[455]Circular of December 11, 1871, signed on behalf of the preliminary meeting by Thomas Mawdsley—not to be mistaken for James Mawdsley, J.P., a subsequent secretary.
[456]Thomas Ashton, J.P. (died 1919), then secretary of the Oldham Spinners, often made this statement. On the 26th of May 1893 the Cotton Factory Times, the men’s accredited organ, declared, with reference to the Eight Hours Movement, that “now the veil must be lifted, and the agitation carried on under its true colours. Women and children must no longer be made the pretext for securing a reduction of working hours for men.”
[457]Speech at Trades Union Congress, Bristol, 1878.
[458]“From what I have heard,” writes Professor Beesly in the Beehive, May 16, 1874, “I am inclined to think that no single fact had more to do with the defeat of the Liberal Party in Lancashire at the last election than Mr. Fawcett’s speech on the Nine Hours Bill in the late Parliament.”
[459]Report of Trades Union Congress, Sheffield, January 1874.
[460]John Burnett, who was born at Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1842, became, after the Nine Hours Strike, a lecturer for the National Education League, and joined the staff of the Newcastle Chronicle. In 1875, on Allan’s death, he was elected to the General Secretaryship of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. He was a member of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress from 1876 to 1885. In 1886 he was appointed to the newly-created post of Labour Correspondent of the Board of Trade, in which capacity he prepared and issued a series of reports on Trade Unions and Strikes. On the establishment of the Labour Department in 1893 he became Chief Labour Correspondent under the Commissioner for Labour, and was selected to visit the United States to prepare a report on the effects of Jewish immigration. He retired in 1907 and died 1914.
[461]A full account of this conflict is given by John Burnett in his History of the Engineers’ Strike in Newcastle and Gateshead(Newcastle, 1872; 77 pp.). A description by the Executive of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers is given in their “Abstract Report” up to December 31, 1872. The Newcastle Daily Chronicle, from April to October 1871, furnishes a detailed contemporary record. The leading articles and correspondence in the Times of September 1871 are important.
[462]See the Times leader of September 11, 1871. This leader, which pronounced “the conduct of the employers throughout this dispute as imprudent and impolitic,” called forth the bewildered remonstrance of Sir William (afterwards Lord) Armstrong, writing on behalf of “the Associated Employers.” “We were amazed,” writes the great captain of industry, “to see ourselves described in your article as being in a condition of hopeless difficulty; and we really felt that, if the League themselves had possessed the power of inspiring that article, they could scarcely have used words more calculated to serve their purposes than those in which it is expressed. The concurrent appearance in the Spectator of an article exhibiting the same bias adds to our surprise. We had imagined that a determined effort to wrest concessions from employers by sheer force of combination was not a thing which found favour with the more educated and intelligent classes, whose opinions generally find expression in the columns of the Times” (Times September 14, 1871).
[463]Here the “International” was of use. At Burnett’s instigation, Cohn, the Danish secretary in London, proceeded to the Continent to check this immigration, his expenses being paid by the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
[464]With regard to overtime, Burnett informed us that “it was found impossible to carry a Nine Hours Day pure and simple at the time of the strike of 1871, and that overtime should still be worked as required was insisted upon as a first condition of settlement by the employers.”