Unfree labor, apprenticeship and the rise of the victorian hull fishing industry: An example of the importance of law and the local state in British economic change

International Review of Social History

Volumn 51, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  Steinberg, Marc W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33746466734     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: 1469512X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859006002446     Document Type: Review

References (235)

1. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 17 May 1866.
2. Daphne Simon, "Master and Servant", in John Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement (London, 1954), pp. 160-200.
3. The exceptions are work on the Black Country, which had high rates of prosecution under master and servant laws. See David Philips, "The Black Country Magistracy 1835-60", Midland History, 3 (1976), pp. 161-190;
4. D.C. Woods, "The Operation of the Master and Servants Act in the Black Country, 1858-1875", Midland History, 7 (1982), pp. 93-115.
5. Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783-1870 (London, 1996, 2nd edn);
6. Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992);
7. Charles More, Understanding the Industrial Revolution (London, 2000);
8. Neville Kirk, Change, Continuity and Class: Labour in British Society, 1850-1920 (Aldershot, 1994);
9. Kenneth Morgan, The Birth of Industrial Britain: Social Change, 1750-1850 (Harlow: 2004).
10. Richard Price, British Society, 1660-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge, 1999) offers some important, more general considerations on the role of the state which 1 discuss below, but does not address the legal system more particularly. In his recent survey of the literature Joel Mokyr ignores the issue;
11. see Joel Mokyr, "Accounting for the Industrial Revolution", in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860 (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1-27.
12. Roger Middleton, "Government and the Economy, 1860-1939", in Floud and Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 2: Economic Maturity, 1860-1939, p. 486.
13. John Saville, "The Crisis in Labour History: A Further Comment", Labour History Review, 61 (1996), p. 326;
14. John Saville idem, The Consolidation of the Capitalist State (London, 1994), pp. 22-23.
15. Douglas Hay and Paul Craven (eds), Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-195; (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004);
16. Douglas Hay, "Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare: Masters, Workers, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England", International Labor and Working-Class History, 53 (1988), pp. 27-48;
17. Douglas Hay idem, "Master and Servant in England: Using the Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries", in Willibald Steinmetz (ed.), Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age: Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Oxford, 2000), pp. 227-264;
18. Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001);
19. Willibald Steinmetz, "Was there a De-juridification of Individual Employment Relations in Britain?", in idem (ed.),
20. Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age: Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Oxford, 2000), pp. 265-312;
21. Mark Curthoys, Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian Britain: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s (Oxford, 2004);
22. Christopher Franks, "'He Might Almost As Well Be Without Trial': Trade Unions and the 1823 Master and Servant Act - the Warrington Cases, 1846-47", Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 14 (Autumn 2003), pp. 343;
23. Christopher Franks idem, "The Defeat of the 1844 Masters and Servants Bill", in Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, pp. 402-421;
24. Christopher Franks, "'Let But One of Them Come Before Me, and I'll Commit Him': Trade Unions, Magistrates, and the Law in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire", Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), pp. 64-91.
25. See also Simon Deakin, "The Contract of Employment: A Study in Legal Evolution", Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 11 (2001), pp. 1-36.
26. For the use of other criminal law for purposes of labor control during the Victorian era, see Barry Godfrey, "Law, Factory Discipline and 'Theft': The Impact of the Factory on Workplace Appropriation in Mid to Late Nineteenth-Century Yorkshire", British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999), pp. 56-71,
27. and Barry Godfrey idem, "Judicial Impartiality and the Use of Criminal Law Against Labour: the Sentencing of Workplace Appropriators in Northern England, 1840-1880", Crime, History & Societies, 3 (1999), pp. 57-72.
28. Ron Harris, "Government and the Economy, 1688-1850", pp. 204-237
29. in Floud and Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860, p. 235.9.
30. Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830-1860 (Cambridge, 1996);
31. Robert Gray and Donna Loftus, "Industrial Regulation, Urban Space and the Boundaries of the Workplace: Mid-Victorian Nottingham", Urban History, 26 (1999), pp. 211-229;
32. Carolyn Malone, "Gendered Discourses and the Making of Protective Labor Leglisation in England, 1830-1914", Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998), pp. 166-191;
33. Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA, 1992);
34. Sonya O. Rose idem, "'From Behind the Women's Petticoats': The English Factory Act of 1874 as a Cultural Production", Journal of Historical Sociology, 4 (1991), pp. 32-51;
35. Peter W.J. Bartrip, The Home Office and the Dangerous Trades: Regulating Occupational Disease in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Amsterdam 2002);
36. Peter W.J. Bartrip idem, "Success or Failure? The Prosecution of the Early Factory Acts", Economic History Review, 38 (1985), pp. 423-427;
37. Peter W.J. Bartrip idem, "State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Fact or Fiction?", Journal of British Studies, 23 (1983), pp. 63-83;
38. P.W.J. Bartrip and T.P. Fenn, "Factory Fatalities and Regulation in Britain, 1878-1913", Explorations in Economic History, 25 (1988), pp. 60-74.
39. On trade unions see Curthoys, Governments, Labour, and the Law;
40. Michael J. Klarman, "The Judges versus the Unions: The Development of British Labor Law, 1867-1913", Virginia Law Review, 75 (1989), pp. 1487-1602;
41. Jonathan Spain, "Trade Unionists, Gladstonian Liberals and the Labour Law Reforms of 1875", in Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 109-133;
42. Barry Jones and Michael Keating, Labour and the British State (Oxford, 1985).
43. Though for compelling work on the weakness of the state in enforcing Factory Acts see P.W.J. Bartrip, "British Government Inspection, 1832-1875: Some Observations", The Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 605-626; 613-616;
44. P.W.J. Bartrip idem, "State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Fact or Fiction", The Journal of British Studies, 23 (1983), pp. 63-83;
45. P.W.J. Bartrip and P.T. Fenn, "The Administration of Safety: The Enforcement Policy of the Early Factory Inspectorate, 1844-1864", Public Administration, 58 (1980), pp. 87-103;
46. P.W.J. Bartrip and P.T. Fenn idem, "The Evolution of Regulatory Style in the Nineteenth Century British Factory Inspectorate", Journal of Law and Society, 10 (1983), pp. 201-222;
47. and Stewart Field, "Without the Law? Professor Arthurs and the Early Factory Inspectorate", Journal of Law and Society, 17 (1990), pp. 445-468.
48. Price, British Society, p. 124.
49. Anne Digby, "The Local State", in E.T.J. Collins (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 8, 1850-1914, pt 2 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1425-1464.
50. As Price notes, "Mid-Victorian localism could thrive because of the limited reach of central government. Institutional links between the centre and the regions remained as weakly developed in the nineteenth century as they had in the eighteenth"; British Society, p. 183.
51. For a discussion of the historical development of state power through a devolved legal system with community bases sec Margaret R. Somers, "Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy", American Sociological Review, 58 (1993), pp. 587-620.
52. A.H. Manchester, A Modern Legal History of England and Wales, 1750-1850 (London, 1980), pp. 160-161, 222-225;
53. Thomas Skyrme, History of the Justices of the Peace (Chichester, 1994). pp. 622-623.
54. Curthoys, Governments, Labour, and the Law;
55. Douglas Hay, "England, 1562-1875: The Law and Its Uses", in Hay and Craven, Masters, Servants, and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, pp. 59-116;
56. John V. Orth, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721-1906 (Oxford, 1991).
57. Pat Hudson, "The Regional Perspective", in idem (ed.) Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1989), p. 30.
58. My project focuses on those industries in which master and servant law was an active and regularized feature of the employment relationship. However, we should keep in mind that employers in many industries, both factory-based and craft-centered, relied on markedly different forms of stability and control in the workplace. James Jaffe has recently emphasized that employers in some artisanal trades such as printing focused on what he terms a "gift-exchange" relationship. This was a bargain in which the employer allowed for discretion in the workplace and the worker exercised his skills in return. He notes that magistrates frequently used such informal agreements as the basis to arbitrate disputes without formal recourse to the law; James Jaffe, Striking a Bargain: Work and Industrial Relations in England 1815-1865 (Manchester, 2000).
59. K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 230.
60. Clark Nardinelli, "Were Children Exploited During the Industrial Revolution?", Research in Economic History, 10 (1988), p. 259.19.
61. O. Jocelyn Dunlop, English Apprenticeship and Child Labour: A History (New York, 1912);
62. Thomas E. Jordan, Victorian Childhood: Themes and Variations. (Albany, NY, 1987);
63. Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600-1914 (Boulder, CO, 1996);
64. Eric Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1994);
65. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, vol. 2: From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act. 1849 (London, 1969);
66. Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain 1860-1918 (London, 1991);
67. Mary B. Rose, "Social Policy and Business: Parish Apprenticeship and the Early Factory System 1750-1834", Business History, 31 (1989), pp. 5-32;
68. K.D.M. Snell, "The Apprenticeship System in British History: The Fragmentation of a Cultural Institution", History of Education, 25 (1996), pp. 303-321. For an argument that industrialists preferred to use children because of technological advances see
69. Carolyn Tuttle, Hard At Work in the Factories and Mines: The Economics of Child Labor During the British Industrial Revolution (Boulder, CO, 1999).
70. Snell, "The Apprenticeship System in British History", pp. 315-317;
71. Jane Humphries, "English Apprenticeship; A Neglected Factor in the First Industrial Revolution", in Paul A. David and Mark Thomas (eds), The Economic Future in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003), pp. 73-108.
72. Jordan, Victorian Childhood, pp. 124-125;
73. Lane, Apprenticeship in England, p. 81;
74. Rose, "Social Policy and Business", p. 7;
75. Hopkins, Childhood Transformed, pp. 179-180, 220.
76. Britain's many sea-based workers were covered by the Merchant Shipping Act as I discuss below.
77. For a detailed discussion of the development of master and servant law for specific trades in the eighteenth century and its generalization to virtually all forms of labor (excluding domestic service and the professions) in the 1823 Master and Servant Act (4 Geo. IV c.34), see Hay, "England, 1562-1875", pp. 82-91. For complete texts of all the acts from 1720-1823
78. see Charles J.B. Hertslet, The Law Relating to Master and Servant [...] (London, 1850), pp. 27-101. As noted below, the law was amended in 1867 in response to trade-union appeals, changing the legal grounds for the imprisonment of workers, allowing workers to testify in their own defence, and requiring adjudication before two justices, among other changes. For these changes and detailed
79. comparisons of the 1823 Act and the 1867 amendment (30 & 31 Vict. c. 141), see James E. Davis, The Master and Servant Act, 1867 (London, 1868).
80. Hay, "Master and Servant in England", p. 228;
81. Simon "Master and Servant", pp. 161-162, 231;
82. W.A. Holdsworth, The Law of Master and Servant; Including That of Trades Unions and Combinations (London, 1876), pp. 30, 43, 72.
83. Carolyn Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford, 1991), p. vi.
84. Carolyn Conley The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent Ibid., p. 173.
85. Punishment was modified under the revised Act of 1867, which provided for damages not available under the previous Act instead of the abatement of wages. It also changed the grounds for imprisonment to aggravated circumstances, though exactly what these constituted was left to the local magistrates. In some areas the number of prison sentences dropped substantially with this provision though, as we shall see, not in Hull; Hay, "Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare", p. 36;
86. Davis, The Master and Servant Act, pp. 49, 71-74;
87. Brian Napier, "The Contract of Service: The Concept and its Application" (D.Phil, thesis, University of Cambridge, 1975), pp. 122-124.
88. Hay, "Master and Servant in England", p. 138.
89. Sec also Hay idem, "England, 1562-1875", pp. 106-108.
90. Frederic P. Maude and Charles E. Pollock, A Compendium of the Law of Merchant Shipping (London, 1861), pp. 117-120;
91. John Rule, "The Smackmen of the North Sea: Labour Recruitment and Exploitation in British Deep-Sea Fishing, 1850-1900", International Review of Social History, 21 (1976), pp. 383-411, 401.
92. There were more elaborate protections under the Merchant Shipping Act than for land workers because of the ways in which seamen could be preyed upon, including abandonment at foreign ports; Simon, "Master and Servant", p. 160;
93. Maude and Pollock, A Compendium of the Law, pp. 124-156;
94. W.T. Greenhow, The Shipping Law Manual (London, 1863), pp. 24-33.
95. Hay suggests that by the 1860s employers were generating about 80 per cent of all complaints; Hay, "Master and Servant in England", p. 258. Whether this was true for the eighteenth century is open to question. Hay suggests that the ratio of complaints might well have been roughly equal, while Morgan and Rushton, in their analysis of an eighteenth-century Durham magistrate's books show a preponderance of claims by apprentices, servants, and other workers. Elsewhere, Rushton has argued that the majority of cases involving apprentices brought before the bench in the north-cast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were by the apprentices;
96. Hay, "Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare", p. 36;
97. Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, "The Magistrate, the Community and the Maintenance of an Orderly Society in Eighteenth-Century England", Historical Research, 75 (2003), p. 62;
98. Peter Rushton, "The Matter at Variance: Adolescents and Domestic Conflict in the Pre-Industrial Economy of Northeast England, 1600-1800", Journal of Social History, 25 (1991), pp. 89-106.
99. The returns are found in annual reports under "Judicial Statistics. England and Wales. Police-Criminal Proceedings-Prisons. Returns for the year". As Hay notes, the ratio of master and servant prosecutions amounted to 12 to 32 per cent of all theft prosecutions, and this ratio would have been higher except that the "enormous expansion of summary convictions for theft had changed the denominator of the ratio"; Hay "England, 1562-1875", p. 108,
100. Joyce Bellamy, "Occupations in Kingston Upon Hull, 1841-1949", Yorkshire Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, 4 (1952), p. 39;
101. Joyce Bellamy idem, The Trade and Shipping of Nineteenth-Century Hull (York, 1971), pp. 31-34, 38-39;
102. Raymond Brown, Waterfront Organisation in Hull, 1870-1900 (Hull, 1972);
103. James J. Sheahun, General and Concise History and Description of the Town and Port of Kingston-upon-Hull (London, 1864), pp. 284, 582, 586, 589-591, 596;
104. David Starkey, "Ownership Structures in the British Shipping Industry: The Case of Hull, 1820-1916", International Journal of Maritime History, 8 (1996), p. 73;
105. The Trade and Commerce of Hull: Its Ships and Shipowners, Past and Present (Hull, 1878, 2nd edn), pp. 11, 17, 113-117.
106. Brown, Waterfront Organisation in Hull, pp. 10-11.
107. The labourers at the largest shipyard, C & W. Earle, had struck in 1864 for an advance, and two years later a major strike of 2,000 union and non-union engineers won advances from their employers; Edward Gillett and Kenneth A. McMahon, A History of Hull (Hull, 1989), pp. 333-334. In 1871 railway workers founded a branch of the Railway Servants' Amalgamated Society and in 1874 the Amalgamated Labour League was founded;
108. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 21 March 1872, 3 September 1874.
109. Beehive, 16 September, 7 October 1865, 30 March 1872; Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 7 September 1865, 13 December 1866, 17 January, 24 February 1867.
110. Brown, Waterfront Organisation in Hull, p. 16;
111. Beehive, 8 November, 20 December, 1873;
112. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 9, 16, 30 November, 7, 14, 21 December 1871.
113. The Master and Servant Act was used by employers to break strikes by prosecuting for leave of absence without appropriate notice or permission; Hay, "Master and Servant in England", pp. 252-254;
114. Simon, "Master and Servant", p, 171. In a review of the changing relationship between judges and unions in the later nineteenth century,
115. Michael Klarman observes that, "The draconian master-servant law was perhaps the most effective means of stemming worker insubordination":
116. Klarman, "The Judges versus the Unions", p. 1493.
117. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 16 January, 9 February 1871.
118. The Commonwealth, 4 May 1867.
119. Kew, British Public Record Office MH/32/99, Baldwin Fleming, Correspondence and Papers Related to the North Midland District; "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices in the Grimsby Fishing Trade", 19 June 1873, fo. 45;
120. Alfred Ansell, On Trawling (London, 1883), p. 7;
121. David Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices of Grimsby (Grimsby, 1973), p. 15;
122. Edmund Holdsworth, Deep-Sea Fishing and Fishing Boats (London, 1874), pp. 25, 69, 257;
123. Robb Robinson, A History of the Yorkshire Coast Fishing Industry, 1780-1914 (Hull, 1987), pp. 47-48;
124. Robb Robinson, Trawling: The Rise and Fall of British Trawl Fishery (Exeter, 1996), p. 67;
125. "Report of the Commissioners on the Sea Fisheries of the United Kingdom", British Parliamentary Papers [hereafter BPP] 1866 XVIII, (3596-1), pp. 156, 163;
126. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 7 August, 13 November 1873.
127. The vast majority of these were before 1870 though; Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 1 January, 24 March, 7 April, 26 May, 6 June 1864; 22 February, 18 October 1865; 18 April, 27 June, 15 August, 14, 28 November 1867; 1 January, 11 February, 10 June, 12 October, II, 15 November 1869; 5 May 1874.
128. Kingston upon Hull City Archives, Registry of Ships DPC/1/15, 1858-1861, Port Number: 18/58 to 8/61; DPC/1/16,1861-1864, Port Number: 9/611015-64; DPC/1/17, 1864-1867, Port Number: 16/64 to 15/67; DPC/1/18, 1867-1871, Port Number: 9/67 to 64/71; DPC/1/19, 1871-1873, Port No. 65/71 to 60/73; DPC/1/20, 1873-1876, Port No. 61/73 to 43/76
129. Joyce Bellamy has noted that the industry was largely detached from the other commercial sectors in the town; Bellamy, The Trade and Shipping, p. 56.
130. "Report", BPP 1866 XVIII, pp. 156, 160.
131. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 11 November 1869. To place this amount in perspective, one shipbuilding firm, Hull Iron Works and Shipbuilding Co. Ltd., was capitalized at £1 million in 1864, and it was by no means the largest;
132. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 28 April 1864.
133. Markchow also observed that large capitalists did not invest in the trade affirming its petty bourgeois foundations; "Report of the Commissioners", BPP 1866 XVIII, p. 160;
134. "Report of the Inspectors of Fisheries and Commissioners for Sea Fisheries. (Frank Buckland and Spencer Walpole)", BPP 1878-79 XVII, (2449), p. 112;
135. "Report of a Committee [...] To inquire into [...] the relations between the Owners, Masters and Crews of Fishing Vessels [...]", BPP 1882 XVII, (3432), p. 60.
136. Trade and Commerce of Hull, p. 133.
137. Rule, "The Smackmen of the North Sea", p. 385.
138. During fleet voyages, which could encompass as many as seventy boats and lasting perhaps eight weeks, smacks would regularly offload boxes of their iced catch to cutters which would speed the fish to a principal port for sale. Boxes were placed in small boats manned by a couple of hands who navigated them to the waiting cutters. Fishermen objected to the system, particularly during the winter, because of the precariousness of negotiating the sea; PRO MH/32/99, "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices", fos 8, 51; Ansell, On Trawling, pp. 19-20, 22;
139. Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices, pp. 10, 93, 96;
140. Holdsworth, Deep-Sea Fishing, pp. 257-261;
141. Pamela Horn, "Pauper Apprenticeship and the Grimsby Fishing Industry, 1870 to 1914", Labour History Review, 61 (1996), p. 176;
142. Leone Levi, The Economic Condition of Fishermen (London 1883), p. 26;
143. Robinson, Trawling, p. 71;
144. Rule, "The Smackmen of the North Sea", pp. 384-387.
145. Robinson, Trawling, p. 56. During the period under study the local paper reported a number of apprentice deaths, though probably not nearly all of them;
146. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 20 April 1870, 20 April 1871, 19 December 1872, 24 April, 7 July, 11 September, 25 December 1873, 7 May, 29 October, 3 December 1874.
147. While the system was started with the inception of the trade in the 1840s, it became common after it was used to break strikes of fishermen's unions in 1852 and 1856; Robinson, Trawling, p. 75.
148. Rule, "The Smackmen of the North Sea", pp. 391, 405;
149. Ansell, On Trawling, p. 19;
150. Holdsworth, Deep-Sea Fishing, p. 258;
151. Trade and Commerce of Hull, p. 134;
152. "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882 XVII, p. 28.
153. PRO MH/32/99, Fleming, "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices", fos 10, 15-17, 20;
154. Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices, p. 27;
155. William Chance, Children Under the Poor Law (London, 1895), p. 281;
156. Rule, "The Smackmen of the North Sea", p. 386.
157. PRO MH/32/99, Fleming, "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices", fo. 23;
158. "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882 XVII, pp. 2-4;
159. Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices, pp. 49-50, 58, 76;
160. Robinson, Trawling, pp. 55-6.
161. Horn, "Pauper Apprenticeship", pp. 177-180;
162. Robinson, Trawling, p. 58. This assumption of property in the apprentice was reflected in the questioning of Henry Toomes, mayor of Hull and a smack-owner, before the 1882 Parliamentary Committee, when he was asked, "No man should own an apprentice who does not own a smack or part of one?", (emphasis added);
163. "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882, XVII, p. 86.
164. Horn "Pauper Apprenticeship", p. 187;
165. Likewise David Boswell, an historian of the trade for nearby Grimsby, has termed these apprenticeships "as much a peculiar institution [...] as was slavery in the United States"; Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices, p. 5.
166. Boswell Sea Fishing Apprentices Ibid., pp. 67, 96
167. Horn, "Pauper Apprenticeship", pp. 184-186;
168. Rule, "The Smackmen of the North Sea", pp. 395-397, 403. One major smack-owner, Alfred Ansell, appearing before the magistrates during an absconding case, noted that many fisherlads preferred jail time particularly "in the winter, when the weather is rough, rather than at sea";
169. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 15 December 1864.
170. PRO MH/32/99, Fleming, "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices", fos 26-27;
171. sec also "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882, XIV, p. 18.
172. In late 1864 and early 1865 the skipper and smack-owner, Thomas Hamlyn, and his second hand John Anderson were brought before the bench on a charge for the death of an apprentice named Kisner. However, at the time the court deemed there was insufficient evidence. It is unlikely that Hamlyn was convicted of this charge, since court records show him as a prosecutor of fisherlads in 1866 and in intermittent years throughout the period; Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 22 December 1864, 5, 12 January 1865.
173. Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices, p. 109;
174. Rule, "The Smackmen of the North Sea", p. 398;
175. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 27 June, 12 December 1867; 30 January 1868; 16 December 1869; 8 September 1872; 13 February 1873; 16 July, 20 August 1874; 25 February 11 November 1875; Kingston upon Hull City Archives, Magistrates' Court Minute Books DPM/1/89, 16 February 1871, DPM/1/93, 2 September 1872.
176. "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882 XVII, p. 57.
177. Under the Master and Servant Act, workers could also sue for wages in the county court which was maintained for small claims. I have recorded a small number of such cases from the local papers for the study years, but they pale in volume to those before the local magistrates.
178. Stanley French, "The Further History of Stipendiary Magistrates", Criminal Law Review, 14 (1967), pp. 227-229,
179. Stanley French idem, "The Further History of Stipendiary Magistrates, Pt 2", Criminal Law Review, 14 (1967), p. 270;
180. Manchester, A Modern Legal History of England and Wales, pp. 77-78. Smack-owners were not represented among the borough magistrates, and thus could not impress their influence directly as did major employers in other towns, as I have demonstrated in Hanley. Additionally, they do not seem to have been among the political elites. Two large smack-owners, Alfred Ansell and Henry Toozes (of Vivian & Toozes) were leading members of the South Myton Reform Association, this being the ward with the largest number of electors and the highest concentration of smack-owners. Both were elected councillors for the district, along with their fellow smack-owner Christopher Pickering, in the early 1870s. They were all Liberals, the normally dominant political force in the borough. However, there is no indication that as a voting bloc they were key players in local politics, or that they had any indirect influence on the borough magistrates;
181. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 3 October 1868; 18 February, 11 November 1869; 6 November 1873; 1 January, 26 February, 15 October, 12 December 1874; 9 November 1875.
182. Exactly who should be appointed was a subject of periodic squabbling; Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 7, 26 July 1866; 8, 22, June 1871.
183. 21 June 1866. On several occasions over this period there were rancorous debates about increasing the salary of the stipendiary and his clerk that divided the borough council; Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 9 March 1865, 26 July 1866, 5 June 1873.
184. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 1 January 1864, 2 August, 21 October 1869.
185. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 9 February 1871.
186. Statistics derived from annual parliamentary reports: Judicial Statistics England and Wales, Police-Criminal Proceedings-Prisons, returns for the year; BPP 1865, LII. [3534] 445; BPP 1866 LXVIII, [3726] 485; BPP 1867 LXVI, [3930] 735; BPP 1867-1868 LXVII, [4701-I] 947; BPP 1867-1868, LXVII [4701] 737; BPP 1868-1869, LVIII [4203] 737; BPP 1870, LXIII, [195] 525; BPP 1871, LXIV [442] 1; BPP 1872, LXV [600] 1; BPP 1873, LXX, [871] 1; BPP 1874, LXXI [1055] 1; BPP 1875, LXXXI, [1315] 1; BPP 1876, LXXIX, [1595] 1.
187. Hay, "Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare", p. 36.
188. Deputy Stipendiary Wrangham, who substituted for Travis on a number of occasions, seems to have adopted essentially the same posture concerning labor cases. As he noted in a master and servant prosecution concerning a shipyard apprentice, "In olden times the apprentice was the domestic servant of the master, and he should contend strictly that in the present day an apprentice was bound to work at all reasonable times. This was a most important principle"; Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 3 October 1867.
189. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 6 March 1873.
190. Case data extracted from Kingston upon Hull City Archives, Magistrates' Court Minute Books, DPM/1/76-83, 85-91, 93-94 96-102, 1864-1875.
191. Trade and Commerce of Hull, p. 132. Despite their readiness to prosecute, smack-owners were frustrated with the legal machinery to do so. Under the Master and Servant Act a summons had to be issued for a servant believed to have left work without permission, If the summons could not be delivered a warrant could then be obtained. Smack-owners complained that they were required to take out summonses for absconding apprentices, knowing full well that they were fleeing, and that the possibility of having a policemen arrest them in the process was diminished since they had to return to court for a warrant;
192. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 2 October, 13 November 1873.
193. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 6 March 1873.
194. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 25 November 1869.
195. Hull and Eastern Counties Herald, 3 March, 15 April 1869, 3 February 1870,13 April 1871,
196. April 1872, 24 April 1873, 9 April 1874, 8 April 1875.
197. Fleming claimed that "a considerable proportion of the fishing apprentices contract venereal disease and it was stated to me that lads purposely committed offences when so diseased in order that they might receive medical attendance in Lincoln County Prison"; PRO MH/32/99, Fleming, "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices", fo. 42.
198. PRO MH/32/99, Fleming "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices", fo. 40-41.
199. see also Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices, pp. 79-83;
200. Horn "Pauper Apprenticeship";
201. Robinson, A History of the Yorkshire Coast Fishing Industry, "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882 XVII, p. 64. My thanks to Martin Wilcox for clarifying the legal bases of prosecution in Hull and Grimsby.
202. J.W. Beeton was a basketmaker who had repeated run-ins with several of his apprentices in the first half of the period.
203. PRO MH/32/99, Fleming, "Treatment of Pauper Apprentices", fo., 46.
204. This supports Hay's claim that prosecutions rose with increased competition in an industry "Master and Servant in England", p. 244.
205. Boswell, Sea Fishing Apprentices, p. 58.
206. Ansell, On Trawling, p. 23; BPP 1882, XVII, p. 41.
207. Bellamy, The Trade and Shipping, p. 49.
208. Chance, Children Under the Poor Law, p. 281.
209. "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882, XVII, pp. xii, 64.
210. An 1894 Parliamentary report noted that one-third of all Grimsby apprentices absconded between 1881-1893; Chance, Children Under the Poor Law, p. 279.
211. Robinson, A History of the Yorkshire Coast, pp. 83-93.
212. Robinson Idem, Trawling, p. 65.
213. Rule, "Smackmen of the North Sea", p. 395. For details of the parliamentary investigation,
214. see "Report of a Committee", BPP 1882 XVII, (3432 ). Horn notes that between 1880-1909. 5,176 boys signed indentures for Grimsby masters, about one-half of whom came from about 170 Poor Law Unions, though the numbers were declining in the 1890s. As many as one-quarter of these fisherlads were imprisoned during this period and the 1883 revision of the Merchant Shipping Act actually provided greater powers for the local marine superintendent to issue warrants for absconding apprentices;
215. Horn, "Pauper Apprenticeship", pp. 177, 184, 187.
216. Marc W. Steinberg, "Capitalist Development, the Labor Process and the Law: The Case of the Victorian English Pottery Industry", American Journal of Sociology, 109 (2003), pp. 445-495
217. and Marc W. Steinberg idem, "Capitalist Law, Relations of Production and Exploitation, and Structured Possibilities for Contention, or Using Three Tillys to Make One Argument", in Maria Kousis and Charles Tilly (eds) Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective (Boulder, CO, 2005), pp. 33-47.
218. As Hay argues, master and servant law was particularly useful in maintaining discipline among skilled workers over whom employers otherwise had little control; Hay, "England, 1562-1875", p. 101. More broadly, Deakin and Wilkinson assert that, "the significance of the master and servant legislation lay in providing employers with a mechanism for imposing discipline on workers who otherwise had only a loose organizational connection to the firm, and who would often be in a position to take advantage of labour shortages to push up wages. [...]. The historical evidence suggests that the disciplinary mechanism of the Acts was widely used as an instrument of economic regulation during a period when modern managerial techniques had yet to develop";
219. Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment and Legal Evolution (Oxford, 2005), pp. 70-71.
220. For details of the contention concerning revision in 1867 and ultimate repeal of master and servant laws with the passing of the Employers' and Workmen's Act of 1875, see Curthoys, Government, Labour and the Law. For opposition to the reform of the law among these industries,
221. see Report from the Select Committee on Master and Servant, 1866, XIII (449), pp. 55-58, 67-68, 106-114, 120-122, 124-128,
222. and the returns to the Royal Commission on Trade Unions questionnaire, "Eleventh and Final Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Organization and Rules of Trade Unions and Their Associations", vol. 2, XXXI 1868-1869 [4123-I], App. E, pp. 86-142. Hay notes that there was likely an expansion of the use of master and servant laws after 1800 and prior the collection of statistics in 1858;
223. Hay, "England, 1562-1875", p. 101.
224. Simon, "Master and Servant", p. 195.
225. As Hay argues, the penal character of the law actually intensifies throughout most of the nineteenth century; Hay, "England, 1562-1875", pp. 106, 109.
226. Simon, "Master and Servant", p. 192.
227. Steinberg, "Capitalist Development", pp. 468-471.
228. Woods, "The Operation of the Master and Servants Act in the Black Country"; Philips, "The Black Country Magistracy". In addition to the towns discussed by these historians, my provisional work with the magistrates' court entry books for Willenhall, Staffordshire shows that lock manufacturers in that town relied heavily on master and servant prosecutions, even for some months after the repeal of the law in mid-August of 1875; Walsall Local History Centre, Willenhall Magistrates' Court Entry Books, 254-1-8, May 1873-January 1876.
229. First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Working of the Master and Servant Act, 1867, and The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 34 & 35 Vict. Cap. 32, PP 1874
230. [c. 1094] XXIV, pp. 147, 155. See also Franks, "'Let But One of Them Come Before Me, and I'll Commit Him", p. 87.
231. Hay and Craven, "Introduction", p. 43.
232. Hay "England, 1562-1875", p. 105. This has been well documented in the case of the Black Country.
233. See Philips, "The Black Country Magistracy";
234. Woods, "The Operation of the Master and Servants Act in the Black Country";
235. Franks, "'Let But One of Them Come Before Me, and I'll Commit Him'"