ScS si lh-1 SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY FOURTH SERIES VOLUME 5 The Minutes of Edinburgh Trades Council THE MINUTES OF Edinburgh Trades Council 1859-1873 edited by Ian MacDougall m. A. ★ ★ EDINBURGH printed for the Scottish History Society by T. AND A. CONSTABLE LTD 1968 © Scottish History Society 1968 or B ^ a17^FEg•; to O 1363^ Printed in Great Britain PREFACE My thanks are due to Edinburgh Trades Council for permission to publish these minutes and to the Council of the Scottish His- tory Society for its invitation to edit them. I am indebted to Professor S. G. E. Lythe of the department of Economic His- tory in the university of Strathclyde for arrangements that enabled this work to be completed much sooner than would otherwise have been possible. Dr W. Hamish Fraser of the same department gave advice and information on several points and I am grateful also to him for allowing me to read his recent ph.d. thesis on trades councils. I did not read it until most of the present volume was already in proof, but as will be seen I have benefited from it at several points in the introduction. Mr W. H. Marwick kindly lent books to me and gave help in locating the obituaries of several of the delegates. Mrs N. Arm- strong and her staff at the Edinburgh Room of Edinburgh Central Public Library were most helpful in providing local source material. I.M. Edinburgh May, 1968 A generous contribution from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland towards the cost of producing this volume is gratefully acknowledged by the Council of the Society CONTENTS Preface v Introduction xi THE MINUTES OF EDINBURGH TRADES COUNCIL I Appendixes I List of office-bearers 373 11 Table of affiliated unions 377 Index 381 ILLUSTRATIONS Facsimile of Edinburgh Trades Council Minutes, i March 1859 (by courtesy of Edinburgh Trades Council) 2 Interiors of Holyrood Glassworks in the 1860s (by courtesy of Huntly House Museum, Edinburgh) 142 Banner of the Tinplate Workers’ Union (by courtesy of Huntly House Museum, Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Branch of the National Union of Sheet Metal Workers) 240 Introduction The task of writing the history of working class organisations and movements in Scotland before the late nineteenth century is made difficult by the frequent lack of documentary record. This problem certainly exists in the case of trade unionism. But the growth of unions in nineteenth-century Britain was accompanied in many towns by the formation of trades councils. These councils were purely local bodies of delegates from various unions and their aim was to promote the interests of working men. In their surviving records, therefore, is a body of written material revealing the activi- ties and attitudes of at least a section of the working class. Although much has been written about the history of trade unions in Britain and several studies of particular trades councils have also been made,1 this is the first attempt to put into print at length the original minutes of any trade union or trades council. The records which follow are the earliest surviving minutes of Edinburgh trades council. Though the council was not one of the most important of its kind in Britain, the value of its minutes as a source of working class and trade union history is magnified by the extensive loss and destruction of other Scottish trades council and trade union records. Except for the recently discovered first minute book of Glasgow trades council for 1858-9, no other Scottish trades council minutes survive for this or any earlier period.2 Even among 1 E.g., K. D. Buckley, Trade Unionism in Aberdeen, 1878 to 1900 (Edinburgh, 1955), G. Tate, London Trades Council, 1860-1950 (London, 1950), J. Corbett, Birmingham inTrades his unpublished Council, 1866-1966 ph.d. thesis, (London, ‘Trades 1966). Councils W. Hamish in England Fraser and has Scotland,made a general 1858-1897’ study 2(University of Sussex, 1967). Meetings of Glasgow trades council in the 1860s are, however, reported in the Glasgow Sentinel. The minute book for 1858-9 is in Mitchell Library, Glasgow (ref. 832300) . No other minutes of the trades council exist before 1884 (Mitchell Library, 832301) , and none of Aberdeen trades council, formed in 1868, before 1876 (Aberdeen duringuniversity the library, period: 124077). Dundee, No formed records about survive 1861 of theand other re-formed trades councilsin 1867, inGreenock, Scotland xii EDINBURGH TRADES COUNCIL English trades councils, which were more numerous, the minutes of only two or three1 exist for all or part of the period covered here. Similar losses have been suffered by Scottish trade union minutes, and only a dozen sets, some of them mere fragments, are known to survive from the whole of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. Of the thirty-one unions affiliated to Edinburgh trades council during 1859-73 the minutes of only five remain.2 The manuscript minutes of Edinburgh trades council are the property of the council and are kept in its offices in Albany Street, Edinburgh.3 The minutes, which are contained in some thirty volumes strongly re-bound in recent years, run almost continuously from 1859 to the present day.4 The first volume covers the years 1859-67 and the second 1867-76. The original intention of gathering the contents of both these volumes into the present publication had to be modified because of their bulk. The choice of December 1873, two-thirds of the way through volume ii of the manuscript, as the point at which to break off publication was not perhaps without some historical as well as practical justification. Not only was the trade union boom of the early 1870s then at its height, but also the date had some significance for the trades council since it was at the last meeting minuted below that the council for the first time ap- pointed a delegate to attend the Trades Union Congress. The minutes of 1859-73 were written by the dozen successive secretaries of the trades council.5 Their spelling was often idiosyn- cratic and sometimes merely phonetic, and one or two of them had weak powers of expression. None the less it is clear that each wrote up his minutes conscientiously. The handwriting is generally easily legible, the layout of each page usually neat, and the accuracy of the formed about 1859 and re-formed in 1872, and Kirkcaldy, formed in 1873. See 1W. H. Fraser, op. cit., 45, 58, 76-78, 92. London, Birmingham, and possibly some of those of Bristol trades council. W. H. 2Fraser, op. cit., 587. The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (hereafter nls) has those of the tin- plate workers (Acc. 4050), printers (Acc. 4068), and bookbinders (Acc. 4395), and will shortly receive those of the cabinetmakers. Minutes of two branches of the joiners are3 at the union’s Edinburgh district office, 1 Hillside Crescent. Permission has recently been given the National Library of Scotland to microfilm the4 minutes up to c. 1950. Those from November 1876 to July 18776 and from November 1903 to July 1906 are missing. Below, appendix 1, p. 374. INTRODUCTION xiii minutes was not often challenged. The naively verbose style of John Beaton, who as secretary from 1861 to 1864 sometimes incorrectly dated his minutes, was fortunately not typical. On the contrary, the minutes too often lapse from the succinct into the cryptic. They will be seen to illustrate the conflict of interests between minute secre- taries and historians, and from the point of view of the latter contain perhaps an unusually large share of inadequacies. Though the few surviving records of affiliated unions are slightly helpful and the contemporary press very much more so, it has not proved possible to identify or enlarge upon bare references to a number of persons, events or organisations. Any criticism of the shortcomings of the minutes as sources ought, however, to be tempered by three con- siderations. The men who wrote them were more accustomed to handling a hammer or a drill than a pen. All were voluntary office- bearers. Their secretarial duties had to be carried out in whatever time remained after employment at their trades for over or well over fifty hours a week, and in some cases in addition to work as office- bearers or activists within their own unions. The minutes of the trades council have, it is believed, so far been consulted by only a handful of scholars. Of these only three appear to have quoted from the minutes in published works.1 No full history of the council itself has yet been undertaken. The history of the trades council in Edinburgh before 1859 is largely obscure. As early as 1825, the year following the repeal of the anti- combination laws, an anonymous journeyman bookbinder in Edin- burgh published with the approval of his union a pamphlet in which he urged the formation of a local association of trades for mutual assistance.2 He proposed that each trade should ‘send a certain 1 W. H. Marwick, especially in his Economic Developments in Victorian Scotland (London, 1936) and Short History of Labour in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1967); Miss A. Tuckett made use at least of the late nineteenth-century minutes in The Scottish Carter (London, 1967); H. McKinven based on the minutes his short brochure Edinburgh and District Trades Council Centenary, 1859-1959 (Edinburgh, 1959). * A statement of the causes which led to the present difference between the Master and fourney- men Bookbinders of Edinburgh, with proposals to journeymen mechanics; drawn up by the authority of the fourneymen Bookbinders’ Society, by a Journeyman (Edinburgh, 1825), 15-16.