James Hobson 'The Last Luddite Executions, April 17th 1817'

Luddites destroyed machines in the Midlands in the period 1811-1816. These machines were destroying skilled jobs and emboldening the master manufacturers to treat their workers with contempt. The Luddites may have been wrong in their belief that they could hold back technological change, but they were organised and principled people who were trying to use their view of the world to bring back social justice. “Luddite” is used here as a badge of honour rather than a term of abuse.

The Luddite violence in Loughborough, Leicestershire was seen by the hostile press of the time as the worst outbreak of machine breaking since March 1811. It was in many ways an unusual example of machine breaking. The perpetrators were not local; this was the first time serious Luddism visited Loughborough; and there was not much love lost for the manufacturers who were the victim of violent protest either.

The lace factory of Heathcote (sometimes “Heathcoat”) and Boden was the target; and there may not have been a less popular pair of businessmen in Loughborough.  John Heathcote and John Boden were no ordinary textile entrepreneurs. Heathcote had invented and patented new technology that reproduced the work of skilled people making   good quality pillow lace at the fraction of the price; earlier Luddites attacks on lace making machines had been on Heathcote’s franchised machines. He was notorious as an exploiter of workers and fellow manufacturers, and his factory in Mill Street (where Loughborough Iceland) now stands, was an obvious target for Luddite resentment.

He employed six guards to protect his factory, but on the early morning of June 28th, they did not prove to be enough. About 30 people organised an attack in the early morning on June 28th. It was a well organised attacked, with men armed with blunderbusses, ramrods, and a detailed knowledge of the layout of the factory. How well organised was impossible to work out; it served the purposes of the hostile press to imply that it was a quasi-military organisation, with a captain on a horse with attackers having their own number; as it turned out most of the men called each other “Ned”

Heathcote and Boden were not popular locally. Heathcote and Boden had already reduced wages  of its 400 employees  in January and survived the subsequent strike (“general turn out”) but starvation and lack of alternatives had forced most to work; some previous workers were “ not accorded that privilege”, according to the loyalist Stamford Mercury. The owners had clearly blacklisted those deemed trouble-makers.

The Luddites attacked the machines because they were convinced that the bosses  had unfairly altered the relationship between masters and men  by exploiting the new technology to reduce wages, although it may be that the company’s reason for reducing wages was the loss of revenue from  other manufacturers stealing their technology. The company, being hated by both capital and labour, were making plans to leave Loughborough even before the attack, having annoyed both lace masters and lace makers. It may have been that the master lace makers even encouraged the attack.

John Asher and two others were guarding the entrance to Heathcote and Boden. John was the first to the pistol and fired at “Ned’s Band” and one of them replied with a blunderbuss and shot Asher in the back of the head; all three guards were disarmed and guarded as the majority pushed their way through to the factory. Five other men were forced to lay prostrate on the floor as 53 lace knitting machine were destroyed to the replacement cost of over £8000 pounds. The whole event took no more than 45 minutes.

The attackers taunted the guards that were lying helplessly on the floor.

Now men, if you can tell us of any machines that are working under price, if it be one hundred or two off, we will   go and break them......

All’s well, Ned Ludd, do your duty well, it’s a Waterloo job by g-d !

The serious nature of this outbreak could be judged by the response. The local constables patrolled the streets and ordered locals not to extinguish their lights to help the Luddites escape; homes were raided and pubs were closed at 9pm; the town crier passed news of the attack and the reward given of £500. Panicking government often offered outlandish rewards for information about the ringleaders during this period. It was by this mixture of law, violence, and bribery that the state operated against the anger of the lower orders.

Another weapon of the establishment was the informer, in this case Jack Blackburn, who turned King’s evidence at the trial of William Towle and the others. Blackburn gave evidence against him at the trial. “Bill” Towle was one of the Ned’s band. According to Blackburn, Bill was armed with an axe or hatchet, mostly for the destruction of the machines, but also available to threaten those guarding the machines. When a dog barked on the entrance to the factory, Bill tried to chop it down but is eventually shot by Jem Towle, William’s brother, who had already been executed for his part in the violence in 1816. Bill was there when John Asher was shot, and was deemed complicit in his injury. John Asher took a few months to recover and was never in danger of dying. The real crime was the organised assault on property- if John has been shot in a pub brawl it would have resulted in a two year sentence at a local House of Correction.

William and the other Luddites, Thomas Savage, William Withers, Joshua Mitchell, John Crowder, and John Amos, were executed at the Leicester County Bridewell on April 17th. The initial expectation was that the execution would take place on the Monday previously, but the crowd was still about 15,000, with dragoons clearly in place to deter any crowd reaction.   They were accompanied by a whole bevy of clerics who all wanted the men to be launched into eternity in with the conventional amount of dejection, admissions of guilt and calls for the undeserved mercy of the redeemer. The Luddites did moderately well; they Luddites appeared very cheerful, but were singing   hymns most of the way as they passed along. They mostly accepted the exhortation to look to heaven; but they were not going to admit their guilt. They carried oranges, as many condemned people on the scaffold, and threw them out to people they recognised, telling them to save them for their children.

Towle did not speak; William Savage said the most; all of the men died with dignity, but Towle wavered a little, according to a later report in the Leicester Chronicle.

“Towle, a fresh looking youth, betrayed no symptoms of agitation, until towards the close of the tragic scene, when, on the cap being pulled over his face, he evidently seemed much affected”.

Mr Musson, the executioner, used the New Drop system of hanging- a long rope rather than slow strangulation. All the other Luddites were buried locally; William Towle’s body was returned to his wife and child in Chilwell.

Heathcote and Boden prospered.  John Heathcote moved his whole enterprise to Tiverton, Devon and took 200 of his Leicestershire workers with him. Legend has it that he went on his horse and his workers walked. They were employing 1500 people by 1822 and members of the two families prospered into the twentieth century.  Heathcote died a rich man in 1861.

After the last executions, the establishment newspapers were triumphant and - literally - of one voice.

“The System of   Luddism , which has been so long carried on to the terror of the Nottinghamshire and the neighbourhood ,is expected to be finally checked by the imprisonment  of the principal offenders”

Stamford Mercury, 21st February 1817
Leeds Mercury, 1st March 1817
Lancaster Gazette, 8th March 1817

A compliant press is not a new phenomenon!

James Hobson
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Alan Brooke's review of the 2015 Luddite Memorial Lecture

Huddersfield historian Alan Brooke has published a review of the 2015 Luddite Memorial Lecture, which we republish here.

The second Luddite Memorial Lecture – a joint Huddersfield Local History Society/University of Huddersfield venture, was held at the University on 16 April 2015. It starred Prof Malcolm Chase of Leeds who spoke on ‘York Castle and its political prisoners – the Luddites in a wider context.’ Malcolm Chase is best known for his ‘Chartism – a new history’ and for his in depth study of 1820 and the threat posed by discontent to the government of the day, including uprisings in Huddersfield and Barnsley, which is soon to appear in paperback. Here I will forgo a grouse about the cost of academic books, since the hardback edition costs a small fortune.

This is the fifth time I have heard Malcolm speak and as usual his talk was both very informative and entertaining. Above all, for me, it was also politically relevant, in that it demonstrated the continuous development of the state apparatus in quelling dissent from mediaeval times to the 20th C.

The speaker’s point of departure was not the Luddite executions but the ‘Pilgrimage to York’ organised by the Ten Hour movement led by Richard Oastler, when in Easter 1833 thousands of working men women and children marched from the manufacturing districts to York Castle in support of their demands to limit the hours of child labour. This was just 20 years after the execution of the 17 Luddites (or Luddites and burglars using the cloak of Luddism) and Malcolm asserted that among the protestors from the Huddersfield area there must have been many for whom York still held that association, through common knowledge, as relatives of Luddites, or even some who had participated in Luddite activities. For those of us who still vividly remember the Miner’s Strike of 1984/85, although 30 years ago now, it seems more than likely that such a dramatic, and indeed traumatic event in people’s lives as the Luddite executions would have been embedded in popular consciousness and would have been recollected by some. As I have mentioned elsewhere however, a culture of ‘omerta’ does seem to have prevailed and there is little evidence of the Luddites being publically discussed at this time. (1)

Having set the scene at York Castle and established its significance in the Luddite story Malcolm recounted not only a brief history of its political inmates but also described the physical evolution of the Castle as a gaol, illustrated by some fascinating slides including an early aerial view. The site, familiar to us today as Clifford’s Tower, the adjacent massive car park and the elegant square bounded on three sides by the Castle Museum and the Law Courts was, in the 19th C, surrounded by a massive curtain wall and accessible only via a formidable towered gate house. Also in the early 19th C a state of the art panopticon prison was built on what is now the car park.

Malcolm described how Clifford’s Tower probably owed its survival to its utility as a gaol when the rest of the Norman castle had been demolished. Since at least the early 13th C it had housed enemies of the Crown including Irish, Scots and French. In the 17th C both opponents of the Monarchy and the Commonwealth, including many Quakers had found themselves in the Castle, though which part of the physical structure was used for their incarceration I either missed or Malcolm failed to specify.

Here Malcolm pulled out of the hat one of those interesting historical coincidences that makes the subject so delightful even if it explains absolutely nothing. Most of the Luddites were hung on 16 January 1813. On the same day in 1664 there was another mass hanging – 16 men implicated in the Farnley Wood plot, a republican attempt to overthrow the restored monarchy of Charles II.

Unfortunately, this is not our Farnley Wood near Huddersfield (although there was some local involvement in the rising) but Farnley near Leeds, otherwise the coincidence would have been even more poignant. However the plot did focus on the woollen manufacturing areas, as did the Luddite rising. It would have been interesting to know the occupations of those executed in 1664. Indeed, two men executed on Attercliffe Moor for their part in the plot were recorded as a clothier and a cloth dresser. (2) But this date was no more than a coincidence and reporting on the Luddite executions in 1813 one newspaper recapitulating other mass executions at York remained oblivious of the Farnley Wood rebels.

The Jacobite rebellion also produced its martyrs at a time when the mediaeval practice of mutilating the hanged men still remained in force. Over 250 were held in York and 22 were executed, the heads of two being stuck on Micklegate Bar where they remained for ten years. Malcolm did describe some other executions as well as the loathsome conditions in the gaol in the 18th C which, being a sensitive soul, I decline to repeat.

As well as Jacobites at least one prominent ‘Jacobin’ as the authorities dubbed him was incarcerated twice in York on the 1790s. James Montgomery (who had previously been an apprentice baker in Wakefield) was indicted in 1795 for writing a subversive poem about the fall of the Bastille and for criticising the shooting down of protestors the following year. Malcolm contrasted the harsh treatment of the Luddites in 1813 with that of the Yorkshire rebels of 1820, when participants in the Grange Moor rising had their death sentences commuted to transportation. This he attributed to a reluctance to exacerbated a dangerously tense political situation which he claimed posed the biggest threat to government since the Jacobite rebellion or subsequently – including the 20th C. In Scotland however three insurgents were executed, creating martyrs that are still remembered today.

Here I have to point out Malcolm’s most serious omission, – a failure to mention the Huddersfield uprising of 1817 where, again, this time mainly due to revelations that a government provocateur had been at work, those arrested were released after trial – apart from Tom Riley who committed suicide in his cell. Since Riley was one who ‘had form’ as a Luddite suspect in 1812/13 his story is a good example of the likely continuity from Luddism to later Radical activity as well as being a personal tragedy that throws light on the conditions of prisoners.

York also held its quota of radicals from the 1830s and 40s, like Joshua Hobson, Huddersfield’s campaigner for the liberty of the press and many Chartists including Feargus O’Connor. However Chartists often served their terms in Northallerton gaol, noted for its harsh regime which resulted in the martyrdom of Samuel Holberry of Sheffield.

York does not seem to have been used for political prisoners in the later 19th C although during the first world war it did hold interred enemy aliens – so many if fact that some had to be accommodated in tents in the grounds.

Malcolm closed with the reflections that York’s political prisoners are not remembered in the city, dominated as it is by a twee heritage industry geared to tourism, which sees Dick Turpin, a petty gangster, as more sellable than radical heroes. He closed with an account of the 2013 Luddite commemoration at York which marked the site of the executions outside the walls of the Castle, now by a busy ring road, with no permanent memorial to the Luddites or to any of the thousands of political prisoners who had passed through that grim place.

The talk was not only a fascinating overview of the workings of the British state through the ages in one locality (which brought out York’s role as de facto ‘capital of the North’), but also a tribute to all those who have fought, lost their liberty and often their lives in the fight for freedom as they saw it at the time. Yorkshire should have a fitting tribute to its radical martyrs and there would be no better site for it than York Castle.  Malcolm’s talk could help kick start that discussion if we as historians and activists carry on the task of bringing our radical history to a wider audience through such popular events as the Annual Luddite Memorial Lectures.

(1)  see https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/the-luddite-legacy/

(2) A. J. Hopper, ‘The Farnley Wood plot and the memory of the civil wars in Yorkshire’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 281-303,

'The Luddite Legacy' by Alan Brooke

Full text of a paper forming the basis of a talk given at York Guildhall on 19th January 2013, to commemorate the execution of the West Riding of Yorkshire Luddites in 1813.

In Huddersfield alone, where the Luddite tradition is the most tenacious, the Bicentenary has involved at least a couple of thousand people in events which have been covered by the media, bringing the name 'Luddite' to thousands more.

There have been numerous meetings, plays, folk sessions and poetry readings involving people with a wide range of interests in Luddism - political and campaigning (such as Luddites 200), academic and cultural. It has involved playwrights, poets, musicians and morris dancers as well as historians. Some people have attempted to analyse Luddism and its continued relevancy – others have been happy to perpetuate the mythic and romantic view of Luddism.

There is no doubt that Luddism has left a vibrant legacy. This talk looks at some aspects of that legacy, both local and international.

Whether the Luddites ever considered that they would be remembered by posterity we have no record. In Yorkshire we have no speeches from the dock and the brief last words of George Mellor on the scaffold were soon after obscured by controversy about what he had actually said.

There was no attempt to claim martyrdom [1] – and in that the mainstream labour movement has been glad to oblige them. The cult of martyrdom, such as it is, is a very anaemic, apologetic and self conscious phenomenon in the British Labour Movement which just doesn’t ‘do’ martyrs. Martyrs seem only acceptable if they are ‘innocent victims’ such as the Peterloo martyrs and the Tolpuddle martyrs. This is despite the long roll call of working class people who have died fighting for their rights.

As well as the 40 or so who fell during the Luddite rising, there are the 3 Pentridge insurgents of 1817, Hardie, Baird and Wilson executed in 1820, Dic Penderyn hung for his part in the Merthyr uprising in 1831, George Shell and the twenty or more others shot in the gunbattle with troops at Newport in 1839 and John Clayton, Samuel Holberry and the other Chartists who died in gaol. More recently we have David Jones and Joe Green who were killed in the great Miners' Strike of 1984-1985.

Although some of these have been honoured with local plaques and monuments, the example of their actions has not been assimilated into the tradition of the labour movement.

Certainly Shelleys’ imagery of martyrdom from his revolutionary poem 'Queen Mab' has not gained wide acceptance in British working class culture as it has, for example, among Irish republicans.

Love’s brightest roses on the scaffold bloom,
Mingling with freedom’s fadeless laurels there...

Shelley was writing this poem as the Luddite rising was unfolding. He was certainly aware of the York executions and suggested raising subscriptions to help the families, though I don’t know if this got off the ground.

I come from the village of Honley in the Holme Valley, three miles south of Huddersfield and a focus of Luddite activity in 1812. From my house I can see the site of two workshops attacked in 1812 and a few hundred yards away is the Coach & Horses pub, where two of the Luddites said to be involved in the assassination of the mill owner William Horsfall, spent the evening after the attack. I grew up on stories of the Luddites - it can safely be said that Luddism is part of my cultural heritage. [2]

But as a historian the problem for me remains – how much is this tradition genuine folklore, handed down orally in the community, and how much has it been derived from a literary tradition which has fed back into local consciousness? How far is it acquired culture and how far real collective memory?

Earlier last year I asked my uncle about my great grandfather who had been a conscientious objector in the First World War and if there was any family account of his imprisonment. He replied, 

"They were a funny lot in those days. I once asked about a relative who was supposed to be involved with the Luddites and was told 'You don’t want to know about that. There are some things best not talked about.' "

How much local knowledge of the Luddites was lost because people didn’t want to talk about events with which they, or those close to them, were involved? A kind of omertà born partly out of loyalty and partly out of fear. This reticence accounts for the paucity of references to Luddism in the generation after 1812-1820, and through the turbulent period culminating in Chartism. It also accounts for the total absence of any accounts of ‘insiders’ in the later period which throw any light on the inner workings of Luddism. For all the claims that late Victorian writers like Frank Peel drew on authentic oral tradition there is really little in his account which reveals anything about the Luddite movement.

However, despite this silence from the Luddite milieu itself, the Luddite rising did maintain a hold on the local imagination. Charlotte Brontё’s 'Shirley' both reflected this fascination and helped to perpetuate it, as did the accounts of Peel and D.F.E. Sykes, author of ‘Ben o’Bills the Luddite’ and others, which mingled fact and fiction in varying degrees. 

For an excellent account of the literary heritage of Luddism one can do no better than read Steven Jones' ‘Against Technology – From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism’.

But as well as the literary and traditional heritage of Luddism, what of its’ practical political legacy?

Locally, the Luddite influence on the immediate aftermath of 1812 is apparent. Luddism did not end in 1813 with the hangings, there was at least one incident of machine breaking in Huddersfield in 1815 and there is no doubt that the militancy of Luddism fed into the insurrections which were planned in the area in 1817 and 1820. George Taylor, a Holme Valley leader, was reputed to have been involved in Luddism in 1812 as was James Smaller of Horbury. Thomas Riley, suspected of planning the assassination of the magistrate Joseph Radcliffe in 1812, was arrested for involvement in 1817 and committed suicide in York Castle. In the run up to the rising one man who asked what they should do if they didn’t have enough arms was told ‘They would go Ludding’, and one of the victims of just such a raid for arms in Honley also described the insurgents as ‘damned Ludding rogues’. Ludding therefore did not just refer to machine breaking but was also associated with raids for arms and rebellion. There is no doubt that the factors which contributed to the vitality of Luddism in Huddersfield in 1812 also played a role in the insurgencies of 1817 and 1820, making the area the only one in Britain to participate in all three risings.

Huddersfield also remained a stronghold of both demands for radical reform of parliament, Owenite trade unionism, resistance to the factory system and to the new poor law in the late 1820s and 1830s,  although now it was the handloom weaver rather than the cropper who was the backbone of the movement. Although there were no attacks on machinery Richard Oastler, the Radical Tory leader of the Factory Movement, did advocate sabotage of  machines used to flout the Factory Acts and overwork children. The culmination of these movements, the great General Strike of 1842, did involve attacks on mills, but not to destroy machinery, only to force their closure and reinforce the strike.

Thanks to the literary tradition I have referred to, and particularly Sykes' novel which was published by the Worker, the Huddersfield socialist weekly paper in 1911, the Luddite centenary was an opportunity to draw on the account of the Luddite rising in the popular domain in order to point out parallels with contemporary events.

The 2012 Luddite Bicentennary has overshadowed the commemoration of more recent events in 1912. This was the high-tide mark of what has been variously called the Workers Rebellion or the Labour Revolt – a wave of industrial militancy between 1910 and 1914 which saw miners, dockers, seamen, railwaymen, builders and others locked in protracted and violent disputes with employers and the state. People were killed in riots in Tonypandy, Llanelli and Merseyside, thousands of troops garrisoned towns and cities and gun boats were stationed on the Mersey and Humber. These events gave impetus to the syndicalist movement which based its tactics, as the Luddites had done, on direct action and sabotage.

This development alarmed those on the left who believed that political action, was primary. In October 1912 the executive of the British Socialist Party, led by the dogmatic Marxist H.M. Hyndman, issued a statement condemning direct action:

‘There is no probability that Syndicalist methods will find favour in Great Britain.  The tactics of the Levellers and Luddites belong to a lower stage  of economic development and working class organisation than that to which we have attained.’

A few weeks later, Ernest John Bartlett Allen, a leading industrial unionist and former associate of Tom Mann (that is Tom Mann the English trade unionist, not the German novelist) wrote an article reproduced in the Huddersfield socialist weekly, the Worker, entitled ‘Is sabotage un-English’. E.J.B. Allen had lived in Honley between 1910 and 1912, where, despite his Oxford education,  he was a labourer in a bobbin turning workshop and was well known in the local movement through his support for the maverick former revolutionary socialist MP, Victor Grayson.  He pointed out:

‘the textile workers created a sabotage of their own when they had their Luddite movement ... In the Huddersfield area they had a specially heavy hammer made for this work ... they sang the praises of this great hammer, Great Enoch, as they had named it.’

He has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, or rather hammer, in saying it was specially made – but his point that direct attacks on machinery were an indigenous form of struggle is valid.
The syndicalist claim to have the Luddites among their fore-fathers was given another twist at a meeting in 1914 when Guy Bowman, editor of the Syndicalist journal, visited Huddersfield. He had been gaoled in 1912 along with Tom Mann for issuing a ‘Don’t Shoot’ appeal to troops called out against strikers. The chair of the meeting George Greensmith, a leading Huddersfield anarchist, claimed that one of the first manifestations of anti-militarism had occurred locally when one of the soldiers stationed in Rawfolds Mill was flogged for  refusing to fire on the Luddites.

Greensmith has gone on record with his own startlingly modern Luddite prophecy. This was  in a debate in 1912 with Fred Shaw, a Huddersfield engineer, leading local Marxist (and syndicalist sympathiser!) Greensmith criticised Marx for reducing man to

‘the modern sport of the machines man had made in the factories man had built.  [but] When man desired they could chuck the machines into the gutter and refuse to go into the mines. It was no longer necessary.  They could chain the tides and harness the sunshine.’

Those who pointed out the differences between 1812 and 1912 had some justification. The Luddites were resisting the introduction of machines in the infancy of industrial capitalism – the years before the first world war saw the zenith of heavy industry in Britain. The main problem now was how to gain control over the industrial system. Though the syndicalists embraced Luddite methods they were not seeking the curtailment or abolition of the machine. However, Greensmith’s quote shows that some anarchists, (as did aesthetic socialists like William Morris), saw the machine itself as an obstacle to a new society.

The dispute between Marxists and state socialists on one side and Syndicalists and Anarchists on the other about the relevancy of the machine and Luddism was not confined to Britain. It was a dispute between those who saw socialism primarily in terms of the development of the productive forces and those who emphasised a new society based on changed social relations. The most revolutionary and original among the latter was the German Anarcho-Socialist Gustav Landauer.

In his stirring and poetic ‘Call to Socialism’ published in 1911 he slammed Marxism for its dependency on technology.

Marxism is the uncultured plodder who knows nothing more important, nothing more splendid, nothing more sacred than technology and its progress ... The father of Marxism is neither the study of history, nor Hegel. It is neither Smith nor Ricardo, nor any of the pre-Marxist socialists. It is neither a revolutionary democratic condition, nor even less the will and longing for culture and beauty among men. The father of Marxism is steam. Old wives prophecy from coffee dregs. Karl Marx prophecied from steam.

For Landauer, socialism could not be produced from the same technological basis as capitalism – it requires a decentralisation and a move back to the land. Above all it requires an assertion of the human soul, or spirit – the Geist. For those of you who think I have wandered off the Luddites, the significance of this will become apparent at the close of this paper.

One who came to Landauer’s views over the following years was the young poet and dramatist, Ernst Toller, whose experiences on the Western Front turned him into a pacifist and who through the anti-war movement came into contact with the Independent Social Democratic Party. Both Toller and Landauer found themselves leaders of the short lived Munich Soviet in 1919 when Toller announced that they were making a revolution not of force, but of love. Nevertheless Toller was projected into command of the soviet’s small red army and led an action which drove the whites out of the village of Dachau.

On 1st May 1919 the army of the German Republic and the proto-Nazi Freikorps paramiltaries took Munich, launching a white terror killing up to a thousand people, including Landauer who was beaten almost to death then shot. Ernst Toller, thanks to the intervention of prominent figures such as Max Weber and Thomas Mann (that is the German novelist not the English trade unionist), was spared the firing squad.

His five-year imprisonment gave him time to reflect on the ethical and moral dilemmas raised by the revolution. In 1920 to 1921 in the Niederschonenfeld Fortress he composed a drama based on the Luddites entitled ‘Die Maschinenstürmer’ - ‘The Machine Wreckers’. Toller was an Expressionist and did not seek just to portray historical events, which is just as well since the play is not at all accurate. The events of 1812 were used to explore his views about revolutionary violence. Ned Ludd is not a leader, mythical or otherwise, but an ordinary down to earth and somewhat naive worker who believes that smashing the machines will improve the situation. The leader of the ‘weavers’ as they are referred to is Jimmy Cobbett, a surname obviously taken from William Cobbett, who exhorts the men not to resort to violence and to take control of the machines, rather than smashing them. It is he, rather than the millowner, who becomes the target of assassination by the Luddites. Toller explained that in his play the machine was:

"..more than a mere thing. It is a ‘devil’ a ‘demon’ and it provokes its own destruction. It is ‘the  symbol of  our mechanistic age."

The question of violence is not entirely resolved. Though it is shown as ultimately futile it is not condemned. Ned Ludd closes by saying:

"We know what we have done and we shall atone for having killed him.  But others will come after us with greater knowledge, greater faith, greater courage than us.  Your kingdom is crumbling O rulers of England!"

The production of the play was met with both enthusiasm and violent hostility, so strongly did people see the parallels with the situation in 1920s Germany.

The domination of the machine is a central theme of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film ‘Metropolis’ but here the culminating act of machine-breaking also leads to the destruction of the worker’s city itself.

In Herman Hesse’s slightly bizarre surrealist novel of that year, 'Steppenwolf', he describes; ‘the long-prepared, long-awaited and long-feared war between men and machines.’ There is a passage so vivid and so resonant with the feelings of some neo-Luddites today that it is worth quoting in full:

‘On every wall were wild and magnificently stirring placards, whose giant letters flamed like torches, summoning the nation to side with the men against the machines, to make an end at last of the fat and well dressed and perfumed plutocrats who used the machines to squeeze the fat from other mens’ bodies [3], of them and their huge fiendishly purring automobiles. Set factories afire at last! Make a little room for the crippled earth.  Depopulate it so that grass may grow again, and woods, meadows, heather stream and moor return to this world of dust and concrete.’

We also have of course Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Modern Times’ which has none of the violence of the above but portrays the life of the worker dominated by the machine which he sabotages in his own individualistically anarchic way. Perhaps an even more powerful reference to  technological society is his closing speech at the end ‘The Great Dictator,  where he asserts that:

‘More than machinery we need humanity'

and he denounces militarism as ‘machine men with machine minds.’

The 1920s and 1930s see a shift from concern about the machine’s effect in the workplace on workers and the labour process to a concern about its domination of society as a whole.

One response which perhaps is closest to the original Luddite concept of what they were fighting for was propagated by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. In fact, when they were discussing a name for their organisation established in 1927 the ‘Luddite League’ was suggested. They settled on the clumsy and uninspiring name of Distributist League. It’s object – to restore the small producer and property owner which they saw was being destroyed by monopoly capitalism. In his manifesto ‘The Outline of Sanity’,

To go mad and smash machinery is a more or less healthy and human malady, as it was in the Luddites. But it was really owing to the ignorance of the Luddites, in a very different sense from that spoken of scornfully by the stupendous ignorance of the Industrial Economists.  It was blind revolt as against some ancient and awful dragon, by men too ignorant to know how artificial and even temporary was that particular instrument, or where was the seat of the real tyrants who wielded it.

Note how Chesterton saw a dragon, where Toller depicted a devil or demon. This I think owes more to the later 19th and 20th century concept of technology than it does to the actual Luddite perception.  The Chartist image was often of Moloch, the idol and consumer of infants.

By the way, Chesterton’s also refers to the Luddites in one of his best known verses:

‘I saw great Cobbett riding,
The horseman of the shires,
His face was red with judgement,
And the light of Luddite fires’.

Here he is obviously in fact referring to the Swing rather than the Luddite rising, a reminder that Ned Ludd came in different guises to serve different causes – Swing, Rebecca, or today’s ‘V’.

Chesterton’s populist ideology, and again this perhaps in some respect bears a real similarity to the original Luddites’ aims of defending small scale domestic industry, appeals more to a nostalgic merrie England of rural artisans and yeoman. In fact one of the alternative names proposed for the Distributist League, the ‘League of the Little People’, though rejected because it suggested fairies,  would have been most appropriate,.

Chesterton’s world view has something Tolkeinesque about it, an aura of the Shire and Hobbits.   Tolkein’s 'Lord of the Rings' actually has its own Luddite episode, though unknown to many because it was not included in the film. The penultimate chapter of the book, ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, deals with the Hobbits’ return home to find not only a police state but environmental destruction centred on a massive new mill with its smoke belching chimney. What the mill does we are not told except it is ‘full o’wheels and outlandish contraptions’. The Hobbits, Luddite style, even arm themselves with ‘heavy hammers’ and after a successful uprising against Saruman’s ‘ruffians’ the mill is destroyed and the Shire re-afforested. This and other references in the trilogy reflect Tolkein’s own real sense of loss in the face industrialisation which destroyed the countryside of his childhood. No wonder that the book became a cult in both the New Age and environmental movement of the 60s.

The unmitigated evil of industrialism, the demon of Toller, the Dragon of G.K. Chesterton seemed to be realised in 1939-45, with total mechanised warfare, industrial scale genocide and nuclear weapons. Lewis Mumford’s concept of the ‘Megamachine’, arising from the domination of an integrated system of technological, economic, political and military power, described in his ‘Myth of the Machine’ and the ‘Pentagon of Power’ also found horrific expression in the Vietnam War and many subsequent so called ‘small wars’. 

Growing consciousness of the pervasiveness of the Megamachine, coupled with concern about ecological damage, climate change, etc has over the last forty years focused hostility on technology itself - not just as a product, but also a cause of a destructive system and attitude to life that arguably threatens the basis of both its own survival and the biosphere of the planet.

The deep ecology movement and the ‘monkey-wrenchers’ have again turned to sabotage and direct action of the machine in order to raise awareness of the threat. The re-adoption of the name 'Luddite' as a symbol of resistance has been described by Kirkpatrick Sale and I can do no better than refer you to his book ‘Rebels against the Future’ (although his account of the original Luddites is not without its faults). The works of Ted Kaczynski, John Zerzan, Green Anarchists and others who have laid claim to, or have been attributed with, the 'Luddite' mantel, are available on the internet. I have not time to go into the pros and cons of Neo-Luddism now - but I urge people not to be put off by some of the more anti-humanist strands of the movement.

Although hostility to new technology has continued in the labour movement – the struggle of dockers against containerisation and of the Wapping printers being perhaps the best known examples – it has been the environmental and anti-globalisation movement which has really embraced neo-Luddism and its traditions of direct action -  anarchists of various types, rather than socialists and trade unionists.

This discursive account has taken us from Huddersfield, via Bavaria to Middle Earth ... and back again - and in case I have lost anyone on the way I should therefore recapitulate the main points in the process of the unfolding of the Luddite legacy:

Opposition to machinery falls into three types, which broadly constitute three historical phases:

•    Opposition to particular machines because they directly effect the worker in a specific trade and in the immediate community.

•    Opposition to industrialisation as a whole because of the degrading and empoverishing effect on the working class.

•    And the phase that we are now in - opposition to technology due to its scale and all-pervasiveness, since it is both fundamentally dehumanising our species and also threatens the ecological stability of the planet as a whole.

What then did the Luddites do for us?

•    They left us the word Luddism which, once merely pejorative and derogatory, is now being reclaimed.

•    They left us the Luddite methods of direct action and the will to resist against massive odds.

•    They left us the Luddite ethos – which is to question received wisdom that ‘progress’ is to be found in technology and economic growth whatever the human cost.

George Mellor’s aphorism in his last letter from York Castle is I think worthy of Socrates or a Buddha ... ‘A SOUL IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WORK OR GOLD...’

We don’t know exactly what he meant by it but the broad message is clear – humanity is more important than mere economic interests.

I think that this encapsulates the most potent part of the Luddite legacy which spans the centuries and is even more relevant today.

Mumford believed that the Megamachine could be beaten.  In the closing words of  the 'Pentagon of Power' he says:

‘for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.’

But the Luddites showed us - it is not just an easy matter of walking out.

Some of those who chose to challenge technocracy in 1812 ended up behind the very real gates of York Castle and other gaols. But they have left us their legacy of sacrifice and their example of resistance in the face of the juggernaut of ‘progress’.

The best tribute we can pay to the Luddites is to continue their work  - and ensure that we create a society where indeed life is revered and:

 'A SOUL IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WORK OR GOLD...’

[1] In the course of the debate following this talk a member of the audience pointed out that the Methodist hymn sang by some of the victims on the scaffold did contain imagery of martyrdom ‘Behold the saviour of mankind/Nailed to the cruel tree...’  and that the Methodist ideology of some of the Luddites may have fuelled  their sense of self sacrifice.

[2] Since writing this I came across another local story.  According to Stuart Christie in his biography ‘Granny made me an Anarchist’,  the house he rented in Honley, where he came to live after his acquittal in the Angry Brigade trials, contained an attic in which  Luddites had hidden after the shooting of William Horsfall ! I have not come across this story anywhere before, so whether this is a garbled account of a true event, a local legend - or a tall tale told by locals to humour Christie I don’t know.

[3] The accounts of the use of the use of the body fat of concentration camp victims to make soap makes this a prophetic utterance rather than just lurid hyperbole.

Alan Brooke on the intended recipient of George Mellor's letter - Thomas Ellis

George Mellor’s letter from York Castle was addressed to Thomas Ellis, a woolstapler, of Lockwood. Whether the survival of only copies indicates that the original was allowed to reach its destination is not known. The Home Office copy also names the intended recipient as ‘Hellice’. This spelling may have been used on the original if, as seems likely, the letter was passed by Mellor to someone on the outside with verbal instructions as to the address.

Ellis’s role is highly significant. He was regarded by the magistrate Joseph Radcliffe of being so deeply implicated in Luddism that he was suspected of firing the shot at Joseph Mellor (in December 1812), intended, if not to kill, at least to intimidate him into making sure that members of his household did not appear as prosecution witnesses. George Mellor clearly saw Ellis as someone to be relied on to help organise the Luddite defence and not just with regard to Joseph Mellor. Ellis himself appeared as a witness in the trial of those accused of the Rawfolds attack, testifying that he had seen James Brook in Lockwood at quarter to twelve on the night in question. He also gave an excellent character reference for all the Lockwood Brooks who had been charged. George Armitage, a Lockwood blacksmith, (who also appeared as a defence witness for Mellor), corroborated Ellis’s evidence and it is clear that they were well known to each other. James and John Brook were acquitted, while Thomas was found guilty and subsequently hanged.

Not only was Ellis not a cropper he was a woolstapler, a dealer in wool, and therefore of a ‘respectable’ profession. It was not an occupation which would have brought him into direct contact with cloth finishers and therefore his relationship with Mellor and the Brooks was of choice, even though he must have known of their sympathy and perhaps even involvement in Luddism. Ellis is an example of the broad community support that Luddism enjoyed. Most of the other defence witnesses, like Armitage, were artisans or tradesmen not confined to cloth dressing.

Mellor’s letter also refers to Ellis’s involvement in collecting signatures for (Major) John Cartwright’s petition for parliamentary reform. This underlines the fact that there was no political compartmentalisation of Luddism. Luddites, even those who perhaps had insurrectionary inclinations, saw no paradox in supporting parliamentary reform. The following eight years, in the Huddersfield area more than anywhere else, showed how easily people could swing from mass agitation for reform to insurrectionary conspiracy and back again as the waves of repression dictated.

- - -

As a coda to Alan's comments, our own research has brought up a curious figure seemingly forgotten by historians of Luddism who may have connections with Thomas Ellis. John Ellis, a 22 year-old Tailor & member of the Huddersfield Local Militia was convicted at the Chester Special Commission in May 1812 of breaking 7 shearing-frames at Tintwistle (then in Cheshire) belonging to Thomas Rhodes on 21st April 1812. Aside from what he was convicted of, it's not clear what else he was doing in Tintwistle, and it may be that there was nothing remarkable about him, as he doesn't appear to be mentioned in any of the Home Office correspondence around this time. But whilst a common surname does not necessarily indicate a direct connection, the link with Huddersfield is clear and the fact that these were the only shearing-frames broken outside of West Yorkshire is also remarkable. John Ellis was sentenced to death at the Special Commission, but had this sentence respited, meaning he was transported for life. Was he a Luddite 'on the run' and hiding in Cheshire who was subsequently caught up in popular disturbances in April of 1812? Was he a delegate between Luddite organisations across the Pennines? Whoever he was, he is an interesting figure who demands further research.

Alan Brooke's review of 'Ned Ludd & Queen Mab' by Peter Linebaugh

"Ned Ludd & Queen Mab – Machine-Breaking, Romanticism and the Several Commons of 1811-1812", Peter Linebaugh (Retort Pamphlet, 2012)

The bicentenary of the Luddite risings has produced disappointingly little new academic research on Luddism. However, this booklet of only 40 pages goes some way towards filling that vacuum. Based on a lecture he delivered to a conference to mark the bicentenary held at Birkbeck College in 2011, Peter Linebaugh sets out not only to rescue the Luddites from the ‘condescension of posterity’ but also place them firmly in an international context. 

As Ned Ludd is the mythic symbol of Luddite resistance to unwelcome industrialisation in England, so Queen Mab, through her personification in Shelley’s poem of that name composed in 1812, becomes the symbol of a radical critique of western civilisation as a whole. Although Shelley later dismissed the poem as naive juvenilia, his passionate denunciation of monarchy, militarism, the church and capitalism remained an inspiration for working class radicals into the Chartist period and beyond.

From the vantage point of 1811-12, Linebaugh launches a sweeping survey of the processes underway which were dispossessing not only the Luddites and the English common people of the means of production, including the land, but were also impacting on traditional communities across the world. And, as with the Luddites, such communities responded with acts of resistance, which, while often ending in defeat, nevertheless helped shape the modern world.

From Ireland to Egypt, through Creek and slave risings in the US, the insurrections of Hidalgo and Miranda in Latin America and the reactionary backlash following the Ratcliff Highway murders in England,  Linebaugh links the increasing exploitation of producers and the expropriation of the means of production to the development of global capitalism. Inevitably, in such a broad brush approach, the details of such interconnectedness is sometimes assumed rather than demonstrated and there are some omissions. Particularly, since he takes the Luddite response to mechanisation in the woollen industry as one of his main points of reference, there is no mention of the clearances in the Scottish highlands and islands, where whole communities were swept away to make room for sheep.

Also, in following E.P. Thompson’s effort to assign the Luddites their proper role in history, Linebaugh has also reproduced one of Thompson’s historiographic errors in placing too much reliance on the late 19th century writer Frank Peel. Consequently Linebaugh suggests that the Luddite, George Mellor, could have been influenced by the utopian socialism of Robert Owen, even though Owen was not a socialist in 1812. Another reference to Mellor also claims that he was a veteran of the Egyptian campaign, for which there is no contemporary evidence, apart from the fact he would only have been about ten years old at the time!

However, such factual errors, and the inevitable omissions inescapable in such an ambitious synthesising work, should not put the reader off. The booklet is extremely thought-provoking and provides a backdrop to the Luddite risings which has not really been explored previously, since Luddite studies have tended to focus-in on the local rather than stand back and observe the global. It also adds a new dimension to English working class history as a whole and helps counteract some of the parochialism which still affects this field both academically and in orthodox ‘labourist’ approaches which concentrate on the supposed deference of the English working class, dominated by a trade union consciousness steeped in constitutionalism. Linebaugh brings to life the other tradition expressed by the Luddites and by Shelley’s damning philosophical condemnation of the British state in all its manifestations.

The final paragraph of the work contains one of Linebaugh’s most valuable insights encapsulated in a single word. Here he refers to the ‘poesis of the Luddites’. This concept is one which requires elaboration for all those who consider themselves the heirs of Luddism.  Instead of the ‘praxis’ of political struggle, an often mechanistic action born of a preconceived theory, the concept of ‘poesis’ implies, as its shared root with poetry suggest, an act of creativity, imagination, intuition and spontaneity. The Luddites have often been dismissed by orthodox Marxists and labourites because their actions did not fit in with the ideal course of class struggle. Linebaugh’s global panorama shows that they had a better grasp of what was at stake than those who claim to be guided by scientific theory. This work is a fitting bicentennial tribute to the Luddites and, notwithstanding its brevity, an important contribution to Luddite research.

Alan Brooke

You can buy a copy of 'Ned Ludd & Queen Mab' from our amazon astore here. An mp3 of Peter Linebaugh's lecture at the 2011 Birkbeck Luddite conference is embedded below.

'Repression And Resistance In West Riding Luddism' by Alan Brooke

(A Paper delivered at the ‘Enoch’s Hammer’ conference, University of Huddersfield, 12 May 2012).

Machinery...is a thief and would rob thousands, we shall find that it shall be the destruction of this country. America won’t get a deal by it – it will be the destruction of that country and in the end, I will venture to say, it will be the destruction of the universe.’[1]

So spoke William Leadbeater, a local ‘operative’, (his occupation is not recorded), at a meeting in Huddersfield in 1830. We may laugh, at the hyperbole, as did those at the meeting, but this quote illustrates a couple of vital points.

Firstly and obviously, that hostility to machinery remained long after 1812. But the main point lies in consideration of the context in which it was made. This was a meeting on distress in Huddersfield following the 1826 bank crash. And this was not the only reference at this time to machinery being a primary factor responsible for unemployment and poverty.

At a meeting on Almondbury Bank on 15 June 1829 one speaker made specific reference to 7 out of 8 cloth dressers being deprived of work by machinery, so earlier struggles were clearly remembered.[2] Indeed one prominent middle class Huddersfield radical claimed that in 1826 he had helped channel local agitation from murmurings about machine breaking to more constitutional political channels. ‘there had been a meeting and some men had been amongst them encouraging them to burn the factories and to rob , rather than to pine or starve...’[3]

The Operatives Committee behind these meetings was composed mainly of handloom weavers, particularly the fancy weavers of Almondbury. Out of such meetings grew the local Political Unions for parliamentary reform, which in the 1830s dovetailed both with trade unionism and with that of the Factory Reform movement, one of the main aims of which, articulated both by radicals and ‘radical Tories’ like Oastler, was preservation of the domestic system of production. Although by now most of the weavers in that sector, particularly in the fancy trade, were proletarianised wage workers.

Therefore, the machinery question, the defence of domestic manufacture and political struggle were all clearly interlinked right through to the Chartist 1840s.

Consider another quote, from another meeting, which discussed: ‘what were the first steps they would take...it was concluded that they should pull down all the machinery, which would return the manufacturing business to the old channel.’[4]

This is from a decade before 1812. It is in the report which was passed on to the authorities of a meeting in Almondbury in 1802 of suspected United Britons, a Jacobin cell.[5] There is clear evidence of Republican activity in the area and no reason to disbelieve that one of the concerns of this group was the impact of machinery. After all, in parts of France machine breaking was part of the revolutionary movement.[6]

But the machinery question was not just a concern of a small group of clandestine Jacobins. In the 1807 Yorkshire county elections the defence of domestic production, machinery and the apprenticeship question was the concern of many of the small freeholders. It contributed, if was not the main factor, in the defeat of Henry Lascelles. Lascelles was the chair of the parliamentary committee in 1806, which found that the domestic woollen industry would not be adversely affected by the repeal of the ancient laws regulating it. William Wilberforce, who was also on the Committee, was elected, but he had not exhibited the same vociferous hostility to the clothiers and cloth dressers as Lascelles. This committee in its report appeared more concerned about the subversive threat from the ‘Institutions’, the organisations representing the clothiers and cloth dressers, than about the threat to domestic manufacture from machinery.

Clearly, both prior to the outbreak of Luddism in the West Riding in 1812, and for a long time afterwards, the machinery question was inseparable from resistance to the factory and defence of the domestic system as a whole. And this resistance implicitly, and often explicitly, had a political dimension.

By political activity I do not simply mean that people were drawing up political programmes expressing their grievances, or were engaged in activities intended to influence or change the parliamentary system. This paper does not consider the wider political concerns of the croppers, such as parliamentary reform and the movement to end the war with France. Nor does it look at their role in elections as enfranchised freeholders, or as non-electors who could at least shout and perhaps kick up a riot. By political I mean that they were forced into a position of responding to and resisting increasing state repression.

This was a state that was shaped by the need to push forward industrialisation at home and to maintain Britain’s commercial predominance abroad, as manifested in the war with France. This was not a remote state apparatus. It was evident on a daily basis in the organisation of the Volunteers in 1794, against not only invasion but ‘intestine commotion’.[7] It was evident in the role of the local magistrates, who since the Combination Acts of 1799-1800 had a direct role in suppressing illegal combinations. And it was increasingly evident in the realisation that parliament was clearly on the side of the manufacturers regarding the machinery question. The armed, the judicial and the legislative arms of the state clearly revealed their class bias, nationally and locally.

Did the active element of the croppers, the occupational group out of which WR Luddism grew realise this? Were they politically conscious in this respect?

The first opposition to gig mills in the West Riding was apparently an attempt to invoke ancient Tudor legislation prohibiting this machine in order to prosecute the Atkinsons of Bradley Mill in 1787. Whether there was any organisation behind this legal initiative is not recorded.[8] According to the Halifax cropper, John Tate, speaking before the 1806 Select Committee on Woollen manufacture, the croppers organisation known as the Institution dated from 1796. In 1799, as a result of the Combination Act, the Huddersfield cloth dressers society, which was presumably the local form of the Institution, was dissolved and its funds disbursed. It called in over 500 membership tickets.[9]

The Institution reformed as a sick brief Institution, ostensibly a friendly society concerned with relieving members in distress. Tate claimed that unlike its predecessor it did not have a Bank of funds, although the suspicion that it did was one of the main concerns of the authorities. It was also an oath-bound society, always grounds for suspicion. Whatever the role of the Institution at this time its’ activities were certainly circumscribed by the Combination Acts. But the limitations of these Acts were shown by the willingness of some croppers to use direct action to resist machinery.
In November 1799 Johnson’s gig mill at Holbeck was destroyed. The description of the event by the merchant and magistrate William Cookson prefigures later Luddite attacks.

‘many hundreds were present and some disguised, ...and though a considerable reward was offered from the government and from the magistrates, and the parties were summoned up who were known to be there, and who could not prove an alibi, no argument or entreaty could prevail upon anyone to confess who were active parties in the business’. (1806).

Similarly, in the West of England disturbances of 1802, a semi clandestine Institution employing strike tactics co-existed with a movement employing direct attacks on the mills housing shear frames. This Institution was clearly linked with the one in the West Riding. Delegates moved between the two areas. The same membership ticket was used showing the Leeds coat of arms and crossed shears and no shearman from the West of England, or West Riding cropper could get work in either area without one.[10]

In the West Riding, where each town had its own committee and sent delegates to central meetings at the White Swan at Birstal, 1802 saw strikes against the gig mill, the employment of non Institution men and the employment of over age apprentices at Huddersfield and Leeds. This had some success since Cookson asked merchants to desist from installing machinery through fear it would lead to ‘horrid outrages’. Fitzwilliam, the Lord Lieutenant, wrote to the Home Office denouncing the ‘system of terror’ and describing the croppers as ‘the tyrants of the country, their power and influence has grown out of their high wages, which enable them to make deposits that puts them beyond all fear of inconvenience for misconduct.’ The powerful closed shop of the croppers had clearly back footed the authorities. Because of the Institution, Benjamin Gott, the merchant and owner of the largest woollen factory in Leeds, was unable to recruit strike breakers in Trowbridge.

But the resistance was not just from the croppers. In 1803 the Rules and Orders of the Clothiers Community, Leeds, established a ‘clothiers brief institution’, in defence of 7 year apprenticeships. [11] Behind that, of course, was desire to protect the domestic system of production as a whole. As one clothier put it in 1805 they were opposed to the ‘mighty factories ...erected ... by these monopolisers.’, wealthy manufacturers and merchants, who were setting up loom shops in their premises. As well as displacing independent clothiers the factory system was held to produce all sorts of baneful moral effects detrimental to the community.[12]

In Leeds in 1805 and 1806 there were numerous strikes both by weavers and other workmen, including shoemakers, tailors, joiners and cabinet makers, bricklayers and flax dressers. In January 1805 five shoemakers were sentenced to 3 months in York for illegal combination. [13] In May in Wortley weavers and spinners were discharged in order to break up the ‘institution formed among themselves for the purpose of relieving each other when sick.’ [14]  While in Farnley, two clothiers were convicted of illegal combination.[15]

In 1805 the merchants and manufacturers of the West Riding had formed a combination of their own. In Leeds 54 firms signed a resolution not to employ any Institution men. Joseph Stancliffe, a clothier, of Hopton, in evidence to the 1806 inquiry, thought that the decision not to employ Institution weavers, ‘has in some measure prevented them.’ But it lead to a bitter dispute. Non Institution men were referred to as ‘snakes’ and homes were attacked in Beeston,Wortley and Armley.[16]

Among the names of the 31 firms signing the Huddersfield resolution are many of those who also supported Lascelles in 1807 [17] and who backed the creation of the Volunteer force. They include the Atkinsons and Horsfalls who were the most prominent advocates of finishing machinery. The class lines were clearly being drawn in this struggle.

Although the main focus of the cloth dressers’ Institution was now on petitioning parliament against the repeal of the old laws regulating gig mills and apprenticeships, they still had enough funds to offer support to other workers. On this point their representatives before the 1806 select committee were intensely interrogated. Payments also included an allowance to Mrs Hilleker, mother of Thomas Hilleker, hung for his alleged part in the burning of Littleton Mill in Wiltshire in 1802.

The 1806 Select Committee concluded that the croppers Institution was not devoted just to petitioning parliament and collecting funds for this purpose, they found in clear reference to the strikes,

‘this explanation far from satisfactory and strongly to suggest the idea of a connection with some other transactions which had taken place not long before in the manufacturing district and in which from their nature the interests of all commercial men were deeply involved’.

Much was made of the membership ticket produced at the committee by Lascelles, and the fact that funds had been given to strikers, to support the finding that the Institution was an illegal combination. More sinister than that, the Committee concluded, 

‘that such Institutions are in their ultimate tendencies still more alarming in a political than a commercial view...a systematic and organised plan and one so efficient and so dangerous both from the amount of its force and from the facility and secrecy with which at anytime and for any purpose that force may be called into action...’

There is no doubt that croppers were aware of the political forces which confronted them. In a last ditch meeting in Huddersfield in 1808 to protest the repeal of the legislation as recommended by the 1806 SC, local croppers stated that they were;

‘...not insensible that it had been the interest and objective of their adversaries to impress opinions upon the different committees of the most unfavourable kind and to describe their endeavours to save themselves and their numerous families from destruction and despair as factious and turbulent...’[18]

With the economic repression imposed by the advance of machinery, with its resultant deskilling of the artisan and imposition of factory discipline, if not the loss of livelihood entirely, combined with the political repression of the croppers organisation and the obstruction of any route to legal redress, the merchants and the government actually shaped the conditions out of which Luddism arose in the West Riding. The ‘Luddite response’ to this is best summarised in the oft quoted anonymous letter, ‘we petition no more, that wont do, fighting must.’[19]

There is no doubt that, even among the Luddites too young to have lived through the experience of the Institution themselves, there must have existed an awareness of the political processes and personalities which had led to the impasse, to a situation where machinery could only be stopped by force. There is clear continuity in the struggle against machinery and the erosion of the domestic system both prior to 1812 and afterwards. I believe that the burden of proof is on those who assert that the Luddites were somehow quarantined from this culture of resistance.

To Summarise. The cloth dressers and others whose lives and livelihood were bound up with the domestic system faced both increasing economic repression and political repression. There response was to resist, by legal channels when possible, but also by direct action. This resistance to machinery was both trans-regional, as is evident in the links with the West of England and trans-occupational, since opposition to machinery and the factory system came not just from croppers, but from the largest occupational group the clothiers, or domestic weavers. The croppers also had a history of strong organisation and of support for other workers. This is the milieu in which they lived and worked and which shaped their ideology. Much of the spilt ink and controversy about the nature of the Luddites has resulted from a failure to recognise this fact. The Luddites have been compartmentalised, pigeon holed, into simply a machine breaking movement.

This predates any retreat from any analysis that appears to be a ‘grand narrative’, though this trend in historiography has created its own problems of obscurantism and confusion. It stems from a reluctance to see the Luddites as part of a wider class struggle. This is not just a fault of the right, some dogmatic Marxists also see Luddism as a reactionary movement, aimed at holding up the inevitable development of the productive forces.

The paradox which both Luddism expresses, and which is evident in later struggles of handloom weavers in the West Riding, is that resistance to the factory system came mainly from workers outside that system. It was those faced with proletarianisation outside the factory, who, through struggle both against employers using machines and the state machine which backed those employers, first developed the clearest class consciousness. The level of political awareness generated by the Luddites left a clear legacy in the Huddersfield area. It cannot be coincidence that two more uprisings occurred in this area, in 1817 and 1820. There is clear evidence from the personnel involved and from the language used that this was regarded as a continuation of the Luddite struggle

This is not to say that the WR Luddites in 1812 were champions of working class liberation or wanted a workers’ revolution, which is a counter-parody of Luddism sometimes voiced on the left, but nevertheless, their struggles were an integral part of the process of the making of the working class. In this, E P Thompson’s seminal work is as valid as ever, and 50 years on, I maintain, it has stood the test of time.

'At War with the Facts' – a rebuttal of Richard Jones’ 'At War with the Future’ in History Today, May 2012

Below is a response to the article about the Luddites written by Cambridge University Student Richard Jones and published in the May 2012 edition of 'History Today'. The article has been written jointly by Huddersfield Historian Alan Brooke, Luddite Bicentenary author Richard Holland, and the Luddites 200 Organising Forum. As we were delegates to the Huddersfield University Luddites Conference last weekend, we were pleased when we noticed Richard Jones appeared on the delegate list, but then disappointed when he did not attend. We were keen to discuss his work with him, and have contacted him asking to see his research. So far, he has not replied to our emails. We look forward to a rejoinder.

Richard Jones’ article ‘At War With the Future’ (History Today May 2012), while purporting to be based on new research, is a mixture of factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated generalisations, based mainly on secondary sources. In the opening paragraph, he introduces an Aunt Sally which he then proceeds to try and knock down with an array of old arguments and non sequiturs dressed up as a new perspective on the Luddites.

He claims that consideration of the long history of mechanisation in the woollen industry ‘makes it much harder to argue that the Luddites of 1811 and 1812 were motivated by a knee-jerk resentment of technological innovation’. This seems to ignore the fact that no historian of the subject makes that assertion. Quite the contrary. Resistance to machinery grew both out of grievances around new work practices employing long established machinery, as in the stocking trade, and out of a long history of opposition to relatively new machinery, as with the croppers. In neither case is there any claim that there was a ‘knee-jerk resentment’, but rather a complex response to the way that machinery was being used. Jones claim to have discovered the ‘moral economy’ governing perceptions of what constituted fair economic practice is also not revelatory, but an aspect of struggles of the time highlighted by Rude and Thompson and others.

Although Luddism in Nottinghamshire and the North West is subsidiary to his main argument this is no excuse for the inaccurate summaries he provides. Luddism in Nottinghamshire did not peak in the autumn of 1811, as he states: in fact there was a lull in activity after the initial outburst of proto-Luddism by the summer, which resumed in the autumn as full-blown Luddism. He lumps together the North West as Lancashire ‘and nearby’, ignoring the significant events in Cheshire and makes no mention of the Chester Special Commission in his resume of the trials.

If his brief account of the other areas is inadequate, his description of West Riding Luddism, on which his central argument rests, is totally flawed. He makes the sweeping assertion that here Luddism ‘emerged so rapidly [and] did not draw on exiting radical movements or long standing grievances as was the case elsewhere.’ This ignores the more than decade-long fight against gig mills and shear frames in the West Riding, the links of the croppers with the similarly aggrieved shearmen of the West of England and their precursor Luddism of 1802, as well as the existence of a strong radical reform and even republican tradition in the West Riding. The powerful cloth dressers ‘Institution’ active since the 1790s in one form or another, both before and after the Combination Acts, is also ignored.

His account of the origin of the first West Riding attacks is garbled, and, if not the product of bad editing, is an atrocious piece of historical misinterpretation. The attacks on frames he quotes from the Leeds Mercury of 1 February 1812 all took place not in Leeds but in Nottinghamshire! In his account of the initial attacks in the Huddersfield area he refers to Joseph Hirst of Marsh as Joseph Marsh [sic] and describes him as a ‘trader’, missing the whole significance that he was not only a master cloth-dresser but also one in the forefront of introducing shear frames. These crass errors indicate that Jones has little grasp of the structure of the woollen industry in general and cloth finishing in particular. His description of these attacks leads him to the astounding conclusion that they were ‘premeditated’. In line with his agenda of downplaying the significance of West Riding Luddism he refers to only parties of four to ten being involved, while in fact those depositions which do mention numbers record 16 to 30.

In another unfounded assertion linked to a non sequitur he claims that the role of public houses in Luddite activities has been ‘overlooked’ by everyone but himself. Anyone familiar with Luddite historiography knows this to be false. One well known contemporary letter, about placing spies among Luddites in Huddersfield, in fact names several pubs where contacts could be made. Pubs were the centre of communal life. It would have been strange if Luddites did not use them. But Jones then makes the bizarre and muddled claim that this shows that Luddite activity was ‘rooted within local society rather than consisting of those who were obviously criminal, detached from everyday life and breaking machines while in disguise.’ As if ‘criminals’ were not also ‘rooted within local society’. It is not clear who he considers were ‘breaking machines while in disguise’ and this paragraph adds nothing to our understanding of Luddism.

Jones then reveals one of his main authorities to be Frank Peel’s ‘Rising of the Luddites’ describing it as ‘mainly oral history.’ It is not. It is a combination of fact drawn from published sources such as the proceedings of the York Special Commission, fictional embellishment, plus a smattering of folk lore which may, or may not, be founded on genuine oral tradition. The fictionalised elements are certainly not a reliable source, as Jones himself seems aware, yet he nevertheless quotes the supposed meeting at the Shears Inn in some detail. He even uncritically includes the highly unlikely account of the singing of the Cropper’s song at what was supposed to be a clandestine meeting in a pub run by the hostile landlord and Sherriff’s Officer, James Lister.

Having wasted space on this story he omits the highly significant attack on Foster’s Mill at Horbury, only days before the Rawfolds Mill attack, which demonstrates just how extensive the Luddite movement in the area was by now. Witnesses claimed up to 300 were involved in the attack. Even allowing for exaggeration it undermines Jones claim that only 200 men were involved in the movement in the West Riding. He also omits the assassination attempt on Cartwright prior to the shooting of Horsfall, again making what was part of an emerging pattern appear unique. By jumping straight from Horsfall’s assassination to the trials he discounts all the intervening Luddite activity dismissing it as not ‘meaningful’.

Jones is also keen to make out that the case against the three accused for killing Horsfall was cut and dried, while ignoring inconsistencies in the prosecution case. His claim that it was just an ordinary murder trial and ‘definitely not a political show trial’ ignored the whole atmosphere in which the Special Commission was held. In sentencing Mellor, Thorpe and Smith, Justice Le Blanc made it quite clear that it not just for the murder’, but for Luddite activity, - destruction of property and administering an illegal oath - that they were being made an example of. Indeed, as far as the authorities were concerned, Luddite activity was criminal activity and so there was no distinction between political and criminal trials.

Jones then proceeds to claim that apart from the shooting of Horsfall and the Rawfolds Mill attack, ‘few’ of the cases were linked to Luddism, citing the ‘particularly absurd example’ of the case of Swallow and others for burglary. This is indeed one case where the burglary was carried out without any claim to be stealing arms, or otherwise following General Ludd’s orders. Nevertheless this trial does reveal the pervasive nature of Luddism. One of the witnesses, Samuel Parkin, who almost became implicated, claimed that he initially came along because he was told that, ‘there was to be a meeting at Grange Moor, of Ludds.’ The authorities clearly subsumed all lawless activity under the name of Luddism and there is nothing ‘absurd’, about the inclusion of this case in the Special Commission. Nor is it merely about clearing a backlog of “ordinary” criminal cases. By separating the burglaries from Luddite activity, even when arms were clearly the main aim, Jones further reinforces his point that after the assassination of Horsfall there was ‘no meaningful Luddite activity’. He creates his own neat and narrow definition of Luddism as a phenomenon entirely about machine breaking.

Not content with having thus defined Luddism, and separating it from the widespread unrest of 1811-1812 which saw many forms of social, economic and political discontent, Jones further reduces it to little more than a violent trade union struggle by a privileged working class elite, which was doomed to failure. Here his not-so-hidden subtext emerges! Like trade unionists they were just looking after their own ‘status...at the expense of the wider population.’ They were holding back economic development which would lead to cheaper goods for all – that is they were hindering the operation of the free market. Despite the claim that he has produced a new interpretation of Luddism Jones falls back on the most crude, simplistic and hackneyed parody of Luddism - ignorant men holding up progress.

The idea that the Luddites were merely protecting their own privilege and did not care about the wider population, and were not supported by them is not corroborated by the facts. Support for Luddism extended far beyond the occupational groups breaking machines, as the difficulties the authorities faced in getting anyone to grass on the luddites, shows, His suggestion that there was an alternate and dominant rationality which persuaded working people to favour the new factory system (and the opportunity for both them and their young children to work 12 hours a day for a pittance), instead of opposing it, because it might lead to them getting cheaper textiles sometime in the future is simply a projection of hindsight, not historical analysis.

While it can be argued that the Yorkshire croppers were in some sense 'privileged', in so far as they commanded higher wages and had some power in the industry, this is certainly not true for the stockingers or hand loom weavers, who were at that time already highly impoverished and at the mercy of the masters. His view that such groups were privileged is a typical laissez-faire reaction to any group of workers that is well organised and has the slightest success in advancing their interests in the face market forces - the norm for workers is supposed to be a position of absolute powerlessness and obedience, and any group that deviates from this is counted as 'privileged'. The historical importance and impact of a social movement cannot be reduced to the number of people involved, nor their apparent success or failure in terms of their own objectives.

His reduction of the heritage of Luddism to simply a form of nostalgia ignores the fact that for the Luddites then, as for the opponents of certain technologies now, opposition is based on a very hard-headed materialist analysis of the vested interests embodied in new machinery. It is because those interests persist, and are a structural part of capitalism that Luddism remains an inspiring and motivating force today. Jones interpretation of Luddism is one which has been rolled out time and again, to attack dockers, print workers, and car workers – anyone engaged in a struggle to maintain jobs and conditions in the face of unbridled capitalism. If he considers this to be a contribution to a reappraisal of the Luddites on the occasion of bicentenary he is deluding himself. His account is as historically threadbare as his ideological motivations, masquerading as Cambridge research, are transparent. This is the ‘emperor has no clothes’ history at its worst.

An initial response to Richard Jones' research on the Luddites published in the May 2012 issue of History Today

Huddersfield radical historian Alan Brooke, has written to the Huddersfield Daily Examiner following their story in this week's edition which adapts the press release put out by Richard Jones, a research student at Cambridge University. He appeared on BBC Radio 4's 'Today' programme yesterday to promote the findings of his research into the Luddites. The letter is endorsed by this website (Luddite Bicentenary) and David King of the Luddites 200 Organising Forum.

Dear Editor,

For History Today, supported by the BBC, to release an ill-informed and badly-argued attack on the Luddites masquerading as 'new research' is bad enough (Examiner 12 April). To do this on the occasion of the bicentenary commemoration of the fight at Rawfold's Mill in which two, possibly four, men were killed and a further five hung as a consequence, is totally insensitive. For those of us to whom the Luddites are a treasured part of our heritage, and who have continued their struggle, do so not on the basis of mythologising, but as a result of a reasoned and detailed understanding of the Luddites and the time in which they lived.

The arguments put forward by Richard Jones are not new, but are part of a long tradition of denigrating working class struggle, particularly when it has involved direct action against the State. Anyone hearing his BBC interview would realise how tenuous and contradictory his arguments are. For him to jump on the Luddite bicentenary bandwagon to promote his career, by putting the academic boot into the Luddites, cannot be justified as an expression of academic freedom. It is clearly a politically motivated attack against working class and radical history.

Those of us who belong to this school of history are open about our sympathies and political beliefs. We are trying to give the poor and oppressed a voice they were denied at the time. What is Richard Jones trying to do and who his he speaking for?

Yours sincerely,

Alan Brooke

The Suppression of British Jacobinism, by Alan Brooke

Membership Card of the United Britons, c.1802

Reformers and Republicans saw the political system of the eighteenth century as a betrayal of the Revolution of 1688, depriving them of constitutional rights guaranteed by the Magna Carta and of their free birthright bequeathed from Saxon times. In fact, the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century had removed the feudal absolutist obstacles to the development of the capitalist mode of production but it, had not removed political power from the sections of the aristocracy who were based on landed capital. Power was in the hands of this small oligarchy composed of landed, and to a lesser extent, commercial capitalists still largely of aristocratic descent, who monopolised parliament through the nomination of M.P.s. The same class composition permeated the hierarchy of the military and judiciary. Except for a few large manufacturers such as Peel, even the majority of industrial capitalists were excluded from central government although they might exercise considerable local influence.

The American and French revolutions provided a great impulse and inspiration to the British reformers and republicans. The Declaration formulated by the French National Assembly was enshrined by Thomas Paine in a book which took the same title "Rights of Man", outlining the course of the Revolution and proposing a reform of the British system of government. Paine's work became the manifesto of the republican movement, stimulating the formation of Constitutional Societies throughout the country, composed mainly of artisans and small tradesmen and "Rights of Man" was read widely by artisans and workers outside these circles. The London Corresponding Society (LCS), founded in 1792, became the largest and most influential organisation, communicating with the main provincial societies such as Sheffield, Manchester and Norwich.

The LCS advocated the reform of parliament by the institution of universal suffrage and annual parliaments and the reform of the fiscal system by the adoption of Paine's plan for progressive taxation and economies in the national expenditure - but there was little clarity as to how they were to be achieved. Paine himself did not exclude an insurrection, but only as a last resort and in defence:

“Reason and discussion, persuasion and conviction, become the weapons in the contest, and it is only when those are attempted to be suppressed that recourse is had to violence. When men unite in agreeing that a thing is good, could it be obtained, such as relief from a burden of taxes and the extinction of corruption the object is more than half accomplished.”

A Convention, with all the associations that term had with the French Revolution, was intended as the focus of agitation to express popular "Reason and discussion" but only the Scottish reform societies succeeded in organising a "British Convention" in November 1793, which made no decisive proposals other than to maintain pressure for reform and to increase co-ordination between the societies in Scotland and England. A contingency plan to convene illegally in the event of proscription or a French invasion was never put to the test.

Some reformers expressed support for an unequivocal republican position acknowledging the need for armed preparations and open approval of the French revolution by pressing for an alliance with the republican, pro-French, United Irishmen (UI) but this was rejected by an earlier Scottish convention in 1792. Government repression acted as a catalyst in the polarisation of the movement, and by 1797 groups of avowedly revolutionary United Englishmen (UE) and United Scotsmen were formed clandestinely, especially in London, Manchester and Dundee, often with the support of Irish immigrant workers, and secret emissaries passed between Britain, Ireland and France.

The basis for a social programme for revolution was also laid by Thomas Spence, although it reflected the immature state of the development of capitalism in proposing a scheme to destroy the economic and political power of the aristocracy by confiscation and redistribution of their landed estates. Whilst not a social revolutionary himself, his theories articulated popular opposition to both the political system and to industrial capitalism, which was expressed in terms of a return to an idealised past of smallholdings, yeomen farmers and manufacturers. It was a challenge to established property relations, if not to the right to property itself, and an explicit challenge to the system of government:

"When a people create Landlords, they create a numerous host of hereditary Tyrants and Oppressors, who, not content with their Lordly Revenue of Rents, seize also upon the Government and parcel it out among themselves and take as enormous salaries for the Places they occupy therein as if they were poor men."

Their domination at home. challenged by these doctrines and the heightened working class activity accompanying industrialisation, and their imperialist supremacy challenged by revolutionary France abroad, the ruling class launched a vigorous reaction. "Rights of Man" was banned as seditious libel and its sellers persecuted, known reformers were intimidated by "Church and King" gangs incited by the authorities and leading Jacobins arrested; the Corresponding Societies had no alternative but to meet behind closed doors. Consequently all information that came to the authorities emanated from undercover agents of one type or another.

After the arrests, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and the mob terror of 1794, the LCS formed a secret executive committee to try and hold the organisation together. One of its number, a certain Citizen Groves, was in fact transmitting detailed reports of all its transactions to the authorities. He was almost exposed, but at a trial before the committee refuted accusations against himself by supplying evidence of his enthusiasm. Such enthusiasm by its agents could be counter-productive for the government. In the same year a government spy, Robert Watt, who claimed he had become a genuine convert to reform, was beheaded for high treason after his conviction for a plot to seize Edinburgh by insurrection. No clear delineation can be made between spy, provocateur and adventurer in such cases. The reformers were certainly aware of the dangers and Thelwall included in his lectures an exposure of the spy system. The use of spies and the arrest of key leaders such as Thomas Hardy, on dubious evidence which almost cost him his neck and which led to the transportation of others like the Scottish Jacobin, Thomas Muir, led to defections from the Constitutional societies. A group of "Working Mecanicks" wrote from Leeds to the LCS in late 1797:

“There was a very good Society here about 3 years since but the arbitrary proceedings of our Justices operated in so terrifying a manner on our Friends in general that their spirits have been sunk under the Standard of moderation & the Sacred flame which had been kindled in their Breasts was almost extinguished.”

The response of other reformers was to establish a more tightly knit secret revolutionary organisation, bound by oaths and other conspiratorial practices and devoted to republican insurrection and support for revolutionary France.

Fear that the leadership of the widespread popular unrest expressed in labour disturbances, food riots and anti-militia conscription riots would fall into the hands of such republican elements was overshadowed by events of 1797-98 when both the obvious and the suspected influence of the republicans assumed a much more alarming aspect. A Parliamentary Secret Committee, convened to investigate the role of the Jacobins on the evidence of informants and captured documents, concluded that members of the LCS had been active amongst the sailors who mutinied at Spithead and Nore where some of the mutineers hoisted a red flag. It had been reported that the Society of United Irishmen was also involved and one member had attempted to fire the magazine of "Repulse" rather than allow her to surrender.

The United Irishmen were also held responsible for the formation of the republican wing of the LCS into the Society of United Englishmen (UE) from a group initially meeting to read the UI paper "The Press" in the cellar of a London Inn. Societies throughout the country, formerly in correspondence with the LCS, were said to have joined the UE and the Manchester county committee was particularly energetic in dispatching delegates to the neighbouring industrial areas. The Parliamentary Secret Committee attributed wide success to this movement especially amongst the working class:

"Many ignorant or inconsiderate persons throughout the country were gradually involved in these transactions and the influence of the destructive principles from which they proceeded was still further extended by the establishment of clubs among the lowest classes of the community which were open to all persons having one penny and in which songs were sung, toasts given and language held of the most seditious nature."

The UI delegate O'Coigly, later hanged for treason, was said to have pressed for a general rising and plans were proposed to land parties of Irishmen on the coast to make their way to London as immigrant workers and to assist the English in seizing the capital.

Although the UE did not rise, the UI, despite the existence of spies near to the central leadership, did. A certain McNally provided detailed reports of the republicans' preparations, including negotiations with Bonaparte; and the Leinster Directory, a dozen key leaders, were seized on the information of another spy, Reynolds. This, plus savage repression in the counties around Dublin, failed to halt the uprising. Its defeat and "the success of the measures which have been employed for detecting and defeating the designs of the conspirators" in England, particularly the arrest of the principle leaders, had, according to the Secret Committee "averted impending danger" but they were unable "to justify the hope that the mischief is eradicated or the danger passed." The fears of the ruling class were expressed in the committee’s summary of the aims of the republicans in both Britain and Ireland as:

“the entire overthrow of the British Constitution, the general confiscation of property and the erection of a Democratic Republic founded on the ruins of all religion and of all political and civil society, and framed after the model of France.”

Fears which were to resurface at every assertion of strength by the working class, and at every alarming display of organisation such as the Institution. The cautious optimism of the Secret Committee received a blow that autumn with news of a disastrous harvest, rocketing food prices and near famine surpassing even 1794-95. Meetings were held throughout the industrial districts, particularly the West-Riding and South Lancashire, in the subsequent period of distress which remained critical until 1802 .The attitude of the authorities is reflected in a warning to the "disaffected" published at Halifax:

“…several illegal and most dangerous meetings have been held in the nightime for treasonable and Rebellious purposes for the subversion of the established government and a cooperation with a French invasion , which meetings it is the Determination of the Civil and Military Power: to oppose with the utmost rigour of Military Execution.”

Protest meetings and food riots had been a common feature of class conflicts in the eighteenth century but now, on the dawn of the nineteenth, they represented a different phenomenon - there existed amongst the working class a national movement, formulating its propaganda with a clear political ideology and agitating for resistance against ruling class and state. But how far this was a cohesive coordinated organisation was (and consequently still is) hard to ascertain. Members were sworn in and given a membership card bearing the motto ‘Liberty, Justice and Humanity’ and a small eight page pamphlet outlining the aims of the organization and its constitution. Each group was to be organized on a cell system where members were known only to the ‘conductor’ of the organization.

The existence of Societies of United Englishmen was suspected in the industrial districts signified by the proliferation of republican handbills and posters; one, in Doncaster in October 1800, calling for a moorland meeting for the establishment of a Convention. Most of this was dismissed by the Lord Lieutenant of the West-Riding as "Loose Conversation, taking its rise from the pressure of the times … ", but as a Whig he had a political interest in playing down anything which would strengthen government reaction. Conversely, Ralph Fletcher J.P. commander of the Bolton Volunteers and a Tory loyalist who managed an extensive spy network claimed evidence of the growing strength of the UE both in his own area and the WR . His agent ‘AB’ reported in 1801 “I am perfectly satisfied for 20 miles around this place 9/10s of the people are sworn to overthrow the present constitution.” Provocation was used even against reformers who were not implicated with the UE. In 1801 a smith, John Howarth was arrested for telling his workmates that the Jacobins ‘were going to demand the excise and be without Kings’ and whilst in custody he was threatened with a harsh sentence if he did not turn informer. He was instructed to join the Political Union for reform in parliament and accordingly approached the local leader, William Moor who swore him in and who was arrested a few hours later for administering an unlawful oath, in accordance with the act passed after the mutinies of 1797.

The incident as recalled by Moor also supports the evidence of Fletcher' spies that widespread disaffection, if not planned insurrection, existed, as thousands had assembled in Bolton and attacked the military escorting him to Lancaster Castle, ‘so much alive were the people at, that, time to parliamentary reform.’ Howarth still appears to have been under Fletcher's control by 1812 when he was executed at the Special Assize for leading an attack on a shop.

Whether or not the UE were planning an insurrection, the republican movement received a demoralising blow in 1802 which, combined with economic improvement and growing disillusionment with the French revolution, proved a severe setback to British republicanism. Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, one of those who had been imprisoned in 1798 and of Irish origin, was arrested in a London Inn at a meeting of soldiers and workers, including many of his compatriots, and accused of a plot to seize the Tower and the Bank of England. The revolutionaries had, or believed they had, wide support amongst soldiers and attempts to seduce soldiers from their duty had been one of the main complaints of the authorities against the UE. Callant, one of Fletcher's victims, was executed for this offence. The plan revealed at Despard's trial was for a putsch rather than a national revolution and the complicity of the United Englishmen arrested in Sheffield could not be proved. Despard's claim to fame lies more in his being a popular martyr, a victim of a reactionary government and its agents, than in being a great revolutionary leader, and the UE (or the United Britons as they sometimes were referred to at this time) shares more characteristics with later Blanquist secret military societies than with a mass revolutionary movement. But this does not diminish their role in this period.

The modus operandi of both Irish and British revolutionary groups was similar and some degree of collusion existed between them – the fundamental difference stemmed from the fact the former could rely on a base of a discontented and nationalistic peasantry with a long tradition of rural guerrilla warfare. No such socially and politically homogeneous force existed in Britain. The development of the factory system was creating such a force, but in a contradictory way. It was workers in the domestic system of production, in their opposition to the effects of industrial capitalism and united by their common conditions of exploitation, who made the first political assertion of the class interest of the working class which transcended trade and regional barriers. This growth in the organisations and consciousness of the working class had its class opposite in the growth of the capitalist state - a fact noted by Marx where he says, in one of his few references to 1812 " … the Luddite movement gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, Castlereagh and the like a pretext for the most reactionary and forceful measures."