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HomeIssues XXX-1The Trade Union Movement, 1850-1914

The Trade Union Movement, 1850-1914

Le mouvement syndical, 1850-1914
Antony Taylor

Abstracts

This article examines the role of trade unionism in the long nineteenth century and considers the drawbacks to standard approaches to this subject. Discussing the changed focus of much historical scholarship towards the history of trade unions, it re-examines the approach to trade union history that emphasizes the movement’s affinities with the Labour party. Moving away from a focus that stresses the institutional and hierarchical histories of individual trade unions, this article explores the new directions in trade union history, stressing the movement’s links with different political parties, recent research on strike action and the rediscovery of particular strikes and the role of transnationalism and emigration in shaping the attitudes and actions of the trade union movement more broadly. Moreover, it detects a renewed focus on the material culture and historical survivals of the trade union movement, and the role of objects like banners in preserving the memory and vigour of the movement in the nineteenth century.    

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Introduction

  • 1 See W. Hamish Fraser, Trade Unions and Society: The Struggle for Acceptance 1850-1880 (London, Geor (...)
  • 2 Malcolm Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot, Ashga (...)
  • 3 Alastair J. Reid, ‘Labour and the trade unions’ in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds) (...)

1A wide literature exists in relation to British trade unionism. A number of seminal studies have explored the movement’s origins, chronologies, the place of trade unions in working-class life, changes in the composition of trade union membership, and the place of trade unionism in the broader history of labour. Further scholarship has emphasized the importance of trade societies and trade unionism in inculcating issues of respectability and self-help, as well as exploring work-place solidarities in working-class associational culture. In this literature trade unions are usually depicted as central to the societal developments of the mid-late nineteenth-century in Britain.1 Standard accounts see them as important in conferring stability in the middle decades of the nineteenth century period, and pivotal in a move away from models of mass political protest of the kind embodied in workplace vandalism, machine breaking and Chartism, towards institutional and organizational methods of protest, campaigns for improved pay and conditions, wage and workplace bargaining, a new legal status for unions, and an embedded presence in communities bounded by workplace and home adjacent to factory or mine.2 In a long narrative arc that extended backwards from the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, trade unions were seen as the foundation stones of the representative institutions of organized labour and instrumental in the emergence of a cohort of MPs from working-class backgrounds who spearheaded the demands of voters like themselves.3

Historiography and Background

  • 4 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism 1666-1920 (London. Longmans, Green and Co., (...)
  • 5 R. A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries’ Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism (...)
  • 6 Keith Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism c. 1770-1990 (Stroud, Allan Sutton, 1992), pp. (...)
  • 7 See E. Allan, J.F. Clarke, N. McCord and D.J. Rowe, The North-East Engineers’ Strike of 1871 (Newca (...)
  • 8 David Howell, ‘Taking Syndicalism Seriously’, Socialist History 16 (2000), pp. 27-48.

2Standard histories of British trade unionism have identified a number of key moments in the emergence of recognizable union organization. Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their highly influential, The History of Trade Unionism, published in 1894, were unequivocal in their view that recognizable trade unions emerged in response to the seismic changes and challenges of industrialization, leading directly to the formation of the ‘new model’ unions.4 They discounted any prior organisational links with the guilds or the culture of itinerant tramping artisans that were a feature of Britain’s commercial landscape from the seventeenth century onwards, a reading that has not gone unchallenged by historians like R.A Leeson and Malcolm Chase.5 Much analysis has focused on the later nineteenth-century transition from skilled craft unions towards wider unions of the unskilled, campaigns to secure the legal recognition of trade unions, demands for the eight-hour working day, legitimation of strike action and picketing, the creation of a Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1868 to co-ordinate the efforts of the craft unions, the emergence of a narrow ‘junta’ of insiders who sought to defend the interests of skilled workers and the impact of the creation of a professionalised body of trade union officials on the aims and demands of particular unions.6 Individual trade unions and periods of strike action have generated studies that ascribe particular significance to victories won, concessions gained, and the unfair exactions of mine and factory owners overturned. Securing a nine-hour working day for engineering trades in the north-east in 1871 was seen as a particular milestone.7 Movements like syndicalism in the build-up to the Great War have attracted a lively literature of their own.8

  • 9 See Samuel Higginbottom, Our Society's History. Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers (Manchester, Man (...)
  • 10 For example, A. E. Musson’s The Typographical Association; Origins and History up to 1949 (Oxford, (...)
  • 11 Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851-1867 (London, Odhams, 1967) (...)
  • 12 John Wilson, Memories of a Labour Leader: The Autobiography of John Wilson, J.P., M.P. (Firle, Cali (...)
  • 13 Chase, Early Trade Unionism, p. 234.
  • 14 Nicola Verdon, ‘A Distinctive Service: Ruth Uzzell, the National Union of Agricultural Workers, and (...)
  • 15 Howell, ‘Taking Syndicalism Seriously’, pp. 38-43.

3As is often pointed out, much of the early literature on specific trade unions in Britain was written by professional union officials themselves.9 Often it sought to mark moments of commemoration or the centenaries of specific unions.10 The service of the founders is usually lauded and particular figures canonized, amongst them Robert Applegarth, the first general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, and executive committee member of the TUC who lived until 1924, the year of the first Labour government.11 Autobiographies of individual leaders represent an important source here. From Ploughtail to Parliament (1898), John Wilson’s Memories of a Labour Leader (1910) and George Edwards’ From Crow-Scaring to Westminster (1922) are not untypical of this genre.12 Most of these works were highly masculine in tone. Early histories of trade unionism stressed the domestic and family role of women and depicted them as significant only for their contributions to bread riots and other expressions of direct action by communities in tactics that were disavowed by the skilled craft unions.13 Women as active agents in the formation of trade unions featured infrequently, if at all. As Nicola Verdon has pointed out, the formative experiences of women like Ruth Uzzell who went on to play an active role in the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union after 1922 were barely acknowledged in trade union recollections and retrospectives.14 In addition, the standard histories discounted the role of workplace organisers and militants like the syndicalists, who espoused workplace democracy and openly opposed hierarchies and officialdom in the trade union movement.15

  • 16 Francis Williams, Magnificent Journey: The Rise of the Trade Unions (London, Odhams Press, 1954), c (...)
  • 17 Reg Groves, Sharpen the Sickle: The History of the Farm Workers’ Union (London, Merlin, 1981 [1949] (...)
  • 18 Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (London, Penguin, 1963), pp. 32-65.
  • 19 Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, pp. 72-96.

4These works often present a triumphal vision of the potential and possibilities of trade union activity and progress. Moreover, these studies ran concurrently with celebratory studies of the Labour party, seeing the two movements as innately or irrevocably intertwined. Such links were often reaffirmed during moments of Labour party commemoration. Francis Williams’ outline of trade union history, Magnificent Journey: The Rise of the Trade Unions appeared in 1954, four years after his commemorative study of the rise of the Labour party, Fifty Years March in 1950.16 Here and in much of the literature relating to the Beveridge Report and the building of a post-1945 labour consensus, trade unions were seen as central strands in the development of the welfare state. Against the background of the 1945 Labour government, the later 1940s provided a highpoint in the production of such literature, notably Reg Groves’ study of the agricultural labour unions, Sharpen the Sickle which sought to reclaim the nineteenth-century land worker as an instinctive ‘rebel’.17 The distillation of much of this historiography remains Henry Pelling’s landmark study, A History of British Trade Unionism, which provides a reiteration of the major themes of the ‘forward march of labour’ before the post-war welfare consensus came under question in the 1970s.18 The book presents a whig narrative of the emergence of the trade union movement, as a standard history of highpoints, moving from the rise of skilled craft unions in the early nineteenth-century, through the rise of the ‘new model’ unions, to the impact of the depression of the 1870s that culminated in the precarious work patterns and structural unemployment of 1888-1889 and fostered an increasing pattern of unionization across the unskilled trades.19

5These established histories are often somewhat partial in their analysis of defeat and the problems and setbacks relating to trade union organization and activity. Whilst capturing histories of excluded and marginalized workers little recorded elsewhere at the time in a scholarship that received little academic recognition, they say rather less about the horizontal community ties and workplace cultures that united particular trades in opposition to employers, middlemen and contractors. Further, such work is insufficiently attentive to the international context of trade unionism, issues of gender, rituals of solidarity and fraternity, the material culture of trade unionism, rural trade unionism, issues of race and whiteness, and the broader imperial context of strike action. Overwhelmingly, it focuses on the institutional and hierarchical structures of labour, to the detriment of the rank and file.

Politics, Protest and Strikes

  • 20 Alun Howkins, Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1870-1923 (London, Routledge and Keg (...)
  • 21 F.E. Gillespie, Labor and Politics in England, 1850-1867 (New York, Octagon Books Inc., 1966 [1927] (...)
  • 22 Eugenio Biagini and Alastair J. Reid ‘Currents of radicalism, 1850-1914’ in Biagini and Reid (eds.) (...)
  • 23 Alastair J. Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain’s Trade Unions (London, Penguin, 2005), pp. (...)
  • 24 Lowell J. Satre, Thomas Burt, Miners’ MP, 1837-1922: the Great Conciliator (Leicester, Leicester Un (...)
  • 25 Reid, United We Stand, pp. 133-135.

6Traditional views of the development of trade unionism are not, however, uncontested. As a counter to many established and institutional histories of particular unions, a strain of scholarship has emerged that emphasizes British trade unionism’s links with the Liberal party, and the degree to which numerous prominent trade unionists remained attuned to the everyday culture and context of mid-nineteenth century liberalism, often through the shared fabric of Nonconformity. Alun Howkins highlighted the constraints of this world, bounded by the Nonconformist chapel and cottage hearth, in his study of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU) in Norfolk. Nevertheless, he records a fervour for the union which he describes as sweeping the county ‘like some massive religious revival’.20 Such links between liberalism and trade unionism have long been acknowledged, especially around the Reform League’s campaign for the passage of the 1867 reform act which was bracketed by strike action by the builders’ unions in 1859 and the London operative tailors in 1867.21 Strongly influenced by the political continuity debates of the later 1990s associated with Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid, this school of historical inquiry prioritises evidence of affinities, overlaps and interrelations with the elite culture and hierarchies of the Liberal party, over evidence of class, workplace and communal solidarities (a feature of this scholarship also noted by Matthew Roberts in similar approaches to Chartism in his article in this journal).22 This body of work asserts that the primacy of organized labour has been over-estimated, and arguments for the rise of formal labour organisations in Britain wrongly ascribed to the mid-nineteenth century period, when they more properly occurred in the twentieth century. Such arguments recapture the vigour and cultural salience of mid-nineteenth century liberalism and locate the ‘new model’ unionism of the 1860s in context. Adopting a biographical approach, Alastair Reid in his study of trade unionism, United We Stand, emphasizes the degree to which prominent trade union leaders like George Howell, secretary of the TUC after 1871, through to John Hill, general secretary of the Boilermakers during the Great War, remained culturally wedded to the books, visions and ideas that were inspirational for mid-Victorian liberalism.23 Support for this view is borne out by the biographies of figures like Thomas Burt, north-east miners’ leader, one of two miners’ MPs aligned with the Liberal party elected in 1874, whose outlook was bounded by Primitive Methodism, temperance, self-help, and rejection of the excesses of the Chartist-inspired 1844 miners’ strike in the north-east.24 Whilst acknowledging the exposure of George Howell to Chartism, in Reid’s reading, memories of the movement had relatively little impact on his later development which was primarily about compromise and securing concessions.25

  • 26 James Owen, Labour and the Caucus: Working-Class Radicalism and Organised Liberalism in England, 18 (...)
  • 27 Ibid, pp. 182-183, Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism, p. 62, David Howell, ‘”One meanin (...)
  • 28 Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. (...)
  • 29 Alastair J. Reid, ‘Labour and the trade unions’ in Tanner, Thane and Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s First (...)

7The continuity debate presupposes an unproblematic and untroubled unity between established liberalism and the emergent labourism of the trade unions. Questioning the scale of this convergence, James Owen has emphasized the conditional and fluid nature of the electoral relations between the Liberal party and working-men’s candidates supported by trade unions. He points out that following the Liberal government’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1871 which criminalized picketing, the relations between both sides of the alliance soured.26 Thereafter, plebeian reform and trade union organisations showed a greater willingness to campaign independently outside the Liberal party for elective roles in municipal or local school board elections, and to embrace more emphatic and radically defined platform movements promoting land reform or criticism of the monarchy. As Owen emphasizes, these tensions varied from region to region. The Northumberland Miners’ Union retained strong connections with local Liberal party machinery whilst David Howell has identified a still buoyant strain of ‘ecumenical’ liberalism in the East Midlands coalfield into the 1920s and beyond. In rural districts the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union formed in 1872, which struggled to organize a dispersed and geographically wide constituency and faced orchestrated opposition from landowners, survived by consolidating its links with patrician liberal sympathisers, but moderated its views on land tenure as a consequence.27 Trade union links with popular Toryism were also apparent after Disraeli’s government restored the right to picket in the 1875 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, promoting some joint ventures and demonstrating the looseness of the affinities between liberalism and the trade unions in Manchester and in Lancashire.28 These trade union links with other parties remained deep and enduring. As Alastair Reid has emphasized, it wasn’t until 1909 that the reluctance of local Liberal party associations to adopt working-men’s candidates led the miners’ unions to formally sever their links with the Liberal party.29

  • 30 Terry McCarthy, The Great Dock Strike, 1889: the Story of the Labour Movement’s First Great Victory(...)
  • 31 Eleanor J. Gordon, ‘Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland, 1850-1914’ (Ph.D dissertation, Unive (...)
  • 32 Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History (London, Con (...)
  • 33 John Tully, Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern L (...)
  • 34 Ibid, pp. 291-292.
  • 35 Cathy Hunt, Righting the Wrong: Mary Macarthur 1880-1921. The Working Woman’s Champion (Birmingham, (...)

8Recent work has reaffirmed the centrality of strike action to the consolidation of the trade union movement in Britain and emphasized that extent to which the depression of the 1870s reversed the trade union gains in recognition and protection of funds of the early nineteenth-century. Work on individual strikes since the centenary of the dockers’ strike in 1989 has reiterated the importance of the unskilled strike wave of the late 1880s.30 It brought unskilled Irish labourers and women workers into the trade union movement in large numbers for the first time. The formation of women’s trade union branches like the Dundee and District Mill and Factory Workers’ Union established in 1885 in the jute manufacturing industry in Scotland demonstrated the willingness of women workers to oppose declining pay and conditions in the workplace.31 The 1888 match women’s strike, recently re-examined by Louise Raw, remains central to this narrative of strike activity in the later 1880s.32 Current research, however, has given increased prominence to relatively unresearched strike agitations that were also formative for the unskilled trades unions of the 1880s. John Tully, for example, characterises the Silvertown strike in East London in 1889 that mobilized gas workers and numerous female employees as ‘The East End’s Great Forgotten Strike’.33 He stresses the particular significance of the strike in mobilizing women workers (11% of the workforce across the gas working trades) and bringing them into contact with the advanced radical ideas of Eleanor Marx on sexual and social inequality.34 Women workers were also central to the strike action by chain and nail workers in Cradley Heath in Staffordshire in 1910 that won a minimum wage for employees in that industry. The biography of Mary Macarthur who founded the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW) for unskilled workers in 1906, indicates the prominence of women in these early trade union agitations, and reveals marked overlaps between trade union organizing, the agitation for women’s suffrage and anti-sweating campaigns. Such links are further exemplified by the career of the shopworkers’ activist and later Labour party MP, Margaret Bondfield.35

  • 36 Eddie May, ‘The mosaic of Labour politics, 1900-1918’ in Duncan Tanner Chris Williams and Deian Hop (...)
  • 37 R. Merfyn Jones, The North Wales Quarrymen 1874-1922 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1981), ch (...)
  • 38 Neville Kirk, Custom and Conflict in the ‘Land of the Gael’: Ballachullish, 1900–1910 (London: Merl (...)
  • 39 Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysi (...)

9A literature attentive to regional variations in strike activity, and a four nations approach to labour traditions has further emphasized the importance of strikes in Wales, Scotland and Ireland and their significance for the later nineteenth-century rupture with liberalism. In South Wales, in particular, a crucible of the labour tradition, the Taff Vale decision of 1901, making unions responsible for the loss of profits by employers during strike action, did much to dent the traditional alliance between trade societies, chapel, and advanced radicalism formed in opposition to Anglo-Welsh landowners and the Anglican Church in Wales.36 In North and West Wales where the Welsh language created strong residual links between communities and the Nonconformist churches, the impact of such changes was also felt; the three-year Penrhyn Quarry dispute of 1900-1903 became a national cause célèbre at a time when the Labour party was in the process of formation.37 Further, in Scotland, Neville Kirk has reclaimed the disputes at the Ballachullish quarries in the West Highlands which in two phases between 1902-03 and 1904-06 reiterated the strength of existing custom and practice in the workplace against imported work patterns and new models of workplace management.38 In Ireland in 1913, the lock-out of tram workers in Dublin and the role of James Larkin in promoting a syndicalist strike campaign around the right to unionise that provoked answering state-sponsored violence, marked a highpoint of union activism in the years before 1914.39

  • 40 See Ralph Darlington, Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14 (London, Pluto Press, 2023).
  • 41 Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism, pp. 95-121.
  • 42 James Moher, ‘Walter Citrine: A union pioneer of industrial cooperation’ in Peter Ackers and Alasta (...)

10Such strike action gained a particular salience during the wave of labour unrest (now sometimes seen as a ‘revolt’) inspired by syndicalism in the years 1911-1912 across the railways, mining, and in port working, which culminated in a national mineworkers’ strike in 1912, riots in Liverpool in 1911, and the Black Country strikes of 1912-1913.40 The literature on syndicalism highlights the rejection of parliamentary representation, autonomous organization in the workplace, direct action, campaigns for a general strike and the mobilization of unskilled workers across trade boundaries that contributed to a sense of crisis in the years before the Great War.41 As James Moher has pointed out, the scale and intensity of these strikes encouraged trade union leaders like Walter Citrine to formulate a rules-based order for the conduct of trade union and Labour party meetings, and led to a splintering of syndicalism, with an irreconcilable fringe attracted towards Bolshevism after 1917.42

Transnationalism and Trade Unionism

  • 43 Neville Kirk, ‘Transnational labour history: promise and perils’ in Leon Fink (ed.), Workers Across (...)
  • 44 Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalisation, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA (...)
  • 45 Luke Trainor, British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism: Manipulation, Conflict and Compromise (...)
  • 46 Neville Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia, 1900 to the Present (Manche (...)

11A greater historical emphasis on the interconnections and interrelationships that underpin different geographical and historical contexts has led to an increasing sense of the importance of transnational perspectives that transcend national boundaries and supersede distinctions of class, patriotism, state and nation. Transnationalism has proved especially influential in refining approaches to working-class society and culture, promoting a scholarship that privileges the fluid, the mobile, the transient and the itinerant over the static and the immobile.43 Notions of internationalism and a universal comradeship between workers common in approaches to the history of labour, make scholarship in this area particularly attuned to models and examples of instinctive fraternity across borders. Neville Kirk and Donald MacRaild have outlined the institutional overlaps between trade unions, kinship and friendly societies that were a feature of migrant culture in the Australian colonies and in the United States.44 In recent approaches, this transnational interpretation has proved central in attempts to understand the broader international context of labour. An externalized and global facing vision has been identified as integral to the London dockworkers strike of 1889. Instinctively outward looking in their views and attitudes, the strike by dockworkers received vocal support from portside workers in Sydney and donations amounting to £37,000 from workers mainly from Victoria. This reciprocation has caused the dockworkers’ strike to be reinterpreted as the first manifestation of the wave of strikes in the maritime and carrying trades in 1890 across the Australian colonies and in New Zealand in 1913 in which migrants were prominent.45 Support for the strikers by Australian trade unions began a long period of interest in the British labour press in the benefits and advantages offered to manual workers in white settler colonial economies.46

  • 47 James Jupp, The English in Australia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 82.
  • 48 Ibid, pp. 82-86.
  • 49 Stephen Murray, ‘Transatlantic Migration and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in Fall River, Ma (...)
  • 50 Robert E. Weir, ‘Whose left/who’s Left? The Knights of Labor and “radical progressivism”’ in Pat Mo (...)

12The formative role of British migrants in establishing trade unions in the Australian colonies, especially in the building industry, printing trade and mining, has been acknowledged in studies of migration.47 The Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) in particular, established an offshoot by migrant members in 1852 which evolved into the later Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union.48 In the United States, an ASE branch established by migrants from Lancashire in Fall River, Massachusetts from the 1870s enjoyed a brief period of success, before falling victim to the tensions surrounding the American labour disputes in the 1880s.49 A seafaring romance of the docks also underpinned a waterside traffic that provided a conduit for radical couriers, refugees and unmoored maritime workers in transit between employment markets. The fluidity of this relationship created a route for the American Knights of Labor (KOL) founded in 1882 to establish branches in Britain, notably in port cities like Cardiff and Liverpool, from the mid-1880s. Sometimes depicted as a quasi-Medieval, almost backward-facing organization, that acted as a bridge between older, more covert methods of workplace resistance and modern trade unionism, the KOL achieved considerable success in anti-sweating campaigns in New Zealand, in boycotting unfriendly newspapers there and in pushing for arbitration in industrial disputes in Britain.50

  • 51 Ibid, pp. 50-78.
  • 52 Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labour’s Vale: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park, PA, The (...)
  • 53 Ben Turner, About Myself, 1863-1930 (London, Humphrey Toulmin, 1930), p. 131.
  • 54 Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz and Jeanne Moisand, ‘Introduction’ in Bensimon, Deluermoz and M (...)
  • 55 Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer, ‘Introduction’ in Cole, Struthers and Zimmer (eds), (...)

13At a time when the vigour and energy of the labour movement in the United States contrasted with the stagnant nature of radical politics in Britain, the KOL achieved considerable success in mobilizing unskilled workers in St. Helens, the Black Country, Birmingham, Rotherham in South Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Ireland.51 The iconography of the KOL also made the journey to Britain. A British Union of General Workers’ banner featuring workmen depicted in front of a saw mill and a gas plant used the KOL motto, ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’.52 Further, it attracted prominent trade unionists like Ben Turner, later national president of the General Union of Textile Workers between 1902 and 1933, who saw it as integral to a widening out of the ranks and grades of those recruited to the textile unions and part of a broader global unity of labour interests.53 Like the work of the earlier International Working-Men’s Association, established in London in 1864, attempts to bridge the gaps between skilled and unskilled workers revealed the potential for tapping the reservoir of unskilled labour in global organisations dedicated to transnational solidarities.54 Recent research by Cole, Struthers and Zimmer has highlighted the same tendencies in syndicalism, which, at its strongest in new world boom towns where class structures were fluid, and represented by international emissaries like Tom Mann, galvanized a truly international constituency of support amongst workers who enjoyed some autonomy in the workplace, especially railway and tram workers and timber and cane cutters in North America and Australia.55

  • 56 Chase, Early Trade Unionism, p. 222.
  • 57 Martin Crawford, Land and Labour: The Potters’ Emigration Society, 1844-51 (Manchester, Manchester (...)
  • 58 Jacob Remes, ‘Movable type: Toronto’s transnational printers, 1866-1872’ in Fink, (ed.), Workers Ac (...)
  • 59 Martin Greenwood, “The promised land”: The story of emigration, 1850-1911’ in Keith Laybourn (ed.), (...)
  • 60 M.K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859-1919 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 89.

14Throughout this period British trade unions remained deeply ambivalent about the advantages and drawbacks to emigration. Downturns in the trade cycle often encouraged trade unions to contemplate a movement of labour to the colonies or to North America. A recent literature has emphasized the extent to which specialised trades that experienced deskilling, contraction and excessive international competition were prepared to contemplate wholesale emigration projects that tackled issues of surplus labour and the relocation of members overseas. The ASE encouraged emigration by its members despite its domestic success in Britain.56 Elements of the utopian Chartist and Owenite land projects of the 1840s lingered in some of these schemes; they were apparent in the Staffordshire Potters’ Joint Emigration Society’s scheme to resettle redundant potters in a planned settlement in Wisconsin.57 Reducing the labour pool and relocating the surplus to productive employment in the white colonies of settlement also seemed appropriate in areas of employment where there was a glut on the labour market. The NALU promoted a formal emigration scheme to Toronto in Canada following a visit by their leader, Joseph Arch, in 1873.58 There were similar exhortations by the NALU for farm labourers to populate New Zealand; some 40,000 labourers and their dependents were relocated there in a union-sponsored scheme during the years 1872-1881.59 Rural England, however, was scarred by the emigration experience. As Kathleen Ashby pointed out, emigration drained the villages of south Warwickshire of their strongest and most skilled inhabitants and denuded Arch’s NALU of members.60

  • 61 Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry 1740-1875 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1 (...)
  • 62 According to W.H. Wilkins, The Alien Invasion (London, Richard Clay and Sons, 1892), pp. 186-187.
  • 63 S.H. Jeyes, ‘Foreign pauper immigration’ in Arnold White (ed.), The Destitute Alien in Great Britai (...)
  • 64 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Inte (...)
  • 65 Parfitt, Knights Across the Atlantic, pp. 41-42.
  • 66 David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914 (New Haven, Y (...)

15Conversely, other unions tackled issues of trade depression, overmanning, and the undercutting of wages by employers, by seeking to erect barriers to exclude migrant labour. Often depicted as a threat, migrant and foreign labour was represented as susceptible to recruitment by strike breakers, and responsible for the undercutting of wages, the dilution of craft standards, and the production of poorer quality goods. Trade unions were often at the forefront of attempts to exclude and to deter migrant incomers or new communities. Strikes in the tailoring trade in Manchester in 1845 and the formation of a branch of the Operative Tailors there in 1851 were marked by a distinct taint of antisemitism directed against Jewish workshop owners and middlemen.61 Forty-three trade unions ranging from the National Boiler Makers and Iron Ship Builders Society through the ASE to the Oldham Provincial Card and Blowing Room Operatives were listed as advocating restrictions against Jewish immigration into Britain in 1892, the year in which the TUC passed its first resolution supportive of border immigration controls.62 In a conspiracy theory relating to Jewish migrants, Jewish employers were seen as opposed to the organization of itinerant Jewish and non-Jewish labour into trade unions, the better to depress wage levels and undercut prices, thus apparently rewarding the boss class.63 Recently, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have argued that the global circulation of ideas about whiteness, racial identity, and anxieties about outside threats and restrictive practices in the trafficking of non-white migrants, created a narrative about the threat posed by outsiders that moved between white settler societies, through North America and into Europe.64 The KOL, for example, brought with them to Britain the opposition to Chinese migrant labour that characterized their platform in the USA.65 The intensity of this debate also encouraged Jewish tailors and workers to organise their own unions and trade associations that stood apart from the host community and the broader union movement.66

The Cultural Landscape of Nineteenth-Century Trade Unions

  • 67 Quentin Outram and Keith Laybourn, ‘”A divine discontent with wrong”: The people’s martyrology’ in (...)
  • 68 J.J. Terrett, The Right Hon. H.H. Asquith M.P. and the Featherstone Massacre (London, The Twentieth (...)
  • 69 R.W. Finch, ‘My Lord They are Printers’ (Bishop’s Stortford, Twentieth Century Press, 1984), pp. 10 (...)
  • 70 Clare V. J., Griffiths, ‘From “Dorchester labourers” to “Tolpuddle martyrs”: Celebrating radicalism (...)
  • 71 Paul Jackson, ‘Preface’ in Laybourn (ed.), The Ascott Martyrs, vii-x.

16Much recent research is attuned to the cultural legacies of nineteenth-century trade unionism. Commemoration and memorialization were at the heart of attempts to highlight battles won, workplace rights defended, and to preserve the memories of those who had suffered or laid down their lives for the cause. Martyrdom was integral to this culture of memorialization, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth-century, where it served to cement the history of older craft unions and to provide validation for the new unskilled union organisations.67 The shooting of striking miners by the military at Featherstone in South Yorkshire in 1893 with two fatalities and as many as sixteen others injured was located by contemporaries in a long tradition of brutality meted out by the state towards strikers and protestors: ‘the Peterloo of the wage slaves’ was the verdict of one retrospective pamphlet on these events.68 Those who had sacrificed themselves for workers’ rights were especially honoured. Five printers who were imprisoned in Newgate Gaol after forming an illegal combination during a strike in the printing trade in 1786 were commemorated annually each 28th June in the nineteenth century by the Bookbinders and Machine Rulers' Consolidated Union and remembered at a special seventy-fifth anniversary held in 1861 by the Nottingham, Leicester and Derby branches.69 The commemorations around the Tolpuddle Martyrs are today the best known and longest surviving of these events, and although the 1834 trial and transportation of the six labourers was barely remembered in the later nineteenth century, the proposal to construct two cottages as almshouses at Tolpuddle in 1909 rekindled interest in the episode.70 Efforts to raise awareness of the sixteen women and two babies imprisoned in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire in 1873 (the so-called ‘Ascott Martyrs’) for allegedly intimidating working agricultural labourers under the terms of the Criminal Law Amendment Act were also ongoing throughout the nineteenth-century, but only resulted in positive recognition for these events in the twentieth century.71

  • 72 Huw Benyon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain (London, (...)
  • 73 Chris Wrigley, ‘May Day in Britain’ in Abby Peterson and Herbert Reiter (eds), The Ritual of May Da (...)
  • 74 Henry Hyde Champion, The Great Dock Strike in London, August 1889 (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1890) (...)
  • 75 Huw Benyon and Terry Austrin, Masters and Servants: Class and Patronage in the Making of a Labour O (...)
  • 76 P.H.J.H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England 1815-1875 (Manchester, Manchester University Pre (...)
  • 77 Nick Mansfield and Martin Wright, Made by Labour: A Material and Visual History of British Labour, (...)
  • 78 Nick Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement (Swindon, English Heritage, 2013), pp. 58-69 and 7 (...)
  • 79 Antony Taylor, ‘“Whatever happened to all the heroes?” The monumental failure of British plebeian r (...)

17Moreover, the history of trade unionism intersects with a recent emphasis on the preservation of material culture and the debates around it in relation to movements of political protest. De-industrialisation and the decline of heavy industry, especially mining, has led to a greater interest in the survivals of the forms of community solidarity created by the trade union movement.72 The centrality of trade unionism in working-class and community life has also left a considerable footprint in the cityscapes and civic environment of Britain’s towns and cities explored in recent work that relates to the public role of trade unionism. Events like May Day, established in Britain in 1890 and campaigning for an eight-hour working day, provided the opportunity for the unions to display their strength, mobilise members, and highlight the craft skills of particular trades.73 The pageantry and trappings of these outdoor demonstrations has received greater attention in recent research, focusing in particular on banners and their significance. H.H. Champion wrote of the “larger numbers of rudely-improvised banners” visible in the trade processions during the 1889 dockers’ strike.74 Lodge banners were also a feature of the Durham Miners’ Gala established in 1871, where the mining unions gathered to celebrate the fraternity of the north-east pit villages. As Huw Benyon and Terry Austrin have demonstrated in their study of the mining unions in the north-east, the gala, framed by a Medieval city with cobbled streets, was a mixture of religious rite influenced by methodism, of carnival and a pageant that brought the mining community together. It has bequeathed numerous artefacts and cultural objects, particularly banners, which, adorned with images of radical leaders and biblical quotations and iconography, assumed an almost religious significance at the event.75 The role of trade union artefacts like sashes, aprons, medals and wall plaques were also totemic for the first generation of trade unionists. Like the cultural artefacts that featured in trade unionism, quasi-masonic regalia, arcane rituals and a culture of conviviality were also the hallmark of friendly society traditions that migrated into trade unionism.76 The everyday significance of such objects and pastimes has been explored by Nick Mansfield and Martin Wright.77 More concrete expressions of such legacies also feature in Mansfield’s research into the buildings of the labour movement, which notes the solidity and ‘muscular’ presence of the building produced by individual unions, from the headquarters of the Durham Miners’ Association at Redhills in Durham constructed on the eve of the Great War, to the more decorative arts and crafts inspired Nelson Weavers’ Institute of 1905. Testament to the pioneering role of women workers in trade unionism in the West Midlands is provided by the Women Workers’ Institute in Cradley Heath, constructed in 1912 with money raised during the chainmakers’ strike, and a genuine community survival of the event.78 Further, trade unions were responsible for the construction of monuments and statues of pioneers of the movement. Subscriptions by trade union members that enabled the construction of a statue to the cotton union official, J.T. Fielding, in Queen’s Park in Bolton in 1896 and a memorial to the prominent local Lancashire miners’ official, Ben Pickard, in 1887 in Wigan cemetery, provide some of the earliest representations and civic records of working people in Britain’s public spaces.79

Conclusions

18From a history of institutions, of men, of affiliation to the Labour party, and of a narrowly British focused area of influence, the historiography of trade unionism has evolved to embrace more current approaches to the past, which include studies of lesser known strikes, and the understanding of a more fluid approach to political affiliation. Recent studies of nineteenth-century liberalism have noted the marked cultural affinities between trade unionism and liberalism. Moreover, developing from the histories of specific trades and particular figures and influenced by the rise of transnational approaches to organisations and institutions, the new trade union historiography is outward-focused, taking into account the global, and, especially, imperial, connections of individual trades and occupations. Here it is in line with the recognition of the global imprint left by many British cultural institutions and associations apparent in imperial and cultural history. Moreover, building on new histories of the rise of the unskilled trade unions, in particular, there is now a greater acknowledgement of the role played by women in a formative stage of the trade union movement. Finally, the marked decrease in heavy industry in Britain, the end of mining as an occupation, and the rise of a museum sector devoted to the heritage of the industrial revolution has created a new emphasis on the material culture, banners, relics and paraphernalia of trade unions in a period of declining trade union membership. Moving away from a static history of institutional development and acceptance dependent on the work of the Webbs, the new trade union history is one that is attentive to the diverse conditions of labour that brought trade unionism into being, and that brings its history back into the mainstream of nineteenth-century culture and politics.

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Notes

1 See W. Hamish Fraser, Trade Unions and Society: The Struggle for Acceptance 1850-1880 (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1974), pp. 120-145 and W. Hamish Fraser, A History of British Trade Unionism, 1700-1998 (London, Macmillan, 1999), pp. 54-70.

2 Malcolm Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000), pp. 218-239 and Sidney Pollard, A History of Labour in Sheffield (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1959), ch. 2.

3 Alastair J. Reid, ‘Labour and the trade unions’ in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s First Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 221-227.

4 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism 1666-1920 (London. Longmans, Green and Co., 1920 [1894]), chs, 1-2.

5 R. A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries’ Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism (London, Granada Publishing Limited, 1979), pp. 252-276 and Malcolm Chase, ‘George Howell, the Webbs and the political culture of early labour history’, in Keith Laybourn and John Shepherd (eds.), Labour and Working-Class Lives: Essays to Celebrate the Life and Work of Chris Wrigley (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 13-30.

6 Keith Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism c. 1770-1990 (Stroud, Allan Sutton, 1992), pp. 38-94.

7 See E. Allan, J.F. Clarke, N. McCord and D.J. Rowe, The North-East Engineers’ Strike of 1871 (Newcastle upon Tyne, Frank Graham, 1971), pp. 125-181.

8 David Howell, ‘Taking Syndicalism Seriously’, Socialist History 16 (2000), pp. 27-48.

9 See Samuel Higginbottom, Our Society's History. Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1939). p. 283.

10 For example, A. E. Musson’s The Typographical Association; Origins and History up to 1949 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1954).

11 Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851-1867 (London, Odhams, 1967), p. 180.

12 John Wilson, Memories of a Labour Leader: The Autobiography of John Wilson, J.P., M.P. (Firle, Caliban Books, 1980 [1910]), p. 314, Arch, Joseph Arch, From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography (London, The Cresset Library, 1986 [1898]), pp. 93-144 and George Edwards, From Crow-Scaring to Westminster: The Autobiography of George Edwards, M.P., O.B.E. (London and Woking, Unwin Brothers Ltd., 1922), pp. 54-60. Wilson was a founders of the Durham Miners’ Association in 1869; Arch founded the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in 1872; George Edwards founded the National Agricultural Labourers and Rural Workers’ Union in 1906.

13 Chase, Early Trade Unionism, p. 234.

14 Nicola Verdon, ‘A Distinctive Service: Ruth Uzzell, the National Union of Agricultural Workers, and the Place of Women in Interwar Rural Trade Unionism’, Agricultural History Review 72 (2024), pp. 84-100.

15 Howell, ‘Taking Syndicalism Seriously’, pp. 38-43.

16 Francis Williams, Magnificent Journey: The Rise of the Trade Unions (London, Odhams Press, 1954), ch. 1 and Francis Williams, Fifty Years’ March: The Rise of the Labour Party (London, Odhams Press, 1950), pp. 12-14.

17 Reg Groves, Sharpen the Sickle: The History of the Farm Workers’ Union (London, Merlin, 1981 [1949]), p. 7.

18 Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (London, Penguin, 1963), pp. 32-65.

19 Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism, pp. 72-96.

20 Alun Howkins, Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1870-1923 (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 66.

21 F.E. Gillespie, Labor and Politics in England, 1850-1867 (New York, Octagon Books Inc., 1966 [1927]), pp. 197-234.

22 Eugenio Biagini and Alastair J. Reid ‘Currents of radicalism, 1850-1914’ in Biagini and Reid (eds.), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1-20 and Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), ch. 4.

23 Alastair J. Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain’s Trade Unions (London, Penguin, 2005), pp. 131-132 and 159-163.

24 Lowell J. Satre, Thomas Burt, Miners’ MP, 1837-1922: the Great Conciliator (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1999), pp. 7-9.

25 Reid, United We Stand, pp. 133-135.

26 James Owen, Labour and the Caucus: Working-Class Radicalism and Organised Liberalism in England, 1868-1888 (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2014), p. 59.

27 Ibid, pp. 182-183, Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism, p. 62, David Howell, ‘”One meaning blots out another”? Liberals and Labour in the East Midlands coalfield’ in Chris Williams and Andrew Edwards (eds), The Art of the Possible: Politics and Governance in Modern British History 1885-1997: Essays in Memory of Duncan Tanner (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 49 and Nigel Scotland, ‘The National Agricultural Labourers’ Union and the demand for a stake in the soil, 1872-1896’ in Eugenio Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 158-167.

28 Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 214-218 and Peter Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1993 [1971]), pp.30-33.

29 Alastair J. Reid, ‘Labour and the trade unions’ in Tanner, Thane and Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s First Century, p. 225.

30 Terry McCarthy, The Great Dock Strike, 1889: the Story of the Labour Movement’s First Great Victory (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988), ch. 1.

31 Eleanor J. Gordon, ‘Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland, 1850-1914’ (Ph.D dissertation, University of Glasgow, 1985), p. 97 and Sarah Boston, Women Workers and the Trade Unions (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), pp. 30-59.

32 Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History (London, Continuum, 2011), chs, 6-8.

33 John Tully, Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labour Movement (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2014), chs 1-2 and Tully, ‘Silvertown, 1889: The East End’s Great Forgotten Strike’, Labour History Review 73 (2014), pp. 281-304.

34 Ibid, pp. 291-292.

35 Cathy Hunt, Righting the Wrong: Mary Macarthur 1880-1921. The Working Woman’s Champion (Birmingham, West Midlands History, 2019) and Margaret Bondfield, A Life’s Work (London, Hutchinson and Co., 1948), ch. 1.

36 Eddie May, ‘The mosaic of Labour politics, 1900-1918’ in Duncan Tanner Chris Williams and Deian Hopkin, (eds), The Labour Party in Wales 1900-2000 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 61-85.

37 R. Merfyn Jones, The North Wales Quarrymen 1874-1922 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1981), chs, 7 and 10.

38 Neville Kirk, Custom and Conflict in the ‘Land of the Gael’: Ballachullish, 1900–1910 (London: Merlin Press, 2007), ch. 2.

39 Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008), pp.116-117 and 175-176.

40 See Ralph Darlington, Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14 (London, Pluto Press, 2023).

41 Laybourn, A History of British Trade Unionism, pp. 95-121.

42 James Moher, ‘Walter Citrine: A union pioneer of industrial cooperation’ in Peter Ackers and Alastair J. Reid (eds), Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth-Century (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 184-185 and Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism, pp. 145-176.

43 Neville Kirk, ‘Transnational labour history: promise and perils’ in Leon Fink (ed.), Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labour History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 18-22.

44 Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalisation, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London, The Merlin Press, 2003), pp. 59-148 and Tanja Bueltmann and Donald MacCraild, The English Migration in North America: Migration, Ethnicity and Association 1730s to 1950s (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), chs 3 and 5.

45 Luke Trainor, British Imperialism and Australian Nationalism: Manipulation, Conflict and Compromise in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 120-141.

46 Neville Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia, 1900 to the Present (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 59.

47 James Jupp, The English in Australia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 82.

48 Ibid, pp. 82-86.

49 Stephen Murray, ‘Transatlantic Migration and the Amalgamated Society of Engineers in Fall River, Massachusetts, 1873-1879’, Labour History Review 78 (2013), pp. 145-170.

50 Robert E. Weir, ‘Whose left/who’s Left? The Knights of Labor and “radical progressivism”’ in Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (eds), On the Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand (Dunedin, University of Otago Press, 2002), pp. 21-38 and Steven Parfitt, Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp. 109-119.

51 Ibid, pp. 50-78.

52 Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labour’s Vale: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 246-247.

53 Ben Turner, About Myself, 1863-1930 (London, Humphrey Toulmin, 1930), p. 131.

54 Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz and Jeanne Moisand, ‘Introduction’ in Bensimon, Deluermoz and Moisand (eds), ‘Arise Ye Wrettched of the Earth’: The First International in a Global Perspective (Leiden, Brill, 2018), pp. 1-17.

55 Peter Cole, David Struthers and Kenyon Zimmer, ‘Introduction’ in Cole, Struthers and Zimmer (eds), Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (London, Pluto, 2017), pp. 1-26 and Neville Kirk, Transnational Radicalism and the Connected Lives of Tom Mann and Robert Samuel Ross (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2017), pp. 103-106.

56 Chase, Early Trade Unionism, p. 222.

57 Martin Crawford, Land and Labour: The Potters’ Emigration Society, 1844-51 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2024), chs 1-2.

58 Jacob Remes, ‘Movable type: Toronto’s transnational printers, 1866-1872’ in Fink, (ed.), Workers Across the Americas, p. 395.

59 Martin Greenwood, “The promised land”: The story of emigration, 1850-1911’ in Keith Laybourn (ed.), The Ascott Martyrs: Why did the Rural Establishment Imprison Sixteen Women and Two Babies in 1873? (Charlbury, Paul Jackson, 2023), p. 187.

60 M.K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859-1919 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 89.

61 Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry 1740-1875 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1976), pp. 70-71 and 116-118.

62 According to W.H. Wilkins, The Alien Invasion (London, Richard Clay and Sons, 1892), pp. 186-187.

63 S.H. Jeyes, ‘Foreign pauper immigration’ in Arnold White (ed.), The Destitute Alien in Great Britain: A Series of Papers Dealing with the Subject of Foreign Pauper Immigration (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), pp. 181-184.

64 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008), chs, 3 and 7.

65 Parfitt, Knights Across the Atlantic, pp. 41-42.

66 David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994), ch. 4.

67 Quentin Outram and Keith Laybourn, ‘”A divine discontent with wrong”: The people’s martyrology’ in Outram and Laybourn (eds), Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland: From Peterloo to the Present (London, Palgrave, 2018), pp. 1-29.

68 J.J. Terrett, The Right Hon. H.H. Asquith M.P. and the Featherstone Massacre (London, The Twentieth Century Press, 1906), p. 3 and Quentin Outram, ‘The Feathersone massacre and its forgotten martyrs’ in Outram and Laybourn (eds), Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland, pp. 31-58.

69 R.W. Finch, ‘My Lord They are Printers’ (Bishop’s Stortford, Twentieth Century Press, 1984), pp. 101-102.

70 Clare V. J., Griffiths, ‘From “Dorchester labourers” to “Tolpuddle martyrs”: Celebrating radicalism in the English countryside’ in Outram and Laybourn (eds), Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland, pp. 62-66.

71 Paul Jackson, ‘Preface’ in Laybourn (ed.), The Ascott Martyrs, vii-x.

72 Huw Benyon and Ray Hudson, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain (London, Verso, 2021), pp. 7-29.

73 Chris Wrigley, ‘May Day in Britain’ in Abby Peterson and Herbert Reiter (eds), The Ritual of May Day in Western Europe: Past, Present and Future (London, Routledge, 2016), pp. 133-159.

74 Henry Hyde Champion, The Great Dock Strike in London, August 1889 (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1890), p. 17.

75 Huw Benyon and Terry Austrin, Masters and Servants: Class and Patronage in the Making of a Labour Organisation, the Durham Miners and the English Political Tradition (London, Rivers Oram Press, 1991), pp. 206-226 and John Gorman, Banner Bright (London, Scorpion Cavendish, 1986 [1973]), pp. 34-35 and 109-114.

76 P.H.J.H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England 1815-1875 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1961), pp. 10-12 and 115-137 and Chase, Early Trade Unionism, pp. 236 and 227-229.

77 Nick Mansfield and Martin Wright, Made by Labour: A Material and Visual History of British Labour, c. 1780-1924 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2023), pp. 113-114 and 167-169.

78 Nick Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement (Swindon, English Heritage, 2013), pp. 58-69 and 75-76.

79 Antony Taylor, ‘“Whatever happened to all the heroes?” The monumental failure of British plebeian radicalism, c.1850-1920’ in Matthew Roberts (ed.), Memory and Modern British Politics: Commemoration, Tradition, Legacy, 1789 to the Present (London, Bloomsbury, 2024), pp. 200-201.

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References

Electronic reference

Antony Taylor, “The Trade Union Movement, 1850-1914”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXX-1 | 2025, Online since 13 January 2025, connection on 20 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/13252; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/133di

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About the author

Antony Taylor

Antony Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He has written widely in the fields of nineteenth-century political culture, post-Chartist politics, and radicalism in the British empire. His most recent book is “London’s Burning”: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840-2005 (Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2012. Paperback version, 2013).

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