A Trade Union of the North-East Coast Seamen in 1825

Abstract

DR MCCORD has recently shown that the merchant seamen of the ports of north-east England (especially those employed on colliers sailing from the Tyne and Wear to London) had a history of militant action at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.' The major strikes which occurred in I 792, I 796, and i8I 5 were, however, organized on an ad hoc basis, even though this was an extremely effective one, showing that the seamen were a well-knit community with established, if unofficial, leadership. Within a decade of the settlement of their two-month-long strike in i8I5, which aimed at maintaining wages which were falling from high wartime levels and fixing a level of manning linked to tonnage of ship, the seamen had created a formal trade organization. While this was always ostensibly a friendly society to provide benefits for its members, it soon began to adopt the attitudes and functions of a trade union-probably the first effective seamen's union in the country and certainly one of the earliest unions in north-east England. Its activities in i825 and i826, which led to rioting and industrial action by the seamen, provide a valuable insight into the attitudes of workmen and the responses of employers and the authorities to union militancy in the period immediately after the repeal of the Combination Acts. In the years after i 8 I 5 economic depression and an over-supply of labour made it difficult for the seamen to organize and to bargain effectively. With the exception of a small increase in wages, obtained on the Tyne in I 8 I 8 under the threat of strike action, and granted by the Wear shipowners in the following year, the seamen remained quiescent. By i 824, however, they were' becoming restive, largely as a result of improving trading conditions and hence the growing opportunities for industrial action. In the spring of i 824 it was the shipwrights on both Tyneside and Wearside who were first involved in disputes with their employers for an increase in wages, and since there was an obvious connexion between the two groups of workers it may well be that the combination on the part of the shipwrights encouraged the seamen to take further organizational steps.2 It is interesting to note that strike action by the seamen before this time had been on a unilateral basis with no overall co-ordination between the north-east ports. In