In London there was a much smaller demonstration on May 1st supported by those purists who preferred to meet the hopes of the most radical at the Paris Congress for action on the day itself, rather than to recognise the realities of British trade unionism. It was led by Jack Williams, a working man from the East End of London, who was a stalwart of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF), in his capacity as a leader of the National Federation of all Trades, a short lived general union centred on south-west London.
However, its main support came from the Socialist League, a breakaway group from the SDF which, by this time, was increasingly being dominated by anarchists. Jack Williams' demonstration mustered between 1,000 and 1,500 people who flocked from the Embankment to Hyde Park. This procession was marked by bands playing the Marseillaise, including one wearing French redcaps, and by companies of young men carrying red flags topped with caps of liberty. On the evening of May Day the Socialist League held a demonstration at Clerkenwell Green, attended by several thousand people, which was addressed by William Morris and other leading League figures. However, as E.P.
Thompson wrote in his biography of Morris, 'For the sake of this principle [demonstrating on May Day itself, which they held to honestly in the belief that they were acting in true international fraternity, they rejected the chance of sharing in the leadership of one of the greatest demonstrations since the last days of Chartism.'
The main demonstration in London, held on Sunday, was one of the largest, quite possibly the largest, in British history. A delighted Engels, who was present on one of the platforms, wrote afterwards:
The demonstration here on 4th May was nothing short of overwhelming and even the entire bourgeois press had to admit it... 250 to 500,000 people, of whom over three-quarters were workers demonstrating...All in all, the most gigantic meeting that has ever been held here.
To Karl Marx's daughter Laura, Engels wrote:
I can assure you that I looked a couple of inches taller when I got down from that old lumbering wagon that served as a platform – after having heard again, for the first time since 40 years, the unmistakeable voice of the English Proletariat.
For all its vast size the main London May Day demonstration was notable for divisions among its sponsors. The Times, which testified to the scale of the event, also noted:
The whole affair, long though it had been in planning, was on the whole, not well organised, probably because there was a lack of unanimity among the leaders. The simple truth of the matter appears to be that orders came from three different sources, that three sets of minds were at work, and that the result was confusion.
The three groups were the Central Committee for the Eight Hours Legal Working Day Demonstration, the London Trades Council and H.M. Hyndman and the SDF.
The Central Committee for the Eight Hours Legal Working Day Demonstration had been formed on April 6th, 1890. It represented ninety-four trade union, socialist and radical groups, most of which had been campaigning for the eight-hour day. One of the most important of these bodies was the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers which had won an eight-hour day through strike action in 1889. When its secretary, Will Thorne, was asked to organise a May Day demonstration he turned to Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling (the socialist with whom she lived). As well as being a major influence on Thorne's development as a socialist, Eleanor Marx had been very active in the struggle to set up the gasworkers' union. She and Aveling were leading figures in the Bloomsbury Socialist Society, which itself had started to make preparation for May Day. Along with the gasworkers and the Bloomsbury Socialist Society, the other major body involved in the formation of the Central Committee was the Labour Electoral Association which had been set up by the TUC in 1886. The Central Committee was committed to the statutory enactment of the eight-hour day.
In contrast, the London Trades Council in 1890 would go no further than to declare itself in 'favour of the principle of reducing hours of labour, leaving the precise method to the future'. It was dominated by an older generation of trade unionists who were nervous about supporting even the Sunday demonstration. However, as one of the old guard of trade unionists, 6eorge Howell, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green, put it, 'Goaded by the attacks of the Socialists and New Trade Unionists, the London Trades Council found itself obliged to participate in May Day celebrations in favour of "solidarity of labour", Eight Hours and other idealist proposals' Tom Mann, a leading socialist and New Unionist, succeeded in getting round the majority's opposition to a legal, eight-hour day by proposing that the London Trades Council hold a separate demonstration on May 4th. Hence the Trades Council made its own separate arrangements, including marching to Hyde Park by a different route from the Central Committee's procession and having seven separate platforms for its speakers in the Park.
To add to organisational disarray. H.M. Hyndman and the SDF were a third element in the great demonstration of May 4th, 1890. Hyndman had long fallen out with Engels and with the Central Committee's leading figures. He arranged with the London Trades Council to have two of its seven platforms in Hyde Park.
By all accounts the London Trades Council's attempt at separate organisation was a disaster. The Leicester Daily Mercury's correspondent gave the following assessment:
The fact is that the Trades Council were beaten by their very numbers. They marched into the park in straggling detachment, and all interest in the demonstration had died away and the crowd had gone before the last detachment arrived, weary and forlorn, at ten minutes to six. Thus the Eight Hours Bill party gained a triumphant victory. They showed their full strength, and their opponents, the numerically stronger, never even looked imposing. They occupied the ground first and engaged the interest of the crowd. They had excellent and well-known speakers, whereas their opponents confined themselves to working men orators. Last, but not least, they had a clear and definite proposition to make.
The only Trades Council platform which drew a large crowd was the main one, at which Tom Mann and Ben Tillett of the Dockers' Union spoke. This was surrounded by dockers, barge-builders, ropemakers and railwaymen. Mann, though he was a well-known advocate of the legal eight-hour day, loyally spoke to the Trades Council motion.
The Central Committee's organisation coped better with the huge number of demonstrators. At 4.00 p.m. a bugle sounded, and their speakers, standing on the seven wagons serving as platforms, began. However as The Times correspondent noted 'Procession after procession came streaming into the park, bands played through speeches and it was a medley of sounds.'
The biggest crowd gathered around platform five, the Gas Workers' Union's platform, to hear John Burns. Burns, then thirty-one, was at the height of his radical reputation; he gave his audience a fiery speech, which included very blunt criticism of the older generation of trade union leaders on the TUC and London Trades Council. He said that he and the men on that platform 'had done more for unionism in the last twelve months and had formed more trade unions in that time than all the Broadhursts and Shiptons put together'. Burns said that although the gas workers 'had got an eight hours day by voluntary effort and by combination', they knew that 'directly trade declined and the boom was passed' the employers would take such gains away unless they were protected by an act of parliament.
While the main theme on the Central Committee's platforms was the eight- hour day, it was not the sole one. On their second platform Thomas Sutherest, then Radical prospective parliamentary candidate for Doncaster, gave a vigorous speech against sweated labour. Michael Davitt, the great Irish Nationalist advocate of land nationalisation, also spoke from that platform, urging not only that 'the land should belong to the people' but also that, 'It rested with the people themselves to send to Parliament men from their own ranks who were really representatives of labour, and the working classes would never achieve any satisfactory reform until they realised and acted upon this fact'. The Central Committee's other platforms had other famous socialist and trade union figures on them. As well as Engels, these included Fabians George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas, Edward Bernstein, Eleanor Marx, George Lansbury, R B. Cunningham Graham MP, and Pete Curran.
While the massive London demonstration of May 4th, 1890, received international attention, there were others elsewhere in Britain. These were held in places with marked SDF, Socialist League or New Union activity or a blend of these. Within England, the largest May Day demonstrations appear to have been in Northampton and Leeds.
In Northampton, in spite of pouring rain, there was a large procession headed by a temperance hand. The Times reported that:
Nearly 10,000 working men assembled in the market square, representing almost every branch of labour in the town and district, including about 2,000 agricultural labourers from adjacent villages.
In Leeds some 6,000 workers marched in procession, with a band playing the Marseillaise. At their head was a banner of the Leeds Jewish Tailors, Pressers and Machinists, and those in the march included 1,100 Jewish tailors, 900 slipper makers and 800 gas workers, followed by contingents of dyers, maltsters, teamsters and general labourers. There were also sizeable demonstrations in Bristol and Plymouth.
In Scotland the largest demonstration was in Aberdeen on Saturday, May 17th. Some 6,000 trade unionists took part in the procession and between 10,000 and 20,000 heard H.H. Champion speak at the open-air meeting. In Edinburgh, in spite of the opposition of the trades council to a demonstration, between 400 and 600 people turned out to hear Keir Hardie and other speakers on Sunday, May 4th.
NOTE
As late as March 1949 West Ham Trades Union Council were claiming that they were the pioneers of the first ever may day in 1890 (probably via the Gas workers union militancy)
source Daily Worker 9 April 1949
The 1890 May day procession was marked by bands playing the Marseillaise, including one wearing French redcaps, and by companies of young men carrying red flags topped with caps of liberty.
In
London there was a much smaller demonstration on May 1st supported by
those purists who preferred to meet the hopes of the most radical at the
Paris Congress for action on the day itself, rather than to recognise
the realities of British trade unionism. It was led by Jack Williams, a
working man from the East End of London, who was a stalwart of the
Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF), in his capacity as a leader
of the National Federation of all Trades, a shortlived general union
centred on south-west London. However, its main support came from the
Socialist League, a breakaway group from the SDF which, by this time,
was increasingly being dominated by anarchists. Jack Williams'
demonstration mustered between 1,000 and 1,500 people who flocked from
the Embankment to Hyde Park. This procession was marked by bands playing
the Marseillaise, including one wearing French redcaps, and by
companies of young men carrying red flags topped with caps of liberty.
On the evening of May Day the Socialist League held a demonstration at
Clerkenwell Green, attended by several thousand people, which was
addressed by William Morris and other leading League figures. However,
as E.P. Thompson wrote in his biography of Morris, 'For the sake of this
principle [demonstrating on May Day itself, which they held to honestly
in the belief that they were acting in true international fraternity,
they rejected the chance of sharing in the leadership of one of the
greatest demonstrations since the last days of Chartism.'
The main demonstration in London, held on Sunday, was one of the largest, quite possibly the largest, in British history. A delighted Engels, who was present on one of the platforms, wrote afterwards:
The Central Committee for the Eight Hours Legal Working Day Demonstration had been formed on April 6th, 1890. It represented ninety-four trade union, socialist and radical groups, most of which had been campaigning for the eight-hour day. One of the most important of these bodies was the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers which had won an eight-hour day through strike action in 1889. When its secretary, Will Thorne, was asked to organise a May Day demonstration he turned to Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling (the socialist with whom she lived). As well as being a major influence on Thorne's development as a socialist, Eleanor Marx had been very active in the struggle to set up the gasworkers' union. She and Aveling were leading figures in the Bloomsbury Socialist Society, which itself had started to make preparation for May Day. Along with the gasworkers and the Bloomsbury Socialist Society, the other major body involved in the formation of the Central Committee was the Labour Electoral Association which had been set up by the TUC in 1886. The Central Committee was committed to the statutory enactment of the eight-hour day.
In contrast, the London Trades Council in 1890 would go no further than to declare itself in 'favour of the principle of reducing hours of labour, leaving the precise method to the future'. It was dominated by an older generation of trade unionists who were nervous about supporting even the Sunday demonstration. However, as one of the old guard of trade unionists, 6eorge Howell, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green, put it, 'Goaded by the attacks of the Socialists and New Trade Unionists, the London Trades Council found itself obliged to participate in May Day celebrations in favour of "solidarity of labour", Eight Hours and other idealist proposals' Tom Mann, a leading socialist and New Unionist, succeeded in getting round the majority's opposition to a legal, eight-hour day by proposing that the London Trades Council hold a separate demonstration on May 4th. Hence the Trades Council made its own separate arrangements, including marching to Hyde Park by a different route from the Central Committee's procession and having seven separate platforms for its speakers in the Park.
To add to organisational disarray. H.M. Hyndman and the SDF were a third element in the great demonstration of May 4th, 1890. Hyndman had long fallen out with Engels and with the Central Committee's leading figures. He arranged with the London Trades Council to have two of its seven platforms in Hyde Park.
By all accounts the London Trades Council's attempt at separate organisation was a disaster. The Leicester Daily Mercury's correspondent gave the following assessment:
The Central Committee's organisation coped better with the huge number of demonstrators. At 4.00 p.m. a bugle sounded, and their speakers, standing on the seven wagons serving as platforms, began. However as The Times correspondent noted 'Procession after procession came streaming into the park, bands played through speeches and it was a medley of sounds.'
The biggest crowd gathered around platform five, the Gas Workers' Union's platform, to hear John Burns. Burns, then thirty-one, was at the height of his radical reputation; he gave his audience a fiery speech, which included very blunt criticism of the older generation of trade union leaders on the TUC and London Trades Council. He said that he and the men on that platform 'had done more for unionism in the last twelve months and had formed more trade unions in that time than all the Broadhursts and Shiptons put together'. Burns said that although the gas workers 'had got an eight hours day by voluntary effort and by combination', they knew that 'directly trade declined and the boom was passed' the employers would take such gains away unless they were protected by an act of parliament.
While the main theme on the Central Committee's platforms was the eight- hour day, it was not the sole one. On their second platform Thomas Sutherest, then Radical prospective parliamentary candidate for Doncaster, gave a vigorous speech against sweated labour. Michael Davitt, the great Irish Nationalist advocate of land nationalisation, also spoke from that platform, urging not only that 'the land should belong to the people' but also that, 'It rested with the people themselves to send to Parliament men from their own ranks who were really representatives of labour, and the working classes would never achieve any satisfactory reform until they realised and acted upon this fact'. The Central Committee's other platforms had other famous socialist and trade union figures on them. As well as Engels, these included Fabians George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas, Edward Bernstein, Eleanor Marx, George Lansbury, R B. Cunningham Graham MP, and Pete Curran.
While the massive London demonstration of May 4th, 1890, received international attention, there were others elsewhere in Britain. These were held in places with marked SDF, Socialist League or New Union activity or a blend of these. Within England, the largest May Day demonstrations appear to have been in Northampton and Leeds. In Northampton, in spite of pouring rain, there was a large procession headed by a temperance hand. The Times reported that:
In Scotland the largest demonstration was in Aberdeen on Saturday, May 17th. Some 6,000 trade unionists took part in the procession and between 10,000 and 20,000 heard H.H. Champion speak at the open-air meeting. In Edinburgh, in spite of the opposition of the trades council to a demonstration, between 400 and 600 people turned out to hear Keir Hardie and other speakers on Sunday, May 4th.
The success of May Day in 1890 ensured that many more demonstrations were organised in 1891. In London some 250,000 people attended the main one on the Sunday. Several thousand people took part in those in Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Norwich. There were also demonstrations in smaller towns such as Jarrow, Sittingbourne and Chatham. In 1891, as in 1890, the new unions were very prominent. The Times noted of Liverpool that the 'processionists were mostly of the unskilled labour class'. As in 1890 the Gasworkers' Union was a major force behind many demonstrations. In the Northeast, at Newcastle and Jarrow, the Tyneside and National Labour Union was prominent. In major ports such as Liverpool and Newcastle the Sailors and Firemen's Union and the Dockers' Union were especially important. In Leeds in 1891, as in 1890, Jewish workers provided a large contingent. In Norwich, Liverpool, Newcastle and elsewhere, the railwaymen, who were pressing for a ten-hour day (eight for shunters in busy yards and for signalmen in busy boxes), were major supporters of the demonstrations. At Newcastle a General Railway Workers' Union speaker spoke bitterly of the parliamentary committee's evidence of men working 'thirty-five hours at a stretch' on the railways.
- See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/chris-wrigley/may-days-and-after#sthash.XHQ6e1IR.dpuf
The main demonstration in London, held on Sunday, was one of the largest, quite possibly the largest, in British history. A delighted Engels, who was present on one of the platforms, wrote afterwards:
The demonstration here on 4th May was nothing short of overwhelming and even the entire bourgeois press had to admit it... 250 to 500,000 people, of whom over three-quarters were workers demonstrating...All in all, the most gigantic meeting that has ever been held here.To Karl Marx's daughter Laura, Engels wrote:
I can assure you that I looked a couple of inches taller when I got down from that old lumbering wagon that served as a platform – after having heard again, for the first time since 40 years, the unmistakeable voice of the English Proletariat.For all its vast size the main London May Day demonstration was notable for divisions among its sponsors. The Times, which testified to the scale of the event, also noted:
The whole affair, long though it had been in planning, was on the whole, not well organised, probably because there was a lack of unanimity among the leaders. The simple truth of the matter appears to be that orders came from three different sources, that three sets of minds were at work, and that the result was confusion.The three groups were the Central Committee for the Eight Hours Legal Working Day Demonstration, the London Trades Council and H.M. Hyndman and the SDF.
The Central Committee for the Eight Hours Legal Working Day Demonstration had been formed on April 6th, 1890. It represented ninety-four trade union, socialist and radical groups, most of which had been campaigning for the eight-hour day. One of the most important of these bodies was the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers which had won an eight-hour day through strike action in 1889. When its secretary, Will Thorne, was asked to organise a May Day demonstration he turned to Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling (the socialist with whom she lived). As well as being a major influence on Thorne's development as a socialist, Eleanor Marx had been very active in the struggle to set up the gasworkers' union. She and Aveling were leading figures in the Bloomsbury Socialist Society, which itself had started to make preparation for May Day. Along with the gasworkers and the Bloomsbury Socialist Society, the other major body involved in the formation of the Central Committee was the Labour Electoral Association which had been set up by the TUC in 1886. The Central Committee was committed to the statutory enactment of the eight-hour day.
In contrast, the London Trades Council in 1890 would go no further than to declare itself in 'favour of the principle of reducing hours of labour, leaving the precise method to the future'. It was dominated by an older generation of trade unionists who were nervous about supporting even the Sunday demonstration. However, as one of the old guard of trade unionists, 6eorge Howell, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green, put it, 'Goaded by the attacks of the Socialists and New Trade Unionists, the London Trades Council found itself obliged to participate in May Day celebrations in favour of "solidarity of labour", Eight Hours and other idealist proposals' Tom Mann, a leading socialist and New Unionist, succeeded in getting round the majority's opposition to a legal, eight-hour day by proposing that the London Trades Council hold a separate demonstration on May 4th. Hence the Trades Council made its own separate arrangements, including marching to Hyde Park by a different route from the Central Committee's procession and having seven separate platforms for its speakers in the Park.
To add to organisational disarray. H.M. Hyndman and the SDF were a third element in the great demonstration of May 4th, 1890. Hyndman had long fallen out with Engels and with the Central Committee's leading figures. He arranged with the London Trades Council to have two of its seven platforms in Hyde Park.
By all accounts the London Trades Council's attempt at separate organisation was a disaster. The Leicester Daily Mercury's correspondent gave the following assessment:
The fact is that the Trades Council were beaten by their very numbers. They marched into the park in straggling detachment, and all interest in the demonstration had died away and the crowd had gone before the last detachment arrived, weary and forlorn, at ten minutes to six. Thus the Eight Hours Bill party gained a triumphant victory. They showed their full strength, and their opponents, the numerically stronger, never even looked imposing. They occupied the ground first and engaged the interest of the crowd. They had excellent and well-known speakers, whereas their opponents confined themselves to working men orators. Last, but not least, they had a clear and definite proposition to make.The only Trades Council platform which drew a large crowd was the main one, at which Tom Mann and Ben Tillett of the Dockers' Union spoke. This was surrounded by dockers, barge-builders, ropemakers and railwaymen. Mann, though he was a well-known advocate of the legal eight-hour day, loyally spoke to the Trades Council motion.
The Central Committee's organisation coped better with the huge number of demonstrators. At 4.00 p.m. a bugle sounded, and their speakers, standing on the seven wagons serving as platforms, began. However as The Times correspondent noted 'Procession after procession came streaming into the park, bands played through speeches and it was a medley of sounds.'
The biggest crowd gathered around platform five, the Gas Workers' Union's platform, to hear John Burns. Burns, then thirty-one, was at the height of his radical reputation; he gave his audience a fiery speech, which included very blunt criticism of the older generation of trade union leaders on the TUC and London Trades Council. He said that he and the men on that platform 'had done more for unionism in the last twelve months and had formed more trade unions in that time than all the Broadhursts and Shiptons put together'. Burns said that although the gas workers 'had got an eight hours day by voluntary effort and by combination', they knew that 'directly trade declined and the boom was passed' the employers would take such gains away unless they were protected by an act of parliament.
While the main theme on the Central Committee's platforms was the eight- hour day, it was not the sole one. On their second platform Thomas Sutherest, then Radical prospective parliamentary candidate for Doncaster, gave a vigorous speech against sweated labour. Michael Davitt, the great Irish Nationalist advocate of land nationalisation, also spoke from that platform, urging not only that 'the land should belong to the people' but also that, 'It rested with the people themselves to send to Parliament men from their own ranks who were really representatives of labour, and the working classes would never achieve any satisfactory reform until they realised and acted upon this fact'. The Central Committee's other platforms had other famous socialist and trade union figures on them. As well as Engels, these included Fabians George Bernard Shaw and Graham Wallas, Edward Bernstein, Eleanor Marx, George Lansbury, R B. Cunningham Graham MP, and Pete Curran.
While the massive London demonstration of May 4th, 1890, received international attention, there were others elsewhere in Britain. These were held in places with marked SDF, Socialist League or New Union activity or a blend of these. Within England, the largest May Day demonstrations appear to have been in Northampton and Leeds. In Northampton, in spite of pouring rain, there was a large procession headed by a temperance hand. The Times reported that:
Nearly 10,000 working men assembled in the market square, representing almost every branch of labour in the town and district, including about 2,000 agricultural labourers from adjacent villages.In Leeds some 6,000 workers marched in procession, with a band playing the Marseillaise. At their head was a banner of the Leeds Jewish Tailors, Pressers and Machinists, and those in the march included 1,100 Jewish tailors, 900 slipper makers and 800 gas workers, followed by contingents of dyers, maltsters, teamsters and general labourers. There were also sizeable demonstrations in Bristol and Plymouth.
In Scotland the largest demonstration was in Aberdeen on Saturday, May 17th. Some 6,000 trade unionists took part in the procession and between 10,000 and 20,000 heard H.H. Champion speak at the open-air meeting. In Edinburgh, in spite of the opposition of the trades council to a demonstration, between 400 and 600 people turned out to hear Keir Hardie and other speakers on Sunday, May 4th.
The success of May Day in 1890 ensured that many more demonstrations were organised in 1891. In London some 250,000 people attended the main one on the Sunday. Several thousand people took part in those in Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Norwich. There were also demonstrations in smaller towns such as Jarrow, Sittingbourne and Chatham. In 1891, as in 1890, the new unions were very prominent. The Times noted of Liverpool that the 'processionists were mostly of the unskilled labour class'. As in 1890 the Gasworkers' Union was a major force behind many demonstrations. In the Northeast, at Newcastle and Jarrow, the Tyneside and National Labour Union was prominent. In major ports such as Liverpool and Newcastle the Sailors and Firemen's Union and the Dockers' Union were especially important. In Leeds in 1891, as in 1890, Jewish workers provided a large contingent. In Norwich, Liverpool, Newcastle and elsewhere, the railwaymen, who were pressing for a ten-hour day (eight for shunters in busy yards and for signalmen in busy boxes), were major supporters of the demonstrations. At Newcastle a General Railway Workers' Union speaker spoke bitterly of the parliamentary committee's evidence of men working 'thirty-five hours at a stretch' on the railways.
- See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/chris-wrigley/may-days-and-after#sthash.XHQ6e1IR.dpuf
