Several early trade unions attempted to establish communities where working people could live in prosperity and dignity, emancipated from the industrial slums – drawing on their own financial resources rather than going cap in hand to the state or to wealthy philanthropists.
From the Potteries to the Prairies
In 1844 William Evans, who ran a newsagent’s shop in Shelton where he sold works by Wollstonecraft, Rousseau and Emerson, proposed to the newly formed Trades Union of Operative Potters that they throw their financial resources into a Joint Stock Emigration Company, to establish a model community in Illinois.
He aimed to persuade 5,000 potters to buy a £1 share in the scheme, paying a shilling a week, producing a working capital of £5,000.By October 1844 all the potters’ lodges had voted in favour of the scheme, and subscriptions were collected.Immigrants were to be chosen by ballot when subscriptions reached each successive £50 level.They would arrive to find a cabin built for them, five acres of land broken and sowed with wheat and corn, and fifteen acres awaiting cultivation.
This proved no hollow promise. The Union purchased land in Wisconsin and settled 134 individuals on 1,600 acres.
Unfortunately, back in the Potteries, the unity of the pottery workers fell apart when a rival union was established.There was also discord in Wisconsin about equitable allocation of the land, which impeded the process of legalising the potters’ possession of the land.The immigrants complained of the heat, the water, the Indians, and the sandy soil.
In June 1850 a meeting of settlers in Fort Winnebago raised charges of misrepresentation, corruption and incompetence.By January 1851 the Emigration Society was abandoned, and the trade union movement in the Potteries was set back many years.
Trade union farms at Sheffield
Around 1848 in Sheffield the trades unions took up the idea of land colonies, inspired by Feargus O’Connor.The Edge Tool Grinders acquired a farm of sixty-eight acres at Wincobank ‘with a view to employing their surplus hands’, and the File Hardeners acquired a similar farm elsewhere.
The Brittannia Metal Smiths established an eleven-acre farm at Gleadless Common Side, employing a manager and a dozen men who supplied a shop which sold the produce at market prices.Employees were paid 14s a week with 6d for each dependent child.
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961, pp. 246 and 254-258.
