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Edwardian Labour Unrest and Coalfield Militancy, 1890–1914*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Roy Church
Roy Church
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Extract

For many years a consensus among historians of the Edwardian age drew a contrast between the essentially stable, liberal society of the late Victorian years, when discussion, compromise and orderly behaviour were the norm, and an Edwardian society in which tacit conventions governing the conduct of those involved in social and political movements began to be rejected – by Pankhurst feminists, Ulster Unionists, trade union militants and syndicalists. This period of crisis was so described in 1935 by Edward Dangerfield in the The strange death of liberal England, a brilliantly evocative title which, despite the lack of precision contained in the argument presented in his book, exercised an enduring influence on subsequent interpretations of British social and political history before 1914. G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate reinforced this interpretation of a society in crisis, and not until Dr Henry Pelling's Politics and society in late Victorian Britain appeared in 1968 was the notion firmly rejected. There he denied that the convergence of the Irish conflict over home rule, the violence of the militant suffragettes, and unprecedented labour unrest signified either connexions or a common fundamental cause. The re-printing of Dangerfield's book in 1980 (and Pelling's in 1979) has been followed by renewed interest in these competitive hypotheses, and has led historians to re-examine the Edwardian age.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 841 - 857
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 For convenient summaries, see Pelling, Henry, Popular politics and society in late Victorian Britain, 2nd edn (London, 1979), pp. 147–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and White, Joe, ‘1910–1914 reconsidered’, in Cronin, James E. and Schneer, Jonathan (eds.), Social conflict and the political order in modern Britain (London, 1982), pp. 73–5Google Scholar.

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11 Price, Masters, unions and men, chs. 5–7.

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18 Davidson, Roger, The labour problem in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (London, 1985), pp. 85–98Google Scholar, provides a detailed account of the work of the labour department of the board of trade and its predecessor the labour bureau.

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23 Changes in the criteria are documented in the annual report on strikes and lock-outs as a preamble to the statistical tables.

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27 Ibid, 106–7, 176.

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30 Ibid.

31 Brown, Phelps, Growth of British industrial relations (London, 1959), p. 334Google Scholar.

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35 Ibid, pp. 522–41.

36 Ibid, pp. 578–80.

37 See below.

38 White, , ‘1910–1914 reconsidered’, p. 76Google Scholar.

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41 Ibid. pp. 337–8.

42 Ibid. pp. 558–60.

43 Ibid. pp. 420–2.

44 Ibid. pp. 589–90.

45 Ibid. p. 584.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid. p. 725.

48 Ibid. p. 693.

49 Ibid. pp. 713–14, 729–30.

50 Ibid. p. 728.

51 White, , ‘1910–1914 reconsidered’, pp. 80–4Google Scholar.

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54 See especially Jones, G. Stedman, ‘Working class culture and working class politics in London, 1870–1900: note on the re-making of a working class’, Journal of Social History, VII (1974), 460–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meacham, A life apart, ch. 7.

55 An extensive literature produced by sociologists pursues this theme, though the thesis is not universally accepted. For an historian's interpretation of mining communities see Storm-Clark, Christopher, ‘The miners, 1870–1970: a test for oral history’, Victorian Studies, XV (1971), 49–74Google Scholar.

56 White, J., Limits of trade union militancy, p. 180Google Scholar.

57 An alternative comparative approach to measuring strike proneness as a persistent phenomenon in certain regions excludes the very large stoppages which were either national, inter-regional, or extensive regional. The result showed south Wales and Scotland to be relatively militant regions, but also recorded a high percentage of working days lost in Yorkshire compared with the proportion of miners employed in the region.

58 Cronin, , Industrial conflict, pp. 106–7Google Scholar.

59 Ibid.

60 Gregory, Roy, The miners and politics (Oxford, 1968), pp. 189–90Google Scholar.