by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
When the war disrupted trade in the 1800s, individual manufacturers reduced the pay for weavers’ labour and goods, forcing other manufacturers to follow suit. Many weavers were unable to switch to better paying bosses because they owed money to their present employer, or did not have the money to re-tool when offered better paid work.
There was also an increasing supply of people who could do their job. Irish textile workers moving to Lancashire and Scotland found it easy to transfer their linen producing skills to cotton. Agricultural workers pushed out of the countryside by the enclosure of farming land used by the poor added to the supply of people who could weave. Manufacturers could enforce lower and lower wages at the same time as food prices were rising. It was a vicious pincer movement on their standard of living.
Weavers used a variety of techniques to improve their quality of life. They petitioned the House of Commons and the Prince Regent. When that failed they demonstrated and marched. When these protests were broken up, they formed trade unions, organised strikes and threatened, or used, violence. The famous machine breaking done by weavers, knitters and croppers in the period 1811-12 were the actions of desperate people. These violent acts of poor workers in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire – ‘Luddism’ – was the last resort of people who had tried everything else.
The law was the first resort. The weavers of Lancashire and Scotland were initially under the illusion that the House of Commons would enforce minimum wage regulations that already existed in theory. In the eighteenth century it was common for the state to protect workers’ conditions. The Spitalfields silk weavers had had the price of their labour regulated by the Justices of the Peace in 1773, admittedly after some vicious rioting and machine breaking – but attitudes were changing and the new general belief was that it was impossible to regulate the value of people’s labour. The Weavers Minimum Wage Bill was introduced in the House of Commons but not put to a vote, as there was not a single voice to speak in favour of it. The best advice MPs could offer was to counsel patience and submission to their privations.
Some manufacturers actively supported the workers’ demand for predictable wages, and often signed their petitions. Regular wage rates prevented conflict and protected the better employers from the unscrupulous ones, who undercut the rest with poor quality goods and low wages. Many bosses also wanted to stop the ludicrous arrangement where the pay offered by some manufacturers resulted in poverty, which had to be alleviated by poor rates paid by all employers, the good and the bad alike.
Workers also had no geographical mobility due to the Poor Law preventing them from getting support outside their home parish. This 1817 petition to the Prince Regent made these points:
In populous towns of Bolton Stockport … the owners of houses … pay 10s in the for poor rates the wages of the weavers are frequently as low as 6s to 8s a week and he who receives them thinks himself perfectly justified in complaining to his master of his wages and who shall say he is not when he cannot live where he is and is prevented by law of settlements from seeking a better [place] for his labour. But he receives as much from the Parish which comes … out of the pockets of the same persons manufacturers who employ him.
It was a new society; one where it was every person for themselves and previous mutual obligations between the rich and poor were dissolving. These weavers were totally dependent on variable wages. The only relationship they had with their betters was an uncertain one based on the selling of their labour in unpredictable national and international markets. There was no longer a fixed price for anything; manufacturers could not guarantee a price when they could not be sure of their markets. Tudor rules for protecting the poor were abandoned; they neither worked nor were very convenient. The Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, which protected conditions and apprenticeships, was declared a dead letter in 1808 at the same time as minimum wages were rejected. This encouraged even more of the desperate poor to learn weaving and further depress wages for all.
Thomas Holden was a typical victim of this new society; the economic and political system was stacked against him. Born in 1792, Thomas was a Bolton weaver and would have seen his family’s fortunes decline inexorably as he grew up. The Poor Law prevented him from moving to an area where his labour could be more valuable – unlike the owner’s capital, which could migrate to wherever was profitable. The Combination Laws of 1799 made forming a trade union illegal; it was also against the law to swear a secret oath – known as being ‘twisted in’. Both were banned by the government because of the implications of conspiracy, violence and treason.
Holden did not have the vote because he was poor, and stayed poor because he did not have the vote. The rejection of the Weavers’ Minimum Wage Bill was hardly a surprise. The workers were not represented in parliament; their bosses were mostly unrepresented too. In 1811, a weaver activist reported back on another failed attempt to influence parliament: ‘Weavers – had you possessed 70,000 votes for election to sit in the House, would your application have been treated with such inattention?’
In response to parliament’s lack of concern, between 15,000 and 40,000 weavers, including many from Thomas Holden’s Bolton, held a protest march (or riot, depending on the source) at St George’s Field, Manchester in May 1808. They presented their grievances to the magistrates; they were working a fourteen-hour day for eight or nine shillings a week and still did not have enough to live on. They were eventually dispersed by the military with one protestor killed.
The establishment press were unsympathetic. In a portent of Peterloo eleven years later, it was reported that the weavers were being supported by the local poor rate so therefore did not need to riot; and it was also reported that many of the poor weavers were Irish, had no poor law settlement and therefore received no poor law support. However, the same conclusion was reached – the weavers were wrong to riot. In the same year that the House of Commons refused to support the weavers, it gave Edmund Cartwright, the man who invented the power loom, a grant of £10,000 in acknowledgement of an invention that reduced the need for weavers’ labour.
After the failure of these tactics, the weavers turned to strike action. This was difficult to organise because weavers were spread around many locations. Most of the time, it was not factories full of power looms that they attacked – it was individuals who would not join the strike or went back to work prematurely. Often the lists of rioters and strikers contained recurring surnames and involved illegal action to maintain the effectiveness of the strike. The newspapers reported this:
Thomas Eckersley, James Crouchly, Thomas Gregson, Henry Gregson and Thomas Cooper, having assembled in an unlawful manner … for the purposes of raising wages, and for entered several houses in the townships of Lauton and Golborne, and forcibly taking away a great number of weavers’ shuttles.3
It should be noted that these Wigan strikers were not destroying machines, merely putting them out of use. The strikers wanted to stop production, not damage the property of people they would have known personally. When machine breaking started in earnest in 1811, the weavers were desperate enough to destroy the means of production permanently, and the response of the government was correspondingly more severe.
In Bolton, as in Wigan and many other places, industrial action was organised locally. Strikers were often families and co-workers. In the case of Thomas Holden, he was part of a weaving family in Hag End, Bolton, which included his parents John and Ellen. Three other Holdens were involved in the attempt to form trade unions and destroy a weaving mill in Westhoughton near Bolton in April 1812, including a William Holden, who shared the same name as one of Thomas’s brothers and seems likely to be the same person.
What was life like in Bolton and other weaving districts to make families like the Holdens desperate? No protest seemed to work. The same pattern occurred more than once between 1808 and 1812. There would be a prolonged and painful strike and then the bosses would raise wages by a large amount – twenty per cent in 1808. Within
a few months the pay rise would disappear as unfavourable market forces took their predictable and inexorable toll. Conditions became intolerable. In a parliamentary report in 1812, sympathetic MPs took evidence from Lancashire residents about the life of the local people. John Wood of Bolton-le-Moor, Salford was a former overlooker in a weaving mill, and shop owner, who knew the local weavers well. He reported that in 1800 the spinners and weavers had a large amount of badly paid but skilled work. Now the situation had changed – the pay was still bad, but the work was irregular and the price of food, fuel and rent had increased. The weavers were living on oatmeal porridge and low quality bread, with almost no animal protein at all. 4
Other witnesses from Stockport and Saddleworth reported the same situation; weavers were sending their children to bed hungry with gruel and water instead of milk; rents were unpaid and evictions were soaring. The only dissenting voice was a Mr Robert McKerrell of Scotland, who thought the root cause of the weavers’ problem was that they had enjoyed such a high standard of living in the past that they had been corrupted by it. They were therefore not able to cope with the present misery, and that agitators and seditious people (such as the Holdens, presumably) were exploiting the situation for nefarious purposes. He painted a picture of the Paisley and Glasgow muslin weavers, corrupted by wealth at the beginning of the century and similar to the Bolton muslin workers:
The rate of wages prior to 1806 was so extravagant that I should suppose upon a Sunday, going to Church, you would see two or three thousand girls in silk stockings, and as many rouged. The very best teas of the East India Company were not good enough for them. Their whole way of life was built on the same system.
So, it seemed that while there was no need for a minimum wage, there was a real danger in a high wage. The poor would forget their place; women would become shameless. There is an irony in the fact that McKerrell did not notice that richer people bought more of the labour of other workers and high wages stimulated the demand and reduced poverty. He liked a bit of poverty – for other people.
There were lots of explosions of anger in 1812 and Thomas Holden was involved in them. Four people, James Smith, Thomas Kerfoot, John Fletcher and Abraham Charlson were found guilty of an attack on Westhoughton Mill near Bolton. This mill had 200 power looms and had been operating since 1808. The recent Frame Breaking Act made the damaging of powered looms punishable by death. This did not stop a mob of about thirty attacking the mill near Bolton on 24 April 1812. Unlike other Luddite attacks in the North of England, there was no attempt to be selective about which machines to destroy and which manufacturers to target. The mill and its contents were burned down indiscriminately and afterwards there were riots. The mill had been guarded by the Scots Greys but they had left earlier on the Friday because they believed the threat of attack was a hoax.
Abraham Charlson, one of the people later found guilty, was seen armed with a scythe, helping to break the windows of the mill and one of the first to get inside due to his size, being passed through a window by others. Two young women were seen actively helping – they were Lydia and Mary Molyneux aged 15 and 19, arrested later but acquitted. The doors to the mill were broken open, and then straw from a barn nearby was used as kindling to start a fire, to which was added cloth from the looms. The Scots Greys eventually returned but the destruction was complete. Afterwards, the owners quit the town for good. There were no power looms in the area again until the 1830s.
On Monday, 1 June 1812, the Westhoughton prisoners were tried at the Lancaster special commission. Thomas Holden was one of three men accused of receiving an unlawful oath at Bolton on 14 April 1812. Taking an unlawful oath does not seem to be a terrible crime; however, the authorities were worried about what they were trying to do. Thomas’s defence that he went to the meeting merely out of curiosity was rejected; there had been a password on the door and the judge suggested that nobody would be in any doubt that this was an illegal enterprise. They were accused at the trial of planning the attack on Westhoughton mill; according to the government spies who gave evidence, they had talked about the best way to enter the mill and warehouse.
The other Holdens – Arthur (33), James (20), and William (17) were fortunate when the defence pointed out there was a flaw in the indictment (it didn’t state that they were assembled for an unlawful purpose), so the prosecution was given up, and the men were acquitted. Thomas Holden was given seven years transportation.
On 13 June 1812, Smith, Kerfoot and Fletcher were executed alongside Abraham Charlson, who was no more than 16 at the time and cried out for his mother as he was hanged. Some sources hostile to the authorities suggested that he was younger than that. Even under the harsh regime of this period, hanging a 16-year-old was uncommon. A clear political point was being made.
On 15 June Thomas wrote to his wife that he was about to be moved from the Lancaster Special Assize. Knowing the criminal system, he asked his wife for money as he would need it to survive in prison, and specifically asked that no new clothes be sent to him because he knew they would be stolen. He was moved on 19 June, and wrote that he still had no money. Thomas was not contrite; organising with his co-workers was not a crime in his view and he said so in a letter to his family:
To part with my dear Wife and Child, Parents and Friends, to be no more, cut off in the Bloom of my Youth without doing the least wrong to any person on earth. Oh my hard fate, may God have mercy on me… Your affec. Husband until Death.
Nine days after leaving Lancaster, Thomas arrived at the prison ship Portland at Langstone Harbour, near Portsmouth, on 28 June 1812. Most prisoners preferred both transportation and life in a penal colony to living on these hulks, and it was mostly pure chance how long was spent there. Holden reported that he had lost his possessions on the ship – they were probably stolen. His journey to the hulk was described to Molly as ‘whett and uncomfortable’ and for the first eight days on the boat he wore the same clothes.
Thomas spent five months on board the Portland, longer than average for a criminal awaiting transportation. He was well enough to do the manual labour expected and complained to his wife that there were many from Bolton on the hulk, but they did not help him at all. Throughout his correspondence, Thomas never mentions any political actions he took, or references any political ideas; he knew that his mail would be opened by the authorities. His disappointment that the people from Bolton showed no solidarity suggests that he was expecting something from their common bond of struggle. The appalling conditions on the hulks and the transportation ships were well known for breaking down the strongest friendships and connections.
Another person who did nothing to help was the Prince Regent. Holden’s wife Molly was among many Bolton wives who made an appeal to the acting monarch, who told them that he was unable to help – although Molly makes it clear that it was a political petition initiated solely by women, showing their involvement in radical protest.
Holden’s journey to Australia was eventful. He contracted jaundice and spent two weeks in bed, not eating for days at a time, and reliant on the goodwill of other prisoners. Unlike many other criminals, who could use their talents in Botany Bay to make a new life in a way that was not possible in Britain, he did not thrive in Australia. He still wrote to his wife complaining about prices and the behaviour of Aboriginal people. He still hoped to get home: ‘I Shall Returne to Ingland and then I hope we Shall Spend the Remainder of our Days in this world in love and happyness togater’ [sic].
At least he was willing and able to keep in touch with his family, except his brother William, who refused to write to him – he may have been the man of the same name acquitted of rioting. In her letters, Molly asks Thomas about two other Bolton men, who had also been transported and from whom their families had heard nothing. Thomas’s letters are a remarkable, raw piece of evidence direct from the mouth of a poor man, albeit one who knew that the censor was looking over his shoulder. Thomas’s story does not have a happy ending. He was given a pardon in Febr
uary 1817, but never returned to England. He never saw his wife, Molly, or his daughter, Ann, again.5
Back in Britain, weavers continued to use methods that had already failed to maintain their standard of living. The Coventry ribbon weavers had an agreement with the masters to pay a fixed price for goods produced. By August 1819, market forces had destroyed the agreement and the workers retaliated by forcing two factory owners to ride through the town on donkeys. One was accused of lowering prices and another was using apprentices on half pay to replace the work of the fully qualified. The weavers’ plan was to parade through the streets with asses and find more victims to sit upon them, until the magistrates intervened. Locals would have recognised this kind of protest – it was a ‘skimmington’ or ritual humiliation of local people who had not behaved according to local standards of morality. The novel aspect was the use of it for owners of capital rather than a nagging wife or an unfaithful husband.
Another, newer, tactic was to target one major employer at a time and refuse to work for them. In 1818, weavers in Preston started to draw the names of employers out of a green bag and the Lancaster Gazette reported that it was ridiculous to pick on Horrocks and Company who had done nothing particularly wrong. The weavers were operating from a position of profound weakness, made more obvious and poignant by the fact that the workers also held a procession from Preston to Gallows Hill, burying some weaving equipment in a mock funeral for their trade. The newspaper mocked the weavers’ efforts, but still hoped that trade would improve – it was clearly permissible to hope, but not legal to do anything about it.
