strenuous labour that hardened the hands and mesmerised the mind with its tedium. The undergraduates who worked with them were naturally more energetic, but were just as obviously strangers to dock-work. Their expressions lacked the sullen glower of the strikers in the crowd outside. Their faces were free of the undernourished grey, and the lines stamped by poverty and restive envy of those to whom life had been less generous.
This strange reversal of roles, in which solicitors, stockbrokers, students and other members of the middle class temporarily assumed the tasks of labourers, occurred on 9th May, 1926, at a time when want and insecurity still marked the lives of many British working men.
All over Britain, overcrowded slums polluted towns and cities, spawning a population whose health was suspect, whose work was menial and could be dangerous, and whose diet sometimes barely skirted starvation level.
After World War I, it was to people like this that employers addressed demands that wages should be cut.
The protests were, naturally, vigorous and, at first, seemed successful. After strike action by railwaymen in 1919, proposals to reduce their wages were withdrawn. And though miners’ pay was forced down in 1921, the mine-owners three years later conceded a rise and a seven instead of an eight-hour day.
The basic conflict however, remained; and it remained at its most aggressive in the mining industry where, despite sporadic flickers upwards, exports were falling in the face of European competition.
In this situation, employers and employed took firm and stubbornly opposing stands.
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Posted in Historical articles, History, Industry, Philanthropy, Politics on Wednesday, 19 February 2014
This edited article about the Victorians first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 557 published on 16 September 1972.
Victorian England was, in many ways, a tremendously exciting place. It was a period bursting with energy and inventiveness. Enormous strides were made in science, particularly in communications and power. A new main road system came into being, then the railway system.
Steam power was harnessed to industrial processes. Gas-lighting gave way to electricity; electricity led the way to the telegraph, telephone and radio. The names that ring down the years from the 1800s are those of engineers, builders and inventors: Watt, Stephenson, Faraday, Edison, Bell, Morse, Marconi.
This changed both the look of the land, and the lives of ordinary people more, and more quickly, than in the whole of man’s previous history. Instead of being born, living and dying in the same village, even the poorest began to move.
In their thousands they moved from the countryside into the rapidly-growing towns, to man scores of new factories. The Industrial Revolution actually began long before Victoria came to the throne, but increased in speed and force as the 19th-century progressed. In 1773 fewer than 14,000 people lived in Manchester. Before the century ended there were 70,000. By 1900 the population had shot up to over half a million. A French critic and historian described it in the 1860s as “a Babel built of brick.”
The simple peasants who left their insanitary country hovels and back-breaking slavery on the land, or the “cottage industries” killed off by new production methods, believed they were moving into a world of bright lights and easy jobs “minding the machines.” They could not have been more wrong. They were merely exchanging one kind of slavery for another, in even worse circumstances.
As the factory-owners moved out of the city centres to the pleasant suburbs, their houses were replaced by towering factories and rows of tiny terraced houses, or tenements, into which the workers were crammed; often several families to one house. Sometimes whole families lived in one small, damp, cellar under the shadow of the soot-blackened factory walls where they spent anything up to sixteen hours every day, working for a pittance. Occasionally they brought the family pigs and hens from the country to share, and i