It’s the 212th anniversary of “a black-letter day in the annals of Nottinghamshire”, according to Robert Chambers in his Book of Days — when the Luddite movement kicked off in the market town of Arnold.
As you may well know, although the name has come to mean ‘person frightened by shiny new things’, the 19th century originals were quite happy with machines. They attacked the ones owned by manufacturers who used them in “a fraudulent and deceitful manner”.
That is, they wanted knitting frames and the like to be operated by someone who’d served an apprenticeship and got a fair wage. Some manufacturers were keener on this than others, and when “several hundred framework knitters gathered in the Nottingham marketplace”, they were “dispersed by the constabulary and a troop of Dragoons” — so they “reassembled that evening in nearby Arnold, and broke some 60 stocking frames”. Historian Eric Hobsbawm called this “collective bargaining by riot”.
(Mind you, when asked “had the radiant tomorrow [of communism] actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?”, he said ‘yes’, so his concept of right and wrong is at the very least up for discussion.)
Not that the lower orders taking matters into their own hands was ever going to go down well. The first fatality was one of their number, shot in another Arnold incident on 10 November.
A mill owner was killed in Yorkshire in 1812 — although declaring his intention beforehand to “ride up to his britches in Luddite blood” might not have been considered conciliatory, and an earlier incident had seen another mill owner order his men to fire on a crowd.
That crowd was a reputed 2,000-strong, so he was probably somewhat intimidated — but, again, three deaths, 18 wounded, and five more people dying the next day didn’t altogether constitute diplomacy. Still, at least people elsewhere in the country remained calm…
Romantic future poet laureate Robert Southey, for example, wrote “I would hang about a score in the country, and send off ship loads to Botany Bay … suspend the Habeas Corpus. Shut up these bellows-blowers, and the fire may, perhaps, go out”.
Blimey, Bob.
To be fair to Southey, a serving British Prime Minister (Spencer Perceval) had been assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons the previous day, so things were a little tense in the country at the time.
The Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1812 was passed to put down This Sort Of Thing, and Hobsbawm reckoned that at one time, there were more soldiers Up North fighting Luddites than there were on the Iberian peninsula having a crack at Napoleon.
So, Luddism was quickly snuffed out. But at least we can all agree who the real winner was. The Luddites attacked looms with sledgehammers which they nicknamed ‘Great Enoch’, after the local blacksmith who made them.
Who also made the looms.
There’s always someone, in any situation, upon whom there are not all that many flies.
