Sources for Chartism: Mather on 1842

In the eyes of contemporaries the semi-revolutionary strike movement, which engulfed the manufacturing districts of Britain in the summer of 1842, assumed an importance which the historian has seldom recognised. Graham, who was then Home Secretary, thought it `more serious’ than the Chartist disturbances of 1839. To Melbourne, according to the Queen, it recalled the tumults of the Reform Bill struggle. Lieutenant Colonel Maberley, the Secretary of the Post Office, whose duties afforded him a unique insight into conditions prevailing in different parts of the country, went so far as to describe it as `a commotion such as we have not witnessed for half a century’.

It would be unsafe to dismiss these opinions as being wildly exaggerated. There are objective grounds for believing that, limited though they were in duration to a period of two months, the disturbances of 1842 were the most intense of any that occurred in Britain from the time of the French Revolution to that of the Chartist détente of 1848. They covered a wider geographical area than Luddism, embraced more trades than the Agricultural Labourers’ Rising of 1830, and broke with more concentrated force than the Chartist unrest of 1839 and 1848. No fewer than fifteen English or Welsh shires and eight Scottish counties were affected by them. The main impact, it is true, was upon the lowlands of Scotland and on a concentrated block of English territory stretching from the Aire and the Ribble in the North to Shropshire and Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire in the South. But there were ripples of the main wave in Cumberland and Glamorganshire, on Tyneside, and at Chard in Somerset. Even the capital was stirred. Public meetings were arranged there to take cognizance of the `awful state of the Country’, and a tumultuous procession surged through the City at midnight.

The movement has been described as a `general strike, the first not only in Britain but in any capitalist country’. The stoppage was never completely general in the sense of nationwide, but in many towns and districts there was, indeed, an almost complete suspension of labour in factories, coalmines and other large establishments, whilst domestic handworkers often turned out to demonstrate and to compel others to join them. But it was also much more than a strike. A local postmaster writing from Accrington at the height of the outbreak observed: `It is more like a revolution than anything else in this neighbourhood, and we fear that plunder and mischief is not at an end.’ Graham and Melbourne, too, harped in their correspondence upon the insurrectionary character of the strike. Nor was this mere moonshine. It would be wrong to conclude that a genuine revolutionary situation existed, for in the last analysis the state’s monopoly of power was not in imminent danger of being overthrown. However, authority was undoubtedly challenged. Workmen pledged not to return to work until the constitution was changed, many thousands of strikers took virtual possession of large towns for hours on end, and even thought of marching on London to set the nation right. On one occasion the mob even unseated a detachment of cavalry by pelting it with heavy stones. The speed with which rumour spread provided a further indication of abnormality, found in other societies when in process of dissolution. Sir Robert Peel, writing from his country house in Staffordshire, told of a report brought by a railway guard from London that the Queen had been assassinated at Windsor. This had apparently circulated like wildfire.

The 1842 outbreak furnishes the opportunity, therefore, to study revolutionary processes at work in a normally stable society, and this will be attempted briefly. We shall hope thereby to throw some light upon the extent of the danger to which the country was exposed, and also upon the reserves of stability.  But first the pattern of the disturbances must be briefly sketched. Although there had been sporadic local turnouts, provoked by wage reductions, from the earliest months of 1842, the period of continuous unrest may be dated from a strike which began on the North Staffordshire coalfield on July 8^th. From that time forward events unfolded in four main stages. During the first of these, which lasted until August 2^nd, the stoppage was confined to the collieries of North and South Staffordshire, and its purpose, like that of previous outbreaks, was the redress of certain economic grievances, notably low wages, truck payments and a fraudulent system of remuneration known as Bildas. Nevertheless, two essential features of the later, more generalised, disturbances became apparent. One was the raking out of boiler fires, and the drawing of boiler plugs, to prevent the pit engines from resuming work. The other was the practice of marching in force from establishment to establishment to compel a suspension of labour. Sometimes the distances covered by the mobs were quite considerable. The North Staffordshire miners got as far as the Poynton colliery near Stockport, a distance of some twenty-five miles, before being repelled by the troops. The second phase opened on August 3^rd, and continued until about the 11^th of that month. Its principal characteristic was an extension of the geographical and occupational coverage of the strike. On August 3^rd. 10,000 colliers and iron miners of the Airdrie district of Lanarkshire left their pits, and started to plunder the potato patches of the neighbouring farmers for food. Two days later there was a strike at Bayley’s cotton factory in Stalybridge, and roving cohorts of operatives carried the stoppage first to the whole area of Ashton and Stalybridge, then to Manchester, and subsequently to towns adjacent to Manchester, using as much force as was necessary to bring factories to a standstill. As yet the movement remained, to outward appearances, largely non-political. Although the People’s Charter was praised at public meetings, the resolutions that were passed at these were in almost all cases merely for a restoration of the wages of 1820, a ten-hour working day, or reduced rents.

During the third stage, from August 12^th to 20^th, the strike was at its height. By dint of the exertions of the large armies of turnouts which marched from town to town it quickly became general in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire, Cheshire and the West Riding, and began to spread into Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. Meanwhile, conferences of delegates assembled in Manchester to direct the movement, and these endeavoured, with some apparent success, to harness it to the People’s Charter. It was at this stage that the revolutionary and anti-governmental features of the outbreak were most in evidence. Manchester was placarded, as London had been at the height of the Reform Bill struggle, with notices calling for a run on the banks, and there were sanguinary clashes between the mob and the military at Preston and at Blackburn, in the Potteries and at Salter Hebble in Yorkshire. This was also, however, the period when the central government intervened, with troops and official exhortations, to curb the violence and procure the arrest of the leaders. The fourth phase, therefore, which stretched into late September in some districts, was anti-climactic. It was a period of diminished violence and steady trickle back to work, and although certain categories of workers, notably the cotton operatives of south-east Lancashire continued to hold out, it was for wage increases that they contended and not for the People’s Charter. The wheel had come full circle. What had begun as a wage dispute was a wage dispute once more.

To return to our main task, discussion of the mechanics of revolution is bound sooner or later to raise the question of the necessity of leadership. This has long been an open question among writers on the subject, whether they be historians or political scientists, sociologists or active revolutionaries. As Crane Brinton formulates it, the division lies between, on the one hand, the ‘school of circumstances’, which regards revolution as a ‘wild and natural growth’, the more or less spontaneous reaction to intolerable oppression, and on the other, ‘the school of plot’, which sees it as a ‘forced and artificial growth’, sparked off by `a series of interlocking plots initiated by small but determined groups of malcontents’. Broadly speaking, the conflict reflects the divergence between the apologists for revolution and the conservative opponents of it, although Communist explanations with their unashamed emphasis on the role of leaders consciously planning a revolt provide an exception to this rule. We may perhaps agree with Crane Brinton that both extremes are nonsense. ‘Chance’, as Pasteur said, ‘favours only the mind which is prepared’, and while sudden and unexpected events like famines, or slumps, or the dislocations of war, do provide the motive power of revolution, the presence of leaders who can channel the anger or despair of the mob into purposeful activity is essential to the achievement of real success. Depending upon the nature of the objects sought, these leaders need not be instruments of an intellectual elite or concentrated pressure group. They may, as Chalmers Johnson implies, be mere hedge preachers and village prophets, but leadership in some form and to some degree is indispensable.

It will be useful to apply this analysis to the General Strike of 1842. The explanation of this which found most favour at the time was that of ‘the school of plot’. The Chartists blamed the Anti-Corn Law League; the Leaguers blamed the Chartists; the Conservative government blamed both, and added the trade unions for good measure. The case against the Anti-Corn Law League need not detain us long. Elaborated by John Wilson Croker in a clever political polemic which appeared in The Quarterly Review, it ran to the effect that, pursuant to a long-term plan, the League engineered the strike both by incitement and by the action of its member millowners in effecting a reduction in the wages of the cotton operatives. Croker made many telling points against the League, and there can be little doubt that the continual harping upon the damage inflicted by the Corn Laws, and on the selfishness of landlords, helped to encourage the insurgents and to demoralise the upholders of law and order when the conflict came. Nevertheless, the League can almost certainly be acquitted of direct conspiracy to foment the outbreak. Both in Staffordshire and in southern Lancashire Tory employers shared with free-trading liberals the responsibility for making the offending wage reductions, and Bayleys of Stalybridge, whose stubbornness was immediately responsible for the outbreak in Lancashire, were in the last resort prepared to withdraw their notice of reduction. It was the men who then refused the olive branch.

But what of the Chartists and the trade unions? It was upon these, acting as he supposed in concert, through a conference of trade delegates meeting in Manchester, that the Home Secretary’s suspicions first alighted. `It is quite clear,’ he wrote to General Sir William Warre on August 15^th, ‘that these Delegates are the Directing Body: they form the link between the trades unions and the Chartists.’ Later historians, however, reacting sharply against such conspiratorial explanations, have emphasised the strike’s total spontaneity. Mr. Christopher Thorne writes that ‘the Plug Riots, manifestations of utter misery…following wage cuts in the summer of 1842, were by no means Chartist-inspired…’, while Dr Ronald Read makes explicit the assumptions of the modern consensus in the words: ‘There was no causal connection between Chartism and the outbreak…The Chartists…merely attempted to exploit it once it had occurred.’ This paper is designed to suggest that the truth lies in between the contemporary and more recent interpretations.

It seems to me that the role of conscious, creative leadership did assert itself at two successive stages in the development of the strike. First in the inception. It is true that the ordinary coalminer or cotton operative, who struck work and endeavoured to persuade others to do likewise, did so out of a sense of exasperation induced by a long series of wage reductions. Without this impetus no amount of oratory would have produced an outbreak as widespread as the Plug Plot. Given this factor, however, the importance of leaders, who suggested when the time was ripe to strike, which factories should be turned out by force, and what should be demanded as the price of returning to work, can scarcely be denied. There is evidence that, in Stalybridge and in the Staffordshire Potteries, the workpeople had local trade committees to formulate their demands, but enthusiasm was principally sustained at large open-air meetings, where directions were also issued as to where the mob should proceed, what should be their terms, and how they should behave. From the official reports of the subsequent trials at the Lancaster Assizes, and from the columns of the Northern Star, it is possible to compile a list of the chairmen and principal speakers at the meetings in Stalybridge and Ashton, and also in Manchester, in the early days of the outbreak. Research into the background of these figures shows that they were mostly Chartists, and that many had no connection with the cotton industry, where the grievances which provoked the strike occurred.

The Star lists the speakers at a meeting in Stalybridge early on August 8^th, which, after an adjournment, ended in a resolution to turn out factories in Stalybridge and Dukinfield. Six names were mentioned. The Chairman, Alexander (‘Sandy’) Challenger, was a hatter, who had once proposed a memorial to the Queen that she should employ only Chartist ministers. William Stephenson was nominated as a representative of Stalybridge to the General Council of the National Charter Association; so also was John Durham (mistakenly described as ‘Derham’), a Stalybridge newsagent. Patrick Brophy was an Irishman who had once been secretary of the Irish Universal Suffrage Association, and had become a Chartist lecturer. Fenton was presumably the notorious pike-selling Chartist from Ashton, once described in a piece of local doggerel as one of ‘Fergus’ dupes’. At a later meeting that afternoon which adopted a resolution `that the people of Ashton go to Oldham and those at Stalybridge and Dukinfield to Hyde’ the principal speakers were Brophy and Richard Pilling, a member of the South Lancashire delegate conference of the National Charter Association. Pilling afterwards headed the Ashton turnouts to Oldham. In Granby Row Fields, Manchester, on August 9^th seven speakers were mentioned; four were certainly Chartists and two more probably so. At a further meeting in the same place on the following day Christopher Doyle, who had been a member of the Chartist Convention of 1842, urged the people to form a procession. In the Ashton context mention should be made of William Aitken (Aitkin), a local schoolmaster and Chartist leader, who went with Challenger as a delegate to Preston, to persuade the workpeople there to strike; also perhaps of Thomas Mahon, who formed the link between the Chartists and the Operatives’ Committee. Similar evidence of Chartist leadership comes from other regions, from the Potteries, from South Staffordshire, where Arthur O’Neill, the Christian Chartist, attended a meeting at West Bromwich on August 1^st and moved resolutions embodying the miners’ grievances, and from Scotland.

It would be tempting to deduce from these cases a nucleated Chartist conspiracy to work up a general strike in favour of the People’s Charter. Only three years earlier a Chartist Convention had adopted such a plan, to rescind it when it found the project lacking in support. Closer examination of the evidence, however, casts doubt on this interpretation. For one thing Chartism was in 1842 too divided to be capable of devising a single national plan. It was split not only between O’Connorites and Complete Suffragists, but also between O’Connor and his editor of the Northern Star on the one hand and the chiefs of the Executive of the National Charter Association on the other. Moreover, the Chartists who put themselves at the head of the strikes in South Lancashire seemed uncertain themselves whether it was for the Charter or for the redress of trade grievances that they were contending. John Leach told a meeting at Hyde that `it would be more proper for them to stand out for the wage than the Charter question’, as `it was impossible for them to get the Charter at present’. At a meeting at the Haigh in Stalybridge on August 11^th Fenton and Durham argued for the wages question; Stephenson and Mahon for the Charter. Yet all were Chartists.

Probably, therefore, these local Chartists headed the turnouts over wage grievances not simply to exploit them (although it would be naive to suggest that they were not, in many cases, also feeling their way to turn the situation to the advantage of the People’s Charter) but out of a deep-rooted sense of commitment to working-class interests which Chartism engendered. There was an established pattern of Chartist leadership in trade disputes going back for at least several months before the Plug Plot commenced. Aitken and Pilling were to be found taking the lead in resistance to a proposed 10 per cent reduction of wages in Ashton as early as March 1842. The action taken in August was in one perspective merely a legitimate extension of this.

If, however, at first, the Chartists contributed little to the shaping of the objects of the strike, they exerted quite a profound influence on the tactics that were pursued. It is possible to discern in the speeches which they made evidence of a design to unify discontents into a single focus of confrontation with the employers. This was apparent in Chartist contributions to strikes even before the Plug Plot began. O’Neill told a West Bromwich strike meeting in May that ‘the whole district should be forthwith canvassed, united and organised to enable them to resist not only the present reduction but also future attempts’. Perhaps there was something in Chartism with its class-conscious appeal to general working-class interests that led its adherents to advise union of forces as an appropriate weapon of defence in trade disputes, for when the strikes broke out in Lancashire in August, it was again the object of the Chartist orators to bring a concerted pressure of the whole area to bear upon the employers. It was resolved at a meeting on Mottram Moor on Sunday, August 7^th ‘that on the Tuesday, they would march to Manchester, stop all labour, visit the Exchange and teach “the merchants how to give better prices for goods”‘. The events of the two following days were fully consistent with such a plan. By a sequence of rallies and turnout marches the operatives of the Ashton, Stalybridge, Hyde and Dukinfield district were slowly shepherded together, until a joint invasion of Manchester became feasible. It occurred on Tuesday, August 9^th, when a section of the invading force did in fact make its way at the earliest opportunity to the Exchange. In this way the Chartists helped to expand and to unify the movement when it occurred, though it is by no means clear that they were acting in accordance with any revolutionary plan conceived before the outbreak began. At least they cast their influence against recourse to violence.

Once the strikes had been successfully launched, a second organised intervention occurred--that of the delegate conferences. These were of two kinds--a national conference of the National Charter Association held in Manchester on August 16^th and 17^th, and a series of regional conferences consisting of delegates from the trades of Manchester and district, which met in the same city from August 11^th to 20^th. In most historical accounts of the Plug Plot the former plays a central role. The latter, however, was in some respects the more important. It was the trade conferences that gave the first general lead to adopt the People’s Charter as the prime object of the strike. On August 12^th, a meeting of the trades and mill-hands of Manchester and its vicinity with delegates from various parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, adopted a resolution: ‘that this meeting recommend the people of all trades and callings to forthwith cease work until the above document becomes the law of the land’. This was confirmed at a differently constituted conference in the Carpenters’ Hall that same afternoon. The deliberations coincided with and strengthened a growing movement in the country to give the turnout a political colouring. Moreover, in the Manchester district, at least, which was the home of the strike, the trade delegates rather than the Chartists came to be regarded as the leaders. Their continued sessions from August 15^th onwards, held after further elections had taken place, were besieged by large crowds, which gathered in the streets outside their meeting halls, eager to know what transpired within, so much so that the delegates themselves, anxious to avoid attracting the attention of the authorities, repeatedly and vainly urged them to disperse.

The assembling of these delegates apparently ex nihilo, and their uncompromising stand for the People’s Charter, is a phenomenon which calls for explanation. To Home Secretary Graham they formed the nub of the supposed conspiracy, linking the Chartists with the trade unions. Events, however, are capable of a less sinister interpretation. The immediate urge which led to the gathering of these bodies, appears to have been more or less spontaneous. Shortly after the march of the turnouts from Ashton into Manchester two separate initiatives were taken in the town to procure the appointment of trade delegates, one by the power-loom weavers and the other by the mechanics. There may, in fact, have been more than two, but that of the mechanics proved the most fruitful and eventually burgeoned into the conference in the Carpenters’ Hall on August 11^th and 12^th, which adopted the resolution to strike for the Charter. It seems that the mechanics were first goaded into an appeal for support from their fellow tradesmen because one of their own meetings had been interrupted by the soldiery. Behind these occurrences, however, lay a long period of unintended preparation. In Manchester and the surrounding towns the tradition of uniting trades by delegates for mutual support upon a regional basis stretched back at least to the Philanthropic Society of 1818, which included the towns of Manchester, Stockport, Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham and Bury. During the nine months preceding the outbreak at Stalybridge this tradition was revived by the attempts of both the Anti-Corn Law League and the Chartists to draw out an expression of support from the trade societies. As early as October 1841 a gathering of the Manchester Operative Anti-Corn Law Association had appointed a committee to invite the trades, mill hands and other bodies of working men to attend a meeting for the purpose of obtaining the extinction of the corn monopoly and compensation for those who had been robbed by it. By New Year’s Day 1842, a conference of deputies from the different working men’s associations of the Kingdom was being held in the Anti-Corn Law League’s rooms in Manchester, and this commissioned a deputation of workmen from Messrs Sharp and Roberts’ engineering works in Manchester to organise the trades upon the subject of Corn Law repeal, which was to be accompanied by an ‘equitable adjustment’ of the National Debt, financed by the landlords out of taxation.

Significantly, the leader of the deputation from Messrs Sharp and Roberts was Alexander Hutchinson, a smith, who was to serve as the standing chairman of the trade delegate conferences held in Manchester in the second week of the disturbances of August. Hutchinson was an Owenite Socialist, who, at the time of his arrest during the Plug Plot, planned to emigrate to the backwoods of America for the purpose of founding or joining a communitarian experiment there. His position was somewhat compromised by the fact that, when he was arrested, the police discovered in his house in Manchester a collection of firearms and gunpowder, which he had intended to take with him on his journey.

But to return to events earlier in the year, Hutchinson and his colleagues fulfilled their commission from the Anti-Corn Law League to organise the trades. Meetings, consisting of delegates from the bricklayers and the mechanics, the silk dyers and the calico printers, the engravers and the glass cutters, the shoemakers and the tailors were duly held. At the last of these, in the Hop Pole Inn, Manchester, on March 14^th, with Hutchinson in the chair, the unexpected happened. Delegate after delegate rose to substitute an agitation for the People’s Charter for one in favour of Corn Law repeal, and eventually a motion for uniting the trades and political bodies of Manchester on the basis of the Charter alone was carried by fifty-nine votes. It was further resolved to invite the trades of Manchester and Salford to attend a demonstration on Good Friday, when Feargus O’Connor would lay the foundation stone of a memorial to Orator Hunt. The lead in favour of the Charter was begun by the representative of the silk dyers and was followed by those of the calico printers and the fustian cutters.

The outcome of this meeting reflects a development, the importance of which historians have only just begun to appreciate. Until recently it has been often assumed that Chartism and trade unionism were two mutually exclusive expressions of working-class endeavour. By some historians, notably Professor Asa Briggs, a pendulum explanation had been invoked to clarify the relationship between them. Working men concentrated upon trade union activity in times of good trade and turned to politics when trade was poor. This thesis is both valid and useful, as a general case, but it must admit of significant exceptions. Certain trades, the skilled handicrafts in particular, retained their organisation through the worst years of depression, and these sometimes turned collectively to Chartism, in response to wage cutting or the threat of downgrading, because reflection had taught their members that a political solution was relevant to their economic difficulties. The columns of the Northern Star during the first six months of 1842 furnish many examples of initiatives by various groups of tradesmen to declare for the Charter or join the National Charter Association. The ‘cordwainers of Colne’, the ‘associated shoemakers of Wigan’, the fustian cutters of Manchester, are all cases in point. Particularly interesting is the conversion of the engineering trades of Manchester, which took place in the two months prior to the outbreak of the Plug Revolt in Lancashire. On May 31st the mechanics, and on July 12^th the hammermen, adopted at their general meetings resolutions to become members of the N.C.A. It is not suggested that these bodies were anything more than local societies or branches or that their conversion to Chartism in any way typified the attitude of national organisations like the Journeymen Steam Engine and Machine Makers Friendly Society, which were often as scrupulous as the Methodists in adopting ‘No Politics’ rules. Nevertheless, at the regional level, in places like Manchester, London and Glasgow, there was a marked coalescence of Chartism and the trade societies, and this exerted a profound influence upon the character of the General Strike.

Success in converting the unions to the Six Points was partly the result of a deliberate Chartist effort to achieve it. Numerous initiatives were taken in the two or three months before the Plug Plot, some of them local and uncoordinated, like that of the Preston Chartists in June for the establishment of a standing joint conference of Chartists and trade unionists, which would refuse to separate until it had achieved the protection of trade and the constitutional liberties of the people. As yet Feargus O’Connor and the editor of the Northern Star newspaper showed no interest in the movement, but three of the leading members of the Executive of the National Charter Association appear to have been involved in it, whether individually or collectively. P. M. McDouall and James Leach were active in lecturing to the trades on the virtues of Chartism, whilst John Campbell, the Secretary of the Association, published a Letter to the Chartists of Great Britain in the Star on June 11^th, calling for a union of the Chartists and the trade societies. `Without union’, he urged, ‘we are powerless; with it we are everything’. There are strong indications, however, that the missionary activity undertaken by the Chartists was only successful because it coincided with a spontaneous development within the trades themselves. Some groups were clearly influenced in their decisions for the Charter by deputations sent to them by other trades--the hammermen by the mechanics, the mechanics by the carpenters. Moreover, in the dialogue conducted at the lodge meetings, the argument for becoming Chartist which carried the greatest weight was the economic one. Political power was necessary to secure the object for which the unions had themselves been founded--the protection of the labour of working men. This could be made relevant to the needs even of those aristocratic trades, which were merely threatened with wage cutting, dilution of labour and machine competition, and not yet seriously oppressed. In this connection it is useful to note an address issued in June 1842 by the Committee charged with the responsibility of preparing the monument to Henry Hunt in Manchester. It reminded ‘the aristocratical portion of the trades’, which had hitherto stood aloof from Chartism, that ‘the same circumstances are at work still which have brought down the wages of, and impoverished other trades, and will continue, if not checked, and operate upon theirs also’. In an age when, as Mr Edward Thompson has shown, the forces of economic change were operating to produce a widespread insecurity among artisans of all kinds, this was a powerful case to use. Its employment reveals not merely the greater sophistication with which Chartists were coming to present their arguments, but also the extent to which the trade societies were deflected towards Chartism by factors present in their own shop-floor experience.

It would seem, therefore, that the sudden assembling of the trades delegates during the Plug Plot disturbances and their declaration for a strike in favour of the People’s Charter can be satisfactorily explained by these features of the recent history of the trades, and without recourse to any notion that the delegates were the instruments of a Chartist plot.

Thus far pursued, our investigation tends in its result to support the generally accepted conclusion that no deep or premeditated nodal conspiracy underlay the disturbances of 1842. We have been led, nevertheless, to attribute to leadership a larger part than has been usually allowed. This leadership was opportunistic and often decentralised, moulding events rather than creating them, arising from disseminated assumptions rather than responding to a single controlling voice. Nevertheless, it existed and its presence rendered the outbreak more serious than it would otherwise have been. It remains to consider briefly how effectively direction was exercised when it reached the level of the conferences of trade delegates.

The men who assembled in the Sheardown Inn, Tib Street, on 15^th August, 1842 to resume the task of directing the strike took a serious view of their responsibilities. They clearly regarded themselves as a sort of alternative government, charged with the duty of bringing order out of the chaos that had arisen. In a published Address to the Trades of Manchester and the Surrounding Districts they claimed to be the ‘true and bona fide representatives of the people of those districts’ and a ‘personification of the public will’. One of their number told the crowds assembled outside their meeting place that they ‘considered themselves a committee of public safety at the present crisis’. Perhaps this was largely rhetoric, derived from Tom Paine and the English Jacobin tradition, which had formed part of the culture of the artisans since the time of the French Revolution. It had, nevertheless, practical implications. The delegates were deeply aware, almost pathetically aware, of the need to provide the country with leadership. When the magistrates of Manchester broke up their meeting on August 16^th, they used the last few minutes available to them to pass a resolution re-affirming their recommendation to the people to cease work until the Charter became the law of the land, and proposing to send delegates to every part of the United Kingdom to enlist the co-operation of the middle and labouring classes in carrying the same. Admittedly, there was a dissentient minority in their ranks anxious to order a return to work, but of eighty-five delegates assembled on August 15^th, fifty-eight declared for going on with the strike until the Charter had been enacted. Even after the disaster of Tuesday 15^th, when the authorities entered their meeting place at the Hall of Science and gave them ten minutes to disperse, the delegates met again each day that week, and carefully explored every avenue of approach for keeping the strike going. This they did notwithstanding the fact that their ranks were being continually thinned by arrests.

It is true, of course, that the exertions of the delegates were strangely out of proportion to the extent of their direct authority. Elected upon a local basis, they were in no sense the apex of a nationwide organisation. Although it was claimed that one of their meetings, on August 12^th, was attended by delegates from Yorkshire as well as from Lancashire, the subsequent gathering on the 15^th, which was more carefully screened, seems to have been mainly constituted by the trades of Manchester and a group of towns and townships lying to the north and east of Manchester. From the lists given in the local press it seems that there were representatives from Oldham, Royton, Clayton and Lees, from Bury, Heywood, Middleton and Radcliffe Bridge, from Ashton, Stalybridge, Hyde and Mossley, and from the cotton spinners of Bolton. But the only delegates from the west of Manchester were from the vicinities of Eccles and Leigh, while none were recorded from the towns to the south. Indirectly, however, the delegates had scope for exercising a much wider influence. If only they could have rallied the trades of the Manchester district behind the strike for the People’s Charter, they could have carried far distant regions with them too, for there was a pronounced tendency in many areas to look to Manchester for a lead as to what to do. At Merthyr Tydfil, while the miners hesitated whether to strike or not, the authorities placarded the town with notices of the failure of the turn out in Manchester in order to place a damper on the proceedings. The Chief Constable of Glamorganshire commented as follows on the situation there: ‘Unless the news from the North be bad I do not apprehend an outbreak. I believe this to be a shadow of the Manchester affair and their object the Charter, and their cry is now or never.’ Likewise at Carlisle, in the week beginning August 14^th, public meetings were held on three successive evenings to hear reports from `the conference of the working classes’ and on the state of the Manchester district. At Trowbridge in Wiltshire, also, the working men waited upon information that the operatives elsewhere intended to persist in the struggle before deciding whether to commit themselves to it. They expressed the desire for a public body to sit either in London or in Manchester to direct the movement.

Inasmuch as the trade delegates in Manchester endeavoured to rise to their responsibilities it would be difficult to maintain that the general strike for the People’s Charter failed for want of leadership. Why, then, did it fail? There are three main reasons.

Firstly, it failed because it was bound to fail. The time-scale was against it. In a society less artificial than our own, the mere suspension of labour by the industrial working class could not subdue the government in less time than it would take to reduce the strikers by starvation. By their insistence on abstaining from work until the People’s Charter had become the law of the land, whilst at the same time refusing to countenance any violence, the trade delegates sitting in Manchester committed themselves to logical inconsistencies which they were ultimately unable to resolve. The dilemma was recognised in their debates. Candelet, a delegate from Hyde, observed in terms which recalled Benbow’s fiery pamphlet of 1832, that ‘there was plenty of provisions for them on the hills--plenty of good crops with which they might supply their wants’, but another member immediately inquired: `How could supplies be obtained during the turnout consistently with “Peace, Law and Order”? To be sure they were told to go to the hills and find provisions, but the man who had reared those vegetable productions had a first and inalienable right to them.’ The point was a fair one for at their meeting on the previous Saturday the delegates had issued a placard headed `Justice!!!, Peace!!!, Law!!!, Order!!!’ In fact, the only way in which a general strike could have been sustained for a lengthy period without violence was by getting the shopkeepers to extend credit to the workpeople while the turnout lasted; and by drawing on voluntary contributions from the well-to-do. The delegates entertained hopes of being able to effect these purposes, for they negotiated through a friendly shopkeeper named Williscroft both with other shopkeepers and with meetings of dissenting ministers. Almost their last throw before giving up the struggle was to convene a meeting of shopkeepers on Friday, August 19th. Nevertheless, despite the fact that printed invitations were delivered at several thousand shops, the project turned out to be a fiasco. Only a handful of people attended. The truth was that, although the shopkeepers and publicans of Stalybridge and Ashton-under-Lyne formed committees to assist the operatives to obtain `a fair days wage for a fair days work’ in the early stages of the strike, these bodies issued notices threatening to withdraw their support as soon as the movement took a political turn. The delegates could rely on some aid from the lower middle classes in a struggle for higher wages, if only because the repeated wage-cuttings of recent years had diminished the shopkeepers’ custom, but they could not have it in a strike for the Charter.

Some delegates--they were in a minority--were ready to cut through the knot by diminishing the insistence on Law and Order. The extremists were mainly Irishmen, like William Duffy, who had once been a lecturer for the Anti-Corn Law League, but had apparently turned against his former employers by the time that the delegates met, because, having threatened the government to stop the supplies if the Corn Laws were not repealed, they had then proceeded, as magistrates of Manchester, to put down public meetings during the strike. Duffy was the principal activist during the meetings of the delegates. He was continually striving to bring the conference into conflict with the authorities by urging it to issue a placard denouncing a proclamation, made by the magistrates against public meetings, as unjust and unconstitutional, and to call for a run on the banks. The wonder is that he was not prosecuted. This could indicate that he was still secretly an agent for the Anti-Corn Law League and that the magistrates of that party managed to protect him. My own conviction is that he appears to have been primarily an Irish nationalist, seeking to make trouble for the Tory government without overmuch concern for the English faction which he happened to be in league with at the time. The same explanation almost certainly goes for Patrick McIntyre, who eventually stormed out of a meeting of the delegates, accusing his fellows of being ‘frightened from their propriety by the very “name” of an army’, affirming his belief that `the way to an Englishman’s understanding was through his belly’ and thanking the Almighty that `he did not belong to a nation whose intellectual susceptibilities were aroused by such carnal instincts’. The role of Irish discontents in the Plug Plot is a subject which, so far as I am aware, has never been investigated, but, to judge by the names of men who played a leading role in fomenting it--Patrick Brophy, Daniel Donovan, Bernard McCartney, Patrick McIntyre, William Duffy, Christopher Doyle--one which would repay exploration.

The general strike for the People’s Charter failed secondly because it lacked sufficient support from workers in the basic industries. This is sometimes obscured by the fact that the conference of trade delegates had so large a majority in favour of it. The delegates, however, although they represented a wide range of occupations, were not nicely proportioned in number to the strength and importance of their constituents. More than a half of those present on August 15^th came from what is loosely designated the aristocracy of labour: the unrevolutionised skilled handicrafts and the mechanical or engineering trades. Out in the country, in the mill towns about Manchester, nothing like a firm consensus for adopting the Charter developed at any stage in the outbreak. Some towns like Hyde and Glossop declared enthusiastically for a Chartist strike; others such as Stockport, Macclesfield, Stalybridge, Mossley, Lees and Bury, remained basically in favour of keeping to a demand for higher wages. Chartist orators, or invading mobs from other towns, sometimes persuaded their inhabitants to declare temporarily for the Six Points, but the decisions thus reached were often quickly rescinded. The divisions within the working classes cannot be easily explained. They were often more a matter of locality than of occupation. It is, nevertheless, clear that the proposal to abstain from work until the People’s Charter became the law of the land was not endorsed by the workmen in some important sectors of British industry. The dissentients included not only the men of the cotton towns of south-east Lancashire, who had begun the strike for higher wages, but also the colliers of Monmouthshire, who answered an appeal from their colleagues of Merthyr with the words: ‘You left us in the lurch at Newport, and now you may go to the devil your own way.’

Finally, the strike failed because of the action taken by the government to restore order. This was swift and determined, more vigorous perhaps than that of any government since Lord Sidmouth was at the Home Office. It quickly removed the leaders, demoralised the participants in the turnout mobs, and created a framework of stability within which a return to work could and did commence. One incidental effect of the Home Secretary’s policy was that, by encouraging the magistrates to suppress all large meetings in the disturbed areas on the grounds that in present circumstances they had ‘a manifest tendency to create terror and to endanger the public peace’, he removed one of the principal means by which advice to strike until the People’s Charter became law was disseminated. This was instrumental in robbing the strike of its political character. It did not, however, take away the matter of the discontent on which Chartism fed. Only time and the adoption of a more humane approach to social problems could do that.

F. C. Mather, ‘The General Strike of 1842: A Study in Leadership, Organisation and the Threat of Revolution during the Plug Plot Disturbances’, in Popular Protest and Public Order: Six Studies in British History 1790-1920, eds. R. Quinault and J. Stevenson, George Allen & Unwin, 1974, pages 115-35.

Sources for Chartism: Harrison on 1842

…Meanwhile throughout the summer of 1842 preparations were going forward for the November municipal elections. A Central Municipal Election Committee was set up in July to organise the return of Chartist councillors. The officers appointed at the first meeting were Joshua Hobson (chairman), William Barron (treasurer) and William Brook (secretary). Ward committees were established as it was hoped to put forward several Chartist candidates. The Northern Star in an eve-of-poll editorial stressed the ‘necessity for the Chartists acquiring local power’; and urged Chartists to capture ‘those outposts to general government, the local offices’, since ‘local power is the key to general power’. This power is within the reach of Chartists - ‘It rests with themselves to put forth their hand and clutch it. It offers itself to their grasp - let them seize it!’ However, only two Chartist candidates actually stood in 1842 and neither was successful. Hobson, who contested the West, Hunslet, and Holbeck wards polled 205 votes in Hunslet, where the main contest was fought, nearly 400 in Holbeck, and in the West ward a mere 53. William Barron polled only a handful of votes in the East ward.

This result was not unencouraging, however, for the immediate background to the elections had been by no means auspicious. In August. the West Riding had been convulsed by the Plug Riots. Beginning in Lancashire the movement had spread across to Todmorden and the towns of the West Riding, where the prevailing unemployment and distress provided ample basis for spontaneous sympathetic action. During the third week in August excitement in Leeds ran high. On Saturday came news of the turn-outs in the West Riding, to be followed on Sunday by movements of troops through the town. William Beckett, M.P. (Colonel of the Yorkshire Hussars), the Earl of Harewood, Prince George of Cambridge, and Lord Cardigan, all arrived to command various units of Hussars and Lancers; and on Monday 1,500 special constables were sworn in. Reports of riots and clashes in Halifax came in during Tuesday, and a meeting of 4,000 operatives on Hunslet Moor passed resolutions in favour of the Charter. Then on Wednesday the turn-out began in the villages near Leeds. Some 6,000 operatives stopped all mills in Calverley, Stanningley, Bramley, Pudsey, and the immediate neighbourhood. Next they drove in the plugs at mills in Armley, Wortley, Farnley, Hunslet and Holbeck. By five o’clock in the evening they were marching down Meadow Lane, Leeds, from Holbeck. All mills in the town were stopped, including Marshall’s, where J. G. Marshall attempted to defend the mill gates, but was driven back. There was a clash with the police at one of the mills, and Prince George and the Lancers were brought up to disperse the strikers. During an attack on the mill of Titley, Tatham, and Walker, in Water Lane, the Riot Act was read, two pieces of artillery were paraded, and thirty-eight people were arrested. On Thursday morning the town was quiet, except for a turn-out at the coal pits at Hunslet and Middleton. The pits were again visited on Friday when fourteen prisoners were taken. A meeting on Hunslet Moor was dispersed by police and soldiers. About 1,200 infantry arrived in the town, the White Cloth Hall was used as a temporary barracks, and General Brotherton was sent from London to take command of the district.

Such was the extent of the disturbances in Leeds. Of the thirty-eight prisoners taken during the affray on Wednesday evening, twenty-seven were committed to York for trial on 3^rd September, and received sentences varying from two to eighteen months’ imprisonment. The fourteen prisoners from Beeston and Churwell, who were mostly colliers, were similarly treated. There is little evidence to show that the local Chartists were responsible for the riots, though they were certainly prepared to make political capital for the Charter out of them. None of the leading Chartists in the town were among the prisoners, nor were there many strangers among the rioters. The affair was basically a violent reaction of unemployed operatives, spurred to desperation by hunger and destitution. Nevertheless the Chartist name was almost inevitably connected with the outbreak; and this, coupled with the government’s policy of arresting Chartist leaders, did not augur well for the Chartist cause in the autumn of 1842

J.F.C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leeds’, in Chartist Studies, ed. A. Briggs, 2^nd ed., Macmillan, 1965, pages 88-90.

Sources for Chartism: Donald Read on 1842

Yet although by the summer of 1842 despair about the prospects of Chartism was setting in, as it had done in 1839, this time despair did not lead to apathetic acceptance of distress but (after a pause) to direct industrial action. Economic distress was now at its peak.

‘Any man passing through the district’, wrote the Manchester Times on 9^th July, ‘and observing the condition of the people, will at once perceive the deep and ravaging distress that prevails, laying industry prostrate, desolating families, and spreading abroad discontent and misery where recently happiness and content were enjoyed. The picture which the manufacturing districts now present is absolutely frightful. Hungry and half-clothed men and women are stalking through the streets begging for bread.’

‘Stockport to Let’, one wag chalked on the door of an empty house in Stockport: one house in eight was empty in the town. A soup kitchen in Manchester was dispensing a thousand gallons of soup per day to the poor. This was the background to the Plug Plot strikes.

The spark which set off the explosion was a threatened reduction in wages, already much reduced. A meeting of protest was held on Mottram Moor on Sunday, 7^th August at which some 8,000-10,000 operatives were present. The meeting passed resolutions calling for the Charter and for ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’. Events soon proved that this latter demand was much the more widely supported. All work had ceased in Ashton on the 5^th, and on the 9^th the strikers there marched into Manchester. Within hours the strike had spread throughout the cotton districts. In nearly every town work stopped and excited meetings of operatives assembled to demand fair wages and fair hours of work. A meeting of about two hundred trade delegates gathered in Manchester on 11^th August and demanded a ten-hour working day and fair rates of wages for both weaving operatives and factory workers; detailed wage rates were drawn up for every branch of the trade.

Thus within a few days a great and spontaneous upsurge of feeling had taken place: extreme suffering had led to sudden action.

‘The people in the neighbouring towns were entirely ignorant of what was coming; there was no combination among them to have a general strike; no deputies had travelled to arrange it, and yet there was a bond of union so firm, that by almost universal consent the movement was sanctioned and adopted. This bond was stronger than a written and sealed bond; it was the bond of suffering and of servitude; it was the feeling that life was become a round of helpless drudgery, or the endurance of forced idleness with want and starvation.’

The strike was thus a sudden economic explosion, not the beginning of a planned political revolution. There was no causal connection between Chartism and the outbreak. Many of the strike meetings did indeed pass vague resolutions in favour of the Charter, but the audiences were much more interested in work and wages than in Chartism. The Chartists made no attempt to claim the credit for the outbreak, but merely attempted to exploit it once it had occurred. By a coincidence a national Chartist delegate meeting had been called to meet in Manchester in the third week of August; O’Connor, McDouall, Cooper, and most of the national leaders of the movement were present. The meeting passed a resolution strongly urging the strikers to remain out until the Charter had been won: ‘while the Chartist body did not originate the present cessation from labour,’ it declared, the Chartist delegates none the less wished to express ‘their deep sympathy with their constituents, the working men now on strike; ... we strongly approve of the extension and continuance of the present struggle till the PEOPLE’S CHARTER becomes a legislative enactment’. This appeal does not seem, however, to have had much effect. Its impact was seriously undermined by differences within the Chartist leadership. O’Connor advocated peaceable action in support of the strikes and the Charter. McDouall, on the other hand, was all for physical force; he urged the people to ‘leave the decision to the God of justice and of battle’. The Chartists were thus seriously divided at a vital moment, and their division lost them whatever chance they may have had of gaining control of the strike movement. Nothing was more remarkable, observed the North of England Magazine in retrospect, ‘than the feebleness and incapacity of the Chartist body’ during the Plug Plot crisis. Not that their ineffectiveness saved the Chartist leaders from arrest; by the beginning of October virtually all of them, national and local leaders alike, had been arrested.

To escape arrest McDouall fled the country. His appeal to physical force had met with almost no response: the strike movement in Lancashire was remarkable for its peacefulness. Plugs had been pulled out of factory boilers (hence the name given to the movement), but this was generally the limit of popular violence. ‘The object has not been to destroy, but simply to stop,’ remarked the Manchester Times on 20^th August; ‘and the simplest and least destructive manner has been chosen .... While at a distance Manchester is thought to be in a state of siege, the whole town may be traversed without a single act of violence being witnessed.’

But peacefulness could not in itself make the strike movement a success. Bound by laissez-faire economic beliefs and confident in the support of the military, the cotton masters offered no concessions. Reluctantly but steadily the operatives returned to work. Some mills in Manchester were already back in production as early as 17^th August. Within a month the great strike had petered out.

The fact that the Plug Plot strikes could break out without Chartist assistance and the ineffective part played by the Chartist leaders during their course, showed how weak the Chartist movement in Lancashire had become by the summer of 1842. It was in fact destined never fully to revive again. Between 1842 and 1846 a great change came over the social atmosphere in Lancashire. The hostile feeling of the operatives towards their employers which had poisoned the social atmosphere for so long and which the Chartists had exploited so assiduously, at last began to lessen. Between 1842 and 1846 both the attitude and the aspirations of the Lancashire working classes underwent a remarkable change.

D. Read, ‘Chartism in Manchester’, in Chartist Studies, ed. A. Briggs, 2^nd ed., Macmillan, 1965, pages 53-56.

Source for Chartism: Ward on 1842

In the industrial areas 1842 was a year of depression, widespread unemployment and wage reductions. The choice for many operatives, as Factory Inspector Horner reported, was ‘employment on any terms, or starvation’. Inevitably, tempers in many districts ran high. There were riots at Blackburn in May, and on 5 June Marsden told a large crowd on Enfield Moor that they should march under arms to London to demand the Charter from the Queen. Emotions were heightened by the case of Samuel Holberry, the young Sheffield Chartist imprisoned for conspiracy and riot in March 1840. Holberry, like other West Riding Chartists, was imprisoned at Northallerton but after the death of his associate John Clayton was removed to York Castle, following the appeals of his friends. But the young revolutionary’s health could not stand prison conditions, and the Home Office agreed to his release, subject to sureties for his future behaviour. However, Holberry died on 21^st June and was thereafter celebrated in Sheffield as ‘a martyr to the cause of Democracy’. His funeral on the 27^th provoked an immense rally and a new folklore. Harney delivered a graveside oration:  “Our task is not to weep; we must leave tears to women. Our task is to act; to labour with heart and soul for the destruction of the horrible system under which Holberry has perished. . . . Compared with the honest, virtuous fame of this son of toil, how poor, how contemptible appear the so-called glories that emblazon the name of an Alexander or a Napoleon! . . . Come weal, come woe, we swear . . . to have retribution for the death of Holberry, swear to have our Charter law and to annihilate for ever the blood-stained depotism which has slain its thousands of martyrs, and tens of thousands of patriots and immolated at its shrine the lovers of liberty and truth.”  Holberry scarcely deserved his eulogy; but Chartism needed its martyrs after the rejection of the second petition.

Chartists were not alone in talking of possible violence. The League’s determination to embarrass the Conservative government had led some of its supporters to make equally threatening gestures, and Oastler cautioned his Northern supporters against falling into the ‘trap’: ‘if the Leaguers urge you to violence, leave that work to them!’ As the 205 remaining NCA localities elected a new executive (McDouall, Leach, Campbell, Williams and Bairstow) in June rumours were spreading that the League planned to provoke major strikes by extensive wage-cuts or lockouts. Indeed, reductions in the West Midlands had already provoked some strikes.

In early August the strike enthusiasm spread to the North. Here, Chartists had certainly discussed striking, but were scarcely in a position to organise it. Workers were provoked by threatened 25 per cent reductions at Ashton cotton mills in July and started a wave of strikes on 5^th August. A rally on Mottram Moor combined the demand for the Charter with the Oastlerite call for ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’. There-after touring mobs of ‘turn-outs’ travelled through the Lancashire mill districts, forcibly drawing the boiler plugs in order to create a general strike. As the ‘Plug Plot’ spread, Chartists naturally sought to use it, by carrying resolutions to ‘stay out’ until the Charter was accepted. Chartist leaders assembling at Manchester were astonished at the scene. ‘Not a single mill at work! Something must come out of this and something serious too’, Campbell declared on the first sight of Manchester, to Cooper who had narrowly escaped arrest in the rioting Potteries. The sixty delegates honestly confessed that they ‘did not originate the present cessation from labour’ but ‘strongly approved of the extension and continuance of the present struggle till the PEOPLE’S CHARTER became a legislative enactment’. But though, for once, the Chartist leadership was near the scene of action, its chronic divisions prevented it from assuming command; McDouall raged about `leaving the decision to the God of justice and of battle’. The rioters took little notice of philosophies, as they engaged in the sort of spontaneous outburst which Oastler had long predicted and which the NCA was unable to organise. Working people closed the mills in Ashton, Bacup, Blackburn, Bolton, Burnley, Bury, Chorley, Crompton, Droylsden, Dukinfield, Heywood, Hyde, Manchester, Newton, Oldham, Preston, Rochdale, Stalybridge and Stockport. The ragged hordes who swept over the Pennines to close Yorkshire mills in Batley, Bingley, Birstall, Bradford, Bramley, Calverley, Cleckheaton, Dewsbury, Gomersal, Halifax, Hebden Bridge, Heckmondwike, Holmfirth, Honley, Horbury, Horton, Huddersfield, Keighley, Leeds, Littletown, Marsden, Millbridge, Mytholmroyd, Ossett, Pudsey, Skipton, Stanningley, Thornhill and Todmorden cared little for Chartism. Their protest was against foul industrial conditions…And up the brave men of the ‘Union’ briefly went. But they ‘went’ without much Chartist support. The Star attacked McDouall’s ‘wild strain of recklessness’, and O’Connor desperately tried to prove his own moderation. McDouall’s bravery immediately evaporated, as he fled abroad.

Unrest spread via Carlisle to Scotland, where conditions were desperate in several areas. The weaving town of Paisley faced near starvation; the Lanarkshire miners struck in protest against wage cuts; rallies of the unemployed on Glasgow Green demanded instant relief; Dunfermline weavers burnt down local factories; in several burghs it was resolved to strike until the adoption of the Charter. Yet in general the moderation of the Scottish radical press and Chartist leadership restrained Scottish Chartists. The principal scene of activity was the flax and jute town of Dundee, where the shoe-maker-preacher John Duncan and the Democratic Society organised a strike at a series of excited meetings on Magdalen Green in August. But the affair ended with the tragi-comic march of a ragged group of Chartists to Forfar, the arrest of the leaders and the real tragedy of Duncan’s death in a lunatic asylum in 1845.

The strike wave soon ended. By late August many workers were returning on the employers’ terms; by late September all was over. And it soon became apparent that the Chartists had made another strategic error. They could never have organised the strikes; they had only sought to take advantage of disputes caused by industrial troubles; but they were widely blamed for the events. The overworked Graham at the Home Office and the Tory publicist Croker continued to suspect that the League might be at the root of the trouble, but were never able to gain proof. Graham was ‘by no means prepared to use Military force to compel a reduction of wages…’ He regarded the government’s role as being ‘to preserve peace, to put down plunder and to prevent…intimidation’. But although he accepted that workers had ‘just cause of complaint against their masters’ and was sickened by the panic of cowardly justices, he considered that ‘a social insurrection of a very formidable character’ could only be met by force. And it was the Chartists who were arrested. By late September, John Mowbray was complaining of the ‘languid state’ of the cause in the North East.

In the autumn of 1842, Chartism was once again rent by bitter recriminations. McDouall, Cooper and others had undoubtedly been excited enough by the opportunity offered by the strikes to advocate violence in some form. But O’Connor had opposed such talk, and the NCA had limited itself to asserting that ‘all the evils which affected society…arose solely from class legislation’ and urging workers to stay out until ‘the only remedy for the present alarming distress and widespread destitution’ -- the Charter -- was adopted. Lovett added his voice, urging workers to ‘avoid violence…[and] restrain outrage’. But Chartists were widely arrested and sentenced. From October, 274 cases were tried in Staffordshire, resulting in 54 sentences of transportation and 154 of imprisonment; Cooper, initially released, was later sent to Stafford Gaol for two years, during which he wrote his celebrated Purgatory of Suicides (1845). Fewer cases were tried in Lancashire, culminating with the trial of O’Connor and fifty-eight others in March 1843. Chartists again raised defence funds.

O’Connor, as usual, had temporised. While Hill had condemned the strikes entirely as a League plot, O’Connor had seized the main chance. Both men had opposed McDouall’s fatal motion, but O’Connor had agreed to its being publicised by the NCA executive (of which he was not a member). Feargus was therefore surprised to be arrested in late September, and henceforth blamed McDouall for the disaster--even opposing the collection of funds to support him in exile. McDouall returned to Britain in 1844, blaming O’Connor for his flight and subsequent poverty. It is difficult to decide between two such convincing liars. Another whipping boy was the executive, which appears to have been neither efficient nor altogether honest. Cooper consequently proposed its replacement, and a December investigation of its activities and accounts led to its disappearance. The League itself remained highly suspect in many Chartist (and Tory) minds. O’Connor therefore turned another policy somersault, condemning ‘the leaning of the Complete Suffragists to the Free Trade party’: now the CSU must be destroyed as a ‘League Job’. The opportunity was soon at hand. The CSU-Chartist alliance was to be cemented at a Birmingham conference on 27 December, which was to be elected (on Lovett’s plan) half by electors and half by non-voters. O’Connor denounced this scheme and urged Chartists to secure election wherever possible. After some bitter arguments, the result was a Chartist victory: to Sturge’s mortification, O’Connor was returned for Birmingham. The CSU and others were aware of the danger; as O’Brien wrote, “A conference composed of such materials as Mr Feargus O’Connor would pack into it would soon find itself utterly powerless and without influence for any purposes but those of mischief …”  But the CSU could do nothing against O’Connorite packing. ‘The Chartists were anxious to get their men elected if possible at the Complete Suffrage meetings,’ recalled Gammage, ‘in order to avoid the expense falling on themselves alone, and in many cases they succeeded in so doing.’

The conference, attended by 374 delegates, assembled in the Birmingham Mechanics’ Institute. The arrogance of a section of the CSU, in rejecting the Chartist name and presenting a secretly prepared 96-clause ‘New Bill of Rights’ in place of the Charter, achieved the almost impossible by uniting the Chartists. Lovett proposed and O’Connor seconded a motion to substitute the Charter for the Bill -- although Lovett (whose ‘lip…was curled in scorn’ as O’Connor spoke, according to Gammage) scarcely enjoyed the alliance. Middle-class CSU men were dismayed by Lovett’s opposition; his known hostility to O’Connor and sympathy with a class-collaboration policy had seemed to guarantee his support. But honest Lovett could not accept the dropping of that document which had advocated  “just and equal representation…in plain and definite language, capable of being understood and appreciated by the great mass of the people…[and for which] vast numbers had suffered imprisonment, transportation and death…”

It was in vain that Lawrence Heyworth maintained that ‘it is not your principles that we dislike, but your leaders’. To Chartists there was something sacred about the old cause and the old styles; and there was a blasphemy, a sacrilege in the proposed change. ‘Give up the Charter! The Charter for which O’Connor and hundreds of brave men were dungeoned in felons’ cells, the Charter for which John Frost was doomed to a life of heart-withering woe!’ roared Harney. He would not give way,  “to suit the whim, to please the caprice or to serve the selfish ends of mouthing priests, political traffickers, sugar-weighting, tape-measuring shopocrats. Never! By the memories of the illustrious dead, by the sufferings of widows and the tears of orphans, he would adjure them to stand by the Charter.”  Chartists were simply not prepared to be patronised by tactless and supercilious Complete Suffragists. To Cooper it seemed that “there was no attempt to bring about a union, no effort for conciliation, no generous offer of the right hand of fellowship. We soon found that it was determined to keep the poor Chartists at arm’s length.”

The varied Chartists carried Lovett’s motion by 193 votes to 94 on 28 December. Sturge thereupon led a secession of the majority of CSU delegates to the local temperance hall, to prepare a Bill for presentation by Crawford. The breach was accompanied by expressions of hope for future collaboration. But the fact was that O’Connor had broken another danger to his controlling position.

O’Connor’s constant purges inevitably cut down conference membership. Having done his duty, Lovett departed. By 31^st December only thirty-seven delegates remained in the NCA-dominated section. And even now the NCA men (who were joined by a few CSU delegates, including Solly, while Vincent threw in his lot with the CSU) were divided. Cooper wanted an annual convention, from which a five-man executive should be elected annually, with only the secretary being paid a regular salary. His plan was (for the moment) generally accepted. But White bitterly opposed Parry’s proposal for continued co-operation with the CSU, and O’Connor, while professing to calm matters, provoked further divisions. Many Chartists left the conference to face their trials, often with great courage: White, while conducting his defence, insisted on the provision of sandwiches and wine and William Jones maintained a running fight with Baron Gurney. The sheer guts of men about to go to prison deserved a worthier cause than the highly personalised, self-centred O’Connorite dream. Place might protest; Lovett might be sickened; Oastler was inevitably almost unheard. What was left of organised English Chartism was now controlled by the megalomaniac Irishman. Place’s rival Metropolitan Parliamentary Reform Association soon disappeared.

The triumph was almost complete. Real or potential rivals to the despot were either running ineffective evening classes (like Lovett) or about to be imprisoned (like the now doubting Cooper). The CSU was cut down to its appropriate size. Its Bill, proposed by Crawford, was rejected by 101 votes to 32 on 18^th May 1843. And when, on 31^st January 1844, it dared to hold a rally under Crawford at the traditional venue of the Crown and Anchor tavern, O’Connor and his supporters contrived virtually to destroy it. But O’Connor was now the monarch of a declining kingdom. By fair means and foul, he had converted the Chartist remnant into a personal following. He was now to try to mould it to new purposes. A sign of coming attitudes was given in the Star in January 1843:  “Chartism is superior to Christianity in this respect, that it takes its name from no man…There should be no sectarianism in it. Chartism is no invention of one man, any more than truth is. Our cause has no father but the First Great Cause…What greater honour can a man have than to be a Chartist? …We worship Truth -- we worship God.”  This was not the first or the last appearance of such arrogance. And it was sadly unfounded. 1842 marked a Chartist peak never to be reached again.

J. T. Ward, Chartism, Batsford, 1973, pages 160-67.

Sources for Chartism: Hovell on 1842

Chartism stood helpless when the combination of Whigs and Tories had thrown out of Parliament the National Petition of 1842. The autocrat of Chartism [Feargus O’Connor] had staked everything on a false move. Once more “moral force” had failed to convince the representatives of the middle-class electorate. Once more there only remained the trial of “physical force.” But, however much he might bluster, O’Connor was neither willing nor able to fall back upon the alternative policy of the hot-bloods whom he had so often denounced. And O’Connor still dominated the movement to such an extent that a course of action of which he disapproved was condemned to futility. Hence the tameness with which organised Chartism bore the destruction of its hopes. Hence the weakness and incoherence of the measures by which the stalwarts of the party strove to maintain the Chartist cause after the failure of the Petition. Hence, too, their eagerness to adopt as their own any passing wave of discontent and claim the storm as the result of their own agitation.

The collapse of the Petition was followed by a few protests, much violent language in the Northern Star, and a few public meetings, notably in Lancashire, where the speaking was even more unrestrained than were the leading articles of the Chartist organ. A notable instance of these assemblies was the great gathering held on Enfield Moor, near Blackburn, on Sunday, June 5^th. Its business was “to consider the next steps to be taken to obtain the People’s Charter.” Marsden of Bolton put before the crowd the fatuous proposal that the people should collect arms and march in their thousands on Buckingham Palace. “If the Queen refuses our just demands, we shall know what to do with our weapons.” But nothing came of this or any other similar manifestations of Chartist statesmanship. It looked as if the leaders could no longer carry on an effective agitation.

The outbreak of a widespread strike in August added a real element of seriousness to the situation in the North. Here again Lancashire was the storm-centre, but the strike movement broke out simultaneously in other districts, ranging from Glasgow and Tyneside to the Midlands, where the colliers in the Potteries and in the South Staffordshire coal-field went out. It is very doubtful whether the strike had much directly to do with Chartism. Its immediate cause was a threatened reduction of wages, which was answered by the workmen in the Lancashire mills drawing the plugs so as to make work impossible. For this reason the operatives’ resistance to the employers’ action was called in Lancashire the Plug Plot.

Whatever the origin of the strike, the Chartist leaders eagerly made capital out of it. They attributed the proposed reduction to the malice of the Anti-Corn Law manufacturers, anxious to drive the people to desperation, and thus foment disturbances that would paralyse the action of the Protectionist Government. In a few days the country was ablaze from the Ribble to the confines of Birmingham. At a great meeting of the Lancashire and Cheshire strikers on Mottram Moor on August 7^th it was resolved that “all labour should cease until the People’s Charter became the law of the land.” A similar resolution was passed at Manchester and in nearly all the great towns of Lancashire. On August 15^th, the same resolution was passed at a meeting on Crown Bank at Hanley, at which Thomas Cooper presided. Despite his exhortations to observe peace and order, serious rioting broke out.

The Chartists’ leaders now gathered together at Manchester, where the Executive Council of the National Charter Association was joined by delegates from the Manchester and West Riding areas. It first assembled on August 12^th, but members came in by slow degrees. It met in Schofield’s chapel[1] and was dignified by the Northern Star with the name of a conference. In this McDouall took the lead, and was not displaced from it even when O’Connor, Campbell the Secretary, and Thomas Cooper, hot from his stormy experiences in the Potteries, joined the gathering. Cooper has left a vivid account of his escape from Hanley by night and of his vacillation between his desire to stay with his comrades in the Potteries and his wish to be in Manchester, where he rightly felt the real control of the movement lay. He trudged along the dark roads from Hanley to Crewe, a prey to various tumultuous and conflicting thoughts. But he was sustained by the noble confidence that O’Connor would be at Manchester and would tell everybody what to do. At Crewe he took the train and found Campbell the Secretary in it. Campbell, now resident in London, was anxious to be back in his old home and see how things were going there. As soon as “the city of long chimneys” came in sight and every chimney was beheld smokeless, Campbell’s face changed, and with an oath he said, “Not a single mill at work! Something must come out of this and something serious too!”

The conference speedily resolved that the strikers should be exhorted to remain out until the Charter became law. To procure this end, McDouall issued on behalf of the Executive a fierce manifesto appealing to the God of battles and declaring in favour of a general strike as the best weapon for winning the Charter. But divided counsels now once more rent asunder the party and made all decisive action hopeless. Even in the delegates’ meeting it had been necessary to negative an amendment denying any connection between the existing strike and Chartism. At Ashton-under-Lyne the strikers declared that they had no concern with any political questions.

The fatal blow came from O’Connor, to whom simple men like Thomas Cooper had gone as to an oracle for guidance. Even in the Convention his puppets had supported dilatory tactics. In a few days O’Connor fiercely attacked McDouall in the Northern Star, for “breathing a wild strain of recklessness most dangerous to the cause.” Good Chartists were advised to retire from a hopeless contest, reserving their energies for some later season when their organisation should have been perfected. The strike, far from being a weapon of Chartism, was a crafty device of the mill-owners of the Anti-Corn Law League to reduce wages and divert men’s minds from the Charter.

Riots and disturbances further complicated the situation. Cooper had fled from the burning houses of Hanley and the fusillade of soldiers shooting men dead in the streets. Now the trouble spread northwards into Lancashire and the West Riding. Shops were looted, gas-works attacked, trains were stopped, two policemen were killed in the streets of Manchester. Troops were rapidly poured into the disaffected districts. There were over two thousand soldiers with six pieces of artillery in Manchester alone. At Preston and Blackburn the soldiers fired on the crowd; Halifax was attacked by a mob from Todmorden. Widespread alarm was created, but there is little evidence that the disorders were really dangerous. O’Connor strongly urged peaceable methods in a public letter. “Let us,” he said, “set an example to the world of what moral power is capable of effecting.” His violent pacifism was largely attributed to lack of personal courage.

The vigorous action of the Government soon re-established order. Then came the turn of the leaders to pay the penalty. The panic-stricken authorities put into gaol both those who had advocated rebellion and those who had spoken strongly for peaceful methods. O’Connor himself was apprehended in London, while William Hill, the editor of the Northern Star, was taken into custody at Leeds. Cooper was arrested soon after his return home to Leicester. But there was long delay before the trials were concluded, and many were released on bail, among them Cooper and O’Connor. The most guilty of all, McDouall, evaded, by escape to France, the consequences of his firebrand manifesto. In the course of September the strike wore itself out. The workmen went back to the mills and coal-mines without any assurances as to their future wages. The economic situation was as black as was the course of politics. With a falling market, with employers at their wits’ end how to sell their products, there was no chance of a successful strike. The appeal from the Commons to the people had proved a sorry failure. Once more the Chartists had mismanaged their opportunities through divided counsels and conflicting ideals.

The discomfited remnant that was still free fiercely quarrelled over the apportionment of the blame for the recent failure. There was a strong outcry against the old Executive. It was denounced for insolence, despotism, slackness, wastefulness, and malversation. A warm welcome was given to a proposal of Cooper’s that the Association should receive a new constitution which dispensed with a paid Executive. As a result of an investigation at a delegates’ meeting towards the end of the year, the Executive either resigned or was suspended.

McDouall was made the scapegoat of the failure. He it was who had given the worst shock to the credit of Chartism. How many tracts might have been published and distributed with the money lavished upon McDouall. In great disgust the exile renounced his membership of the Association. However, he came back to England in 1844, and at once made a bid for restitution. His first plan was to drive home the old attack on O’Connor by an attempt to set up a separate Chartist organisation for Scotland independent of the English society. At the same time he denounced O’Connor for his ungenerous exploitation of his pecuniary obligations to him in the hope of binding him to him and gagging him. It was O’Connor, too, who had advised him to run away in 1842 in order to throw upon him the whole responsibility for the Plug Riots. Both accusations are only too credible, but no trust can be given to McDouall’s statements. His veracity and good faith are more than disputable, and his constant change of policy was at least as much due to self-interest as to instability. He was one of the least attractive as well as most violent of the Chartist champions. It is startling after all this to find that in 1844 O’Connor was welcoming McDouall back to the orthodox fold and that the Glasgow Chartists raised the chief difficulties in the way of the ostentatiously repentant sinner. There was no finality in the loves and hates of men of the calibre of O’Connor and McDouall.

Though its prospects were increasingly unhopeful the Complete Suffrage agitation was not yet dead. At Sturge’s suggestion a new attempt was made to bridge over the gulf between Suffragists and Chartists, which was found impossible to traverse at the Birmingham Conference. With this object a second Conference met on December 27^th, 1842, also at Birmingham. Sturge once more presided over a gathering which included representatives of both parties. The Suffragists were now willing to accept the Chartist programme, but they were as inveterate as ever against the use of the Chartist name. To the old Chartists the Charter was a sacred thing which it was a point of honour to maintain. Harney thus puts their attitude:

“Give up the Charter! The Charter for which O’Connor and hundreds of brave men were dungeoned in felons’ cells, the Charter for which John Frost was doomed to a life of heart-withering woe! . . . What, to suit the whim, to please the caprice, or to serve the selfish ends of mouthing priests, political traffickers, sugar-weighing, tape-measuring shopocrats. Never! By the memories of the illustrious dead, by the sufferings of widows and the tears of orphans he would adjure them to stand by the Charter.”

The Conference was carefully packed by the O’Connorites, but there was more than O’Connorism behind the pious enthusiasm that clung to the party tradition. Nor can the Sturgeites be acquitted of recourse to astute tactics to outwit their opponents. Knowing that they were likely to be in a minority, they got two lawyers in London to draft a new Bill of Rights which they laid before the conference in such a way that they burked all discussion of the Charter in its old form. The New Bill of Rights embodied all the “six points” of the Charter, but the old Chartists bitterly resented the tactics which gave priority to this new-fangled scheme. Lovett came out of his retirement to move that the Charter and not the Bill of Rights should be the basis of the movement. He sternly reproached the Sturgeites for their lack of faith. O’Connor himself seconded Lovett’s proposal and strove, though with little effect, to conciliate with his blandishments the stubborn spirit of his old adversary. But even their momentary agreement on a common policy united for the time the old Chartist forces. In the hot debate that followed, the doctrinaire tactlessness of the Sturgeite leaders added fuel to the flames of Chartist wrath. “We will espouse your principles, but we will not have your leaders,” said Lawrence Heyworth, the most offensive of the Sturgeite orators. Years afterwards Thomas Cooper voiced the general Chartist feeling when he declared “there was no attempt to bring about a union--no effort for conciliation--no generous offer of the right hand of fellowship. We soon found that it was determined to keep the poor Chartists at arm’s length.”

In the end Lovett’s resolution was carried by more than two to one. Thereupon Sturge and his friends retired, and the Conference broke up into two antagonistic sections, neither of which could accomplish anything that mattered. The failure practically put an end to the Complete Suffrage Movement, which was soon submerged in the general current of Radicalism. No doubt the dispute in the form in which it arose was one of words rather than things, but it was no mere question of words that brought Chartists of all sorts into a momentary forgetfulness of their ancient feuds to resist the attempt to wipe out the history of their sect. The split of the Conference arose from the essential incompatibility of the smug ideals of the respectable middle-class Radical, and the vague aspirations of the angry hot-headed workman, bitterly resenting the sufferings of his grievous lot and especially intolerant of the employing class from which Sturge and his friends came. The gulf between the Complete Suffragist and the Chartist is symbolised in the extreme contrast between the journalism of the Nonconformist and that of the Northern Star.

The Birmingham failure was another triumph for O’Connor. He had dragged even Lovett into his wake and could now pose more than ever as the one practical leader of Chartism. It was to little purpose that Lovett, shocked at the result of his momentary reappearance on the same platform as his enemy, withdrew, with his friend Parry, from the O’Connorite Conference. The remnant went to a smaller room and finished up their business to their own liking. If Chartism henceforth meant O’Connorism, it was because O’Connor, with all his faults, could upon occasion give a lead, and still more because, lead or no lead, it was O’Connor only whom the average Chartist would follow.

The failure of this last effort at conciliation was the more tragic since it was quickly followed by the conclusion of the long-drawn-out trials of the Chartists, accused of complicity in the abortive revolt of the summer of 1842. Some of the accused persons, notably Cooper and O’Connor, were still on bail at the Conference and went back to meet their fate. Their cases were dealt with by special commissions which had most to do in Staffordshire and Lancashire. The Staffordshire commission had got to work as early as October, and had in all 274 cases brought before it. Thomas Cooper was the most conspicuous of the prisoners it dealt with. Acquitted on one count, he was released on bail before being arraigned on another charge. He finally received a sentence of two years’ imprisonment, which he spent in Stafford Gaol. In prison he wrote his Purgatory of Suicides, a poetical idealisation of the Chartist programme, which won for him substantial literary recognition. Most of the Staffordshire sentences were much more severe than that of Cooper, fifty-four being condemned to long periods of transportation. In Lancashire and Cheshire the special commission was presided over by Lord Abinger, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, whose indiscreet language gave occasion for a futile attack on him by the Radicals in Parliament. But the actual trials do not seem to have been unfairly conducted, and the victims were much less numerous than in Staffordshire. O’Connor was found guilty, but his conviction, with that of others, was overruled on technical grounds. His good fortune in escaping scot-free, while other Chartist leaders languished in gaol or in exile, still further increased his hold over the party. It was another reason why O’Connorism henceforth meant Chartism...

Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement, 2^nd ed., Manchester University Press, 1918; 1925; re-print edition, 1963, pages 259-67.

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[1] James Schofield was the leader of the ‘Church Chartists’ in Manchester.

Sources for Chartism: Frank Peel on 1842

Trade in 1842, the year of the plug riots, was worse than ever, and the sufferings of the working classes throughout Yorkshire and Lancashire were very great. It was hoped that as summer came on matters might improve, but they grew gradually worse, and at the beginning of August the distress was at its height. The corn laws were then in full operation, and the ports being closed the people throughout the country were starving. In the north it was reported that a fourth part of the population was dying of famine. At Stockport, half the masters had failed and five thousand work-people were walking the streets, nor were they much better in any of the towns in Lancashire. The Chartist movement had gathered much strength during the past year, and the working classes in all the large towns were in a state of great discontent and disaffection. The masses of the people were still persuaded that the “People’s Charter” would enable them to secure higher wages and better food, and that for that very reason the “aristocrats,” against whom they inveighed so furiously would not grant it. Another immense petition in favour of the charter was presented in the House of Commons in May, and great meetings were of almost nightly occurrence in all the large towns of Yorkshire. At Leeds the pauper stone heaps now amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand tons, and the guardians offered 6s weekly for doing nothing rather than 7s 6d for stone breaking. Poor rates swelled to with dismay the heavy drain on their resources. Towards the end of June a meeting of tradesmen and shopkeepers was held in the Bradford courthouse, “to enable them publicly to make known the unparalleled distress which prevailed, and the decay of trade consequent thereon, and to adopt such measures relative thereto as might be deemed advisable with a view to avert impending ruin.

Disturbances of an extraordinary character and on a large scale took place in Lancashire, which speedily assumed an alarming character. They commenced at Stalybridge. On Sunday, August 7^th, a large meeting was held at Mottram Moor, which was attended by eight or ten thousand people. The disturbances originated in this way. Some of the manufacturers of Stalybridge finding, as they stated, that others in the vicinity were paying lower wages than they were gave notice of a reduction. The workmen consented at one mill at the expiration of the notice to take the lower price. At another place, however, they refused to submit to the change. The workpeople of the firm last mentioned waited upon their employers, Bayley Brothers, and spake roughly on the proposed reduction, on which one of the masters said if they took the matter up in that spirit they had better play until they thought differently of it. On hearing this the deputation set up a loud shout, when all hands left the mill, without waiting for any formal answer to the demands of their representatives. Proceeding to the different mills in the town, the workpeople nearly all turned out and joined them, and their number soon swelled to more than 5,000, of whom one-third were females. Day by day they extended their march and emboldened by their numbers they determined to put an end to all work until their political demands were met. In accordance with this resolve they stopped all the collieries, and insisted upon men of all trades participating in the general holiday. Finding that all were not willing to join in the mad enterprise, they did not hesitate to overawe and coerce them, and procuring a number of formidable bludgeons, they tried to intimidate any workman who resisted them. Proceeding to the print works of Thomas Hoyle and Son, who had made themselves very obnoxious, they spoiled a great many of their goods, and then went on to Ashton, where they were joined by fresh crowds. An immense meeting was held there, when the passions of the mob were inflamed by the fiery oratory of reckless demagogues. They next proceeded to Oldham and Manchester, where, however, they found the military drawn up to check their excesses. As the mob did not at once commit depredations the military were withdrawn, but a scene of pillage and disorder soon followed, the chief sufferers being the provision dealers and bakers. The military again marched out and fourteen of the ringleaders were taken into custody. At Birley’s Mill a determined struggle took place. The rioters were first deluged with water, but as this did not compel them to disperse, some of the workpeople ascended the roof and threw pieces of iron, stones, and other missiles upon them. Many persons were very seriously hurt, and a young girl killed on the spot. From Lancashire the disaffection speedily spread into Yorkshire.

The Halifax Chartists were on the “qui vive” on Saturday, August 13^th, the leaders having received word that large detachments of turnouts were on their way from Lancashire. Groups of suspicious-looking people with bludgeons were seen entering the town. Evening came on, and about eight o’clock the bellman went round the town calling a public meeting to be held next morning at five o’clock. The gathering took place, and was well attended. About six o’clock, while Mr. Ben Rushton, a well known local democrat, was speaking, the special constables, who had been sworn in on the previous day, were seen approaching the gathering, headed by two magistrates, Mr. George Pollard and Mr. William Brigg, and were received with groans. Mr. Pollard at once rode in front of the platform and declared the meeting to be illegal. He advised that the proceedings should be immediately brought to an end, and that all should depart in quietness to their homes. Mr. Rushton attempted to resume his speech, but he was not allowed to do so by the special constables, and, eventually, the assembly formed into procession and perambulated the district. Ere they dispersed it was arranged that another gathering should take place early next morning.

On the afternoon of that same Sunday (August 14^th) a large gathering took place on Bradford Moor, under the presidency of George Bishop. Mr. Ibbotson, a well known news vendor, whose place of business was on the Bowling Green, addressed the gathering, which was estimated to number 10,000, and was followed by other speakers, stirring up the enthusiasm of the surging crowd, who received their treasonable utterances with wild cheering. The alarmed authorities summoned the chief inhabitants to meet the same evening at the Talbot Inn, when it was resolved that steps should be taken to put down the outbreak. Special constables were sworn in in large numbers, and troops were sent for from Leeds. Next morning another Chartist meeting was held in front of the Odd-Fellows’ Hall, Thornton Road, at the early hour of seven, when it was resolved that the people should never relinquish their demands until the Charter became the law of the land. The immense crowd then formed into military order, marched up Manchester Road towards Halifax, stopping at the mills on the way. The arrival of the Bradford contingent at Halifax was preceded by that of J. W. Hird, Esq., a magistrate, who announced to the startled authorities that thousands were on the way there that the rest of the Bradford magistrates and a troop of the 17^th Lancers were coming to the assistance of the Halifax authorities. As news had just been received in Halifax that a large body was also on the march from Todmorden, the alarmed authorities held at once a hurried consultation, and it was resolved to move the civil and military forces to New Bank, it being thought that the aim of the rioters would be to stop Messrs. Ackroyds’ and Messrs. Houghs’ mills. The cavalry, under the command of Captain Forrest, and a body of infantry, under Major Byrne, accordingly proceeded to the spot, and arrived at New Bank just as the rioters were seen coming over the brow of the hill. The first action of the lancers was to range themselves across the road in order to prevent the rioters from going further. Behind the cavalry were ranged the foot soldiers and the special constables. The rioters, pressed forward by the surging mass behind, came marching on until the two bodies met, but eventually the mob, seeing their way was effectually barred, got over the walls, ran across the fields, and formed again in Range Bank, where they encountered the Bradford contingent and joined forces, forming a compact mass of 25,000 men and women - for no inconsiderable number of the insurgents and women - and strange as it may seem the latter were really the more violent of the body. The mob thus reinforced proceeded down Crown Street towards North Bridge, and were met at the top of Park Street by the military and civil forces. Here the Riot Act was again read, but the magistrate who read it was jeered at by the crowd.

…After stopping Messrs. Haigh’s mill the crowd proceeded to Haley Hill, where they did the same at Mr. Dawson’s mill letting off the steam. They then went forwards to Messrs. Ackroyd’s mill where they stopped the works and turned the hands out. They forced the boiler plug, and, while this was being done, a party proceeded towards Booth Town to stop Atkinson’s silk mill, and another branched off into Mr. Ackroyd’s grounds for the purpose of letting off the reservoir.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, a meeting of ten to fifteen thousand people was held on Skircoat Moor, when resolutions were passed touching the “people’s rights,” and a deputation despatched to the Mayor to demand the release of the prisoners that had been captured by the authorities during the day’s “melees.” The women were very excited and were heard urging the men to attack the prisons in which the rioters were confined. Another gathering was held on Tuesday morning, and opened with singing and prayer, as was customary at most Chartist gatherings. The speakers were far more temperate in their language than on the day before. After the meeting they divided into hands and left for Greetland, Elland, Brighouse and other places to continue the work of stopping the mills. At Brighouse they seem to have first attacked Samuel Leppington’s mill at Brookfoot, where they drew the plugs; and from thence they proceeded to John Holland’s, Slead Syke; Perseverance Mill, and Victoria Mill (Rev. Benjamin Firth), Upper and Lower Mills; Robin Hood and Little John Mills, were all visited. At the latter place a local man, Joseph Baines, drew the cloughs in connection with the water wheel, and was tried at York for the offence afterwards, being sentenced to six months imprisonment. Thornhill Briggs Mill was also visited, and part of the crowd then went to Bailiffe Bridge and drew Holdsworth’s plugs. Several local ringleaders at Brighouse and Elland, who made themselves conspicuous, were afterwards punished, some, however, judiciously absented themselves until the storm had blown over.

The great pressure brought to bear on the Halifax authorities with respect to the prisoners, and the strong manifestations on their behalf, led them to think it would be better to remove them to safer quarters, and it was decided to convey them to Wakefield. For this purpose two omnibuses were procured, and six police officers being told off to escort the eighteen men in custody to Elland railway station, a band of eleven hussars accompanying them. Upon arriving at the bottom of Salterhebble hill the party encountered a large mob, who made way for the omnibuses, but sent a volley of stones after them. The soldiers, however, escaped without much injury, passing through Elland Wood in safety, and the prisoners were duly placed in the train. Upon returning, Mr. Brigg wisely resolved that the troops should proceed up the higher road by Exley to Salterhebble, as he feared another encounter with the mob in Elland Wood. In coming down Exley Bank the soldiers were observed by the mob, who rushed out of the wood in vast numbers. Mr. Brigg, who was a little in advance of the hussars, motioned them forward. This magistrate appears to have been a special object of attack, and the first stone that was thrown hit his horse a severe blow on the head. The soldiers galloped forward, but, when opposite the Elephant and Castle, they encountered the mob in force congregated on the rising ground. Scores were also on the tops of the houses. The mob had all large stones, and it was evident from the number that they must have accumulated them. These missiles they hurled with fearful violence upon the devoted soldiers in the road beneath. Mr. Brigg was hit in several places, his left arm being broken; his groom was hurt, and three of the hussars were unhorsed and taken prisoners. The soldiers fired upon their assailants, but the shots took little or no effect. Deeming that to continue the conflict would mean certain death, the hussars wisely retreated to a position on the brow of the hill, where they were joined by the remainder of the troop from Halifax, who had fortunately gone to meet them, expecting that their help would be required. Reinforcements were immediately sent for from Halifax, and the infantry with ten hundred special constables were shortly on their way to Salterhebble to disperse the mob. At another meeting held at Skircoat Moor, it was agreed to proceed to Haley Hill, which was now defended by the authorities, the entrance being protected by wool packs, &c. About four o’clock the turn-outs began to arrive, a large number of the malcontents being as usual, women. A shot was fired from the crowd at the military massed at the bottom of Haley Hill, and the bullet or slug struck one of the officers, but did him no great injury. Several stones were then thrown, whereupon the soldiers received orders to fire upon the mob, which they did, and several persons were wounded. The hussars also dashed up the hill at full speed and several sabre blows were administered to the flying crowd. The mob gave way, and then made for Bankfield, the residence of Mr. Ackroyd, but were met by a well directed fire from some defenders of the mansion, and about thirty persons were captured. After this the mob made no further headway in the town and on the day following order was restored.

The Lancashire turn-outs commenced operations in the Huddersfield district by stopping two manufactories at Milnes Bridge. They met with a slight resistance at Armitage Bros’. Mill; and one still more determined at Starkey’s at Longroyd Bridge, the gates being closed against them, but they had to be opened or soon would have been broken down by the enraged mob who congregated round them. At Folly Hall, a very extensive factory, the workpeople, being apprized of the approach of the rioters, left the mill to avoid any collision. At places where the mob encountered any opposition they threatened to return next day, when, if they found the mills running, they would pull them down. The first halt they made in the town was at Joseph Schofield’s Scribbling Mill in New-street, where, meeting with some resistance, they drew the plug and let out the water. The crowd then divided, parties proceeding to Paddock, Marsh, &c., the main body next visiting Lockwood’s factory in Upperhead Row. Thence they proceeded through the town to the factories of Messrs. Roberts and Mr. W. Brook. At the latter place Mr. Brook hesitated to turn his workpeople out, and endeavoured to reason with the mob, but they refused to listen to him, threw him While this was progressing, other parties proceeded down into the engine house, and drew the boiler plug to every mill in the neighbourhood, stopping them all. A meeting was then held at Back Green. The speakers were chiefly Lancashire men, and their utterances were resolute and determined. After the meeting, a raid was made upon many of the shops and houses for eatables. Mr. Brook, a magistrate, attempted to harangue the people at a meeting on Back Green, but the crowd refused to disperse and would not listen to him. The streets were by this time filled with people. In front of the George Hotel the mob was especially demonstrative, brandishing their bludgeons, and shouting and gesticulating wildly. Here some of the leaders were captured by the military, and taken into the inn. Rescue was attempted, but the result was that several others of the more prominent mob leaders were taken into custody. At this time the Market Place, New-street, Kirkgate, and Westgate presented one dense mass of human beings, and the aspect of affairs was very threatening. The military were commanded to clear the streets, and an awful scene took place as the trumpets sounded and the lancers dashed into the crowd, cutting down or riding over all who stood in their way. The crowd, thus assailed, ran in all possible directions, screaming dreadfully in their terror. Every street and corner was soon speedily cleared, the mob rushing wildly into the open country to escape the soldiers and by eight o’clock on Monday evening the town was comparatively quiet.

…By this time all the towns and villages in Yorkshire were in a state of great excitement and confusion. On Tuesday, the 16^th of August, a considerable mob entered Cleckheaton, and met with much opposition from the people at work in the mills. They succeeded in stopping one mill, and then went on to the works of Mr. George Anderton. Here they were gallantly opposed by the workmen within the mill, who with the assistance of a large number of the inhabitants drove them out of the mill yard, and pelted them with stones, until they finally expelled them from the town. On the same day mob law was put in force at Dewsbury. A large meeting was held at the Market Cross at six o’clock in the evening, after which a procession was formed, and the crowd proceeded to Batley Carr, Batley, Birstall, Littletown, and Heckmondwike. They tapped all the boilers on the way and turned out all the hands, after which another meeting was held at the Cross, at which it was stated that thirty-six boilers had been “let off.” The Dewsbury shops were closed as soon as word came that the rioters were returning, and the public-houses closed at six o’clock. Next morning another gathering took place after which the mob marched through Earlsheaton, and Horbury Bridge, coming back by way of Thornhill Lees. They had some time to wait at the colliery of Joshua Ingham, Esquire, to get out the men and horses before they tapped the boilers. Here a field of turnips belonging to the Rev. Henry Torr, the rector, was nearly stripped of its produce. Another meeting was held at the Cross on their return and it was arranged that the next muster should be held at Birstall. The shops were again closed although it was market day. The men, who were all armed, went from house to house begging, and in many instances, if refused and only women happened to be in the house, force was resorted to. The magistrates, J. B. Greenwood and John Hague, Esquires, attended from early in the morning till late at night to swear in special constables, and many hundreds from Dewsbury, Batley and Heckmondwike offered their services.

On Thursday morning, all the factories and collieries round Dewsbury were stopped by a mob 5,000 strong. The same mob then visited Batley and stopped Bromley’s and Ellis and Sons’ mills, where they drew the plugs without any opposition. They then resolved to pay a second visit to Cleckheaton, to do the work they had been unable at their previous visit to accomplish, and strong parties were told off to stop the mills, collieries, etc., at Gomersal, Millbridge, and Heckmondwike. It does not appear that any opposition was offered at any of those places, and as the various mobs passed rapidly through the towns to rejoin the main body of their comrades at Cleckheaton their ranks were swelled by a large number of local chartists, who, deceived by the apparent impotence of the authorities, were persuaded that they were about to inaugurate a revolution…The first attack of the mob at Cleckheaton was on the mill of Mr. Sutcliffe Broadbent, where they were suffered to draw the plugs without any serious resistance being offered, and being joined by some of the other detachments, they proceeded in a body numbering some five or six thousand to St. Peg mill, and had withdrawn the plugs from two of the boilers when an alarm was raised that the soldiers were coming. As soon as it became known that the rioters were approaching Cleckheaton in strong force, the late Mr. Jas. Anderton, of Upper House, then a young man, rode, it is said, from Cleckheaton to Bradford in the incredibly short space of half an hour to fetch a troop of the Lancers then stationed there, but before they arrived a troop of the Yorkshire Hussars came from Leeds, where Prince George of Cambridge was acting against the insurgents. When the Yeomanry reached Cleckheaton they were joined by some hundreds of special constables, and then proceeded in a body to Peg Mill. The mob had, as we have stated, withdrawn the plugs from two of the boilers, and were proceeding to the third when they saw the soldiers defiling down the lane. Hastily massing themselves, those who were unarmed proceeded to pick up all the loose stones in the yard, while those who were armed with bludgeons, scythes, &c., were thrust to the front. The appearance of the rioters, as they somewhat unsteadily waited for the arrival of the troops, was certainly formidable, but the discipline of the little band who came to attack them more than counterbalanced the disadvantage of the great disparity of numbers. The leader of the friends of law and order called out for a halt as they neared the mob, and addressed to his men a few simple words of encouragement, appealing to their sense of duty to the throne and the peace of the realm. He then waited for the reading of the Riot Act. Before this could be done the mob advanced in disorderly fashion and threw pieces of dross at the compact mass before them, and several men were knocked senseless and bleeding from their horses.

The moment was critical, as the mob, taking advantage of the confusion occasioned, were advancing with stones in their hands once more, Clissett, who was in the front rank, excitedly waving his arms and crying, “Follow me, my brave boys!” when orders were given to fire. Though this and a second volley was fired in the air, the crowd fell back in disorder, and the Yeomanry, taking advantage of the confusion, rode rapidly upon them, flourishing their sabres over their heads and striking them with the flat sides. The special constables followed up the advantage thus gained and drove the rioters towards the beck, on reaching which they scattered in all directions, some crossing the stream and others rushing into a neighbouring corn field, where they hoped by lying flat to hide from their pursuers. In a few minutes about twenty or thirty were taken into custody, and all the fields and lanes in the neighbourhood were black with wild struggling masses of human beings trying to escape from the horsemen, who rode after them flourishing their weapons. The following is a list of those taken into custody:-Charles Leighton (18), farmer, Gomersal; Richard Thomson (26), clothier, Gomersal; Thomas Barber (22), collier Gomersal; David Walker (17), clothier, Batley Carr; Charles Brierley (32), machinist, Batley Carr; John Hey (18), collier, Hightown; Matthew Parkinson (30), dyer, Dewsbury; Josh. Holdroyd (20), raiser, Dewsbury; David Brooke (34), sawyer, Dewsbury; Joseph Farnhill (35), weaver, Dewsbury; W. Allport Bell, Dewsbury; Robert Waterson (16), no trade, Birstall; Matthew Mawson (26), collier, Birstall; J. Hodgkinson (30), weaver, Birstall; Samuel Newsome (14), clothier, Hanging Heaton; Josh. Blakeborough (39), weaver, Batley; Edward Exley (22), weaver, Earlsheaton; Wm. Wild (17), collier, Alverthorpe; and Matthew Castle, hawker, Bradford.

Frank Peel, The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plug-Drawers, 4^th ed, Frank Cass & Co., 1968, pages 329-43.

Sources for Chartism: Riots in the Potteries 1842

The Staffordshire potteries saw the worst of the 1842 general strike and the harshest crackdown. During the strike, which had been sparked by wage cuts, workers stopped the pumps that kept coal mines clear of water and closed down every factory that they could. But the strike leaders failed to keep control, and in the riots that followed police stations were raided for arms, prisoners were released, poor-rate books seized and destroyed, and the houses and offices of magistrates, coal mine owners, rate-collectors and parsons set on fire or pulled down. A detailed account of events is contained in the far from sympathetic account by John Ward in his The history of the Borough of Stoke-on-Trent, published in 1843.

“Early in the month of July, 1842, a dispute arose between Mr. Sparrow, a principal iron and coal-master of Longton, and his workmen, on account of a reduction he required in their wages. The men refused to submit to his terms, and turned out in a body from his employ. They imagined that by inducing the colliers in general to follow their example, and stopping the works of the other proprietors, they should obtain the rate of wages they contended for. 

They proceeded, therefore, systematically to compel the vast body of working colliers in the district to cease working, visiting the different pits, and threatening or coercing the refractory. This state of things having lasted for several weeks, bands of colliers proceeded through the Pottery towns, and all round the neighbourhood, soliciting relief for supporting themselves and families during the struggle with their employers; and the boldness of these beggars became at length most annoying and alarming. 

On Saturday, the 6^th August, three men, carrying a begging-box through the alleys of the shambles in Burslem-Market, were taken into custody by the police-constables, and placed in the lock-up, under the Town-Hall, on a charge of vagrancy. Their incarceration becoming known to their Hanley comrades, they assembled there towards midnight, to the number of about 200, proceeded to Burslem, broke open the Police Station, carried off their friends in triumph, committed much other mischief, by the demolition of windows, and the illuminated dial of the Town-Hall clock, and then retired before dawn of day, without being known or identified. A general stoppage of the manufactories was necessarily produced by the stoppage of the Collieries, and the workman, suffering from these privations, became the convenient and ready instruments of the seditious demagogues, who had been long disseminating the deleterious doctrines of “The People’s Charter,” as the sovereign and sole remedy for poverty, and all political grievances. 

These notions had taken deep root among the ignorant and most excitable portion of the working people, and many were ripe for insurrection. Although danger was apprehended from the combinations of the Colliers, and the distress produced by the stoppage of business, and the magistrates took precautionary means, by swearing in special constables, to maintain the peace, yet was the district very ill prepared to meet any outbreak of popular fury. No military force was at hand until, upon the urgent representations of the magistrates, a small troop of dragoons and a company of infantry were sent to Newcastle about the beginning of August. The weather was beautifully fine, the fields covered with abundance, and the ring-leaders of sedition hence conceived that the time was particularly auspicious for the assemblage of large mobs, and the achievement of their traitorous designs.

The very general stagnation of trade at this period produced similar effects in Lancashire, und the town of Manchester was for some time at the mercy of a mob. The “Delegates” of the Chartist conspiracy had (there. is good reason to believe) resolved upon a grand demonstration on the 16^th of August, the anniversary of the “Peterloo Massacre”. It was commemorated indeed at Burslem, as will presently be seen. On Monday the 15^th, after some inflammatory sermons by Cooper (a talented Chartist orator from Leicester), on the day before at Longton and Hanley, the fraternity of Chartists and the surly advocates for a fair day’s wages (which was all the Colliers in general sought for, and no more than they had a right to expect), assembled in formidable array at the Crown Bank in Hanley, where the Chartist Meetings had been usually held, proceeded thence to stop the engines at Earl Granville’s works, broke open the Police Office at Hanley, also a print-works, also a principle pawnbroker’s shop there, and the house of the tax collector; proceeded to Stoke, demolished the windows of that Post Office, and afterwards those of Fenton and Longton.

The rectory-house at the latter place was the especial object of their fury; it was gutted and set fire to, though the fire was extinguished before it destroyed the premises. The house of Mr. Mason at Heron Cross, that of Mr. Allen of Great Fenton, and that of Mr. Rose, the police magistrate at Penkhull, were in like manner visited and treated by parties of marauders, who, returning to Hanley in the evening, were again lectured, and commended by Cooper for what they had done, though he reproved them for their drunkenness, as being likely to expose them to detection. Terror and consternation spread around, and many families left home for security. The scenes of the night were expected to surpass the atrocities of the day, and so they did.

Religion and justice must be exhibited as public victims on the altar of Chartist divinity.  Accordingly the parsonage of the Rev. R. E. Aitkens in Hanley, and Albion House in Shelton, the residences of William Parker, Esq., one of the county magistrates, were, with all their valuable furniture, burnt and destroyed. The offices of Earl Granville in Shelton shared the same fate. The morning of the 16^th discovered their smoking ruins. The mob, after the excesses of the night slowly congregated at their usual place of rendezvous and was addressed in violent language by Ellis, a local Chartist, who encouraged them to proceed in their laudable career till the Charter was established as the law of the land. It appears the Chartist emissaries had made previous arrangements for a general inroad of their forces on the morning of this day in the town of Burslem. A large body from Macclesfield and Congleton bivouacked during the night in the streets of Leek, and pressed all they could lay hold of the accompany them. These were to form a junction at Burslem with the Hanley brigade. The latter entered Burslem at about nine o’clock in formidable numbers, and immediately forced the George Inn, rifled the money drawers, and being then driven out by a few soldiers, broke all the front windows of the house. This was the second serious injury of the kind which Mr. Barlow, the landlord, had sustained within a few days, his house having been one of the objects of attack on the morning of the 7^th.

The town of Burslem was fortunately prepared for a proper reception of the Banditti. A small troop of the 2^nd Dragoon Guards had arrived there from Newcastle, under the command of Major Trench, and a large body of volunteers, from among the friends of law and social order of all classes of society, had been hastily organised as special constables, by the praiseworthy exertions of Samuel Alcock, Esq., he chief constable of Burslem.

About the time of the arrival of the Hanley mob, Capt. Powys, an active magistrate, aware of their movements, rode into the town, and under his directions the troop of Dragoons were assembled, and the constables called out. The military as the proceeded to form were assailed by the populace, the riot act was then read by Captain Powys, and after an interval of about an hour, passed in preparing and skirmishing, the mob from Leek arrived with which the Hanley forces formed a junction on their approach. Their united phalanx numbered from 6000 to 8000 men, armed with cudgels, or furnished with stones, eager to repeat the scenes of spoliation and destruction which had been acted the preceding day in other parts of the Borough. The military were drawn up at the entrance into the market-place from Leek, opposite to ‘The Big House’, with the special constables in their rear. The mob advanced upon them, brandishing their cudgels and discharging at them collies of stones; their fury and numbers could be checked only by the weapons of the soldiers. They were ordered to fire on the insurgents, when one man fell dead upon the spot, another received a wound all but mortal, and several others wounded less or more, ran or were carried away, some of whom are supposed to have afterwards died. A charge was made by the Dragoons and constables upon the rioters, who then dispersed in all directions, and thus the authority of the law vindicated, and anarchy subdued at Burslem on the memorable 16^th of August, 1842. 

Sturdy bands of the discomfited mob went about the country for some days afterwards, terrifying and plundering wherever they came, and robberies and burglaries were committed to a great extent. The slow, but no less sure, arm of the law however followed these proceedings, and the county jail was soon filled with prisoners. Cooper and Ellis were apprehended, the former in Leicester, the latter in Glasgow, and Ellis was committed on a charge of high treason (but which was finally relinquished, and he indicted and convicted of arson). A special commission was appointed for trial of the delinquents concerned in these outrages, with others of a less aggravated kind committed in the South of Staffordshire. The trials occupied three learned judges, sitting in three separate Courts, for the space of a fortnight (i.e. from the 1^st to the 15^th of October).

Sir W. Follett, Solicitor-General, with several auxiliary Counsel, conducted the prosecutions, which were carried on at the sole expense of the Government and superintended by the Solicitor to the Treasury. Many acquittals took place, rather from the humanity of the judges than from defect of evidence; but enough was done to satisfy the demands of justice.”