Tolpuddle Martyrs and Trade Union Oaths

Abstract

It is paradoxical that some of the most celebrated names in the trade union martyrology?Loveless, Standfield, Hammett and Brine?should belong to unionists who, in their own time, represented no important centre or extension of trade union influence. They were farm labourers at a time when trade unionism among farm labourers was wholly unimportant; their region was remote from the northern, midland and London heartlands of contemporary trade unionism; they were not affiliated to any of the expanding trade unions of their time. George Loveless's Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers was a sport. It owed a good deal, no doubt, to the trade union ferment of the early 1830s, a ferment with which the literate Loveless could have become acquainted through the newspapers. But it owed a good deal more to Loveless's local and personal initiative. Its sole ascertainable link with outside trade union movements?apart, of course, from the championing of the Labourers by the Consolidated Union after their conviction?appears to be wholly accidental. This championing, by which the Labourers became a part of British trade union history, underlies the habit of vaguely associating the Tolpuddle men with the Consolidated Union. But they formed their union a good five months before the Consolidated came into existence; the Consolidated, in fact, was no more than a week old when Loveless and his fellows were arrested.1