The Tolpuddle Martyrs
The Tolpuddle Martyrs: By Marjorie Firth and Arthur Hopkinson ; with a Foreword by the Right Hon. Waltei Elliot, M.P. (Martin Hopkinson. 3s. 6d.)
CiN March 19th, 1834, at. Dorchester Assizes six labourers from the village of Tolpuddle were sentenced to transportation for seven years. They were convicted, under an Act of 1797, of " administering an unlawful oath." In fact, they were trade unionists, and the oaths concerned were merely those in common use at that time by all trade unions and friendly societies. The Act of 1797, which was passed to deal with the Mutiny at the Nore, had never been designed to cover them ; and the Tolpuddle labourers were as innocent of any intent to infringe it as, perhaps, any of the million or more of their fellow-countrymen who might equally have been prosecuted for doing so. Nevertheless, by the letter of the statute, their conviction was good in law. Such at least was the conclusion reached by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., when he reviewed the matter some years ago.
The ferocity of the sentence passed on these humble
villagers excited widespread pity for them, which was in- creased by what became known of their excellent personal cliaracters, their brave demeanour in the dock, and a certain " plain heroic magnitude of mind " shown by their leader, George Loveless. Three of them, moreover, were Methodist Meal preachers, and as such attracted the sympathy of Nonconformists. After two years a free pardon was obtained for them ; but more than another two years elapsed before
the last of them returned to England.
This little book, which has been motived by the present
centenary, is in temper and intention all it should be. In execution it is not so good ; there is far too much space given to. vague moralizing round the story, and nowhere a sufficient explanation of why things happened just as they did. For that a single page in Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's The Age of the Chartists gives you more than the 140 pages here. Robert Owen's Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, founded in the previous October, had made meteoric progress, and the Government were thoroughly alarmed - by it. Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, resolved to strike panic into its members, and to do so aimed his resounding blow, not at one of the Union's big town branches, but, as the Hammonds truly phrase it, " at its weakest point " in the persons of these downtrodden Dorset labourers. Th0
unfortunate men were sentenced, not for their own sake; but to frighten trade-unionists generally. That was admitted
by: the judge himself, when he said : " I am not sentencing you for any crime you have committed, or that it could be proved that you were about to commit, but as an example to the working classes of this country."
That was why (as the Hammonds say) "Melbourne insisted on carrying out this inhuman sentence, in spite of protests and entreaty " ; and that is why (as our authors in this little book ought to make clear, and do not quite) the six convicts are justly entitled " martyrs "because they suffered, not for an offence of their own, but as innocent scapegoats on behalf of others. It should be added that in his immediate calculation Melbourne was justified. His -blow shook-the Grand National COnsolidated, Trades Union to its foundation, -and gave it perhaps the decisive push towards its rapid collapse.
. This little book tells us what is known of the,naartyre after+ history, but unfortunately it is not much. Only one of the six remained in Tolpuddle, and he (after losing his sight), died in the workhouse. The other five migrated to Essex, where they were set up in farms purchased for them by the " Dorchester Labourers' Fund." But after two years they all left and settled in Canada. Why they did so, nobody now knows, and they passed into complete obscurity.
R: C. K. Exson.
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