Racial Exclusionism and the City: The Urban Support of the National Front by Christopher T. Husbands

Author:Christopher T. Husbands [Husbands, Christopher T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Human Geography, Earth Sciences, Social Science, Geography, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781135685638
Google: bLrXyqKonnMC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-03-07T13:08:27+00:00

Blackburn

Blackburn, like Bradford, is an example of a small market town that grew into a large industrial area on the strength of textile production. Its early reputation, like that of towns on the opposite side of the Pennines, had rested on woollen manufacturing, but its local economy was fundamentally altered by the introduction of cotton from the United States. Large-scale mechanised procedures slowly doomed domestic handloom weaving and spinning. Once cotton had become established as the basis of the town's industry, weaving became a dominant if not exclusive local activity, although one nineteenth-century history of the city (Abram, 1877, p. 210) does mention that a calico-printing Industry once flourished in the district.

Blackburn had the status of a growth centre during much of the nineteenth century and attracted a heterogeneous population from other parts of Lancashire, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Here, as elsewhere, the Irish population was the basis of the local Roman Catholic community. Blackburn's industrial history during much of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was one of continual conflict between labour and capital. It shared this characteristic with other parts of north-east Lancashire but the industrial militance of the town's history is clear from a succession of episodes that occurred at least until the late 1870s. As early as 1764 there were serious anti-machinery riots in the town. In 1826 loom-breaking riots occurred and at the same time there was an exodus of weavers to the United States because of local distress. In 1831 there began a strike of spinners who held out for forty-two months. In 1842, during the 'plug-drawing' episodes in the general strike of that year (Jenkins, 1980), and again in 1878, there were industrial riots. Those of 1826 and 1842 were quelled by troops. In 1826 weavers had smashed at least 160 looms and the riots of that year resulted in forty-two death sentences (which were later commuted), a sentence of seven years' transportation for one of the leaders, and numerous lesser gaol sentences. The 1878 riots were a consequence of grievances among weavers about reductions in rates of pay. An attempt to cut wages by 10 per cent produced a widespread strike of weavers in north-east Lancashire and 20,000 persons struck in Blackburn alone. A crowd reputedly of 4-5,000 people set fire to the house of the chairman of the Cotton Masters' Federation after negotiations with representatives of the workers had broken down. One of the leaders, subsequently sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude, reportedly roused the crowd with the call, 'We shall never be slave to our masters' (Miller, 1951, pp. 98-102, 122-49).

However, although Blackburn had a history of industrial militance during the nineteenth century, this never really metamorphosed into any corresponding political militance on the part of the town's working class. Joyce (1980, pp. 90-133) in a fascinating book emphasises the deference of the industrial population of Blackburn and elsewhere in the later nineteenth century and it is not easy to discern any marked autonomy in the working-class politics in Blackburn before the First World War.

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