MASTER CARPENTERS (1783-1799)

A unique case study of British industrial relations before the Combination Acts, 1799 and 1800.

 

This case study was completed in 1983/4 and a summary of the study was also delivered as a paper to the Construction History Society in London in the same year. The study was re-edited and published privately in 2015.

 

The study is based upon primary source material discovered in the archives in the library of the Chartered Institute of Building, Ascot, and initially thought to be a very old collection of accounts that had been presented to the Institute of Builders, in 1899 by their first president: Colonel Stanley G. Bird.

 

One of the papers in the collection refers to a trial of journeymen carpenters at the Old Bailey on the 4th November 1789, and this trial was mentioned in the classic 1923 history of building trade unions: The Builders’ History by Raymond Postgate. However, Postgate could offer little background detail to it.  

 

The Webb Trade Union Collection (Collection ‘E’, Building Trades, Section ‘A’, Volume VI, pp. 47 -51), held by the British Library of Political and Economic Science, contains a report by Sidney and Beatrice Webb of their interview with Colonel Stanley G Bird in 1894, when they were researching the history of British Trade Unions, and it is now clear that Colonel Bird did not inform them that he had papers in his possession that predated most of the trade union records that Sidney and Beatrice Webb were able to find.

 

What we do know is that only five years later, in 1899, he presented documents to the Institute of Builders, to be kept as archive material in the Institute library.  

 

What these papers tell us is outlined in the following case study of industrial relations in the London building industry in the later eighteenth century.  This study give new information about our social and legal history.

 

The case study throws detailed light on the nature of British industrial relations before the Combination Acts, 1799 and 1800. What it tells us bears no relationship to the disastrous state of British industrial relations during much of the nineteenth century, before Marxist ideas further poisoned relationships between private employers and their emplotees.

 

I trust readers will agree that this a unique case study that warrants further examination and interpretation, by politicians, lawyers, employers, trade unionists, and all students of British social history.

 

This edition of Master Carpenters (1783-1799) is only available for purchase directly from the author.

 

For more information, email Harry at houldken@gmail.com 

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TO ORDER FROM HARRY:

Paperback, ringbound, A4 edition - £15.00 (plus postage and packing)   

(Email Harry at houldken@gmail.com for further details.)