Trade Unions and Society

The Struggle for Acceptance, 1850-1880

Hamish Fraser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032218380
• eBook ISBN: 9781000554021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Workplace Culture
• Index: Business

First published in 1974, Trade Unions and Society examines the process by which trade unions sought and achieved recognition in the three decades after 1850. It shows a parallel process: on the one hand, trade unionists struggling to attain the indispensable Victorian virtue, 'respectability', without sacrificing their essentially protective functions; on the other hand, employers recognizing the value of an ordered system of industrial relation in which trade unions could exert discipline and control over their workers. While this was going on, middle-class radicals (often themselves employers) continued their attack on aristocratic domination of political institutions and looked to a 'labour aristocracy' as allies. The book shows the manner in which, thanks to their own efforts and those of their indefatigable publicists, unionists became identified with the respectable elite of the working class. It deals with a crucial period in the trade union development but looks at it not merely from the point of view of the unions, but also that of the employers, politicians, the press, intellectuals, political economists, giving for the first time a rounded picture of trade unionism and industrial relations in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This book will be of interest to students of economics and history.

Chapter 1 Trade-union Growth, Structure and Policy

DOI 10.4324/9781003270256-2

Accurate returns of total trade-union membership in Britain are not available before the 1890s and, therefore, for the mid-Victorian period we are dependent on the reasoned guesses of a few interested contemporaries. It was estimated that there were 600,000 unionists in 1859; Frederic Harrison talked of there being ‘not short of half a million’ in 1865; George Potter suggested 800,000 in 1867 and George Howell thought there were 1,600,000 in 1876.¹ Whatever the exact value of these figures they support the conclusion that between 1850 and 1880 there was a substantial growth in the number of unions and in the number of unionists. Taking a sample of fifteen important unions, in both England and Scotland, Sidney and Beatrice Webb calculated that their membership rose from 24,737 in 1850 to 125,339 in 1880, an increase of more than 500 per cent.²

The growth was not steady, for membership of individual unions could fluctuate quite erratically. Preparations for a major strike usually brought a flow of new members who would disappear just as rapidly if the strike failed. The trade cycle also played its part, for at times of depression and of high unemployment workers were less willing to take the risk of belonging to a union, especially if the union was powerless to prevent wage cuts. In times of boom, with the union in a position to press for advances and the workers feeling secure enough to ignore employers’ hostility to unions, membership tended to rise. Broadly, the overall pattern was one of growth from the last years of the 1840s to 1852, when there was a set-back. A revival in 1853 brought steady expansion until the financial crisis of 1857, with a subsequent depression in many of the main industries, slowed down the rate of growth for two or three years. The first half of the 1860s saw sustained growth in most unions, only for it to be halted once again in 1867, 1868 and 1869. From 1870 to 1875 all unions were expanding at an unprecedented rate amid boom conditions, but the onset of depression in the second half of the decade decimated most of them. Many disappeared entirely and others lost most of the gains in membership they had made since 1870. And within that broad pattern every union was subject to its own peculiar fluctuations.

We are equally dependent on interested observers for estimates of the strength of unionism in particular crafts and between different parts of the country. At the beginning of the 1850s that painstaking observer of London life, Henry Mayhew, estimated that about 10 per cent of the workers in the average London craft were in a trade society.³ In 1867, Alfred Mault, secretary of the Midlands-based General Builders’ Association, gave his estimates of unionisation in the building trades to the Royal Commission on Trades Unions: 10.3 per cent of carpenters and joiners, 17 per cent of masons, 18.75 per cent of bricklayers, 30 per cent of plasterers, 9.75 per cent of plumbers, glaziers and painters and 6 per cent of brickmakers.⁴ In 1879, George Howell, concerned to show the strength of unionism, and despite the losses in the years after 1875, claimed a higher percentage: 50 per cent of carpenters and joiners, 66 per cent of masons, 60 per cent of bricklayers, 33 per cent of plasterers and 16 per cent of painters.⁵ Outside the building trades Howell estimated that one in three engineers was in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, in 1879,⁶ while a decade earlier William Allan had thought it somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters.⁷ Ironfounders seem to have maintained a high level of unionism. Daniel Guile told the Royal Commission that in strong districts five out of six ironfounders were members of his society⁸ and, in 1879, Howell estimated an overall average of two out of three. Other estimates of union strength given to the Royal Commission were 25 per cent of cabinetmakers, 90 per cent of cotton spinners, 90 per cent of provincial printers and 85 per cent of London bookbinders,⁹ while Howell thought 75 per cent of boilermakers were unionised in 1879.

The main geographical areas of union strength followed the distribution of industry. The North West was the strongest with its cotton factories and engineering works, followed by the industrial Midlands, though Birmingham was a black spot because of the small scale of most of its industry. Despite great weakness in the woollen industry, Yorkshire as a whole was quite strong, as was the North East. The West of Scotland was well organised, and Edinburgh had one or two strong unions, but taken as a whole, Scotland was generally regarded as weak. Some London trades societies were strong, but the high level of casual labour in the metropolis made the overall picture not very bright. In the mining areas the level of unionisation varied quite drastically throughout the period, with the ups and downs of mining unions. Indeed, in all areas and in each industry there were quite marked fluctuations in membership in response to the ebb and flow of the trade cycle or to the internal problems of unions.

I

In the building trades the largest society was the Operative Stone-masons’ Friendly Society, formed amid the Owenite enthusiasm of 1833. Its main areas of strength were Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, but under the able leadership of its secretary from 1847 to 1872, Richard Harnott,¹⁰ it grew from 4,671 members in 1850 to more than 26,000 in 1876, with 373 branches,¹¹ before the end of the building boom of the seventies began to take its toll and it fell back to under 13,000 in 1880. The society covered England and Wales. In Scotland there was the United Association of Operative Masons, formed in 1852 and with 6,000 members in 1880. The bricklayers were divided between the London and Manchester Orders of the Operative Bricklayers’ Society, two quite distinct and mutually hostile bodies. The two Orders had split in 1848 and the expansionist policies of Edwin Coulson, secretary of the London body from 1860 to 1891 created great bitterness. Attempts at an accord between them were usually short-lived. Until the end of the 1870s the Manchester Order was the larger with 7,350 members in 1875. The London Order grew from 200 to 300 at its formation to over 5,500 in 1866. By 1870 this had fallen to 1,441, but a steady recovery in the 1870s took it to 6,749 in 1877 and despite a fall in the depression it had, by the 1880s, surpassed the Manchester Order.¹²

The best-known builders’ society of the period was undoubtedly the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, formed by the amalgamation of twenty local — mainly London — societies in 1860. It began with only 600 members, but from 1862, when the efficient and dedicated Hull joiner, Robert Applegarth, took over as general secretary, it grew steadily: 3,320 in 1865, 10,178 in 1870, 14,917 in 1875, and 17,764 in 1880. With headquarters in London, its more than 300 branches by the end of the seventies covered England, Wales and Ireland and there was a number of branches in the United States. A similar amalgamation, the Associated Carpenters and Joiners, was formed in Scotland in 1861 and had about 7,000 members in the mid-1870s. Outside the amalgamations was the Manchester-based General Union of Carpenters and Joiners whose history went back to 1827. It was steadily passed in membership by the Amalgamated Society, but it still had more than 10,000 members in 1875. However, in the following years the Amalgamated Society began a war of attrition against the General Union, deliberately setting out to ‘poach’ whole lodges and by the middle of the following decade the membership of the General Union had fallen to under 2,000.¹³ Besides these large bodies, many small local societies of carpenters and joiners remained in existence, particularly in London. George Potter’s union, the Progressive Joiners’ Society, for example, had a mere 130 members.¹⁴

Local societies of plasterers came together in a National Association of Operative Plasterers in 1860. Its general secretary, based first in Liverpool and later in Birmingham, was Charles Williams and although he was a man of considerable ability and enthusiasm, the Association grew only slowly and was under 4,000 members at the end of the 1870s. It suffered from frequent splits, such as in 1870 when most of the London branches broke away to form a Metropolitan Association.¹⁵ Other building trade unions remained small and of little significance. The United Operative Plumbers’ Association covering Birmingham, the North of England and Scotland grew only slightly to just over 2,000 members after its formation in 1865 and it, too, suffered from lodges breaking away, particularly the Scottish ones. The painters, who had been suffering for decades from an influx of unskilled and casual labour, found it the most difficult to organise on a national basis. About sixty North of England societies were loosely linked in the Manchester Alliance from 1855, but not until 1873 was George Shipton able to organise a mainly London Society, the Amalgamated Society of House Decorators and Painters.¹⁶ A Manchester-based Brickmakers’ Society achieved considerable notoriety in the 1860s with its policy of sabotage, boycott and machine smashing against machine-made bricks, but, by the 1870s, the battle had been fought and lost. In London attempts to organise the brickmakers in the 1860s were short-lived.

At the forefront of British industry in the mid-century was the iron industry and its related machine-building and shipbuilding industries and it was here that the strongest unions developed. Above them all stood the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, formed in September 1850 by an amalgamation of the Manchester-based Journeymen Steam Engine and Machine Makers’ Friendly Society (‘the Old Mechanics’), the Steam Engine Makers’ Society and a number of London unions of millwrights and smiths. Right from the start it was larger than any other union, with 12,000 members by the end of its first year. Its rate of growth was spectacular: 21,000 by 1860, 35,000 by 1870, 44,692 in 1880. It covered fitters, turners, smiths, patternmakers and millwrights in locomotive building, in machine-building — particularly textile machines — in steam-engine making and in marine engineering. Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Tyneside and London were its strongest areas but by the end of the 1860s it had spread to all parts of the country and beyond. Its 312 branches in 1868 included 35 in Scotland, 13 in Ireland, 9 in Australasia, 4 in Canada, 11 in the United States, 1 in Malta, 1 in Constantinople and 1 in France.¹⁷ Not all eligible workers joined the A.S.E. and a number of small rival societies persisted, such as the Steam Engine Makers’ Society, with just over 4,000 members in 1880; the United Patternmakers’ Association with 800 members; the United Machine Workers with 300 members, and, in Scotland, the Associated Blacksmiths with 2,000 members, in 1880. In addition there was a proliferation of tiny specialist engineering societies on a local basis.¹⁸ None of these presented a threat to the domination of the A.S.E., but they were a source of frequent irritation and dispute at certain works.

In the foundries the moulders and ironfounders had been organised since the beginning of the century in the Friendly Society of Iron Moulders, changing its name in 1854 to the Friendly Society of Iron Founders. Its outstanding secretary was Daniel Guile, general secretary from 1863 to 1881, under whom membership grew from around 8,000 in 1860 to over 12,000 at the end of his period of office. In Scotland the Scottish Iron Moulders’ Union, which became the Associated Iron Moulders of Scotland, grew fairly steadily to around 4,000 members in 1880. Alongside the moulders in the foundries were smaller groups of iron dressers and coremakers usually organised in their own societies. In the brass foundries of the Midlands the workers were, from 1866, organised in the United Journeymen Brassfounders’ Association with 1,900 members in 1880, and in 1872 W. J. Davis created the Amalgamated Brassworkers’ Society with 5,000 members in 1880.

The actual makers of the iron, the puddlers and millmen of Staffordshire, Teesside, Yorkshire, Durham and central Scotland were slow to organise on a permanent basis. The Staffordshire men formed a union in 1863, which became the Associated Ironworkers of Great Britain. A split in 1865 caused the North of England to form their own National Amalgamated Association of Ironworkers under the presidency of John Kane. Kane’s body, with around 5,000 members in 1866, became the best known. The Staffordshire millmen continued with their own separate body.¹⁹

The vital fuel of British industry was coal and by 1873 more than half a million workers were employed in the industry. The miners, however, proved notoriously difficult to organise on a permanent national basis. It was not for want of effort, but isolation of miners’ villages, differences in work conditions at different collieries and in different coal fields and the hostility of the coal owners proved major barriers to permanency. A National Association under Martin Jude had had a short-lived existence in the 1840s, but by 1850 there were no national links and what organisation there was was on a county or even more localised basis. In 1855, however, under the leadership of Alexander McDonald, a university-educated miners’ agent from Lanarkshire, a Scottish Miners’ Association was formed, loosely linking what remained of county organisations in Fife, Midlothian, Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, Stirlingshire and West Lothian. Three years later the Yorkshire miners succeeded in forming a permanent association, the South Yorkshire Miners’ Association, which after the appointment of John Normansell as secretary in 1864 became one of the best-organised miners’ unions. A much weaker West Yorkshire Association appeared in 1863 but for a time its existence was a very precarious one. Some traces of unionism persisted in Northumberland and Durham in the 1850s, but it usually made an appearance only at times of strike. However, in 1862 an organisation, which proved to be permanent, the Northumberland Miners’ Mutual Confident Association, was formed to resist the reintroduction of the yearly bond, with Thomas Burt as its secretary from 1865. Five years later, the Durham men followed their neighbours’ example with the Durham Miners’ Association of which William Crawford became general secretary in the 1870s. In Lancashire, Thomas Halliday was the main force behind the revival of mining unionism and in the early 1860s he was able to form a federation of most of the Lancashire unions.²⁰

Much of this revival of mining unionism in the 1860s was due to the efforts of Alexander McDonald in the 1850s to renew contacts between miners’ unions, mainly for the purpose of pressing for improved conditions in the mines, through parliamentary legislation. The efforts bore fruit in 1863 when the National Association of Coal, Lime and Ironstone Miners was formed, linking unions in all the main mining areas. Unity was not maintained for long, however, and in 1869 a breakaway body was formed by those who favoured a more centralised organisation and one which would create a national organisation for industrial purposes and not confine united action between regions to parliamentary lobbying, as McDonald’s body did. The main strength of the Amalgamated Association of Miners, as the new body was called, lay in Lancashire and in Wales, where it was responsible for organising the South Wales miners in a union. It proved a substantial rival to the National Association between 1869 and its demise in 1875. In 1873, at the height of the boom, the Amalgamated Association was claiming 99,145 members compared with the National Association’s 123,406.²¹ Despite the collapse of the Amalgamated Association in 1875, due to a number of disastrous strike defeats, the National Association was not able to maintain its existence in the face of the depression. Even most of the county organisations broke up and only in Fife and Northumberland and Durham was a really widespread organisation maintained.

In the textile industry the cotton mills of Lancashire housed the major concentrations of labour: and there union organisation among the cotton workers was effective and extensive. It was, however, largely made up of local societies. Frequent attempts were made to link together these local bodies, but any organisations that did emerge were fairly loose federations. John Doherty’s General Union of Spinners had collapsed in the early 1830s. An attempt at a new federation was made in 1842 when the Association of Operative Cotton Spinners, Twiners and Self-Acting Minders of the United Kingdom was formed, which sought to unite both hand-mule spinners and the workers on the new self-acting machines. Rivalry between the two groups put a great strain on the Association and it faded away after 1847, when the Bolton and Oldham spinners’ societies withdrew. A new amalgamation was constructed in 1853, again consisting of hand-mule spinners and self-actor minders. It survived the big Preston strike of that year but steadily declined in importance, since the two main areas of Bolton and Oldham were not associated with it. A further federation in 1860 remained weak and unco-ordinated and not until 1869 was a permanent Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners, Self-Acting Minders, Twiners and Rovers of Lancashire and Adjoining Counties formed. By 1880 this body, although weakened by a major strike in 1878, had just under 12,000 members.

In weaving, there were some powerloom weavers’ associations in the 1840s and probably some informal federation of a few of them in the early 1850s. From 1854 when the Blackburn Weavers’ Association was formed a number of district associations of weavers’ societies appeared, clustered around the main cen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Trade-union growth, structure and policy
• 2 Trade-union strategy
• 3 Enemies and friends
• 4 The employers
• 5 Trade unions and politics
• 6 Politicians and pressure groups
• 7 Versus the political economists
• 8 Trade unions and the law
• 9 Trade unions and the press
• 10 Trade unions and the working class
• Biographical notes on trade unionists
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index