Be warned in good time—why there isn't a man, Sir,
Or at most one or two, whom the universe misses;
You strut for a moment, and then, like poor Anser,
You vanish, uncared for, with splutter and hisses.
THE NEW "QUEEN OF THE MAY"
The Coal Strike of 1890
To modern readers, however, the most instructive passages dealing with industrial unrest in 1890 relate to the Coal Strike. In March of that year Punch published a prophetic journal of events, looming possibly somewhere ahead, of life in London after being without coal for sixteen weeks. It is interesting to compare this forecast with the realities of 1921. According to the prophet, people have burned their banisters and bed furniture; a syndicate of noblemen start boring for coal in Belgrave Square, but are stopped by the sanitary inspector. The wood pavement is pulled up and riots have broken out. The Archbishop of Canterbury preaches on the Plague of Darkness in the Abbey by the light of a farthing candle, which goes out; etc. Even if the recent stoppage had lasted sixteen instead of thirteen weeks, it is more than doubtful if Punch's prophecies would have been fulfilled. At best they are an exercise in burlesque, and lacking in circumstantial imagination. Punch might have foreseen the scenic possibilities of a long coal stoppage and its clarifying effect on the atmosphere. And with his belief in the solid sense of the people he ought to have refrained from the suggestion of riot. But he may be pardoned for failing to foresee how oil would come to our rescue. At the close of the same month Punch addresses a versified remonstrance to the miners. He admits that pay should be liberal for dangerous underground work, but deprecates the use of the strike weapon as ruinous to trade and other industries by the laying up of ships and the closing of factories and railways. So, just two years later, in a cartoon on "Going on Play," he condemns the miners' strike, which aimed openly at creating an artificial scarcity, and thereby kept up wages. A poor clerk is seen expostulating with a working man: "It's all very well, but what's play to you is death to us." In the omnibus strike of 1891 Punch was decidedly sympathetic towards the overworked drivers and conductors, just as he backed up the hairdressers in the same year when they agitated for an early closing day and better and healthier conditions. The verses on the Democratic Village of the Future, a paradise of sanitation in which there would be no more "bobbing to their betters," and the rule of Squire and parson would cease, are largely ironical, and the Socialist appropriation of May Day inspires a long warning to this "new May Day Medusa"—the International—in a "Hymn of Honest Labour" in May, 1892.
Bidding for the Labour Vote