10-minute read

Dermot Feenan

LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law FRSA

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Two hundred and fifty years ago the word ‘strike’, to describe a form of collective work stoppage, entered the English language during the London Strikes of 1768, involving, principally, coal-heavers and sailors. The word originates in the action of ‘striking’, or removing the topsails of ships, thus disabling their movement. The word is recorded in the second week of May 1768 explicitly with reference to securing a pay rise. It has since informed numerous worker disputes globally, from the London Dock Strike of 1889 through to the West Virginia Teachers Strike of 2018.

Across the centuries, the strikes of 1768 continue to provide lessons for contemporary labour struggles, through: their origins in the exploitation of workers by employers; the economic hardship that prompts direct action; the necessity of confrontation and the risk of violence; repressive employer and state responses; solidarities, but also internal tensions and conflicts, among workers; and, the value of organisational leadership. The London Strikes of 1768 are sometimes treated as comprising distinct strikes – principally of the coal-heavers and, separately, sailors – but intersecting interests between the two effectively combined to stop trade on the Thames. Their actions appear to have inspired simultaneous copycat actions by other labourers and journeymen in the city. 

The strikes of 1768 also counter any tendency to see all strikes as necessarily the same. Contested relations of power and status, peculiar to time and place, helped define the strikes of 1768. These included the distinctive identities and consciousness of the protagonist sailors and Irish coal-heavers, the political context of a Hanoverian England shaped by war and the expansion of commerce and the state, and the spectacular, and often lethal, violence of sovereign punishment. 

Moreover, while the London Strikes are reportedly the first labour agitations to use the word ‘strike’, it was not the first collective withdrawal of labour as a form of protest to preserve or improve pay or conditions. Records shows such withdrawals of labour in ancient Egypt and Rome. 

Indeed, prior to the London Strikes of 1768, keelmen of the Tyne and Wear in north east England had so effectively used collective agitation since the mid-seventeenth century that they were, as John Stevenson notes, regarded as ‘among the first trade to be organised in a primitive form of trade union’. In north west England in December 1762, sailors in Liverpool had withdrawn labour to secure an increase in wages. And in 1765, coalminers across the north of England had engaged in prolonged withdrawal of labour. In April 1768, sailors in Sunderland prevented ships from leaving port by lowering down the yards (thus ‘striking’ their sails). As a result, the owners and masters of the ships agreed to the sailors’ demands for pay rises. Sailors on the Thames would repeat these actions in May. News of the tactics in the north east would inevitably reach London’s coal-heavers.

The Coal-heavers

The rapid growth of London in the eighteenth century required vast quantities of coal, supplied from the mines of north east England via collier ships. The coal was offloaded by coal-heavers in Wapping and Shadwell, on the north bank of the Thames. It was arduous, dirty work. Injury and oppressive conditions caused coal-heavers to take on other kinds of work such as sailoring, harvesting and soldiering. The heavers’ work was controlled by ‘undertakers’, middlemen who hired the heavers and paid them on a piecework basis. The undertakers, many of whom owned the local inns and taverns, paid in kind alongside the ‘sack’ or ‘vat’ of coal that was an element of payment. Coal heaving was thirsty work, and, given the poor quality of water at the time, beer was the normal means of hydration. Given that the inns and taverns were the only convenient places to eat and drink in the area, the undertakers exercised considerable control over the coal-heavers’ labour and means of subsistence. 

Most of the coal-heavers were Irish. Some had emigrated in the wake of the first wave of land agitation in southern Ireland in 1762-1763. Some were ‘Whiteboys’, a secret organisation which used violent tactics to defend tenant farmers’ interests in Ireland, but it is equally possible, as David Featherstone observes, that some Irish migrants copied or mimicked their tactics. The coal-heavers worked together on the docks in groups of 16 or so. The lineaments of collective organisation were already in place. 

In 1758 they successfully petitioned Parliament to break the undertakers’ monopolistic arrangements in the manufacture and then rental at extortionate rates of the shovels they required for their work. Legislation introduced in 1758 to improve the wage-labour relation with coal-heavers was quickly circumvented. The local alderman responsible for implementation of the law – William Beckford, an owner of substantial sugar plantations worked by slave labour in Jamaica – represented the new class of laissez-faire capitalist unwilling to meaningfully intervene in the interests of labourers. The undertakers’ monopolistic control over employment led to further conflict with the coal-heavers, and disputes also recurred over the accuracy of the volume of each coal-heaver’s sack.

The growth in commerce and light manufacturing in eighteenth-century London’s East End began to witness increasing unrest among workers generally. In the Spitalfields riot in 1765, during a downturn in the silk-weaving industry, weavers organised to attempt to ensure that the rates paid for their piecework was not cut beneath the level at which they could feed themselves and their families. The organisation was unofficial trades unionism. It was illegal. In 1765, they protested the importation of French silk. They continued rioting in 1767. In 1768, food shortages led to further riots throughout London. In late-April coal-heavers boarded ships, wounding a number of strike-breaking labourers. 

On land, protest focused on the undertakers who had been using their inns and taverns as a base to recruit strike-breaking labour. The coal-heavers attacked premises in February and April. They also sought the help of a local magistrate, Hodgson, to help break the monopoly on assignment of work held by the undertakers in agreement with the coal merchants. Hodgson responded by setting up a hiring hall with a ‘proper clerk’ at which ships’ captains might enquire about hiring coal-heavers. The undertakers responded by bringing in outside labour. In April, the coal-heavers targeted undertaker John Green’s Roundabout Tavern with gunfire. A coal-heaver and a shoemaker were killed. The next day Green saw off another attack, shooting dead a number of assailants. Seven coal-heavers were arrested, convicted and hanged. 

Nonetheless, coal-heavers continued to lobby for better pay. In early May, they withheld their labour until they had received written assurances that they would receive an increase in pay. At the same time, they engaged in other direct action designed to disrupt the supply chain; taking away the horses from several coal carts that delivered coal from the East End’s streets towards the wealthy West End of London. That month, sailors in London demanded a wage rise.

The Sailors

Following the Seven Years War which ended in 1763, there was less work for sailors. Sailors’ pay varied in scale and frequency for like-work between different ship-owners. The coastal sailors in Sunderland had shown the power of collective agitation in securing agreement to a wage increase. But striking sails was not their only tactic. Several hundred had marched with drums and flags to present their petition, intimidating bakers and butchers – the purveyors of ‘necessaries’ they could no longer afford. At the start of May 1768, concern among sailors – including now deep-sea sailors – about poor pay led them to check rates of pay across a range of ships in London. When the differences were confirmed, they forcibly boarded ships and unreefed, ‘struck’, the sails on the ships threatening that none would sail unless they received a pay rise. 

The sailors petitioned Parliament and the Lord Mayor for a wage increase. By May 11, they could marshall 14,000 to march to Westminster. They were able, as reported by Walter Shelton, to call upon ‘watermen, lightermen, ballast men, ballast heavers, coal-heavers etc. to leave their duty and not to go to work until our wages be settled’. By the start of the second week of May, several boats with coal-heavers and sailors passed Parliament, landed west of the Houses of Parliament, and urged other workers on the wharves to join them as they marched several miles back east, collecting more workers as they went until, when they reached Stepney Fields – open land just north of Wapping – they were joined by a ‘prodigious’ number of other coal-heavers and sailors. Within weeks, all trade on the Thames – a maritime artery of Empire handling almost one-third of Britain’s trade – had been brought to a standstill. Others, such as watermen and carmen, joined or threatened strikes.

Conflict

Undertakers continued, however, to arrange that strike-breaking coal-heavers be brought from Tyneside, thus subverting the alliance between the coal-heavers and the sailors. By early May, the sailors demand for a wage rise was refused. The government deployed naval ships along the docks. Conflict escalated. As scab labour began to unload the ships, a riot broke out. A sailor was fatally wounded. There would be little doubt about the severity of response. The atmosphere elsewhere in London was febrile. On May 10, troops shot and killed 6 (or 7, depending on accounts) people in a crowd south of the river protesting against the imprisonment of John Wilkes who had been convicted of obscene libel and seditious libel for writing critically of George III. 

Nine coal-heavers were charged with the sailor’s murder. Two were hanged at Tyburn, a traditional site of execution, but in a spectacular display of sovereign power six others were hanged in July at Sun Tavern Fields – close to where the coal-heavers lived and worked. Fifty thousand people attended, with hundreds of constables and troops deployed. Troops were kept stationed in the area until September. The hangings broke the coal-heavers’ resolve, but the underlying resistance they exemplified against the intersecting repressions of commerce and Crown was not forgotten and it fed future protest.

Legacy

While the coal-heavers and sailors encountered recurring exploitation, their protests demonstrated a power that could be exercised collectively against employers through the halting of production or non-performance of contracts. They deployed other multiple actions: petitioning Parliament, enjoining politicians, mobbing, intimidation, and violence. The initial ‘striking’ of sails on the Tyne and Wear, disrupted a form of transport that was inextricably linked to the mercantile-monarchical economy that both coal-heaver and sailor rejected and challenged – albeit from distinctive standpoints. The success on Tyneside was not lost on the sailors in London. Within days of the sailors stopping all outgoing ships on the Thames, we encounter the first record in print that fellow-workers (hatters) ‘struck’ for a pay increase (St James’s Chronicle and The British Evening-Post, May 7-10, 1768). It is likely that the technical term for ‘striking’ sails – which had secured the Tyneside sailors their masters’ agreement to raise pay in April – quickly circulated from the docks onto shore and then among London’s labouring population who were increasingly suffering from the same high prices for food. By spring 1768, a new term for labour agitation appears to have been coined.

Seamens’ strikes would subsequently occur on both sides of the Atlantic with increasing frequency, inspiring other workers. In 1775, shipwrights went on strike in Portsmouth – then the largest naval dockyard in Britain. In the US, the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers in Philadelphia, for instance, engaged in regular ‘turnouts’ from the late-eighteenth century aimed at protecting shoemakers’ wages, culminating in the early-nineteenth century in action believed to involve the first usage of the verb ‘to strike’ in America. 

Moreover, as Hitchcock and Shoemaker record in London Lives, the wage-earners ‘showed an unprecedented degree of solidarity during these disputes’, even though there were violent confrontations between the coal-heavers and strike-breaking coastal sailors. The strike represented a clear development in the potential for sympathetic labour agitation. Conversely, the settlement of the dispute over sailors’ wages which led to their return to work meant that coal-heavers were thrown into conflict with sailors, and not simply the strike-breaking seamen. 

The coal-heavers’ action was characterised by direct violence inflicted upon the body and property; from the coal-heavers themselves, the undertakers, and the Crown. The phenomenon of riotous assembly among communities was not new in Hanoverian England. It was a form of popular protest at a time when George III became increasingly reactionary and when the aristocracy and the newly-propertied landowners and merchants ruled Parliament, ignoring the needs and interests of the vast majority of the population. 

Moreover, punishment by spectacular hanging was part of an ideological process serving the ruling and mercantile class by turning London’s poor into a compliant industrial working class. It was one among a number of ways that law served, as Douglas Hay shows in Albion’s Fatal Tree, the interests of property and the ruling classes, another being the reliance on the offence of riotous assembly and the rapid deployment of troops to suppress disorder. While violence on all sides continued to characterise a number of strikes subsequently, notably in the US in the Homestead strike of 1892, a recurring feature has been the alignment of capital and state interest in the violent suppression of strike action – as evident in the Battle of Orgreave in Britain in the late 1980s, when baton-wielding and mounted police charged striking miners in the context of the Thatcher-government’s assault on the unions. 

While the legacy of the London Strikes resonates today, it is also necessary to acknowledge its distinctive features. The pivotal role played by Irish coal-heavers likely drew upon subaltern subjectivities. Drawing from actual experience or mimicry of Whiteboys’ agitation in Ireland, the coal-heavers deployed tactics of collective resistance and exemplary intimidation close to a major artery of Empire. It is plausible that the agitation among coal-heavers drew from Irish labourers’ resentments arising from hostility towards them elsewhere in England. Anti-Irish sentiment undoubtedly informed the severity of punishment inflicted on those convicted of offences but it converged with growing mercantile interests and unprecedented Crown anxieties triggered by Jacobite rebellions in the first half of the century and burgeoning republican sentiments that would inform the American War of Independence in its third quarter. The strikes by sailors would have instilled much greater fear among Britain’s rulings classes, whose status, wealth and power depended on the close alignment of burgeoning global trade and maritime supremacy. These interests and anxieties, combining also with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and a new era of radical dissent, entailed decisive suppression of political difference and the disciplining of a new and growing population of mobile and potentially unruly workers. 

While the suppression of the coal-heavers might be said as well to reflect an absence of effective leadership (though the absence of much else besides official records from the period warrants caution in making dispositive conclusions), it is plausible that the heavers organised on a much looser basis, with horizontally-distributed organisation rather than hierarchically-ordered authority. This may seem puzzling to modern labour activism. It was not until over two hundred and twenty years later in the London Dock Strike of 1889 that coordinated leadership bore profound results. Led by organisers including Ben Tillett and John Burns, it was a turning point in the history of trade unionism in Britain; marshalling a massive collective work-stoppage through a new union and agitating on a clear objective: payment of the dockers’ ‘tanner’. 

That the London Dock Strike succeeded, led workers throughout the country, particularly the unskilled, to gain a new confidence to organise themselves and carry out collective action. That strike played a key role in the rise of the British Labour movement. But the coal-heavers and sailors, too, were pioneers. Before ‘strike’ had become a word readily understandable to modern union activists and before labouring solidarity had yet to be framed into, as E. P. Thompson argued, an identifiable working class, these eighteenth-century workers made a mark in labour history. In due course, the ‘strike’ would develop from a tactic deployed against ostensibly local mercantile interests, through to distinct stoppages against government and magnates, and on to general strikes and actions against multinational corporations. 

Despite a number of discontinuities with contemporary industrial action, the London Strikes of 1768 remain important, not least for giving a name to a form of labour activism that is enshrined in article 8 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in the constitutions and laws of numerous jurisdictions, and in the struggles of millions of workers worldwide.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Hester Swift, Foreign and International Law Librarian, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, and Freya Levett, Royal Museums Greenwich, for assistance in locating materials for this article. Thanks also to Karen Bensusan and Stan Evans for comments on earlier drafts of the article. Any errors are my responsibility alone.

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An edited version of this article is published as ‘The Birth of the Strike’, Jacobin, 23 May 2018.

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© Dermot Feenan 2018