Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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the other industrial counties of the north and midlands. In 1872 they had four times

as many members as the trade unions, and twelve times as many as the co-

operative societies.

At mid-century ‘nearly half the adult male population,’ it

was claimed, belonged to friendly societies of one kind or another.

Not all of them were strictly working-class institutions. The so-called county

societies were paternal, charitable bodies, ‘managed by some of the leading

gentlemen in any county, or by the clergy’ for the express purpose of saving the

poor rates. But these were small and few in number—less than 90,000 out of 1,

857,896 registered members in 1872—and the great bulk were founded by

working men themselves, ‘to enable the industrious classes, by means of the

surplus of their earnings, to provide themselves a maintenance during sickness,

infirmity and old age.’

Some, the burial societies, provided only that barest

minimum of social security, a decent, non-pauper funeral. Others provided a

great deal more: widows’ and orphans’ pensions, medical treatment or,

especially in the small local societies and lodges of the great affiliated orders

with their splendid names— the Oddfellows, Foresters, Druids, Ancient

Shepherds, Rechabites, and so on—good fellowship, conviviality, and a sense of

belonging to a secret and powerful freemasonry. They all had this in common,

however, that they were from the beginning non-revolutionary, ameliorative

organization designed to mitigate by mutual insurance the insecurities of the

competitive system without in any way seeking to overturn it.

It is true that some of them, especially the ‘particular trade societies’ during

the period of the Combination Acts, were really trade unions in disguise, but

most of these after 1825 died out or were transformed into overt trade unions. It

is also true that the State and the ‘influential classes’ for long had ambivalent

feelings about them, encouraging them on the one hand with a series of nineteen

benevolent Acts from 1793 to 1875 as instruments of working-class thrift and

independence of the poor laws, while on the other suspecting them of secretly

supporting ‘the system’ of political and industrial insubordination, as the ruling

aristocracy viewed most working-class organization down to mid-century.

late as 1848 a House of Lords Committee still saw ‘certain customs’ of the

affiliated orders as ‘open to very serious objections, viz. the employment of

secret signs, the circulation of lectures, and the introduction of orations after the

burial service’

Yet there is no doubt that of all working-class institutions the

P.H.J.H.Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815–75 (Manchester, 1961), pp. 7,

16, 22–4.

[W.R.Greg], ‘Investments for the Working Classes’, Edin.Rev., 1852, XCV. 407.

P.P., 1872, XXVI, R.C. on Friendly and Benefit Building Societies, 2nd Report and

Evidence, q. 594; Sir F.Eden, Observations on Friendly Societies (1801), p. 1; Gosden, op.

cit., pp. 15, 53–4.

Cf. ibid., pp. 155–9.

314 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

friendly societies came nearest to the middle-class ideal of self-help and self-

dependence. As the Vicar of Harrow put it in 1817,

It is the great benefit of Friendly Societies that they teach a man to avert

his eye from the workhouse: to look to the blessing of God on his own

endeavours; to get his bread by the sweat of his brow….

For the Society for the Improvement of the Working Population in the County of

Glamorgan in 1831 the friendly society enabled the labourer to say,

Poor as I am, I am obliged to no man for a farthing, and therefore I consider

myself as independent as any gentleman or farmer in the parish.

And a contemporary historian of the Victorian working class could claim with

truth in 1890 that ‘the record of the progress of Friendly Societies is a record of

the sturdy self-help, the self-dependence, the independence of Englishmen, of

which as a nation we may well be proud’

These, of course, were the views of

members of the higher classes, but in so far as they reflect the cautious and

‘responsible’ behaviour of the societies themselves, they accurately represent the

mutual acceptance and respect between the State and the most widespread of

working-class institutions, which not only fostered the benevolent friendly

society legislation and the paternal administration of the first Registrar, Tidd

Pratt, ‘minister of self-help to the whole of the industrious classes,’

but paved the

way for the mutual acceptance and respect between the State and other working-

class institutions.

Friendly society membership was not a life-absorbing role, and no doubt many

such members, as concerned as the rest with social security and the legal

protection of their funds, were also ardent co-operators, militant trade unionists,

or physical-force Chartists. The co-operative societies, in particular, appealed to

similar motives of thrift, self-help, and mutual security. But the co-operative

movement in its earlier phase, from the 1820’s to the 1840’s, was far more than

the instrument for the cheap and efficient supply of pure and unadulterated

consumables which it later became. It was a revolutionary, if non-violent,

movement for ‘the transformation of the whole of capitalist society into a

socialist commonwealth’

As such it was the purest institutional embodiment of

Ibid,, p. 159

J.W.Cunningham, A Few Observations on Friendly Societies (1817), p. 22; ibid., p. 161.

Cowbridge Tracts, No. 5, On the Advantages of Friendly Societies (1831), p. 2; ibid., p.

163.

C.S.Roundell, The Progress of the Working Classes (1890), p. 22.

P.P., 1874, XXIII, R.C. on Friendly Societies, 4th Report, Appendix I.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 315

the working-class ideal of an equalitarian society based on labour and co-

operation.

The aim of every co-operative society down to and including the Rochdale

Pioneers of 1844 was to found a self-sufficient, primitive communist community

into which the members would escape from the competitive system and establish

their own system of co-operative production and equalitarian distribution. From

isolated cells in the capitalistic body politic, or islands in the ocean of selfish

competition, the co-operative communities would expand until they were large

enough to take over by a silent and peaceable revolution the whole activity of the

existing economic system, and so replace the ‘old immoral world’ with the ‘New

Moral World’ of the founder, Robert Owen.

The transition from community building to shopkeeping, from the making of

utopias to the making of dividends, from a visionary alternative to capitalism into

an alternative form of capitalism itself, was more than the progressive betrayal of

a great ideal. It was the most conspicuous example of education by success, of

the process by which the only institution with an immediate, practical

programme for establishing a new society based on the working-class ideal

transformed itself into a pillar of capitalist society. As such it was a paradigm of

the penetration of working-class institutions by the entrepreneurial ideal.

The process was a classic instance of the substitution of means for ends. To

make themselves independent of the capitalist the co-operators had to find

capital with which to build their communities. When the traditional method of

raising weekly subscriptions proved too slow and unpromising, recourse was had

to the ‘Brighton system’ of Dr. William King:

We must form ourselves into a Society for this essential purpose; we must

form a fund by weekly deposits; as soon as it is large enough, we must lay

it out in various commodities, which we must place in a common store

from which all members must purchase their common necessaries, and the

profit will form a common capital again to be again laid out in the

commodities most wanted….

When the capital has accumulated sufficiently, the Society may produce

any manufactures they please, and so provide for all their wants of food,

clothing and houses. The Society will then be called a Community.

Co-operative trading seems to have caught on with most of the 500 or so

societies, with 20,000 members, which were in existence at the height of the

Owenite enthusiasm of the early 1830’s,

but most of them were swept away in

Specifically the aim of the Leeds Redemption Society—J.F.C.Harrison, Social Reform

in Victorian Leeds: the Work of James Hole, 1820–95 (Leeds, 1954), p. 14; cf. S.Pollard,

‘19th-century Co-operation: from Community Building to Shopkeeping’, in Briggs and

Saville, ed., Essays in Labour History, pp. 74f.

316 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

the deluge of failure which met the grandiose schemes—the Labour Exchanges,

the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, and the Association of All

Classes of All Nations—by which Owen tried to hasten the millennium.

Nevertheless, co-operative store-keeping persisted, and manifestly succeeded,

in great contrast with the persistent failure of Owenite communities at Orbiston,

Ralahine, Manea Fen, Ham Common, and elsewhere, culminating in the collapse

of Owen’s favourite community, Harmony Hall at Queenwood, East Tytherley,

in 1846. In the 1840’s the co-operative movement split into three streams. The

purest Owenite stream flowed into the ‘Redemption Societies’, beginning in

Leeds in 1846, which under the slogan, ‘Labouring Capitalists, not Labourers

and Capitalists’, tried to build utopias on a penny per week subscription. The

failure by 1855 of the Leeds Society’s experiment at Garnlwyd, near Swansea,

symbolized the petering out of this stream. Another flowed via John Minter

Morgan and his ‘Church of England self-supporting villages’ into the co-

operative workshops founded by the Christian Socialists between 1848 and

1854.

Although these had little influence, in spite of stimulating the interest of

the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, on the future of co-operative production,

they did achieve some success in educating the higher classes to accept the co-

operative movement as a harmless, indeed a beneficial, development, and to

provide in the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1852 a legislative

framework for it.

The third stream was the main river of the future. The Rochdale Pioneers of

1844 were firmly in the original Owenite stream, in that their ultimate object was

‘as soon as practicable …to arrange the powers of production, distribution,

education and government; or, in other words, to establish a home colony of

united interests….’

But their invention, or re-invention, of the dividend on

purchases ensured both the unbounded success of their shopkeeping venture and

the postponement of community building to the Greek kalends. As co-operative

trading prospered and expanded amongst the Pioneers and their numerous

imitators—by 1872 there were 927 societies with over 300,000 members and

annual sales approaching  10 million

—co-operative community founding

withered away. In 1855 the Pioneers’ Almanack still paid lip-service to ‘the

emancipation of the working classes from poverty and degradation, by enabling

them to reap the fruits of their own industry,’ through self-employment,

‘agricultural operations’, and ‘community of property’. By 1860, however,

according to The Co-operator, ‘the present co-operative movement does not seek

to level the social inequalities which exist in society as regards wealth,’ but only

to mitigate the exploitation of the workman. In the words of their president,

Abraham Howarth, ‘The Co-operative Movement…[joins] together the means,

The Co-operator, 1828, No. 1, p. 3, printed in G.D.H.Cole and A.W.Filson, British

Working Class Movements: Select Documents, 1789–1875 (1951), pp. 210– 11.

Pollard, loc. cit., p. 86.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 317

the energies, and the talent of all for the benefit of each’ by ‘a common bond, that

of self-interest’.

Soon many co-operators were deliberately repudiating the Owenite ideal and

accepting the existing social system:

We have seen enough of Communism, enough of the Utopian ridiculous

mummery of Socialism…. We don’t want it; we have seen the new moral

world, and don’t like it…. Let Co-operation be what it is…. Let it inculcate

no other spirit but gratitude to God, loyalty to our Sovereign, love to our

country, and good-will to all mankind…in the cause of constitutional

competitive co-operation.

And all agreed that the movement was now an instrument of working-class

amelioration rather than social revolution: ‘Modern Co-operation’, in the words

of a prize essay of the 1860’s, ‘means a union of working men for the

improvement of the social circumstances of the class to which they belong… it is

the working man’s lever, by which he may rise in the world.’

If this was still an

ideal, it was much nearer to the self-help of Samuel Smiles than to the primitive

communism of Robert Owen. To that extent the most practical exponents of the

working-class ideal had come to embrace the ideal of the capitalist middle class.

The grandiose Owenite institutions which tried around 1834 to find the short

cut to the millennium were, equally, the most conspicuous examples of the

education of the working class by failure. Of these the Grand National

Consolidated Trades Union was the most important. It was the culmination and

focus of two diverse traditions of working-class organization: that of the general

trades union, the general union of all the trades, which should be so powerful vis-

à-vis the employers that wage reductions and other forms of exploitation, but not

the capitalist system, would be abolished for ever; and that of the revolutionary

general strike which should sweep away the capitalist system itself and replace it

by one of co-operative production by voluntary associations of working men.

The first tradition went back to the Philanthropic Society and the ‘Philanthropic

Hercules’ of 1818, and reached the Grand National Union via John Doherty

whose Grand General Union of the Operative Spinners of the United Kingdom in

1829 led on to the National Association for the Protection of Labour in 1830.

The latter was in no sense a revolutionary organization but an ameliorative one,

aimed at ‘preventing such [wage] reductions and securing to the industrious

workman a just and adequate remuneration for his labour’

The second was a

Armytage, Heavens Below, pp. 96–112, 145–83, 209–23.

See above, § 1.

G.J.Holyoake, History of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers (1857), p. 11.

B.Potter, The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (1891), Appendix V.

Pollard, loc. cit., pp. 97–8.

318 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

short cut to Owen’s millennium by way of William Benbow’s general strike or

‘sacred holiday month’, which should ‘come suddenly upon society like a thief in

the night. One year may disorganize the whole fabric of the old world, and

transfer, by a sudden spring, the whole political government of the country from

the master to the servant.’

The failure of the general strike and the collapse of the Grand National Union

submerged both traditions for half a century or more. The National Association of

United Trades for the Protection of Labour of 1845 was not a general union in

this sense but a precursor of the T.U.C., which it closely resembled in

organization and outlook.

The idea of the political general strike was revived

only in the Edwardian age, when it was re-imported from France, by the

Syndicalists. The manner of the failure, however, was as important as the failure

itself for the education of the working class in viable class relations, for out of

the defeat of revolution was plucked a victory for non-violent politics. The

general strike—if so premature, partial and ill-organized a stoppage, precipitated

by the attempts of particular unions to get national backing for local strikes and

lock-outs, can be called a general strike—was defeated by the disunity of the

members and the rapid exhaustion of the funds.

In the midst of the battle,

however, came a godsend from the Government, the gratuitous prosecution of

the six Tolpuddle labourers for swearing an illegal oath to the Union. The

Tolpuddle affair enabled Owen to pull together the disintegrating Union and to

divert the whole energy of its half-million members from revolutionary

industrial action into peaceful petitioning for a free pardon. The vast meeting at

Copenhagen Fields and the procession of 40,000 to 50,000 London Unionists to

the Home Office temporarily failed in its ostensible purpose, but it succeeded

admirably in its underlying one, that of re-uniting the working-class movement

in a cause in which it could hope to achieve a visible, and bloodless, victory.

The eventual return and pardon of the transported labourers not only sweetened

the legend of 1834 with triumphant martyrdom: it taught the lesson that the

politics of peaceful petitioning might be more effective than the head-on

collision with capital.

The lesson was taken up by the Chartists, the greatest protagonists of the mass

petition and of the working-class ideal as a political institution. Chartism was more

than a movement for Parliamentary Reform: it was an attempt to restore by

The Co-operator, I. 1861–2, II. 68, and 1866–7, VII. 357; ibid., p. 100.

National Association for Protection of Labour: Resolutions and Laws, in United Trades

Co-operative Journal, 10 July 1830; Cole and Filson, op. cit., p. 252.

The Crisis, 12 October 1833; S. and B.Webb, Trade Unionism, p. 164; cf. W. Benbow,

The Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes (1831).

Cf. Report of its inaugural committee, Northern Star, 29 March 1845; Cole and Filson,

op. cit., pp. 469–70.

Cf. G.D.H.Cole, Attempts at General Union (1953), pp. 115–26.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 319

political means the workers’ right to the whole produce of labour. In the view of

its most powerful thinker, Bronterre O’Brien,

Every industrious man who produces more (in value) of the goods of life

than he needs for his own or his family’s use, ought to own the difference

as property. You are almost all in that condition, for there are few of you who

do not yield more value to society every day than society gives you back in

return. Why are you not masters of the difference? Why is it not your

property? Because certain laws and institutions, which other people make,

take it away from you, and give it to the law-makers.

But since, as we have seen, there were almost as many versions of the right to the

whole produce and how to restore it as there were labourers,

and since the

Charter was only a means and not an end in itself, Chartism overlapped with

every other working-class aim and movement of the period.

It derived principally, through Lovett and the London Working Men’s

Association, from the earlier independent working-class Reform movement, the

National Union of the Working Classes, and ultimately from the Regency

Reformers of the period of the birth of class. Through the L.W.M.A., too, it was

connected with the campaign for a free, unstamped press and the secularist

movement of Carlile, Hetherington, and company, and through Lovett with

Robert Owen and co-operative socialism.

Through William Benbow it inherited the revolutionary general strike from

Owenite unionism, threatened in 1839, put into ineffective practice in 1842.

Through J.R.Stephens it acquired the fiery antinomianism of the anti-poor law

campaign and the moral indignation of the factory reform movement. Through

Lovett again it linked up with working-class emancipation via self-education,

through Henry Vincent with the temperance movement, and through Arthur

O’Neill with ‘Christian Chartism’. Finally, through O’Connor himself it reverted

to the old, nostalgic working-class dream of a return to the land and the peasant

life.

These ideological differences help to account, through the personalities and

their local connections, for the local and regional diversity of Chartism.

Educational Chartism was connected principally with London, temperance

Chartism with Bath and the South West, Christian Chartism with Birmingham

and Paisley, the industrial general strike and the threat of physical force with the

North of England, the actual use of physical force with Newport and the volatile

Welsh.

Local research is still needed to elucidate all the manifold currents of

this richly complex movement, but local research will not alter the fundamental

Cf. The Martyrs of Tolpuddle, 1834–1934 (T.U.C., 1934).

National Reformer, 15 January 1837; Cole and Prison, op. at., p. 351.

Cf. chap. vii, § 2, above.

320 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

point, that Chartism was the main attempt in the nineteenth century to forge a

single working-class party for the purpose of changing society by political

means, which failed chiefly because of the geographical and ideological

fragmentation of the working class.

Even so, its different forms failed in different ways, or, rather, contributed in

different ways to the education of the working class to accept the viable class

society. Moral-force Chartism experienced the education of success. Its various

institutions, the Chartist churches, schools and temperance clubs, survived long

enough to undergo the same sort of transformation which overtook the co-

operative movement, the pathetic evolution of their dissidence into conformity

with existing society. Lovett’s splendid vision of society transformed by

education, for example, petered out in the secular day school which he ran from

1848 to 1857, and in the lectures and textbooks on physiology, astronomy,

zoology, geology and a neo-Smilesian brand of Social and Political Morality, on

which he spent the rest of his long life. His work came to chime with the

entrepreneurial spirit of the age. As his friend George Combe wrote after visiting

his National Hall school in 1849,

This is the true method of promoting the extension of the political

franchise to the working classes. If a generation taught and trained in

schools like these were fairly to come to maturity, they might be safely

trusted with political power.

Physical-force Chartism experienced the education of failure, not only at the end

as a movement but continuously through the rejection of violence by a

succession of its leaders. For violence and punishment for violence were great

educators in themselves, but had to be experienced in person. As a Scottish

Chartist put it, ‘It is very easy to talk of physical force when warming our toes

before the fire….’

When it came to push of pike one protagonist of violence

after another found he had had enough of physical force. The fiery parson

J.R.Stephens repudiated it at his trial in 1839.

Thomas Cooper, the Leicester

Chartist leader, was similarly cured of his loose talk of violence by a spell in

prison, and ended by preaching, in verse, the removal of social wrong by ‘the

growth of themasses in Knowledge, Temperance, and Self-Respect.’

Even John

Frost, the Newport draper who led the only organized Chartist rising, seems to

have wept like a child and talked of heaven and hell at the prospect of it, and

only to have gone through with it out of a sense of loyalty to a supposedly

national revolutionary movement.

O’Connor himself gratefully allowed his

bluff to be called by Police Commissioner Maine on Kensington Common in

1848, and spent his last sane years vainly pursuing an alliance with the middle-

Cf. the contemporary Welsh riots against the turnpikes, David Williams, The Rebecca

Riots: a Study in Agrarian Discontent (Cardiff, 1955).

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 321

class Radicals.

Finally, the last great Chartist leader and protagonist of ‘the

social war’, Ernest Jones, who broke with O’Connor in 1850 over his defection

from physical force, turned six years later to the same solution: ‘He now called

upon them to unite with the middle classes for Universal Manhood Suffrage.’

As for the movement as a whole, it is doubtful whether it ever had a practical

programme of revolution either as a means to gain power or as an end if and

when power were achieved. As a means the threat of violence was used in much

the same way that Place and the middle-class Radicals used it to obtain the Great

Reform Act, but with two differences; first, that the Chartists had no-one in their

rear with which to frighten the aristocracy, and, secondly, that in case mere

threats failed they never had even so much of a plan of action as Place had

mounted against the Duke in 1832. Wild talk of collecting muskets and

manufacturing pikes there certainly was, but, apart from sporadic arming and

drilling by small groups on distant moors, no evidence whatever of centrally

organized preparation for rebellion outside the imaginations of romantic rebels

like Benbow and Russophobe counter-revolutionaries like David Urquhart. Of

this, the fiasco at Newport, which was defeated by a garrison of twenty-eight

soldiers, is conclusive proof.

Physical force, as far as the national leaders were

concerned, was mere bluff, and when their bluff was called they could only

retreat.

To revolution as an end they had given even less thought. Even O’Brien, a

critic of capitalist society who anticipated and rivalled Marx, could only suggest

the gradual nationalization of the land at the death of existing owners with full

compensation to their heirs, the proscription of further public debt, a currency

based on the labour value of wheat instead of on gold or silver, the

nationalization of distribution through public marts or bazaars, and ‘an honest

system of public credit’ through District Banks funded from the rents of public

land.

Ernest Jones, apart from the purchase of land for self-employment by the

workers, seems to have thought mainly in terms of co-operative factories,

workshops and stores, the further control of factory hours and conditions, and

Letter to The Scotsman, 17 November 1849, W.Jolly, Education: its Principles and

Practices as developed by George Combe (1879), p. 228; cf. ibid., pp. 224–30, and

Lovett, op. cit., pp. 360–6, 374–9, 408–10.

W.G.Burns at Calton Hill meeting, Edinburgh, 5 December 1838, A.Wilson, ‘Chartism

in Glasgow’, Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, p. 279.

Cole, Chartist Portraits, p. 75.

Preface to his poem, The Spirit, or a Dream in the Woodlands (1849).

David Williams, ‘Chartism in Wales’, Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, p. 236.

Read and Glasgow, O’Connor, pp. 133–6.

‘The Social War’, The People’s Paper, 13 November 1852; speech at Chartist

Conference, ibid., 13 February 1858: ‘Mr. Jones sat down amid loud and continued

applause.’

322 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

abolition of the truck system.

But the chief contribution of Chartism to the

transformation of society was the famous Land Plan of O’Connor. This nostalgic

attempt to recreate the supposedly idyllic peasantry of Merry England— or pre-

Cromwellian Ireland—was designed not to produce a social revolution but,

through the conservatism of small proprietors, to prevent one. As O’Brien’s

National Reformer put it, ‘Every man who joins these land societies is practically

enlisting himself on the side of the Government against his own order.’

Thus Chartism both in its practice of the politics of petitioning and in its lack

of any constructive theoretical alternative to capitalism was, in spite of its

revolutionary appearance, a long step on the way to the viable class society.

The collapse by the 1850’s of all the overtly revolutionary working-class

institutions and the conversion of all the covertly revolutionary ones into pillars

of existing society left only the trade unions as residuary legatees of the working-

class ideal. The extinction of general unionism had reduced these to three

comparatively small groups of solidly organized unions: the traditional craft

unions, mainly in building, printing, wood-working, glass and pottery, and the

metal and engineering industries; the textile unions, especially in cotton; and the

miners’ unions, which last maintained only a flickering life outside the north-

eastern coalfield.

Their total membership was small—probably under 100,000 in

1842, certainly well under a million before the upsurge of growth in the early

1870’s.

It was practically confined to the most prosperous stratum of the

working class, the so-called labour aristocracy, for one or both of two reasons.

Only the highly-paid worker could afford the high subscriptions, as much as a

shilling a week or more, charged by the skilled unions, and only a well-organized

trade, able to restrict entry to the occupation, could in the competitive labour

market of the mid-nineteenth century maintain a high rate of wages.

Indeed, as H.A.Turner has shown, whether a trade was described as skilled

and as therefore belonging to the labour aristocracy depended less on its intrinsic

skill and the length of training necessary to acquire it than on its ability to restrict

recruitment and so to command an ‘aristocratic’ wage. Thus a ‘closed’ union of

machine-minders like the cotton spinners’ was able to maintain its position as a

Hovell, op. cit., pp. 138, 175–6, 178–80.

J.B.O’Brien, ‘Programme of the National Reform League’, National Reformer, 16

January 1847, in Cole and Filson, op. cit., pp. 407–9.

Cf. Report on the ‘Labour Parliament’ at Manchester, The People’s Paper, 11 March

1854, in ibid., pp. 419–21.

Hovell, op. cit., p. 275.

Cf. H.A.Turner, Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy: a Comparative Study of the

Cotton Unions (1962), pp. 169–70; there were a few other unions outside these

categories, such as the operative boot and shoe makers and the railway footplatemen and

guards, but they were either tiny or to all intents and purposes friendly societies.

S. and B.Webb, Trade Unionism, pp. 748–9.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 323