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A POOR OLD MAN.

iwA contemporary cartoonist’s view of the 1868 Parliamentary election in Sheffield,
where, during the early 1860s, some crucial things had-been happening. Now

—_ eee satel

A. J. Mundella, a pro-trade union hosiery manufacturer, was adopted, with Sheffield
Trades Council's backing, as Liberal candidate—thus displacing J. A. Roebuck, the
anti-trade-union Liberal M.P. for Sheffield, who had been serving as a member of

the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Trade Unions.

Ss

Some of the events which led
up to the founding of the TUC:
the Sheffield outrages...and
the Royal Commission of
Inquiry into Trade Unions

THE CHAIN of cause and effect which
led to the establishment of the Trades
Union Congress can perhaps be most
clearly traced in the course of events in

Sheffield during the 1860s.

The dispute in the Sheffield file trades,
which originated from a_ grinders’
wage claim in September 1864, and

came to a head with the grinders’ strike .

of 1866, gradually revealed itself as a
dispute which was basically not so much
about wages as about the proposed
introduction of new machinery for
file-cutting, and the safeguards which
the unions would deem necessary if they
were to accept the new machines.

The Sheffield Trades Council (or As-
sociation of Organised Trades) realising
that there was an important principle at
stake, gave the file trade unions their
full backing. The employers insisted on
unconditional acceptance of machinery;

and the men struck. The A.O.T., hard
pressed to find the necessary dispute
pay, appealed for wider support. Both
the Junta and George Potter’s rival
London Working Men’s Association
sent funds. And the Sheffield Trades
Council adopted a suggestion of the
Wolverhampton Trades Council, for a
national conference of trades’ delegates
in Sheffield.

That conference, which assembled in
July—some six weeks after the file
trades strike had ended, virtually on the
employers’ terms—established a “*per-
manent” (though short-lived) body,
called the United Kingdom Alliance of

Organised Trades. But, meantime, the .

repercussions of the“‘Sheffield outrages”
—agegressive acts which had been per-
petrated by a handful of militants
against non-unionists and which cul-
minated in the use of gunpowder to

blow up the house of one of them—had
stimulated the outcry for an inquiry not
only into these outrages, but into trade
unions in general. Eventually the trade
unions themselves; who were being
increasingly accused in the newspapers
of complicity in these outrages, felt
obliged to ask for an inquiry in order to
establish their innocence.

Accordingly, on November 17th a joint
delegation from the Sheffield Trades
Council and the London Trades
Councils waited upon the Home

Secretary with a request to that
effect. :

The special Commission to enquire
specifically into the Sheffield outrages

__ Was not appointed until May 1867. But,

significantly, the Government lost little
time in setting up its Royal Commission
of Inquiry into Trades Unions, which
was appointed in February 1867,

5 _ Thomas Hughes, lawyer @
3 Socialist, who had been ele

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ef

union support, as Radical
Lambeth. One of the Ro}
Commissioners most f
unions. :