Continuity and Change in the Rise of Labour: Working-class Politics in Plymouth, 1890-1920[1]

 

Mary Hilson

 

 

Introduction: The rise of Labour and the decline of the Liberal Party

Until recently, historians largely agreed that the changing political alignments of early twentieth century Britain, notably the rise of Labour, were related to the emergence of social class as a basis for political alignments.  Debate was concentrated on the timing of the maturation of class experience into political consciousness, rather than disputing it altogether.  For some, the failure of the Liberal Party to accommodate working-class demands made the rise of independent labour politics inevitable, even before 1914.[2]  Anti-trade union legal judgements in the early twentieth century strengthened the convictions of trade unionists that supporting the Liberal Party was becoming increasingly inappropriate, and led them to establish first the Labour Representation Committee and then the Labour Party as a serious electoral threat to the Liberals in the pre-war period.[3]  Other scholars, however, although accepting that class did become an important factor in defining political alignment during the early twentieth century, argued that the Liberals, as the traditional working-class party, were able to respond adequately to intensified class consciousness before 1914.  Peter Clarke, for example, argued that the ‘New Liberalism’ expressed in a series of major social reforms from 1906, was able to rally working-class support for the Liberals before the war.[4]  It was the strains of the war itself, and the resulting split in the Liberal Party which eventually led to Labour’s ascendancy over the Liberals.  Some progress was made by Labour immediately before the war, but no body of contemporary opinion believed that Labour was on the verge of a breakthrough: “no shred of evidence existed anywhere which might suggest that within ten years the Labour Party would be forming the government of the country.”[5]

 

Further debate has taken place over the nature of the class consciousness which motivated the founders of the early Labour Party.  For those coming from a Marxist perspective, the problem has been to explain the failure of the Party, whilst in office, to remain consistent to its working-class roots.[6]  The disastrous government of 1929-31 in particular has been interpreted as a betrayal in these terms.  Yet for others, the party behaved entirely consistently with the class consciousness of those, predominantly trades unionists, who founded it.  It was interpreted as the product of a particular type of working-class awareness; not socialism, but a socially conservative, defensive working-class identity which was cultivated by the trade unions, and expressed for example through the associational leisure activities in which many workers took part.[7]  Thus the Labour Party could be essentially characterised as a bureaucratic trade unions’ party, where loyalty to the movement replaced socialist ideology: “this was a trade-union code of behaviour; so were the political aims of the Labour Party essentially trade-union ones.”[8]

 

The most significant point about class-based explanations of the rise of Labour is the implicit suggestion that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented a period of fundamental discontinuity within British politics, when class replaced older allegiances such as religion, ethnicity, or deferential loyalties as the basis for political alignment.[9]  Recent work has posed a challenge to this interpretation, attempting instead to explain popular politics in terms of a sustained continuity in popular Radicalism which may be traced through the Chartist movements of the 1830s and 1840s, and the popular support for Gladstonian Liberalism, into the early twentieth century and the rise of the Labour Party.[10]  Of central importance to understanding political formations, it is argued, is the ideological content of popular politics.  The formative influences on this thesis are thus acknowledged as the work of Peter Clarke and Gareth Stedman Jones in stressing the importance of reconstructing and reasserting the intellectual roots of popular politics.[11]

 

This work is valuable, and much of it is persuasive.  The adapted quote used by Biagini and Reid to summarise their thesis - “those who were originally called Chartists were afterwards called Liberal and Labour activists”[12] - cannot easily be disputed, even if it may only be explained in generational terms.  The Labour Party was not fashioned upon an entirely clean sheet.  Many of its early activists did indeed express views which may be placed within the Radical political tradition, and many of them indeed supported or were active in the Liberal Party; some of the oldest could no doubt draw on memories of Chartism.  Indeed, perhaps the most useful aspect of this new work has been the reassessment of the radical undercurrents informing the politics of the period 1850-1880, hitherto explained largely as a difficult hiatus within the history of class struggle, or rather inadequately in terms of a theory of labour aristocracy.[13]

 

I want to suggest, however, that this thesis is inadequate as an explanation of the dynamics of popular politics, in that it fails to explain why the Labour Party was formed in the first place, and rose to prominence as the main political party of the left in Britain.  In other words, if Liberalism had a genuinely widespread popular appeal, and there seems to be no reason not to go along with the suggestion that in the Gladstonian era at least it did have, why did it fail, after 1900, to accommodate a growing body of working-class radicals?  Or, perhaps more accurately, why did it lose out to the Labour party in some localities, but retained its strength in other areas, notably the south west of England, until the 1930s?  This research focuses on the south west town of Plymouth, and explores the changing political and social formations in the town during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Analysis of social relations and politics in two of the most important institutions in Plymouth, the naval dockyard and the consumers’ co-operative society, suggests that the period may in fact be perceived as a major discontinuity within popular politics, when the entire political system was remade.

 

What follows is divided into several sections.  First, I offer a brief overview of the context in which this study is set, and then focus on the two main areas of concern, the dockyard and the co-operative society.  Then I turn my attention to the movement for independent labour representation as it developed within Plymouth, paying close attention to the deployment of particular political languages.  The final section is devoted to a closer analysis of the changes in popular politics during this period.

 

Context: Plymouth and Devonport

Existing work on the politics of the south west of England has largely been concerned with the continuity of the Radical tradition and the survival of Liberalism as an electoral force until the 1930s.[14]  The success of Liberalism was generally associated with the ascendancy of nonconformity in the region, especially Wesleyan Methodism, and social relations were linked to an elision of religious fraternity with class fraternity, reconciliation and industrial harmony.[15]  Thus the continued importance of an old-fashioned allegiance - religion - combined with other factors, such as the continued prominence of individual candidates and their personal votes, to characterise the politics of the south west as backward.  This was linked in turn with the portrayal of the region’s economy as locked into rural stagnation. 

 

Some problems exist with this interpretation, however.  In the first place, the coherence of the region itself, both historically and contemporarily, is doubtful.  There were some profound differences between the mining districts of Cornwall and west Devon, where nonconformity and Liberalism were indeed widespread, and the agrarian areas of the rest of Devon, not to mention the developing tourist industry on the coast.  Economic decline should thus in many places be understood as deindustrialisation, rather than agrarian stagnation.  Furthermore, the portrayal of the region as locked into rural stagnation is unhelpful for understanding the main concern of this thesis, the major industrial conurbation of Plymouth and Devonport.  During the nineteenth century, the town grew at a rate which far outstripped the rest of the region; the population increased by 345% during the nineteenth century, as labour was drawn in from the surrounding districts.[16]  The population of the county of Devon as a whole, meanwhile, grew by barely 95% between 1801 and 1901, and that of Cornwall declined absolutely after mid century as the mining industry contracted.[17]  Up until the eighteenth century, Plymouth’s main role, like that of the other west country ports, was as a centre for the export of the products of local extractive and agricultural industries.  In 1681, the town ranked fifth among English ports in tonnage and number of ships entering.[18]  During the mid-seventeenth century, the town assumed some political prominence as a major parliamentary stronghold.  From the early eighteenth century however, Plymouth, lacking the infrastructure and hinterland of other ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, began to decline, and it is from this period that its economy became dominated by its connections with the navy, following the decision to use the natural deep water harbour as a site for a new royal dockyard and naval base in 1691.  The town of Devonport, known until 1824 only as Plymouth Dock, grew up entirely on the back of the dockyard and naval auxiliary industry; it did not exist before the dockyard.  Although Plymouth benefited from remaining the major metropolis in the west - the railway arrived in 1844, and the port was designated as an official emigration terminal two years earlier - the dockyard and the navy assumed a position as by far the largest employer of labour, and this relationship situated Plymouth and Devonport within the national economy in a particular way.

 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the total population living in the conurbation was a little under 200,000.  There were actually three towns, the county boroughs of Plymouth and Devonport, each with its separate municipal authorities, and East Stonehouse which was administered as an Urban District under the auspices of Devon County Council.[19]  Collectively, the area was commonly known as the ‘Three Towns’, and for many purposes was considered as one unit.  Amalgamation became an important and contested issue within municipal politics, and was eventually achieved in 1914.  In terms of morphology, the Three Towns were indisputably maritime, bordered by river estuaries to both the east and west, and the natural harbour of Plymouth Sound, enhanced by the Napoleonic breakwater, to the south.  Despite the dominance of the navy, the harbour had other uses. Sutton Pool, in the oldest part of Plymouth, was the base for a sizeable fishing fleet.  The Millbay docks in Stonehouse were owned by the Great Western Railway, and served as a liner terminus and embarkation port for emigrants.[20]  The major influence on the economy of the Three Towns, however, was the presence of the navy.  Apart from the royal dockyard, which was by far the largest employer in the whole region, the towns, particularly Devonport, played an important role in supporting and servicing the fleet, and were host to large numbers of naval personnel.  These links with the navy had a crucial impact on the internal economy of the towns, and their place within the wider world.  It has been argued that the presence of the navy and the dockyard contributed in the long run to the underdevelopment of Plymouth as a commercial port, which has resulted in decline and serious unemployment during the latter part of the twentieth century.[21]  However, the naval connection also generated unique links with the national state, as the major employer of labour, and with the other dockyard towns, especially Portsmouth and Chatham.  It is therefore to the social relations and politics of the dockyard that I shall first turn.

 

Trade identities and industrial relations in the dockyard

It is hard to overexaggerate the significance of the dockyard in Plymouth and Devonport, particularly in terms of the labour market.  In the census year of 1911 it had a total workforce of over 10,000, accounting for nearly 17% of male employment in the Three Towns.  Together with Portsmouth and Chatham yards, and the smaller establishments at Pembroke Dock and Sheerness, Devonport represented a crucial link in the nation’s naval defence strategies, and underwent immense change from the 1890s as output was expanded in response to the European arms race.  Dockyard historians have commented on the distinctiveness of the culture of work within the dockyards, stemming from their unique position as long-established, large-scale industrial plants under national control.[22]  In particular it has been noted that the Admiralty’s institutional structures seemed specifically designed to fragment collective solidarities by fostering a competitive meritocracy and a culture of individualism. This system worked in several ways: by differentiating wages among members of the same trade based on merit; by a flexible and open promotion system through examination, which extolled the value of individual self-improvement through education; and by structures such as the Establishment which cut horizontally across trade divisions.  This last institution was a device intended to guarantee the loyalty of a core group of workmen by offering them permanent job security together with certain material benefits such as a pension.  It represented about 20% of the workforce, and in theory all classes of workers were eligible for Established status.  The greatest opportunities for self-improvement were available to the annual intake of boy apprentices, the brightest of whom had the potential opportunity to train as draughtsmen, or even naval architects, via a scholarship to Greenwich Naval College.  Even those entering as ordinary labourers or yard boys, however, could hope for promotion to the rank of skilled labourer, performing work such as riveting which normally required an apprenticeship in private sector shipbuilding.[23]

 

Although the Admiralty’s aim seems undoubtedly to have been the undermining of a collective workplace culture, it is more difficult to uncover evidence to show that this was indeed achieved.  The wage system might have been expected to foster a competitive individualist culture: each trade had its own strata of wage rates, and promotion to higher rates was on the basis of the recommendation of a chargeman in recognition of merit.  The Devonport evidence however suggests that the net result of this system was to generate resentment and allegations of corruption and favouritism among the men, and that it did not undermine the bonds of collective solidarity among the members of particular trades.  This view of the dockyard thus corresponds more closely to studies of the private shipbuilding sector, which have generally described the industry as one characterised by a rigid stratification of the workforce along trade lines, reinforced by the presence of craft unions, and beset by deeply entrenched trade rivalries and demarcation disputes.[24]  As in the private shipyards, the division of labour within the dockyards was based on a complex combination of different factors, and it is even possible that the Admiralty structures designed to foster individualism actually contributed to cementing solidarities among the members of different trades.  In this respect, perhaps the key aspect of the division of labour in the dockyards was the status of the shipwrights at the apex of the hierarchy of trades.  Unlike their counterparts in the private sector, the dockyard shipwrights were retrained to work in metal following the demise of wooden shipbuilding, and thus retained their status as the major trade of the yard, responsible for the greater part of the construction of the ship’s hull, and exercising a considerable amount of autonomy over their work, organised in small gangs.  This status was reinforced by several structures within the yard, even though the shipwrights’ wages were not necessarily higher than those of the other skilled trades employed in the workshops.  Shipwrights were more likely to have entered the yard via an Admiralty apprenticeship with the promotion opportunities attached to that privilege.  They were also the major beneficiaries of the Establishment, open in theory to all dockyardsman, but in practice dominated by the shipwrights.  Central to the construction of trade identities was also an entrenched culture of masculinity.[25]  Furthermore, trade solidarities within the dockyard were mirrored outside the yard, with distinct groups of workers identifiable within different neighbourhoods in Devonport.[26]

 

Perhaps the most unusual feature of the dockyards vis-à-vis private shipbuilding was the system for the articulation of workplace grievances.  The Admiralty’s position with regard to trade unions was rather ambiguous.  The official line was that,

the Admiralty were perfectly prepared at certain times to receive a deputation and to hear representations on behalf of trade unions generally, but that the workmen who might be responsible for preparing the Navy for instant action which was necessary in war should all be affiliated with a trade union, which might influence their action at a critical moment, was not a position that the Admiralty could accept.[27]

 

This did not mean however that the dockyard workmen were not permitted to join a trade union, although there is evidence that many felt discouraged because of their fears that chances of promotion rested on political acceptability as well as competent workmanship.[28]  The Admiralty maintained that existing channels for the expression of workmen’s grievances were perfectly adequate, and were not inclined to view leniently any resort to other methods.[29]  In place of more conventional structures of collective bargaining, the workmen were invited to submit  their complaints to the Admiralty for consideration, either individually or collectively, in the form of an annual petition.  The majority of these were concerned with pay, but petitions could also take up other issues, such as work conditions, demarcation, and nomenclature of trades.  Representatives of the Admiralty toured the yards and interviewed the men for evidence in support of their claims, and the decisions were posted in the yards after due consideration.  The dockyardsmen thus enjoyed unique access to the institutions of state, and it has been suggested that this helped to make them particularly aware of the possibilities for action through political channels.[30]  Additionally, MPs for the dockyard constituencies could also take up grievances in Parliament or with the Admiralty on behalf of individual constituents.[31]

 

Significantly, the Admiralty’s defence of this system, and their refusal to view favourably demands for alternative methods of representing grievances, was partly couched in the liberal language of the tyranny of the minority:

The desire now, as it has always been, is to maintain a fair field and no favour in the Dockyards.  Trade Unionists admittedly have easy access to Parliamentary influence nowadays and as a very large number of the men in our Dockyards are believed not to be Trade Unionists, it is here that the fair field disappears.[32]

 

The idea of the petitions system was that it allowed every worker, individually or collectively, to gain legitimate access to a fair and unbiased hearing of his grievances.  The use of a written petition, and of political channels via a direct appeal to those in authority, to seek redress for economic woes suggest that if any group of workers might be expected to demonstrate the resilience of the Radical tradition, and look towards Parliament and the rule of law as a strategy of social change, then the dockyard workers were that group.  In one interpretation, a reformulation of just such a discourse may be distinguished in the political philosophy of the secretary of the Boilermakers’ Union, Robert Knight, who began his career in Devonport dockyard.  According to Alastair Reid, Knight’s reaffirmation of the Radical tenets of liberty, equality, justice, and minimal intervention by the state was based on his experience of the government-run dockyards.[33]  And there is evidence that many of these principles found favour locally as well, especially as the organised labour movement began to explore the politics of state socialism.  Here, in Devonport, was an example of a government-owned enterprise, in direct control of the state; here was a town where the state was highly visible, and where formal channels existed to give all access to the state, and yet here was no state-run utopia.  Rejecting wholesale nationalisation of industry as a palliative for the inequalities of the capitalist economy, representatives of the local labour movement were inclined to argue for less, not more state intervention.  The following comment is from the local labour journal:

The Dockyards will not [under government control] become what they really ought to be, pure civil business establishments conducted in such a manner as to secure the maximum efficiency at the minimum cost.[34]

 

There is evidence however to suggest that this outlook was changing during the years before the First World War.  In 1901 dockyard trade unionism received a boost following the abolition of the pay classification system, which removed workers’ need to retain favour with their superiors in order to achieve promotion.  Consequently, the dockyard unions began to step up their activities within the yards, and to take a more forward role in the petitioning process.[35]  Further administrative reform followed, for the most part marked by a shift towards the casualisation of the labour force, in an attempt to economise on naval spending in the wake of the expensive new Dreadnought building programme.  Paradoxically, therefore, as output expanded, the workforce actually contracted during the years 1904-6, and pay was frozen and admission to the Establishment suspended for a number of years.[36]  For a workforce hitherto sheltered from the vicissitudes of the business cycle, this contraction was a severe shock, and provoked increasing dissatisfaction with the existing channels for the expression of grievances.  There is evidence that many workers were coming to regard the petitions system as little more than a formality which did little to alleviate their difficulties, and moreover, one that was degrading.  The South West Labour Journal was ironical and condemnatory:

The time has nearly arrived when those Dockyard employees who fancy they may have a grievance can avail themselves of the doubtful privilege of memorialising their Lordships of the Admiralty for redress; yet, in spite of the promise that early replies would be given to the petitions of last year, in most cases no answer has yet been received.  But hope springs eternal in the human breast, and it is astonishing to see the fervour devoted to the framing of a petition by most bodies of Dockyard workers, even after successive years of disappointment.[37]

 

This dissatisfaction was undoubtedly behind the first wave of expansion of the local movement for independent labour representation, as dockyardsmen grew inclined to bypass their Lordships in seeking redress and turn their attention to more direct channels of representation.  Dockyardsmen were well-represented in the local Labour Representative Association (LRA) which was forced by its financial circumstances to confine its efforts to the municipal sphere, but retained the election of a Labour MP as an ultimate aim.  In this Devonport lagged behind Chatham, where dockyardsmen succeeded in getting a shipwright elected as their MP in 1906, but from 1907 Devonport men, whose names are recognisable as those of leading dockyard activists, attended the Labour Party conference.[38]

 

A further dimension to dockyard politics existed however, which suggests a rejection of the state as a means of social change, and the development of strategies for the alleviation of material difficulties which were strongly mutualist.  Many hundreds of informal networks and organisations existed within the dockyard alongside the trade unions.  Some of these were merely social, such as the apprentices’ and ex-apprentices’ associations which organised treats and excursions, and the numerous football teams, which helped to cement the collective culture of the yard.  Most important however were the mutual benefit societies which operated unofficially, but were nonetheless recognised as part of the life of the yard.  An Admiral Superintendent’s order prohibiting the transaction of any club business during working hours was thought to affect ‘hundreds’ of unregistered clubs for sickness, injury, infectious diseases, money-lending and the like.[39] Some of these clubs attracted a very large proportion of dockyardsmen - the Western District Government Employees Infectious Diseases Club had approximately 5000 members in 1904 - whilst others were smaller, ad hoc, or temporary.[40]  Ultimately, these kinds of activities were linked with the rejection of the Admiralty’s paternalism, and by definition, state paternalism, by organising alternative, mutual provision of welfare benefits.  Many dockyardsmen were also active members of the most important formal expression of this tradition in the Three Towns, the consumers’ co-operative society.

 

Alternative Visions: The Co-operative Society

The Plymouth Co-operative Society may justly be claimed to be the most important working-class organisation in the Three Towns.  Membership grew rapidly from 1860 when the society was founded, to the point where it was the third largest retail co-operative society in England in 1908, with over 30 000 members.  As Figure 1 illustrates, membership had almost doubled by the end of the war, and the extent to which co-operation penetrated the life of the town is perhaps indicated by the inception of a rationing scheme in 1917, when 183 000 people out of a population of approximately a quarter of a million were registered with the society for the distribution of potatoes.[41]

 

Figure 1.  Membership of Plymouth Co-operative Society, 1896-1920

(Source: Co-operative Congress reports, return of trade etc. for South Western Section, 1896-1921.  1901 membership is estimated, based on average growth.)

 

The retailing sector was in a state of considerable flux during the late nineteenth century, characterised essentially by the rise of multiple store retailing at the expense of the small independent shopkeeper.[42]  The co-operative movement was well-placed to take advantage of these changes, especially in the vertical integration of distribution and production through the central Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS).  It is very difficult to account for the relative market shares of different types of traders, but there can be no doubt that the Plymouth Co-operative Society was, by the end of the nineteenth century, making a significant impact on the retailing trade in Plymouth.  Trade grew rapidly in line with membership, so that in 1908 the Board of Trade commissioners commented on the extent to which the society accounted for working-class purchase of groceries in the Three Towns.[43]  The society’s aggressive expansion, geographically across the locality as well as in terms of market share, threatened the small independent traders, and provoked conflict: anti-co-operative propaganda, and rumours of boycotts circulated widely between 1898 and 1905.  The conflict was eventually settled in 1905 by recourse to the law.  In a milestone case for the movement as a whole the Plymouth society won a libel action against a grocers’ newspaper, which had claimed erroneously that the society was on the verge of bankruptcy, and panicked many members into withdrawing their savings.[44]  The greater significance of this case for Plymouth co-operators, however, was the spotlight that was thrown on the forms of retail trade.  The traders’ threats were ultimately responsible for forcing the society to attempt to define a mode of consumption which was recognisably distinct from capitalist trading, distinguished through the creation of a moral discourse around the conditions under which goods were produced and consumed.  This could involve, for example, attempts by the society’s buyers to source goods only from firms which met trade union requirements for minimum wages and working conditions.[45]

 

Of central importance to this strategy was the development of the notion that consumers, acting as consumers, could work collectively to bring about change within society.  Accordingly, the debate took on a gendered aspect, as women were identified as the principal consumers within individual households, and became the main targets of co-operative propaganda.  Increasingly, the relationship between producers and consumers was conceived as a reflection of the marital partnership between the wage earning, trade unionist husband and his wage spending, co-operative wife.  During the war, the whole issue reached a new pitch as the society sought an alternative strategy to the price mechanism for the fair distribution of scarce basic foodstuffs.  Pre-war conflicts had been fought out outside the realm of politics, by means of propaganda, boycotts and eventual recourse to the rule of law, but now the issue was politicised as a result of the entry of the state into the field.  From 1915 Co-operators found themselves in conflict with the national government, over its decision to impose excess profits duty on co-operative surpluses.  Then, in response to the escalating food shortages, a decision was taken to set up local Food Control Committees in order to oversee local rationing schemes.  The composition of this committee was in the hands of the municipal authorities, and co-operators felt that, given their influence on the local food supply, they were grossly underrepresented when the new committee was established.  The outrage over the composition of the committee, and the intransigence of the local authorities, provided the major catalyst for the formation in 1917 of the Labour and Co-operative Representation Association to contest municipal and parliamentary elections from 1918.  What was most interesting about these developments was the increasing identification of common interests between co-operators and other representatives of the labour movement in Plymouth, in opposition to the private traders who made up the majority of local councillors of both parties.  Economic enemies in the commercial sphere were identified with the political enemies in the council chamber, whose vested interests were corrupting the fair workings of the Food Control Committee.  A local co-operative organ made this quite clear: although the councillors were represented as encompassing a wide range of political beliefs, “You will not be told, however, that they ALL UNFAILINGLY SUPPORT CAPITALIST PARTIES.  Parties, that is, who subordinate the interests of the common people to the profits of their masters.”[46]

 

This emerging sense of class within the society was further cemented by the consolidation of the movement’s strength within the locality and its associational culture.  The society’s strategies for expansion followed closely the development of working-class residential districts within Plymouth and Devonport, so that co-operative stores came to represent a distinct, identifiably working-class mode of consumption, one which was local, which involved frequent, small-scale purchases, and was governed, unlike private stores catering for similar neighbourhoods, by a strict rule that goods were not to be supplied on credit.[47]  The ‘divi’ system of returning profits to customers as a share of their purchases at the end of each quarter was the defining feature of the Rochdale system of co-operation, and probably constituted the main meaning of co-operation for most consumers.  Yet, in addition to the role played by local stores as nexuses of gossip and social contact, the society could also offer a network of educational and recreational activities which were equally as important in defining co-operation as an associational movement.  The Plymouth Society had a particularly active education department, funded out of the society’s annual trading surplus, and responsible for running a range of activities including evening classes in such diverse subjects as book-keeping, first aid, electricity and political economy; a winter lecture series; libraries and reading rooms; children’s classes and social clubs; a monthly newspaper; several choirs; and a full programme of treats, excursions and concerts.  Education had several intended purposes, it could offer opportunities to individuals through a range of scholarships and the University Extension Movement, and it also had an ideological aim of educating members in co-operative principles and citizenship.  Much soul-searching was devoted to the desirability or not of holding more frivolous entertainments such as concerts and dances, but these were undoubtedly popular, and furthermore could provide a form of recreation which was recognisably co-operative, and morally distinct from more dubious forms of commercial entertainment.[48]

 

A recent historian of co-operation has pointed out that the political expressions of many within the movement lend themselves easily to a reading in terms of a broad, inclusive populism.[49]  Indeed, the sense of class within the early twentieth century co-operative movement was at best ambivalent, stemming in part from its inheritance of an Owenite tradition of inclusiveness.  Pre-Rochdale co-operation had at its heart a theory of social transformation, but this was not based on class; rather, it extended its appeal to all humanity in a bid to transcend divisions of class.[50]  Recent work has made a case for the vibrance of this tradition at the end of the nineteenth century, asserting that the movement was concerned with more than the prosaic, everyday business of shopkeeping, and retained at its heart a vision of the Co-operative Commonwealth as a scheme for social redemption.[51]  Co-operative philosophy thus represented a continuation of an alternative tradition within popular politics: a strand of secular millenarianism which could trace roots at least as deep as those of Liberal Radicalism.[52]  It also demonstrates, however, the use and reformulation of political histories in response to present circumstances.  The decades around the turn of the century were a crucial period for the co-operative movement, and in Plymouth, at least, response to these changes led to the rhetorical reinvention of the Owenite tradition.[53]  The decision to enter politics, viewed pessimistically as an indication of the movement’s ideological bankruptcy by many co-operative historians, was actually presented by contemporary co-operators as a reformulation of co-operative ideology, which gained its legitimacy by reference to the pre-Rochdale Owenite tradition of social transformation through community building.[54]

 

The co-operative movement in Plymouth thus offers evidence for the existence of another tradition of popular politics, and furthermore suggests how this tradition was reinterpreted, and restated rhetorically in response to new and contemporary challenges.  However, we may also note the important shifts which were taking place during this period, firstly in response to structural changes in the organisation of retailing, and secondly in response to the government intervention in the sector during the war.  In particular, we may note the development of a sense of class within the movement, firstly in response to the escalation of conflicts within the retailing sector, and secondly in the consolidation of a strong associational culture organised within the movement.  This did not come to fruition in an explicitly political movement until 1917, with the formation of the Labour and Co-operative Representation Association (LCRA), but the prominence of the society and the extent of its affairs within the town were taken to provide a model for a new development of municipal politics in the pre-war era.  The final section of this article explores how these traditions came together and were expressed in the politics of the movement for independent labour representation in the Three Towns.

 

The Movement for Independent Labour Representation

The movement for independent labour representation in Plymouth and Devonport had its roots among the skilled workers of the dockyard.  Although so-called ‘independent labour’ candidates occasionally ran for municipal office from 1892, without conspicuous success, it was not until 1902 that electoral campaigns were co-ordinated under the umbrella of the Labour Representation Association (LRA), and the first labour representatives were elected to the municipal authorities.  The LRA was linked to the dockyard, inasmuch as many of its activists gave their trade union affiliations as dockyard unions, and its main electoral challenges were largely confined to the Devonport districts dominated by the dockyard workers and their families.[55]  The LRA was formed independently of the national Labour Representation Committee (LRC), and seems not to have affiliated formally for some years, but it was in correspondence with them, and was approached by members of the National Executive Committee (NEC) when the opportunity arose to put forward a Labour candidate for the Devonport by-elections in 1902 and 1904.[56]  Unofficial links were acknowledged between the LRA and other local working-class organisations, such as the Plymouth branch of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF).  The Co-operative Society too debated briefly the possibility of running its own candidates in local elections, but the idea proved too controversial.  Nevertheless, the society’s education committee contributed funds to the LRA, and many co-operators were active in campaigning for the organisation.

 

Crucial to an understanding of the politics of the LRA, expressed mostly through the South West Labour Journal,[57] is the predominantly local focus of its work.  The movement lacked the resources to run a parliamentary candidate in any case before 1918, but two by-elections in Devonport in 1902 and 1904 presented a potential opportunity which the national executive committee of the LRC was anxious not to let slip.  Enquiries were made but interest foundered amid allegations that local activists were not true to the principles of independent labour representation, on account of their willingness to support a Lib-Lab candidate.[58]  Accordingly it was municipal politics that was the focus for independent labour activity, and this took place within the context of other important shifts in local politics.  In the first place, local government became increasingly politicised as local councils extended their activities into new and controversial fields.[59]  In Plymouth and Devonport both borough councils found themselves drawn into conflict over issues such as housing, local transport and the municipal supply of utilities such as water.  Secondly, other new political groupings, besides the Labour Party, emerged during the first years of the twentieth century.  From the late 1890s local elections were contested by candidates running under the auspices of the Ratepayers’ Association, which campaigned on a platform of municipal retrenchment in response to escalating rates and during its peak year of 1908 had seven councillors in Plymouth.  Although it was alleged in some quarters that the RA merely represented the Conservative Party in a new guise, its candidates denied this and made a virtue out of the association’s challenge to the traditional two party competition. 

 

The political labour movement was thus part of a wider trend of ‘movement away from party’, which in its early years at least was the LRA’s defining feature.  The greatest virtue of the LRA, according to the Labour Journal, was that it

appeals not, in the first place, to Liberals and Conservatives as such, but to all alike as men....  The ranks contain ex-Liberals and ex-Tories, men who see the folly of distinctions without differences... Our candidate... will vote as his conscience dictates, and not at the bidding of ‘party whips.’[60]

 

In the long run, however, independence from party could not be sustained as an electoral platform.  The formation of a distinctive ideological platform was closely linked to developments within the municipal sphere, especially, in Plymouth, the campaign for better housing.[61]  The gradual evolution of the debate on housing is illustrative of wider political developments.  An Association for the Better Housing of the Working Classes was launched in 1900 at the instigation of the Plymouth branch of the SDF, as an inclusive organisation which proclaimed that housing was a question for all citizens and deliberately sought to play down the class aspects of the debate.[62]  The emphasis on a broad alliance of all classes against the intransigence of the centralised state may indeed be read as reflecting the dominance of Radical populist discourse.  Yet evidence also suggests that this position was evolving during this period.  After three years’ raising awareness of the high levels of overcrowding within the Three Towns, the leaders of the Housing Association decided that the populist emphasis was not working, and relaunched their organisation as a trade union based association with a more explicit focus on class.  What was hindering the construction of more municipal housing, it was argued, was the presence among the municipal authorities of those whose interests were actually opposed to this goal, the “builders, contractors, property owners and vendors; members of the legal profession who finance jerry-builders and advise others; gentlemen who hold shares in and direct gas, water, brewery, and cemetery companies.”[63]  The housing question became a key issue in LRA electoral campaigns seeking to replace those described in characteristically antagonistic terms as ‘self-interested jobbers representing private interest and privilege’.[64]  Independence from party was not sufficient as a platform in its own right, it was merely a symptom of the escalation of class-based politics.  The existence of the Ratepayers’ Association “furnishes,” according to the Labour Journal,

conclusive evidence that the property-owning classes are... irrespective of Liberal and Tory politics, combining ‘against the growing danger of Socialism.’  This combination is known by different names in different parts of the country.  In West Ham it is ‘The Municipal Alliance;’ in Plymouth, ‘The Ratepayers’ Association.’[65]

 

Does the Liberal Radical tradition lie at the heart of this politics?  The construction of class in this case could indeed be read as drawing on older notions of the term denoting the assertion of sectional interests in the constitutional balance of power, the municipality conceived here as the state in miniature: vested interests versus ‘the people’.  The Labour councillors, although elected on the basis of class solidarity, would nonetheless transcend class divisions and govern in the interests of all citizens, rather than the ascendancy of the working class.  Yet it also comes across quite clearly from detailed readings of the South Western Labour Journal that the contemporary perception was not one of an evolutionary and continuous trajectory.  The emphasis in the Journal is on the novelty of the new labour politics, and there is little self-conscious suggestion of any continuity from traditional Radicalism.  The following passage is worth quoting in full in this respect:

We must realise that the municipality is the people, and not only a select few - that the Council is a servant and not a master.  So far we have been labouring under the delusion (and are now suffering for it) that a certain section of the community have some divine right to govern us how they please.  We have been too long the victims of proprietary respectability - of the idea that the landlord must be the Council lord - that our boss in the workshop must be our boss in the Council.  The truth is that masters and men, landlords and tenants, are equal as citizens, and the sooner we rise to this knowledge the better.[66]

 

The traditional parties were presented as being hopelessly out of date; the Labour Party, by contrast was new, young, and forward-looking.  “So far....” “too long....”- the emphasis in the passage quoted above is on the change in consciousness, from subjection to equal citizenship.  Also important is the means of change which was stressed: ultimately it was uniform, sudden and complete.  The profile of one of the founder members of the Plymouth SDF, Arthur Grindley, describes a process of gradual awakening and realisation, but the final dawning of consciousness was characteristically experienced as a conversion, with its connotations of a clean and complete break with the past.  Grindley’s career had spanned “in turn, missionary collector, Sunday-school teacher, chapel organist, Band-of-Hope secretary, Methodist local preacher, then unattached Socialist, and finally a Social Democrat,” according to his profile in The Social Democrat.  Revealingly, the writer of the profile went on,

The changes are not inconsistent with one another, and if the first four are grouped together..., then each of the succeeding three marks a distinct advance in thought and action over its predecessor.[67]

 

Grindley’s speeches and writings were coloured throughout by a religiosity clearly related to his nonconformist preaching roots; references to ‘the Promised Land of Social Democracy’, ‘spreading the light’ and ‘preaching the gospel’ being only the most obvious.[68]  The short biographies of the LRA and SDF candidates and activists carried in the Labour Journal and the Co-operative Record conform to a similar formula.  The use of such a discourse demonstrates the vibrancy of other traditions within the labour movement, in particular the co-operative millenarian vision.  These alternative traditions were also expressed within the municipal programme of the LRA as it grew to maturity.  Municipal house-building was not the only policy solution available for the housing crisis; it had to compete with mutual strategies such as the Co-operative Society’s own house-building programme and a similar scheme carried out by a body known as the Dockyard Workman’s Dwellings Co. which built several streets of cottages in the Ford district of Devonport in the late 1890s.  The dockyard-based Government Labourers’ Union disaffiliated from the Housing Association over its unwillingness to countenance the proposal for extensive municipal housing.  Such views may be read as embodying the rejection of the state as a channel for social reform which was suggested amongst the political strategies of the dockyardsmen.  Furthermore issues of self-help and independence were central to the LRA’s programme in its insistence that municipal poor relief should be organised on the basis of justice - the rights of all to minimum welfare standards - rather than patronising charity.

 

Conclusion: The Roots of Political Change in Plymouth

It is not my intention to suggest that the trends in popular politics distinguished in Plymouth necessarily reflected those taking place nationally, or even those within the other dockyard towns.  Rather, it is hoped that the evidence from this study will help to complete our understanding of a fragmented national picture.  Some general points may be made however.  In my view it is necessary to consider the period as one of fundamental discontinuity in British politics.  The notion of a smooth, evolutionary transfer of momentum from the Liberal Party to Labour as the embodiment of popular political aspirations stems in part from the prevailing conception of British politics in terms of a basic dualism: the opposed forces of reaction and radicalism.  This in turn may be linked to an electoral system requiring only a simple majority, and the dominance of the two party model in British politics during the latter part of the twentieth century, in contrast to the multi-party models and proportional electoral systems found elsewhere in continental Europe.[69]  Nevertheless, alternative versions to this model have arisen at different times during the past century.  In 1916, and again during the 1930s, competing parties were replaced by a national coalition; whilst at other times a third party has commanded a significant share of popular support, sometimes resulting in a long-standing position of regional hegemony.[70]  I argue that the period around the turn of the century was one such crucial juncture when the prevailing system of British politics broke down, and was fundamentally reformed.  It follows, therefore, that we should understand the changes in this period not just in terms of the realignment of voters from the Liberal to the Labour parties, but as a major discontinuity within the entire political system.  Apart from the realignment of voters away from the Liberal Party and towards the Labour Party, these included a movement away from party altogether, expressed at a national level in the form of the pre-war patriotic leagues, and the ‘coupon’ election of 1918 in which the ruling coalition prevailed, and also at the local level where, as we have seen, non-aligned ratepayers’ parties challenged the existing bi-partisan structure of local politics.  ‘Country before Party’ formed a crucial part of the Conservative Party’s efforts to take account of the extended franchise, and reform themselves as a mass party with a popular base in the constituencies. It has not been possible to examine popular Conservatism in Plymouth in this article, but it may be noted that through the medium of organisations such as the Primrose League, the Tories were able to construct a populist conservatism which drew most of its success from an inclusive portrayal of imperial patriotism, as a counterweight to the potentially fracturing languages of class and gender.[71]  The extension of the franchise further increased the possibilities for mass canvassing to solicit votes, and necessitated for all parties a move from an elitist, metropolitan-based politics to the formation of caucuses within the constituencies.

 

Perhaps the most crucial change concerned the shifting boundaries between local and national government, as the nation state was consolidated, and the limits of government redefined.  To be meaningful, the renewed emphasis on local and regional studies of the rise of Labour must pay close attention to local politics, and recognise the differences between the coalitions formed at this level and those concerned with parliamentary politics in a local context.  The early twentieth century was a period when the boundaries between municipal and national government were in flux, as responsibilities were consolidated and extended.[72]  Before 1918, local government elections operated on a different franchise to parliamentary elections, although it remains difficult to assess the impact that this had on working-class voters.  Yet analysis of local election results may help to indicate a more accurate picture of the extent of Labour’s success before 1918, not only in terms of council seats gained, but also of electoral contests forced where previously candidates had been returned unopposed.  Also, even where the local labour movement was not able to achieve a critical mass within the council chamber, local politics remained a crucial focus for labour activism.  Individual membership of the Labour Party was not possible until the constitutional changes of 1918, but in the earlier period more informal ward-based arrangements allowed individuals to participate even when they had no trade union affiliation.

 

The central question remains, however, that concerning the motivation for political activity.  How do groups of people within any society come to recognise their shared experiences and identities and articulate their interests politically?  The fundamental challenge of recent work in social history has been the suggestion that the political consciousness of shared identities such as class or gender are not necessarily rooted in the social structure.  Instead, this work has seen an emphasis on language and textual deconstruction to explore how categories such as class may be seen as social discourses which are constructed in order for people to make sense of the social order in which they live: “consciousness cannot be related to experience except through the interposition of a particular language which organises the understanding of experience.”[73]  Class, or any other interpretation of the social order, is rooted in the knowledge and self-identity of the individuals themselves who make up a social class rather than in the social and economic structures in which these individuals live.  Some historians, notably Patrick Joyce, have questioned the existence of class altogether.[74]  Joyce’s emphasis on language and ideology allows him to show that a monolithic consciousness of class is replaced by competing discourses of social identity, of which class is one, but one which must compete with other ways in which people understood the social order.  Of these, class was in fact more or less rejected in favour of an inclusive and consensual ‘populism’, which represented a continuation of popular Liberalism, especially in its perceptions of injustice as being rooted in the political rather than the economical sphere.

 

Such interpretations are crucial to an interpretation of Labour politics in terms of a continuity of Liberal Radicalism.  Of particular importance has been Gareth Stedman Jones’ work on Chartism, which argued that the political demands of the Charter should not be treated as merely symbolic, but were in fact central to the whole story.  His method shows that the language of Chartism was not a language of class, but of political exclusion, thus placing it firmly within the Radical political tradition.[75]  The relationship between politics and social identity is turned on its head.  As Eugenio Biagini puts it, “politics then did not have the function of providing favourable legislative changes for class-conscious groups: rather it supplied a collective identity to groups whose social and material interests did not in themselves lead to a politically relevant class consciousness.”[76]  This similar emphasis on the language and ideology of labour politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, does, it is argued, demonstrate the centrality of the Radical tradition to popular politics, and the relative unimportance of competing languages such as class and socialism. 

 

What, then, were the specific distinguishing components of popular Radicalism?  As is often the case, Radicalism is partly defined by what it is not, in this case class.  Thus Patrick Joyce argued that while to qualify as a language of class, political discourse might be expected to articulate an understanding of injustices which were embedded in the realm of economics, combined with a strategy of social exclusivity and conflict; popular Radicalism by contrast exhibited a concern with identities forged outside the economic sphere, and was inclusive and universal.[77]  The popular sense of injustice remained rooted in the political sphere: even trade unions were concerned with issues of mastership, authority, respect and honour as much as bread-and-butter concerns.[78]  This work thus follows Stedman Jones’ analysis that the demands of the Chartists were rooted not in economic experiences of hardship, but based on a sense of political and juridical injustice, exhibited in their demands for open government and the rule of law, the sovereignty of Parliament, and universal suffrage.  Crucially, this work lays its emphasis on the underlying component of Radicalism: the concern with individual freedom, expressed not only through the preoccupation with the rights of every individual citizen, but also through for example the extollation of essentially individual virtues such as independence, and the Liberal distrust of state intervention.  Biagini and Reid are thus able to distinguish, when they describe the long trajectory of Radicalism, a continuation of the “strength of libertarian attitudes within the population at large.”[79]  Fundamentally, therefore, it seems that such ‘populist’ interpretations are an assertion of the individualist or libertarian strands within British popular politics and a downplaying of the collectivist and mutual traditions within the Labour Party itself.  The protagonists of this position argue that the ‘people’ as a collectivity were essentially reducible to their own individualist interests, and that the strongest part of the Labour Party’s inheritance was the libertarian tradition stemming from this individualism.

 

Undoubtedly the notion of a simple linkage between material deprivation and labour politics is far too simplistic; however, a total rejection of material interests would be profoundly unhelpful, it seems to me.  It is useful to reconsider Michael Savage’s attempt here to place material interests foremost in political formation, in particular his emphasis on politics as a response to material insecurity.[80]  The concerns with the fundamentals of everyday life - wages and food prices - were at the root of the changing political languages articulated within the contexts I have explored above.  Language was the means by which groups interpreted the material insecurities which they experienced, and formulated their response to these difficulties, but discourse must be understood in relation to the material context in which it was employed.  What were these particular discourses in the context of Plymouth?  As discussed above, evidence could indeed indicate that Plymouth was fertile ground for the survival of a Radical political tradition which stressed Parliament and the rule of law as a means of social change, and an understanding of the social order in terms of an inclusive populist model, rather than one of class conflict.  However, Radicalism competed with other traditions, notably the utopic Co-operative vision, and the vibrancy of mutual self-help found in both the dockyard and the Co-operative Society. Furthermore, these visions were by no means static, and were re-interpreted and employed in the formation of a new politics in response to the changes during the period.

 

Therefore, as two of the largest institutions in the Three Towns, both the dockyard and the Co-operative Society may be considered to be important sites for the formation of social identities, through the shared experiences of work, recreation, and the consumption of household necessities.  Whilst I reject any notion of a determinist relationship between social deprivation and political action, I have argued that it would be equally over-simplifying matters to reject such a relationship outright.  I have attempted to show how various different sites for political formation in Plymouth provided the social resources for a politics which was at its root collective.  Political formation is understood as a process of identification which rests necessarily on the recognition of collective bonds between individuals, based on a shared outlook, whether this be a sense of grievance or a vision for social transformation.  Inescapably, it seems, at the heart of these strategies was a critique of at least some aspects of capitalist economic and social relations.

 

Political formations may indeed be understood by means of a close analysis of political discourses within a specific context, but some difficulties are raised by the so-called ‘linguistic turn’.  In the first place, there is a danger that the concern with language necessarily underlines the primacy of written texts as historical sources, since in practice, analysis of historical languages has relied upon the close reading of these texts.  It thus becomes difficult to avoid place the weight of historical interpretation on elite discourses, as it is these languages which were most likely to be converted into written texts, and therefore make themselves available to the historian.  Gareth Stedman Jones has been criticised in this respect for his rather narrow understanding of language,[81] but to be fair to some of the more recent proponents of the linguistic turn, historians such as Joyce have stated their wish to expand the sense in which language is considered by historians, and to move beyond an understanding of language which focuses exclusively on public and formal discourses.[82]  Secondly, the more serious criticism is that there is a real danger here of these texts becoming unpinned from the contexts in which they were produced and consumed, despite the avowed awareness of the need for minute criticism of historical sources which the new methodology has raised.[83] A close analysis of political discourse may allow us to understand the reformation of politics, but it is important that these languages should be placed within the particular context in which they were articulated.  In particular, we need to understand how versions of the past were deployed rhetorically in order to contribute towards a contemporary picture of the social order and legitimise new political formations.  Statements of continuity should not be taken at face value therefore.  Central to the Conservative Party’s strategy for forming a political appeal to a new constituency was an invocation of an antiquarian mediaevalism, harking back to a golden age, expressed through the activities of the Primrose League.[84]  Similarly, the new politics of the Labour Party were articulated with reference to real or mythologised traditions: Liberal Radicalism, secular millenarianism, and even its own brand of mediaevalism in the guild socialist movement, which were reformulated in order to suit existing political contexts.

References

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Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic Ideas in the British Labour Movement, 1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Christine Bellamy, Administering Central-local Relations, 1871-1919: The Local Government Board in Its Fiscal and Cultural Context (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

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George L Bernstein, ‘Liberalism and the Progressive Alliance in the Constituencies, 1900-1914: Three Case Studies’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983) 617-640.

Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 

Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Mark Brayshay, ‘The Emigration Trade in Nineteenth Century Devon’, in M Duffy, et al., eds., The New Maritime History of Devon, vol. 2 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1994).

N Casey, ‘An Early Organisational Hegemony: Methods of Social Control in a Victorian Dockyard’, Social Science Information, 23 (1984) 677-700.

P F Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

P F Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

Ann Day, ‘The Forgotten ‘Mateys’: Women Workers in Portsmouth Dockyard, England, 1939–45’, Women’s History Review, 7 (1998).

Michael Dawson, ‘Liberalism in Devon and Cornwall: The “Old-Time Religion’”, Historical Journal, 38 (1995) 425-437.

R Douglas, ‘Labour in Decline, 1910-1914’, in K D Brown, ed., Essays in Anti-Labour History: Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain  (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 125.

E H H Green, ‘Radical Conservatism: The Electoral Genesis of Tariff Reform’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985) 667-692.

Peter Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870-1930  (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) p. 53.

J M Haas, ‘Trouble at the Workplace: Industrial Relations in the Royal Dockyards’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 58 (1985) 210-225.

J M Haas, A Management Odyssey: The Royal Dockyards, 1714-1914 (London, Maryland: University Press of America, 1994).

Peter Hilditch, ‘The Dockyard in the Local Economy’, in M Duffy et al., eds., The New Maritime History of Devon, vol. 2 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1994).

Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth Century Britain’ in his Labouring Men (London: Weidenfeld, 1964).

Christopher P Hosgood, ‘The ”Pigmies of Commerce” and the Working-class Community: Small Shopkeepers in England, 1870-1914’, Journal of Social History, 22 (1989) 439-460.

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A Howkins, ‘Edwardian Liberalism and Industrial Unrest: A Class View of the Decline of Liberalism’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977) 143-161.

David Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s’, English Historical Review, 111 (1996) 59-84.

Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-class Culture and Working-class Politics in London 1870-1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’, and ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Neville Kirk, ‘In Defence of Class: A Critique of Gareth Stedman Jones’, International Review of Social History, 32 (1987) 1-47.

Jon Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880-1914’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993) 629-652.

Jon Lawrence, ‘The Dynamics of Urban Politics, 1867-1914’, in Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997).

Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997).

K McClelland and A Reid, ‘Wood, Iron and Steel: Technology, Labour and Trade Union Organisation in the Shipbuilding Industry, 1840-1914’, in R Harrison and J Zeitlin, eds., Divisions of Labour, (Brighton: Harvester, 1984).

R McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910-1924 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).

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Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (London: Merlin, 1972).

Henry Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880-1906 (London: Macmillan, 1954).

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Sidney Pollard, ‘Nineteenth Century Co-operation: From Community Building to Shopkeeping,’ in A Briggs and J Saville, eds., Essays in Labour History, vol. 1, (London: Macmillan, 1960).

S Pollard and P Robertson, The British Shipbuilding Industry 1870-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).

Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880-1935 (Oxford:Blackwell, 1985).

Alastair Reid, ‘Old Unionism Reconsidered: The Radicalism of Robert Knight’, in Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

J Saville, ‘Trade Unions and Free Labour: The Background to the Taff Vale Decision’, in A Briggs and J Saville, eds., Essays in Labour History in Memory of G D H Cole (London: Macmillan, 1967).

Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

G R Searle, Country Before Party: Coalition and the Idea of National Government in Modern Britain, 1885-1987 (London: Longman, 1995).

David Starkey, ‘The Ports, Seaborne Trade and Shipping Industry of South Devon, 1786-1914,’ in Duffy, et al., eds., The New Maritime History of Devon, vol. 2, (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1994).

Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983).

Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: The Struggle for London 1885-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).

James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Mavis Waters, ‘Dockyard and Parliament: A Study of Unskilled Workers in Chatham Yard’, Southern History, 6 (1984) p. 137.

Stephen Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883-1896’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977) 5-56.

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Unpublished Theses

A F Alexander, ‘The Evolution of Multiple Retailing in Britain, 1870-1950: A Geographical Analysis’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1994).

A M Dawson, ‘Politics in Devon and Cornwall 1900-1931’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1991).

M K Hilson, ‘Working-Class Politics in Plymouth, c.1890-1920’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1998).

M T Hornsby, ‘Co-operation in Crisis: Challenge and Response in the Co-operative Retail Movement in England from the Later Nineteenth Century to the Mid Twentieth Century’, (unpublished MPhil thesis, University of York, 1989).

G H Tredidga, ‘The Liberal Party in Cornwall, 1918-1939’, (unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Exeter, 1991).

G H Tredidga, ‘The Liberal Party in South West England, 1929-1959’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1995).

Mavis Waters, ‘A Social History of Dockyard Workers at Chatham, Kent, 1860-1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1979).