When Manchester turned out to support locked out farm labourers

It was Lawrence who had first introduced me to the great agricultural labourers lock out of 1874.

But at that time I was researching the book on Chorlton which had an end date of 1850 and so as historians often say it was out of my period.

And any way despite a bit of ferreting around I couldn’t find any reference to it in Chorlton but then at the time I reasoned that it was unlikely to have had much impact here in the township where the majority of farming was done by small family market gardeners tilling between one and nine acres.

But I was drawn back again when Lawrence mentioned that there had been a huge demonstration here in Manchester in support of the agricultural labourers, which was too good a story to pass up, especially as one of our own was involved in the relief committee.

A lock out put simply is when the employers decide to pre-empt an industrial dispute by “locking out” their workers who are in the process of making demands for the betterment of pay and conditions and keeping the workforce out till it has accepted the conditions imposed by the employers.

Our great lock out was centred on the east of the country and began on March 21st 1874, after a period of two years where groups of labourers had requested a modest rise in their wages to just 14s a week and eventually announced they would go on strike.  The lockout extended across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Dorset, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire with 10,000 labourers thrown out of work.

Agricultural wages in the eastern counties were lower than the national average and much lower than  in parts of the north where farmers had had to compete with the pull of industrial wages from the great cities and towns of the north.

In 1850 the weekly average wage was 9s 3½d, while in the Eastern counties it was 8s 8d and in Lancashire it might vary from 11s to 18s.  And while during the late 1860s into the 70s there was a growing parity between national average and that paid in the east it was still  lower.

Now much is always made of the appalling living conditions in the new urban areas but equally poor conditions were there in the rural areas.  So in the small Suffolk village of Exning where the labourers made the first demands many of the their cottages had “only one bedroom, and a sitting room 9 feet square, with a ceiling so low that an average sixed man could not stand upright.  The bedroom had a shelving roof and was dimly lighted by a small window, and in this room, or rather loft, father and mother and children slept together.  The boards of one cottage were so rotten that they swarmed with vermin, ‘Enough to run away with the children’, the mother said.”*

At first it aroused little stir but gradually it began to attract the attention of the wider public and so to our demonstration in Manchester.  It was called by the trade unions of the city and surrounding area with trains run “specially for this occasion from most of the great cities and towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and some societies in the procession from distant parts of the country.”**
It was as the Guardian remarked a very big demonstration the Management of which was “ exclusively in the hands of the unionists, and in the result it was extremely creditable in their energy and power of organaistaion,”

The demonstration formed up in Albert Square and walked to Pommona Gardens , by way of Mount-street, Oxford-street, Portland-Street, Piccadilly, Market-street, St Mary’s Gate and thence by New Bailey-street, Bridge-street, Deansgate, and Chester Road to the Gardens.  Vast crowds lined the whole way and the windows, balconies, and in many cases the roofs were thronged with sightseers.”

Here amongst the 14,000 marchers were the full representation of trade unions including, the baker’s, boilermakers, shipbuilders, brass founders bricklayers and many more, each carrying banners and distinctive signs representing their particular trades and in the midst of it all was the Money Box carried on a cart for the collection of the money donated by the crowd.

It took over two and half hours for the entire demonstration to marshal at the arrival point in the gardens where they were met with six platforms full of speakers from the entire labour movement and from all parts of the country.

Sadly the labourers were defeated.  The farmers brought in more machine to harvest the crops and men began drifting back to work in August, on their employers terms.  “Threatened with eviction from their tied cottages; threatened with the loss of both public and private charities, by the class which governed them, voteless, isolated, for the most part unable to read or write, and with the air full of rumours of appropriation of union funds, sedulously circulated by their enemies, the miracle would have been if the men had won.”***

Picture; from the Graphic Newspaper 1874

*Green, F E A History of the English Agricultural Labourers 1870-1920, 1920 page 54
** Manchester Guardian June 22 1874
*** ibid Green, page 59