4 WE Pitot have a Concress of ourown

.

The First Trades Union Congress —

The Editor:

In 1968, the British Trades
Union Congress published a
history of that organization
showing its start in 1868 and its
progress over the following 100
years. This history also
records the plight of the British
workers during the industrial
revolution and the valiant fight
waged by the trade unions and
social reformers to improve
the working and living condi-
tions of the workers.

Believing that our readers
will find this history of the TUC
fascinating reading, the
Lumber Worker is reproducing

it in part in this and future
issues.

The words were those of Samuel
Caldwell Nicholson, President of
the Manchester and Salford Trades
Council, who, with William Henry
Wood, secretary of the trades
council, was later to send out the

first summons to the first Trades
Union Congress. .

Both men were journeymen
compositors, Nicholson was
treasurer, and Wood was secretary
of the Manchester Typographical

’ + Society. Nicholson’s momentous

words were uttered on the spur of
the moment, after he had heard
from a brother compositor,
William Dronfield, secretary of the
Sheffield Typographical Society,
an account of his frustrated and
stultifying attempts to obtain a
wide hearing for the trade union
point of view through the medium
of the Congress of the National
Association for the Promotion of
Social Science.

The Social Science Association,
as this middle-class body was com-
monly called, had for several years
professed a sympathetic interest in
trade unionism. Yet when, at the
Association’s Ninth Annual Con-
gress, held in October 1865, Dron-
field read a paper in defence of
trade unions — after a ferocious
attack on them by the previous
speaker — not one word of Dron-
field’s paper, nor of the ensuing,
discussion in which a number of
Sheffield trade unionists took part,
was ever allowed to appear in the
Association’s report.

What then was the point, Dron-
field pondered, of trade unionists
going to these congresses of

- allegedly ‘“‘progressive’’ middle-
class organisations, if the views of
working men present were to be
methodially suppressed? And from
Nicholson came the epoch-making
answer: “Why not have a congress
of our own?”’

Why not? There were other good
and urgent reasons for the estab-
lishment of such a congress at such
a time. Thus far, throughout the
1860s, the trades unions had had
their backs to the wall. The Hornby
vs. Close judgment had deprived
them of legal protection for their
funds. The trade slump of 1866 had
given the press a pretext to
denounce British unions for un-
patriotically undermining
Britain’s trading position in the
face of low-wage competition from
‘“furriners’’. The ‘Sheffield
outrages’’, perpetrated by a hand-
ful of extremists against non-
unionists, had been publicised in a
manner designed further to in-
flame public opinion. Employers in
Sheffield and elsewhere had
developed the lock-out as a made-

-to-measure instrument for the dis-
integration of trade societies. And,
early in 1867, the Government had
appointed a Royal Commission of
Inquiry into Trade Unions, whose
eventual findings, it was feared,

might put the clock back to 1824,

when all trade combinations had
been quite simply illegal.

Confronted. by these recurrent
- onslaughts and by the menacing
uncertainties of the immediate
individual trade unions

national representative body
through which they could hope to
speak and act in unison.

True, as’ far back as the early
1830s Robert Owen and John
Doherty had organised their own
kind of national trades’ confer-
ence; but this had borne no lasting
fruit. And the National Association
of United Trades for the Protection
of Labour, which was founded in
1845, had failed to win the essential
participation of most of the larger
societies, who were preoccupied
with their own individual trades
and did not care for the idea of
trades’ federations or “general

Confronted with the
challenge of the Polish
revolt against the
Russians in 1863, the
British government
equivocated, But the
Junta brought its people
out on to the streets in
‘unequivocal human
solidarity with the Poles,

Robert Applegarth,
secretary of the
Amalgamated
Carpenters, and the
dominant figure in

. the Junta, the
leadership of the
London Trades
Council.

William Allan,
secretary of the
Amalgamated
Engineers. A man
whose cautious nature
and policies -
conditioned the
Junta’s reservations
about George Potter’s
flamboyant militancy.

George Odger, an
official of the Ladies
Shoemakers, who,
while still a working
shoemaker himself,
became the eloquent
part-time secretary
of the London
Trades Council.

In fact, such wider inter-trades

leadership of the working-class

movement as existed in the years
before the first Trades Union
Congress was vested in the trades
councils. Of these, the most iriflu-
ential was the London Trades
Council, which had come into being
after the London builders’ strike
over the nine-hour day, in 1860.
This trades council was guided by
men like Robert Applegarth,
general secretary of the carpen-
ters and joiners, a national amal-
gamated society; William Allan of
the engineers, another national
amalgamated society; and George
Odger, an official of the ladies’
shoemakers. These men, and a few

’

others of their colleagues, were
later to be given the name of the
“Junta” by Sidney and Beatrice
Webb, who described them as “‘an
informal cabinet of the trade union
world’’.

The London Junta in the 1860s
pursued a cautious and concili-
atory policy where strikes and
lockouts were concerned, but at the
same time they led some vigorous
campaigning for various political
reforms, such as the right of the
working man to vote; and they
pressed for new legislation to
regulate conditions in the mines,
and for a Conciliation and Arbi-

tration Act. They also backed the.

Glasgow Trades Council’s
energetic campaign for the reform
of the Master and Servant Act,
which made it possible for
magistrates to threaten strikers
with imprisonment for breach of
contract, if they did not return to
work.

In February .1866, following a
lock-out in the Sheffield Associ-
ation of Organised Trades, of
which William Dronfield was
secretary, sent out an invitation to
all national ‘‘trades’’ and trades
councils in the country to attend a
conference of trades’ delegates
with the object of creating ‘‘a
national organisation among the-
trades of the United Kingdom, for

Members of the Junta
and some of the political
causes, at home and

abroad, for which they
rallied the support

of trade unionists

“THE MINUTE-BOOKS of the London Trades Council from 1860 to
1867 present a mirror of the Trade Union history of this. period . . .”
wrote the Webbs. “In 1861-62, for instance, we see the Council trying

vainly to settle the difficult problem of overlap between the trades of the
shipwrights and the iron-shipbuilders . ...

>

“But the special interest of these minutes lies in their unconscious revela-

tion of the way in which the Council become the instrument of the new

policy of participation in general politics.

“Under Odger’s influence, the Council took a prominent part in organising
the popular welcome to Garibaldi, and in 1862 it held a great meeting in
St. James’s Hall in support of the struggle of the Northern States against
negro slavery, at which John Bright was the principal speaker.

“In 1864, the Junta ‘placed itself definitely in opposition to the ‘Old

Unionists’, who objected to all connection between the Government and
the concerns of working men.”

The international climate in which

‘