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.