There is a chain of towns in North Staffordshire, stretching some five or six miles from Longton at the South of the chain to Tunstall at the North, which together produce nine-tenths of the earthenware manufactured in the United Kingdom ; and more than half their population of a quarter of a million is more or less directly engaged in, or concerned with, the industry which has procured for the chain of towns the name of "The Potteries." That comprehensive designation was originally bestowed upon them from outside, and though in course of time it became accepted by the inhabitants of the district — to whom the names of Longton, Fenton, Stoke, Hanley, Burslem, and Tunstall, had an individual and sufficient significance — there still lingers in the minds of the people of " The Potteries " a parochial resentment of the hasty generalisation which could not stop, or stoop, to discriminate between municipal boundaries, but merged the identity of each unit into one colloquial, though undeniably convenient, name for all.

Sheffield would have successfully resisted any attempt to describe it as " The Cutleries " ; Northampton had acquired an honoured place in history before the circumstance of its manufacture of boots could have filched its good name, and substituted one less euphonious ; and the cluster of towns in the south-east corner of Lancashire, whose chief industry has given to Manchester the proud title of Cottonopolis, and enabled her to carve her way to the sea, still preserve their separate identity as Burnley, Bury, or Blackburn, and have escaped the degradation of being lumped together as "The Spinneries." And as to that quarter of the county of Nottingham where Welbeck, Thoresby, and Clumber cluster together in unwonted opulence, it merely exhibits, by accepting the bantering alias of "The Dukeries," that gracious condescension which is the prerogative of conscious superiority, and not a single strawberry leaf in the neighbourhood droops at the familiarity.

One other district in England has suffered the injustice which has been done to Hanley and Burslem and their sister towns. At the other end of the county of Stafford lies a manufacturing and mineral-producing district as uninviting to the eye as that in the North, and travellers who have returned from those remote regions have spoken of their visit to the " Black Country." Yet even here Wolverhampton emerges with proud distinctness from the surrounding darkness ; — but Longton and Tunstall, what and where are they?

There are legends to the effect that in the days of stage coaches, those that ran from London to Liverpool and Chester regularly stopped at Burslem and Stoke, and changed their horses ; and it is conceivable that the travellers who passed by the smoking potters' ovens — then surrounded by pleasant fields, and now by other potters' ovens — inquired and learned that they were in Burslem, where Josiah Wedgwood lived and worked, or in the town of Stoke, upon the River Trent. But the main iron highways of to-day avoid " The Potteries," and it lies from the path of the travellers who go from London to the North, in an " isolation " that may be " splendid " for the travellers, but is regretted by its inhabitants as the legacy of the cupidity and stupidity of some of their land-owning predecessors. And so, to the Man in the Street, " The Potteries " is a place "somewhere in the Midlands," and if you ask him for a more precise location, he will tell you that it is " part of the Black Country " ; and thus this laxity of geographical expression perpetrates a fresh injustice to the small chain of towns in the North — or to the longsuffering cluster in the South? — of the county of Stafford. But should you come across a man in the street who really knows "The Potteries," and something about it, you will hear that it is a strange place where men fight dogs — and, in truth, Americans have descended upon " The Potteries," asking which was the veritable house in the salubrious quarter of Tinkersclough where a certain ill - authenticated encounter occurred, and perhaps have found local guides — anxious to turn an ill-wind to comparatively honest account, at trifling expense of imagination and sacrifice of scruple — to show them ; but assuredly have found many houses in Tinkersclough. 

But it is to be feared that there are others who remain in the outer darkness, and have not even heard of that legendary hero, " Brummy " — (a name which suggests that, viewed from the distance of Fleet Street, Birmingham too may be geographically mixed up with the Black Country and The Potteries) — nor of his canine antagonist ; and by such " The Potteries " may never have been consciously assigned to any more precise location than is allotted to Utopia. But lately, special correspondents have gone down from London to Tinkersclough and its environs, and have written special articles in their newspapers concerning the men and women and children who work in the potteries, and certain evils of lead-poisoning which they have long borne, and others have just discovered, which articles have led in turn to questions and even debates in Parliament, and these newspaper articles and Parliamentary debates may have stimulated geographical research. But at any rate they have quite overshadowed the legend of the Man and the Dog, and given " The Potteries" a new notoriety, and certainly have dispelled any lingering ideas which may have associated it with Utopia.

It is with the industrial struggles of the working potters in this district that the following pages are concerned. The author has no better claim to tell their story than that the materials which supply it have been peculiarly accessible to him ; but whilst he cannot pretend to have made any deeper study of the industrial and economic questions to which it is related than that made by anyone who endeavours to follow the drift of the chief movements of his own time, he hopes that the book may be of some interest to the general reader on the ground of at least an equal endeavour ; and he can only ask for the indulgence of any industrial experts into whose hands the book may fall, in the hope that they will be able to winnow some grain from the gleanings he has gathered from a corner of that field in which they have reaped their harvest

But there are two obvious divisions in the class of general readers who may be induced to read the book : those who may look in it for some corroboration of their own views of the malign influence exercised by Trades Unions upon " trade " — by which "capital" is meant — and those who, sympathising with the efforts of Trades Unions, may hope to find in it some justification of their faith, or who, living in a day when political economy (which theorised on the inevitability of effects produced by mutable conditions) has given place to a broader social science (which challenges the inevitability, and investigates the causes of those conditions, and leaves to statesmanship the task of changing them) take an interest in the labour question merely as a branch of the social problem.

The days of cavilling at the existence of Trades Unions are over, and the working-classes of the kingdom are as free in the management of their industrial affairs as they are in the enjoyment of political power. One condition could not exist without the other; and the desire for, and gradual acquirement of the one, inevitably brought corresponding progress in the parallel path. Both movements — if they can really be distinguished — were warmly championed and hotly opposed ; but though a generation has been born which found Trades Unions legalised, farm labourers and working-men voting in the security of the ballot, and schools built in part from the money of the rich or the childless ratepayer, into which troop the children of the poor ; and though this generation reads as history the struggles and battles which enabled it to come into the world, with the hurlyburly done, and these things accomplished facts, there undoubtedly exists in the minds of the ancient enemies of the democratic movement — who fought in or witnessed the struggle — or of their intellectual descendants, who review the field of buried controversy, a distrust of the powers and privileges conferred on the "lower classes," as workers or as voters, which has not wholly been dispelled by the falsification of the predictions which were made in regard to the use to which they would be put.

To such, the perusal of the detailed story of the aims and efforts of several generations of workingmen, engaged in one trade, and concentrated in one district, to work out their industrial progress, may help to dissipate the prejudice which only sees in a Trades Union a sinister instrument, unwisely placed in the hands of working-men by a weak legislature, for " upsetting trade and driving capital out of the country " ; and may present an aspect of the activities of such organisations which will lead to some modification of their opinions, even if it does not change their point of view.

In the narrative told in the following pages, there is abundant testimony to the intelligence, moderation, and far-sightedness of the working potters, varied only by such aberrations from the strict path of prudence — as in their emigration movement — as involved no injustice, in intention or effect, to their employers, but recoiled on themselves. 

Their dealings with their employers have not been those of a disciplined but unscrupulous army of thoughtless labourers, holding helpless Capital by the throat, but those of a body of peaceful, orderly, and self-respecting men, negotiating and fighting for what they believed to be right, with a body of gentlemen who often believed them to be wrong, and still oftener refused their demands, but who were, at any rate, always well able to take care of themselves. 

The employers of the Staffordshire Potteries have, indeed, generally shown an enlightened appreciation of the right of their workmen to combine — even in the days when there was legal sanction for the fashion which held Trades Unions as "things accursed." So far as their main body is concerned, they have not assumed any lofty pretence of their respect for " the sacred rights of labour " by endeavouring to persuade their Union workmen that they were sacrificing their independence by their foolish combinations. 

They have implicitly recognised the justice of their workmen's Unions by uniting themselves, and have given practical effect to the re-cognition by generally seeking to deal with the accredited organisations of the men through their own. They have not sought, in times of crisis, to get at the men behind their leaders, but, on the contrary — and especially in later times — have themselves invoked the interference, and upon occasions have unreservedly accepted the mediation, of the leaders of the men in disputes with the latter. 

To those, therefore, who are more royalist than the king, the assurance may be given that the employers of the Staffordshire Potteries have not given known utterance to the hope that they could be relieved of the tyranny of their workmen's Unions.

By thus frankly " accepting service " of the complaints preferred by the Unions on behalf of those for whom they acted, the employers of the Staffordshire Potteries have simplified the situation and narrowed the issues that are dealt with in the following pages. 

The history of the Potters' Unions, therefore, affords an excellent example of how, given a frank and even cordial acceptance by the employers of the existence and official responsibility of their workmen's Unions, those Unions affect the relations between employers and employed, and of the points of conflict that may arise between the two, and allows the general observer to form a judgment upon the reasonableness and justice of the demands made and resistance offered by the one side or the other.

The narrative shows that the disputes between the two sides have not always presented the simple issue of whether more wages could be forced, or less imposed, to be determined by the relative strength of the combatants. 

The questions of " annual hiring," " good - from - oven," and " allowances " involved matters of principle connected with the basis of the conditions of employment and remuneration, and will be admitted to have been at least subjects for legitimate controversy. And even the simple issue of wages has been complicated by a "principle." The working potters fought for higher wages, and thought they deserved them, but they were innocent of any sinister desire — so often strangely attributed to their class — to take the bread and butter out of their own mouths ; and had no more deliberate intention of driving the Staffordshire potting industry to Germany than the bricklayers of London ever had of sending the building trade to France. 

The employers, of course, almost invariably resisted their demands for higher wages, and predicted at each period of unrest that the trade must inevitably succumb to any increase in the cost of production. The workmen, on the other hand, insisted that they knew better than their masters, and that there were other means of preserving the trade than by a reduction in wages, when one was asked for by the employers "to save the trade," and other possibilities of compensating for any increase in the cost of production when the masters contested a claim for an advance in wages on the ground that to concede it would destroy the trade. And, through the latter half of the history of the Potters' Trades Unions, there run these opposing contentions of employers and employed : on the part of the former, that wages must fall with selling prices, or could not rise because selling prices had not risen ; and on the part of the employed that such a regulating principle could only be enforced if as much attention were given by employers to collectively keeping up selling prices as was collectively bestowed upon the effort to keep down wages, and that, in such case, both sides would be the gainers. 

The workmen offered co-operation to that end, and it was refused. The views of the employers prevailed with successive arbitrators over the arguments of the men, and selling prices continued to fall, and wages too, and both sides wondered when the decline of each would stop.

Quite recently, and after the writing of this narrative was thought to be concluded, a remarkable movement in The Potteries opportunely supplied a probable solution to that question. Many employers came to the conclusion that they must look within their own ranks for the greatest enemy of prosperity to their trade. 

The workmen had named him over and over again in years gone by, and had offered their assistance in coercing him into better conduct, or exterminating him altogether. He was, and is, the "cutter" of the trade. Sometimes he is a man of much capital, sometimes of none. In the former case, he uses his capital as a weapon ; in the latter it is the circumstance of his lack of capital that is the motive force, and he is the helpless, though willing instrument. In both cases labour is equally necessary, and often equally ill-paid. 

The main body of employers are in a condition between the two extremes, and suffer by the deliberation of the one and the helplessness of the other. They have now asked their workmen to join them in fighting a common enemy — the manufacturer who beggars his class by unrestrained and ill-regulated competition — and the Trades Unionists have responded to an invitation which they asked to be extended to them years ago. 

It is a safe prediction that, if the projected movement becomes ratified and complete, the enemy will either be vanquished or absorbed. Either consummation would be good, but the latter better. 

At any rate, a position has to-day been reached in which both sides combine to extract the best possible results to each from the trade in which they are engaged. Whether it will yield the full fruits of its promise remains to be seen, but all the indications are favourable. The effort, in itself, is at least a satisfactory outcome of long years of strenuous controversy ; and being, as it is, the fulfilment of the hopes and efforts of the leaders of the workmen, is an adventitious aid to the desire of the author to show that the motives and actions of Trades Unions are, whilst necessary to the protection of the class which they are primarily designed to serve, not irreconcilable with the interests of the class which they are popularly supposed to oppose ; and it enables him to close his narrative with the fair promise of a future — only usually assured in narratives of a more imaginative and interesting character — summarily described as " Happy ever after." 


LONDON, January 1899.