PART FIVE 



THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT 



THE 'NINETIES. 



THE " revolt of the field " of 1872 was a spontaneous act 

 on the part of the agricultural labourer. It started, as we 

 have seen, by a group of labourers asking Joseph Arch, one 

 of themselves, to be their leader, and although the towns- 

 man element was imported into the movement, its history 

 shows that it was purely an agrarian uprising. Its rank 

 and file sprang from the hedgerow, and its leader was the 

 champion hedge-cutter of England. Not only were its 

 members, but its organisation was distinctly rustic in char- 

 acter. Branches sprang up suddenly in out-of-the-way 

 villages like mushrooms in the night ; strikes were declared 

 by little village communities who rarely saw an organiser 

 or consulted a leader. Though it received large sums of 

 money from sympathetic townsmen, no one could say that 

 Arch's movement was organised from the towns. 



The new trade union movement in the early 'nineties, 

 however, is a different story. In 1889 the great Dock 

 Strike occurred, followed by the gasworkers' strike, and the 

 town leaders of the Dockers' Union and of the Gaswoikers' 

 Union discovered to their cost the danger to the unskilled 

 town labourer of leaving unorganised the ill-paid agricul- 

 tural labourers, who were continually deserting the country- 

 side to fight for a crust of bread at the dock gates, or at the 

 fiery jaws of great gas retorts. The dockers' delegates 

 brought up the question of organising the farm labourer 

 at the Trade Union Congress, with the result that during 

 1890 their Union and the Navvies' Union sent organisers into 

 Oxfordshire, Lincolnshire, and the Home counties, whilst 



