[465]Meeting of London pattern-makers to seek advance of wages, Beehive, October 21, 1865.
[466]Letter from “Amalgamator,” Beehive, January 19, 1867.
[467]The rank and file were more sympathetic than the Executive. The machinery for making the collections was mostly furnished by the branches and committees of the Society.
[468]An “Assistant Secretary” was subsequently added, and eventually another. But these assistants were, like the General Secretary himself, recruited from the ranks of the workmen, and however experienced they may have been in trade matters, were necessarily less adapted to the clerical labour demanded of them. The great Trade Friendly Societies of the Stonemasons, Bricklayers, and Ironfounders long continued to have only one assistant secretary, and no clerical staff whatever.
[469]Question 827 in Report of Trade Union Commission (March 26, 1867).
[470]Bookbinders’ Trade Circular, January 1866.
[471]In 1892 the Amalgamated Engineers provided themselves, not only with district delegates, like those of the Boilermakers, but also with a salaried Executive Council. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters has since started district delegates, and the other national societies gradually followed suit.
[472]Mention should here be made of the Manchester and District Association of Trade Union Officials, an organisation which grew out of a joint committee formed to assist the South Wales miners in their strike of 1875. The frequent meetings, half serious, half social, of this grandly named association, known to the initiated as “the Peculiar People,” served for many years as opportunities for important consultations on Trade Union policy between the leaders of the numerous societies having offices in Manchester. It also had as an object the protection of Trade Union officials against unjust treatment by their own societies (see History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910, p. 89)
[473]Report of the Trades Union Congress, Sheffield, 1874. A table printed in the Appendix to the present volume gives such comparative statistics of Trade Union membership as we have been able to compile.
[474]“Statement as to Formation and Objects of the National Federation of Associated Employers of Labour,” December 11, 1873, reprinted by the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress. This Federation comprised in its ranks a large proportion of the great “captains of industry” of the time, including such shipbuilders as Laird and Harland & Wolff; such textile manufacturers as Crossley, Brinton, Marshall, Titus Salt, Akroyd, and Brocklehurst; such engineers as Mawdsley, Son & Field, Combe, Barbour & Combe, and Beyer & Peacock; such ironmasters as David Dale and John Menelaus; such builders as Trollope of London and Neill of Manchester, and such representatives of the great industrial peers as Sir James Ramsden, who spoke for the Duke of Devonshire, and Fisher Smith, the agent of the Earl of Dudley.