England: Tracing the trade union roots
The Martyrs’ Inn, in Tolpuddle, England, is named after the six local workers whose actions gave birth to the modern trade-union movement.
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Mitchell Smyth
Meridian Writers’ Group
Tolpuddle, England –This Dorsetshire village is the very essence of a peaceful, sleepy community, all the more so since a bypass was built a few years ago to carry the A35 highway traffic away from its main street.
It comes as a surprise, then, to find here, among thatched cottages and leafy lanes, the echoes of an event that changed the face of industry and business around the world.
That event was the birth of the trade-union movement. You’d expect, somehow, to find organized labour’s birthplace in some sweatshop or an assembly line in an industrial city—Manchester, perhaps, or Sheffield, or Detroit or Pittsburgh.
But, no, it was here that labour was first organized, by six men who tried to get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Their efforts cost them dearly. That’s why they’re called the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
Their story is told all over the village, in a cottage, a church, the local pub, even in a tree on Main Street.
That tree is a huge sycamore. It was already full grown in 1834 when six farmhands met in its shade to talk about wages. The local squires had decided to cut a workman’s pay from nine shillings a week to six. The men who met under the tree swore to stand together and fight the pay cut.
That oath was their undoing. The squires dug out an old law, the Mutiny Act, which banned “unlawful oaths” and, duly convicted, the men were sentenced to seven years in the Australian penal colonies.
The sentences galvanized workers around the country and, in the wake of mass protests and petitions to Parliament, organized labour became a reality.
On the 100th anniversary, in 1934, the British Trades Union Congress recognized the Martyrs’ groundbreaking efforts by building seven cottages here. Six—each with the name of a Martyr above the door—are rented to retired farm workers.
The seventh is a museum, which tells the whole story, in pictures, handbills, notices of protest marches and fund-raisers, and newspaper clippings.
The village pub, the Martyrs’ Inn, also has framed exhibits. There’s a memorial arch at the Methodist church and information on the local heroes inside.
And what happened to the Tolpuddle Six? Brief biographies in the museum show that, following the mass protests at their sentencing, the government relented and they returned from Australia after a couple of years. Five of them later immigrated to Canada and settled in the London, Ont., area and in Perth County, Ont.
One of them, John Standfield, became reeve (mayor) of East London (now part of London, Ont.). It seems the sentences cooled the Martyrs’ ardour, for in Canada they led low-key lives as far as labour relations were concerned.
There’s a visitors’ book in the museum. The comment box contains such entries as, “You did it all for us, brothers. We are grateful,” “The injustices go on; we must fight on to end them,” “So many owe so much to so few,” and “History is still repeating itself.”
Explore More:
Tolpuddle (pop. 330) is 12 kilometres [7 ½ miles] west of Dorchester in west Dorset.
For more information visit www.tolpuddlemartyrs.com.
For information travel in Britain go to the Visit Britain website at www.visitbritain.ca.
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