TRIBUNE HISTORY

Chartist Ancestors

2008-03-28T09:22:00.001Z

Chartist Ancestors

2008-03-13T12:38:00.001Z

The Chartist Ancestors website now has a chartists.net news blog. Have a look.

Michael Meacher on the 1974 general election

2007-10-16T14:08:00.000+01:00

And here is a Labour Party political broadcast from the same, February 1974, general election which ends with a very young Dennis Healey.

Strike of the month: Marie Lloyd and the music hall strike of 1907

2007-09-22T15:07:00.000+01:00

Marie Lloyd is best remembered today as the doyenne of music hall entertainers. Her command of double-entendre and ability to give a risqué sexual charge to the most innocent of lyrics made her a huge star, not just in her native London, but around the UK and beyond.

But the woman who brought the house down with the likes of “I sits among the cabbages and peas...” never abandoned her East End roots, and when music hall performers in the capital went on strike in 1907, Marie Lloyd, star of the Edwardian stage, was there at their side.

Until the turn of the century, most music hall entertainers had enjoyed relatively flexible working arrangements with music hall owners. By the Edwardian era, however, terms and conditions were increasingly formal, preventing entertainers from working at other local theatres, for example.

The 1907 dispute began when in addition to the single matinée (afternoon) performance included in most performers’ contracts, music hall owners began to demand additional shows – adding up to four matinées a week to the workload for no extra money in some cases.

The Variety Artistes Federation, established the previous year and with a membership of nearly 4,000 performers, was having none of it. On 22 January, performers, musicians and stagehands at the Holborn Empire walked out on strike.

The dispute would spread to 22 London variety theatres, and saw 2,000 of the Variety Artistes Federation’s membership on picket lines at one time or another.
The dispute was backed by a number of leading performers, including Arthur Roberts, Gus Elen and Marie Lloyd – as well as by the stars of the Edwardian labour movement, among them Ben Tillett and Keir Hardy.

Lloyd explained her support:

"We (the stars) can dictate our own terms. We are fighting not for ourselves, but for the poorer members of the profession, earning thirty shillings to £3 a week. For this they have to do double turns, and now matinées have been added as well. These poor things have been compelled to submit to unfair terms of employment, and I mean to back up the federation in whatever steps are taken."

For two weeks, the union ran a masterly publicity campaign, distributing leaflets declaring a “music hall war” and hiring the Scala Theatre to put on a fund-raising show.

When the music hall owners responded by engaging lesser known acts and bringing others out of retirement, the union picketed theatres. On one occasion, Lloyd recognised one of those trying to enter and shouted, "Let her through girls, she'll close the music-hall faster than we can."

In due course, the dispute was referred to arbitration – the suggestion apparently coming from the author Somerset Maugham – and Sir George Askwith, concilation officer at the Board of Trade, was appointed to try to find a resolution.

After 23 formal meetings and numerous less formal ones, the resulting settlement produced a national code, a model contract and a procedure for settling disputes. In effect, the performers won more money, plus a guaranteed minimum wage and maximum working week for musicians.

Although the strike ended well, the music hall owners exacted a sour little revenge on Marie Lloyd. Five years later, when the first music hall royal command performance for the music hall was held, vengeful managers excluded the greatest star of the music halls from their line-up.

Further information
Theatre History Online – including leaflets and posters from the strike
Wikipedia entry on Marie Lloyd
Historical Directory of Trade Unions: Vol 1. Non-Manual Unions, by Arthur Marsh and Victoria Ryan (Gower, 1980)
Trade Union Ancestors
Marie Lloyd - Queen of the Music Hall BBC drama video featuring Jessie Wallace as Marie Lloyd - see the advert below...

Tribune Magazine - 21 September

2007-09-21T20:16:00.000+01:00

Prime minister Gordon Brown writes exclusively in this week’s Tribune Magazine about his plans to overhaul the Labour Party’s structures, promising “a process at national as well as local level that is more participatory than ever before – and less focused on declarations of intent, more focused on finding real answers”. Plus George Osgerby asks what would have happened if Brown not Blair had become Labour leader in 1994.

On the Tribune Cartoons blog, Martin Rowson records Margaret Thatcher’s return visit to Number Ten, Hack gets into the party conference season spirit with some seaside knockabout, and Alex Hughes brings us a fat cat with rather more than a little stick of Blackpool rock.

Tribune Magazine - 14 September

2007-09-14T15:48:00.000+01:00

In this week's Tribune Magazine, Catherine MacLeod argues that Gordon Brown needs to make sure Labour supporters in the unions know what his real strategy is. The magazine's leader column says the jury is still out on Brown as prime minister. And Paul Collins says legislation is needed to stop companies exploiting overseas workers so we can have cheap clothes.

Plus, on the Tribune Cartoons blog, Alex Hughes, Hack and Martin Rowson offer different takes on Gordon Brown's TUC speech.

Old stateswoman: Anne Loughlin (1894-1979): first woman president of the TUC

2007-09-13T17:49:00.000+01:00

The 139th Trades Union Congress, which came to a close earlier today, was the third consecutive Congress to have a woman president. For the first 75 years of its existence, however, no woman held the post.

It took until 1943 for the TUC general council to elect a woman to chair it. However, their first choice, Margaret Bondfield, who had already served as the first British woman cabinet minister, was unable to see out the full year in office. Citing other work commitments with the wartime coalition government, she stood down – and in her place was elected Anne Loughlin.

Loughlin, born in Leeds of Irish descent, had a tough childhood. At 12, her mother died, leaving Anne to look after her four sisters; at 16 her father also died, and she became the family’s main breadwinner, starting work at a clothing factory for just 3d an hour.

Little else is known of her early working life, but by 1915 Loughlin had become a full-time official for the United Garment Workers Union. Within the year she was at the head of a strike by 6,000 clothing workers in Hebden Bridge.

The union would go through a difficult time in the late 1920s. Tension between the left-wing and largely Jewish or Protestant London branches and the right-wing, Catholic strongholds around Leeds, where the union had its headquarters, led at one point to a Communist-led breakaway union.

The bitter in-fighting clarified Loughlin’s position as a union right-winger and protégée of general secretary Andrew Conley, and during the 1930s, as merger led the union to be renamed the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers, she moved into a national leadership role, serving on a number of government commissions and advisory panels after the outbreak of war.

When Loughlin took the chair at the 1943 Trades Union Congress in Southport, she paid tribute both to her “colleague and friend” Margaret Bondfield and to the “organised working women” who were then playing an increasingly large part in the trade union movement.

At the end of her term of office, Loughlin was made a dame and asked to serve on the 1944-46 Royal Commission on Equal Pay, where she stood out against the majority line and argued that there was no justification for paying women less than men.

In 1948, Loughlin fought and won election to the post of general secretary, with the vocal backing of Andrew Conley. Her term in office was, however, relatively short, and after working with Harold Wilson, then president of the Board of Trade, to bring about a new Clothing Industry Development Council involving both employers and unions, she stood down due to ill health in 1952.

After retirement, Loughlin appears to have made a clean break with the union and public life. In 1975, her union unveiled a plaque in its boardroom to mark her achievements; she was too ill to attend, but was represented by her sister Agnes. Anne Loughlin died in 1979

Further readingReport of the Proceedings at the 75th Annual Trades Union Congress held at Southport, September 6th to 10th, 1943 on the Union Makes Us Strong website.
Records of the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers can be found in the GMB Collection at the Working Class Movement Library.

TUC welcomes new prime minister’s trade union legislation

2007-09-10T15:57:00.000+01:00

Delegates to the Trades Union Congress were in bullish mood on the first day of their annual conference.

In the 12 months since they last met, trade union membership had continued to grow, new trade union legislation passed by a sympathetic government had removed some of the legal risks they faced when taking industrial action, and a boom in trade had brought rising levels of employment and improvements in wages.

Yes, 1907 was, on the whole, not a bad year for trade unions. When the first TUC conference had taken place in Manchester in 1868, there were 34 delegates representing some 118,367 members. Forty years on, TUC affiliated unions represented 1.7 million people and sent a total of 521 delegates to Congress – among them no fewer than 34 Members of Parliament.

For the unions themselves, the most significant development of the previous year had been the passage of the Trades Disputes Act 1906. This piece of legislation, promoted by the Liberal Government elected that year under Henry Campbell-Bannerman, gave trade unions some degree of legal immunity during strike action – and in effect overturned the Taff Vale ruling of 1901 that held the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants liable for losses suffered during a strike against the Taff Vale Railway Company.

Other causes to celebrate included the passage of a Workmen's Compensation Act which extended protection against industrial accidents and industrial diseases to a further six million workers in the building trades, shop assistants, clerks, domestic servants and seamen.

In addition, the Home Secretary had introduced legislation for an eight hour day for coal miners. And there were to be new provisions to introduce state-funded old age pensions – although the TUC general council was not entirely happy that the pension proposals were generous enough.

Finally, the conference heard reports on the new parliamentary working arrangements agreed between Labour MPs and the trade union group of MPs over the previous year – which would over time evolve into the Labour Party we know today.

Back in 1907, the TUC was also extending its geographical scope. It was meeting for the first time in the Assembly Rooms at Bath – hardly a renowned trade union stronghold, but one which gave them a cordial welcome all the same.

Perhaps surprisingly, the largest union in the district was the Somersetshire Miners Association, with nearly 4,000 members which took a prominent part in organising that year’s conference alongside Bath Trades Council.

In the year that followed the Bath conference, the trade union movement found itself facing more difficult times. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, one of the biggest and most important unions, disaffiliated from the TUC. Unemployment began to rise again. And scares over a possible war with Germany had begun to alter the political climate.

While the TUC continued to grow and expand its role for many years to come, the Bath conference of 1907 represented something of high point for organised labour in an Edwardian summer that would end in war, mass unemployment and the economic disasters of the 1920s.

Pictured: Cllr A W Thomas JP, President of Bath Trades Council, 1907 (Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants)

Further reading
Report of proceedings of the 40th Trades Union Conference held in the Assembly Rooms, Bath, on September 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, 1907 on the Union Makes Us Strong website.

A short history of the Somersetshire Miners Association on the Trade Union Ancestors website.

Tribune Magazine - 7 September

2007-09-08T10:22:00.000+01:00

This week's Tribune Magazine has London Mayor Ken Livingstone on "What makes Boris run", Unison's Dave Prentis on free collective bargaining as the route to equal pay, and Robert Taylor on why Britain's military withdrawal from Iraq can't come too soon.

Plus, on the Tribune Cartoons blog we have Martin Rowson on Gordon Brown's horizons, and Alex Hughes on Britain, America and Iraq.

Finally, watch out on Monday for a TUC report on this blog.

Strike of the month: the crystal palace glaziers, 1850

2007-09-06T19:16:00.000+01:00

The crystal palace that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851 was one of the wonders of the Victorian age. But neither the event nor the building were without controversy.

With Chartism’s high tide just three years past, some feared the event would attract foreign revolutionaries bent on subverting British workers with their “socialist eloquence”, as Lord Normanby, the British ambassador to Paris warned the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston.

Others thought Joseph Paxton’s greenhouse design was too insubstantial to withstand a gale, let alone the weight of vast numbers of visitors tramping through its galleries.

In the event, none of this came to pass. But at one point, in the late November of 1850, it appeared that a dispute between the building contractor and the hundreds of men employed to fit the massive glass panels of the roof and walls might halt the entire project.

The techniques being pioneered in the construction work were unique. Some 300,000 of the largest glass panels ever made, each 49 inches by 12 inches, needed to be slotted into the iron framework within a matter of weeks if the exhibition was to open on time.

The work was hard. The glass was inserted into prepared grooves from a trolley (pictured), pulled backwards along rails which would later be used as rainwater gutters. Each trolley carried a crew of two men and two boys. The trolleys were covered, so that work could continue in all weathers, and the working day continued long after it had grown dark each evening, their efforts illuminated by vast bonfires of leaves and woodshavings lit in the nave far below.

At a meeting of the glaziers on Friday, 22 November, William St Clair declared that the rate for the job – 4 shillings a day provided 58 panes of glass were fitted in that time – was unacceptably low.

He argued that it was not possible to fit so many panes without skimping the work, leaving the building prone to leaks or worse. He proposed that the men should demand 5 shillings a day, or 6d and hour, regardless of the number of panes fitted.

When this and a demand for longer lunch breaks were put to the site manager, they were rejected, and 30 glaziers walked out on strike. Others on the site demonstrated their support by refusing to gather round the booth where payments were made, instead singing the National Anthem.

About 150 men now gathered at the Ennismore Arms public house, just south of Hyde Park, where letters were drawn up to be sent to Charles Fox, senior partner in the construction firm building the palace, and to the Commissioners appointed by the government to oversee the project.

In their letter to Fox, the men warned that if their demands were not met they would place an advertisement in daily pappers (then a common tactic in trade disputes) warning the public that the work had been skimped and the building would therefore be unsafe.

Fox, however, refused to budge. In a sharp reply, he told the glaziers that they could return to work on his conditions or leave.

The following Monday was set for confrontation.

The metropolitan police arrived in force at 5am, well before work was due to begin, to ensure that the pickets could not close down the site. All those who had gone on strike were sacked and replaced by other glaziers, and later that day, St Clair himself was arrested and charged with sending a threatening letter.

With its leader now in police custody, and the most militant of the glaziers removed from the site, the strike now collapsed and work resumed as normal. The dispute had ended in defeat, but it would not be the last to take place in the building of the Victorian era’s great monuments.

Further reading
The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation, by Michael Leapman The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display,by Jeffrey Auerbach

Charlotte Bronte’s eyewitness account of a visit to the Great Exhibition

MI5's Big Brother file on Tribune's George Orwell revealed

2007-09-04T10:08:00.000+01:00

It will come as little surprise to anyone that George Orwell, one of Tribune’s most famous writers, was subject to MI5 surveillance for more than 20 years. Nor that the intelligence service was unsure what to make of his views.

But the documents released today by National Archives today cast fascinating light on the evidence used by the security services in assessing whether and how much of a risk Orwell posed with his supposed sympathy to the Communist cause.

Compiling the case against Orwell, who wrote a regular column for Tribune from December 1943 to March 1947, one police sergeant noted that he had attended Communist meetings, and added damningly: “He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours.”

After questioning the policeman at length, an intelligence service operative concluded that Orwell, referred to in the official documents by his real name, Eric Blair, was certainly not affiliated to the Communist Party.

His report added: “"It is evident from his recent writings - The Lion and the Unicorn - and his contribution to Gollancz's symposium The Betrayal Of The Left that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him."

Despite all this, MI5 remained suspicious. Orwell had helped out at left-wing bookshop in Hampsead during the 1930s, offered to write for a forerunner of the Communist paper, the Daily Worker, and had signed a peace manifesto in 1938.

The file released today consists of reports of Orwell´s activities between 1929 and his death in 1950. It gives some insight into Orwell's financial position while in Paris and includes a 1929 MI6 report to the Special Branch on his activities there, and various subsequent Special Branch reports.

One of these by police Sergeant Ewing, from January 1942 (serial 7a), asserts that: "This man has advanced Communist views, and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings. He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours."

It is of some interest to note the part Orwell´s answers to a published Left magazine survey had in convincing the Service that Orwell should not be considered a Communist. The file includes a copy of Orwell´s passport papers and original passport photographs.

Further reading
Download the National Archive documents on George Orwell

Orwell in Tribune by Michael Foot and Paul Anderson Two former Tribune editors bring Orwell’s Tribune writings to a wider audience

George Orwell’s “As I Please” columns

News reports
The Guardian: Odd clothes and unorthodox views - why MI5 spied on Orwell for a decade
BBC: MI5 confused by Orwell’s politics
Daily Telegraph: Big Brother was watching George Orwell
The Times: Big Brother was watching Orwell for his dress style

Politics and history books for autumn 2007

2007-08-31T14:19:00.000+01:00

Looking for something history-related to read this autumn? The mytimemachine bookshop has the editor's choice of new books and the best of those already in print.

Why not try

• The Panic of 1907 an inside look at the financial crisis of 1907, explaining what happened, why it mattered, and what we've learned;

• The "Times" Great Victorian Lives featuring obituaries of the most influential Victorians as profiled by The Times, including Dickens, Darwin, Ruskin, Peel, WG Grace and Florence Nightingale.

• With warriors from the world famous terracotta army now on display at the British Museum, make sure you read John Man's The Terracotta Army.

You can also come bang up to date with our new selection of Twenty-first Century History books, kicking off with Tony Benn's More Time for Politics - the latest instalment of his ongoing diaries.

If none of these is quite what you are looking for, visit the mytimemachine bookshop and browse what we have, or use the search engine to fine what you want.

Old stateswoman: Beatrice Webb (1858-1943): social reformer and Fabian

2007-08-28T13:43:00.001+01:00

Few would describe the co-author of Soviet Communism: A New Civilization as a libertarian socialist. Even she would have been bemused by the idea that Clause IV of the pre-Blairite Labour Party constitution, which she helped to draft, would become an icon for the Left.

Yet even with these and so many other counts against her, not the least of which was her part in founding the New Statesman magazine, Beatrice Webb richly deserves a place in the pantheon of Labour movement history. For, using the skills of social investigation that she learned assisting Charles Booth in his Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People of London, and a relatively late-found commitment to Fabian socialism, she did more than anyone to expose the failings of the workhouse system and to end a Poor Law regime that had blighted people’s lives for nearly a century.

Martha Beatrice Potter was born in 1858, the granddaughter of the Radical MP Richard Potter, and grew up in the distinctly upper class surroundings of Standish House, near Gloucester. In 1876, at the age of 18, she “came out” (was presented at Court) as was the practice for young women of her social standing. The picture shows her at around this time.

As a young woman, the then Beatrice Potter did some work for the Charity Organisation Society and helped to run Katherine Buildings, a social housing scheme funded by philanthropists near London’s St Katherine’s Docks. A failed relationship with the then Liberal (later Conservative) MP Joseph Chamberlain, and work with “Cousin Charlie” (Charles Booth) followed. As late as 1889 she allowed her name to be added to a manifesto protesting against votes for women.

That same year, however, her politics began to undergo a fundamental shift. A study of the co-operative movement led her both to Sidney Webb, a leading light in the Fabian Society, and to a joint project on the history of the trade union movement. Fearing her father’s reaction, Beatrice kept her 1891 engagement to Sidney secret from her father, marrying only after his death. But the two now travelled the country, talking to local trade union officials and uncovering dusty old documents and books which allowed the pair to write their magisterial book on The History of Trade Unions. The book effectively established labour movement history as a discipline, and proved so enduring that it was republished, with updates, into the 1920s.

For the remainder of their lives, Sidney and Beatrice Webb worked so closely as a team that they are usually referred to in a single breath. Together they helped found the London School of Economics, and the New Statesmen, and drafted the 1918 constitution of the Labour Party which established local parties for the first time. In due course, Sidney would become Labour MP for Seaham (1922-29) and subsequently Lord Passfield, holding office as secretary of state for the colonies and dominions.

But in many ways, Beatrice Webb will be most happily remembered for her role on the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, established in December 1905 by the outgoing Balfour government. Beatrice’s minority report, published in 1909, attracted the support of only three of the 19 other members of the Commission – Francis Chandler, secretary of the carpenters’ union; George Lansbury, later leader of the Labour Party; and Rev Russell Wakefield, a Church representative. Its importance lay in the assertion that the emphasis should be placed on prevention not cure, and its insistence that poverty was a problem for society not for the individual to solve.

A massive campaign followed, first through the National Committee for the Break-up of the Poor Law, and subsequently through a rather less focused National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, which within a matter of months had recruited 16,000 members, among them Labour and Liberal MPs, trade unions and a distinguished list of the great and good beside which New Labour's early infatuation with Britpop fades into insignificance.

Although the campaign failed to achieve its aims in the short term, it did force a rethink of policy approaches. Insurance Acts in 1911 and 1916 were based on the principles set out by Beatrice Webb, and in 1920 unemployment protection was extended to the great majority of working people. In 1929, a Conservative government finally abolished the Poor Law boards of guardians. The process that Beatrice Webb began would find its ultimate expression in the 1944 Beveridge Report and in the post-war welfare state which followed.

By then Beatrice was dead. She died at her home, at Passfield Corner in Sussex, in 1943; Sidney survived until 1947. She was not a lovable person. Disapproving of slack morality and definitely lacking a sense of humour, it was probably above all her lack of personal feeling that blinded her to the horrors of Stalin’s Russia, which she visited extensively in the 1930s and lionised in print.

One hundred years on from the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, however, this aspect of her work, at least, deserves our respect.

Vote Tribune (and win £100 of political DVDs)

2007-08-20T14:21:00.001+01:00

Political blogger (and Tory) Iain Dale is compiling his annual list of the top twenty political blogs. Please help to make sure Tribune gets a mention by nominating Tribune History and Tribune Cartoons blogs.
Oh, you might even win £100 worth of political DVDs. Find out how to vote.

Strike of the month: August 2007

2007-08-16T09:53:00.000+01:00

Great London dock strike, 1889

By the late 1880s, the trade union movement had become, if not quite a part of the Liberal establishment, then at least a respectable body whose existence would do little to put the fear of insurrection into the authorities.
In its report to the TUC conference of 1888, the governing parliamentary committee was able to note with some satisfaction:

"We congratulate the Trades on the comparative industrial peace experienced since our last meeting. No great national labour contest has occurred to strain the resources of our Unions or to disturb the relations between capital and labour."

Events on the London Docks the following summer would end the cosy consensus as thousands of casual workers who had been largely excluded from trade unionism until then went on strike for the security of 6d an hour.

Despite the difficulty of union organisation on the docks, there had been numerous small strikes down the years. The first indications were that a dispute involving the sailing ship Lady Armstrong at South West India Dock in early August 1889 would be just another of these.
The argument over payment of half a penny an hour bonus was first drawn to the attention of Ben Tillett, secretary of the Tea Operatives' and General Labourers' Union on 12 August. Under his guidance, the men would draw up a set of demands including the famous "dockers; tanner", the right to a minimum four hours' work a day and 8d an hour overtime.
Not waiting for the employers to respond, however, the dockers walked out on 14 August and the strike began to spread rapidly.
Realising the scale of the dispute, Tillett called in the more experienced Tom Mann, who was swiftly joined by the even better known labour leader John Burns, and within two days the three were leading a demonstration of 6,000 men.
As the strike spread, it won the support of the two unions representing the better-paid stevedores, and that of the newly formed Seamen's and Firemen's Union, all of whom joined forces under a single strike committee. By 22 August, 100,000 men would be on strike.
Although this level of industrial action was unprecedented in the docks, the strike is perhaps best remembered for the great marches of dockers and their families which to Hyde Park, and for the high level of public support they gained.
George Julian Harney, the veteran Chartist leader now in his 70s, would write for the Newcastle Chronicle:

"Not since the high and palmy days of Chartism have I witnessed any movement corresponding in importance and interest to the great strike of 1889."

The organisation of the dispute became legendary. In addition to Tillett, Man and Burns, H H Champion and Eleanor Marx of the Social Democratic Federation lent their services, as did Will Crooks of the coopers' union.
Some 25 miles to the east, Henry Orbell, president of Tillett's small union reluctantly took charge but proved adroit at maintaining the strike and convincing a group of strike-breakers brought in from Liverpool to return home.
Under Mann, £1,200 was spent from the strike fund to keep 15,000 pickets and banner carriers on duty. They were immensely effective at blockading the docks, with the engineers at Commercial Docks among the few significant groups to carry on working.
The strike also won backing from Sidney Buxton, the radical Liberal MP for Poplar, and other public figures. Cardinal Manning, the head of the Catholic church in England, and the Salvation Army made great efforts to feed the dockers and their families.
But the most significant support came from the public. A final balance sheet drawn up after the strike finished showed that a total of £46,999 had been raised, including £30,423 from “the colonies” – mostly from workers on the Australian waterfronts.
As the strike went on, some attempts were made by the strike committee to turn the dispute into a general strike, and a manifesto issued on 29 August called on all London workers to join them on the following Monday.
Realising that this would alienate much of their support in other unions, Ben Tillett, Frederick Engels and Eleanor Marx used their influence to reign in these rasher demands.
At the same time, and at the request of the strike leaders, Cardinal Manning now began to play a crucial part in mediating with the dock company directors. With the dock workers adamant in their demand for 6d an hour, the debate came down to the date at which the new rates would become effective.
On 14 September, a settlement was finally agreed and the men returned to work. They had achieved 6d an hour and 8d for overtime, a minimum four-hour call-on guaranteeing at least 2 shillings a day, and other concessions.
As importantly, the tea operatives’ union had grown from a few hundred members at the start of the strike to an organisation 18,000 strong. Immediately after the strike it became the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers Union. Within three months it had 30,000 members.
In due course, the union would become one of the founders of the Transport and General Workers Union.

Union ancestors
TGWU family tree pdf

Read Trade and General Workers Union, 1870-1922 to learn more.

Old statesmen: John Arnott (1799-1868) Chartist leader and poet

2007-08-08T11:57:00.000+01:00

John Arnott, 1799-1868
General Secretary, National Charter Association

By the time of his death, John Arnott had been largely forgotten. Impoverished and ill, he entered St Pancras Workhouse at the end of April 1868, and within a week was dead. His body was buried in a communal pauper’s grave without ceremony or memorial.

Yet less than 20 years earlier, he had been one of the best known political organisers of the age. As general secretary of the Chartist movement, and secretary of the committee that organised the great Chartist rally of 10 April 1848 on Kennington Common, Arnott had been an indefatigable driving force behind the first truly working class political party in Britain.

John Arnott was born on 22 October 1799, at Chesham, Bucks. He married there in 1819, and worked as a cordwainer (shoemaker), apparently moving to London some time around 1835. He would spend the rest of his life in the Somers Town area of St Pancras, in and around the area now occupied by the British Library. What sparked his political involvement is unknown, but he appears to have been a member of the National Charter Association (established 1840) from its earliest days. As a Somers Town branch delegate, he was by 1844 chairing meetings of the Metropolitan Delegate Council covering all of London, and in October that year he was made secretary.
The Chartist movement had a strong social and cultural element to it, and Arnott was a noted singer. A soiree reported in the Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, records that among the toasts and addresses delivered by leading figures including Feargus OíConnor and George Julian Harney, Arnott sang ‘a patriotic song‘ amidst much applause.

Arnott also contributed a poem to mark the launch of the National Land Company, set up by O’Connor in 1846 as a co-operative venture intended to provide small holdings to industrial workers. The upbeat poem was printed and sold in aid of the venture, which though doomed to failure was seen at the time as a viable way forward for the Chartist movement. Further poems followed, many of which appeared in the Northern Star. But Arnott also had more serious political work in hand, as chair of a Veterans, Orphans and Victim Relief Committee, set up to support the families of Chartists who had been imprisoned or transported overseas in the oppression that had followed the last Chartist petition in 1842.

In August 1846, he joined the Fraternal Democrats, which served as the internationalist left-wing of Chartism working closely with political exiles including Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and which would develop a socialist programme for the Chartist movement under the slogan ‘the Charter and something more’.

Over the coming year, Arnott would throw himself into organising what would turn out to be the Chartist movement’s last attempt at a national petition of Parliament, and the rally and march planned to deliver the document to Westminster. In that capacity, he would have to make clear the NCA’s determination to put on a ‘peaceable, orderly, and moral display of the unenfranchised toiling masses’.

In the official crackdown that followed 10 April 1848, however, hundreds of Chartists were arrested on charges ranging from seditious libel to riot and treason, and Arnott was once again busy as secretary to the National Victims Fund, raising funds on behalf of the ‘law-made widows’ and their children, more than 100 of whom were reliant on their efforts. Giving 3 shillings each to the widows and one shilling for every child under 12, left the committee liabilities of £10 a week, and on some weeks it had been reduced to giving just 2 shillings a week to the mothers of five, six or seven children. In August 1849, it was reported that the balance sheet over 17 weeks showed receipts as £103, expenditure £102. This amount was divided among 31 families and Arnott made a further appeal the following month.

Despite this desperate relief effort, Arnott found time to be active on the committee of the Fraternal Democrats, and to put forward a demand at a public meeting in March 1849 for the separation of church and state, arguing that it further impoverished workers to pay taxes for the upkeep of the Church of England. With the release from prison of Ernest Jones in July 1850, Arnott was at the forefront of the celebrations, and of efforts to reunite the National Charter Association, Fraternal Democrats and the more middle class National Reform League. From this, Arnott emerged in November 1850 as general secretary of the NCA at a salary of £2 a month.

As the NCA became more socialist in its orientation under the leadership of Jones and Arnott, dissent grew, however, and internal disputes became more acute. By early 1852, the organisation was unable even to pay its secretary’s expenses, and Arnott was forced to hand over the position and find paid work in his old trade.

The last recorded instance of any political involvement by Arnott came in 1853, though in 1862 he was present at the funeral of another popular Chartist organiser, Thomas Martin Wheeler at Highgate Cemetery. Although Arnott whttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifould play no further role in politics, the radical journalist W E Adams later recalled in his Memoirs of a Social Atom:
"Some time about 1865 I was standing at the shop door of a Radical bookseller in the Strand. A poor half-starved old man came to the bookseller, according to custom, to beg or borrow a few coppers. It was John Arnott! Chartism was then, as it really had been for a long time before, a matter of history."

More online at Chartist Ancestors
* Read a more detailed biography of John Arnott
* Find out what happened on 10 April 1848
* Read the Duke of Newcastle’s hostile account of 1848
* Discover more about Chartism and the Chartists

Best of Tribune History on this website

2007-08-02T11:27:00.000+01:00

Strike of the month
Chocolate workers taste victory - 1890
The first general strike - 1842
Hairdressers down scissors - 1918

Coming soon - Great London Dock Strike - 1889

Old Statesmen/Old Stateswomen
P C Hoffman – shopworkers' union official who campaigned against compulsory living-in.
Mary Macarthur - founder of the National Federation of Women Workers
Robert Applegarth - A very Victorian trade union leader
Will Crooks - dockers' leader and early Labour MP
Woodrow Wyatt - Labour MP turned arch-Thatcherite

Coming soon - John Arnott - Chartist activist and poet

Strike of the month: the chocolate workers’ strike, 1890

2007-08-02T11:19:00.000+01:00

In the aftermath of the Great Dock Strike of 1889, trade unionism flourished. Between 1888 and 1892 membership doubled from 750,000 to 1.5 million, and new groups of workers in previously unorganised trades and industries flooded into the movement.

Among the many now forgotten strikes was that by East End chocolate makers in 1890. Though small in scale, and even at the time little noticed, it greatly encouraged those organising London’s tens of thousands of young women workers and produced yet another victory to celebrate.

Writing in the Fortnightly Review of August 1890, Clementina Black (pictured), secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, described how earlier attempts to organise both men and women in the confectionary trade had come to nothing. After a meeting for the young women working at Messrs Allen’s factory on 10 July, however, that changed.

“Twelve girls came, and their dread of being followed, watched and subsequently discharged was pitiful,” wrote Black.

The following day, the Women’s Trade Union League despatched Miss James, a full-time organiser and former confectionary worker, to distribute handbills at the factory in Emmott Street explaining the objects of the union.

“To her amazement she found the girls standing about in a crowd, though it was not yet seven o’clock. They surrounded her, telling her that they were ‘out’ and asking anxiously, ‘What shall we do?’ ‘Is there anybody who will help us?’ Miss James led them to the office of the Women’s Trade Union Association, 128 Mile End Road, where I happened to be.”

Clementina Black went on:

“In a twinkling the room was full and over-full of girls, and the street outside was full of those girls who could not come in, and of the fringe of onlookers which gathers so speedily in that great boulevard of the East End, the Mile End Road.”

After the hubbub had subsided, six young women stayed behind to tell their story. It appeared that one had slipped and fallen at work. Hearing the commotion, the forewoman had issued her with a fine, which she refused to pay. The next morning, she was summoned to the office and told she must pay half a crown or be dismissed. At that, the other girls on the shop floor had stopped work and demanded her reinstatement.

By 5pm, with no work done all day, Mr Allen himself came down to investigate. Unimpressed by what he discovered, he told them to “put on their hats and go home”. It was not a strike but a lock-out.

Slowly, the full scale of the young women’s grievances emerged. They were forbidden to leave the factory in the dinner hour, forbidden to eat between eight and one on weekdays and between eight and two on Saturdays, and they were subject to “vexatious” fines and deductions from pay. Without the freedom to go outside at lunchtime, the girls spent all day from 8am to 7pm inside the factory.

Clementina Black called in the legendary union organiser John Burns, and a meeting for all the factory girls employed by Messrs Allen’s was held at Mile End Liberal and Radical Club at which a committee was elected and a register drawn up. All those present also joined the union.

The following Monday morning, John Burns and Miss James were at the factory gates before 8am, and a “business-like system of picketing” put in place. Just eight factory workers went in, though occasionally “a clerk would peep out” to see what was going on.

Once a committee room had been set up in nearby Skidmore Street, a “polite note” was sent to Mr Allen asking for a meeting. Work then began to raise money to support the 80 or 90 young women who were out on strike, mainly by personal appeals to other trade unions since the Women’s Trade Union Association was forbidden to use its funds to support strikes.

By the following day, money had begun to flow in, and the union organisers were able to issue tickets allowing the girls to get lunch and tea. Their cause was also boosted by support from the young women working at Messrs Allen’s Canal Road and Copperfield Road factories, who had wanted to join the strike. Not wanting to escalate the dispute, John Burns persuaded them to carry on working as normal, but promised that they should be called on to join the strike if necessary.

Over the next few days, fundraising progressed remarkably well. Burns himself collected more than £50 in an hour at the London County Council offices; at the Woolwich Arsenal and in the docks, men lined up to donate coppers to the cause. An envelope postmarked House of Commons contained £5.

By the Wednesday, Allen had replied to the letter sent by Burns, declining mediation and saying that he would rather deal with his workers directly. “On this, a deputation of girls was elected, and a letter sent in, asking Mr Allen to see them.” They were to demand reinstatement for the young woman whose dismissal had sparked the strike, a right to leave the factory at lunchtime, an end to fines, an end to the practice of suspending those who were absent for a further two or three days, and a promise of no punishment for those who had joined the union.

Allen now decided that he would be well advised to meet John Burns before beginning talks with his workers, and a three-hour discussion took place which left no-one in doubt that the dispute would soon be over. A further series of meetings between Burns, Allen, Black and the striking factory workers themselves rapidly reached a satisfactory conclusion.

In due course, Allen agreed to all the demands except the abolition of fines for lateness, which he agreed to reduce and withdraw at the end of the year provided attendance did not suffer as a result. An agreement was finally signed on 22 July, and work at the chocolate factory resumed.

Find more trade union history, including trade union family trees and an A-Z listing of 5,000 UK trade unions at Trade Union Ancestors.

Trade union family trees - from Amicus to Unity

2007-07-31T15:49:00.000+01:00

Trade Union Ancestors has a series of Trade Union Family Trees to download in PDF format. Family Trees reveal a union's ancestry by showing how different unions have merged over the years to create the organisations we know now.

Family trees exist for the following unions:
* Amicus (now Unite)
* Communication Workers Union
* GMB
* Nautilus
* Public and Commercial Services Union
* Rail, Maritime and Transport Uniona
* the teaching unions (including NUT, NASUWT and UCU)
* Transport and General Workers Union (now Unite)
* Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians
* Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers
* Unison
* Unity

Trade Union Ancestors also includes a listing of more than 5,000 UK trade unions known to have existed at some time in the past two centuries.

Old statesmen: PC Hoffmann (1878-1959): shopworkers' organiser

2007-07-26T18:51:00.000+01:00

P C Hoffmann’s brief parliamentary career, as an MP from 1923-34 and again from 1929-31 was undistinguished. Yet his record as a union organiser, working tirelessly to improve the lot of shopworkers, deserves rather more than a footnote in labour movement history.

Hoffmann had lived the life of a downtrodden shopboy and was instrumental throughout the Edwardian era and beyond in the campaign to abolish compulsory “living in” – a system which subjected shopworkers to a petty tyranny that even governed their right to marry.

The son of a wealthy silk mercer, Philip Charles Hoffmann (he seldom used his first names) was orphaned at the age of nine and grew up as a boarder at the Warehousemen’s, Clerks’ and Drapers’ School in Purley. He was apprenticed to a Holborn draper at the age of 16.

He would later recall his first experiences of the world of the shop assistant:

“That I night I found myself along with half a dozen other young shavers in a small dirty room with six beds packed very close together, covered with coarse red and black counterpanes. The ceiling was very low and could be reached easily by stretching our young arms. Both walls and ceilings were bare, grimy and splotched. The two windows, being curtained with dirt, needed no other obscuring. The naked gas jet had a wire cage over it.

“The boys undressed or dressed sitting or standing on their beds – there was so little room otherwise. But there was no bed for me; I had been overlooked. The steward with one eye, who was one of the porters, said I must sleep with one of the others. I refused. I had never done that before. He brought me from somewhere a blanket and a pillow. I lay down with them on the floor between two of those crowded beds. The gas was turned out at the main at 11.15. One of the boys lighted a piece of candle and they hunted for bugs on the wall, cracking them with slipper heels... I sobbed through that dismal night.”

The living in system was much disliked. With labour cheap, shop owners were able to make it a condition of employment, providing poor accommodation and food, charging high prices deducted direct from wages, and enforcing rules that ranged from compulsory lights-out and attendance at church through a system of fines and lock-outs. Many were even denied the right to vote.

Hoffmann rapidly became involved in the shop assistants’ union and in June 1901 was active in the launch of a campaign against living in which captured the imagination of the capital’s shopworkers. After a packed meeting at Westbourne Park Chapel (advertised by Hoffmann and his fellow activists dressed in top hats and frock coats), the issue became one of the union’s central concerns.

Hoffmann is pictured here third from the left, apparently wearing a monocle.

In the months after this meeting, shopworkers began to demand improvements to their living conditions, and following a fire at one Dublin shop, employees refused point blank to return to their employer’s premises after rebuilding. But the first strikes against the system would not take place until 1907, when the campaign swept the country.

By now Hoffmann was a full-time organiser for the union, and was actively involved in organising first negotiations and then strikes. First Debenham and Freebody, then D H Evans of Oxford Street and other lesser names in London, Oxford, Newcastle-under-Lyme, and most of all South Wales, where the union was strong, caved in and agreed to end living in. At C and A Daniels (drapers) of Kentish Town, a strike involving 24 shop assistants stretched on for 16 weeks before ending in victory.

In Merthyr and Dowlais, however, the campaign faltered. Despite the support of Keir Hardy, two drapers held out, and issued writs for libel against Hoffmann and Hardy’s paper, the Merthyr Pioneer. Hoffmann was bankrupted by a court order to pay £250 plus costs. But the campaign went on and by early 1914, the whole of South Wales was free of the living in system.

Hoffmann himself returned to the capital as the union’s London organiser, and became involved in winning union recognition. A strike at the Army and Navy Stores in 1919 laid the groundwork for a comprehensive London-wide agreement, and a protracted six-week strike at John Lewis of Oxford Street taxed his organising skills to the full – requiring him at one point to find emergency accommodation for 200 young women who neither would nor could continue to live in.

In December 1923, Hoffmann was asked by the union to stand for election in South East Essex. Standing for the Independent Labour Party, he was successful, but lost the seat the following October and returned to the union as national organiser. Five years later he would again become an MP, serving from 1929 until Labour’s rout after the Ramsey Macdonald split of 1931. His attempt to regain the seat in 1935 failed, and he became union organiser for the Eastern Counties until retirement at age 65.

Persuaded by, among others, his friend H G Wells (whose own experiences as a young shop boy form the background to the1905 novel Kipps), the Labour MP William Wedgewood Benn and union colleagues, Hoffmann – by now known almost universally within the union as Hoffie – wrote a history of the shopworkers’ union which closely followed his journey through the struggles of the early 20th century. The book, They Also Serve: The Story of the Shopworker, was published in 1949.

After his retirement, Hoffmann continued to attend conferences of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW), which had been formed through amalgamation in 1947. His 59th and final conference was at Easter 1959 in Scarborough. Soon after, on 20 April, he died at his home in Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Further resources
USDAW’s website has a brief history of shopworkers’ trade unionism.
The Trade Union Ancestors website has a family tree for USDAW and its predecessor unions.
Kipps, by H G Wells is available from the Trade Union Ancestors bookshop.

Chartist Ancestors relaunched

2007-07-24T16:00:00.000+01:00

The Chartist Ancestors website has been relaunched. The site has a new look and has been moved to a different hosting arrangement.

The website, which has been running since 2003, includes both narrative accounts of episodes in Chartist history and lists of many of those involvement in the campaign for democracy between 1838 and Chartism's ultimate demise in 1860.

Strike of the month: the first general strike, 1842

2007-07-19T17:43:00.000+01:00

At its peak, the general strike of 1842 involved half a million workers. Factories, mills and coal mines were hit in an arc that ran from Dundee, through the Lancashire and Staffordshire heartlands of the dispute to South Wales and Cornwall. Although later histories refer disparagingly to the events of that summer as the “plug plot riots”, in reality, something far more sophisticated was happening.

At the root of the strike were the swingeing wage cuts that accompanied a downturn in trade, at a time when the economy had been in desperate straits for a full five years. But the strike grew into something far more than that as workers took up the political demands espoused by Chartism, leading to confrontation not just with employers but with the state.

Towards the end of 1841, the cotton industry had entered a slump of unprecedented proportions. With unemployment rife, the mill owners began to demand wage cuts – first at Droylsden, then into the new year at Chorley, Blackburn, Bolton and Ashton-under Lyne. Once obtained, they came back for more. There were also confrontations in the coal mines of Lancashire and the Midlands, and the chill winds of economic crisis hit the engineering factories of Manchester and elsewhere.

During the summer of 1842, colliers in Staffordshire walked out over proposals to reduce their wages, and for the first time demands for shorter hours and better pay began to be linked with a demand for the People's Charter. The unrest spread, and in July began to centre on South East Lancashire, where in response to demands for a wage cut of 25% the mill workers of Ashton, Stalybridge, Dukinfield and Hyde called meetings to formulate their demands for a return to the wage levels of earlier years and to plan their next steps.

In The General Strike of 1842 (Lawrence & Wishart 1980), Mick Jenkins makes a compelling case that, far from being the desperate rabble so often described in other histories, the mill and factory workers of the North West were politically aware and quite able to make the link between demands demands for better wages and the need for the Charter.

The focus of activity in late July and early August was in South East Lancashire, where local Chartists played a leading role in organising mass meetings to oppose wage cuts and make the case for the Charter. This was an important stage in building support for collective action later. These leaders succeeded in uniting workers who were more hesitant in their opposition to the employers behind the more militant factories and mills, and created a base for a widespread strike.

August 7 was a crucial day: two mass meetings of workers from Ashton and Staleybridge were held on Mottram Moor, and support was given for a "Grand National Turn-Out" to begin the next day. Support for the Charter was incorporated into the resolutions passed. The next day, workers left their factories and began to move from workplace to workplace, "turning out" other workers to join them. The derogatory name often given to these events - the "plug plot" - derives from this time; as the workers closed down a factory they would frequently remove the boiler plug to prevent it restarting. The movement spread rapidly, not only in Manchester but in the towns around it. At Preston, Burnley, Blackburn, Chorley, Todmorden, Bacup, Stockport, Macclesfield, Leek, Congleton, Oldham, Glossop, Dukinfield, Wigan, Bolton, St Helens and in the mining villages, work ceased.

As the strike went on, the workers took control. Factories were permitted to operate only with the permission of "committees of public safety" that now began to co-ordinate action. These committees gave permission, for example, for work to be completed so that goods would not spoil or for humanitarian reasons. In one case, permission was granted to keep water pumps operating without which coal mines would have flooded.

The authorities were powerless: troops were drafted in from London and the South East - but even in the capital they had to run the gauntlet of strike supporters and were compelled to fix bayonets and march with police escorts to the trains that would carry them north.

As all this played out, work was also under way to prepare for both a Trades Conference and a delegate conference of the National Charter Association. The former was unequivocally a forum for the leadership of the strike. Planned for 15 and 16 August, it was preceeded by meetings across the region as groups of workers elected and instructed their delegates. Thousands attended such events in Manchester, Oldham and elsewhere. In Bacup, the Riot Act was read, but the workers continued their meeting for an hour and a half more. Elsewhere, the strike was spreading, with turn-out activities reported from as far afield as Glasgow and Merthyr Tydfil.

The Trades Conference opened on the morning of Monday 15 August at the Sherwood Inn. Alexander Hutchinson, representing the Manchester wiredrawers and card makers, was elected to the chair. Charles Stuart, representing the mechanics of Patricroft, was elected secretary. By lunchtime, the conference had adjourned to meet again at Carpenters Hall - the first venue proving too small. That day, 143 accredited delegates were present.

Attempts to separate wage demands from the Charter were soundly defeated - with 120 votes in favour of a resolution that explicitly linked the two. Of the 85 delegates who spoke or indicated their constituencies' views, 58 were for the Charter, seven for making this a struggle for wages alone, 19 had been instructed to abide by the decision of the conference, and one had no mandate.
The conference achieved a great deal in organising the strike. It agreed a series of positions, made provision to support those on strike and elected a 12-strong executive to carry forward its plans. But within days, as the authorities grew stronger and realised that they must srike back or stand to lose everything, the principal leaders of the conference and of the strike were behind bars.

In the mean time, the Chartist conference had also taken place on 16 and 17 August. At first the Chartist leadership was suspicious of the strike, and Feargus O'Connor never quite abandoned the idea that it had all been got up by the Anti-Corn Law League - which largely represented the free-trade mill and factory owners - to discredit the Chartist movement and apply pressure to the trade protectionist government.

In the midst of the events unfolding around Manchester, however, the conference had no option but to throw its weight behind the strike. From the moment it issued its first address in support, the strike became a national one. From Dorset to Norwich, Scotland to Somerset, turn-outs now spread. And in response, the government mobilised the troops - Grenadier Guards backed by artillery, the 34th regiment of foot, and the 73rd regiment were ordered north while a detachment of Royal Marines were moved to Woolwich to replace them.

Mass meetings took place in London between 17 and 20 August, and the police and military were sent to disperse them. In Preston, troops fired on an unarmed crowd, killing four; soldiers charged and fired on crowds at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Halifax and Skipton. But some elements of the state's response proved less than solid - in Manchester, a troop of Chelsea Pensioners refused to confront a crowd of strikers; shopkeepers and others called up as special constables declined to act against the workers, and there were reports of soldiers being taken away in chains for refusing to fight.

Despite this, with regular troops now on the streets with fixed bayonets and many of the strike's leaders now under arrest, the tide had turned against the strikers. The turn-outs ran on through August, and in many cases into September, with the Manchester weavers holding out to the last at the end of September. In many cases, mill workers went back with some element of their demand for a return to earlier wage levels met - or, at the very least, employers' demands for wage cuts abandoned. But all hope of achieving the Charter was now lost.

In the aftermath of the strike, there were at first plans for a large-scale show trial, to take place in London, with O'Connor and others facing charges of treason that could have resulted in the death penalty. In due course, these plans were shelved, and a new approach was adopted. By the time of the trial, it had become clear that the government and judiciary had thought better of presenting the strike and the Chartist involvement in it as a well-thought out plan. Instead, it was to be presented as little more than an episode of mob violence by desperate workers in which the Chartists had become almost accidentally involved.

When the trial of O'Connor and 58 others eventually took place at Lancaster in 1843, the charges were less serious. And in the event, though some of those charged were found guilty, none was ever sentenced. Those arrested elsewhere were less fortunate. In all, around 1,500 men and women were put on trial; of the 274 tried in Staffordshire alone, 54 were transported to Australia and 146 imprisoned.

More online at Chartist Ancestors
* Read an account of the trial of delegates to the Chartist convention and leaders of the General Strike, along with a list of defendents, jury members and witnesses.
* The names of those transported for their part in the strike and associated riots in Staffordshire.
* An account of the National Conference of Trades of 1845 listing delegates and a short discussion of Chartism's relationship with trade unions.

Tribune Magazine – 20 July 2007

2007-07-19T17:39:00.000+01:00

This week’s Tribune magazine reports Gordon Brown’s charm offensive over Labour Party reform but bemoans his ministers’ reluctance to tax the rich. Columnist Joan Smith investigates the high human cost of low-price clothes, and Catherine MacLeod is hopeful about the chances of improving education.

Old stateswomen: Mary Macarthur (1880-1921): union leader

2007-07-13T08:43:00.001+01:00

As the daughter of a Tory shopkeeper, Mary Macarthur could have gone the way of the young Margaret Roberts. Instead, sent by her father to spy on the Ayr branch of the Shop Assistants’ Union, she was converted to trade unionism and rapidly became branch secretary.

Through Will Anderson, an activist for the Independent Labour Party and later an MP and chairman of the Labour Party, Macarthur took to socialism. With the support of Margaret Bondfield, later to be the first woman Cabinet minister, Macarthur gained the confidence to stand – successfully – for election to her union’s national executive.

Moving to London in 1903, she became secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League, where she worked closely with James Keir Hardy and Ramsey Macdonald in the campaign to end sweated labour, and established The Woman Worker as a monthly magazine. She was also active in the campaign to win the vote for women, opposing moves by the main suffragette organisations to settle for a limited extension of the franchise to middle class women.

At Macarthur’s instigation, the Women’s Trade Union League eventually became the women’s section of the TUC. During the industrial turbulence of the Edwardian era, she, however, continued to play an active role in leading and supporting strikes by women workers all across the country – among them jute workers in Dundee and chainmakers at Cradley Heath in the West Midlands. In 1906, she forged the numerous small unions set up as a result of these disputes into the National Federation of Women Workers, of which she became general secretary.

Macarthur and Anderson married in 1911. An opponent of the first world war, she nonetheless became secretary of the Ministry of Labour’s central committee on women's employment. In the 1918 general election, Macarthur stood as the Labour candidate for Stourbridge but was defeated. The following year, Anderson died in the great flu epidemic.

Macarthur continued to work for the NFWW and helped bring about its merger with two other unions to form the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (today’s GMB). Increasingly ill with cancer, however, she did not live to see the outcome of her work. She died on 1 January, 1921 – the day the new union came into being.

Tribune Magazine – 13 July 2007

2007-07-13T08:40:00.000+01:00

This week’s Tribune magazine reports on a Tory by-election stunt that backfired when a Labour councillor denied switching parties, and Kevin Maguire reads the auspices for former CBI boss Digby Jones’s role in a Labour government.

Tribune Magazine - 6 July 2007

2007-07-06T15:45:00.000+01:00

This week’s Tribune Magazine reports Unite TGWU general secretary Tony Woodley’s call for Gordon Brown to scrap Tony Blair’s trade union policies and roll back anti-union legislation, and Jill Palmer reckons Scottish health minister Nicola Sturgeon is taking the right approach to the health service – even though she’s an SNP politician.

Strike of the month: Hairdressers down scissors, 1918

2007-07-06T09:44:00.000+01:00

As the first world war drew to a close, there was an explosion of industrial militancy in some unlikely sectors of the economy. Even hairdressers downed scissors and curling tongs in pursuit of a better deal on pay.

There had been minor disputes with local federations representing mostly small employers in the industry for some years. Early in 1917, Glasgow hairdressers won a minimum wage of 28 shillings a week, and Belfast hairdressers came out on strike for a similar deal.

But it was London that saw the most significant confrontation, when hairdressers in the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks drew up a comprehensive charter covering both pay, working hours and the role of shop stewards.

Widespread negotiations in the West End of London beginning at the end of 1917 resulted in 20 firms adopting the charter, which laid down a 48-hour week.

A short strike at Faulkner’s Saloons, which operated at a number of railway stations brought another significant employer into line in January 1918. And in June, Harrods Stores, with 71 hairdressing employees also signed up.

However, 12 months of negotiations with three separate employers’ federations on a London-wide deal made little progress, with the employers holding out for a 56-hour week and the right to fine employees who arrived late for work.

In December 1918, the shop assistants' union decided to submit an across-the-board pay claim of 10 shillings a week in all London saloons where there were members. The claim went in to 46 employers.

When employers at the more heavily unionised West End and City saloons procrastinated and started taking steps to smash the union by dismissing its stewards, 277 hairdressers downed tools and walked out.

The strike was a tremendous success. As saloons caved in one by one, their employees returned to work, and the union brought out its members in other locations; blacklegs bussed in to break the strike were swiftly recruited by the union and also joined the picket lines.

Even Fleet Street was sympathetic. The Daily Mail called it “the polite strike” while cartoonists had a field day.

When employers donned aprons and joined forces to try to break the strike at Shipwright’s, the largest saloon in the West End, the union organised the hairiest men it could find on the capital’s streets to queue for a cut and shave.

Meanwhile, the assistants opened their own saloon, and fashionable London flocked to have its hair cut and nails manicured. Peers, generals, music hall stars and even the prime minister of Australia came through their doors.

By mid February, talks facilitated by the Ministry of Labour had produced a temporary deal to raise commissions, and after seven weeks on strike, the hairdressers returned to work.

A final settlement saw 46 employers raise wages by the 10 shillings the union had first sought. Among them were Bond Street firms including Hills, Trufitts and Douglas. A further 20 firms settled at a slightly lesser rate.

By any measure, the strike had been a great victory.

Today in Tribune cartoons

2007-07-04T15:02:00.000+01:00

Martin Rowson on A new Brown constitution (see left). And Hack on the Conservative Party reshuffle.

Today's Tribune

2007-07-02T10:22:00.001+01:00

A metamorphosis.

Old Statesmen: Robert Applegarth (1834-1924): carpenters' leader

2007-06-26T10:13:00.000+01:00

Robert Applegarth deserves the credit for taking Victorian trade unionism from the precarious edges of illegality to acceptance as the legitimate voice of working people in wider society. Yet his active involvement with trade unions lasted for barely a decade in a life of more than 90 years.

Applegarth was born in Hull, the son of a whaling brig captain and began work in a shoemaker’s shop at the age of 10. As an adult, he moved to Sheffield, working as a carpenter, and then to America. Although based in New York, he travelled through Mississippi, where he was appalled by slavery. Later, during the American civil war, he would become a vocal supporter of the North and its cause.

Back in Britain after 1857, Applegarth joined the Sheffield Carpenters Union, becoming its secretary and leading it into merger in 1861 with the newly formed Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. Within a year, his work on behalf of the union and the co-operative movement won him the job of general secretary of the national union.

The ASCJ had been formed by the merger of a number of smaller bodies drawn together to defeat employers’ attempts to impose “The Document”, a signed pledge not to join a trade union. It swiftly adopted the centralised “new model” union organisation pioneered by the Amalgamated Engineering Union a decade earlier.

Under Applegarth, the union grew from a membership of 1,000 to 10,000 in just eight years. He would also be seen as a central figure in the “junta” of London trade union leaders who effectively acted as a general staff of the trade union movement nationally in the years before the TUC was formed. But it is in his role as “observer” to the Royal Commission on Trade Unions that Applegarth made his most significant contribution.

The commission had been established after the “Sheffield outrages” of 1867 during which William Broadhead, the secretary of the sawgrinders' union paid two men £5 to murder a small employer who had taken on too many apprentices. Applegarth worked tirelessly briefing the two pro-trade union members of the committee and assisting them with their minority report.

When the Liberals returned to power in 1870 under William Gladstone, the resulting Trade Union Act of 1871, far from seeking to criminalise trade unions once again, gave them immunity from prosecution for conspiracy and enabled them to register as legal bodies with protection for their funds.

Applegarth was no left-winger or proto-socialist. He constantly urged fellow trade unionists to be careful in their use of the “double-edged weapon” of the strike, and hounded George Potter, whom he accused of being “a manufacturer of strikes”, out of the London Trades Council with accusations of dishonesty and maladministration.

He would eventually fall foul of his own union’s executive after accepting a seat on the Royal Commission on Contagious Diseases in 1871. Although he was the first ever working man to serve in such a role, his opponents complained long and loudly that he was neglecting the work for which they paid him as general secretary. When he stood down, a civil war split the union.

Applegarth would live on for a further half a century, becoming a revered elder statesman of the trade union movement. But his life moved on in other directions, and he became, in turn, a commercial traveler in underwater breathing apparatus, the manufacturer of an early form of electric street lighting, and eventually a poultry farmer.

His later political activities were channeled through the Working Men's Committee for Promoting the Separation of Church and State. Before he died, he was offered the title of Companion of Honour, but turned it down. He was buried, according to his wishes, without religious ceremony.

Old statesmen: Will Crooks (1852-1921): union activist turned warmonger

2007-06-24T10:49:00.000+01:00

A powerful public speaker and one of the first ever Labour MPs, Will Crooks was a towering figure in the politics of London’s East End for 30 years from the great docks strike to his death in 1921.

Born in Poplar, the son of a ship’s stoker and a seamstress, Crooks experienced extreme poverty in his early life. When his father was disabled in an industrial accident, the nine-year-old was forced into the workhouse along with other members of his family, where he saw the casual cruelty of the poor law system and bread riots as men fought each other for a few scraps.

Although Crooks’ mother was eventually able to scrape together enough work to rescue the family from the institution, money remained tight, and Crooks found work as a grocer’s errand boy on two shillings a week as soon as he was able. He would later be apprenticed to a cooper at the age of 14, joining the coopers’ union of which he remained a member for the rest of his life.

Sacked as a political agitator for his efforts to secure a pay rise, Crooks and his young family were forced to leave for Liverpool. But when his young son died, the family returned to the East End and Crooks found work as a casual labourer in the docks, where he continued his trade union activities.

From the long but eventually successful great docks strike of 1889, there emerged a new trade union movement among unskilled and semi-skilled workers. At its heart was a new cadre of union leaders, among them Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, John Burns and Will Crooks himself.

The same year, Crooks won election to London County Council; he would soon become the first working class member and chair of Poplar’s Board of Guardians, using his personal experiences to reform conditions in the workhouse with the support of fellow Labour member George Lansbury.
Crooks became the first Labour mayor of Poplar in 1901. Two years later, with the support of the Liberal Party and the Labour Representation Committee, he wrested Woolwich away from the Conservatives to become only the fourth Labour MP.

As an MP, Crooks worked to secure pensions and unemployment benefits, and to reform the House of Lords. Re-elected at the general election of 1906, he and other Labour MPs backed the reforming Liberal governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Herbert Asquith. Although he lost his seat in January 1910, he reclaimed it in December the same year and remained an MP until ill-health forced him to retire in 1921.

Crooks’ later parliamentary career was blighted by his strong support for the first world war, particularly during its early days when many Labour figures stood out against it. During 1914, he travelled 6,000 miles speaking to more than a million people in his efforts to encourage men to enlist. After one visit to the front in 1915, where he was confronted by troops concerned by strikes at home, he returned to denounce the new militancy sweeping industry. He was rewarded in January 1916 by being made a privy counsellor.

After his death, however, many old enmities were forgotten. James Maxton, the left-wing leader of the Independent Labour Party and staunch opponent of the war, later fondly recalled: “Will Crooks combined the inspiration of a great evangelist with such a stock of comic stories, generally related as personal experiences, that his audience alternated between tears of sympathy and tears of laughter. I know of no stage comedian who can move his audience today to such roars of merriment as could Will Crooks, when he related the human incidents that formed so valuable a part of his platform stock.”

Old statesmen: Woodrow Wyatt (1918-97): lech, toady and turncoat

2007-06-19T11:19:00.000+01:00

Friends called Woodrow Wyatt a “great English eccentric”; most people regarded him as a turncoat, a lech and a toady of monumental proportions – obsequious to the point of parody in his efforts to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch and with Tory ministers in the Thatcher and Major years.

It had all begun so well. Wyatt served with distinction through the second world war, rising to the rank of major and being mentioned in despatches for his part in the Normandy landings. Back in civilian life, he was elected in the 1945 general election as Labour MP for Birmingham Aston, and in 1951 was appointed by Clement Attlee to a junior ministerial role.

Out of Parliament when his seat disappeared in the 1955 general election, Wyatt worked in television as a reporter for the Panorama programme, where he revealed extensive ballot-rigging by Communists in the Electrical Trades Union.

By 1959, Wyatt had returned to the green leather benches of the House of Commons, but his lack of sympathy with the thinking of the Labour Party was already becoming evident. When Harold Wilson’s government was elected in 1964 with a majority of just four seats, Wyatt and Desmond Donnelly revolted over steel nationalisation and were able to block it for two years.

Leaving the political frontline, Wyatt was inexplicably made chairman of the state-run betting service, the Horserace Totaliser Board, in 1976. It was a lucrative post that he would continue to hold for more than 20 years, until removed from it by death.

He also became a columnist for the News of the World for an annual fee reported to be around £50,000 a year, writing under the increasingly inaccurate title of “the voice of reason”. Among his many interesting views was that: "Man's biological function is to impregnate the highest number of females."

As late as 1995, he would write that, far from being harmful, smoking was an aid to longevity, while the campaign against it had “no scientific basis” and was “mob driven”. He added: “The emotions aroused are akin to those which fuelled anti-bomb marches, sit-ins at Aldermaston, demonstrations against the USA in Vietnam, poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square, attacks on Jews as enemies of the state in Nazi Germany and other similar irrational mob behaviour.

By the end of the 1970s, the former Labour MP had also become an avid Thatcherite. His reward, in 1987, was a life peerage. In his diaries, Wyatt wrote: "I know she is the best prime minister of my lifetime and if I can help to strengthen and comfort her when things look bleak, I will do it." Appalled by the Tories’ decision to ditch Margaret Thatcher, Wyatt nonetheless assured her successor that he considered him “a great man”.

Even the ardent admirers of Margaret Thatcher and notably unconventional Tory MP Alan Clark regarded him as “gaga”.