FOOTNOTES:
[207]In a manuscript essay on the different forms of association, entitled “Trades Unions condemned, Trade Clubs justified,” Place gives us the distinction between the two. “A trade society,” he says, “that is, a club consisting of the journeymen in any one trade which does not form part of a union of several trades, which does not appoint delegates to meet other delegates, is a very different thing from a Trades Union, even though it may call itself a union. Trades Unions are those in which several trades, or portions of several trades, in the same line of business or in different callings, are confederated by means of delegates.” Place often refers to this distinction between the Trade Clubs, which were, according to his view, “very valuable institutions,” and the “Trades Unions,” or “associations of several or many trades in one combination,” which he regarded as “very mischievous associations.” William Lovett, too, watching the same transformation, makes, in a letter published in the Poor Man’s Guardian of August 30, 1834, exactly the same distinction.
[208]See the reports to the Home Secretary (Home Office Papers, 42—179, 180, 181, 182); The Town Labourer(by J. L. and B. Hammond, 1917), pp. 306-11.
[209]See the “Articles of the Philanthropic Hercules, for the Mutual Support of the Labouring Mechanics,” dated December 24, 1818, which Gast contributed to the Gorgon. Gast’s preliminary address appears in the issue for December 5, 1818, and in that of January 29, 1819, the society is described as established (Place MSS. 27899—143).
[210]The Herald of the Rights of Industry(Manchester, April 5, 1834).
[211]Labour Rewarded: The Claims of Labour and Capital: How to secure to Labour the Whole Product of its Exertions, by One of the Idle Classes [William Thompson], 1827; see The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919.
[212]A Report of the Proceedings of the Meeting of Cotton-spinners at Ramsay, etc. (Manchester, 1829, 56 pages); Copy of Resolutions of the Delegates from the Operative Cotton-spinners who met at the Isle of Man(Manchester, 1830), in Home Office Papers, 40—27.
[213]John Doherty, described by Place as a somewhat hot-headed Roman Catholic—really one of the acutest thinkers and stoutest leaders among the workmen of his time—was born in Ireland in 1799, and went to work in a cotton-mill at Larne, Co. Antrim, at the age of ten. In 1816 he migrated to Manchester, where he quickly became one of the leading Trade Unionists, and secretary to the local Cotton-spinners’ Society. We find him, for instance, taking a prominent part in the agitation against the proposed re-enactment of the Combination Laws in 1825. Whether he was concerned in the Philanthropic Society or General Union of 1818 or 1826 we do not know. In 1829 he organised the great strike of the Hyde spinners against a reduction of rates, and became, as described in the text, successively General Secretary to the Federation of Spinners’ Societies, and to the National Association for the Protection of Labour, in which office he is reported, probably inaccurately, to have received the then enormous salary of £600 a year. We naturally find him the object of great suspicion by the Government, but no charge seems ever to have been brought against him (Home Office Papers, 40—26, 27). The articles in the Voice of the People and the Poor Man’s Advocate, which are evidently from his pen, show him to have been a man of wide information, great natural shrewdness, and far-reaching aims. His idea was that all the local and district Unions were to be federated in a national organisation for the sole purpose of dealing with trade matters, and that they should also be federated in a National Association for obtaining political reforms. In 1832, during the Reform crisis, Place describes him as advising the working classes to use the occasion for a social revolution. He subsequently acted as secretary to an association of operatives and masters established to enforce the Factory Acts, and was one of Lord Shaftesbury’s most strenuous supporters. In 1838, when he had become a printer and bookseller in Manchester, he gave evidence before the Select Committee on Combinations of Workmen, in which he described the spinners’ organisations and strikes. There is a pamphlet by him in the Goldsmiths’ Library at the University of London, entitled A Letter to the Members of the National Association for the Protection of Labour(Manchester, 1831).
[214]Home Office Papers, 40—27.
[215]Ibid., December 3, 1830, 40—26.