GROWTH UNDER STORMY SKIES. 183 



see how in 1913 a grant of 500 was made by the Congress to 

 enable the National Agricultural Labourers' Union to employ 

 an extra organiser or two. 



Another Union also took the field on behalf of the agricul- 

 tural labourer, a Union which was destined to play a most 

 important part in organising the farm worker. This was the 

 Workers' Union, which in 1898 could barely find the money 

 to pay its country organiser I2S. a week. It had grown into 

 a powerful urban union and turned its attention once more 

 to its first love the agricultural labourer. Its organisers 

 argued that farm labourers would be in a stronger position 

 if they joined the agricultural section of an urban union 

 blest with funds, and this appealed to many men who had 

 suffered from or heard of the instability of Arch's old 

 Union. They saw too that it was difficult to carry out a 

 successful strike without money, and there was certainly 

 plenty of scope for an organiser who would take the trouble to 

 organise agricultural labourers. Few trade unions had 

 shown great eagerness to expend money in organising a scat- 

 tered and badly paid body of workers on a contribution of 

 twopence a week, and credit is certainly due to the Workers' 

 Union for cultivating a crop which had borne but little 

 fruit and was subject to be nipped in the bud by early frosts. 



The desire of the Workers' Union to make the farm worker 

 a trade unionist, was no doubt prompted by the feeling 

 that the position of the unskilled workers of the towns was 

 jeopardised by the importation of non-union men from the 

 country when any industrial trouble arose. The gas- 

 workers, the dockers, the navvies, had all experienced this 

 cold draught blowing in from the open fields, eddying round 

 their gates. Thus their organisers, Alderman Morley of Hali- 

 fax, and Councillor Beard of Birmingham, began to send out 

 their emissaries into Yorkshire and the Midland counties. 



Fresh interest in Trade Unionism amongst the agricul 

 tural workers was evinced in the spring of 1912 by the un- 

 veiling of a memorial to the Tolpuddle martyrs on May 

 27, 1912. On the top of the curved arch at the entrance 

 to the little Wesleyan Methodist chapel of the Dorsetshire 

 village are engraved the words " Tolpuddle Martyrs," and on 



