Understanding the context of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. From E P Thompson to slavery & colonialism
In the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson argued that there was and is a reason why the Tolpuddle Martyrs have become a labour movement tradition while others have not:
Since Luddites or food rioters do not appears satisfactory ‘fore-runners’ of ‘the Labour Movement’ they merited neither sympathy or close attention. And this bias was supplemented, from another direction, by the more conservative bias of the orthodox academic tradition. Hence ‘history’ has dealt fairly with the Tolpuddle Martyrs… but the hundreds of men and women executed or transported for oath-taking, Jacobin conspiracy, Luddism, the Pentridge and Grange Moor risings, food and enclosure and turnpike riots, the Ely riots and the Labourers’ Revolt of 1830 and a score of minor affrays, have been forgotten by all but a few specialists, or, if they are remembered they are thought to be simpletons or men tainted with criminal folly’
Sixty years on this remains an important corrective to the grand narratives of people’s history that can sometimes be found being celebrated.
There is also a wider context and one which Thompson does not touch on, that of slavery and colonialism. Corinne Fowler underlines this in her recent book on walks through the British colonial countryside:
Corinne Fowler’s Our Island Stories, tells the story of the impact of the slave trade in the British countryside through a series of walks. One of these takes in Tolpuddle.
From the early seventeenth century Dorset people were despatched to Barbados to work on plantations. However by the 1830s they had long been replaced by African slave labour. The profits from the plantations made land owning families wealthy, but not of course the people who worked their land in the County.
The key plantation owner in Dorset were the Drax family whose land in Barbados produced sugar using slave labour. The Drax plantation still exists, although, no thanks to the family, the slaves have gone. The current owner Richard Drax has refused all attempts by anti-racism campaigners to address his families past and present.
James Frampton was the Tolpuddle Magistrate and landowner who was responsible for the prosecution of the Tolpuddle labourers. He was concerned that a union would hit profits. He had married into a family who owned plantations in Antigua
The Martyrs were framed, found guilty and transported to Australia. Frampton had sought the advice of the Home Secretary Lord Melbourne on how to successfully prosecute the Tolpuddle men. The foreman of the jury was the Home Secretary’s brother in law.
Once in Australia one of the Martyrs James Hammett was set to work for the colonial administrator of New South Wales Edward John Eyre.
A campaign saw the Martyrs returned to Britain. Meanwhile by the early 1840s Eyre had been appointed as Protector of Aborigines in south-east Australia. Suffice to say protection of colonial interests was his priority not those of the indigenous population who he described as ‘savage hordes’.
Eyre was promoted, acting as Governor of New Zealand from 1846 to 1853 and then of the Caribbean island of St Vincent to 1860. By 1865 Eyre was in charge of Jamaica. While slavery had officially ended conditions for labourers on the plantations remained appalling. Protests were organised and in 1865 Eyre imposed martial law. A thousand Jamaicans were tortured and some executed in what is known as the Morant Bay rebellion.
Eyre was recalled to Britain but was never prosecuted. Rather he was able to live out the remainder of his life on a modestly reduced Colonial Governors pension on his Devonshire estate. He died in 1901.
The links between the attempts to resist trade union activity in Britain and the colonial slavery regimes often owned by the same people have been too little explored. While the Tolpuddle men were certainly not slaves exploitation for profit at home and abroad was the name of the game for people like James Frampton.
It is far from just history either. At the July 4th Election Richard Drax who was the long standing Tory MP for a Dorset Constituency lost his seat to Labour. A small victory for the six men of Tolpuddle even if i
Leave a Reply