[554]Mr. Drummond, who resigned his secretaryship in 1892, was in the following year appointed to the staff of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade, from which he retired in 1918.
[555]See its Circular of June 1886.
[556]Some isolated protests against the employment of non-Unionists are of earlier date. Thus, the minutes of the Birmingham Trades Council show that, on July 3, 1880, at the instance of a painters’ delegate, it passed a resolution protesting against the employment of “non-Union and incompetent men” by the local hospital. And in the same month the Wolverhampton Trades Council had successfully protested against the employment of non-Unionist printers upon a new Liberal newspaper about to be established.
[557]The chief medium for the attack was the Labour Elector, a penny weekly journal published, from September 1888 to April 1890, by Mr. H. H. Champion, an ex-officer of the Royal Artillery, who (prosecuted in 1886, as we have seen, with H. M. Hyndman, J. Burns, and Williams, for sedition) had at one time been a leading member of the Social Democratic Federation, from which he was excluded on a difference of policy. He afterwards emigrated to Melbourne, where he still (1920) resides.
[558]Henry Broadhurst: the Story of his Life, by himself, 1901, pp. 218-24; History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910.
[559]The men employed by two of the gas companies in London, and most of those engaged by provincial municipalities, have retained this boon. But in December 1889 the South Metropolitan Gas Company insisted, after a serious strike, on a return to the twelve hours’ shift. A scheme of profit-sharing was used to break up their men’s Union and induce them to accept individual engagements inconsistent with Collective Bargaining. This example (which is not unique) confirmed the Trade Unions in their objection to schemes of “Profit-sharing” or “Co-partnership.”
[560]This strike had the good fortune to find contemporary historians who were themselves concerned in all the phases of the struggle. The Story of the Dockers’ Strike, by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Hubert Llewellyn Smith and Vaughan Nash (1890, 190 pp.), gives not only a detailed chronicle of the highly dramatic proceedings, but also a useful description of the organisation of the London Docks.
[561]This movement was much assisted by the “Red Van” campaigns of the English Land Restoration League, 1891-94, which coupled Land Nationalisation propaganda with the formation of local unions of the labourers in the Southern and Midland Counties of England. In the agricultural depression of 1894-95, when staffs were further reduced and wages again lowered, nearly all these new Unions sank to next to nothing, or entirely dissolved. Most information as to them is to be gained from The Church Reformer for 1891-95; History of the English Agricultural Labourer, by W. Hasbach, 1907; and Ernest Selley’s Village Trade Unions of Two Centuries, 1919.
[562]Short-lived and turbulent combinations among seamen have existed at various periods for the past hundred years, notably between 1810 and 1825, on the north-east coast, where many sailors’ benefit clubs were also established. In 1851, again, a widespread national organisation of seamen is said to have existed, having twenty-five branches between Peterhead and London, and numbering 30,000 members. This appears to have been a loose federation of practically autonomous port Unions, which for some years kept up a vigorous agitation against obnoxious clauses in the Merchant Shipping Acts of 1851-54, and fought the sailors’ grievances in the law courts. In 1879 the existing North of England Sailors and Sea-going Firemen’s Friendly Association was established, but failed to maintain itself outside Sunderland. In 1887 its most vigorous member, J. Havelock Wilson, convinced that nothing but a national organisation would be effective, started the National Amalgamated Sailors and Firemen’s Union, which his able and pertinacious “lobbying” made, for some years, an effective Parliamentary force.
[563]Address to members in First Half-Yearly Report (London, 1889). The spirit of the uprising is well given in The New Trade Unionism, by Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, 1890; on which George Shipton was moved to write A Reply to Messrs. Tom Mann and Ben Tillett’s Pamphlet entitled “The New Trade Unionism,” 1890.