[226]It is not clear whether this scheme was initiated by carpenters or masons. The carpenters and joiners are distinguished among the building trades for the antiquity of their local trade clubs, which are known to have existed in London as far back as 1799. A national organisation was established in London in July 1827, called the Friendly Society of Operative Carpenters and Joiners, which still survives under the title of the “General Union.” MS. records in the office of the latter show that this federation had 938 members in 1832, rising to 3691 in 1833, and to 6774 in 1834, a total not paralleled until 1865. This rapid increase marks the general upheaval of these years. But this Society did not throw in its lot with the Builders’ Union until 1833. On the other hand, the existing Operative Stonemasons’ Friendly Society, which dates its separate existence from 1834, but which certainly existed in some form from 1832, has among its archives what appear to be the original MS. rules and initiation rites of its predecessor, the Builders’ Union; and in these documents the masons figure as the foremost members. Moreover, these rules and rites closely resemble those of contemporary unions among the Yorkshire woollen-workers; and an independent tradition fixes the parent lodge of the Masons’ Society at the great woollen centre of Huddersfield, whereas the Friendly Society of Carpenters and Joiners, founded in London, had its headquarters at Leicester. But however this may be, the constitution and ceremonies described in these documents owe their significance to the fact that they are nearly identical with those adopted by many of the national Unions of the period, and were largely adopted by the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834.
[227]A similar ritual is printed in Character, Objects, and Effects of Trades Unions(1834), as used by the Woolcombers’ Union. Probably the Builders’ Union copied their ritual from some union of woollen-workers. The Stonemasons’ MS. contains, like the copy printed in this pamphlet, a solemn reference to “King Edward the Third,” who was regarded as the great benefactor of the English wool trade, but whose connection with the building trade is not obvious. In a later printed edition of The Initiating Parts of the Friendly Society of Operative Masons, dated Birmingham, 1834, his name is omitted, and that of Solomon substituted, apparently in memory of the Freemasons’ assumed origin at the building of the Temple at Jerusalem.
The actual origin of this initiation ceremony is not certainly known John Tester, who had been a leader of the Bradford Woolcombers in 1825, afterwards turned against the Unions, and published, in the Leeds Mercury of June and July 1834, a series of letters denouncing the Leeds Clothiers’ Union. In these he states that “the mode of initiation was the same as practised for years before by the flannel-weavers of Rochdale, with a party of whom the thing, in the shape it then wore, had at first originated.... A great part of the ceremony, ... particularly the death scene, was taken from the ceremonial of one division of the Oddfellows, ... who were flannel-weavers at Rochdale, in Lancashire; and all that could be well turned from the rules and lectures of one society into the regulations of the others was so turned, with some trifling verbal alterations.” In another letter he says that the writer of the “lecture book” was one Mark Warde. Tester is not implicitly to be believed, but it seems probable that the regalia, doggerel rhymes, and mystic rites of the unions of this time were copied from those of an Oddfellows’ Lodge, with some recollections of Freemasonry. In his Mutual Thrift(1891), the Rev. J. Frome Wilkinson describes (p. 14) the initiation ceremony of the “Patriotic Oddfellows,” a society which merged in the present “Grand United Order of Oddfellows” before the close of the century. The ceremony so described corresponds in many characteristic details with that of the Trades Unions. All the older friendly society “Orders” imposed an oath, and were consequently unlawful.
[228]Home Office Papers, December 29, 1832, 40—31.
[229]At Birmingham, when the builders’ strike presently extended to that town, the following was the manifesto drawn up for adoption by the Builders’ Union, for presentation to the leading building contractor who had just undertaken to erect the new grammar-school. (No record of its adoption and presentation has been found.) “We, the delegates of the several Lodges of the Building Trades, elected for the purpose of correcting the abuses which have crept into the modes of undertaking and transacting business, do hereby give you notice that you will receive no assistance from the working-men in any of our bodies to enable you to fulfil an engagement which we understand you have entered into with the Governors of the Free Grammar School to erect a new school in New Street, unless you comply with the following conditions:
“Aware that it is our labour alone that can carry into effect what you have undertaken, we cannot but view ourselves as parties to your engagement, if that engagement is ever fulfilled; and as you had no authority from us to make such an engagement, nor had you any legitimate right to barter our labour at prices fixed by yourself, we call upon you to exhibit to our several bodies your detailed estimates of quantities and prices at which you have taken the work; and we call upon you to arrange with us a fixed percentage of profit for your own services in conducting the building, and in finding the material on which our labour is to be applied.
“Should we find upon examination that you have fixed equitable prices which will not only remunerate you for your superintendence but us for our toil, we have no objections upon a clear understanding to become partners to the contract, and will see you through it, after your having entered yourself a member of our body, and after your having been duly elected to occupy the office you have assumed” (Robert Owen: A Biography, by Frank Podmore, 1906, vol. ii. p. 442-4).
[230]An Impartial Statement of the Proceedings of the Members of the Trades Union Societies, and of the Steps taken in consequence by the Master Traders of Liverpool(Liverpool, 1833); Remarks on the Nature and Probable Termination of the Struggle now existing between the Master and Journeyman Builders(Manchester, 1833); Times, June 27, 1833.
[231]Pioneer, December 7, 1833; History of Birmingham, by W. Hutton (Birmingham, 1835), p. 87.
[232]It was edited by James Morrison, an enthusiastic Owenite, who died, worn out, in 1835 (Beer’s History of British Socialism, 1919, p. 328).