On May Day, the London Mob
I mentioned some weeks ago that I was on my way to have tea with Clive Bloom, authority on anarchy in Britain (see what I did there?) so we could chat about the nature of London protests over the centuries. It was fascinating. And the dictaphone failed.
So on this May Day, the holiday of the ordinary people to which the movement for restricted working hours became attached, I thought I'd look back on the history of what has become known as 'International Workers' Day' and blog about how it came to be here in Britain and my tea with Professor Bloom.
The one defining notion I took from my conversation with Clive was his response to my question 'What's the one defining characteristic of the London Mob's identity and how has it changed through time?' Sounds a bit pseudy, no? But think about it, all mobs have an identity: the football crowd at a Wembley Stadium match are markedly different from the crowd that will attend a rock concert in the same venue. Clive's answer was that in the eighteenth century, the Mob's defining characteristic was outrage. When a relatively small group of people were disaffected by something within their environment they saw as intolerable, they took to the streets in outrage and protested (violently, more often than not). Throughout the eighteenth century these riots focussed mainly on rates of pay, rather than working conditions, as well as threats from foreign workers although the Gordon Riots are a notable exception. The Gordon Riots were billed as an anti-Catholic reaction to the Papists Act of 1778, but were in fact an excuse to take to the streets and cause trouble. Catholicism had long since had the ability to enrage the London proletariat, for reasons that largely remain unclear. As Daniel Defoe sagely remarked, the London anti-Catholic mob was comprised of 'ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse'.
In the early nineteenth century, this mindless outrage began to change, slowly. War was causing prices to rise and people were feeling the pinch. London in particular, had doubled in size and had a huge poor population which was beginning with greater frequency to mobilize. The Spa Fields 'Riots' in the winter of 1816 had begun as peaceful gatherings but Henry 'Orator' Hunt succeeded in whipping up the crowd, thought now to be in excess of 20,000. The underlying theme of the meetings was Spencean. Thomas Spence was an radical communist with some good basic ideas (universal suffrage, income support for the disabled and the rights of children to protection) but his overwhelming hatred for the aristocracy betrays an unbalanced reason. Again, alcohol played a large part in the actions of the mob and the 'uprising' was quelled.
Some of the ringleaders of the Spa Fields Riots would go on to become involved in the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820. The Peterloo Massacre in 1819 had proved how frightened the government was by mass meetings. Robert Stewart, Lord Castelreagh had become a figurehead for the oppression of the common people due to his promise and subsequent failure to bring in Catholic Emancipation and designing the Congress system to try and avoid land wars in Europe (but which effectively allowed governments to suppress dissenters). When it was reported in the papers that the Cabinet would be dining together with relatively little security, the conspirators decided to act. The target was a house in Grosvenor Square and they established a fake coffee shop nearby to disguise their comings and goings. The weapons store was in Cato Street, Marylebone. Like most unsuccessful conspiracies, Cato Street failed because of the big mouths. One of the conspirators declared, in the days before the planned assault, 'We are going to kill his Majesty's Ministers and will have blood and wine for supper!' Inside the group were traitors and even paid government spies. The conspirators were arrested and executed in front of a huge crowd on May Day, 1820. They were the last people to be executed by beheading in Britain. In a strange twist their intended victim, Castlereagh, would cut his own throat two years later after suffering a complete breakdown due to overwork and the collapse of his political vision.
Even by the time of Cato Street, itself poor and dependent upon a small group of nutters, the early and largely incoherent protests were giving way to the nineteenth century 'sense of purpose'. Movements for workers were springing up as factory conditions spread and intensified. These movements were less likely to be fuelled by drink (temperance was gaining ground fast) and they gathered to protest in large numbers, identified by their sense of purpose. The nature of working life had changed very rapidly since the 1760s, with the new manufactories employing huge numbers of people who would previously have worked upon the land or in small scale industry. The deployment of new types of machinery had the unexpected consequences of industrial illnesses and accidents. The urge to increase productivity led to longer and longer working hours. Britain, particularly urban Britain has always tended towards long working hours, which are acceptable in a situation such as a shop or cottage industry where natural breaks and conversation, as well as nipping outside for a smoke or a pee or a breath of fresh air is expected. Factory conditions are not conducive to the natural fits and starts of human labour: the machines must be kept in motion so that they may pay for themselves. If this type of work is to be pursued then the only obvious thing that must be done for these workers is to cap working hours.
Robert Owen was a Welshman with a set of revolutionary ideas. He was an atheist who put great store by personal responsibility and was also deeply disturbed by the oppression of the human spirit caused by factory work. To this end he attempted to create model factories of his own and campaigns for shortened working hours and also the co-operative system. He believed in an eight hour working day, and was disappointed in his failure to have this introduced: Britain finally got the ten hour working day (for women and children) in 1847. Owen was Britain's first proper, self-identifying socialist and this term became current in his rhetoric in 1835, although it is possible to pin it down to 1817 in his ideas.
Britain, a country which puts its hand to its mouth through businesses based upon international trade, consumption and financial speculation was never in a position to embrace socialism and it would be to co-operative movement that would shape Owen's legacy. This was the one thing which so impressed the young bloods who would lead the Chartists, inspiring them with a more rational and moderate creed and creating an inclusive movement based upon the interests of the common working man (note no women, whilst the earlier radicals were notable in including women in their ideals). The People's Charter of 1838 wanted a vote for every man over 21, the secret ballot, a wage for MPs, re-organisation of constituencies and annual Parliaments. Critics said it was too moderate and that it would achieve nothing, yet Chartism with its defining sense of purpose went on to become the first mass workers' movement and possibly the most successful, with five of their six requests being met by 1918.
Chartism had sensible ideas and realistic aims; in many ways it established the idea of the British mass protest and our very 'right' to protest through taking to the streets in huge numbers. Professor Bloom and I discussed this innate and British idea that we are entitled to gather in the streets and how the Victorian creation of an ordered urban environment lends itself to peaceful protest. The wildernesses of Moorfields, Spa Fields and other common places in the eighteenth century, where anything was possible, gave way to the manicured parks of the nineteenth where no one, as Professor Bloom said, is going to step on the tulips.
When we came to discuss the modern Mob, I repeated my question about the defining characteristic and was intrigued to hear the anarchy expert laugh. 'We are back to outrage,' he said. We have, in essence, returned to the Mob of the eighteenth century. On the surface, the crowds are turning out to protest educational fees or cuts in spending but their underlying characteristic is once again, outrage. And once again small groups within the mass are fuelled by anger towards disruption.
There's more on all of this in Clive's excellent book Restless Revolutionaries: A History of Britain's Fight for a Republic. I highly recommend it.