[143]A Few Remarks, etc., p. 86.
[144]Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 395.
[145]See the Gorgon for January and February 1819.
[146]Second Report of Committee on Artisans and Machinery, 1824, p. 62. For other cases, see The Town Labourer, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917, pp. 130-33.
[147]Throughout the century it seems to have been customary in most handicrafts for the artisan to be allowed the privilege of apprenticing one son, usually, the eldest, free of charge. For other boys, especially for the sons of parents not belonging to the trade, a fee of £5 to £20 was exacted by the employer. The secretary of the Old Amicable Society of Woolstaplers thirty years ago informed us that, as his brother had already entered the trade, his father had to pay £100 for his indentures.
[148]To take, for instance, the cabinetmakers and millwrights. When Lovett came to London in 1819 he found that he could not get employment without joining the Union (Life of William Lovett, by himself). The millwrights at the beginning of the century were so strongly organised—this probably led to the engineering employers’ petition in 1799 out of which the Combination Acts sprang—that when Fairbairn (after being actually engaged at Rennie’s works) was refused admission into their society, he was driven to tramp out of London in search of work in a non-union district (Life of Sir William Fairbairn, by himself, 1877, pp. 89, 92). For the last three-quarters of the century a considerable proportion of the cabinetmakers and engineers employed in London have been outside the Trade Union ranks.
[149]Articles of the Society of Journeymen Brushmakers, held at the sign of the Craven Head, Drury Lane, 1806; Minutes, April 27, 1831.
[150]John Gast, a shipwright of Deptford, was evidently one of the ablest Trade Unionists of his time. We first hear of him in 1802, when there was a serious strike in London that attracted the attention of the Government (Home Office Papers in Record Office, 65—1, July and August 1802), as the author of a striking pamphlet entitled A Vindication of the Conduct of the Shipwrights during the late disputes with their Employers(1802, 38 pp.). In 1818 he is found advocating the first recorded proposal for a general workmen’s organisation, as distinguished from separate trade clubs—to be described in our next chapter; and his Articles of the Philanthropic Hercules for the Mutual Support of the Labouring Mechanics, which were printed in the Gorgon, attracted the attention of Francis Place, who described him (Place MSS, 27819—23) as having “long been secretary to the Shipwrights’ Club: he was a steady, respectable man. He had formed several associations of working men, but had been unable to keep up any one of them.” He became one of Place’s most useful allies in the agitation for a repeal of the Combination Laws, and when, in 1825, their re-enactment was threatened, his “committee of trades delegates” was Place’s strongest support. Gast was the leading spirit in the establishment of the Trades Newspaper in July 1825, and became chairman of the committee of management, as well as a frequent contributor. In the same year he was actively engaged in the shipwrights’ struggle for a “Book of Rates,” or definite list of piecework prices, and the energy with which he counteracted the design of the Board of Admiralty, of allowing the London shipbuilders to borrow men from the Portsmouth Navy Yard, contributed mainly to the success of the fight.
[151]Place MSS. 27800—195.
[152]Place MSS. 27798—11; and The Town Labourer, 1760-1832, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917. Between 1798-1803 and 1804-16 the piecework wages for handloom cotton weaving were reduced in some cases by 80 per cent at a time of war prices (Geschichte der englischen Lohnarbeit, by Gustav Steffen, Stuttgart, 1900, vol. ii. pp. 19-20). See History of Wages in the Cotton Trade during the Past Hundred Years, by G. H. Wood, 1910; and Cunningham, Growth, etc., 1903, p. 634.