Cardiff Cigar Workers and The Feminine Strike of 1911

R U O
Pamphlet No. 4
HISTORY
New Series 1.50
Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911 by Robert Griffiths
Published by the Communist Party May 2012 ISBN 978-1-908315-16-8
Britains Road to Socialism

The new edition of Britains Road to Socialism, the Communist Partys programme, adopted in July 2011; presents and analysis of capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be bought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like. The BRS was first published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century. Other previous editions of the BRS have been published in 1952, 1958, 1968, 1977, 1989 and 2000 as well as multiple substantially revised versions.
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Our History No. 4
R U O
Pamphlet No. 4
HISTORY
Communist Party
www.communist-party.org.uk
New Series
1.50
AND THE 'FEMININE STRIKE' OF 1911 by Robert Griffiths

CONTENTS
page Prefaceby Robert Griffiths Cardiff and the 1911 strike wave Women and girls to the for! Freemansthe fight continues The storm before the calm Notes 2 6 11 16 20 26
Cardiff Cigar Workers
Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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Preface
Communist Party History Group
During the first decade of the 20th century, living standards declined for large sections of the labour force in Britain. While wages were stagnant for many workers, food prices rose by an average of 14 per cent between 1900 and 1911. [1] The British economy's competitive position deteriorated in the face of sharpening competition from Germany, France, the United States and other capitalist powers. Increasingly, the trade gap had to be compensated by rising returns from rent, profit and interest on financial services, shipping and overseas investment. At the same time, the British capitalist class was squeezing workers' pay packets at home while importing cheap goods from overseas in an effort to deflate the pressure for wage rises. Politically, Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George had manoeuvred the Tory Party into a trap which was precipitating a full-blown constitutional crisis. The House of Lords had obligingly rejected his 'People's Budget' two years previously. Their Lordships were equally determined to reject the Liberal government's proposals for Irish home rule and Welsh disestablishment. Now, in the summer of 1911, the original 'Welsh wizard' was planning to clip their wings.
(Civil Service Live network) Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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In the labour movement, the impact of so-called 'New Unionism' and the socialist revival of the 1880s and 1890s could still be felt. The spread of trade unionism among unskilled and semiskilled workers had not been wholly reversed by the employers' counter-offensive. The new Labour Party had taken root in many working Women workers strike (origin unknown) class communities, due in no small part to the spade-work done by local trades councils and the Independent Labour Party. Legal rulings such as the Taff Vale judgement in 1901 (which made trade unions financially liable for the cost of industrial action) and the Osborne verdict in 1909 (which outlawed union funding of the Labour Party) had ignited passions and hardened resolve, drawing more workers into the organised labour movement. From 1908, the tempo of industrial struggle had quickened as different battalions took action for higher wages, shorter hours and union recognition for collective bargaining purposes.
Womens Suffrage Meeting, Punch Magazine (1911) Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
Cardiff and the 1911 strike wave

In summer 1911 as the dry, hot weather showed no sign of abating, the National Sailors and Firemen's Union signalled that the industrial storm that was about to break. Its members refused to embark ships from midJune, the shipowners having refused to negotiate new pay scales with the union's Tom Mann, addresses a mass assembly of workers representatives. The (Phil Dickens 18/03/2011 Liverpool dockers then propertyistheft.wordpress.com) walked out in solidarity led by Tom Mann, co-founder of the National Federation of Transport Workers. In Cardiff, the seafarers responded enthusiastically to the strike call issued at a mass meeting on June 14, at Neptune Park on Newport Road. [2] Subsequently, they thronged regularly at the dock gates opposite the Sailors' and Firemen's offices, on the corner of James Street and Bute Street, from the balcony of which they were whipped up by their local union organiser, the bizarre and quixotic Captain Tupper. Part swashbuckling militant and part collaborator with the shipping bosses, he claimed to have been working for the Secret Service since 1906. [3] That claim may have been true; his captaincy, like his boast of the Victoria Cross, was almost certainly false. The seafarers' union had lost its pre-eminence in the city, by now the biggest coal port in the world. The expansion of waterfront industries and municipal and retail services had reduced the seafarers' share of Cardiff's workforce from more than one-quarter in 1871 to less than one-tenth by 1911. Moreover, shipping was a particularly difficult industry to unionise
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in an exporting port. Once the money from their last ship had run out, sailors would arrive from far and wide to sign on with an outward-bound cargo boat. The Cardiff Shipowners Association had long resisted union attempts to fix standard wage rates for the port as a whole. The companies preferred the inexorable law of supply and demand, setting rates for each voyage individually in the knowledge that they were dealing with large numbers of transient workers desperate for a wage. [4]
Tupper addressing the crowd at Bute Docks in 1911 (peoplescollectionwales)
Other unions also organised on the Cardiff waterfront. Back in 1891, the Dockers Union had joined the seafarers in action to exclude non-union labour from the ships. But the 'tippers' (coal-loaders on the quayside) were defeated by the Bute Docks Company, having failed to gain support from the men who stowed the coal on board, members of the newly-formed Cardiff Coal Trimmers Union (CCTU). [5] Although many tippers subsequently defected to the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the Dockers Union eventually managed to establish itself among other sections of the waterfront workforce. In doing so, they overcame the ferocious anti-unionism of W.T. Lewis (later Baron Merthyr), managing director of the Bute Docks Company, Tory, coalowner and unofficial chief constable of the docks police. His hostility to trade unions did not, however, extend to the Cardiff Coal Trimmers Union (which had refused to join Tom Mann and Ben Tillett's transport federation). The trimmers provided Cardiff Trades Council with its most prominent leaders usually Liberals at least until 1908, after which Independent
Labour Party (ILP) members came to the fore. Thereafter, too, the ILP and the Trades Council finally succeeded in establishing permanent Labour Party organisation in the city, as the Cardiff and District Labour Party affiliated to the Labour Representation Committee. [6] Yet the 'Lib-lab' influence persisted, Coal ships tied up at Cardiff c1911 not least because of the relative (The Libary of Congress, USA) numerical strength and political weight of the CCTU in relation to the weaker but more left-wing Dockers Union. Nonetheless, the mood in the latter half of June and early July, 1911, was one of unity, solidarity and militancy. The moulders at GKN steelworks were already on strike in the city, with Keir Hardie championing their case in the House of Commons for fair pay in accordance with Admiralty contracts. [7] Now, inspired by victories at one port after another, Cardiff's seafarers picketed docks and ships, paying special attention to strikebreakers such as the Chinese workers brought down by train from East London by the Board of Trade on behalf of the shipowners. [8] The SS Lady Jocelyn had arrived in the Penarth Roads for 'the purpose of accommodating non-union seamen to be supplied through the Shipping Federation for the different ships lying in the Docks', in the words of Cardiff Head Constable William McKenzie. [9] Efforts to put men on board near Sully had failed. On July Mounted police wait near the Royal Docks during the docks strike of July 17, workers at Cardiff's East Dock
1912. (Port Cities London) Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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refused to unload SS Annan because the crew was in dispute over pay. Attempts to use non-union labour from the workhouse inflamed the situation the next day, as protestors lit fires on the quayside and clashed with police. The Head Constable successfully applied to the Home Office for the Troops near Llanelli during the 1911 railway importation of what in the Strike, (peoplescollectionwales.co.uk) end amounted to 320 officers from the Metropolitan Police and 90 from neighbouring forces. Early on Wednesday morning, July 19, a strike committee was convened in the offices of Captain Tupper. Cardiff's largest union the National Amalgamated Labourers Union sent a representative, as did the dockers, the Fitters' Helpers Society, the Rivet Workers Union and the Cooks and Stewards Society. The Boilermakers Society and the coal trimmers attended in an 'unofficial' capacity. The Cardiff strikers resolved to 'remain out until settlement is arrived at affecting every section of workers involved, and furthermore call for the active support of all Trade Unionists now at work by a policy of down tools, the full Police and strike-breakers during the 1911 settlement to be submitted to
strike.(National Maritime Museum, London) Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
a full conference for confirmation'. Their statement also warned that 'any section violating this will be repudiated'. [10] At 10 o'clock that morning, between fifty and sixty strikers marched from Tyndall Street to Roath Dock and back, calling out the deal-carriers, timber men, tippers and trimmers with growing success. On the way, the marchers now in their hundreds anti coal strike cartoon (Western Mail June 8, 1898) captured several charabancs of luggage belonging to Chinese strike-breakers who were aboard SS Farley in Queen Alexandra Dock. Ten mounted and docks police were beaten off as the charabancs were hauled back to Tyndall Street to be looted and burnt by a large crowd. According to the main local morning paper: 'A feature of the incident was the prominent part taken by women and children'. [11] By the next day, the dockers of Cardiff and Newport had joined the strike, followed by the coal trimmers whose Executive Committee had decided that their members could no longer work 'under the indignity of police protection'. [12] With some six thousand workers now on strike at Cardiff docks, extra police were arriving from London, Gloucester, Monmouth and Merthyr Tydfil. Lord Mayor Charles Bird divided his efforts between instructing the Head Constable to summon the military (500 infantry and 150 cavalry) and seeking to conciliate between employers and unions. [13]
Soldiers during a 1912 strike ([I Edwards] North Wales Miners Association Trust Ltd)
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On Thursday evening, July 20, large crowds attacked Chinese laundries and lodging houses in the Cathays, Canton, Grangetown, Riverside and Roath areas of the city. Police were pulled from their horses while struggling to restore order. According to press reports, few bona-fide strikers took part in the violence. However, Cardiff Trades Council and Captain 1910 Tonypandy- after serious civil disturTupper had already called for a bances boycott of the laundries in the belief largely if not wholly erroneous that they were housing Chinese strikebreakers. [14] Only a few days previously, too, Chinese seafarers aboard the besieged SS Foreric in Bute Dock had drawn knives to defend themselves during fierce fighting with local strikers. Increasingly over previous years, Hong Kong Chinese seafarers had been signing on at Cardiff for ships exporting coal. Excluded from the union because they were new to the industry and exempted from the employers' somewhat selective English-language tests, they had quickly gained a reputation for accepting low pay and undermining solidarity a reputation seemingly reinforced by the Board of Trade's railway escapades and the strike-breaking preparations on board SS Farley and SS Foreric. Thus there was no A solitary scab tram halted whilst a massive love lost between Cardiff seafarers march of a thousand strikers in their uni- and dockers, on the one hand, and form prove the press wrong it had been their Chinese counterparts on the claimed only 250 were on strike and all other. [15] At the same time, it
trams were running normally Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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should be acknowledged that most of the city's Chinese residents were innocent of any involvement in the machinations of employers and the state at that time.
On the Friday, a number of marches around the docks and through surrounding streets Unemployed miners march along Rich- spread the strike to more ard St, Cilfynydd, during the Cambrian workplaces. With coal trimmers Colliery dispute of 1910-11 (people col- parading in solidarity with the lection -Wales) seafarers, tippers and weighmen and 'top' men left work after a meeting at Roath Dock, giving a 'rousing reception' to the newly-arrived Loyal North Lancashire Regiment stationed in nearby cattle lairs. Coal washers walked out and crews abandoned their ships, around a hundred of which now lay idle at the port. The processions were joined by foundry workers, wagon builders and repairers, Spillers and Bakers mill workers, Taff Vale Railway employees, timber yard operatives, storemen and warehousemen, Pure Ice Company builders, manufacturing and engineering workers, assistants in the so-called 'English' laundries and wire-rope and brattice cloth* workers. That evening, some twenty Chinese laundries were reportedly wrecked in Cardiff, the police stables were stormed by crowds defying repeated baton charges. On Saturday, the American roller-skating rink now a makeshift police headquarters in Westgate Street became the target as the fiercest fighting of all went from street to street.
Llanelli railway strike Burnt out * Brattice cloth was used to make fire-resistant wagons guarded by police (BBC canvass, which was erected to aid ventilation in Wales) mines Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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Women and girls to the fore!

However, according to one local news reporter, events had also taken a more exotic turn during the day on Friday, July 21: 'A new and almost entirely unexpected phase of the strike presented itself when girl employees at the various factories and workshops joined the strikers. The feminine Women workers striking against poverty strike was not without its exciting wages at Pinks in Bermondsey in 1911 incidents, but humour was its (TUC Library) outstanding feature'. [16] Women and girls on the potato wharves had left work and apparently gone on the rampage, forcing entry to other premises and pitching casks of beer into the dock. The journalist from the South Wales Daily News continued: In Penarth-road, a big centre of factory girl workers, the strikers made their first call. They forced the girls of Messrs. Claytons, Basker and Elliotts, and Hancock's Brewery to leave. At the last-named place, peaceful persuasion having failed, they adopted sterner measures. It was not until a bombardment of potatoes had been continued for some time that the girls decided to come out. With augmented ranks the marchers proceeded to Frank's sweet factory, and again, it is alleged, violence was offered, several employees complaining that they were literally dragged out and their dinners stolen and eaten by the crowd. Then the White Heather Laundry and Tudor-road laundry received attention with like results. Next a visit was made to the cigar factory in North Clive-street, where about 100 girls were employed. The girl strikers marched down Cornwallstreet dancing and singing. Despite the presence of police, the management were compelled to allow the employees to leave to the accompaniment of
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cheers and the singing of 'Fall in and follow me'. Yet another laundry was stopped, this one being in Redlaver-street. The Rope Works were to have been visited, but on the way the crowd, now about 2,000 strong, were met by the employees who had struck 'on their own'. In Clive-street mounted police came across the crowd, and under these and an escort of foot policemen, the marchers, now looking decidedly dishevelled, were broken up with little difficulty, those inclined to resent interference being quietly and tactfully subdued. The cigar-making company of J.R. Freeman and Son had moved to Cardiff from Shoreditch, London, in 1908. Initially located in Bridge Street, the firm transferred premises soon afterwards to North Clive Street, Grangetown. Back in 1839, John Rykes Freeman had conceived the idea of producing a cheap and popular fat 'segar'. This was J.R. Freeman & Son now made from the raw tobacco leaves shipped into building (JTL Cardiff from the East and West Indies. [17] Grangetown Community Concern)
The leaves had to be graded and sorted, moisturised, de-stemmed (or 'stripped') and rolled. Some of these tasks required the nimble fingers of girls and young women. Hence the age and gender profile of Freeman's workforce: in 1911, the company employed 208 women (and only five men), more than half of them aged between 14 and 17; the remainder were no older than 24, except for nine who were all under 35. All the women were unmarried except for one widow. This was one of the youngest Young woman at JR Freemans cigar fac- female workforces in Cardiff,
tory (JTL - Grangetown Community Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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matched only by women workers in the city's paper industry and among the bread- and pastrymakers. [18] They had been swept up in the strike wave which engulfed southern Cardiff on July 21. While the all-male strike committee met in the Mount Stuart Hotel to plan the campaign on behalf of 19,950 union 'men', many Leaders of Women's Trade Union 1907. (Spartacus) of the women had flocked to Griffiths' Restaurant to hear representatives from the Workers Union and the Womens Labour League and to take out union cards. During the ferocious battles of Saturday night, July 22, Freeman's was one of the 15 business premises placed under police guard to 'protect the workpeople and the property, both day and night'. [19] The next day, the Lord Mayor brokered a settlement between the National Sailors and Firemen's Union and the Cardiff Shipowners Association which conceded union recognition and an improved pay structure. Then, after meeting, the strike committee executive (which included J.H. Thomas of the ASRS and Ernie Bevin of the Dockers Union), the mayor convened a conference of employers including Freeman's to consider the committee's demands for all-round union recognition, immediate negotiations on terms of employment, no legal proceedings against the unions and no victimisation of strikers. As the bosses pondered these peace requirements, the ILP conducted three mass rallies across Cardiff on the Sunday. In Cathays Park, a crowd of ten thousand approved a resolution condemning the 'severe treatment of peaceful citizens by the Metropolitan Police on Friday and Saturday nights' and insisted that 'the continuance of their presence constitutes a serious menace to the peace of the city'. With James Griffiths presiding, the meeting demanded the 'immediate withdrawal' of London's finest.
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Elsewhere, a procession from Roath Park of two thousand people delivered a an identical resolution to the Lord Mayor's Mansion House. [20] Throughout Monday, July 24, the employers sought to modify the proposed settlement. They wanted an immediate return to work before they would accept the strike committee's terms, demanding also that the railway companies be exempted from the clause on union recognition. Meanwhile, women and girls were coming to the fore in daily rallies and processions. On the Monday afternoon, for instance, a thousand of them from the laundries, bottle-washing plants and small industries across the city assembled in Cathays Park to hear Workers Union organiser Margaret Bondfield. She urged her audience many of them sporting their new union badges to stand by the movement's four main demands and pledged an inquiry into the working conditions of every grade of the labour force in Cardiff. Furthermore, she appealed to girls enjoying better wages and conditions to support their less fortunate sisters. [21] That evening, more than sixty thousand strikers filled the same park to hear Bondfield and other orators address them from three different platforms. Food prices rose as bread and potatoes became scarce and employers called upon the strike committee to relax its embargo on the transportation of flour. When all-night talks failed to end the stalemate, some companies began to sue for a separate peace. Thus the rolling strike of around one thousand laundry girls was settled on Wednesday evening, July 26, when the Cardiff and National Women's Trade Union League District Launderers Association (Libary of Congress)
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agreed to improvements in pay, working hours, overtime rates, unauthorised deductions and fines. According to Margaret Bondfield, 'a new charter for laundry workers had been secured' in what was a 'glorious victory'. [22]
On Thursday, July 27, employers and the Cardiff strike committee reached a comprehensive agreement The National Fedbased on the latter's four original demands, but with the eration of Women Workers (NFWW) Taff Vale and Cardiff railway companies exempted from the requirement to recognise unions. was formed in However, not all of the city's employers or workforces chose to accept or abide by the settlement. On Thursday morning, the workers at Ely paper mills had gone on strike for the first time in the history of Thomas Owen and Co.; they were pursuing a list of demands drawn up at a meeting of six hundred girls and youths in Victoria Park the night before. With these young workers now insisting upon a pay rise, the skilled men already laid off at the mills decided to seek higher overtime rates while women employees fought for a reduction in their working week from 60 hours to 45. Like many others in the same position, the unskilled and semi-skilled operatives at Ely paper mills found the Workers Union prepared to represent them. Not so Cardiff's domestic servants, whose request that a strike meeting be organised for them met with the response that the union had 'quite sufficient work on hand for the present time'. [23] That work included negotiating with the Brain, Whitbread and Hancock breweries, with the first two quickly acceding to the four basic union demands together with other improvements. But other workers stayed out, notably the rivet warmers, platers' helpers and the Ely paper mills engineers.
1906 by Mary Macarthur.
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Freeman's the fight continues

As the dockers and seafarers returned to work in Cardiff, Penarth and Barry although not in Newport or Swansea the Metropolitan Police headed back to London and the Workers Union turned its attention to the continuing dispute at J.R. Freeman.
JR Freeman Cigar factory (JTL - Grangetown On Friday, July 28, the cigar workers appointed a Community Concern) deputation to accompany union president Charles
Duncan MP to a meeting with company representatives on the following morning. Later on that Saturday, after inconclusive discussions, a notice was displayed outside the factory: 'Work will be resumed here on Monday, at 8.30 am. The firm are quite prepared to meet you and consider any grievances after resumption of work J.R. Freeman and Son'. [24] On Tuesday, August 1, the South Wales Daily News carried a lengthy letter from the company rebutting 'inaccurate statements' about conditions at 'Freeman's segar factory'. It set out in detail the wage levels and piece-work rates earned in five different departments for girls and women aged from 14 upwards, alleging that 'our workers had no grievance at all prior to July 21st, when they were forced out by other Cardiff strikers'. All fines imposed to 'ensure early attendance and careful work' were refunded in the Tipping tobacco at Freemans (Paul Fisherform of Bank Holiday bonuses and Grangetown Community Concern)
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work at the factory was 'light, congenial and healthy', with 'every convenience and comfort' afforded to the employees. The letter also claimed that 'all our staff, and practically all time workers, have now come back to work'. Yet far from the impression given by such statements, at least two-thirds of the Freeman's workforce were still on strike. And while wages at the firm compared favourably with those at the city's laundries, for example, they lagged considerably behind the average pay for women in Britain's textile, clothing, pottery, retail and clerical sectors. According to the Board of Trade's first-ever census of women's wages in 1906, average pay in the tobacco industry was 12 shillings a week, with fewer than one-third of women and girls receiving less than 10 shillings. [25] By its own admission, Freeman's paid workers below 10 shillings in four of its five departments in July 1911 some as little as 6 shillings a week. The average wage in the highest paid department was, in fact, only 10 shillings. However, the company claimed that these figures were pulled down by the earnings of short-time workers and 'learners'. Indeed, according to the management's letter, 'many of our employees can easily earn more than 16 shillings'. The average wage of Freeman's piece-work employees the majority in the factory of below 10 shillings a week can also be contrasted to the rate set by the Liberal government for women Post Office workers in 1908, namely 13 shillings and 6 pence. This had been condemned by trade unionists as 'the Government Hall-Mark
Women and girls from JR Freemans on a picnic trip in the 1920sbefore paid holidays were allowed.(Grangetown Community Concern)
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of Sweating'. [26] The statutory minimum wage levels set soon afterwards for four of the most notorious low-paid industries varied from 11s 6d to 14s 1d, while the National Union of Shop Assistants' minimum wage committee called for women retail workers to receive at least 18s a week. [27] Alongside the demand for equal pay with men for work of equal value, women's organisations and trade unions pressed for amendments to the Truck Act to regulate fines and other deductions from wages. For their part, Freeman's striking employees now included the abolition of fines in their list of demands along with union recognition and higher pay. The company's own statement indicates that fines were not always refunded in full. The determination of the cigar workers to win redress for their grievances could only have been reinforced by a resurgence of the waterfront strike wave. On the Tuesday that the Freeman's letter appeared in the press, the Engineering and Shipbuilders Employers Association reacted to the rivet warmers and platers' helpers action by locking out six thousand dry dock workers in Cardiff, Penarth, Barry and Newport. When the Cardiff Railway Company refused to meet Dockers Union organiser Ernie Bevin, the pit-prop carriers walked out again, with the crane men and general cargo workers hot on their heels. The skilled men at Ely paper mills were holding out for recognition of their union, the Associated Society of Engineers. On Wednesday, August 2, the general secretary of the National Union of Cigar Makers, Ben Cooper, arrived from London. He addressed a meeting of the Freeman's strikers at the Ruskin Institute, informing them of terms of employment obtaining in the tobacco industry elsewhere in Britain. The firm's piece-rate women then decided unanimously to remain out while awaiting a
Freeman's in modern times Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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response from the union's executive. [28]
The National Union of Cigar Makers could justifiably claim to be one of Britain's oldest surviving trade unions. Founded as the London Society of Cigar Makers in 1835, by men who made only the finest brands, it had become the biggest of four unions organising skilled workers in the tobacco industry. Its Tobacco Workers Union badge reputation was that of a well-run organisation with a sound financial base, ready to take action for its members when necessary. In 1866, the London Society had affiliated to the International Working Men's Association of Karl Marx, contributing 5 (or 100 shillings) to its funds. The following year, it paid 1 9s on behalf of 700 members and donated 1 1s to the association's Congress Fund. A few years later, the London Society used the International to make contact with cigar makers in Brussels and Antwerp to try to prevent Belgian workers in London's East End from undercutting wage levels there. In 1871, London and Liverpool cigar makers had helped the General Council of the International to collect 600 for the locked-out cigar workers of Antwerp. [29] The following year, an attempt had been made to recruit women into the society, but they had refused because they feared that men would take their jobs (male cigar makers having fought against the substitution of lowerpaid women for higher-paid men in the industry). In 1890, as the Mutual Association of Cigar Makers, the union had co-operated with the Women's Trade Union League to establish a London Society of Female Cigar Workers. These women then joined the men in 1895, in what was renamed the National Union of Cigar Makers. [30] Although, as in most industries, piece-rates for women remained below those for women in the tobacco industry by about 20 per cent the society secured proper pay statements for its female members in a period when this was not yet normal practice.
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The storm before the calm

General secretary Cooper returned from London to Cardiff early in August 1911, bringing with him the society's president H. Coster. They spent a few days advising their members and helping them financially and trying in vain to arrange talks with Freeman's. On Wednesday, August 9, Cooper urged the strikers to hold firm while he and his colleagues went back to consult the union executive and seek additional funds. [31] On Friday, August 11, with the temperature at its highest-ever recorded level of 91 degrees fahrenheit in the shade, a journalist visited the cigar factory to find the entrance guarded by police constables. Outside the North Clive Street premises, Grace Scholefield of the Workers Union had joined girls who were engaging in 'animated discussion'. She was president of the Cardiff branch of the Women's Labour League and had been working with Margaret Bondfield to unionise the city's laundry women. [32] Inside Freeman's, where some seventy employees had turned up, the reporter witnessed 'many comely damsels' dancing and skipping in the works' garden during their dinner-hour. There had, apparently, been 'a lot of booing and trumpet-blowing
Llanelli damage to railway carriages on 19 August 1911 (BBC Wales)
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and other signs of hostile demonstration'. Indeed, he noted, the factory was 'not exactly an abode of love just at the present'. [33] That same day, a procession led by 120 girls and their banner made its way to Cathays Park, where Grace Scholefield presided over a Hopkinstown Wales, a rail disaster in Jan1911 rally addressed by seafarers killed eleven. representative Charles Damm and Matt Giles of the Workers Union. Captain Tupper declared it the duty of male trade unionists to assist women workers and contributed a sovereign to the strike fund. [34] A few days later, he praised police for attacking black seafarers who were protesting against job discrimination. [35] Meanwhile, a much bigger industrial storm had been gathering. At the beginning of the month, railways workers in Liverpool had walked out in support of union recognition and a programme of improvements in terms and conditions. They had been followed by colleagues in other areas, including Cardiff. On Tuesday, August 15, the four main railway unions served two days' notice of an all-Britain strike as a military officer shot dead two protestors in Liverpool. A short but violent struggle, which saw the deployment of more than fifty thousand troops, culminated in a settlement brokered by Chancellor Crowds gather in Llanelli in August 1911 (BBC Lloyd George on the
Wales) Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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Saturday evening, August 19. Two men had been killed by soldiers in Llanelli but it appeared, erroneously, that the railways unions had secured the means to recognition through a commission of inquiry.
As the storm subsided, the battle at Freeman's flared up Funeral of the two young men, namely Leonard in the streets surrounding the Worsell and John John, who were shot down by factory. On Monday, August 21, soldiers at Llanelli during the railway strike of a crowd of strikers barracked 1911 (People's Collection Wales) the 'blacklegs' coming off shift. According to one of the latter, 17-year old Eva Hampton, Mrs Evangeline Spittall (or Spittle) had said to her: 'For two pins, I'd put my fist through you'. Later that evening, in Llanmaes Street, Spittall allegedly threatened Hampton again before tearing the girl's collar, ripping open her blouse and then striking her on both sides of the face, 'knocking her stupid'. In court, Spittall admitted using the term 'blacklegs', but claimed that Hampton and other girls had retaliated by jeering and jostling her. Despite her protestations, Mrs Spittall was fined 3 plus costs by Cardiff's stipendiary magistrate, with the option of one month's imprisonment with hard labour. The next day, the crowded court heard another case of alleged assault. Kate Wilkins claimed that she and some friends had been stopped on Tuesday, Tinplate worker John John had joined August 22, by a crowd in Tanyard the picket line in support of the rail Street (later renamed Sloper Road). strike (BBC Wales) They had been called 'dirty blacklegs'
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and pelted with soot, 'clinkers' and tufts of grass. Kate Geary had then hit Wilkins in the face while exclaiming 'Fight me now!' Her victim had reputedly fainted soon afterwards. Geary denied having struck anyone, but was 1910: The cloth cap was almost a badge of class for fined 1 with costs or 14 male workers (Image Rhondda Cynon Taf County days' gaol. A third Borough Council) defendant, 15-year old William Price, was accused of assaulting Annie Maud Dudden (or Dutton) and sent for trial to the juvenile court. [36] The dispute at Freeman's continued until September 22, the longest duration of all the struggles in Cardiff that summer. Ben Cooper and company representatives reached an agreement on all but a few points, which was to be put to the workforce after a full return to work. The tobacco strippers had then gone back immediately, joined by the other strikers on Monday, September 25. [37] The Freeman's workers had played their part in the take-off of trade unionism among women. The number of women trade unionists in Britain increased from 183,000 in 1910 (about 5 per cent of the female workforce outside domestic service) to 358,000 by 1914. At the outbreak of the Great War, women in the National Union of Cigar Makers paid 4d a week in membership dues in the
Strikers at Llanelli station (Hiraeth)
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'provinces' (compared with 8d in London and 1s 3d or 15d for men) in return for strike, unemployment, 'lost time' and funeral benefits. During the war, beginning in London, the union succeeded in abolishing the lower piece-rates for women and then strengthened by an Demonstrators from Cefn Mawr 1912 ([I Edwards] North Wales Miners Association Trust amalgamation with the Nottingham Society of Female Cigar Makers in 1918 it negotiated away the provincial differential. By that time, too, skilled women in the tobacco industry were able to earn between 3 (or 60s) and 3 10s a week, more than double their average pre-war earnings. In May 1919, all tobacco strippers and other 'unskilled' workers in the industry (whether unionised or not) were guaranteed a statutory minimum wage of 1 10s (30s) for a 48-hour week. Within the union at that time, too, women were advancing through the ranks. Three of the seven executive members were women, along with one of the full-time organisers. [38] Thus began the long tradition of trade unionism at Freeman's or after 1947 Gallahar's, from being in the 2,500-strong National Cigar Makers and Tobacco Workers Union reorganised in 1920, through the tobacco section of the union of Technical and Supervisory Staffs (TASS), into the Manufacturing, Services and Finance (MSF) union, then Amicus and from 2007 Unite. A prominent member of the Freeman family also came to play an idiosyncratic role in the labour movement. Company director Peter Freeman was elected Labour MP for Brecon and Radnor in 1929 and then
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for Newport in 1945. A millionaire, Poor Law guardian, Welsh tennis champion, non-smoking teetotaller and one-time president of the Vegetarian Society, he championed such unfashionable causes of the time as animal rights, a parliament for Wales and abolition of the death penalty. [39] The Grangetown plant that he sold was later relocated to Penarth Road in the early 1960s, still fully unionised. In September 2007, new owners the Japan Tobacco group announced that the Cardiff factory would close in September 2009, putting 184 workers out of work, although 95 jobs would be created at Gallahar's larger site in Ballymena, Ireland. A Japan Tobacco spokesperson blamed the decline in cigar-smoking, accelerated by the recent smoking ban in public houses, for its decision to transfer production and reconfigure its international labour force. [40] The achievement of those women and girls and their 'feminine strike', in the hot summer of 1911, endured for almost a century but it could not survive a combination of changing public taste and capitalist globalisation.
Rhondda Valleys, Ynysybwl. Poverty during the great strike of 1912 led to desperation, - men and a boy digging for coal on Darren Ddu Tip.(Old UK Photos) Cardiff Cigar Workers and the Feminine Strike of 1911
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Notes
1. A.H. Halsey ed., British Social Trends since 1900 (London, 1988 edn.) pp.180, 182. 2. For a general account of this and subsequent events, together with some earlier history of the labour movement in Cardiff, see Neil Evans, '"A Tidal Wave of Impatience": The Cardiff General Strike of 1911' in Geraint Jenkins & J. Beverley Smith, eds., Politics and Society in Wales 1840-1922 (1988). 3. South Wales Daily News, July 7, 1911; for an account of his role in the seafarers' struggle, see Evans (note 2 above) and Campbell Balfour, 'Captain Tupper and the 1911 Seamen's Strike in Cardiff', Morgannwg Vol. XIV (1970). 4. See M.J. Daunton, Coal Metropolis: Cardiff 1870-1914 (Leicester, 1977) pp. 181-88 and 'Jack Ashore: Seamen in Cardiff Before 1914', Welsh History Review, Vol.9 No.2 (December 1978). 5. For the history of the union, see Martin Daunton, 'The Cardiff Coal Trimmers' Union 1888-1914', Llafur Vol.2 No.3 (Summer 1978). 6. For the development of labour movement politics in Cardiff, in addition to Evans (1988) and Daunton (1977) pp.178-214 above, see also Neil Evans, 'Cardiff's Labour Tradition', Llafur Vol.4 No.2 (1985) and Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams & Deian Hopkin, The Labour Party in Wales, 1900-2000 (Cardiff, 2000). 7. See, for example, House of Commons Debates, July 3 1911, Vol.27 col.784. 8. Having been ruled out of order of previous occasions, Liberal Unionist MP for Ludlow, Rowland Hunt, finally succeeded in raising this matter in Parliament on June 20. After evading the question several times, Board of Trade President Sidney Buxton eventually denied the allegation, albeit in ambiguous terms (House of Commons Debates, June 20 1911, Vol.27 cols. 183-7). 9. Report of the Head Constable of Glamorgan to the Watch Committee of August 10, 1911, in City of Cardiff: Reports of Council and Committees May-November 1911 pp.323-24. 10. South Wales Daily News, July 21, 1911. 11. South Wales Daily News, July 21, 1911. 12. South Wales Daily News, July 21, 1911. 13. City of Cardiff: Reports of Council and Committees May-November 1911, p.326. 14. South Wales Daily News, July 5, 1911. 15. Evans (1988) recounts this and other episodes in more detail. Barbara Weinberger also discusses the anti-Chinese dimension of the Cardiff strike movement in Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain, 1906-1928 (New York/Oxford, 1991) pp.79-84. For a broader and more analytical account of anti-Chinese prejudice in the city, see Joanne M. Cayford, 'In Search of "John Chinaman": Press Representations of the Chinese in Cardiff 1906-1911', Llafur Vol.5 No.1 (1988). 16. South Wales Daily News, July 22, 1911. 17. Clive Pritchard, 'Happiness is a Cigar ...' in Stewart Williams ed., The Cardiff Book: Volume Three (Cardiff, 1977).
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18. 'County of Glamorgan Area, Families or Separate Occupiers and Population etc.', Table 23 p.42, The Census of England and Wales, 1911 (1914). The statistics relating to 'Tobacco Manufacture' in Cardiff pertain entirely to J.R. Freeman and Son. 19. Report of Supt. William Burke to Head Constable, July 30, 1911 in City of Cardiff: Reports of Council and Committees May-November 1911, p.340. 20. South Wales Daily News, July 24, 1911. 21. South Wales Daily News, July 25, 1911. 22. South Wales Daily News, July 27, 1911. Bondfield went on to become Minister of Labour in the Labour Cabinet of 1924. For details of her subsequent career, see Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville eds., Dictionary of Labour Biography Vol.II (London, 1974) pp.39-45; and Margaret Bondfield, A Life's Work (London, 1949). 23. South Wales Daily News, July 28, 1911. 24. South Wales Daily News, July 31, 1911. 25. The census results were analysed in B.L. Hutchins, Women in Modern Industry (London, 1915), Chapter VI. 26. Sarah Boston, Women Workers and the Trade Unions (London, 1987 edn.) p.79. 27. Barbara Drake, Women in Trade Unions (London, 1984 edn.) pp.54 and 58, first published by the Labour Research Department (1920). 28. South Wales Daily News, August 3, 1911. 29. See the index entries in Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London, 1965). 30. Drake (1984) p.38. 31. South Wales Daily News, August 10, 1911. 32. Christine Collette, The Newer Eve: Women, Feminists and the Labour Party (Basingstoke, 2009) p.46. Scholefield's name was wrongly recorded as 'Schofield' in some press reports of the time. 33. Western Mail, August 12, 1911. 34. South Wales Daily News, August 12, 1911. 35. South Wales Daily News, August 16, 1911. 36. Cardiff Times & South Wales Weekly News, September 2, 1911. 37. South Wales Daily News, September 23, 1911. 38. Drake (1984) pp.162-63 and Table II. 39. http://www.paulflynn.co.uk/peterfreeman.htm. See also Mike Bloxsome, The Green Casanova The Life Story of Peter Freeman (Talybont, 2004). 40. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/7016043.stm
28
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Published by the Communist Party May 2012 ISBN 978-1-908315-16-8

Britains Road to Socialism

Communist News & Views

Our History No. 4

AND THE 'FEMININE STRIKE' OF 1911 by Robert Griffiths