Labour History on your Desktop

Researchers in 19th century labour history can benefit from the RLUK 19th century pamphlets project, which was completed last year. Over 20,000 pamphlets from major collections in the UK have been digitised and can be searched online. Much of this material published by political parties, campaigners and politicians in the 19th century had been kept in the basements of university libraries and was very difficult to find. It was collected initially by campaigners such as the Webbs at LSE and Joseph Cowen in Newcastle. Now these collections can be searched by keyword on JSTOR.

It is easy to search for pamphlets by author – Francis Place, John Thelwall, William Cobbett and for organisations such as the London Working Men’s Association.There are some significant pamphlets written by Keir Hardie – his election address to the electors of the middle division of Lanarkshire in 1880, and the case for an Independent Labour Party in 1895. The collection also contains the report of the First Conference of the Independent Labour Party in 1893.

There are a number of pamphlets written by William Morris including The labour question from a socialist standpoint, Chants for socialists, Useful work v useless toil and most dramatically in the light of the events of the G20 summit – a death song to Alfred Linnell killed in Trafalgar Square in 1887 – a passer-by who got caught up in a demonstration and was trampled upon by mounted police. Following a fractured thigh, he died in hospital of blood poisoning. This pamphlet was sold for a penny for the benefit of Linnell’s orphans who ended up in the workhouse.

Events like the Captain Swing riots of the 1830s are captured in this collection, illustrating the hostility of the landed gentry. Words to the White Horse men was issued by a Berkshire magistrate, anonymously condemning the actions of the farm workers.There are pamphlets reflecting the working conditions of the 19th century – for instance in relation to child labour – Sufferings of factory children, Poor little sweeps and the Cry of the children written by Katharine Glasier. These were published by the Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys.

There are over 1,000 pamphlets on aspects of the history of the trades union movement. One gem is A narrative of the sufferings of Loveless, Brine, Thomas and John Standfield – four of the Dorchester labourers displaying the horrors of transportation written by themselves with a brief description of New South Wales written by George Loveless and published by the Dorchester Committee.

The collection contains many contemporary pamphlets on the London dock strike of 1889 – including the Great dock strike of 1890 written by Henry Hyde Champion, as well as pamphlets written by Ben Tillett. There are also pamphlets on the Match Girls Strike. Pamphlets on the campaign for the Eight Hours Day include arguments from all points of view , for example Pensions for all at sixty and an eight hours day by the Chairman of a Yorkshire School Board, 1892, The eight hours movement by Charles Bradlaugh, who cites the probable detrimental effects on trade, and some Plain words on the eight hour day including the difficulties of enforcing it by law, by Alfred Hiley in 1892. There are also publications on the possible impact on different industries such as mining and iron and steel. A history of the engineers strike for a nine hour day in Newcastle and Gateshead was written by John Burnett in 1872. This was published by the Nine Hours League. For those studying the social policy of the 19th century there are many pamphlets on the Poor Laws and conditions inside the workhouse.  The accessibility of the collection makes it a valuable resource for local labour history and keyword searching will retrieve references to localities.

These are just some of the pamphlets in this 20,000 strong collection, which covers a whole range of political, economic and social issues. The material on the banking crises of the 19th century could have been written today! Inevitably there will be gaps as the collection of this sort of material was hit and miss and much will have been lost or deliberately discarded. But as a resource for historical research it is invaluable in giving us an insight into the lives of those who lived in the 19th century, how they thought and what they hoped to achieve. Perhaps the lesson is the importance for future generations of ensuring that the equivalent documents of today are preserved for future generations.

The digitised pamphlets are not freely available on the internet but can be accessed from JSTOR. Access is free to libraries in educational institutions in the UK.

http://www.britishpamphlets.org.uk/

Barbara Humphries (LSE Library)

Conference Report

Chartism (1838-1858): new perspectives, 2-4 July 2010, Sorbonne, Paris

by Janette Martin, University of Huddersfield

The start of July 2010 saw around fifty Chartist scholars from across the globe (UK, France, Italy, Australia and America) descend upon Paris for an international symposium upon Chartism.  The mix of old and new researchers and the welcome presence of academics outside of history departments demonstrates the continuing vibrancy of Chartist studies. The three day event allowed plenty of time for delegates to consider new perspectives on Chartism.  Besides the welcome interdisciplinary nature of the conference another remarkable feature (no doubt encouraged by its location outside of the UK) was its comparative angle.  Two speakers compared the British radical experience to that French experience in papers considering petitioning and political mobilisation. Another paper investigated how the colonial issues were reported in the Chartist press.  Of equal importance to the intellectual treats was the social aspect of the conference, with much discussion taking place long into the night in pavement cafes and bars.  Particular praise should go to Fabrice Bensimon and his team at the Sorbonne for taking care of the delegates with great aplomb.  All in all one of the best conferences (academically and socially) I have ever attended – next year’s organisers will have a tough act to follow!

What follows is a brief overview of the papers. After a welcome by Fabrice Bensimon (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne) and Joan Allen (Newcastle University), Malcolm Chase (University of Leeds) gave a keynote speech: 'What next for Chartist Studies'?. In a stimulating and wide ranging address Malcolm outlined new directions for Chartism.  Areas, in particular, singled out for further work include Welsh Chartism post Newport; the differing demands of the 3 monster petitions of 1839, 1842 and 1848 (beyond the Six Points of the Charter); the subsequent political experiences of ex-Chartists and the need to look again at the local picture particularly in South West London, Dudley, Huddersfield, The Spen Valley and the West Country.  Malcolm reminded the conference of the importance of considering ‘the mental furniture of the Chartist mind’ and the need to look beyond the abundance of journalistic printed sources to consider the visual/material culture and the oral.  Next Joan Allen gave an interesting paper on 'George Julian Harney and the Democratic Review'.  Joan focused on Harney’s contacts with political émigrés, including Engels and Harney who he made foreign correspondents in his newspapers. Harney reported on the meetings of the Fraternal Democrats founded in 1845, but his reports failed to interest English radicals, indeed his continuing focus on internationalism eventually led to a split with Feargus O’Connor.  Joan stressed the need to view the Democratic Review alongside the Northern Star in this period as Harney was editing both. Ian Haywood (Roehampton University, London) gave a stimulating paper on 'Illuminating Propaganda: W. J. Linton and Chartist visual culture'   which viewed Linton as a bridge between pre- and post Chartist visual culture. Haywood argued that Linton’s wood block illustrations for the poem Bob Thin: The Poor House Fugitive (1845) should be interpreted in the context of Chartism, in particular the Chartist Land Plan.  Haywood described Linton’s Oddfellow as a precursor to Punch, pointing out that Linton was a personal friend of many Punch illustrators.  Haywood’s work, from the perspective of English literary studies, exemplifies the rich new direction of Chartist scholarship beyond politics into literary and visual culture.  Day one of the conference was rounded off with a champagne and canapé reception, a much welcomed innovation at Chartist gatherings.

Saturday, 3 July 2010

The second day’s proceedings opened with Greg Vargo (Columbia University, New York, USA). Greg’s paper, 'Outworkers of the citadel of corruption', considered the ways in which the Empire and colonial issues were reported in the Chartist press. By analysing Chartist commentary on the promotion of British emigration to the colonies and colonial issues such as the wars in Afghanistan, China, India and Africa, he demonstrated that the Chartist press delivered an important critique of colonialism and one which intently questioned the pro-imperialist bias of stories they reprinted. Chartist writers assumed that as (in their eyes) the Government was illegitimate and unjust it was highly likely that the British State used similar powers of coercion elsewhere in the globe.  Next Matthew Roberts (Sheffield Hallam University) gave a fascinating paper on 'Chartism and the Radical Tradition' which considered the intellectual heritage of Chartism by examining Chartist toasts and the range of radical thinkers cited in Chartist publications and used by Chartist lecturers.  Matthew described how the Chartist press was studded with extracts from radical heroes and the ways in which the intellectual heritage of radicalism was disseminated by lecturers and via book clubs, libraries and Mechanics’ Institutes.  These selections were often highly eclectic, based on the perceived actions of radical figures as much as their ideologies. Matthew noted the preference for radical heroes with identifiably working class roots (such as Tom Paine, a former staymaker) over men like Francis Burdett and John Wilkes who were disdained as sham radicals.  The enduring impact of Major Cartwright was also noted by Matthew. Michael Sanders (University of Manchester) spoke next on 'Chartist Hymn Books Lost and Found: The case of the "National Chartist Hymn Book"'.  Mike intrigued the audience with his description of a hitherto undiscovered Chartist hymn book (he has yet to reveal the exact location of this find). He described how Chartist hymnology combined the political with the aesthetic transfiguring Chartist ideology into a format familiar to all.  Interestingly, each hymn stipulated the meter at which it was to be sung demonstrating the ways in which congregations could instinctively adapt words to music. I was particularly fascinated by the persistence of these hymns into the post Chartist period, for example, during the Preston Lockout.

There followed two papers comparing Chartism in Britain with radicalism in France.  The first was by Benoit Agnès (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne) who delivered a paper on 'A Chartist singularity? Mobilising for democratic petitions in Britain and France 1838-1848'.  Benoit stressed that massive petitioning movements were not peculiar to Chartism while acknowledging that the depth of radical tradition and extent of political mobilisation differentiated the Chartist movement from its French counterpart.  He concluded that the visible strength of the Chartist platform in the UK was central to mass mobilisation of the people. Next Iorwerth Prothero (Manchester University) finished the plenary section of the conference with a paper on 'Chartism and contemporary French Radicalism: a comparison'. Prothero noted that during the Chartist movement popular radicalism was relatively weak in France, and that it only began to spread extensively under the Second Republic as Chartism entered its terminal decline. While there was much common ground in Radicalism both sides of the Channel, Prothero argued that the crucial difference between the two countries was their different political situations, particularly the more stable and greater freedom of Britain and the extent of open political campaigning there.

Sunday, 4 July 2010

On Sunday 4 July the Sorbonne conference closed with a 'Revolutionary Walk' around Paris led by Louis Hincker of the Universite de Valenciennes (a French historian of the 1848 revolution) followed by a hearty lunch.  Unfortunately I missed both as I had an early train to catch!  Next year the annual Chartism Colloquium returns to the UK and will be held at Leeds University on Saturday 2 July 2011, at the Brotherton Library.

Obituary: Nina Fishman (1946-2009)

‘It goes back hundreds of years, love.  Does 1848 mean anything to you?’  Such was Nina Fishman’s response to a journalist seeking ‘background’ for an article on the resurgence of student protest in early 2009 (Hugo Rifkind, ‘Student activism is back’, The Times Online, 16 February 2009, available online at: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article5739655.ece).  Quotations from Nina’s conversations seem to have the power to bring her back to life.  The homeliness of her mode of address, as reassuring as a London bus conductor’s ‘m’ duck’ or a hospital nurse’s ‘pet’ or ‘petal’ was startling to those used to the more reserved style of the usual British academic.  The ready reminder of historical parallels and the assumption, or the hope, that your knowledge of European history was as broad and deep as hers was as unsettling as the smile and the homeliness were warm and genial.

To those of us who had the misfortune to have missed out on Sussex University in the late 1960s and who lived outside the political sub-cultures of the London left during the 1970s and 1980s, Nina Fishman entered our lives only in the mid-1990s and she did so as the author of The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933-1945 (Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1995).  It was the first book on the British CP that was not only serious and important but also a ‘rattling good read’.  It was evidently written by someone who could vividly and easily imagine and understand the pressures of daily life faced by working class, ‘rank and file’ communists.  In Nina’s hands the ideas that the British Party would develop a doctrine of ‘revolutionary pragmatism’ and a faith that ‘Life Itself’ would bring about a revolution that might, equally, be indefinitely delayed seemed both natural and understandable despite the novelty and ideological unorthodoxy of these suggestions.  The book, and much of what Nina wrote afterwards, was also clearly written by someone who retained a sometimes impish sense of humour.  When one reads a sentence beginning ‘The 12th Party congress had declared rank and file movements…’ one’s heart sinks a little in anticipation of the tedium and dreariness traditional in CP historiography.  Then one is encouraged to see a vivid and appropriate metaphor: ‘…to be the new transmission belt to revolution’ and enlivened by the final clause ‘and Pollitt urged delegates to go forth and multiply them’ regardless of the bizarre mix of the mechanical and the organic in the metaphors and references.  Despite her repeated insistence on the seriousness of the historian’s calling, Nina was always the first to suggest that history, even CP history, could be fun.

I did not know her biography at this point but its political aspects would not have come as a huge surprise to anyone who had read her book.  As other obituarists have noted at greater length than I shall do here (see the 13 December obituary by Donald Sassoon on The Guardian website at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/dec/13/nina-fishman-obituary), Nina was a ‘red baby’ and stayed a red baby.  She was born in San Francisco on 26 May 1946, the daughter of Leslie Fishman, an economist and a member of that enduring triumph of hope over experience, the Communist Party of the United States of America.  He was blacklisted and had to leave his post at the University of California in the late 1940s, but he eventually found refuge at Idaho State College and later obtained a post at the University of Colorado.  (See Nina’s obituary of him in The Guardian for 18 March 2008 available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/18/1).  The family finally came to Britain in 1967 by which time Nina was already doing an economics degree at Sussex University.  Political activism got in the way of examination success and, perhaps, economics proved not to be the one best path to revolutionary enlightenment that many of us thought it was at the time.  Nina moved on though she never lost her respect for economics as a discipline.  She did a part-time history degree at Birkbeck and followed that with doctoral work supervised by Jonathan Zeitlin and Eric Hobsbawm, gaining her Ph.D. in 1991.  It was her Ph.D. thesis that became the 1995 book and which effectively started her career as a publishing historian.  It is astonishing to reflect that all of Nina’s public career as a historian has been compressed into the fifteen years between then and now.

Not that the earlier years were empty.  From 1980 she taught at Harrow College of Higher Education, subsequently part of the Polytechnic of Central London and later the University of Westminster.  Through one of the shop stewards’ courses she taught at Harrow she met Phil McManus who later became her husband.  As well as this there was a substantial career as an activist.  She supported the conclusions of the 1975 Bullock report on industrial democracy. She organized the Campaign for a Socialist Europe (CASE) in the mid-1970s.  She was a founder member of Tactical Voting 1987 (TV87) designed to maximize pressure on the Thatcher regime in the general election of that year. 

These activities led to a body of writing in current politics and she became a frequent contributor to the Political Quarterly.  ‘Extending the scope of representative democracy’ (Political Quarterly, 60 (1989), pp. 442-55) put forward an argument for re-invigorating British society by extending democratic processes to the government of schools, social services and hospitals in place of the market-mimicking processes favoured by Thatcher (and later by Blair).  It was an argument placed within a grand perspective of British and European history since the advent of mass electorates.  Her political interest in electoral reform led to ‘Whigs and punters: The role of radicals in reaching reform’ and its appendix ‘Electoral reform in historical perspective’ in Gareth Smyth’s edited collection Refreshing the Parts: Electoral Reform and British Politics (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1992).  In ‘Reinventing corporatism’ (Political Quarterly, 68 (1997), pp. 31-40) she argued that the roots of corporatism lay deep in British history and that ‘neo-corporatist arrangements of some kind’ would have to be found if Blairite rhetoric about ‘stake holding’ was to become anything more than hot air.  The key part of this article concerned the possibility of reviving a movement towards industrial democracy that the ‘stake holding’ rhetoric of the time suggested.  But to this reader the startling aspect of this thesis was the history: not the familiar history of British corporatism but the quite unfamiliar history of the impact of British corporatism on the history of German co-determination.  Startlement became a familiar pleasure in reading Nina’s work and at its base was often Nina’s Europeanism, as obvious in her history writing as in her political campaigning.  Nina’s ability to survey the broad sweep, and to encompass continental Europe as well as the British Isles in that sweep, was the most obvious way in which her writing resembled that of her teacher, Eric Hobsbawm.

The concern with corporatism stood behind what has been her most controversial contribution, her re-assessment of Order 1305 (‘ “A vital element in British industrial relations”: A re-assessment of Order 1305, 1940-1951’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 8 (1999), pp. 43-86).  Order 1305 is most widely known for supposedly making strikes and lock-outs illegal during the Second World War; but it also provided machinery for the settlement of industrial disputes either by arbitration or by conciliation, typically conducted by the Ministry of Labour’s own local officers.  In response to Nina’s article, Adrian Tyndall contributed a detailed account of the use of Order 1305 during a strike at Betteshanger Colliery in Kent in 1942, an experience which became the standard illustration of the impracticality in British conditions of prosecuting large numbers of people for going on strike (‘Patriotism and principles: Order 1305 and the Betteshanger strike of 1942’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 12 (2001), pp. 109-30).  Nina’s concerns were somewhat broader than this particular issue.  She had argued that the abolition of Order 1305, or rather its successor Order 1376, in 1951 reflected the Labour Party leadership’s failure ‘to address the fundamental question of how the trade unions could be incorporated into a post-war order involving positive rights in exchange for accepting co-responsibility for the economy, including some form of wages policy.’  John McIlroy and Alan Campbell’s reply (‘Beyond Betteshanger: Order 1305 in the Scottish coalfields during the Second World War’ Parts 1 and 2, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 15 (2003), pp. 27-52 and 16 (2003) pp. 39-80) constituted an emphatic re-statement of traditional views bolstered by valuable new accounts of wartime industrial conflict in the Scottish pits.  Jim Jaffe’s response sought to situate Order 1305 in the long history of arbitration, a topic which has been badly neglected, and demonstrated how the Order embodied the enduring historical ambiguities of arbitration under the common law (James A. Jaffe, ‘The ambiguities of compulsory arbitration and the war time experience of Order 1305’, Historical Studies in Industriall Relations, 15 (2003), pp. 1-25).  To provoke such wide-ranging and detailed responses was a major achievement.

After the publication of her 1995 book on the history of the CP, excursions into the pages of the Political Quarterly and similar outlets had become less frequent.  The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions was widely recognized to be an important contribution and it won the 1996 Outstanding Academic Book Award of the American Library Association.  She followed it up with a number of pieces examining different aspects of, and extending the temporal scope of, the material first introduced in her book.  These included ‘No home but the trade union movement: Communist activists and “reformist” leaders 1926-56’, a chapter in the collection Opening the Books (Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman, and Kevin Morgan, eds., Pluto Press, London, 1995); and two chapters in Miners, Unions and Politics 1910-47 (Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman and David Howell, eds., Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1996).  It was in the latter collection that she first admitted she was researching, with Hywel Francis, a biography of Arthur Horner, a member of the Communist Party from 1920 until his death and the Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers from the nationalization of the industry in 1947 to his retirement in 1959.  Nina’s admiration for Horner’s ‘revolutionary pragmatism’ was evident throughout her writings about the British CP.  Francis had begun the project but had to drop out in the face of increasing political commitments after his election to Parliament in 2001.  From then on Nina shouldered the task single-handedly.  It was to occupy her until the last few weeks of her life; the book will be published in two volumes early in 2010 by Lawrence and Wishart (see http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/books/archive/arthurhorner.html).

The exploration of Horner’s life took Nina’s researches back to the end of the nineteenth century (Horner was born in 1894) and forward into the world after 1945.  A number of studies on special aspects of post-war industrial politics followed: essays on the shipbuilding and engineering strikes of 1947 and on the 1958 London bus workers’ strike in British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics (2 vols., Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman, and John McIlroy, eds., Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000; re-published in paperback under the titles The Post-War Compromise: British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics 1945-64 and The High Tide of British Trade Unionism: Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, 1964-79, by the Merlin Press, Monmouth, in 2007); ‘The phoney cold war in British trade unions (Contemporary British History, 15 (2001), pp. 83-104); ‘Horner and Hornerism’, in the collection Party People, Communist Lives (Alan Campbell, Kevin Morgan, and John McIlroy, eds., Lawrence and Wishart, London, 2001) and, finally, an essay written with Holger Heith and Anita J. Prazmowska which demonstrated her Europeanism once more ‘Communist coalmining union activists and postwar reconstruction, 1945-52: Germany, Poland, and Britain’ (Science & Society, 70 (2006), pp. 74-97).  Her interest in post-war industrial relations led her into collaboration with Richard Whiting on a book to be called The Eclipse of Power: A History of Trade Unions in Twentieth-Century Britain.  It is hoped that this will be published in the not too distant future.

Nina’s kindness to young scholars was proverbial.  Her attitude to their research was always co-operative, never competitive.  The jealousy, disparagement, and backbiting that disfigure so much of the academic world were unknown to her.  She saw in a young scholar both the man or the woman who might need some encouragement and a representative of the next generation of historians who it was important to nurture.  In 2006 she participated energetically in a conference hosted by the Institut für soziale Bewegungen (Institute for Social Movements), Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany designed to discuss work in progress by young historians working on 19th and 20th century European mining history.   Subsequently she initiated and was the driving force behind a group of European academics seeking to establish an international training network for young researchers in the history of mining and heavy industry (who, in fulfilment of an EU funding requirement which insisted that groups have not only names but also acronyms, called themselves the Comparative Historical Analysis of Regional Mining Economies consortium or CHARME).  This group is continuing.

I shall end on a few personal notes.  Nina could be a daunting friend and companion.  Once, taking a stroll with me round Leeds one afternoon, I found myself being gently interrogated on the economic history of the city and was soon floundering, struggling to put odd anecdotes, images, examples of commercial and industrial architecture, and largely forgotten bits of books together into an intellectually coherent account of the last two or three centuries.  I resolved to undertake some revision and do better next time.  On another occasion she talked to me at length about Galicia.  I said very little because I wasn’t sure whether Galicia was in Spain or somewhere in central or eastern Europe.  I resolved to find out and do better next time.  I discovered Galicia was in Spain and, also, there was a Galicia which stretched across Poland and the Ukraine: there were two!  Now, I thought, I shall be able at least to nod intelligently in the right places.  Another time, I bumped into her at the National Archives, just after I’d discovered 150 pages of witness depositions taken by the Treasury Solicitor.  ‘I had no idea the Treasury Solicitor did things like that,’ I complained.  ‘Oh, yes’ she said.  ‘Didn’t you?  Oh, there are wonderful things in the TS files’.  I resolved to go away and bone up on nineteenth century administrative history.  She was, in this way, challenging to be with but the challenges were always put in a way which encouraged one to do more.  So much for the daunting.  But there was also the joy and excitement of discovery, a joy which she rushed to share, and which was the best of antidotes to the varieties of melancholia to which historians are prone.  She was the only historian I knew who would hurry to the phone to tell you what she’d found in the archives: ‘Quentin, it’s Nina.  I’ve just come out of the Durham Record Office.’ ‘Yes, Nina?’  ‘I’ve been looking at miners’ lodge minutes.’  ‘Oh, yes, Nina.’  ‘Some of them were still covered in coal dust.’ ‘Mm.’  ‘And they’re talking about checkweighing, Quentin, checkweighing.  In the 1940s!’  I was late to dinner that night.

Quentin Outram
Leeds
4 January 2010