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From International Socialism (1st series), No.40,October/November 1969, p.42.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Miners’ Association
Raymond Challinor and Brian Ripley
Lawrence and Wishart, 42s
The Handloom Weavers
Duncan Bythell
Cambridge University Press
That ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ which causes all today’s industrial strife has been around for a long time. The politicians, coalowners and upper classes of 1842 really believed that the Miners’ Association was formed because ‘the agitation of Chartism brought to the surface of society a great deal of scum that usually putrifies in obscurity below’. This scum, defeated in its political aims in 1842, imposed itself on the gullible miners, seeking both a living at their expense and dupes for its ‘malignant notions’.
This venomous distortion was easily made by the upper classes who had the evidence before their eyes of the very real connections between this first great national trade union and Chartism. The major importance of Challinor and Ripley’s book is that it challenges the accepted notion that the ‘General Strike’ of 1842 created a gulf of antagonism between political and industrial activists. Historians have till recently focussed themselves on the New Model Unions created by the skilled workers, and tended to ignore the unskilled ‘losers’ till they re-emerge as an organised force in the 1880s. Yet the short career of the Miners’ Association enables the authors to argue convincingly that after 1842 Chartism and trade unionism were not competing but in fact complementary forces.
In the case of the Miners’ Association the connection is clear from the beginning. The full-time lecturers (organisers) always included a large proportion whose experience had come from their organising and speaking activities in Chartist branches. And of course there was W.P. Roberts who, as attorney for the miners, identified himself completely with the working-class and fought every case, no matter how hopeless, exposing the class bias of the law yet by his skill defeating it in case after case. The Miners’ Association is the union most closely connected with Chartism, by a two-way process in which the defeated Chartists of 1842 became more favourable and helpful to trade unionism, and the miners emerging from their self-contained ignorance and brutality assumed the connection between politics and higher wages to be self-evident. The clarity of the particular Chartist-trade union connection in the Miners’ Association does not, however, completely prove the authors’ general case, and there is a real need for more studies as good as this one. Duncan Bythell’s handloom weavers were real ‘losers’. In 1770 there were only a few of them in the infant cotton industry, in the 1820s probably a quarter of a million, but by 1850 the trade had all but disappeared. Industrialism created them, and its progress cast them aside.
Bythell’s book clears’ away other myths – they weren’t skilled, they weren’t Irish, and their hardships weren’t due to mechanisation alone. Nor could they have been the backbone of Chartism, as many (including Engels) have believed. Their geographical confinement and their rapid decline in numbers in the 1830s, ensured that their role in a great national movement was quite restricted. Like many other groups, their political activity tended to follow the trade cycle but on a declining scale, so that by the 1848 Chartist upsurge they could hardly have been represented.
Useful though this book is for the facts it produces, the author’s ‘optimistic’ views of the Industrial Revolution lessens its worth. Because most people suffered in poverty, because other jobs (in the hated factories) were available for many, Bythel minimises the suffering that contemporaries, including the handloom weaver’s themselves, can testify to. And to argue that public men did their best ‘with the administrative machinery to hand and with the prevailing framework of ideas’ is to desert history for apologetics.
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