R U O
HISTORY
Pamphlet No. 5
New Series
£1.50
“Rouse,Ye Women” The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
Published by the Communist Party June 2012. ISBN 978-1-908315-17-5 Cover image from “White Slaves of England”
Britain’s Road to Socialism The new edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism, the Communist Party’s programme, adopted in July 2011; presents and analysis of capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be bought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like. The BRS was first published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century. Other previous editions of the BRS have been published in 1952, 1958, 1968, 1977, 1989 and 2000 as well as multiple substantially revised versions.
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HISTORY
Our History No. 5
R U O
Pamphlet No. 5
Communist Party www.communist-party.org.uk
New Series
£1.50
"Rouse, Ye Women" The Cradley Heath Chain Makers CONTENTS page Preface Introduction Unionisation for women Trade Boards Action at Last! “Asserting the rights of women” The end is nigh! And afterwards? Epilogue Sources
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Communist Party History Group The song, "Rouse ye Women", sung to the tune of 'Men of Harlech’, was the anthem of the strike. It attacks the system of sweated labour, praises trade union action, and celebrates the establishment of a Trade Board (Wages Council) by Act of Parliament. [Modern Records Centre]
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Preface The inspiration for a good part – but by no means all - of this pamphlet was work first carried out by the noted West Midlands historian and life-long Communist, George Barnsby (1919-2010). George was a member of the CP until its dissolution in 1991 but did not rejoin the Party after refoundation. Nonetheless, in his last years he worked in comradeship very closely on a number of issues with Midlands Communists, notably in themes he promoted on his blog and in preserving his work as the preeminent historian of Birmingham and the Black Country for the future. Much of George’s work can still be found on: www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk George was particularly interested in our proposals to produce popular illustrated introductions to important themes in working class history, which eventually recently reached fruition with this new series of “Our History”, of which this pamphlet is No. 5. His “Socialism in Birmingham and the Black Country 1850-1939” was a particularly invaluable source and this pamphlet is dedicated to the memory of stalwart Communists from the Black Country, many of whom were immortalised by George and some of whom got their first taste of struggle in the battles of Cradley Heath chain makers.
The Communist Party History Group
Most of the pictured used here are credited but thanks are due to: the Modern Records Centre (University of Warwick), the Black Country Living Museum, Cradley Links, the Black Country Society, R H Sherard, George Barnsby, Express & Star, Hull University, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of New Zealand.
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Introduction Chain making mostly became as industrialised as any other sector of manufacturing during the 19th century. That is to say, at least all big chains, such as those used in maritime activity like anchor chains, were made in establishments across the country. For a goodly part of the century, great struggles took place in the Black Country, some leading to vicious and violent opposition from employers. But the workers were in the main successful in establishing trades unionism and winning better conditions [“White Slaves of England”] for the mainly male chain makers. These were strongly allied to lock makers and nail makers, all associated trades once associated with each other. So intense were the struggles that revolutionary socialism began to take root very early on. Tom Mann, the most famous trades unionist of the latter part of the 19th century and first half of the 20th, made a major propaganda tour of Midlands localities at the end of 1886. Although this only resulted in permanent and effective organisation of the Social Democratic Federation in Birmingham (SDF, which led to the British Socialist Party – the bulk of which merged with others to form the Communist Party in 1920), Black Country socialism was given a big fillip. Then a male factory chain makers’ strike lasted over a year, resulting in the regular holding of SDF meetings in Smethwick and West Bromwich.
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Left: Cradley Heath anchor chain making in 1911 [Cradley Links] One specialised union that became important for the big factory section of the trade had been first founded by Thomas Sitch. Born in Cradley Heath in 1852, he began work at the age of eight. When he was seventeen, his family moved to Newcastle-on-Tyne where Thomas worked in the chain trade, interested himself in trade unionism and became the youngest member of the local Trades Council. He later moved to near Chester and, finding no trade union organisation there, founded in July 1889 the United Chainmakers & Strikers Association of Saltney, Pontypridd & Staffordshire with himself as general secretary and just fifteen members. This was a union for factory workers only, but Sitch also founded the National Amalgamation of Chainmakers’ & Chainstrikers’ Association, conceived as an umbrella organisation for all in the trade whether factory (UCM&SA) or what was often known as small chain, which was almost exclusively carried out in the home, or a back garden shed. The finished products of small chain manufacture were mainly used in agriculture, domestic and small business scenario. The making of them became increasingly focused in Cradley Heath. Now in Sandwell Borough, a discrete town within the wider conurbation, it is located about ten miles west of Birmingham, but – confusingly to outsiders – is an entirely separate town to that of nearby Cradley in Worcestershire. Sitch returned to Cradley Heath to become full-time secretary of the factory union which, by 1896, had a membership of 850. An upturn of trade from 1889 to 1891 brought conditions for further struggles to raise wages and the Midlands Counties Trades Federation (a kind of predecessor “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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Communist Party History Group of the Midlands TUC) began also to agitate for support for the small chain makers’ section as public consciousness of what was beginning to be known as the `sweated trades’ began to take hold. The small chain, domestic, or outworker, section of the trade was considered to be totally sweated. We are today perhaps familiar with the expression “sweat shop”, meaning a nasty workplace forcing workers to work very hard and long hours for very little money but “sweated trades” is an unfamiliar term – even though today’s labour market and viciously anti-working class government has resurrected the practice if not the name. [“White Slaves of England”]
Much of the manufacture of these “small” chains was performed in tiny workshops, mostly by women and young girls and usually hand-worked by women who were largely non-unionised and their treatment bordered on the abusive. Although women dominated handmade small chain manufacture, centred upon tiny manufactories in outhouses, there were some modestly infirm males and some non-skilled young boys involved. The conditions and remuneration applying in this outworking section of chain-making were sufficiently bad to be viewed as scandalous throughout the latter part of the 19th century. Eventually, Robert Harborough Sherard, a writer on working conditions and urban poverty, published a series of articles in Pearson's Magazine, on a range of industries including chainmaking, which was eventually published as a book, The White Slaves of England (1897). Sherard would go on to publish other books on poverty in Britain but what made the Cradley Heath industry so attention- grabbing was the large number of women and young girls involved in the trade. “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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On the other hand, the `dollied’ or `tommied’ section of small chains was exclusively a male gendered trade. Dollies and tommies (like a `tommy’ or toffee hammer) were devices something like those used today by skilled panel beaters, which were employed here on the link of a chain after welding. All of this small chain making was poorly paid, partially arising from the nature of the trade, which was devoted almost exclusively to export to the colonies and dominions of the Empire of cow ties (a chain for `hitching’), horse traces (chains for carriage pulling), and gate-securing chains. Any pressure for improved terms and conditions saw the employers threaten to invest in mechanisation, which would eliminate the jobs altogether. Parliamentary agitation on behalf of women chain makers began to be carried out as early as the middle of the 19th century. This was pressed for so effectively that conditions in the industry were looked into by a Royal Commission in 1876, although this was a frequent device for parking an awkward issue and then doing nothing about it. Then, a decade later, Robert Cunningham Graham, an MP elected on the Liberal ticket but who was the first ever self-avowed Socialist to enter the House of Commons, sought another Royal Commission. This was side-lined, since the House of Lords opened an inquiry into the “Sweating System”. Cunningham Graham’s embarrassing questions were shunted off there – but not before he had asked the rhetorical question of a minister if he was “aware that they were paid under 3 shilling a week”? (This was an outrageously pitiful sum. In contrast, the London docks strike of 1889 was over a demand for 6 shillings an hour!) Even so, nothing much happened Charles Sitch [BCLM] “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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about the women chain makers’ wages and conditions, of course. Yet the women – and large numbers of their men – turned to self-organisation, the first step of any oppressed group. Below: contemporary pictures from Cradley Heath [Cradley Links]
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Unionisation for women Women, of course, still did not have the vote. Yet they had to accept the opinions of largely well-to-do males in Parliament as to what could or couldn’t be done about their livelihoods. Thus, in 1904, petitions for the extension of the parliamentary franchise to women from Cradley Heath and Leicester, both places with a high volume of women workers, were presented to Parliament. There is little doubt as to the ironic intent of this but the device to bring attention to a scandal of poverty wages was merely met with a vote for the petitions to “lie upon the Table”. But this merely provoked the battle lines to be finally formed. Parliamentary forays aside, the following year, in 1905, women chain makers in Cradley, formed their own Cradley Heath and District Hammered and Country Chainmakers’ Association, a bona-fide trade union not often much mentioned in accounts of this struggle. In 1907, this body took a conscious tactical decision to enter the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW) wholesale by means of block affiliation, to be transformed into the NFWW Chain Makers’ Section. Relations with the mainly male branch must have been strong, for the secretary of even this NFWW chain makers’ branch was Charles Sitch (1887-1960), the son of Tom Sitch, general secretary Chain Makers apprentice [“White of the men’s factory union, the Block Slaves of England”] Chain Makers. The BCMA had been “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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established in 1888 purely for outworkers who made small block (a mechanical sprocket chain device) and other qualities of chain, as a branch of the Chain Makers' and Strikers' Association. This link was critical for the dispute mainly because it was highly local – every family bond conceivable must have been involved. It is also important to realise that, oddly, the NFWW did not start as a part of the classic labour movement, despite being the largest organisation of women at this time in Birmingham and the Black Country. Bodies such as the regionally-focused Women Workers’ Industrial Organisation led by Julia Varley (who we will meet again shortly) also affiliated to the NFWW but then so did the Pankhurst’s Women’s Social & Political Union. Effectively, the NFWW was an alliance of working class women’s trade unions and 1910 April 11th—a flyer advertising the reform-minded women’s groups that big meeting [Modern Records Centre] were dominated by women from nonworking class backgrounds—but not in Cradley Heath! As for the chain employers, some realised it was bad business to pay poorly and demand excessive workloads for it, especially if the work was prestigious. Noah Hingley & Sons were typical of the unionised heavy chain sector in that this firm installed expensive machinery in 1909. But then this level of investment was on the cards ever since the Netherton “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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factory had shifted towards maritime work some time previously. The firm was shortly to provide three-inch chain cables for two ill-fated liners - the Titanic and the Lusitania – capable of standing a strain of 350 tons. Unions in this sphere had tended to local and craft in character but, as the trade union movement became stronger and more militant in the early years of the 20th century, a trend towards more general organisation ensued. Bodies such as the Workers Union aimed to organise irrespective of trade, industry or skill. Alongside this trend, the campaign against "sweated" labour in general industries, mostly dominated by women, finally produced some movement. In 1909, against the background of a small but rising number of Labour MPs being elected, a Liberal government enacted the Trade Boards Act and this would have a galvanising effect on some sixty or seventy years agitation in the Black Country chain making industry. One of the leading figures of this reforming Liberal government was one Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill, who was later to switch sides and become a Tory!). He spoke for anti-sweating legislation on the grounds that: “It is a national evil that any class of Her Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions … where you have what we call sweated trades, you have no organisation, no parity of bargaining, the good employer is undercut by the bad and the bad by the worst; the worker, whose whole livelihood depends upon the industry, is undersold by the worker who only takes up the trade as a second string… where these conditions prevail you have not a condition of progress, but a condition of progressive degeneration.” It was as good an argument for what would first be called Trade Boards (and later Wages Councils) as was ever heard.
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Trade Boards Eventually, the Trade Boards Act of 1909 provided for the fixing of minimum wages where "the rate of wages prevailing in any branch of the trade was exceptionally low, compared with that in other employments". These boards were independent tripartite bodies, made up of representatives of both employers and workers (usually unions), together with supposedly independent members (though the independence of these seemed to lean more to the employers than anything), whose function was to conciliate between the two sides and, where agreement could not be reached, to vote in favour of one side or the other. This legislation established bodies to regulate rates of pay in, at first, only four manufacturing industries – lace, box, chain, and ready-made clothes. In early 1910, a minimum wage for hand-hammered chain-workers was proposed for 2 ½d an hour, for a 55 hour week, nearly double the existing rate. (A loaf of bread then cost 2½d.) As the deadline for enactment of the new rates in small chain making drew near, employers announced they would simply not pay any more and would, moreover, keep the old piecework system. Despite the lowness of this minimum, it would still meant a massive rise for most women, doubling wages to ten shillings or more. Yet most of the Cradley Heath employers point blank refused to implement this legally backed rate, some even tricking the women to sign up to a waiver from the regulation. Presumably prompted to ask a question in Parliament to enable this to be pointed out, on April 6th 1910 Ramsay Macdonald asked the House whether the Board established that would cover the chain-makers of Cradley Heath had fixed wages yet; and, if so, whether it had sanctioned a time rate of 2½d per hour. This rate was really need to be fixed as a legal minimum. R H Tawney (later well-known as a social reformer and writer) made an analysis that showed that about a quarter of the women earned between 4/- (shillings) and 5/“Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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and another 170 earned less than that; another 91 earned between 5/- and 7/and only 61 earned more than 7/-. There was, however, no sign of the new rates being introduced. The hand hammered rate was to come into existence in August 1910 and the dollied rate in February 1911. After this the Board of Trade fixed the hourly rates at 2 1/2d for the hammered trade and between 5d and 7d for the men’s dollied trade. These rates were to apply from the dates stated and after six months would become compulsory. In the absence of Mary-Macarthur [Cradley Links] the small time bosses ever giving up, the Cradley working class began to prepare for trouble. The intention of the employers was to destroy the minimum rate by building up a large stock of surplus chain. The workers would have been all too conscious of this, as they saw the piles of chains rise high against workshop walls. Noting no sense of any desire by the employers to act, all “female workers engaged in the Hammered Branch of the Chain Trade" were asked to observe the afternoon of Monday 11th April 1910 as a halfday holiday, to hear a report on the Trade Boards' Bill and its effects on the chain trade. Speakers at the meeting included the trade unionists Mary Macarthur and Thomas Sitch, and also Mr J.J. Mallon, President of the Anti-Sweating League. Little or no action had ever happened before, for all the past faith in legislation, it hd only ever been talk. It was only when the Cradley women now began a battle to establish the right to a fair wage, culminating in a ten week strike and lockout that progress emerged. At the time, there were “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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several thousand chain makers in the Cradley and Cradley Heath district, over two-thirds of them women. Something like 850 now came out on strike or were locked out for refusing to accept the stance of defiance against the Trade Boards of their employers.
Julia Varley-in prison clothes when imprisoned as a suffragette [Hull University]
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Action at Last! In May 1910, the Chain Trade Board produced a notice, “Minimum rates in the hand-hammered chain trade”. Employers were required by law to post up copies of this in every factory, workshop or other place used for outwork. Objections to the proposed new rates had to be lodged within 3 months, which is to say by 16th August 1910. Not only did many employers fail to post the notices, almost all of them showed great reluctance to do anything at all. This situation dragged on for a while until, finally, on 22nd August, some 850 women began a 10 week action, with the bulk of them staying the full course. About half of them had actually to still join any union. A key name associated with the dispute has long been that of Mary Macarthur, in fact the leader of the National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW). She had been born in Glasgow some thirty years before to a family rooted in small business. Although not a worker, she had become active in the Shop Assistants' Union in 1902 as a sympathetic person from the middle class. She was then elected to its national executive. Only a year later, she was made Secretary of the Women's Trade Union League, a long established reforming body that had recently started to get a little more militant. Out of that, in 1906, Macarthur and others founded the NFWW, of which she was first president and then general secretary. The NFWW was now to be explicitly a women workers’ trade union in the Julia Varley -[George Barnsby] way its predecessor had not been. In “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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her new capacity, Mary became greatly involved in the Anti-Sweating League and became generally expert on issues of low pay and gender. It was natural for the Cradley women and their male allies to have linked up with her; now she would demonstrate the value of that in applying her skills in persuading people of wealth, status, and influence to listen to Cradley Heath’s cause. Macarthur was certainly able to play a significant role in the corridors of power to push things forward, lobbying in Parliament, with the press, and with the Trade Board. She was also central to the collection of a fantastic amount of £4,000 for the striker, which sustained them in a long battle. (It is always difficult to make comparisons, since worker’s wages and the value of significant capital sums have little links, but some sources would put this sum in the range of £370,000.) Yet, usually forgotten in accounts of this struggle, is that most of the actual practical work carried out locally with regard to the dispute, including the hard slog of keeping the women together and maintaining the support of male trades unionists, was carried out by Julia Varley (1871-1952), Macarthur spending most of her time in London. Unlike Mary, Julia had started out in working life at the age of thirteen as a sweeper in a Bradford woollen mill. She became involved in the major NFWW delegation to the Scottish TUC—Mary Macarthur dispute at the local is second from right [Nat Library of Scotland] Manningham Mills “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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strike in 1890. Imprisoned as a suffragette campaigner, on her release she set up her own tiny Women Workers’ Industrial Organisation. Then, in 1909, she was appointed secretary to the Birmingham Women Workers' Organisation Committee of the local Trades Council, which was anxious to exploit the rising militancy that became evident amongst all workers, including women and affiliated her group to the NFWW. [See for an example of this in the OH New Series No 4 “The Feminine Strike of Cardiff – 1912] Both Julia and Mary were involved in amassing and (in Mary’s case) presenting evidence to the Chain Board, which heard of the fine detail of the rates still being paid and the difference with their new rates. Evidence submitted on 15th July 1910, indicated the working circumstances of two young women and a "Mrs C", who ran a four-hearth workshop and had seven children making chain. This work had begun as far back as January for Mary. A controversy - at the time not widely known about - ensued over Mary Macarthur’s travelling expenses, refundable by the Board. She vigorously complained over the "invidious distinction" between the First Class tickets permitted for employers whilst workers' representatives could only claim for third class trains. [“White Slaves of England”]
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“Asserting the Rights of Women” Back in Cradley Heath, things had reached a head. Now the women were refusing en mass to sign the employers’ document exempting them from the Trade Board stipulations and, on the 27th August, the employers declared a general lock-out of all workers. Yet this was, in retrospect, not a clever move. The dispute was already biting from the start, since some 350 women were already receiving Trade Board rates and 200 on a special section called `country chain’ were unaffected by the dispute During the first week a mass meeting ended with a procession along the High Street with the women singing Onward Christian Soldiers. An office was opened in the High Street with Charles Sitch in residence. Support money was paid out by this Cradley Heath branch of the National Federation of Women Workers to aid the dispute. In the first week of the strike 212 union members and 202 non-members received 5/- and 2/6 respectively. The effect of this was electric. Mary Macarthur speaks in Cradley Heath
By the second week, numbers thus supported had risen to 226 members and 430 non-members. Probably the largest of the mass meetings was when over a thousand women went to Grainger’s Lane School. A few days later an official demonstration was arranged and five thousand people gathered outside the school. Led by the Quarry Bank silver band the procession proceeded to Cradley and Colley Gate and then back again. Many small children and babies were carried, whilst all listened intently to Julia Varley and a deputy for Mary Macarthur from London. The mood of the women was joyous – liberated, even. At one rally, in the Empire Theatre a music hall in Cradley Heath, the women learnt “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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humorously mocking songs to the tune of `All the Nice Girls love a Sailor’ and `Daisy, Daisy’. On Saturdays, collectors from amongst the women went as far afield as Birmingham and all over the Black Country came back laden with cash. No-one asked if they had authority to collect on the streets and all they had to do was rattle their buckets and say “give to the Cradley girls’ strike” (it works better with the right accent!). Vastly more money came this way than from the guineas of the well-to-do. Whilst most donations came from trades unionists, some interesting and unexpected support also arose. Okell & Owen of Liverpool exported cheap chains of the type produced by the workers of Cradley Heath to India. Yet the firm were strong supporters of the striking women, possibly since, being a major export firm in the trade of all manner of goods to India, they could not afford their business being embargoed by the highly organised local dockers! On 26th August 1910, the firm sent a contribution of £5 towards the strike fund. They argued "that if all the manufacturers in Staffordshire pay fair wages to their workers, the trade will continue without any diminution". An important business supporter was a Mr W Lashford Griffin, a Cradley Heath chain manufacturer who gave confidential advice and technical assistance to Mary Macarthur. She sent a letter of thanks to him on 6th September 1910, saying that "I am afraid my experience during the past ten years has forced me to adopt the policy of hitting a head whenever I see it. It is well that we agitators should be reminded that there are heads and heads". Public support for the strikers was strong and press reports were highly emotional. On the 1st September 1910, the Daily Express ran an article about Mrs Patience Round, an "aged striker of 79", and one of 12 striking chain makers over the age of seventy. The Birmingham Despatch revealed she had been chain-making since she was ten years old – that’s 1861! The reports mention Mrs Round's limited horizons, having "never in her life stepped across the outskirts of Cradley Heath", as well as her domestic “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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situation - combining work from dawn to dusk to provide funds to care for her disabled husband. Patience went on record to say: "these are wonderful times... I never thought that I should live to assert the rights of women". Below: Mary Macarthur can be see in the centre of the crowd of women chain makers , their families, and supporters in Cradley Heath during the strike and lock out
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The End is Nigh! One Monday, Mary Macarthur paid a flying visit. She was met at the station by women who formed an impromptu procession that grew as it marched. They escorted her to Quarry Bank, after which there was a procession to Lomey Town Mound in Cradley Heath. Here Mary Macarthur said that they could now pay 6/- a week to striking trade unionists and 4/- to others. Contributions to the strike were now being received both from home and abroad. Edward Cadbury had promised £5 a week and George Cadbury guaranteed £10 a week, then a huge sum. There were at this point 638 women locked out, 320 of whom were unionists and 318 non-unionists. In all up to 800 individual strikers were paid strike pay almost certainly the reason why, within a month, 60% of employers had agreed to pay the minimum rate. The support for the strike of some wealthy individuals was not, as has been suggested, some magnificent coup on the part of the NFWW, although the popular refrain that the women were the “white slaves of England” no doubt helped. Cadbury and other benevolent paternalists like them were actually by no means celebrated exceptions without there being some highly rational motives behind it. The Cadburys, operating as they did in their own sector in highly advantageous market conditions, catering for internal consumer demand free of foreign competition, could afford such postures that actually benefited them by even more endearing the public in the Midlands to their chocolate! At the other end of the telescope, Joseph Woodhouse on behalf of the middlemen now placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the chain factory employers by explaining that few middlemen had known that it was possible to contract-out until they were informed of this by the large employers who also provided them with the necessary forms. A conference of Manufacturers and Chain Makers took place at the Cradley Heath council offices. The employers undertook to do all in their power – there’s a phrase to conjure with - to ensure that the minimum was paid, if the “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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union would undertake to pay 4/- a week to all women who refused to work under the rate. It just wasn’t good enough. A demonstration at Old Hill was said to be remarkable for the number of women on the `country list’ coming to the office and announcing that they were not working, even though they could not directly benefit from the Trade Board rates. Pathé News announced that it was sending a team to take what it called `living pictures’ for their cinema newsreel programme. It was now a game of waiting. The third week of the strike saw another Monday rally and demonstration at the Empire Theatre, so did the fourth week. By now 35 manufacturers had agreed to pay the full rate. By the 24th September – the fifth week of the [“White Slaves of England”] dispute— steady progress to resolution was clearly under way. The middle men stated that they were prepared to pay the Trade Board rate, if the major employers agreed to place orders only with middle men who signed up to the Board rates. 90% of the trade was now tied up with such employers and the settling of the dispute rested with the big employers. 600 unionists were now working under the proper rates with 140 unionists and 280 non-unionists still in dispute. In the sixth week of the dispute, on the Sunday, there had been yet another large meeting at the theatre this “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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time with Labour parliamentary leader, Arthur Henderson, and celebrated novelist, John Galsworthy, as the main speakers. The solidarity fund had reached £1,700. The employers rejected the proposals of the middlemen and the dispute went into October with bitterness increasing. Talk turned to picketing out all factories – what today would be called secondary action. Some women asked if a general strike would not soon sort things! Mary Macarthur found herself under serious pressure; many women were beginning to suspect that she would seek to avoid really militant action. To placate them, she asked the women for trust and promised that if there were not a final settlement by October 19th, when a further meeting with the employers was due, she would call all women to decide on more drastic action than to date. The seventh week brought no progress but the next week brought a sudden settlement. It was a complete climb down, since all employers agreed to deal only with middlemen who had signed up to an agreement to pay Board rates – there now being no less than 153 such middlemen fully signed up. A packed meeting of women at Grainger’s Lane School that very day concluded that this was the complete and decisive victory they had been looking for over the last ten weeks. The women had been presented with countless chances to settle but,
Furlong Lane, Cradley Heath in 1911 [Cradley Links]
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for them, it had to be all or nothing. Only on Wednesday 19th October 1910 in the schoolroom of Grainger's Lane Primitive Methodist Church, did they finally agree to end the dispute. Since only one firm was holding out but, to preserve `face’, they would give in if the strikers went back first, enabling a settlement with the last employer to sign up on 22nd October. Grainger’s Lane church—one of the regular meeting places of the strikers before it became too small for them and the weekly rallies had to be held at the Empire Theatre. Provision to enable a gradual resumption of work was made, with the Fund kept open for a few months to cater for any last minute hiccups. Around a dozen employers had still not signed up to fair wages. The women kept up monthly meetings with special speakers from outside. Some interest existed in finding means for girls to learn another craft so that they would not be entirely dependent on chain making. Not one employer went out of business as a result of the higher wages, no women lost their jobs, nor did the trade move abroad. The strike fund was so buoyant that a building was constructed with the surplus in Lomey Town. This came about as Cradley Heath had acquired a reputation abroad and at home as being a drab place with no joy in the lives of the women chain makers, more as a result of over-hyped and inaccurate newspaper reports. Thus, Mary Macarthur proposed that after the dispute an Institute for trade unionists should be built in Cradley Heath. The Workers Institute became a centre for women to meet, learn, socialise, and organise. The "Stute", in recent times under threat of demolition, was moved to the Black Country Living Museum, being taken down brick by brick in readiness for reconstruction.
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And Afterwards? Did things change? In 1911, the President of the Board of Trade was asked whether he could state the districts in which the provisions of the legislation establishing what would become known as wages councils were in operation, the trades affected, and the results so far. Trade Boards had been established for: ready-made and wholesale bespoke tailoring paper box-making hammered and dollied or tommied chain-making machine-made lace and fancy-net finishing tailoring A new two-year system of apprenticeship agreements did come in and perhaps some of the improper treatment of youth labour faded a little in the wake of societal disapproval. But, as far as the broad sub-industry went, basically, the state dragged its feet on the issue of regulated minimum wages and the whole thing even went into reverse. The Board’s enquiries in the Cradley Heath district in July 1912 considered the need for a "living wage", taking into account rental costs, food prices, rates of pay for women in other local industries, and the impact of competition from overseas manufacturers and machine-made chain. There had been progress but it was tantalisingly small. A study of hours worked in 1913 collated once again by R H Tawney divided almost equally into four quartiles of women working less than 30 hours, 30 to 40 hours, 40 to 50 hours, and 50 to 60 hours and above. His analysis of the earnings of 588 women showed that the main groups of women now earned between 5/- and 8/- a week, compared with pre-trade board wages of 4/- to 7/-. His view was that moving from a position where under 15% of workers earned over 7/- a week to one in which 60% achieved that “offers some cause for satisfaction”. “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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The next two years saw such a high level of strikes in all manner of industries that historians often refer to the period as “The Great Unrest”. But despite the groundbreaking precedent of the women chain makers, nothing really changed for them in the end. Tawney’s and other surveys, in 1915 for example, despite a high degree of self-regarding optimism, showed that wages always tended to lag after the Board’s set minima. The First World War, with a partially effective German blockade, and the lessening of ties with Europe, a market for some of the small chain work, and with the Dominions, saw a diminishment of the trade. Women understandably deserted it in droves to work in the higher paid munitions factories in other parts of the Midlands. As the motor bus became ever more common, places like Cradley Heath seemed less remote and working even as far as Birmingham really possible. The recessions of the early 1920s and early 1930s also had a devastating effect. Although the Chain Trade Board never really changed much in the long run, it is worth considering that the view of trades unionists back then was that `buying’ jobs by subsiding profits and accepting a low wage was of no real benefit. But the concept of a Board to regulate wages in some specific sectors was not now so controversial and that was the main legacy handed down by the Cradley Heath women. The new Board even had the force of law and were therefore a very early form of minimum wage regulation, leaving most employment to be fixed by free collective bargaining. Subsequent legislation allowed the Boards to fix overtime rates and, importantly, “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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holiday entitlement and then other terms and conditions of employment. In the post Second World War era, their replacement – Wages Councils – functioned well as an adjunct to collective bargaining. Even though all workers were not unionised, even at the height of unionisation in, say, the mid 1970s, nearly 90% of workers worked in sectors where their income was established by bargaining, in effect, even if they and their employer did not participate. The rest of workers were covered by Wages Councils. By the late 1980s there were 26 Wages Councils operating in Britain (a similar system operated in Northern Ireland), covering over 2 million employees, the vast majority of who were employed in retailing, hairdressing, and clothing. The minimum rates set by the Wages Councils were low compared with the rates of pay in other sectors and there were some problems of underpayment. But the Conservatives under Thatcher saw Wages Councils as unnecessary and an interference with employers' freedom to set wages, and had favoured their abolition for many years before they had the chance to act. The scope of the Wages Councils was reduced by the Wages Act 1986, which removed workers under 21 from regulation and restricted the Councils to setting a single minimum hourly rate, a single overtime rate and a limit for accommodation charges. As for the chain makers, by 1928 only a small number of the older women who could not adapt remained. A decade later and only a dozen workers could be found. At the end of the war, the “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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entire system was overhauled by the Wages Councils Act of 1945 but chain making was no longer a part of it. A handful perhaps carried on. It is said that the last ever woman chain maker in Cradley Heath was Lucy Woodhall, who retired in December 1973. She had begun her apprenticeship in November 1912 at the age of twelve, being one of the first beneficiaries of some degree of regulation. The Wages Councils were finally abolished by the Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act 1993, leaving the Agricultural Wages Board (AWB) as the only remaining body providing a statutory minimum wage. In July 2010 the coalition government announced plans to scrap the AWB. A campaign to save it now ensued and continues. .
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Epilogue What happened to all the main players after all the fuss had died down? The Workers’ Institute relocated [Flickr] Mary Macarthur continued in her work of representation at national and government level, unsuccessfully seeking to become a Labour MP in 1918. But, after the war, she suddenly became ill died of cancer on 1st January, 1921. In 1924, the National Federation of Women Workers (with its many middle-class activists now depleted) joined with the Municipal Employees Association, the Gas Workers and General Union, and the National Amalgamated Union of Labour to form a single general workers’ union – the National Union of General and Municipal Workers. Sadly, the NFWW now became merely a separate Women’s Department of the NUGMW and, as recession forced women back into the home, and the union became less interested in organising female workers. In May 1927, the NUGMW (effectively today’s GMB) wound up its Women's Department, which did not emerge again for some six decades. Thomas Sitch died on April 23rd 1923; his son, Charles, the ostensible `leader’ of the Cradley women was elected a Labour MP in the 1918 general election for Kingswinford, near to Dudley in the West Midlands and therefore not so far from Cradley Heath. The Block Chain Makers saw a massive decline in out-work in connection with the making of the higher qualities of small chain gradually and this so reduced the membership that the Association was dissolved on 27 December 1917. The main body, the UCM&CSA, the United Chain Makers' & Chain Strikers' “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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Association, kept going after Thomas Sitch’s death, with Charles Sitch taking his father’s role as its general secretary. It kept offices at Unity Villa, Cradley Heath, although it finally became defunct in 1967 with the closing of the last chain factory, and was finally dissolved as an independent union in 1977 Charles Sitch lost his parliamentary seat in 1931 and came unstuck when he was arrested on February 28th 1933, for the fraudulent use of the funds of the UCM&CSA. He was imprisoned for 9 months' in June 1933 after evidence was presented that some almost five thousand pounds was definitely identified as being defrauded. Seemingly, the Treasurer of the society hardly ever handled money and the office accounts were managed by Sitch’s sister. Things seemed to get out of hand from 1928 and suspicions arose since Sitch never presented accounts, claiming overwork, but dictated to committee members the sums involved, which they took down in pencil and subsequently read them out to members at meetings. Eventually, some brave soul went to the bank and asked how much the society had in its account only to find that they had only £7 in assets, when it should have been in the thousands Julia Varley joined the Workers' Union in 1913 as its women's organiser for the Midlands. She became the first woman delegate to Birmingham Trades Council but, since her union and most suffragettes had decided to back the First World War, she became increasingly at odds with the rising anti-war majority there. Yet there was also an incredible level of friction between the WU and the NFWW, with the latter content in practice not to challenge the refusal of the skilled craft unions to accept women in membership. She continued to aid the WU wherever women were brought into struggle, especially in the militant period from 1917-21, when she had the phenomenal total of twenty paid women organisers to rely upon. She – and they - fought many a sharp fight involving women in places such as Derby, Oxford, and elsewhere. After her union merged with the TGWU in 1929, she became the latter’s National Women's Officer until she retired in 1936; she died in 1952. “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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Many of the women in the 1910 dispute are, as is so often the case, nameless and lost to us, apart from the named but unknown women quoted in contemporary press reports. Charley Johnson, a stalwart Cradley Heath Communist, himself only a child in the dying days of the chain making industry and born fourteen years after the dispute, has recorded how he was influenced in his choice of politics by his godmother, Tilly Harris, who was well known in those parts in those days. In her early years, she was highly active in the chain-makers’ dispute. Her son was Bert Harris, who would become the Communist union convenor at Boulton and Paul’s aviation factory in Wolverhampton during the Second World War, where a significant factory branch of the Communist Party was organised. Some women chain makers clearly learned lessons from the affair that would never go away!
The first Trade Board notice “Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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Sources: C Johnson personal correspondence to F Watters c.1982 Eric Taylor “The Working Class Movement in the Black Country 1863-1914” University of Keele (1973) G Barnsby “Socialism in Birmingham and the Black Country 1850-1939” (1998) Hansard: HC Deb 16th March 1904 vol 131 c12371237; 22nd March 1911 vol 23 c572W572W R H Sherard “The White Slaves of England” (1897) R.H. Tawney BA "Studies in the Minimum Wage. No 1 The Establishment of Minimum Rates in the Chain-making Industry under the Trade Boards Act of 1909 (1913) Ron Moss "Chain & Anchor Making in the Black Country" (2006) S Blackburn “Employers and Social Policy: Black Country Chain-Makers and the Cradley Heath Strike of 1910”, Midlands History XII (1987) Stourbridge County Express various editions in 1910 T. J. Raybould, The Economic Emergence of the Black Country: A Study of the Dudley Estate (Newton Abbot, 1973) 'The Times' 24th March 1933 (re C H Sitch)
“Rouse, Ye Women”The Cradley Heath Chain Makers
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