoured to turn this system of a yearly bond into a slavery nearly as gross as that
1 The workers in mines and salt works of Scotland were nominally released from bondage in 1775 (15 George III. c. 28), but as this measure was not effective a further Act was passed in 1799 (39 George ill. c. 56).
* Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining, Series I., pp. 75-76, suggests 1460 as the date when miners were emancipated. Annual Register, 1765, p. 130. 18
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 18
which was legal in Scotland. The occasion for this attempt was, strangely enough, the scarcity of pitmen due to the rapid increase of the coal trade. An apologist for the masters explained that in 1764 some colliery owners near Newcastle attracted workers by offering them two, three, or even four guineas as ' binding money ' in place of the customary shilling, with the result that the men in other collieries became discon- tented, and as their year of service drew to a close showed signs of readiness to quit their respective masters, and to offer themselves where golden guineas were to be had.1 Another account explained that it was the owners of the more hazardous pits who started the scheme, because they found the bounties which they were forced to give to attract workers a serious expense.2 Whatever the origin of the idea, the result was that the coal-owners of the Tyne and the Wear met and entered into an agreement * that no coal-owner should hire another's men, unless they produced a certificate of leave from their last master ; and, as no coal-owner would grant such a certi- ficate, it was by the pitmen called a binding during the will of the master.' 3 The men's position was described as follows : if they wanted to move and go to another pit they * now find that no other Owner will hire them, but that they must be forced to work at pits which perhaps they do not like, and at what Wages the Master pleases, starve, or go to other parts.' * The men in fact found themselves faced with the prospect of virtual slavery.
To protest against this agreement of the coal-owners the men all struck work on August 25, the date when, as they thought, their year's bondage expired. The masters retorted by declaring that they were bound till November 11, a discrepancy that can only be explained by the sup- position that the masters had inserted a clause to that effect in the bonds without the knowledge of the men. It is clear that it was the usual custom to bind the men for eleven months and fifteen days in order to prevent them from gain- ing a settlement in the parishes where their masters lived. Whatever the rights or the wrongs of this particular point, the men's action had a very rapid effect on their masters' policy, and the scheme of introducing virtual serfdom collapsed, as
1 Annual Register, 1765, p. 130.
2 Lloyd's Evening Post and British Chronicle, September 20-23, 1765.
1 Annual Register, 1765, p. 130, and London Chronicle, September 2 1 -23, 1765. * Lloyd's Evening Post and British Chronicle, September 20-23, 1765.
14 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
we learn from a handbill preserved among the Home Office Papers.1 It is dated August 31, and runs as follows : * The Gentlemen in the Coal Trade, on the Rivers Tyne and Wear, earnestly recommend to the several Pitmen to go immediately to their work, as they are obliged by Law to do, till the Expira- tion of their present Bonds, at which Time they do assure them, that each Pitman shall receive a Discharge in Writing if he shall require it, that he may be at Liberty to engage in the Service of any other Master : and that no Agreement is entered into by the Gentlemen of the Coal Trade, to refuse employing any Pitman on Account of his having served in any other Colliery the Year before.' These assurances, how- ever, came too late, and the only pit where the men would work was the Hartley Colliery owned by Thomas Delavel : ' a very remarkable Instance,' so the newspapers called it, ' of the Gratitude of the common People,' for Mr. Delavel was conspicuous as a humane employer, and the strikers sent him assurances that his pit should not be in any way molested.2 On the other hand, when Sir Ralph Milbanke started some of his pits on September 13, in the middle of the strike, a body of men came and broke up the machinery, and three troops of dragoons were sent for to protect the colliery district.8 With this exception the men do not seem to have done any actual damage, though we read afterwards,
' Mr. of Fatfield has been obliged to keep soldiers and
a Justice of Peace in his house night and day for this fortnight past. . . .'4
The reason why the masters did not test the legality of their claim that the binding extended to November 11, by summoning their recalcitrant servants before a magistrate, and having them sent to prison for a month,5 is explained in a letter, dated September 13, from Mr. J. B. Ridley to the Earl of Northumberland.6 The letter is interesting as showing the solidarity of the men. You may wonder, he writes, why no proceedings have been taken under 20 George n., * this
1 S.P. Dom. (George m.), vol. iv. 8 Annual Register, 1765, p. 131.
3 London Chronicle, September 17-19, 176$; Home Office Papers, S.P Dom. Entry Book, 194, September 17.
4 Lloyd's Evening Posf, September 3O-October 2.
5 By 20 George n. c. 19 a workman could be sent to prison for a month if a master satisfied a J.P. that the workman was guilty of 'a misdemeanour, mis- carriage or ill-behaviour ' in his service.
S.P. Dom. (George in.), vol. ir.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 15
is very well, where two or three or a dozen men desert their service, and has been many times properly executed with good Effect, but where there is a general Combination of all the Pitmen to the Number of 4000, how can this measure take Effect ? in the first place it is difficult to be executed as to seizing the men, and even if they should not make a formidable Resistance which scarce can be presumed, a few only can be taken, for upon the Face of the thing it is obvious that the whole persons guilty can not be secured, so the punishment of probably twenty or forty by a month's confinement in a House of Correction, does not carry with it the least Appearance of Terror so as to induce the remaining Part of so large a Number to submit, and these men that should be so confined would be treated as Martyrs for the good Cause, and be supported and caressed, and at the end of the time brought home in Triumph, so no good effect would arise. . . .'
The coal-owners accordingly thought it the wisest course to obtain military help and to insert the following advertise- ment in the Newcastle papers :
' Whereas most of the Bound Pitmen, of the Gentlemen of the Coal Trade on the Rivers Tyne and Wear, have lately deserted their respective Employments before the Expiration of their Bonds and refuse to return to serve out the respective Times for which they were bound, as they are by Law obliged to do : The said Gentlemen therefore earnestly desire all Persons not to retain or employ any of the said Pitmen till they have performed their bound Services to their present Masters, as they have not till then a Right to serve any other.' l
The pitmen in answer to this drew up and published 2 a declaration so remarkable for its spirit of independence and for its outspoken language that it deserves to be given in full :
' Whereas several scandalous and false reports have been and still continue to be spread abroad in the Country, concerning the Pitmen in the Counties of Durham and Northumberland absenting from their respective Employments before the Expiration of their Bonds : This is therefore to inform the Public, that most of the Pitmen in the aforesaid Counties of Durham and Northumberland were bound the latter End of August, and the remainder of them were bound the Beginning of September 1764, and they served till the 24th or 25th of August 1765, which they expect is the due time of their Servitude ; but the honourable Gentlemen in the Coal Trade will not let them be free till the llth of
1 Newcastle Chronicle and Courant, September 14 and 21.
2 Ibid., September 21.
1C THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
November, 1765, which, instead of 11 Months and 15 Days, the respective Time of their Bonds, is upwards of 14 Months, So they leave the most censorious to judge whether they be right or wrong. For they are of Opinion that they are free from any Bond wherein they were bound. And an Advertisement appear- ing in the Newspapers last Week commanding all Persons not to employ any Pitmen whatever for the Support of themselves and Families, it is confidently believed that they who were the Authors of the said Advertisement are designed to reduce the industrious Poor of the aforesaid Counties to the greatest Misery : as all the Necessaries of Life are at such exorbitant Prices, that it is impossible for them to support their Families without using some other lawful Means, which they will and are determined to do, as the said Advertisement has caused the People whom they were employed under to discharge them from their Service. Likewise the said honourable Gentlemen have agreed and signed an Article not to employ any Pitman that has served in any other Colliery the year before ; which will reduce them to still greater hardships, as they will be obliged to serve in the same Colliery for Life ; which they conjecture will take away the antient Character of this Kingdom as being a free Nation. So the Pitmen are not designed to work for or serve any of the said Gentlemen, in any of their Collieries, till they be fully satisfied that the said Article is dissolved, and new Bonds and Agreements made and entered into for the Year Ensuing.'
The Gentlemen of the Coal Trade meanwhile repeated with greater emphasis their denial of the existence of the obnoxious agreement not to employ each other's pitmen, and issued further handbills and advertisements to that effect :
< Whereas an opinion still seems to remain, that an engagement is subsisting among the gentlemen of the coal trade, or some of them, not to engage any pitman who shall have been employed in any other colliery : It is therefore hereby declared, in the most public manner, that there is no such agreement, nor any agree- ment intended to be entered into ; or is it meant by the gentlemen of the coal trade to refuse employing any pitman on account of his having served in any other colliery ; and that they require no more from the pitmen than that they shall perform the conditions of their present bonds.' l
The pitmen, however, were not satisfied with this declara- tion from their employers, and they seem to have taken the opportunity to improve their position with respect to wages before their return to work, which finally took place on October 4. It is interesting to notice from the newspapers of the time
1 Newcastle Chronicle and Courant, September 21.
\\
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 17
that the question of government interference to settle the wages was raised. Why should not the Privy Council intervene before the meeting of Parliament : ' it is imagined there would be no greater difficulty to settle these unhappy men's wages than it was to fix a price for the labour of the journey- men taylors.' l The terms on which the men returned are nowhere stated ; all we can learn is that the contest was settled amicably and that they resumed work * in great spirits.'
A striking feature of the accounts of this episode in the Press is the sympathy shown to the miners. The local papers indeed give no comment, but the London papers — and London was seriously affected by the shortage of coal, which went up from under 30s. to 4Os. a chaldron — published many letters from the district, showing that the men had public opinion on their side. What is perhaps most remarkable is that protests were made against the employment of the military. * Impartial people,' ran one letter, ' think the masters have brought this upon themselves, by endeavouring to break through an old custom ; however, in a country which boasts its Liberty, it is an odd way of deciding differences between masters and servants by Dragoons.' * Again, ' The sending a body of troops against them [the pitmen] is a measure but little approved by the considerate part of the people ; every- body thinks that some expedient to reduce the price of pro- visions, would have been the best means of quieting the tumult ; and many persons say, it is rather an extraordinary circum- stance to knock a set of poor men on the head, because they will not quietly submit to be starved.' *
The conditions of the colliers' lives and of the hardships under which they suffered were described in some detail and with much feeling in a letter published in two London papers * by a certain Richard Atkinson during the strike. This letter is particularly interesting because it shows that the familiar charge of extravagance was levelled against the miners even in these early times. Mr. Atkinson's indignation had been roused by the masters' assertion that the troubles were due to laziness and not to distress. The men's wages he tells us
1 London Ckmricle, October 1-3. 1 Uojnfi Evening Post, September 16-18.
" Lloyd's Evening Post, September 18-20. See also Londtm CkronieU, September 28, for letter of protest from Y. EL against use of military. 4 LleycTs Evening Post, September 25-27, and Publit Ledger, September 26.
B
18 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
are 7s. a week.1 * Cut off from the light of heaven for sixteen or seventeen hours a day, they are obliged to undergo a drudgery which the veriest slave in the plantations would think intolerable, for the mighty sum of fourteen pence.' Further, they cannot spend even that sum as they like, for the overseer, appointed by the proprietor to keep the men to their duty, and to pay them their wages ' constantly keeps a shop contiguous to the Pit, where he lays in every necessary both for the belly and the back, and obliges the poor men to buy whatever they want from him, stopping it out of their wages,' and keeping them constantly in his debt. ' Such, Mr. Printer,' he exclaims, ' is the real situation of the Colliers. To be sure it is the business of the Proprietors to represent them as a set of lazy, disorderly fellows, who want only to increase their wages, for the sake of extending their extravagancies ; the more they are kept down, the more their Masters will be enabhd to venture ten thousand guineas on a favourite horse, or the accidental turn of a card. But the sensible part of the kingdom, who will always judge for themselves, must immediately see, that when Butter in the northern parts of England is at sixpence and Butcher's meat at threepence a pound, a man who has but seven shillings a week to support himself, a wife, and four or five children, can have no mighty matter to squander away at an alehouse, or at any other place of recreation, which happens to agree with the casual bent of his inclination.'
From the letters of Mrs. Montagu, the famous blue-stocking, herself a colliery owner, we learn the impression the colliers made on their employers in these early days. ' The Tyne Vale where I live,' she wrote in 1775,2 ' used to look green and pleasant. The whole country is now a brown crust, with here and there a black hole of a coal-pit, so that I cannot boast of the beauty of our prospects. As to Den ton, it has mightily the air of an ant-hill : a vast many black animals for ever busy. Near fourscore families are employed on my concerns here. Boys work in the colliery from seven years of age. I used to give my colliery people a feast when I came hither,
1 The employers' view (London Chronicle, September 21-23, ar»d Annual Register, 1765, p. 130) was that they earned from twelve shillings to fourteen shillings a week. Arthur Young, who got his figures from employers, in his Northern Tour, vol. iii. pp. 8 and 9, gave the earnings as one shilling to four shillings a day with firing.
2 See A Lady of the Last Century, by Dr. Doran, pp. 199 ff.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 19
but as the good souls (men and women) are very apt to get drunk, and when drunk, very joyful, and sing, and dance, and holloo, and whoop, I dare not on this occasion,1 trust their discretion to behave with proper gravity ; so I content myself with killing a fat beast once a week, and sending to each family, once, a piece of meat. It will take time to get round to all my black friends. I had fifty-nine boys and girls to sup in the court-yard last night on rice pudding and boiled beef ; to-morrow night I shall have as many. It is very pleasant to see how the poor things cram themselves, and the expense is not great. We buy rice cheap, and skimmed milk and coarse beef serve the occasion.'
Mrs. Montagu goes on to explain that she will also ' bestow some apparel ' on the most needy. Self-interest and benevo- lence blend in a happy concord over the cheap rice and the skimmed milk : ' Some benefits of this sort, and a general kind behaviour gives to the coal-owner, as well as to them, a good deal of advantage. Our pitmen are afraid of being turned off, and that fear keeps an order and regularity amongst them that is very uncommon.' But Mrs. Montagu was a woman of sensibilities, and even the promise she made to herself to start a spinning school for the girls, if profits continued good for two years, failed to quiet her scruples ; * I cannot yet reconcile myself to seeing my fellow-creatures descend into the dark regions of the earth ; tho' to my great comfort, I hear them singing in the pits. . . .' 2
Arthur Young gave in 1768 an unfavourable picture of colliers as * a most tumultuous, sturdy set of people, greatly impatient of controul, very insolent, and much void of common industry.' s Their characters indeed were not of a kind to endear them to their social superiors, and as the eighteenth century went on and the coal trade increased, the manners of the pitmen altered ' materially for the worse.' There is little mention of them in the records of the time beyond references to their turbulence. Thus a petition from the Magistrates and Principal Inhabitants of Sunderland in 1785 asks for a permanent military force as a protection not only against the disobedience of the Seamen and Keelmen, but against the unruly behaviour of ' another description of Men called Pit- men,' amongst whom, ' from their numbers and habits of
1 Her husband had lately died.
* A Lady f the Last Century, p. 202.
3 Northern Tour, ii. p. 261.
20 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
Life, discontents frequently arise which call for the inter- position of the Civil Power aided by a Military force.' 1
In the first volume of the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor 2 there is a long and serious account of the situation and shortcomings of the mining poor, and of the provisions made for the benefit of the Duke of Bridgewater's colliers near Manchester, by the Rev. Thomas Gisborne, written in 1798. ' It is to high wages,' he informs his readers, ' that many of the criminal habits, so often ascribed to the character of a collier, may in part be ascribed. . . . To economy, he is, in general, an utter stranger.' When first his wages are paid the collier and his family may be seen ' indulging themselves in the use of animal food three times a day.' The week after, it is true, they have to descend to a diet of rye bread with oatmeal and water, till ' the next receipt of their wages enables them to return to a course of luxury.' A contrast is drawn between the luxurious and riotous pitman with his wage of 16s. (or with the family's labour of 20s. or even 80s.) and the decent and frugal agricul- tural labourer who, on his wage of 9s. a week, would cer- tainly never be able to succumb to the wild debauchery of meat three times a day. Drunkenness, profane language, deceit, ' riotous dispositions, impatience of supposed griev- ances, and discontent inflamed by the contagion of turbulence and clamour,' are amongst the charges brought against the miners. The chief remedy proposed by the Rev. Thomas Gisborne was that the colliers should by religious education be led to ' a just sense of revealed religion, and of the rewards and punishments of a future state.' Failing this the posses- sion of gardens and other property was to be encouraged as a corrective to bad habits ; 3 and the truck system and ' tommy-
1 H.O., 42. 6. In 1793 the Mayor and magistrates of Newcastle asked for barracks to be built (H.O., 42. 25).
2 Pp. 170-73, and pp. 223-6.
3 The effects on miners' characters of giving them some land above ground had been noticed by Arthur Young in his Northern Tour, 1768, vol. ii. pp. 262 ff. A certain Mr. Danby, who owned a colliery at Swinton in the West Riding, tried the expedient of allowing the colliers to enclose bits of the barren moor. The effect was magical : ' the whole colliery, from being a scene of idleness, insolence and riot, is converted into a well-ordered and decently cultivated colony. It has become a seminary of industry ; and a source of population. One of these model colliers in particular roused Arthur Young's keenest admira- tion. This man, James Croft by name, after working from midnight till noon every day in the colliery, cultivated seventeen acres without outside help. He
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 21
shops ' instituted near Manchester by the Duke of Bridge- water were praised. By such a method ' the collier always has credit for necessaries and reasonable comforts ; and, at the same time, is not able to squander the mass of his gains, to the injury of himself and his family.'
The unsatisfactory behaviour of the miners created a good deal of uneasiness amongst their neighbours. The Bishop of Durham, who as Lord of the Manor had been given the mineral rights of the district by a legal decision early in the century, when the growth of the mining industry made the question vital, now urged the creation of additional chapels in populous districts. ' I hope,' he had written in 1793, in reference to a dispute between coal-owners and men, ' the good sense of the People will in a little time prevail and convince them of the happiness which they enjoy.1 But so little did the expedient of additional chapels succeed, that seventeen years later, in
1810, the Bishop's stables were requisitioned to hold three hundred recalcitrant strikers, for whom there was no room in the Gaol and House of Correction.
The dispute in 1810 was not connected with wages.2 It was concerned primarily with that persistent cause of friction, the yearly bond, and incidentally with certain special griev- ances, including fines. The history of the dispute is briefly as follows.3 In October 1809, just before the annual binding, the masters agreed amongst themselves to bind the men for a year and a quarter instead of a year, that is till January
1811, so that after that time the yearly binding should be in January instead of in October. This they did because, October being a very busy time, the men could force up the binding bounty. The new plan was propounded to the men at the binding ; they agreed to it and were bound for the year and a quarter. Afterwards, on thinking it over they realised the
never took more than four hours' sleep, and on moonlight nights less. Arthur Young raised a subscription of ^100 to free him from colliery work, so that his twenty hours' toil should be in future devoted to the land alone. It is not surprising to read that Croft's industry brought him to an early grave. See Autobiography of Arthur Young, edited by M. Betham Edwards, p. 55.
1 H.0.,42. 23.
2 Wages were estimated to have risen thirty or forty per cent, in 1804, and so great was the demand for men that bounties of twelve and fourteen guineas on the Tyne, and of eighteen guineas on ihe Wear were given (Galloway, Annals, i. 440 ; Victoria County History of Durham, vol. ii. p. 347)-
1 See Sykes, Local Records, ii. p. 403, and Tyne Mercury, December II, December 18, 1810; January I, January 15, 1811.
22 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
disadvantages, and determined that in October 1810 they would strike, unless the masters consented to bind them for a year as usual. The men had some sort of ' brotherhood ' or confederacy, possibly formed now, possibly of earlier date. Its existence was publicly known about July.1 In October the masters refused to grant the demands made on them, and all the men on the Tyne and the Wear struck work. The dele- gates from the different collieries held frequent meetings, but ' they were hunted out by the owners and magistrates, assisted by the military, and committed to prison.'
The hunt for strikers continued for several weeks, and the overflow of prisoners from the Gaol and the House of Correc- tion at Durham filled the Bishop's stables, without any effect being produced on the strike itself. At last, when matters were at a deadlock, a parson magistrate, the Rev. Mr. Nesfield, Rector of Brauncepeth, and Captain Davis, in charge of the Caermarthen militia, who guarded the prisoners, intervened as mediators. The stable prisoners, to whom they appealed as the leaders of the strike, refused to make terms, * leaving it entirely to their partners at liberty.' The result of the negotiations was that the pitmen returned to their work, and promised to fulfil their present bonds, that is up to January, whilst Mr. Nesfield pledged his word to them that he would act as mediator and bring forward proposals to improve their position in future. The main proposal, to which they are said to have agreed at the time, was that by a compromise the binding time should in future be neither October nor January, but April. As soon as the prisoners were released they published in all the Newcastle papers 2 a dignified message of thanks to the inhabitants of Durham, for their * kindnesses and favours ' during their confinement in the stables, to the soldiers who did their duty over them for their ' good behaviour,' and to Captain Davis, Mr. Nesfield, and others for the trouble and interest shown in befriending them. This message was signed by four leaders on behalf of 159 prisoners.
After the men had gone back to work, Mr. Nesfield found the path of the peacemaker a thorny one. He addressed the coal-owners on the River Wear, inviting them and two men from each colliery to meet him at Chester-le-Street on December 20, and offering to submit for their consideration
Commit tee on Combination Laws, 1825, p. 2; and Tyne Mercury, February 26, 1811. a Tyne Mercury ', December 4, 1810.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 23
such regulations as would remove the peculiar cause of the present discontent. But the coal-owners refused his over- tures ; they argued first, that the River Wear did not consti- tute the coal trade, but that the River Tyne, Hartley, Blyth, and Cowpen were integral parts of it, and that therefore they could not make any separate arrangements ; secondly, that the plan of inviting two men from each colliery was objectionable ' lest such Meeting should hazard a Recurrence of the late Disturbances.' They further hinted that his inter- ference was uncalled for, and that if his services were needed he would be informed, in which case the coal-owners would ' attend with Deference to your Recommendation as far as they can do consistently with what is fit to be observed on such an important Occasion ; at the same Time keeping in view the Duty they owe to themselves, their Workmen, and the Peace of the Country.'
Mr. Nesfield's goodwill was not daunted by this cold recep- tion, and he proposed a new meeting on January 3, inviting this time all the coal-owners of the Tyne and Wear districts to attend. Whether it was the near approach of the new binding time and the fear of riots, or some other motive that changed their attitude, the coal-owners now accepted the invitation, the conference took place, and Mr. Nesfield brought forward proposals under twelve heads. On this occasion it was the men who thwarted Mr. Nesfield's good intentions of acting as peacemaker ; the masters, after notifying the fact that some points did not meet with their approval, accepted his proposals as a whole for the sake of peace and quiet. The pitmen agreed to the clauses which enacted that the condi- tions, apart from the bond under which they were hired, should be clearly set down in a book, that a copy of the bond should be handed to a representative appointed by them, that fines should lapse if not demanded at the ensuing pay day, and that if fined when they were voluntarily idle they should be paid when they were compelled to be idle : but they now rejected, though not unanimously, the proposal they had originally accepted that the binding time should be on April 5. They also rejected the proposals designed to meet their grievances about fines for deficient measures, and foul coal, and payment when the pit was made unfit for working by an accident to the engine.
The conference accordingly broke up without arriving at any agreement. The negotiations that followed can only be
24 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
guessed at. This much is certain : that the men were ulti- mately forced to accept the proposals, and when their bonds expired in January, were bound peaceably for 1J years. The 5th of April henceforth remained the regular binding day till the bond system came to an end in 1844. The coal- owners were afterwards said to have adjusted the business ' by the assistance of legal weapons,' l and as no records of actual prosecution exist, threats of prosecution under the Conspiracy and Combination Laws were probably sufficient.
A curious glimpse into the scenes of the binding time is afforded by a correspondence in the Tyne Mercury.2 That paper on January 29 inserted a paragraph explaining that the reluctant pitmen at Jarrow were urged by a Methodist preacher to accept their bonds, under pain of hell fire if they refused. * At the time appointed, the pitmen WERE bound, the fear of hell vanished, and they got comfortably drunk, as usual upon such occasions.' Next week a correspondent wrote on behalf of the Methodist preacher, impugning the truth of this account, and declaring that the fulminations from the pulpit were directed against the combination or Brotherhood with its oath. ' This Oath is illegal ; and because Christianity teaches subjection to the laws it is unchristian and immoral.' This version of the affair roused violent protests from a voluminous writer signing himself ' No Methodist,' who quarrelled with the Methodists, not because they had used unfair pressure in urging the pitmen to return to work, but because after being ' the principal founders, supporters, and propagators of the combination,' they now posed as its destroyers, whereas in reality they had not declared their opposition till it was already * annihilated by the strong arm of the Law.'
The use of the strong arm of the Law to put down the pitmen's combination possesses a certain piquancy from the fact that the masters themselves were formed into an illegal combination commonly known as the ' Newcastle Vend.' 3
The Vend, which had existed ever since 1786, and possibly before, was an agreement made between the different coal- owners that no pit should sell or ' vend ' more than a certain
1 Tyne Mercury, February 12, 1811.
* Ibid., January 29, February 5, February 12, and February 26, 1811.
* For particulars of the Vend during this period, see 1800 Reports of the House of Commons Committees on the Coal Trade (specially App. 41 to the First Report, which shows how it was worked), and the 1829 Report of the House of Lords' Committee on the Coal Trade.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 25
fixed amount of coal. At the beginning of the year a rough and liberal calculation was made of the whole amount for which there was likely to be a demand, and the proportion in which each individual colliery might supply it was arranged. The price of the coal of different collieries differed according to its quality, and that too was fixed at the beginning of the year. By this arrangement the collieries with inferior coal were ensured a certain sale, and if any owners shipped more than their stipulated quantities they were bound at the end of each year to make an allowance to those who had shipped less.1
From the men's point of view the Vend gave them more or less regularity of employment by equalising the work. ' One great Consideration,' said a coal-owner to the 1800 Committee, in speaking of the system, * is, I believe, the Peace and good Order of the Country.' He went on to explain that if the inferior pits were to stop work the men would go and call out the workers in other pits.
In the troubled days of 1816, when the iron trade was almost at a standstill, and the Staffordshire and Shropshire miners were wandering about the country starving, the pitmen of the Tyne and Wear suffered much less severely. The mines which, like those in Northumberland and Durham, supplied coals for the London market were, of course, less affected by the depression of trade than the mines whose output was mainly consumed by neighbouring furnaces. On the Wear indeed there was a small strike ' upon the ostensible ground of their present wages being inadequate to their support, while the price of bread-corn continues so very much higher than it has been,' but the magistrates and the soldiers soon sent the strikers back to work.2
It is clear that the system of a yearly bond, guaranteeing the men a certain minimum of work at a fixed rate of pay,
1 A case was begun in 1794 against the Duke of Northumberland's agent and five others, principal members of the Vend, for wickedly conspiring, combining, and confederating to cheat the public, by a certain Mr. Errington who had inherited an interest as lessee in a coal mine belonging to the Duke of Northum- berland, and had found the output limited below a profitable amount by the agreement, but after obtaining the removal of the trial Irom Newcastle to York Mr. Errington's ardour cooled and the matter was dropped. See First Report on the Coal Trade, 1800.
a Annual Register, 1816, Chronicle, p. 73, quoting the Tyne Mercury. See H.O., 42. 151, for the Rev. Mr. Nesfield's views on this strike. He thought the men unjustified.
26 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
gave a certain protection to the Northumberland and Durham miners in sudden depressions of trade during the year. It also gave them facilities for concerted action which the Com- bination Laws might check but could not destroy. Their well- known ' turbulence ' acted also as a protection against any attempt actually to lower the money wages at the time of binding. Mr. Buddie, the well-known colliery manager,1 was asked in 1829,2 whether a reduction in wages could ' be effected without danger to the tranquillity of the district, or risking the destruction of the mines, with all the machinery and the valuable stock, vested in them ? ' 'I should think not,' he answered ; ' but the coal-owners have not the power of reduc- ing the wages till April next.' . . . ' Is it possible another year to hire the workmen at lower wages, if the present prices of coals continue ? ' — ' I should conceive not without great disturbance and perhaps not succeeding in the end.'
The system of paying wages in goods or truck instead of in money was prohibited by law in 1817.3 The truck grievance seems never to have been so acute in the Northern as in the Midland mines,4 although its existence is mentioned from time to time.
In 1819 the wave of excitement about Reform which spread over the country after Peterloo affected the pitmen in the north.5 ' Until within these few weeks,' wrote Mr. John Buddie on October 25,6 ' our Colliers and the body of Labourers, of every description, connected with the Coal Works, never troubled their heads with politics.' The mischief he ascribes to the publications, the Black Dwarf and the Block Book. ' They are to be found in the Hat Crown of almost every pitman you meet.' This zeal for politics was combined with discontent about their lot, and restiveness about the bond. ' Their constant cry,' he writes some weeks later, ' is that they work
1 He invented the system of 'splitting the air.' See Galloway, History of Coal Mining, p. 146.
9 1829 Lords' Committee on the Coal Trade, pp. 68, 69.
1 57 George III. c. 122. 4 See Town Labourer, 1760-1832, pp. 66-71.
5 For an interesting estimate of the numbers of men and boys employed in 1819, see H.O., 42. 198.
Underground. Above ground.
Tyne T . . 6,000 2,800 8,800
Wear . . 4,000 1,850 5.850
I Hartley and Blyth 500 250 750
15,400 • H.O., 42. 197.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 27
" far too hard for their wages," and cannot exist upon [them]. One fellow at Heaton, after having solemnly made this declara- tion last say Friday, gave 6s. lOd. next day for a White Hat.' 1
The men's grievances are fully set out in a pamphlet entitled A Voice from the Coal Mines, or a plain statement of the various grievances of the Pitmen of the Tyne and Wear, addressed to the Coal-owners, their head agents and a sympathetic public, published by the Colliers of the United Association of Northumberland and Durham in 1825, 2 a publication made possible by the repeal of the Combination Laws. A clear account is given of the conditions of employment.
Foremost among the grievances was the system of fines. Without entering into tedious technicalities, the men's fines can be briefly described as follows :
(1) When the hewer's coal was measured, if there was any deficiency in any particular corf or basket, he forfeited the whole corf. There was great uncertainty as to the standard measure, and hence the system gave * rise to much injustice and oppression.' 8
(2) If foul coal, flint, or stone was found mixed in any corf the hewer was fined 3d. a quart for it, and if there were more than 4 quarts he was guilty by law of a misdemeanour. Under the term foul coal, it was said, ' the master classes whatever part of the strata he pleases.' *
A second grievance was what may be called the * three-days grievance.' A stipulation that a minimum of work of nine days a fortnight must be provided, was inserted in the bond, but by the arrangements drawn up by Mr. Nesfield in 1810, if an accident happened to the engine which made the pit unfit for working, after three days the men were to be paid 2s. 6d. a day. Later on the clause was amended in such a way that the arrangement applied if a pit was rendered unfit for working by an accident to the engine, * or any other cause.' Some of the coal-owners interpreted these words ' or any other cause ' very liberally ; and when work was slack they would lay the pit idle for three days, resume work for one day, lay it idle for three days again, and so on, thus cheating the men not only
1 H.O., 42. 199. Although the name of the writer is scratched out the letter is clearly from Mr. Buddie.
2 This Union was founded after the Repeal of the Combination Laws, 1825. Cf. Galloway, Annals, i. p. 465, and Buddie's Evidence before Committee on Combination Laws in 1825, p. I.
3 A Candid Appeal to the Coal-Owners and Viewers, 1826 * Hid.
28 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
of their stipulated minimum but of their 2s. 6d. a day as well. The men who were thus cheated when work was slack were themselves fined half a crown a day if they were absent when their employers wanted them.
A grievance which was to play a more important part later was the length of hours worked by the boys, seventeen in some pits ; and another grievance was the hardships caused by the use of the Davy lamp.1 Owing to this lamp, declares the pam- phlet, the miner has now ' to suffer the most awful agony in an exceedingly high temperature.' Complaints with reference to wages were mainly connected with shortage of work and with fines and deductions. Detailed estimates from two pits put these fines and deductions at a little over 2s. a week. Thus in one pit where not more than nine days' work a fortnight was provided and the weekly earnings were about 13s. 6d., the deductions were reckoned as follows :
S. D.
Candles 0 7|
Caller and smith . . . .01
House rent and fire . . .03
» Picks and pick handle . . .03
1 2*
Fines and forfeits . . . .10
The estimate of the wages which would produce ' reasonable comfort ' to the collier's family, we give elsewhere ; 2 they are high compared with the actual wages. The colliers in fact had no intention of being reduced to subsistence level, and appeals to them to remember that mine owning and mine working were expensive occupations, which left little margin for wages, met with a blunt response : ' We are not ignorant of the great expense incurred in the working of the mine ; yet princely fortunes have been amassed by both our employers and their ancestors ; and even men from our own ranks, have grown rich by the emoluments arising from the coal mines. . . .'
According to the 1842 Mines Report, a great impetus was
1 See Town Labourer, 1760-1832, p. 25.
Town Labourer, 1760-1832, pp. 34-35. It works out at £it 6s. 3^d. a week. .
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 29
given to the Miners Association in 1826 by the refusal of the masters to give the customary hiring bounty, and 4000 men are said to have joined the Union.1 ' The Union of the Pitmen,' wrote Lord Londonderry that same year, February 26, 1826,2 * is entirely established, and if the Coal-Owners do not resist their Combination they must surrender at Discretion to any Laws the Union propose.' He enclosed an interesting pamphlet called A Candid Appeal to the Coal-Owners and Viewers, . . . from the Committee of the Colliers United Association, from which we learn particulars of some attempted negotiations between the Pitmen's Union and the Coal-Owners. When the Colliers United Association, as it called itself, approached the Coal- Owners Union Committee with the suggestion that a meeting should be held by representatives of both sides ' in order the better to adjust the exceptionable parts of the Bond,' the coal-owners ' refused to take any notice of it on the ground that we were not a corporate body, and the Coal-Owners Union Committee knew nothing of and therefore would not recog- nise or treat with such a body of men as the Colliers Union Association.' 3
It is interesting to notice in the Candid Appeal that the men claim a certain share in the management of affairs that directly concern them. Thus they object to the clause in the customary Bond which refers ' the settlement of differences and dis- putes between the contracting parties to two viewers,' and ask that a body consisting of two viewers appointed by the proprietors and two hewers appointed by the men should be set up for the purpose. They also object to a proposed scheme for a Benefit Society : ' It has long been a favourite object with the rich and opulent to desire and promote plans for making the poor maintain the poor, and the funds of Benefit Societies have generally been made to aid the poor rates, and thereby relieve at the same time both the poor and the rich. . . . We view therefore with some jealousy and suspicion a recommendation lately submitted to us from the colliery viewers, or some of them, to institute a general fund for the relief of colliers, their widows and families, etc. We can hardly hope that those who have refused to attend to our complaints or make any reply to our just remonstrances, will be prepared to lay aside all partiality and sinister views and
1 First Report of Commission for inquiring into employment of children in mines and manufactures (Appendix, Part i.).
a H.O..V40. 19. s See A Candid Appeal.
30 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
interest themselves sincerely in the management and direc- tion of a fund solely for our benefit. Besides, any plan pro- posed for our benefit, to which we should be called on to con- tribute, must be under our own special management and direction.' 1
Lord Londonderry's alarm at the power of the Union was unnecessary, for during the next few years the men lost ground rather than gained it. In 1828 the 15s. a week guaranteed them by the Bond was reduced to 14s., and in 1830 ' it was withdrawn altogether by a section at least of the coal-owners, with the result that in many collieries wages fell very low, as low as 8s. or 10s. per week, owing to want of work.' 2
1 A Candid Appeal, pp. 4, 5. 5 Galloway, Annals, i. p. 465.
CHAPTER III
THE MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR
The Strikes of 1831 and 1832
THE men, unable to improve their position by peaceful per- suasion, determined to join battle with the coal-owners. On February 26, 1831, about 10,000 pitmen l of the Tyne and Wear met near Chester-le-Street and resolved to obtain redress for their grievances, and on March 21 a mass meeting of about twenty thousand persons, attended by the workers from forty-seven collieries, was held on the Town Moor of Newcastle, at which a policy was formulated. Amongst other things the system of ' tommy-shops ' was condemned. To the Lord Mayor of Newcastle, who had offered to act as mediator, they sent on March 23 a letter detailing their grievances.8 First and foremost comes the three-days grievance, which we have already described. ' An article in the bonds empowers the Owners to limit the working days to only nine in the fortnight, in which nine days we are allowed as much work as will yield us 28s. at the prices for working which is mentioned hi the bond ; but there is another article the former part of which reads as follows : if through any accident happening the engines or pits, rendering them unfit for working, or any other cause, the pits be laid off work for more than three successive days, we are to be paid 2s. 6d. per day, but not until we have laid idle three successive days. But, sir, that clause in this article which reads thus, or any other cause the pits be laid off work, does, we think, destroy the virtue of the former article : for if the owners chooseth to keep the coals and not send them to market, they may assign it as a sufficient cause for laying the pits off work for three days, and if we be set to work upon the fourth, we have no claim of any allowance
1 In 1831 the Mayor of Newcastle estimated that the total number of pitmen employed on the Tyne and the Wear was 30,000 to 40,000 (H.O., 52. 14). Mr. Buddie before Lords' Committee on Coal Trade, 1829, gives 20,954 as the number.
Tyne Mercury ', April 12, 1831.
32 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
for the loss of such time. . . .' * The second grievance was the length of the hours worked by the boys : ' Again, another article binds the boys to work fourteen hours from starting at the crane and until ending at the same, which through the distances the crane is underground, keeps the boys sometimes seventeen hours from home, leaving them only seven or eight hours a day for every other purpose of life.'
The third grievance was the system of colliery houses by which the men and their families were dependent for shelter on signing the bond, for if * we are not agreed for the ensuing year, or if we be legally discharged from the colliery, the owners, their agents or servants are empowered to enter such dwell- ing, turn us with our families and furniture to the door, without having recourse to the legal proceedings of the law.'
The fourth grievance was the system of fines already described. * These measures we wish to have softened ' ; put in blunter language, the men wished for protection from fraud, especially with regard to false corves, for * if the corves be made ever so much above their measurement, we are not allowed to have them adjusted, so that we have to guess when there is a suffi- cient quantity of coals in her, but if, when sent to bank, any corf be deficient, we lose the price of that corf altogether.'
Into the grievances connected with the ' tommy - shop ' system the men did not enter; probably they felt strong enough to settle that question by themselves, on the lines of the resolution passed at their meeting. It is important to note that they did not actually threaten to strike, if their demands were not granted ; they expressed their determina- tion to refuse to be bound till they were satisfied, but were willing to continue working unbound, whilst their original plan was to send two delegates to London to state their case before the House of Commons. As the Mayor of Newcastle had offered to ' intercede ' for them, they turned to him first.
The result of the Mayor's mediation was that the coal- owners passed certain resolutions on March 28.2 They conceded a twelve-hours day for boys at the crane, ignored the three-day grievance, merely reiterating that a minimum of 28s. a fort- night should be guaranteed as before, suggested that in future the binding contract should be entered into in January, three months before it took effect, so that the men should have time to arrange about their houses if necessary, and refused to make any concessions in the matter of fines or honest dealing ; the
1 Tyne Mercury, April 12, 1831. 2 Ibid,
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 33
fines ' being a necessary protection to the owners against negli- gence, or frauds.' No change in reference to the size of the corves, they said, was required, since a measure existed at the top of the pit. On the subject of the truck system they passed the following curiously worded resolution : * That the workmen be paid their wages in money as has hitherto been the custom, and remain at liberty to supply themselves with candles, gunpowder, and shop goods, wherever they may think proper.' It is noteworthy that the Tyne Mercury, which represented the views of the coal-owners, forgetting that the week before it had denied the existence of any grievance on the ground that such a system would be illegal, hailed this abolition of * tommy-shops ' as an important concession. Finally the coal-owners resolved not to carry on any colliery after April 5 with unbound men.1
In answer to this, the pitmen replied that the masters had not met their point about the ' three-day ' grievance, and they asked a question which showed that they had now raised their minimum terms, * Is it unreasonable to ask for employ- ment for eleven days in a fortnight at 3s. per day ? * 2 The masters retorted by an ingenious denial of the three-day grievance, showing that on paper it could not exist ; how- ever, they practically conceded the men's demands, agreeing that as there was some ambiguity in the wording, * the inten- tions of the parties being the same,' the clause might be more clearly expressed.3 This point settled, the dispute was narrowed down to two questions: (1) the demand for a 33s. minimum a fortnight ; (2) fraudulent fines. On the first question the coal-owners with bewildering logic affirmed in the same breath, first that the men already made higher wages than 33s. a fortnight, and could count on as much for the ensuing year, and secondly that if the men were bound on those terms only three-quarters of them would be engaged. Further, comparisons were drawn with the wages of other miners and those of other occupations. The fines they could not dispense with, * but they may state that they are levied
1 The Mayor of Newcastle told Sir H. Ross, who was in command there, that the coal-owners did not wish for an immediate settlement, but wanted the price of coals enhanced and hence offered terms unlikely to be accepted. Ross wrote : ' . . . The terms they have offered to the pitmen are such as to be very beneficial to themselves if accepted, and if rejected (which they will be) they will be well content '(H.O., 40. 29).
8 Newcastle Chronicle, April 9. 3 Tyne Mercury, April 12,
C
34 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
unwillingly and with every proper discrimination and for- bearance.' Again the men demanded protection from fraud ; they asked not to be fined till the fault was shown before witnesses on both sides, and to have ' the privilege of measur- ing the Corves at any Time without previous Notice of their Intention,' a demand which speaks for itself.1
For several weeks the dispute went on and the pits lay idle ; 2 eleven magistrates not connected with the coal trade offered their services as mediators without success, an offer deprecated by the Tyne Mercury 3 as ' liable to produce an impression on un- educated men that their complaints are well founded and must be attended to.' In vain Lord Londonderry offered 30s. a fort- night to his pitmen, asking that the fines should ' be left to his honour, and that of his agents.' 4 ' I conceived my colliers,' he wrote afterwards 5 ' were really attached to the family and their old establishment. I tried by addressing them (as well as Lady Londonderry) to work upon their sense of justice and regret as well as their affections.' At last both sides agreed to a minimum of 30s. a fortnight, and the fines remained the only point at issue. The Tyne Mercury 6 made the novel but unfruitful suggestion that they should be used for a fund for the education of the pitmen's children. Ultimately towards the end of May it was decided that the several collieries should treat separately with their own men. Lord Londonderry started concessions ; 7 other coal-owners followed suit, and by the middle of June all the pits were at work again.8 The
1 Newcastle Chronicle, April 16. 2 See H.O., 52. 12, and 52, 14.
3 April 12.
* Newcastle Chronicle, May 14. Lord Londonderry was criticised by the Tyne Mercury (April 12) for joining with two other J.P.'s in issuing a warning to the pitmen against assembling, acting violently, and deterring others from working: 'it is not very decorous of the Marquis of Londonderry to put his name as a magistrate to such a notice, when he is himself interested as a coal- owner.' B Newcastle Chronicle, June II.
6 May 3. 7 H.O., 52. 14, and 40. 29.
8 The Duke of Northumberland wrote to the H.O. on May 26 that work had been resumed — ' the occupiers having made their own terms respectively with the' refractory workmen, and thereby departed from the Union which they had recently established in their own defence ; whilst the original and imposing Union of the Pitmen is in full authority and force. In many cases new covenants have been made upon fair and tenable principles, abrogating some hard and indefensible customs and giving an advance of wages upon an average of £IQ per cent. In some cases a precipitate and absolute concession has been made to the demands of the pitmen — more I apprehend in the eagerness of mercantile zeal than from any positive and impending intimidation ' (H.O., 52. 14).
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 35
Tyne Mercury1- thus summed up the result of the negotiations : ' Though it be true that the owners of each particular colliery have made the best terms they could for their own concern, it is quite clear that the servants have triumphed over their masters in the struggle.' The men in fact had won a twelve- hours day for the boys and for the inferior grades of labour, had raised their own guaranteed minimum Is. a week, and had secured themselves against a system of fraud. For a few months there was peace.
The hero of the fight was Thomas Hepburn, a pitman at Hetton Colliery. The Union which had won the victory is commonly called Hepburn's Union, for he was its moving spirit, but it was not till August of this year (1831) that he was appointed a paid organiser to visit the different collieries.2 Hepburn's watchwords which he reiterated to his followers at every meeting, with almost wearisome emphasis, were modera- tion and abstention from violence. On their orderly behaviour public sympathy depended, and public sympathy was an important factor, especially when it took the form of credit allowed by tradespeople to pitmen earning no wages. During the 1831 strike Hepburn was on the whole successful in en- forcing orderly conduct ; some machinery indeed was destroyed at Blyth, Bedlington, and at Jesmond Dene, and soldiers were called out to protect the pits when blacklegs were work- ing, but considering that 17,000 men were idle, and for the most part hungry, the absence of serious outrage was remark- able. Hepburn was a politician and he took a prominent part in the Reform agitation, speaking both at the dinner of the Northumberland Political Union in September, and at the great meeting in October on Newcastle Town Moor when 50,000 persons gathered together to demand Reform. The pitmen themselves, in all the pride of their recent victories, met in August at their usual meeting place, Boldon Fell, to the number of 10,000 or 12,000, and resolved to send a loyal address to the King ' thanking him for his beneficent attention to the wants of his people, for the Reform Bill, and for the support he had given to his ministers.' 3 The address which was dispatched to Lord Melbourne was signed by 11,561 workmen from fifty-seven collieries.
To understand the events of 1832 it is necessary to consider
1 May 31. 2 Sykes, Local Records, ii. p. 308.
3 Sykes, Local Records ; ii. p. 308 ; Newcastle Chronicle, August 20 ; Tyne Mercury, August 23.
36 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
the position of the coal-owners and their outlook on life. They had been beaten and they dreaded the future. As early as June 21, 1831, the perils of their position were put very ably by an anonymous writer, under the pseudonym of * Vindex,' in the Tyne Mercury. The men, he reasoned, by the very- orderliness of their conduct, had shown themselves to be powerful antagonists. * Their minds were bent upon the attainment of certain rights which they esteemed due to them, and during a season of abject poverty and great distress they have maintained those rights more by arguments and reason- ings, than by tumults or disorders.' The delegates, he urged, had been chosen with ' infinite discrimination,' and their appeals to the public distinguished by art and ability. The coal-owners, on the other hand, had played an ignominious part : if the prosperity of the coal trade was not to pass away they must rouse themselves and ' resist the exorbitant demands of the pitmen. If the spirit of intimidation ever stalked abroad, and if revolt was ever brewing, it is now.' x
The coal-owners, moreover, had lost something more sub- stantial than prestige. During the year that followed April 1831 their profits fell, partly, no doubt, in consequence of the strike ; partly, if unkind critics are to be trusted, in con- sequence of the new Coal Act, under which London coals were sold by weight and not by measure.2 By the use of false bottoms in the boats masters had often packed on a boat, supposed to carry 21 or 22 tons, as many as 27 to 30, thus cheating the pitmen, the canal companies, and also the royalty owners.3 Another cause of diminished profits was the stricter supervision of the men's corves or baskets. A writer who gave the men's version of affairs in the Newcastle Chronicle of January 7, 1882, estimated that by the ' adjustment of corves ' after the strike, from three to four keels a day less were frequently wrought in a colliery: in other words, formerly ' the men were frequently cheated out of three or four keels a day.' This means, of course, that the men by working at the same piece rates could now make the required sum in a shorter time.
With the object apparently of distributing the work equally over different days and amongst the different workers, the
1 Compare H.O., 40. 29 (H. Morton Lambton to General Bouverie on June 8, 1831) : '. . . the business of mining cannot be carried on for a great length of time if the men remain in the present state of insubordination.'
2 I & 2 William IV. c. Ixxvi.
8 Tyne Mercury, January 10, 1832, quoting from Birmingham Journal.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 37
Union laid down a rule that no hewer should make more than 4s. a day.1 On this the coal-owners seized as a serious grievance, attributing their losses largely to this diminished output. They stated boldly that two-thirds of the hewers made their 4s. in six hours, a statement vehemently denied by the men. Since the guaranteed minimum was 80s. for eleven days, and the owners admitted that eight hours was the customary day for a hewer, the statement on the face of it seems improbable. However this might be, many of the coal-owners believed that the men had passed that ' limit beyond which wages cannot be raised, because beyond it the employment of labour ceases to be profitable.' 2 The pitmen, wrote Mr. James Losh, a pro- minent colliery owner, on January 28,3 have forced from their employers higher wages for shorter hours, consequently many collieries have made no profit, and many masters will soon cease employing men at all unless the men show a more reasonable spirit. Mr. Losh who represented, so to speak, the reasoning faculty on the employers' side, basing his arguments on large generalisations of political economy and on quotations from Holy Scripture, never wearied in assuring the pitmen that their own and their masters' interests were inseparably united, the masters being presumably the only judges of those interests. Comparisons with the wages of other occupations in the district and elsewhere fortified the belief that the pit- men were overpaid, and that by the law of supply and demand their remuneration must be reduced ; thus we find Mr. Losh pointing out 4 that sailors and fishermen are worse paid for more dangerous occupations, lead, tin, and copper miners paid only half as much for as dangerous work, whilst the lot of South-country agricultural labourers should make the pitmen thankful for the many blessings they enjoy. Even the coal miners at Bilston were said to make only 8s. 7£d. a week when rent was deducted.5
Apart from these theoretical considerations the natural man in the employer was tempted by the supply of cheap labour available from the neighbouring lead mines, where 7s. or 8s. a week was the usual wage for men, who, if not engaged in precisely similar tasks, were at any rate working under- ground. Indeed the masters soon persuaded themselves that it was a positive charity to give these distressed lead
1 H.O., 52. 14. 2 Tyne Mercury, May 31, 1831.
* Newcastle Chronicle. 4 Newcastle Chronicle, April 23, 1831.
6 Times , December 9, quoted in Tyne Mercury, December 27, 1831.
38 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
miners work, and the objections of the pitmen to this course were ' a heartless combination against their industrious but starving fellow creatures.' l ' How absurd it is,' wrote Mr. Losh,2 ' to attempt to hinder men who are working for 8s. or 9s. per week, from removing thirty or forty miles, to places where they can earn, with less labour, more than twice that sum. I will only add,' he went on, summing up the position with obvious sincerity, ' that whoever advises the pitmen to seek for unreasonable wages far above the average of the district in which they live, or in any way to interfere with the property or controul the operations of their employers, must be very ignorant or very wicked ; and I think one may safely conclude that they can neither be good Christians nor honest men, who act themselves, or advise others to act, contrary to the scripture rule of " doing unto others as you wish they should do unto you." '
In the autumn of 1831 the cholera came creeping on towards the North of England from Russia. About the end of October it appeared in Sunderland, from December till March of the next year it devastated Newcastle, Gateshead, North Shields, and the neighbouring colliery villages. * It raged principally amongst the lower orders whose dissolute habits and poverty rendered them speedy victims to its direful attacks, most of them only surviving a few hours.' 3 At Newbum-on-Tyne out of a popu- lation of 550, 424 persons were attacked, of whom 57 died. Public subscriptions were opened for the relief of the sufferers ; * but in spite of this the epidemic proved a severe drain on the resources of the young Union, and left it without any reserve funds to face the next conflict with the masters. By March 1832 no less than £10,000 had been paid out by the Union for the relief of the sick and destitute ; in Hetton alone £700 was subscribed by the men for the relief of the sick.5
Meanwhile trouble of another sort was brewing. At Callerton, Coxlodge, and Waldridge lead miners were imported and the
1 ' Publicola' in Tyne Mercury, December 13, 1831.
2 Newcastle Chronicle, January 28, 1832.
3 Sykes, Local Records, ii. p. 323.
4 To the Sunderland Fund Lord Londonderry sent ^100 with ' a very feel- ing letter,' Lord Durham .£100 and noo tons of coal. 'Such philanthropy,' wrote the Tyne Mercury, December 20, 1831, 'better becomes their rank than the brightest coronets they can boast.'
6 See account of Union Meeting of March 3 in Newcastle Chronicle, March 10, 1832.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 39
pitmen refused to work with them ; at Waldridge the angry coal miners stopped the engine and endangered the lives of the lead miners working below. The Union had nothing to do with any of these affairs ; indeed at Waldridge the delegates did their best to prevent mischief, and the Union sided with the masters in the original matter of dispute : the refusal of the pitmen, in defiance of their bond, to accept the prices fixed for a new seam. The Union's policy was clearly stated by Hepburn : ' It was wrong for men to combine and prevent others from working, when they had got work in a legal manner. . . . By the articles into which they had lately entered, though they bound themselves to the maintenance and support of each other, they could not hinder any one from working with them.' l Again he urged strongly that when once the bond was entered into it must be kept, and whoever broke it would be punished.2 The law indeed provided penalties, and various pitmen from the above-mentioned collieries were sent to prison for three months' hard labour because they had deserted their work.
The case of Coxlodge was particularly hard. By an oral agreement at the binding time, it was arranged that as more workmen had been bound than could be employed at Coxlodge, the surplus men from Coxlodge should go to Gos- forth (a less profitable pit for the workers), but that they should have the first claim if extra labour was required at Coxlodge.3 In defiance of this understanding, when extra labour was wanted at Coxlodge, the owner imported low-paid lead miners. The pitmen already employed at Coxlodge, finding their remon- strances ignored, struck work. Some were sent to prison, the rest had their indentures cancelled, and soldiers were called in to evict them from their houses. When the doors of their cottages had been nailed up, they at last appealed to the Union. Delegates from that body made an investiga- tion and passed the following unheroic resolution : ' That the dispute having terminated in a manner highly prejudicial to the men, and in a way which cannot but be also injurious to the masters, a deputation from this meeting be appointed to wait on the Rev. Mr. Brandling, the owner, to solicit him to continue to employ those men who may be willing to remain.' 4
1 Newcastle Chronicle^ August 20, 1831.
3 Ibid., March 10, 1832.
* Ibid., January 17, 1832.
4 Ibid., January 28, 1832.
40 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
But the men concerned rejected this proposal by 108 votes to 34. * Is it to be believed,' urged the Union Committee in its appeal to the public, ' that a large body of sober, industrious men (and in the whole district there is not a more sober and industrious body than was lately at Coxlodge) would without provocation, without ill treatment, without witnessing violation of contracts, wantonly abandon their work, to experience, with their families, all the misery of houseless penury ? ' 1 It is not surprising that bitter words were uttered about the minister of the Gospel who had so merged the Christian in the employer as to turn these families adrift at a time when cholera was raging.
Into the intricacies of the 1832 quarrel between masters and men it is unnecessary to enter; overseers and pitmen gave their different versions of the same affair, anonymous writers on both sides sent long letters to the Press, charge was followed by countercharge, statement by denial with bewildering rapidity. Conditions varied at different pits, and techni- calities often obscured the issues. Early in the year some of the masters began to threaten the deputy overseers and others with a loss of their places at the next binding unless they consented to leave the Union. The policy of the Union, as formulated by Hepburn on March 3, was to support all those who lost their places from the caprice of their masters and to refuse to supply their places ; 2 but not, as was often after- wards stated, to refuse to be bound altogether.
On March 10 a general meeting of coal-owners on the Tyne and Wear, with Robert W. Brandling in the chair, issued what can only be described as a provocative manifesto in view of the approaching binding time.8 After a fantastic computa- tion of the loss to the coal trade by the 1831 dispute and the diminished output, they described the introduction of the lead miners, their happiness, and the excellence of their work. 4 These facts are most important, as they prove beyond the possibility of doubt, that the Pitmen formerly employed could have been neither overworked nor ill-paid.' Their disputes in fact were due not to grievances but to a secret combina- tion, and the Waldridge affair was cited as an illustration. Beyond issuing this declaration, the coal-owners seem to have taken no concerted action at the binding time. In about half
1 Newcastle Chronicle, January 28, 1832.
* Ibid., March 10, 1832.
* Itid., March 17, 1832.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 41
the pits, including Lord Durham's and Lord Londonderry's, the men were bound as usual on the same conditions as the previous year. In the other hah*, difficulties arose, with the result that April 5 passed and the pits lay idle and eight thou- sand men were out of work. The point of dispute at most pits was the refusal of the owners to bind 'the deputies, shifters, bankmen, and enginemen,' or the more prominent members, unless they deserted the Union. In some cases their com- rades refused to be bound without them. At some pits the men tried, as was the custom at binding time, to get some particular grievance remedied. In some, no doubt, unreason- able demands were made, as at Hetton, where some of the younger men asked for the dismissal of the viewer.
It is clear that there was no uniform demand for higher wages or better conditions : the Union's policy was to keep what had already been won. As the dispute went on it became a commonplace on the masters' side that the quarrel had begun because the men demanded higher wages : the men invariably denied this ; the explanation of this contradiction is perhaps to be found in a sentence in the Tyne Mercury* where after repeating that the men had struck for higher wages the writer naively adds : ' This they have not said in words, but they have required more privileges than they previously had, which is equivalent to demanding a higher price for their labour.' On the other hand, the men declared that various collieries were offering reduced wages, a fact which the Tyne Mercury admitted might be true, excusing it on the grounds of reduced profits. But whatever the original causes of dispute at the various collieries, by the middle of May the issue had become clear and simple ; the policy of all the coal-owners whose pits still lay idle became identical ; they refused to bind any men unless they deserted the Union. It was a life and death struggle for the right to combine.
In the early days of the strike the men's hopes ran high. They were as confident as the coal-owners that God was on their side. A resolution at one of their meetings in April was worded thus : ' That as oppressed people, in every age of the world, when united, had confounded their enemies, we act in conjunction with the example of such ancients and moderns, as have withstood and overcome their enemies.' 2 At the same meeting one speaker outlined a proposal for a great
1 April 10, 1832. * Newcastle Chronicle, April 21.
42 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
general union to spread over the whole country.1 ' It would be an excellent thing if this could be brought about, union would go forth, and religion would follow, and moral degrada- tion be banished from the earth, and the world become evangelised.' When several weeks had passed their growing bitterness was expressed in somewhat grandiloquent language : * That as our opponents are all alive to our destruction, we, the objects of their antipathy, resort to every auxiliary within our reach to frustrate their diabolical design.' 2
How were the eight thousand unemployed pitmen supported during their long struggle ? As we have seen, the cholera had depleted the Union funds, but half the pits were still at work, and in them the Unionists, out of every £1 earned, contributed 6s. to the support of their comrades : 3 a further proof in the masters' eyes, if one were wanted, that the wages paid were excessive.
Meanwhile lead miners and others were being brought into the district to take the place of the Unionists in pit and cottage. Evictions were carried out with the aid of soldiers and angry passions let loose.4 At Hetton, where ejections first took place on an extensive scale, a pitman Errington, who with two others had deserted the Union, was found murdered. At Friars Goose the ejection was accompanied by a serious affray. The signal was given by a pitman's wife, Elizabeth Carr, who refused to move, was carried to the door on a chair, seized the hat of a policeman, flourished it above her head and cheered on the exasperated mob. The justice dispensed by the authorities was rough, and the indignities suffered by the rioters were not likely to pacify the feelings of men already embittered by the loss of home and work. Special constables were sworn in and instructed to arrest miners whenever they found them standing together, and to lock them up in the colliery stables or empty houses. * Some of them were bound hand and foot against the mangers in the stalls all night, with neither food nor water, and if they attempted to make the least resistance, a cutlass or pistol was held to their faces. It was not the riotous and disorderly persons that were mostly punished, but chiefly those who had been taking leading parts in the union, and who had taken
1 They seem to have had no connection with the National Association for the Protection of Labour. See Town Labourer, pp. 311 f.
2 Newcastle Courant, June 2.
a H.O., 40. 30. « Ibid.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 43
no part whatever in the disorders.' x It was in vain that Hepburn urged the unbound men not to go near the collieries where other men were at work, and above all to keep their wives from interfering in matters with which they had nothing to do.2 The wives might well have answered that they were pretty intimately concerned with measures that turned them out of house and home, and they certainly showed their feel- ings in vigorous fashion : thus when some lead miners were being marched to their new abodes at the Tyne Main and Friars Goose they were * assailed in Gateshead by the pit- men's wives, who not only " cudgelled " them with their tongues, but threw stones at them.' 3 In many cases the owners added to the hardships of eviction by publishing at the same time the clauses in the Vagrancy Act which pro- claimed penalties for encamping in the open air or under a tent.4
Whilst the unruly strikers were breaking the heads of the lead miners, the orderly strikers were publishing accounts of their incompetence, which were promptly contradicted by the masters. In this connection it is interesting to read in the 1842 Mines Report5 that the newcomers are said to have been unsatisfactory, and that by 1842 hardly one remained in the district.
Competent or incompetent, the tide of supplanters flowed steadily in from Wales, from Staffordshire, and from York- shire ; by June about two thousand had already entered the district.6 Still the strikers kept up a bold front, and at their meeting on June 16, when the strike had lasted ten weeks, Hepburn declared that they must be out for another ten, after which their services would be needed at the busy time, and they would win.' * Meanwhile a tragic event which struck the public imagination prejudiced their cause. On June 11, Mr. Fairies, an old magistrate of seventy, was accosted when on horseback by two pitmen who asked for money for a drink. Angry words passed, blows followed, and in the end Mr. Fairies was left brutally wounded in the ditch. Eleven days later he died. Jobling, the man who had first addressed him, was arrested and afterwards hung. His corpse was ex- posed in chains on a gibbet until, to the public relief, it was
1 Fynes, Miners of Northumberland and Durham, pp. 28, 29.
2 Newcastle Chronicle, June 2. * Tyne Mercury, May 8. 4 Newcastle Chronicle, May 26. 8 Appendix, Part i.
6 Losh in Newcastle Chronicle, June 2. 7 Newcastle Chronicle, June 23 .
44 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
stolen away. Armstrong, who had committed the actual assault, was never found, though tradition said he was at large in the district till after Jobling's execution. Like all other crimes and misdeeds this assault was attributed to the Union. ' I am afraid,' said Mr. Justice Parke, in sentenc- ing Jobling,1 ' that this is one of those melancholy circum- stances which are occasioned by that combination which has prevailed in this county so long — one of the unlawful effects, and we have witnessed many — arising out of a combination, alike injurious to the public weal and the private interests of all who are concerned in it. It is to that combination that I attribute that utter want of moral feeling which in- duced you to stand by and assist another in inflicting that mortal wound which led to the death of the deceased.' George Weddle, a policeman who had killed a miner named Skipsy, was sentenced at the same Assizes as Jobling to six months' imprisonment.2 Skipsy had been trying to make peace in a quarrel between miners and constables when Weddle shot him dead.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of the heavy odds against which the Union was fighting for recognition is con- veyed in the letter from Lord Melbourne to the magistrates of the district : 3
WHITEHALL, July 16, 1832. •
SIR, — I am commanded by his Majesty to call your most serious and immediate attention to the state of the colliery districts in the county of Durham.
It appears that, for some time past, extensive and determined combinations and conspiracies have been formed and entered into by the workmen, for the purpose of dictating to their masters the rate of wages at which they shall be employed, the hours during which they shall work, the quantity of labour which they shall perform, as well as for imposing upon them many other regulations relating to the conduct and management of their trade and concerns.
In pursuance of this system, and in furtherance and support of these demands, which are as unwise and injurious to the authors of them as they are violent and unjust in themselves, tumultuous assemblages of people have been gathered together, to the great danger of the public peace, at which the most seditious and inflammatory discourses have been delivered, and the most illegal resolutions adopted.
The natural consequences of such proceedings have shown
1 Newcastle Chronicle, August 4. 2 Tyne Mercury, August 7.
* Newcastle Courant, July 28, 1832.
MINERS OF THE TYNE AND THE WEAR 45
themselves in outrages of the most atrocious character, in menaces and intimidation, in the injury and maltreating of peaceable and industrious labourers, so as to endanger their lives,-— and in the commission of murder in the face of open day.
In these circumstances I am commanded by his Majesty to express his confident expectation, that all who hold the commission of the peace will act with the promptitude, decision, and firmness which are so imperatively required, and that they will exert themselves for the prevention and suppression of all meetings which shall be called together for an illegal purpose, or which shall, in the course of their proceedings, become illegal ; for the detection and punishment of all unlawful combination and con- spiracy, as well as of all outrage and violence ; and for the encouragement and protection of his Majesty's peaceable and well-disposed subjects. — I have the honour to be, sir, your humble servant, MELBOURNE.
As the summer passed secessions became more frequent, and the ardour of the contributors to the strike fund cooled. Six shillings in the pound was a heavy tax when no end seemed in sight. By August 28 one hundred men in Lord Durham's pits refused to pay any longer.1 Others soon followed suit. On September 1 the Union held its last meeting at Boldon Fell. They were willing to alter their rules to meet the employers' wishes provided they might continue as a society. But no compromise could be accepted, the ' monstrous System of Violence and Insubordination ' must cease to exist. ' By the Introduction of Workmen of more upright Principles, and with more correct Notions of the Rights and relative Duties of Masters and Servants,' the coal-owners, they were told, hoped to prevent the recurrence of these disgraceful scenes.2 The Union was beaten ; on September 20 it was formally dis- solved.3
All through that summer and autumn over Northumberland and Durham there were rejoicings for the passing of the Reform Bill, public dinners, the ringing of bells, and a proud display of banners with appropriate mottoes : ' A day of liberty is worth an eternity of bondage.' ' United we stand, divided we fall.' ' Fortune follows the Brave.' As winter approached, Hepburn, shunned by those men whom he had led to disaster, spurned by the men who had proved faithless to their cause, wandered about in the bitterness of failure,
1 Tyne Mercury.
* R. W. Brandling to J. Losh, Newcastle Chroniclt, September 8, 1832.
3 H.O., 40. 30.
46 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
a ragged hawker of tea whose wares no one would buy. Driven by hunger, he sued for work at the Felling colliery, and was told it would only be given him if he promised to have no more to do with Unions. He paused, consented, and kept his word.1 Perhaps the darkness of his days was lightened by the vision of the future pictured in almost his last public speech : ' If we have not been successful, at least we, as a body of miners, have been able to bring our grievances before the public ; and the time will come when the golden chain which binds the tyrants together will be snapped, when men will be properly organised, when coal-owners will only be like ordinary men, and will have to sigh for the days gone by. It only needs time to bring this about.' 2
1 He lived till 1873 ; see Fynes, op. «'/., p. 36.
2 Fynes, op. erf., p. 36.
CHAPTER IV
THE COTTON WORKERS 1760-1818
THE history of the cotton industry is often regarded as an epitome of the Industrial Revolution, for it presents in a clear and striking form all the features of that Revolution. Unlike older industries it was unhampered by traditions or restrictions — except such restrictions as its rival the woollen trade could succeed in imposing on it — for ancient industrial regulations were discredited by the time it grew up ; it rose in an incred- ibly short time from a small struggling trade to become England's leading industry ; it was centralised in the Lancashire district, changing the whole character of that district ; it was the chief field for the application of the mechanical inventions of the period. A few figures will illustrate the rapidity of its growth.
In 1764 the import of cotton wool into Great Britain was 8,870,392 Ibs. ; in 1833 it had risen to 303,726,199 Ibs.1
At the Coronation of George m. in 1761, representatives of the principal trades of Manchester walked in procession through the streets ; tailors marched in that pageant, worsted weavers, woolcombers, shoemakers, dyers, joiners, silk weavers, and hatters ; but there were no cotton weavers or manufacturers,2 and yet by 1774 there were probably about 30,000 persons in and round Manchester engaged in the cotton industry.3 By 1787 some 162,000 persons were employed in that industry in Great Britain : 4 by 1831 these numbers had risen to 833,000.6
It is with this multitude of workers and with the vicissitudes of their fortunes that we are concerned, and we shall deal with the development of the industry and the application of mechanical inventions only in so far as they affected the workpeople.
The early history of the use of cotton is largely a history of
1 Baines, History of Cotton Manufacture, pp. 109, III. 1 Aston, A Picture of Manchester, p. 19.
3 Chapman, The Lancashire Cotton Industry, Manchester, 1904, p. 3.
4 Baines, op tit., p. 219. 6 Baines, op cit., p. 218, quoting M'Culloch.
47
48 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
the attempts of the old-established woollen trade to strangle its young rival. In the seventeenth century only coarse cotton fabrics were made in England, but with the development of colonial commerce in the latter part of the seventeenth century fine cotton goods were imported in considerable quantities from India and the East.1 Indian calicoes, muslins, and chintzes took the fancy of the elegant world and ' the liberty of the ladies, their passion for their fashion ' 2 was blamed as destruc- tive to the old silk and woollen manufactures of England.
The vagaries of fashion are amusingly described by Defoe in 1708 : ' . . . such is the power of a mode as we saw our persons of quality dressed in Indian carpets, which but a few years before their chambermaids would have thought too ordinary for them ; the chints was advanced from lying upon their floors to their backs, from the foot-cloth to the petticoat ; and even the queen herself at this time was pleased to appear in China and Japan, I mean China silks and callico.' 3
The appeals that were made to patriotic sentiment on behalf of silk or wool were unsuccessful, and to protect the woollen trade against this competition an Act was passed in 1700 prohibiting the introduction of Indian silks and printed calicoes for domestic use, either as apparel or furniture, under a penalty of £200 on the wearer or seller.4 But this drastic Act was ineffective ; goods were smuggled in or else calicoes were manufactured in India and printed or dyed in England. In 1720 another attempt was made to destroy the trade. An Act 5 was passed which entirely prohibited the use of any * printed, painted, stained, or dyed calico ' for clothing or for furniture under the penalty of £5 in the case of clothing, £20 in the case of furniture. Cotton goods made with warp of another material, if printed or dyed, were prohibited. Calicoes dyed all blue and muslins, neckcloths, and fustians were ex- cepted. Now English cotton goods were in those early days made with linen or woollen warp, for the English fingers could not match the suppleness of the fingers of the Hindoos or spin a sufficiently fine strong thread for the warp ; they could only produce in fact a ' mongrel manufacture.'
Doubts arose as to the scope of this Act, and it was argued
1 Mantoux, La Revolution Industriclle au xviii' siicle.
2 A Plan of the English Commerce, 1728, quoted by Baines, op. cit., p. 80. 8 Quoted by Baines, op. cit., p. 79-
* II & 12 William III. c. 10; see Baines, op. cit., p. 79. 6 7 George I. c. 7 ; see Baines, op. cit., p. 1 66.
THE COTTON WORKERS 49
by some that fustians came under it. These doubts were set at rest in 1736 by an Act which legalised the use of fustians.1 Pure calico goods if printed or dyed were still prohibited and remained prohibited till 1774 when, owing to the exertions of Arkwright, who was producing pure cotton goods of this description, and in spite of the opposition of the other Lancashire manufacturers, the prohibition was repealed.2 The efforts of the woollen trade to retain its position had failed and cotton had to a great extent superseded silk, so that by 1785 it could be said ' Women of all ranks, from the highest to the lowest, are clothed in British manufactures of cotton, from the muslin cap on the crown of the head, to the cotton stocking under the sole of the foot.' *
The New Machinery
Our period is the period of the great mechanical inventions that revolutionised trade and the workers' lives, and it will be necessary to give some account of them. In 1760 cotton was carded and spun by hand in the spinsters' own houses, and woven at hand-looms in the weavers' houses. By 1830 hand- spinning was dead, and all the processes previous to weaving were carried on by complicated machinery in factories, whilst weaving was partly done in factories, by power-looms worked by girls, but partly *yil by hand-loom weavers in their own houses.
In 1733 John Kay, a native of Bury but an inhabitant of Colchester, had invented the flying shuttle,4 a device by which the weaver could pull a string and so send the shuttle on its course through the web, without throwing it himself by hand. By this, invention one man could manage a wide loom alone whereas previously it was necessary to have a man each side of the loom. Kay's invention, like many other inventions, was unpopular with the workers, but it made its way, and by 1760 it was in general use for cotton weaving, causing a con- siderable increase in the demand for yarn. The weavers in fact wanted more yarn than the spinners could supply.5 New markets were opening in Germany, Italy, and North America ; the merchants pressed the weavers, the weavers in their turn
1 9 George II. c. 4; see Baines, op. tit., p. 167.
* 14 George in. c. 72 ; Baines, op. tit., p. 168.
1 Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, quoted by Baines, p. 336. 4 Mantoux, op. cit., p. 198.
* Ure, Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, i. p. 192.
P
50 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
pressed the spinners. The system of production at this time is described by Ure :
' The workshop of the weaver was a rural cottage, from which when he was tired of sedentary labour he could sally forth into his little garden, and with the spade or the hoe tend its culinary productions. The cotton wool which was to form his weft was picked clean by the fingers of his younger children, and was carded and spun by the older girls assisted by his wife, and the yarn was woven by himself assisted by his sons. When he could not procure within his family a supply of yarn adequate to the demands of his loom, he had recourse to the spinsters of his neighbourhood. One good weaver could keep three active women at work upon the wheel, spinning weft.' l
The troubles of the weaver trudging round several miles to procure his yarn are described : ' he was often obliged to treat the females with presents in order to quicken their dili- gence at the wheel.' 2
This was a satisfactory state of things for the spinsters but it did not last long, for three inventions, Hargreaves' spinning- jenny, Arkwright's water frame, and Crompton's mule turned the tables, and unworked yarn was soon produced faster than the weavers could consume it. Instead of being scarce and a prize, yarn became an important article of export. These inventions must be briefly described.
The spinning- jenny invented by James Hargreaves about 1765, though not patented till 1770, was a multiplied wheel. One spindle alone was worked by the ordinary spinning wheel, but Hargreaves' invention made it possible to work first eight and afterwards as many as one hundred spindles by a single wheel. The output was enormously increased, but the struc- ture of the industry was not altered as the jennies could be worked at home. Arkwright's water frame, on the other hand, patented in 1769, revolutionised the character of the trade.
It is impossible here to give even in outline the remarkable story of Arkwright's career, how he rose from a travelling barber who bought country girls' locks, dyed them with a special secret dye and sold them to wig-makers, to be a knight and a High Sheriff worth half a million ; nor can we discuss the vexed question of the precise credit due to him, how far he picked other men's brains, how far the inventions he patented
1 Ure, op. cit., \. p. 191. 8 Ure, op. cit.t i. p. 193.
THE COTTON WORKERS 51
were his own. As it has been well put, his history as an in- ventor is obscure, his history as a manufacturer is clear.1
A process of spinning by means of passing the material to be spun through rollers had been invented and patented by Wyatt and Paul as early as 1738, and establishments where the process could be worked had been set up, but they had all failed. Those establishments can be regarded as the real ancestors of the cotton-spinning factories. No attempts were made for many years to introduce the process, and roller spinning remained an idle discovery till Arkwright took out a patent for a roller-spinning frame, worked by water power, in 1769. This water frame, as it was called, produced a stronger thread than the wheels or jennies, a thread that could be used for warp ; thus it was now possible to manufacture pure cotton goods, unmixed with linen, and, as we have seen, Parliament was petitioned to withdraw the prohibition on these goods.
In 1775 Arkwright took out another patent for a series of machines, for the subsidiary processes of carding, drawing, and roving. In the lawsuits which Arkwright brought later against rivals whom he accused of infringing his patents, each of the several methods he patented was claimed by some other inventor, and in the final trial the verdict was given against him. Whatever his claims as an inventor, he pos- sessed at all events an unrivalled power of working other people's ideas, and it was he, more than any other single man, who brought the cotton-spinning industry into the factory system. For some time water frames in factories producing warp, and jennies in houses producing weft, worked on side by side. * The jenny,' it has been well put, ' simply multiplied human hands, while the water frame was a substitute for human skill,' 2 but not for human skill exercised in the cotton industry, since the1 warp produced by the frames had pre- viously been made of linen or wool.
The third of the inventions, the mule, was invented by Samuel Crompton in 1779. Crompton was the antithesis of Arkwright. A quiet man of inventive genius but without any administrative or business ability, he devised his new machine after some years' work in his ancestral yeoman's house near Bolton. The machine was called a mule because it borrowed features from the water frame and from the jenny. It had both rollers and spindles, and produced a finer and
1 Mantoux, op. cit.t p. 214. a Chapman, op. cii.t p. 53.
52 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
stronger thread than any that could be spun before. It made the production of fine muslins possible, and thus established a new branch of the cotton industry in England. Crompton worked his mule by hand in his garret, but the quality of the yarn he sold was so excellent that neighbours soon began to pry into his secrets. Ladders were placed against his house, and holes were made in the walls for inquisitive eyes. Crompton lacked the money or the business enterprise to take out a patent, and was persuaded to give up his secret in return for a voluntary subscription. The story of Crompton's career reflects little credit on his hard-headed rivals. The original subscription list amounted to £67, 6s. 6d., but not all of this was paid ; after the mule had been brought into general use, when the new muslin industry had grown up in Bolton, Paisley, and Glasgow, and was making huge fortunes for others, a further subscription of £500 was raised for Crompton. In 1812, Parliament, treating him much less generously than the undistinguished relative of a successful politician, voted him the sum of £5000, but the several business enterprises in which he invested his money came to grief, and he died a poor and disappointed man.
The original mules, as we have said, were worked by hand ; gin-horses were sometimes used and water power was applied to them about 1790, but it was only slowly that jennies or mules passed into factories, and ' for many years the typical jenny- or mule-factory remained small,' l and men would start with one mule in a loft, adding others gradually.2 For Arkwright's water frames, on the other hand, water power, large mills, and considerable capital were essential. It must be remem- bered that any new invention takes time to supersede its rivals, the structure of an industry does not change in a day or a year, and the introduction of the mule did not mean that jennies disappeared, though it ultimately took their place and, in a perfected form, superseded the water frame. Hence during the last twenty years or so of the eighteenth century, whilst the cotton industry was increasing by leaps and bounds, there were large mills or factories, built where water power was plentiful on country rivers, producing warp by means of Arkwright's water frames, whilst jennies and mules were pro-
1 Chapman, op. cit., p. 59.
2 Robert Owen, for example, in 1789 started by taking a factory and sub' letting all but one room where he employed three men on three hand-mules (see Chapman, op, fit., p. 60).
THE COTTON WORKERS 58
ducing the weft in dwelling houses or small establishments. Larger businesses, however, were gradually replacing the smaller and steam power was also beginning to supplant water power. Meanwhile the weavers, a growing and a prosperous body of men, were working in their own houses, turning the yarn into cotton goods.
The class of labour required by the different machines varied. Before the inventions already described, spinning, as we have seen, had been a woman's industry with children helping in the subsidiary processes. The factories or mills were now worked by child labour, chiefly prentice labour, with a few unskilled men or women ; in the case of the jennies and mules, on the other hand, skilled men's work gradually replaced the labour of women and children. Jennies with eight or twelve spindles were worked by children, but when jennies were larger and mules more complicated, it became more economical to employ skilled men ; hence we have, side by side with the exploitation of child labour, the growth of a small skilled aristocracy of spinners, who followed the machines into the factories. Their conditions, wages, and outlook present a marked contrast to those of the weavers.
The conditions of the child labour in the factories are dis- cussed elsewhere ; * we must here consider the attitude of the adult workers to these new inventions.
Men and women who see their livelihood taken from them or threatened by some new invention, can hardly be expected to grow enthusiastic over the public benefits of inventive genius. A larger view and a vivid imagination may teach them that the loss to their particular occupation may be temporary only ; but then, as it has been remarked, man's life is temporary also.2 The indignant spinsters of Blackburn with their friends broke open Hargreaves' house and destroyed his jennies, and Hargreaves was thus driven from his native county to find a more peaceful home for his inventions at Nottingham. In 1779 there was a more systematic attack upon the new machines, directed especially against the new series of machines for carding, roving, etc., patented by Arkwright in 1775. Trade was depressed in consequence of the war with America, and the new factories and the jennies that turned a number of spindles were looked on as partly responsible for
1 See Town Labourer, chap. viii.
1 Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalismt 1906, p. 328.
54 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
the want of work. Arkwright, who had started his career as an organiser of factories at Nottingham where he found the necessary capital, had afterwards set up mills in Derbyshire. For his different enterprises he enlisted different partners but he was careful to manage the whole business himself. About 1776 he tried his luck in Lancashire, providing the machinery for a mill erected at Birkacre near Chorley. But the people of Lancashire were hostile. ' Upon the fourth day of October last,' stated one of the proprietors in a petition for redress to Parliament, ' a most riotous and outrageous Mob assembled in the Neighbourhood, armed in a warlike Manner, and after breaking down the Doors of the Buildings, they entered the Rooms, destroyed most of the Machinery, and afterwards set fire to and consumed the whole Buildings, and every Thing therein contained.' 1 The damage he estimated at £4400, the sum actually spent on the undertaking.
At the first attack, on Sunday, the proprietors put up a fight and two of the assailants were killed and eight wounded, but the mob returned next day in overwhelming force.2 Josiah Wedgwood, who happened to be travelling through the district at the time, estimated their numbers at eight thousand, and noted that the Duke of Bridgewater's miners were amongst them.3 The works of the elder Peel (father of the first Baronet) at Altham were also visited, and the machinery con- structed on Arkwright's processes destroyed. Peel retired in disgust to Burton-on-Trent and built mills there instead.4 Wigan, Bolton, Blackburn, Preston, and Manchester were all visited or threatened by mobs who destroyed in those districts all jennies with more than twenty spindles, leaving those with twenty and fewer spindles, which they held to be a * fair machine ' as it could be used in a cottage.6 Ultimately the rioters were stopped by the appearance of military force, but it is clear that there was much private sympathy with their objects. It was alleged by the Edinburgh Review many years later 6 that the Birkacre mill was destroyed ' in the presence of a powerful body of police and military without any one of the civil authorities requiring them to interfere to
1 House of Commons Journal, June 27, 1780.
2 Annual Register, 1779; Chronicle, p. 229. 8 See Mantoux, op. cit., p. 418.
4 W. Cooke Taylor, Life and 7^imes of Sir Robert Peel, pp. 7-9.
5 Chapman, op. cit., p. 76; Baines, op. cit., p. 159. 8 Edinburgh Review, June 1827, p. 14.
THE COTTON WORKERS 55
prevent so scandalous an outrage.' This may be a myth, but it must be remembered that Arkwright was intensely unpopular with other manufacturers, and that the landed class were afraid that the poor rates would be burdened with persons thrown out of work by the new inventions.1 At Wigan the magistrates, principal inhabitants, and manufacturers met and agreed to suspend the use of all machines and engines worked by water or horses for carding, roving, or spinning, till the determination of Parliament on the subject was known.2 The Quarter Sessions at Preston, however, passed resolutions on the advantages of machinery and the dangers of competition from other counties if its progress were checked. They went on to ask for a special commission to try the rioters lying in Lancaster gaol.8 The request was refused, as the Law Officers reported that there were only two persons, Richard Haslam and Samuel Parkinson, against whom it was possible to bring a capital charge.4
The extent of public sympathy with the rioters is illustrated by the tone of the petition sent up to Parliament next spring by the cotton spinners and others of Lancashire. The petition is interesting, as it is perhaps the only document expressing the workers' opinions about the new changes. The petitioners explain that in addition to the distress caused by the American dispute and by the war with Spain, events which have caused a * casual Diminution of Commerce,' ' a Domestic Evil of very great Magnitude ' has sprung up during the last few years in the form of the introduction of patent machines threatening the petitioners with a total loss of employment. They do not hesitate to avow their share in the Riots ; last September, they declare, their sufferings became so ' intolerable as to reduce them to Despair, and many Thousands assembled in different Parts to destroy the Causes of their Distress ' and demolished one of the largest patent machines together with some smaller ones. They recall the resolutions of the magis- trates and manufacturers of Wigan, declare that the work produced by machines is inferior to hand work, and call the machines a mere monopoly * for the immense Profits and Advantages of the Patentees and Proprietors.' 5
1 Baines, op. eit., p. 160.
2 House of Commons Journal, April 27, 1780: Petition of Cotton Spinners.
3 Annual Register, 1779; Chronicle, p. 233.
4 H.O. Dom. (George HI. 13).
5 House of Commons Journal, April 27, 1780.
56 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
A Parliamentary Committee investigated their complaints and reported in favour of machinery.1 The cotton masters gave evidence of the enormous increase in the cotton manu- facture during the last ten years ; the looms, they said, had increased to three times their former number, and the weavers could not be supplied with warp if the machinery were stopped, whilst a jenny spinner could make 2s. or 2s. 6d. a day in con- trast to the 3d. or 4d. a day made by a spinner with one spindle. The spinners, on the other hand, stated that though a woman could now only make 3d. or 5d. a day with one spindle, sixteen years ago she could earn from lOd. to Is. 3d. a day, whilst the earnings on jennies of twenty-four spindles had also gone down. They reiterated their belief that the work was better done by small jennies than by large ones, and added a significant complaint that marks the rise of the new order of capitalism : ' the Jenneys are in the Hands of the Poor and the Patent Machines are generally in the Hands of the Rich.'
After these riots in 1779 the workers made no more attempts to check the introduction of machinery for spinning. The reason no doubt lies in the fact that whenever any labour was dis- placed by the introduction of any particular species of machinery for spinning, it was soon absorbed by an expansion of trade.2 Many of the economists of the day, with this example before them, came to think that the introduction of machinery would be a similarly painless process in every case. The weaving trade offered employment to any surplus labour from spinning. The mills with ' patent machines ' to which the petitioners of 1780 objected continued to grow in number and size. Not only did Arkwright set up new establishments, but he sold his machines or permission to use them to ' numbers of adven- turers, residing in the different counties of Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Worcester, Stafford, York, Hertford, and Lan- caster.' 3 By 1782 Arkwright estimated that ' a business was formed, which already employed upwards of five thousand persons, and a capital on the whole of not less than £200,000.' In addition to this there were numbers of unauthorised mills set up in defiance of the patent. In the lawsuit over the validity of the patent the counsel opposed to Arkwright
1 See ffouse of Commons Journal, June 27, 1780.
2 Chapman, op, cit., p. 74.
8 Baines, op. fit., p. 183, quoting Arkwright's 'Case.' These attempts to localise the cotton industry in other counties were a failure.
THE COTTON WORKERS 57
described these unauthorised mills as employing 30,000 persons and a capital of some £300,000.*
It will perhaps be convenient to trace here briefly the further changes in the cotton-spinning industry during our period. The cardinal change is the introduction of steam power to work the machinery. When Watt's steam engine was per- fected, and it was no longer necessary to place mills on streams, machinery was attracted back to towns. The first mill to use Watt's engine was one at Papplewick in 1785 ; the engine was first used in Manchester in 1789, in Oldham in 1798. 2 It did not of course supersede water power at once, but early in the nineteenth century its superiority was so manifest that water mills ceased to be built, whilst steam factories rose on all sides. Mules and jennies were gathered more and more into factories and worked by steam power. The self-acting mule was a later development ; many unsuccessful experiments were made with it, and it was not in satisfactory working order till about 1825.
We can summarise the results of these changes by saying that whereas at the beginning of the nineteenth century the bulk of the master cotton spinners were still small men, as the century advanced the small establishments could not hold their own against the large establishments worked by steam, and employing many hundreds or even thousands of hands. This development had an important consequence in the history of the workers, for in these establishments the men spinners formed a compact body with common aims among whom combination was easy.
The Weavers and the Combination Act
We must now turn to the cotton weavers. In their case we shall find no startling changes in the structure of the industry, for at the time of the Reform Bill weaving is still in the main a domestic industry, though the power-loom and the factory system are rapidly gaining ground. But though there was no startling change in the structure of the industry, there was a lamentable change in the conditions of the weavers.
Before the invention of the spinning-jenny, the weavers suffered from a shortage of yarn. After that invention and the introduction of Arkwright's water frame, yarn was abun- dant, and by 1780 it was said that the number of looms had
1 S«e Baines, op. cit., pp. 183, 184, a See Chapman, of. cit., p. 57.
58 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
increased threefold.1 It is probable of course that many of these looms were looms that had been converted from linen or woollen looms to cotton looms. When the mule came into use the demand for more looms grew rapidly, and the almost feverish prosperity of the trade is graphically described by William Radcliffe.2
He calls the years from 1788 to 1803 ' the golden age of this great trade,' and describes how ' the old loom-shops being insufficient, every lumber-room, even old barns, cart- houses, and out-buildings of any description, were repaired, windows broke through the old blank walls, and all fitted up for loom-shops. This source of making room being at length exhausted, new weavers' cottages, with loom-shops, rose up in every direction.' Of the ' operative weavers on machine yarns? he says, ' both as cottagers and small farmers, even with three times their former rents, they might be truly said to be placed in a higher state of " wealth, peace, and godliness," by the great demand for, and high price of their labour than they had ever before experienced. Their dwellings and small gardens clean and neat, — all the family well clad, — the men with each a watch in his pocket, and the women dressed to their own fancy, — the church crowded to excess every Sunday, — every house well furnished with a clock in elegant mahogany or fancy case, — handsome tea services in Staffordshire ware, with silver or plated sugar-tongs and spoons, — Birmingham, Potteries, and Sheffield wares for necessary use and ornament, wherever a corner cupboard or shelf could be placed to shew them off, — many cottage families had their cow, paying so much for the summer's grass, and about a statute acre of land laid out for them in some croft or corner, which they dressed up as a meadow for hay in the winter.'
The golden age was not so golden nor did it last so long as William Radcliffe suggests.3 Early in 1799 the weavers were complaining of the decrease in the price of labour and forming themselves into an Association for mutual protection and for obtaining Parliamentary relief. At the end of April a correspondent wrote from Wigan to the Home Office to say
1 See p. 56 above. Radcliffe (quoted Baines, op. cit., p. 338) denies that there was any increase till 1788.
a William Radcliffe, Origin of Power- Loom Weaving, 1828, pp. 59-67.
3 Nor did all weavers enjoy its blessings, for Prof. Chapman points out that the fustian weavers were not in this happy case (op. cit. , p. 39). See also The Cotton Trade during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warst by G. W. Daniels (Manchester Statistical Society).
THE COTTON WORKERS 59
that numbers of societies were being formed in that and the neighbouring counties, and that ' when the sum of five hundred pounds is collected by the grand central committee at Manchester consisting of three persons . . . they are to pay it into the hands of some great person in London who hath engaged to procure them an act of parliament for an advance of wages.' l
On May 27 the same correspondent sent to the Home Office an address that had been issued to the public by the newly formed association of weavers.2 It is worth quoting at some length. The address is to be printed and distributed in different towns in the name of the general committee assembled at Bolton, May 13, 1799. John Seddon is president, James Holcroft is secretary, and the committee is composed of representatives from different towns as follows : from Bolton and the neighbourhood six, from Manchester and Salford three, from Stockport, Oldham, Wigan, Warrington, Blackburn, Chorley, Newton, and Bury two each, from Whitefield, Chow- bent, and New Chapel near Leigh one each.
The writers begin : * The present existing Laws that should protect Weavers, etc., from imposition, being trampled under foot, for want of a union amongst them, they are come to a determination to support each other in their just and legal rights, and to apply to the Legislature of the country for such further regulations, as it may in its wisdom deem fit to make, when the real state of the cotton manufactory shall have been laid before it.' They talk of the ' mutual interest of both employers and employed ' and ask for a ' candid consideration how every necessary of life has increased in price, while the price of labour has undergone a continual decrease. . . . And ye who are our enemies, do you not blush to hear these facts repeated — Great Britain holding the reins of universal com- merce, is it not shameful that her sons should be thus imposed on ? — are you afraid that we should approach Government, and there tell the truth ? — that ye use the mean artifice of stigmatising us with the name of Jacobins, that ye raise your rumours of plots, riots, etc.' They disclaim all connection with attempts to undermine Government, and in their dread
1 H.O., 42. 47-
s H.O., 42. 47. This address is printed by William Radcliffe, op, cit.t p. 76. He also gives a later one of June 29 which shows that the Association was trying to join with the masters in advocating the prohibition of the export of cotton twist.
60 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1882
of any misunderstanding on this point go so far as to declare the ' late law on meetings x appears to us to be only intended as a bridle to that wild democratical fury that leads nations into the vortex of anarchy, confusion, and bloodshed.' They give particulars of reduced payment ; supposing a man to be newly married in 1792, he would then be receiving 22s. for forty-four yards of cloth ; in 1799, surrounded by four or five small children, he would be receiving only 11s. for sixty yards, worked with a finer weft. ' It is in vain,' they conclude, ' to talk of bad trade ; if goods are actually not wanted, they cannot be sold at any price ; if wanted, 2d. or 3d. per yard will not stop the buyer ; and whether does it appear more reasonable that 2d. or 3d. per yard should be laid on the con- sumer, or taken from the labourer ? ' The official endorse- ment on this document is interesting. It is in the handwriting of the Duke of Portland (Home Secretary) : ' Can anything more be done in this case than calling the Attention of the Magistrates to the Facts by a Letter to the Chairman of the Sessions, or some intelligent Magistrate in that part of the County which is indeed all or at least the principal part of the manufacturing district.'
The correspondent (Mr. John Singleton of Wigan) who sent up the weavers' address denied that the weavers had grounds for complaint ; the labouring class he declared was * fully employed and well very well paid for their labour and before these arts were us'd to disturb their peace and make them discontented was both happy and contented.' He throws an interesting sidelight on the introduction of women into the trade : in spite of the war the number of looms have increased, ' for if a Man enlists, his Wife turns Weaver, for here the women are weavers as well as the Men, and instructs her children in the art of weaving — and I have heard many declare that they lived better since their husbands enlisted than before.' 2
The action of the weavers in associating together was speedily followed by the first Combination Act, passed July 1799. It seems probable, indeed, that their association was a cause of its introduction. The paper containing their manifesto was sent up, as we have seen, to the Home Office on May 27.3 On June 17 Pitt obtained leave to bring in the Workman's Combination Bill, and in his speech referred specially to the combinations in the northern part of the kingdom.4 The
1 Probably the Seditious Meetings Act, 36 George III. c. 8.
2 H.O., 42. 47. s Ibid. * See Town Labourer, p. 119.
THE COTTON WORKERS 61
Combination Act, however, was not the sort of answer that the weavers wanted or appreciated. A general meeting of the acting magistrates within the hundred of Salford in November even thought it necessary to publish a handbill of warning to the discontented : * We, the undersigned, taking into con- sideration the various and repeated Attempts that have lately been made, to excite a spirit of Dissatisfaction amongst the Weavers and others employed in the Manufactures of this County, and by violent Hand Bills, and other inflammatory Publications, to encourage an illegal Opposition to the Act passed in the last Session of Parliament " To prevent unlawful Combinations amongst Workmen " do hereby signify our determined Resolution to maintain, as much as in us lies, due Obedience to the Laws . . .' 1
The passing of the Combination Act did not deter the weavers from pressing Parliament next year for a regulation of their wages. The journeyman weavers of Chester, York, Lanca- shire, and Derby sent up a petition 2 praying for a more speedy and summary mode of regulating abuses ' and for the settling of the Wages, Pay and Price of Labour from time to time.' The Combination Act, it must be remembered, nominally prohibited combination amongst masters not less than amongst men, and the weavers take the opportunity to point out that their evils are due to ' a powerful Combination of the Master Weavers or Manufacturers, and that the Petitioners scarcely earning a bare Subsistence by their daily Labour, are totally unable to seek the Suppression of Combinations of so much Secrecy, Wealth and Power, or any Redress of their Grievances, by any existing Law.' Some of the master manufacturers, however, were on the men's side, for on the same day came a petition from master manufacturers in Chester, York, and Lancashire stating that their difficulties were due to the fact that there was no power to settle wages. A special Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to take evidence, and on May 8 it published the Minutes of Evidence.3 James Holcroft, weaver of Bolton, who had been secretary of the Association the year before, stated the men's object clearly. * Is it the wish of the Weavers,' he was asked, ' to have any Standard Price or not ? ' ' We wish for no particular Wages, but what may be fixed upon mutually between the Manufacturers and Workmen, or by the Quarter Session.' * Is it not regu-
1 H.O., 42. 48. • House of Commons Journal, March 5, 1800.
3 Ibid., May 8, 1 800.
62 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
lated at present by the Manufacturers and Workmen ? ' ' No, we wish to be regulated similar to the Silk Manufacturers.' *
The Cotton Arbitration Acts
The weavers did not obtain their desired regulation, but they were given instead an Act 2 providing for arbitration in the cotton trade. Richard Needham, weaver of Bolton, who had been one of the general committee in 1799, gave the history of this Act both before the Committee on Artisans and Machinery in 1824 3 and also before the Committee on Hand- loom Weavers ten years later, in 1834.4 We will quote the latter account : ' At that time Mr. Pitt was prime minister and chancellor of the Exchequer as well ; I was not here but another person was here at the time we were applying for it. Mr. Pitt stopped Colonel Stanley from moving any further in the business ; he sent to the weavers' solicitor, and sent him down to hold a delegate meeting to consult the weavers as to the plan he had to suggest, which was a principle of arbitration, and if we would give up the application for a regulation of wages at that time, he would give us that in lieu of it.'
That Pitt had seriously considered the question of granting a minimum wage seems probable. Mr. Bayley, the Lancashire magistrate, as early as 1798 wrote to the Home Office urging the adoption of some such measures as ' indispensable to keep quiet the lower Orders and to conciliate their good Will. . . . If the great Mind of Mr. Pitt would give it five Minutes Con- sideration, I am sure the Bill would pass.' 5 Amongst the Home Office papers for 1800 is an undated and rather illegible paper probably belonging to the year before, which seems to be a memorandum on the subject prepared for Pitt by Mr. King, then Under Secretary of the Home Office.6 ' On look- ing into Burn's Justice Title Servants, head 4 Rating of Wages, Mr. Pitt will see the Authority given to Magistrates to settle the wages of all artificers and labourers by the day, week or month. If any thing can be done as suggested by Mr. Bayley it appears to Mr. King that it must be grounded on the acts there mentioned.' The memorandum points out that the
1 See Chapter vn. * 39 & 40 George Hi. c. 90, passed July 28.
8 Fifth Report, p. 544.
4 Report from Select Committee on Hand-loom Weavers' Petitions, 1834. 8 H.O., 42. 45. From this letter it seems that Rose had a Bill on the subject in his charge. * H.O., 42. 55.
THE COTTON WORKERS 68
existing Acts apply to cases where employment is uniform ; in manufactures of great extent and employing great numbers the only remedy seems to be ' to leave it to the call for employ- ment to regulate the wages. ... I know not what Rule Mr. A. Smith or anyone would desire to lay down.'
If Pitt played with the idea of an Act for regulating wages, he rejected it and gave the weavers instead the Arbitration Act. This Act l provided that in all cases of dispute over wages or hours each party could name an arbitrator, and if the arbitrators could not agree either arbitrator could require them to submit the points in dispute to a Justice of the Peace whose decision would be final. The Act had some success for a short time as a device for settling disputes and protecting the men from actual frauds, but before long the masters put their finger on a fatal flaw in the drafting. The Act obliged the masters to appoint an arbitrator, and made provision for cases of dis- agreement between the arbitrators, but it contained no pro- vision to compel an arbitrator to act. The masters having discovered this hiatus amused themselves by appointing an arbitrator living in London or some other distant place who had no intention of acting, with the result that the arbitra- tion went no further.
The working of the Act and the grievances of the weavers are described very fully three years later in the evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Commons.2 Thomas Thorpe, who had acted as arbitrator in some two hundred cases (in a few he was chosen by the masters), said so long as the Act was carried out it worked well. Of the cases in which he had acted eleven had been referred to a magistrate, and of those eleven all but one had been settled in the men's favour. James Holcroft, who had acted in some three hundred cases, said that only four or five had been referred to a magistrate. He described in detail a case which throws light on the scope of the Act and the persistent desire of the men for a minimum wage. At Whitefield, where wages had been reduced some time before from 6£d. to 3£d. a yard, the men, hoping to use the Act to raise their wages, wished to arbitrate in a body, but they were advised by Mr. Gurney that they could only act individually. Consequently some nine hundred applica- tions for arbitration were made, but the magistrates treated
1 39 & 40 George in. c. 90.
2 Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee on the Cotton Weavers' Petitions, 1803.
64 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
the demand as if it were an attempt by the men to fix wages, and said that the Act gave no such power. This interpretation of the Act, which of course made it worthless as a protection to the men against anything but actual fraud or breach of agree- ment, was supported by the legal opinion of Law, afterwards Lord Ellenborough ; Gurney, who advised the men, taking the opposite view that the reduction of wages on this scale was a proper subject for the operation of the Act. When Holcroft was asked if it was the favourite wish in Whitefield that there should be a regulation of wages, he replied : ' It was not only the favourite Wish of the People at Whitefield, but the favourite Wish of the Four Counties of Lancaster, Cheshire, York, and Durham.'
Another witness, James Draper, gave an instance of the dismissal of a workman because he had appointed an arbi- trator, and it came out very clearly in the inquiiy that the masters thought it beneath the dignity of an arbitrator of their class to meet a workman, that they resented workmen being allowed to administer oaths, and that dishonesties and frauds of the meanest kind were very common on the part of the employers. One master, Richard Cliff, in defending his conduct in choosing a remote and non-effective arbitrator, said, ' I don't know who I could have got to attend against the People who were appointed on the Weavers' Side.'
It is clear that there was a good deal of uneasiness amongst the authorities about the attitude of the weavers, law-abiding and even anti-Jacobin though the latter at this time were. Prices were leaping up, food riots were occurring all over the country, and sedition of the stomach and sedition of the mind were often confounded by the anxious friends of law and order. When hunger prompted the composition of the many doggerel rhymes 1 sent up by the recipients in alarm to the Home Office during these years, it was in truth difficult to distinguish the two. Any attempt of the working classes to assist themselves in the ' Wants and Distresses arising from the various Events which Divine Providence may permit to chasten us ' 2 was regarded with suspicion, hence it is not sur- prising to find Mr. Bayley, who at this time wrote constantly
1 e.g. ' The Bishops, Vicars, Curates,
Parliament and Kings Not only Evils are But worthless Things.'— H.O., 42. 55.
Salford magistrates' handbill, H.O., 42. 48.
THE COTTON WORKERS 65
to the Home Office, declaring that 'much of sedition has mixed itself with the Weavers' Petition and Bill. It will not have escaped your Observation,' he adds, ' that Mr. Gurney is their Counsel and Mr. Foulkes their Solicitor.' *
' Cavalry should be stationed near Bolton and an eye kept on whole quarter' is the official endorsement of an enclosure in Mr. Bayley's letter. The enclosure, from Mr. Fletcher of Bolton who figures in our pages elsewhere, had amongst other things urged the taxation of the export of cotton twist, a measure which was constantly being pressed by the weaving interest, and as constantly opposed by the spinning interest, Mr. Bayley's fears were not allayed by the receipt of an anony- mous threatening letter a few weeks later.2 There is of course no reason to connect this letter with the weavers or their organisation, but as a type of the letters that were showered upon the magistrates all over England wherever famine was rife, it is worth while to quote part of it. These letters are interesting as showing how far the poor were from taking the same view as their betters about the chastening mercies of Divine Providence. We have altered the spelling and punc- tuation. ' And the people said unto Joshua, the Lord our God will we serve and His voice will we obey. You Magis- trates and Gentlemen of old England, by God's laws and the church we mean to stand, and men's laws to destroy. Unless the price of provisions comes to a fair price, a famine appears in the midst of plenty. Betwixt the Badger and the huxter the poor do starve. As a caution take this writ. For a fare living on our bended knees to God we will call.' Unless this comes about the writer threatens ' a civil war ' and ' your fine halls and your pleasure ground we will destroy either by fire or sword.'
Throughout the year 1801 there was great distress among the workers in the cotton district, and great alarm among the authorities. There seemed indeed cause for alarm lest hunger should drive the manufacturing population, ill-policed as it was, into open rebellion against law and order.8 There were rumours that the cotton factories at Bolton would be burnt, tales were told of large bodies of men, some said fifty
1 H.O., 42. 50. * Ibid.
3 The sums paid for the prosecution of felons in the county of Lancaster rose from .£583 in 1798 to ^1429 in 1799, and £2764 in 1800. Of these sums nearly two-thirds were paid at Manchester. H.O., 42. 55 (Mr. Bayley, October 21).
E
66 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
thousand, bound together by illegal oaths. The magistrates were not the only alarmists. Thomas Ainsworth, the manu- facturer, wrote to Sir Robert Peel (1st Baronet) from Bolton : l ' There is nothing to fear from Jacobinism further than avail- ing themselves of the distracted state of the country and the common saying of the poor is better to die in a battle than be starved in our houses.' With reference to a rising he adds : ' If ever there is an invasion or other commotion to employ the regular force of the country I make no doubt but that opportunity will be seized.' Mr. Yates, Peel's partner, wrote in equal alarm two days later, giving an account of food riots at Bury : 2 ' I am sorry to say that what I have seen and heard to-Day, convinces me that the Country is ripe for rebel- lion and in a most dangerous situation, and I firmly believe that if provisions continue at the present high prices, a Revolution will be the consequence . . . my heart bled this morning,' he adds, ' to see so many Children not more than half Fed.' Both these gentlemen share the magistrates' doubts of the Volunteers. In the Bury food riot it was thought wiser not to call them out. Mr. Ainsworth went so far as to declare ' great doubts are entertained as to Volunteers acting and some are supposed to be corrupted. I am of opinion not one Corps in Lancashire would [act] 3 in their own Towns against their neighbours and perhaps relatives.'
Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the magistrates were alarmed. Seditious language was not wanting,4 but more dangerous than mere seditious language, doctrines subversive of the foundations of society were being circulated in the cotton district,5 and opinions unfavourable to the Government seemed to be gaining ground. This was the belief of Mr. Fletcher of Bolton, who wrote that he had ' en- couraged several loyal masters who employ great numbers of servants in different Branches of the Cotton manufacture, to examine into the political opinions of their workmen, and to discharge such as are known to be Jacobin from their employ.' 6
1 H.O., 42. 61, March 12, 1801. 2 H.O., 42. 61. 8 Torn out.
4 e.g. One Dyson was sent to the Salford House of Correction for saying 'Damn the King and Country.' When told he would be informed against, thinking perhaps he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, he not only damned the magistrates but damned the volunteers for a set of damned fools. He had further announced that it was 'time to take Billy Pitt's head off.' II. O., 42. 62.
f See Town Labourer, p. 315. 8 H.O., 42. 62.
THE COTTON WORKERS 67
It is in the year 1801 that the first mention is made in the Home Office Papers of that unhallowed band of informers and spies, of whom the magistrates henceforth made continual use. The Rev. Mr. Hay, J.P., who will figure later in the Luddite chapters, rejoices in having found an informer to attend the secret meetings, although it cannot be said that the information he furnished was very exciting.1 Mr. Fletcher of Bolton also begins to send up informers' tales.2 It is in this year that we first hear of Mr. Bent, alias ' B.,' so long the trusted informer of Mr. Fletcher and the trusted confidant of the discontented.3
Meanwhile the organised weavers directed their efforts to obtaining by lawful means an amendment of the Arbitration Act. Now an application for amendment involved concerted action, and concerted action, however law-abiding, in this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, was at once attributed by the magistrates to sedition and Jacobinism, and hence the weavers worked under difficulties. Their meetings, too, were constantly stopped or dispersed.
' The intention of a second application to Parliament to amend what is called the Weavers' Bill,' wrote the Rev. Mr. Bancroft of Bolton,4 ' has I believe been made a means of combining and stimulating the People. It was mentioned before that Correspondencies were carried on between a Leader here (Holcroft) and the People of Scotland. I expect that Holcroft has of late abated in his exertions.'
Mr. Fletcher of Bolton wrote to the same effect early next year : 5
' In this neighbourhood (Bolton) the seditious seem to be mostly occupied about the intended application to Parliament for regulating the cotton manufacture. This application (although perhaps some small alteration may be necessary in the existing Laws as to that Trade) certainly originates in the Jacobin Societies and is intended as a means to keep the
1 H.O., 42. 62. * H.O., 42. 62, and 42. 65.
J See Chapter x. B.'s name occurs in some papers sent up to the Law Officers about the prosecution of persons for sedition. The suspected persons meet in public-houses to redreas gri«vances ; they talk vaguely about the regulation of wages, and Bent the chairman, who always dealt in large figures, declared that he could raise 50,000 women and children in three days. The Law Officers discouraged the idea of prosecuting without more facts than those disclosed. H.O., .12. 61.
4 May 2, 1801, H.O., 42. 62. * Apiil 3, 1802, H.O., 42. 65.
68 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
minds of the Weavers in a continual Ferment, and as a Pre- text to raise Money from them which will probably be em- ployed in part at least, to seditious purposes.'
Parliament was less suspicious of the weavers' intentions than were the magistrates, and a Special Committee, from whose report we have already quoted, heard evidence from both masters and men. The result of the inquiry was the passing of an amending Act designed, not as the weavers had hoped, to oblige the masters to carry out the law, but to soften their hearts towards it by removing some of the features that were particularly repugnant to them.
In the course of the debate Rose made a significant speech commenting upon the ' extraordinary way ' in which the masters had behaved and suggesting the application of an Act like the Spitalfields Act to the cotton manufacture. * That law might be extended to the cotton trade with much less difficulty, and in the silk trade there were above 1000 articles to become the object of the wages of workmen, whilst in the cotton trade there were not above 100.' 1
The amending Arbitration Bill, as introduced in 1803, pro- vided that the J.P. was to choose two arbitrators, one to be a master or manager or foreman, the other to be taken from a list drawn up by the workmen. The Act 2 in its final form empowered the magistrate to choose a panel (not less than four or more than six, half to be masters or their agents, the other half to be weavers) from which the two sides should each choose an arbitrator. Another provision in the Act sought to protect the workman from a common method of fraud by obliging the masters to give out tickets, if required, stating the quality, nature, and price of the work assigned to a work- man. The new Act seems to have been practically inopera- tive. Richard Needham indeed declared later that it had answered its purpose to a great extent and that thousands of pounds had been recovered under it,3 but Needham's views were not shared by his fellow weavers. From this time he became closely allied with the authorities and represented what they termed the ' loyal ' weavers, whilst the great mass of his fellow workers were gradually becoming convinced that application to an unreformed Parliament was useless. A
1 Parliamentary Register, February 13, 1804. 8 44 George in. c. 87.
3 Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 544 ; Committee on Hand-loom Weavers, 1834, p. 421.
THE COTTON WORKERS 69
petition from the cotton weavers at Bolton in 1813 described the Act as ' unavailing inasmuch as no one conviction before a Magistrate under this Law has ever been confirmed at any Quarter Sessions of the Peace ' ; l and in the Reform agita- tion of 1819 the uselessness of the Act was constantly men- tioned as an illustration of the necessity for a radical reform of Parliament.2
The clause requiring the masters to give out tickets was evaded by giving tickets with ' no wages promised.' A witness before the Committee on the Cotton Weavers' Petitions in 1808 described how one master, who had suffered defeat in an arbitration, indemnified himself by a general reduction of wages. Arbitration, in fact, without the right and the power of combination was worthless from the moment the masters had set their faces against it. Moreover, apart from the Combination Laws, organised action amongst the weavers was particularly difficult, and every year the difficulty increased.
The Decline of the Weavers
Before describing the renewed and persistent applications of the weavers, and of many of their employers, for a regula- tion of wages, it will be well to discuss some of the peculiar circumstances of the weaving trade, and to glance ahead at that future of long-drawn-out misery which the victims were striving in vain to elude. From the prosperous men described by Radcliffe3 who believe, in the depression of 1799, that Government has only to be told the truth to restore them to their former condition, the hand -loom weavers become by 1832 perhaps the most wretched and famished class in the com- munity. The figures given in the Report of the Committee on Hand-loom Weavers in 1835 illustrate that decline graphically.4 Assuming that the wage was spent in equal proportions on
1 House of Commons Journal, February 25, 1813; cf. p. 87. Needham wanted the power of appeal to Quarter Sessions against the penalty taken away. See Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 544.
2 e.g. In 1819 the Stockport weavers spoke of it as a law ' granted them after spending many thousands of pounds to obtain it ; which law professes to redress their grievances, and then to protect them from oppression in future. But the magistrates would not act upon it.' See Manchester Observer of July 3 in H.O., 42. 189. Cf. Broadhurst's speech at Blackburn Reform Meeting : see Manchester Observer, July 10, in H.O., 42. 189.
1 See p. 58 above.
4 Parliamentary Papers, 1835, xiii. p. 13, quoted by Chapman, op. cit.t p. 43.
70 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
flour, oatmeal, potatoes, and butcher's meat, the Committee worked out the comparative wages as follows :
1797-1804 — price 26s. 8d. amt. of provs. 281 Ibs. 1804-1811 „ 20s. „ „ 238 „
1811-1818 „ 14s. 7d. „ „ 131 „ 1818-1825 „ 8s. 9d. „ „ 108 „
1825-1832 „ 6s. 4d. „ „ 83 „
There were many causes at work to bring about this disas- trous result. Weaving was easily learned,1 and during its pros- perous days it offered the attraction of high wages. In other trades, the trade societies managed to restrict the flow of incomers ; the weavers, disorganised and scattered, had no such power. Ireland was pouring out her population from their wretched homes into Lancashire ; peasants and cottagers, dis- possessed by the agricultural revolution in England, were leaving the land, and after 1815 discharged soldiers were looking for employment. Hand-loom weaving became the 4 refuge of the surplus numbers from nearly all other trades.' 2 At the same time numbers of small masters sprang up, because the cotton trade offered rapid profits and in the early days comparatively little capital was needed. Competition or the spirit of enterprise led them to vie with each other in cheapening production by cutting wages. They took full advantage of the weak and disorganised position of the weavers, playing upon their necessities until they had reduced them below subsistence level, and employers who would have preferred to pay good wages thought themselves bound to follow suit.
The Power-Loom
In the later years the extension of the use of the power- loom was one element in the depression of the hand-loom weavers. The process was slow, for though the power-loom was invented in 1785, as late as 1835 the Select Committee that reported on Hand-loom Weavers could report that while the power-loom had been in operation for many years, it was only of late that it had come into direct competition with hand-
1 There were of course special kinds of weaving that required strength and skill, and the Hand-loom Weavers' Commissioners pointed out that the men who did this fine work suffered much less and were earning aos. to 28s. a week in 1839 (Chapman, op. cii., p. 43).
2 Report from Hand-loom Weavers' Commissioners, 1841, p. 40.
THE COTTON WORKERS 71
looms. Its advance was actually retarded by the low rate at which the hand labourers worked.1
The story of the original invention of the power-loom is a curious one. The Rev. Edmund Cartwright, a country parson, Fellow of Magdalene, Cambridge, and brother of Major Cart- wright the reformer, was staying for a holiday at Matlock in 1784, and happened to fall into conversation with some Man- chester men about the newly invented spinning machinery. With the boldness of inexperience, for he had never even seen a weaver at work, Cartwright advanced the proposition that weaving no less than spinning should be done by machinery. The experts derided him, advancing arguments which from want of technical knowledge he could not even understand. Cartwright went home, and from his theoretical knowledge of the process of weaving invented the first power-loom which he patented in 1785. This invention produced cloth indeed, but it took ' two powerful men to work the machine at a slow rate, and only for a short time. . . . This being done, I then condescended to see how other people wove ; and you will guess my astonishment, when I compared their easy mode of operation with mine.' 2 He set himself to improve his power- loom, and in 1787 took out a patent for an improved machine. Cartwright, like Crompton, had little business ability, and his attempts to profit by his invention were failures. A factory for four hundred of his looms was indeed built by Messrs. Grimshaw in Manchester, but it was burnt down in 1792 and not rebuilt.
The power-loom was in fact still too clumsy a machine for general use, but some of its defects were remedied by a dressing machine, patented by William Radcliffe of Stockport in 1803-4.3 Hitherto each power-loom had required a man to dress the warp from time to time ; by this invention the warp was dressed before it was put into the loom. In 1803 Mr. H. Horrocks of Stockport patented power-looms of iron, another important improvement. Yet in spite of these
1 ' It is now found, for the first time in the history of mankind, so low are wages fallen, so great is the pressure of distress, that manual labour is making reprisals on machinery, standing a successful competition with it, beating it out of the market, and precluding the use of an engine, far from costly in itself, which saves three labourers in four. The farther introduction of the power loom is actually stopped by the low rate of weavers' wages ! ' — Brougham, Speech, House of Commons, March 13, 1817 ; Spteches, 1838 edition, vol. i. p. 560.
a Cart wright's own statement (see Baines, op. «'/., p. 230).
3 Baines, op. cit., p. 231.
72 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
improvements power-looms were not universally adopted. The attempts of the workers to destroy them in 1812 are described in a later chapter.1 In 1813 it was estimated that there were 2400 power-looms in the United Kingdom ; in 1820 there were 14,150 (12,150 of them in England) ; in 1829 there were 55,500 (45,500 in England), and by 1833 they had reached a total of 100,000 (85,009 in England).2
In spite of this rapid growth in the number of power-looms, the number of hand-loom cotton weavers did not decrease during our period. All estimates, it is true, are more or less guesswork, but any marked diminution must have been noticed. Baines 3 accepts the estimates of the number of cotton hand-loom weavers in 1833 in England as 200,000, and thinks that they had probably increased rather than diminished during the previous years. It was only in the thirties that the power-looms were used for muslin goods.
The early power-loom weavers were all women or boys. In the case of spinning, when work left the cottage for the factory, men in factories with the help of children replaced the women domestic spinners : in weaving, when the change from domestic to factory industry took place, women and boys in factories replaced men who had worked at home.
The Agitation for a Minimum Wage
The weavers had desired a Bill for regulating wages, and had received instead from Parliament in 1804 the second Arbitration Act. They had not renounced their hopes, and Rose's speech in the debate on the Arbitration Act had given them some encouragement. The first move in the agitation, which culminated in the riots at Manchester on the rejection of the Minimum Wage Bill in 1808, seems to have come from the masters. The inner history of the movement is best told in Richard Needham's words : 4 ' In 1805 the master manu- facturers, some of the most wealthy in Bolton, applied to me and others to desire the weavers to call a meeting and choose a committee, and they would go with us to Parliament to get a regulatory law on the principle of the Spitalfields Act, we were glad of it and we did do so : those gentlemen met us
1 See Chapter x.
3 Report from Assistant Hand-loom Weavers' Commissioners, 1840, quoted Chapman, op. cit.^ p. 28.
3 Op. cit.y p. 237.
4 1834 Report from Select Committee on Hand-loom Weavers, p. 421.
THE COTTON WORKERS 73
and a joint Committee was appointed.' It was in connection with this movement that Mr. Fletcher of Bolton noted the weavers' activity. The disaffected, he writes,1 are ' under the mask of protecting the Weavers against their Employers, forming them into Societies, each consisting of any number of classes not exceeding eleven — these Classes by a manager corresponding with the Secretary of the Society and each Society sending a delegate to a general meeting.' They had printed rules ; the entrance fee was 4d. and the subscription Id. a week. The growth of such a society, Mr. Fletcher points out, might become not only injurious to the ' manufacturing Interest,' but dangerous to Government, since the leaders would have at their disposal large sums of money, and most of the leaders are ' known to entertain Opinions adverse to our happy Constitution.' The same letter encloses a bill for £123, 3s. 6£d., being the payment for the services of four spies, B., C., T., and L. F. since the previous August.
The efforts of the weavers to obtain a minimum wage were connected by Mr. Fletcher with the further agitation also engineered by ' the disaffected ' against the Corn Law of 1804. This law, it will be remembered, practically prohibited the importation of foreign corn till the price of English corn had risen to 63s., instead of to the 50s. fixed in 1791. A petition against the law was extensively signed in Manchester and ' B.' was one of the Committee.2
The weavers meanwhile were very busy with their applica- tion. * We applied to Parliament,' said Richard Needham,3 * in 1806, but a dissolution of Parliament took place in con- sequence of a disagreement between His Majesty and his Ministers.' The Whig Ministry of * All the Talents' then took office for a brief year, but they showed no favour to the application. ' At that time the present Earl Grey was Secretary of State for the Home Department,4 and he would not suffer us to go into the question till we had had an interview with the Board of Trade. We had an interview with them and they opposed us.' 5 A monster petition was presented to Parlia- ment on February 26, 1807,6 signed (according to Needham) by no fewer than 180,000 cotton weavers from Lancashire,
1 January 16, 1805, H.O., 42. 82. 2 H.O., 42. 79, 42. 80, 42. 82.
3 1834 Report from Select Committee on Hand-loom Wearers, p. 421.
4 This, of course, was a mistake. The Home Secretary was Lord Spencer.
5 Lord Auckland was at the Board of Trade. 8 House of Commons Journal.
74 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
Cheshire, and York. This petition pointed out '|that when- ever the demand for goods becomes slack, many Master Manu- facturers adopt the expedient of reducing wages, thereby compelling the Petitioners, in order to obtain a livelihood, to manufacture great quantities of goods at a time, when they are absolutely not wanted, and that great quantities of goods so manufactured are sacrificed in the market at low prices, to the manifest injury of the fair dealer, and the great oppres- sion of the Petitioners,' who could often only earn 9s. a week. They asked for a Bill to regulate wages from time to time.
In March 1807 the Whig Ministry fell and Perceval became Prime Minister, with Rose, the professed friend of the minimum wage policy, at the Board of Trade. Hopes of Government action ran high. Early in 1808 the Journeymen Cotton Weavers again petitioned Parliament 1 asking that a minimum price should be fixed, below which goods should not be manu- factured, and drawing attention to their growing distress owing to the bankruptcy of many masters. Their average earnings were now six shillings a week. Several masters supported the men's application. Richard Ainsworth, a manufacturer, sent up a petition 2 stating that a meeting of masters at Bolton had approved the action of the men,3 and on March 9 an im- portant petition from several Cotton Merchants, Manufac- turers and others in Lancashire and Cheshire, was presented to Parliament.4 This petition stated that the petitioners had suffered great injury from the fluctuation in wages, which during the last three years had been more than 100 per cent., being at least 33 per cent, on the value of a great part of the cotton goods in a finished state, ' and that this fluctuation of wages gives no increase to the demand from foreign markets, whilst its direct tendency is to ruin the fair Manufacturer by reducing the value of his stock on hand ; and that capital, ingenuity and industry cannot ensure success in the Cotton Trade till some limits are fixed by the Legislative below which the wages of workmen cannot be reduced.' The petitioners appealed to the landlord interest in Parliament, pointing out that it would ultimately be affected by the numbers of poor thrown on to the parish for relief.
These petitions were referred to a Select Committee, who
1 House of Commons Journal, February 19, 1808.
2 Ibid., March 7, 1808.
* Cf. Mr. Fletcher, December 27, 1807, in H.O., 42. 91. 4 House of Commons Journal.
THE COTTON WORKERS 75
at first merely reported the evidence.1 The inner history of negotiations has been told by Richard Needham and others. The masters' petition, says Needham,2 was * signed by 101 master manufacturers, and most of them very wealthy, some of them kept a thousand hands.' They sent up six delegates from Manchester, Chorley, Preston, Bolton, and Stockport. The men also sent delegates whose expenses were largely paid out of money loaned by different Friendly Societies.3 The Bill favoured by the committee of men, which the delegates went to London to promote, provided that fifteen towns or districts were to send persons chosen by masters and men to Manchester, where under the presidency of the presiding magistrate they were to fix wages.4 The list of subscriptions for the purpose, which has also been preserved, is interesting.5 £477, Is. 6d. was raised, and the subscribers include
£ s. D.
By Mr. Ainsworth for masters . 75 0 0
Mr. Horrocks, M.P. . . 31 10 0
J. B. Spencer & Co. . . . 10 10 0
Sir Robert Peel, M.P. . . . 31 10 0
Even Mr. Fletcher of Bolton no longer saw disguised sedition in the prayer for a minimum wage. He wrote in February 1808 6 to say that the weavers and some of the manufac- turers had agreed to petition Parliament to regulate wages, and that the committee for managing the application have been detached from the agitators for peace. ' To secure these Men by Attention to their Application — even though it should not be deemed expedient to make the Law proposed — will tend much to give a right Bias to the Weavers' Affections both on this and future Occasions.'
The London merchants joined forces with the applicants : 7 * there was a meeting of merchants formed in London, and the leaders of that meeting were Messrs. Helps, Lewis and Ray, the two Goldschmidts, brothers, Messrs. Rowland and Burrs, in fact the whole of the merchants of Cheapside were
1 1808 Report of Select Committee on Cotton Weavers' Petitions, printed April I a. 8 1834 Report from Select Committee on Hand-loom Weavers, p. 421.
3 See Mr. Fletcher, March 6, 1816, in H.O., 42. 149.
4 See Philip Halliwell's evidence before Select Committee on Hand-loom Weavers' Petitions, 1834, p. 447.
5 Ibid., p. 448. « H.O., 42. 95.
7 R. Needham, 1834 Committee on Hand- loom Weavers' Petitions, p. 422.
76 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
on the committee and joined with us, and they subscribed money to support the application.' Needham gives an account of a curious incident from which it seems that the policy of a minimum wage was nearly adopted : '. . . Mr. Rose com- municated to me when I arrived in London that the Privy Council had had a meeting, and that the Ministers had agreed to give us an Act for three years on condition we would submit to that ; a meeting of the merchants of London took place at Mr. Ainsworth's, Cheapside, and they were ready to receive it ; however the following morning I was to have the ulti- matum of Government ; and then they would only give it for one year, and the merchants would not consent to take it upon that principle.' An interview took place, between Perceval and nineteen merchants and manufacturers at which Richard Needham was also present. All urged Perceval to facilitate the passing of the law. ' Mr. Perceval raised many objections, and those objections were answered by many of the merchants, large manufacturers and spinners, some of whom were employ- ing 1400 persons ; Mr. Perceval proposed that there should be a meeting called at Manchester of all the influential manu- facturers, such as the Horrockses, Ainsworths, and others, that they should meet and agree to this measure ; and if the smah manufacturers who afterwards competed with them entered into a competition to run the prices down, he would on the ensuing session of Parliament, pass those resolutions into a law, but the manufacturers and merchants refused to act upon that proposal.' *
How far were the manufacturers and merchants really sincere in their advocacy of the minimum wage ? Whatever their original sincerity it was clearly unable to stand the test of opposition. Possibly some of the masters, in the spirit of Mr. Fletcher of Bolton, thought it desirable to humour the men by subscribing to their cause. Peel's conduct is a case in point. Needham in his enthusiasm probably exaggerated their zeal, for it is impossible to believe that had they been truly in earnest the project would have been so friendless in Parliament.
One manufacturer indeed, Thomas Ainsworth, a man paying some £40,000 a year in wages, was unsparing in his advocacy. Eleven years later he addressed to Sidmouth a long memo- randum about the repeated vain applications to Government
1 1834 Committee on Hand-loom Weavers' Petitions, p. 425.
THE COTTON WORKERS 77
for a regulation of wages, a memorandum in which narrative is so mingled with rhetoric that there is some excuse for the flippant official endorsement * A Rhapsody.' l ' I was . . . both pressed and led by inclination,' he writes, ' during Mr. Perceval's time, into the service of the distressed Manufacturers and Weavers, in order to state their case to Government, etc., and seek relief — To detail to your Lordship the support we had from the Country Manufacturers, and the Merchants in London, etc. The arguments then used, The causes of the distress assigned, The remedy proposed and the probable result of an unsuccessful application would fill a volume.' He then details a private interview he had with Mr. Perceval when Ainsworth warned him in vain of impending calamity.
The project had a very brief life in the House of Commons. Rose, Vice-President of the Board of Trade, moved apolo- getically for leave to bring in a Bill to regulate wages in cotton weaving.2 The fate of the proposal was a foregone conclu- sion. Perceval explained naively ' that it was better that the cotton weavers should be disappointed after a discussion of the merits of their application in the House of Commons, than by a refusal of his honourable friend to submit it for consideration.' Sir Robert Peel expressed his disapproval of the measure and with regard to ' this application being coun- tenanced by the masters, he was sure, if this was the case at all, it was only in a very limited degree ' : a curious com- mentary on his subscription of £31, 10s. No voice was raised on behalf of the Bill, whilst, in addition to Perceval and Peel, Davies Giddy, Horner, Lord Milton, Thomson, Tierney, Baring, and Lascelles all spoke against it. The arguments were of the usual kind : that abilities must be equalised before a minimum wage could be fixed ; that numbers of workmen would be discharged and left to destitution ; that the evil in the trade was not that wages were too low but that they had been too high and thereby attracted an abnormal supply of labour. Rose withdrew his proposal ; he had previously explained that he made it not from a conviction of the ' pro- priety ' of the measure, but from a desire to comply with the wishes of the cotton weavers * backed with the consent of their employers.'
Unfortunately the reasoning that convinced the House of Commons seemed less conclusive to Manchester, and the
1 H.O., 42. 197, October 21, 1819.
* Parliamentary Register, May 19, 1808.
78 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
refusal of Parliament to discuss the Bill was followed by serious rioting. To appreciate the full extent of the distress of the time we must bear in mind that a large number of the weavers were Irishmen and therefore without a settlement and not entitled to any parish relief.1 The wages of the weavers in employment were admittedly only 6s. a week. The workmen started by holding orderly meetings on May 24 and 25, from which they sent delegates to the principal manufacturers, and to the borough-reeve and other town officers asking for a redress of their grievances. A correspondent in the Times stated that there were from 10,000 to 15,000 people present on the second day. ' Loud indeed were the murmurs of the poor wretches but not the least indication was there of a riot. Many baskets of bread, with some ale, and several cans of butter-milk were distributed among the multitude ; and their sorrowful and piteous tales of distress quite unmanned me, as also several other sympathetic spectators.' 2 As the assembly failed to disperse when the borough - reeve advised them to do so, the soldiers were called in and they killed one man,3 and wounded several others.
Having failed in their appeals to Parliament, to their em- ployers, and to the local authorities, the men struck work, demanding a 33| per cent, advance in their wages. They prevented any others from working by the simple expedient of entering their houses and taking away the shuttles. The policy spread over the cotton district : Stockport, Rochdale, Wigan, and other places were affected. One gentleman who went with a force of 100 volunteers to stop a party of strikers near Manchester was much impressed by their reasonable- ness, when he parleyed with them. ' The Language they held forth to me was this, that for the last six months their distress had been well known, and no prospect of being relieved appeared, that driven to the miserable situation in which they stood it was indifferent to them which way they perish'd ; they acknowledged the Law was against their present conduct, but extreme want was the cause.' 4
The panacea suggested by one Lancashire magistrate, Colonel Silvester, was to make the taking away of shuttles a
1 Times, May 30, 1808 ; cf. H.O., 42. 95. 2 Times, May 28, 1808.
3 Prentice, Historical Sketches of Manchester, 1851, p. 31, says 'the officers and soldiers of the 4th Dragoon Guard presented a day's pay to the widow of the poor man who was killed.'
4 H.O., 42. 95, May 30, 1808.
THE COTTON WORKERS 79
capital felony,1 an expedient which also commended itself to the energetic Mayor of Wigan who had arrested some shuttle takers. ' This Case was considered by me to be barely Felony — but I wished to give it that construction, conceiving that such an interpretation of the Offence would have great effect on the Minds of the People.' 2
At Rochdale there was some disorder. The strikers happened to leave unguarded two bags full of shuttles, which the constables seized and deposited for safety in the House of Correction. The strikers, after rescuing five or six of their comrades who were being conveyed to prison, came up and demanded the shuttles : their demand being refused they broke into the prison and burnt it down. One ardent spirit, Samuel Bayley, a book-keeper, was heard to hail this event rather prematurely as a second fall of the Bastille, an exclamation of which he afterwards repented at leisure in prison.3
Early in June (1808) it was reported that 60,000 looms were idle in the Manchester district. At the end of May the masters — 350 of them according to Needham *• — held a meet- ing and agreed to give a 20 per cent, advance ; some person signed this agreement for the weavers, but the main body of weavers repudiated the agreement and held out for their 33£ per cent.5 The men during the strike drew on the funds of the Friendly Societies.6
The strike did not extend to Yorkshire, though the Lanca- shire woollen weavers joined the cotton weavers, and there were some food riots on the borders of Yorkshire and Lanca- shire in the Clitheroe district.7
Curiously enough there is no record in the Home Office Papers of the terms on which the strikers finally returned to work ; apparently they gained their demands.8 Richard Needham, who dissociated himself from the extremists and
1 H.O., 42. 95, May 31. a H.O., 42. 95, June 15.
3 H.O., 42. 95-
4 Report from Select Committee on Hand-loom Weavers' Petitions, 1834.
8 See H.O., 42. 95, Handbill enclosed in letter of June 2 ; also Annual Register, 1808 ; Chronicle, p. 63.
8 H.O., 42. 95, June 14; also H.O., 42. 149, March 16, 1816, where a report from Adjt. Warr on Friendly Societies states that they gave IDS. a head to be repaid in six or twelve months with interest.
7 H.O., 42. 95, June 9.
8 See H.O., 42. 95. Lord Ribblesdale, June 10, wrote that grain was lowered and wages raised.
80 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
was willing to take the 20 per cent, advance offered by the masters, afterwards described the victory as lasting for about a month ' and then it all tumbled to ruins again.' J During that month the victorious weavers must have thought a strike a better method of gaining their ends than appeals to Parlia- ment.
The weavers did not all return to work at once, and for some time spasmodic disorders continued, the malcontents occasionally syringing goods with vitriol. ' The women,' it was said, ' are, if possible, more turbulent and mischievous than the men. Their insolence to the soldiers and special constables is intolerable, and they seem to be confident of deriving impunity from their sex.' 2
The movement for Parliamentary Reform was going on steadily all this time, but was quite unconnected with the strike ; indeed the politicians of Royton, that home of debating societies and disaffection, even issued a han .""bill to the weavers, urging them to return to work and to spend their energies on attacking the war, the root of evil.3
That public sympathy was on the side of the weavers is manifest from the trials of the rioters at the Lancaster Assizes on September 5. The Crown was clearly anxious not to press the charges, and the tone of the prosecution and the sentences are in marked contrast to those after the Luddite disturbances four years later. Six men were proved to have gone with other persons to Mr. Thomas Ashton's house at Heap near Manchester at night and to have forced him, after some rough handling, to sign a paper promising increased wages : ' . . . from their violent conduct,' said Mr. Ashton, ' he was fearful that his life was in danger, and he signed the paper upon his knees in the public road.' Their counsel eh' cited from Mr. Ashton the admission that his wages were not above half as much as they used to be, and the Jury acquitted all the prisoners.4 It is fair to add that Mr. Ashton had expressed his wish that the prosecution should be as lenient as possible.
Only one man was found guilty of firing the prison at Roch- dale and his sentence was two years' imprisonment. The
1 Report from Select Committee on Hand-loom Weavers, 1834.
2 Times, June 25, 1808.
3 H.O., 42. 95, Handbill enclosed in letter of June 2. For Royton see H.O., 42. 87, January 31, 1806; and H.O., 42. 99, October 30, 1809; and H.O., 42. 153, September 14, 1816; and H.O., 42. 163, April 7, 1817.
* Times, September 9, 1808.
THE COTTON WORKERS 81
offence was not capital because no one was dwelling in the prison. Seven other prisoners who had destroyed woollen machinery or broken into houses or extorted money escaped with sentences varying from one to twelve months ; amongst them was a woman, Elizabeth Walmsley, who was sentenced for breaking three shopkeepers' windows in Blackburn with a big stick. Six strikers who had taken away shuttles or stopped persons from working were not proceeded against.1
The leniency shown to the riotous weavers was not extended to a man in a more prosperous condition of life, who was charged with having encouraged the strikers. Joseph Hanson, a colonel in the volunteers, who had stood as candi- date for Preston and was popular with the weavers for his advocacy of the minimum wage Bill, rode on to the field during the monster meeting of May 25 and addressed the people in opposition to the wishes of the captain of Dragoons. His own witnesses, citizens of respectable character, swore that he merely urged the people to go home peaceably, but witnesses for the prosecution, a sergeant, two corporals, and two of Nadin's constables, swore that Hanson had used inciting expressions. ' My lads, your cause is good ; be firm and you will succeed.' ' I will support you as far as £3000 will go, and if that will not do, I will go farther.' ' Nadin and his faction shall not drive you from the field this day.' * I am sorry your Bill is lost. My father was a weaver, and I am a weaver, and I am the weavers' friend.' 2
The case was tried before Mr. Justice Grose in the King's Bench in May 1809, and Hanson, after a homily from the Judge, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and to pay a fine of £100.3 The treatment of Hanson seems to have made a profound impression on the minds of the Lancashire workers. Prentice dates from this event ' that bitter feeling of employed against employers ' with which we shall meet later. In their generous indignation they wanted even to pay his fine by penny subscriptions, an offer which was declined ; but 39,600 subscribers presented him with a silver cup.4
Two months before Hanson's trial the Select Committee of the House of Commons, to whom the petition for a minimum wage had been referred, reported again.5 This time they
1 For account of trials see Times, September 9 and 10.
1 Prentice, op. cit., p. 32. ' See State Trials, vol. xzxi. pp. 1-99.
4 Prentice, op. cit., p. 33.
8 Report from Select Committee on Cotton Weavers' Petitions, 1809.
82 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
declared a minimum wage to be ' wholly inadmissible in prin- ciple, incapable of being reduced to practice by any means which can possibly be devised, and, if practicable, would be productive of the most fatal consequences.'
Next year (1810) began well for the manufacturing districts, and a report to the Home Office from Manchester could even declare that ' the lower Classes in this populous district are perfectly happy, content and tranquil in their respective situa- tions,' l a tranquillity that was destroyed by an extensive strike of the spinners.
The weavers' prosperity in 1810 was short-lived. By August trade was declining and their wages were seriously reduced. Their next effort as an organised body was to attempt to induce the masters to limit the quantity of work instead of lowering the price paid for it. Manifestoes were printed in various towns, signed by a committee of weavers and addressed to the manufacturers. The Blackburn Mani- festo,2 after enlarging on the identity of the interests of master and workman, submits a plan to meet the emergency of trade depression. ' It is simply this ; Reduce the Quantity of Goods when the Market is overstock'd, and their value will undoubtedly increase with the scarcity.
' Gentlemen, the whole body of Weavers in this Town have come to a Determination not to submit to a Reduction of Prices, but will rather be limited in the Quantity of their Work, and will, in conjunction with their Masters, bear every priva- tion for a few Weeks or Months, until a change takes place in the Markets.' This manifesto caused so much alarm to the Blackburn magistrates that they asked for troops to be sent there. The local militia, they pointed out, was mostly com- posed of weavers.
Trade went from bad to worse ; no mere restriction of out- put— even had the masters adopted the suggestion — could have tided over the evil days of the Orders in Council.3
The despair of the victims was voiced in an address to the
1 H.O., 42. 1 06. A sidelight is thrown on a method by which the working classes tried to meet fluctuations by the complaint of a colonel of the Lancashire militia that it was a common practice for young men to be bound apprentice to their relatives, and to enlist when trade was bad only to be claimed back as soon as trade revived. See H.O., 42. 105, February 27.
2 H.O., 42. 108, 1810.
3 For an illuminating account of the vicissitudes of the cotton trade during this period, see G. W. Daniels, The Cotton Trade during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
THE COTTON WORKERS 88
' Gentlemen, Landholders, Merchants, Manufacturers, and other respectable Inhabitants ' of Great and Little Bolton from a committee of cotton weavers appealing for a public meeting to consider the distress.1 ' It is true benevolent institutions have been established, and poor rates also are increased, but the temporary relief afforded by these estab- lishments, is only to the most wretched, helpless, and worn- out children of indigence. We are well convinced anything of this nature can never be applied to the relief of many thou- sands mechanics, who are able and willing to labour hard to support their families honestly, and who of course disdain to become paupers, until forced by the arrogant lash of necessity.'
Petition followed petition to London ; the Bolton and Stockport weavers urged the Prince Regent to intervene on their behalf.2 One more effort was made to obtain relief from Parliament. A monster petition, signed by nearly 40,000 weavers from the Manchester district, was presented to the House of Commons on May 30, 1811 ; 3 and it was accompanied by petitions signed by 7000 Bolton weavers, and by 30,000 Scottish weavers.4 These petitions described the miserable plight of the weavers and asked for measures of relief in general terms without mentioning the rating of wages. The Man- chester petition indeed asked for the revocation of the Orders in Council, or if that were impossible a pecuniary grant ; the Bolton petition suggested ' salutary laws,' but the delegate from Manchester and the three delegates from Scotland sent up to forward the business seem to have been more explicit in their demands and it was generally understood that the rating of wages was the weavers' ultimate object. The peti- tions were referred to a Select Committee on June 5, more from a sense of courtesy to the petitioners in their misery, than because any one thought that any relief could be afforded them. The consideration of the report of the Committee was put off tune after time, till at last the question was dis- missed and the petitioners were forced to be content with the many compliments lavished on their patience under suffering, and a suggestion that they should either ' work at lower prices or ... employ their labour in some other manner.' 6
According to Mr. Ainsworth • the delegates disappointed by Government ' applied to the opposition, to Mr. Whit-
1 H.O., 42. lio, February 1811. 8 See H.O., 4*. no, 42. 115.
3 See Hansard. 4 H.O., 42, 117, May 2$, iSn.
* Hansard, June 24, 1811. * See p. 76 above.
84 THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760-1832
bread in particular, his answer as near as can be repeated was as follows : " You have only to petition the King to dismiss his Ministers, we can do nothing while they are in Office, etc.'* The answer of the delegates was, " No, we will not make our concern a party question, we only want the protection we ought to have and we would sooner die than forward such a petition." ' l
How the conduct of the House of Commons struck the petitioners is told in a remarkable paper giving an account of the proceedings, signed by Richard Taylor, secretary of the committee for the petition, but said to be the composi- tion of John Knight.2 This paper may be said to mark a definite date, from which the mass of the weavers, recognising the uselessness of appeals to Parliament, as it was then con- stituted, were driven more and more to take up the cause of reform.
The paper gives an account of the number of signatures and delegates sent up and the reference of the question to a com- mittee whose report was to be considered on the 19th June, but as