Dr Annie Ravenhill-Johnson, born 1942, is from Jersey in the Channel Islands. She gained her BA (Hons) from the University of Warwick, and holds a postgraduate diploma with distinction and an MA with distinction in the history of art and design from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (University of Central England in Birmingham), where she also studied for her DPhil.

Paula James was born in Southampton in 1950. She holds a PhD in Latin from the University of Southampton, and is a senior lecturer with the Classical Studies Department at the Open University, having held the post since 1993. She is also a staff tutor in the Arts Faculty of the Open University’s South East Region. 

The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem, 1850-1925

By Annie Ravenhill-Johnson, Paula James

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 Annie Ravenhill-Johnson and Paula James
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-530-0

Contents

Preface, ix,
Acknowledgements, xi,
About the Authors, xiii,
List of Plates, xv,
Introduction, 1,
Chapter 1 The Genre, 11,
Chapter 2 The Emblem within the Emblem, 25,
Chapter 3 Depicting the Worker, 35,
Chapter 4 James Sharples and His Legacy, 47,
Chapter 5 The Development of the Architecture of the Emblem, 63,
Chapter 6 Arthur John Waudby and the Symbols of Freemasonry, 83,
Chapter 7 Men, Myths and Machines, 105,
Chapter 8 The Classical Woman, 119,
Chapter 9 Walter Crane, 139,
Chapter 10 The Art of Copying, 159,
Conclusion Reprise and Review, 177,
Notes, 191,
Glossary, 209,
Bibliography, 215,
Index, 221,

CHAPTER 1

THE GENRE

Annie Ravenhill-Johnson

There are many excellent books in existence dedicated to trade unions, their histories and their outward form of display – banners, certificates, posters, regalia, medals, pottery and ephemera. The intention of this book is to cover a previously neglected field – how the artists who devised the emblems of the Victorian and Edwardian eras conceived their ideas. Our inspiration lies with the groundbreaking work of Joan Bellamy, who opened up this field of exploration in the Open University Art Foundation course.

Little exists on the commissioning of banners and certificates. Minute books and monthly records of the unions and friendly societies, if they record the matter at all, often merely state that a particular artist has been contracted to perform the work for a given amount of money. In some cases, the printers themselves (who also produced commercial advertising posters) designed the certificates. Sometimes the certificates were issued with a ‘key’ in order to explain the intricacies of the iconography to the union members. The key was a separate sheet of paper on which was reproduced a scaled down version of the emblem and an explanation beneath. Sometimes the explanation described the scenes above and why they were included, but others printed a number beside certain figures or scenes with a list of the numbers beneath and a very basic identification or explanation of what was portrayed. Keys also appear in trade journals of the period. However, it is often only by studying the emblems embodied in the certificates and banners that we are able to deduce from the iconography what the union set out to portray about itself, the identity that the artist (often of the middle classes) chose to confer upon on it or the unwitting testimony it reveals about prevailing social conditions.

The purchase of a certificate by a union member would often be a major outlay, to be framed and proudly displayed in the home as proof of the wage earner’s standing within the family, the workplace and the community. The more intricate and detailed the certificate, the more prestigious it would seem, the more value for money it would appear to embody and the more time and attention could be given in perusing and examining it. Similarly, the larger, the more colourful, the more elaborate the banner, with its gilded poles, fringing, ropes and tassels, the greater the importance it would achieve in a march, the greater would be the pride of those bearing it and marching with it and the greater would be the impact on the viewing audience. Some banners were so huge that they were too large to be carried and were mounted on specially designed wheeled frameworks that were pushed along. Size really mattered! So banners, great painted silken sails, formed a major focus moving through a choreographed procession. But, unlike certificates, they needed to be easily read and understood from a distance, so their designs are frequently less complex, bolder and more striking.

The roots of trade union membership are embedded deep in social history. In ancient Greece and Rome, trade clubs existed into which members paid subscriptions and from which they received hardship benefits. Plutarch mentions the collegia opificum instituted by Numa Pompilius, which included guilds of tradesmen. Usually associated with the goddess Minerva/Athena, her temple in Rome on the Aventine Hill was both a religious space and a business meeting place, and throughout the Roman Empire tradesmen met in their schola in towns, for trade protection, socializing and for funerary grants to cover the costs of burial in the collegium or in a public columbarium. Elected officials administered the finances.

In second-century Ostia, grain was imported from Roman colonies and stored in warehouses for onward distribution. The Forum of the Corporations was a large, colonnaded square containing the offices of some seventy merchants and ship owners who conducted their business in the forum. Each room was paved with a floor mosaic identifying the particular type of business carried out there. The room of the ship owners and merchants of Cagliari, Sardinia, for example, was paved with a black-and-white tesserae mosaic depicting a merchant sailing vessel flanked by two rutellae or grain measures (Plate 1), and from this type of trade emblem we see the origins of later trade union emblems.

During the Middle Ages, guilds – either religious fraternities or trade fraternities – provided sickness benefits and financial assistance for widows and orphans. The growing power of the medieval guilds resulted in the depiction in high art of the urban craftsmen. Forty-seven of the stained glass windows of the twelfth-century Chartres Cathedral were donated by the guilds and illustrate the occupations of their donors. Vincent of Beauvais, the great dominican theologian who died circa 1262, author of the Speculum Maius (the ‘Great Mirror’), an encyclopaedia and history of the world, believed that the artes were a means of mitigating Adam’s Original Sin, the consequence of which was manual labour. Crafts became symbols of the arts mécaniques and appear, for example, in reliefs by Andrea Pisano and his workshop on the campanile of Florence Cathedral. With the advent of printing, moralizing Books of Trade were published in Britain until the middle of the nineteenth century, offshoots of this tradition.

From the seventeenth century, friendly societies were founded. Victoria Solt dennis, in her excellent book Discovering Friendly and Fraternal Societies: Their Badges and Regalia, relates how members, drawn from a cross-section of trades and professions, paid into a fund that provided sickness benefit, superannuation benefit and burial monies and how, after 1793, friendly societies were legalized under the Rose Act as corporate bodies. She describes how these societies adopted the outer forms of ritual and secrecy of Freemasonry with initiation ordeals, sworn oaths, passwords and gestures of recognition, and how each meeting ended in dining and drinking. They covered a variety of interests from serious debating clubs to riotous drinking clubs and, by the nineteenth century, women were forming their own societies.

Workers in a particular trade also joined together in trade clubs to air grievances, to make demands such as shorter working hours, to protect their interests by controlling admission to their trade and to protect ancient privileges guaranteed by Parliament. Prior to the nineteenth century, the movement was limited to a very few skilled workers in the larger conurbations, meeting usually in public houses, some of which still bear their names today, for example, ‘The Bricklayers’ Arms’.

The Enclosure Acts (1770–1820) ended traditional rights such as the collecting of wood for fuel, the grazing of livestock and the mowing of hay on common land. These were major blows that, together with the loss of the few acres villagers farmed for themselves, resulted in whole communities being forced off the land. The result was the creation of a new landless class now entirely dependent upon wages. They moved in to swell the labour forces of the growing industrial cities where they were confronted with long hours, low wages and appalling housing conditions.

The journeyman craftsman found himself working with many others of his own kind in the large industrial complexes, where the chances now of his ever becoming a master himself had become minimal. It is at this time that trade unionism really took hold. It begins in groups of workers banding together to protect their interests, to restrict admission to their trade or to fight against a particular injustice. However, the activities of these trade clubs and societies became illegal under the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797, the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799 (not repealed until 1967) and the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, when it was feared that revolutionary influences in France and republican ideas from America (promoted in popular books by authors such as Tom Paine) could cause the British working classes to rise in a revolution for democracy and political reform. The acts also applied, of course, to trade combinations by employers but were not enforced in that regard. Freemasonry was also exempt, due to its large number of aristocratic and royal members but, even so, every lodge was forced to register with a magistrate, pay a fee and produce a list of members.

Peace with France had coincided with widespread unemployment, not only for the many thousands of out-of- work fighting men but, due to the expansion of factory mechanization, for domestic hand loom weavers as well. The power loom, the steam hammer and the spinning machine took away work from the individual working at home, and relocated this work in the factory or mill. This new organization of labour brought with it the division of labour in order to speed up production and turn out cheaper goods.

Before the acts, any ‘conspiracy to raise wages’ was already punishable in law. However, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the Luddite Movement of 1812–15, led by the mythical ‘Ned Ludd’, revealed that these acts were not effective in preventing the joining together of workers who saw their livelihoods threatened by the new steam-driven machines. In Nottingham, for example, in March 1811, the riots there resulted in the destruction of 60 of the new mechanized stocking frames. Reprisals against the Luddites were harsh, with transportation, imprisonment and even the death penalty. In Manchester, workers meeting at St Peter’s Fields in 1819 were cut down in the ‘Peterloo Massacre’. In 1815, employers such as the Lancashire firm of Butterworth, Brooks and Co., were able to advertise employment for boys and women as journeymen who were ‘independent of combination’. But in reducing workers to starvation wages, capitalism ruined its own home market and became reliant upon export markets.

The restrictions imposed by the Combination Acts resulted in the growth of friendly societies, which remained legal because they existed ostensibly not for the improvement of wages or working conditions, but for insurance purposes and for the provision of social gatherings such as annual family outings and dinners. However, in defiance of the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797, which could inflict seven years’ transportation on anyone convicted, some of these societies, such as the Agricultural Friendly Society set up by the Tolpuddle Martyrs, still defiantly employed sworn oaths of secrecy in their ritualistic admission, initiation or ‘making of members’ ceremonies, with the threats of severe injury or even death to anyone who revealed them. It was dangerous for any trade union records to be kept so we know little of the unions during these years. The Iron Founders, for example, met on dark nights out on lonely moors and kept their records buried in the ground. Postgate describes the rituals of the Stone Masons in which the lodge was opened by the singing of an anthem, followed by a prayer. The Inside Tyler brought in the new recruits, the doxology was sung and the new recruits were told to kneel and read the Ninetieth Psalm, after which the President addressed them and a further hymn was sung. In darkness, the President requested that they be given light, then pointed to a skeleton and delivered a sermon on how death was every man’s destiny. Candidates were then sworn in on the Bible, and swore on their own lives to keep all rituals secret.

In 1824, the Combination Acts were repealed (largely due to the efforts of Joseph Hume and Francis Place, and also the negligence of MPs in reading the actual wording), making trade union membership legal. Employers were outraged, and lobbied for the restoration of the acts. However, even half a century after the repeal of the Combination Acts, the records of the unions still reflected those years of fear of discovery and trade protection. In 1873, the September Monthly Report of the United Society of Boiler Makers and Iron Ship Builders records that the Secretary had difficulty each quarter sending out ‘the pass-words’. As some lodges received many reports, the one containing the quarterly password was falling into the hands of ‘private members’ (i.e. ordinary members), with the result that the lodge officers were not receiving them. To overcome the problem, a key to the passwords would thenceforth be printed in the Initiation Book, with a copy sent to all lodges, featuring the ‘Hebrew alphabet’ with the ‘English alphabet’ printed directly above it. A key, of course, is itself symbolic of the unlocking of something such as a door that has been locked to keep people out or secrets in. In future, the password printed ‘in Hebrew’ would be sent out each quarter in the Monthly Reports, and by comparing the letters to the ‘English alphabet’, the new password would be revealed.

The union, with its social strata and hierarchy, was a class system in itself within the broader class system of Victorian society. Much of its new imagery referred to the secrecy of its clandestine years and its links with Freemasonry, which had also evolved from a medieval craft guild to a society of brothers engaged not in manual labour, but in philosophical work. Trade unions organized themselves along lines of the infrastructure of Freemasonry, with passwords, officers, regalia, rituals, lodges and grand lodges. In their lodges, the skilled craftsman and the factory worker alike bonded together for mutual protection, but almost as a by-product of membership they also learned organizational and leadership skills that would eventually lead to the formation by the working classes of their own political party. The history of the developments of trade unions after the repeal of the Combination Acts is well documented and no purpose is served by reproducing it here. Suffice to say that by the middle of the nineteenth century, new membership certificates for the home and banners for public display were being produced, the large majority of which were formed in terms of the classical, which, from the 1820s, had been undergoing an immensely popular revival in architecture, art and sculpture. The classical speaks of rationality, Roman Republican values and democracy. However, there was also a minority of unions and friendly societies who employed the Gothic as their way of representing themselves, influenced by the Gothic Revival. The great Victorian architect Pugin saw the Gothic as the expression of religious values embodied in British medieval architecture, but of course its roots are French, originating in the Church of St Denis of Abbot Suger.

Chartism entered the political field in 1837, originating in the London Working Men’s Association. It proposed a radical charter of ‘universal’ suffrage (by ‘universal’, however, it meant for men only), annual parliaments, secret ballots, no property qualifications for Members of Parliament, salaries for MPs and equal electoral districts. The movement was divided into those who wished to achieve these aims by force and those who merely advocated moral reform. These internal rifts, along with stiff government repressive measures, eventually resulted in the demise of Chartism in the 1850s, but not before London had been so intimidated by a Chartist rally held there in 1848 that the city was fortified and armed, anticipating rioting and revolution that did not happen.

Benefits first offered by the savings clubs of friendly societies became more and more important in the nineteenth century when the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 abolished parish relief for paupers in their homes and brought in the cruel conditions of the workhouse. The Anatomy Act of 1822 allowed the bodies of those who died in the workhouse to be collected by medical schools for dissection, saving the cost to the parish of burial. Under their 1839 Rule Book, when a member of the Order of Friendly Boiler Makers was thrown out of work, every man in his branch was required to claim an extra shilling a day from their employer to donate to him. If an employer refused, members in other workshops or yards were informed and expected not to take up any future employment there. Men also charged employers double rates for night and Sunday work, not for their own benefit but in order to discourage overtime working so that employers would give jobs to the unemployed. Many later trade union and friendly society banners and certificates, such as the 1866 certificate of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners by Arthur John Waudby (Plate 2), contain reassuring depictions of their insurance benefits. In this emblem, flanking scenes of working men, four small vignettes set between the two incised Corinthian pilasters on each side of the arch show the reverse side of the coin – what happens to those unable to work. They depict the accident at work, the £100 benefit payment, superannuation payment and relief of the widow, scenes which recur in so many emblems of the period. Union officials (sometimes holding conspicuously large bags of money) are pictured visiting the sick, the injured or the widowed, and old people sitting happily outside rose-covered cottages or at a cosy fireside – images designed to comfort and allay the fear of the workhouse. Later, under Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act of 1911, all wage earners were required to belong to a legal institution such as a trade union or friendly society for unemployment and sickness benefit. When this was replaced after the Second World War by state-controlled National Insurance and the National Health Service, the need for friendly societies within the United Kingdom dwindled.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem, 1850-1925 by Annie Ravenhill-Johnson, Paula James. Copyright © 2013 Annie Ravenhill-Johnson and Paula James. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.