BOOKS

The valley of death

Paul Foot

LAND OF LOST CONTENT: The Luddite Revolt, 1812 by Robert Reid Ware not Luddites' Harold Wil- son, leader of the Labour Party assured his party conference in 1963. He was anxious to identify with the 'white heat of the technological revolution' and therefore to distance himself from the rioting 'mobs' of the early 19th century who reacted to new technology near Harold Wilson's birth- place — Milnsbridge, Huddersfield — by smashing machines. In chorus, respectable trade unionists before and since have always reacted bitterly if accused of 'Lud- dite tendencies'. The Luddites, it is gener- ally agreed on all sides, were irresponsible hooligans. They set a bad example to the moderate Labour movement.

E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class rescued the Lud- dites from what he called 'the condescen- sion of history'. Robert Reid has followed that example. He has written a grand book about a grand subject. Few who read it will ever again be tempted to insult the Lud- dites.

The book takes its title and its setting from the description by Daniel Defoe of the Calder Valley, and that of its tributar- ies, the Colne, the Holme and the Spen, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Defoe fell in love with the valley at first sight. He was struck by its egalitarianism. Here were men and women making cloth in relative comfort, almost completely free from the arrogance and the subservience which dis- figured other parts of England.

The egalitarian idyll was very quickly shattered in the first decade of the 19th century. New inventions were suddenly available to do the work of the old skills especially of the 'croppers'. At the end of the decade, as the Napoleonic wars reached a new frenzy, a trade slump, part of it imposed by a tyrannical Tory govern- ment, threw many thousands of wool workers out of their jobs.

By 1811, the combination of sudden mass unemployment and cuts in the living standards of those lucky enough to work created a boiling pot of resentment among the woolworkers. In November 1811, at Bulwell, Notts, a gang of 70 men gathered by night, attacked the house of a promin- ent and despised hosier, and smashed up all his shearing frames. At their head was a commander who called himself Ned Ludd. The idea caught on. In a few months, the whole county was seething with gangs of workers, meeting by night, swearing secret oaths, and invading houses and mills to smash the frames.

The Luddites' influence spread like lightning through Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lancashire (especially

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Stockport and Manchester) and Cheshire. But the movement took strongest hold in Defoe's idyllic West Yorkshire valley. There the 'twisting in' of new members went on every day, while every night a new attack was launched on the terrified mill- owners. On a freezing night — 11, April 1812 — a vast gang of some 500 Luddites attacked Rawfolds mill on the River Spen near Cleckheaton. They were beaten off by a determined owner, and two of them subsequently died from gunshot wounds. In the fury which followed their deaths, Robert Reid argues, there was in the North of England a revolutionary upheaval. The millowners and the generals who comman- ded the troops billeted in the North of England, searched frantically for the lead- ers of this new movement. It was so well coordinated, so brilliantly organised, that they concluded with General Grey: 'There must be some persons above the common order of people, both in consequence and ability, who direct the operations of the rioters.' Like the police chiefs in London and Birmingham in 1985, they searched among known political leaders in parlia- ment and in high society for 'agitators'. They looked in vain. As Robert Reid points out in some of the strongest parts of his book, the parliamentary radical leaders were far more interested in their own verbosity than in any revolution among the yobs. Sir Francis Burdett, Major John Cartwright, even Lord Byron were sym- pathetic enough with the poor fellows up north, but really couldn't spare a moment from their devotion to Parliamentary re- form or romantic poetry.

In fact, the rioters were led by less famous people, such as the old hatter John Baines, and the young cropper, George Mellor. Such men were organisers of the highest courage and ability. They linked smoothly without any of the deference or hierarchy which inspired the organisation of their betters, with similar working men in the Midlands and in Lancashire. Their weakness was chiefly in aspiration. From the outset, their aim was to defend them- selves against the savages of the social order, to wring concessions from it — but not to overthrow it. 'The tragedy of the poor' Robert Reid reminds us 'lies in the poverty of their aspiration'.

One man who understood all this was General Tom Maitland, who commanded the huge army which set off to subjugate the disaffected north. Wellington had sailed for the Peninsula in 1808 with less than 10,000 regular troops. Maitland left for Yorkshire in 1812 with 13,000, and had access to 22,000 part-timers. This was one of the largest British armies ever put into the field.

Maitland knew perfectly well that the Luddites were motivated by genuine grie- vances. It was all the more important, he concluded, that they should be subjugated with the maximum brutality and speed. He made full use of spies and torturers who were able to get the information he needed. The more conspirators he could scotch by such means, the less, he knew, he would have to fight an open battle. The nastiest and most ruthless characters — Francis Raynes, who led the SAS of his time, and Jeremy Lloyds who doubled up as a torturer and solicitor — were encour- aged to wring the necessary confessions from the broken bodies of captured crop- pers until enough Luddites were commit- ted for a show trial. The rest of the job could then be left to the judiciary, who were as merciless as ever, and witty with it. When Sir Alexander Thomson, one of the judges, asked whether 14 of the convicted Luddites should be hanged from one beam, he replied: 'Well, no, Sir, I consider they would hang more comfortably on two.'

Robert Reid's `no nonsense' approach to history and to the squabbles of pedantic historians is refreshing. His style recalls that of Raymond Postgate at his best. He concludes a little hesitantly that govern- ment should make it their business to soften the blows of advanced technology. The truth was, however, as it is today, that new technology was introduced not for the benefit of everyone, but for the benefit of one class.

There was therefore no chance whatever that the increased wealth it would provide would be enjoyed, even in the smallest part, by the low-born people who did the work. Their resistance was therefore as justified as it was determined. Its failure lay not in its activity nor in its organisation but in its lack of resolve to remove the real cause of their distress: the division of society, its wealth and its labour, by class.

Robert Reid does not spell that out, but it shouts from every page of his exciting book. I only hope he turns his skills as television producer to a big new series on the Risings of the Luddites, and that the heroes of his story take up their proper place in the popular imagination.