Scabs and Traitors: Taboo, Violence and Punishment in Labour Disputes in Britain, 1760-1871 by Thomas P Linehan

Author:Thomas P Linehan [Linehan, Thomas P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781317397465
Google: k31aDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 39821446
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-05-11T13:39:35+00:00

The origins of the well-known miners’ anti-blackleg folk song, The Blackleg Miner, with its less carnivalesque and much more uncompromising lyrics, is difficult to determine, though it may have originated in the attempts of the Durham and Northumberland pitmen to curtail blacklegging during the bitter dispute of 1844.8

It should be mentioned as well that, beyond 1844 and mineworkers, other groups of workers also wrote songs and broadside ballads, both emotive and satirical, to amplify issues and problems specific to their particular trade, circumstances and struggles. For example, the Kidderminster carpet weavers issued as many as seventeen broadside ballads during their long-running strike of 1828 over piece rates in an effort to give emotional expression to their grievances and promote their cause by other means.9 Satirical songs also featured in a strike in Wolverhampton in 1850 involving tin-plate workers resisting a reduction in their wages. In one such song, the Song of a Strike, apparently sung to the tune of King of the Cannibal Islands, strike-breakers or ‘rats’ were held up for derision, as shown by the following selection of lyrics from the song:

They [the masters] cast honest workmen in the street,

And catch each long-tail rat they meet,

…Now every maiden old and young,

Shun every rat who now does wrong,

They’ll only lead you in the throng,

Of slavery, not Freedom.

(Kidd 1949: 77)

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