MDMD(8) Questions - Strikes

[Steven Maas (CUTR)]

In a no-doubt hopeless attempt to generate some interest in the works of
TRP:

> 244.26 `strikes of '43 and '50'   Anyone know the relevant history?

"Few decades of the early eighteenth century passed without a major strike
on the Tyne, which invariably involved successful picketing, sometimes
holding up trade on the river for weeks at a time.  The seven-week strike
of 1750 was perhaps the longest in this period, but somewhat shorter
disturbances in 1701, 1708, 1710, 1719 and 1738 all caused grave
disruption to Newcastle's coal-based economy and demonstrated the
keelmen's collective strength."

"By 1750 [the keelmen] were reported to be displaying printed bills in
public places setting out their grievances, indicating a development in
tactics as well as the advanced' nature of these industrial disputes.  It
was this evidence of organization and control that was most disturbing to
the authorities, partly because it threatened comfortable contemporary
assumptions that all members of the lower orders were 'a sort of
Unthinking people', and partly because of the authorities' relative
impotence in the face of a simple, orderly refusal to work."

"The constantly-repeated claim that the keelmen were espousing Jacobitism
may also be traced to this desire to translate the strikes into something
that fitted into the accepted framework of the social order.  In fact the
Scots Presbyterian keelmen seem to have been fairly safely anti-
Jacobite..., and in 1719 they achieved official recognition as 'the only
well affected Mob in England'" 

"There is much to support Morris's contention that the origins of
nineteenth-century class society are to be found on Tyneside rather than
in the Lancashire cotton industry."

>From "A Dynamic Society: Social Relations in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
1660-1760" by Joyce Ellis.  In _The Transformation of English Provincial
Towns 1600-1800_, edited by Peter Clark, Hutchinson and Co. (Publishers)
Ltd., London, 1984.

No mention of a strike in 1743, and no mention of strikers being sentenced
to the Gallows or transported to America.

	Steve Maas