[202]£232,000 was raised by one committee alone between 1826 and 1829. See Report of the Committee appointed at a Public Meeting at the City of London Tavern. May 2, 1826, to relieve the Manufacturers, by W. H. Hyett, 1829.
[203]Wool and Wool-combing, by Burnley, p. 169.
[204]Home Office Papers, 40—20, 21, etc.; Annual Register, 1826, pp. 63, 70, 111, 128; Walpole’s History of England, vol. ii. p. 141.
[205]A Letter to the Carpet Manufacturers of Kidderminster, by the Rev. H. Price (1828, 16 pp.); A Letter to the Rev. H. Price, upon the Tendency of Certain Publications of his, by Oppidanus, 1828; and A Verbatim Report of the Trial of the Rev. Humphrey Price upon a Criminal Information by the Kidderminster Carpet Manufacturers for Alleged Inflammatory Publications during the Turn-out of the Weavers, 1829.
[206]Resolutions of the Meeting of Journeymen Broad Silk Weavers at Spitalfields, April 16, 1829; in Home Office Papers, 40—23, 24. See, for this period, Cunningham’s Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, 1903, pp. 759-762; and also The Skilled Labourer, by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1919, published too late for us to make use of its interesting descriptions of the principal trades.
CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
[1829-1842]
So far we have been mainly concerned with societies formed in particular trades, nearly always confined to particular localities, and known as institutions, associations, trade clubs, trade societies, unions, and union societies. We have by anticipation applied the term Trade Union to them in its modern sense; but in no case that we have discovered did they call themselves so. It is in the leading articles of the newspapers of 1830-4 that we first come upon references to some great Power of Darkness vaguely described as “the Trades Union.” We find, moreover, that there was in that day, as there has been repeatedly since, an Old Unionism and a New Unionism, and that “the Trades Union” represented the New Unionism, and the trade club, or Trade Union, as we have called it, the Old. The distinction between a Trade Union and a Trades Union is exactly that which the names imply. A Trade Union is a combination of the members of one trade; a Trades Union is a combination of different trades. “The Trades Union,” the bugbear of the Times in 1834, means the ideal at which the Trades Unionists aimed: that is, a complete union of all the workers in the country in a single national Trades Union. The peculiar significance of Trades Union as distinguished from Trade Union must be carefully borne in mind throughout this chapter, as it has passed out of use and occurs now only as a literary blunder. Our present unions of workers in different though related trades are usually called Amalgamations or Federations. But both Amalgamations and Federations, being definitely limited to similar or related and interdependent trades, are in idea essentially Trade Unions. The distinctive connotation of the term Trades Union was the ideal of complete solidarity of all wage-workers in “One Big Union”—that is to say, a single “universal” organisation. It is the attempt, on the part of the Trade Union leaders, to form not only national societies of particular trades, but also to include all manual workers in one comprehensive organisation, that constitutes the New Unionism of 1829-34. [207]
We are not altogether without information as to the genesis of the idea. The first attempt at a General Trades Union of which we have any record is that of the “Philanthropic Society” or “Philanthropic Hercules” of 1818. This we hear of almost simultaneously in Manchester, the Potteries and London, though it seems to have originated in first-named town. A meeting of workmen of various trades, held at Manchester in August 1818, convinced of the impotence of isolated Trade Clubs, sought to establish a society on a federal basis, each constituent trade raising its own funds and separately moving for advances or resisting reductions; but pledged first to consult the committee and the other trades, and promised the support of all, both in approved trade movements and in case of legal prosecution or oppression. A committee of eleven was to be chosen by ballot, one-third retiring monthly by rotation; and was to be assisted by a similar local organisation in each town.[208] How far the “General Union,” as the “Philanthropic Society” seems also to have been called, got under way in Lancashire or Staffordshire remains uncertain; but in London the idea was taken up by one of the ablest Trade Unionists of the time—the shipwright John Gast, whom we have already mentioned as an ally of Francis Place, who became president and called upon “the general body of mechanics” to subscribe a penny per week to a central fund for the defence of their common interests. [209]
Whether anything came of the attempts at a General Union in 1818-19 we have not discovered, but in all probability the project immediately failed. Seven years later a similar effort met with no greater success. “In 1826,” as we incidentally learn from a subsequent Labour journal,[210] “a Trades Union was formed in Manchester, which extended slightly to some of the surrounding districts, and embraced several trades in each; but it expired before it was so much as known a large majority of the operatives in the neighbourhood.”