Artisan or Labour Aristocrat?

*
by E. J. HOBSBAWM

The lecture which I have the honour of giving today is not intended as
a continuation of the debate on the labour aristocracy, which has been
gathering pace and impetus in recent years.1 In this sense the question-mark
at the end of the title is deceptive: there will be no direct answer to the
question whether the concept of a labour aristocracy is useful, what this
stratum consisted of, or how it developed. Of course, such an answer is
unnecessary for the group on which I want to concentrate today, namely the
skilled workers usually known in the nineteenth century as "artisans", since
as a group they, or certainly their organized sector, would certainly have
considered themselves a privileged stratum or aristocracy of labour. Conver-
sely, insofar as there was a model of the "labour aristocrat" in the minds of
the many who used this term, or equivalent terms, in the nineteenth century,
it was almost certainly that of the skilled artisan, separated by an abyss from
the "labourer". Whatever may have been the case elsewhere, in the world of
the tradesman "according to workshop etiquette-and nowhere is professional
etiquette more sternly insisted upon than among the handicrafts-all who are
not mechanics are labourers. "2 However, while I believe that my observations
have some bearing on the debate about a labour aristocracy, my argument
does not depend on any particular position in that debate.
It is essentially an argument about the fortunes and transformations of the
skilled manual wage-worker in the first industrial nation. His characteristics,
values, interests and, indeed, protective devices, had their roots deep in the
pre-industrial past of the "crafts" which provided the model even for skilled
trades which could not have existed before the industrial revolution, such as
the Journeymen Steam-Engine Makers. Skilled labour continued to bear the
marks of this past until well into the twentieth century; in some respects it
survived strongly until World War II. It is now generally accepted that
the British industrial economy in its prime relied extensively, and often
fundamentally, on skilled hand-labour with or without the aid of powered
machinery. It did so for reasons of technology, insofar as manual skill could
not yet be dispensed with; for reasons of productive organization, because
skilled labour supplemented and partly replaced design, technological expert-
ise, and management; and, more fundamentally, for reasons of business
rationality. So long as it did not stand in the way of making satisfactory pr
the heavy costs of replacing it, or incidental to its replacement, did not seem
* A revised version of the Tawney Memorial Lecture, ig83.
1 Much of this lecture is based on the research, still largely unpublished in print, of a number of younger
labour historians. Among them readers familiar with the field will recognize my debt to Nina Fishman,
Gareth Stedman Jones, Wayne Lewchuk, Keith McLelland, Joe Melling, Alastair Reid, Richard Price
and Jonathan Zeitlin.
2 Anon., Working Men and Women by a Working Man (i879), p. 62.

355

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 356 E. J. HOBSBAWM

to be justified by the prospects of the profits to be made without it. This

applied not only to special cases like Fleet Street. Sir Andrew Noble of
Armstrong's argued, no doubt correctly, that there was more money to be
made from building one river boat than from producing 6,ooo cars.3 Unlike
the USA, skilled manual labour was not in short supply. And the major
incentive to replace it, namely the mass production of standardized goods,
was unusually weak or patchy in the British home market until the last decades
of the century, while the commanding position of British goods on the world
market, or more precisely in the markets of what today would be called the
"third world" and the white empire, kept old methods of production viable.
Moreover, it may be suggested that, in terms of money wages, British skilled
labour was probably not expensive. It may well have charged less than the
traffic could have borne.
The British skilled worker thus occupied a crucial position of considerable
strength, and the longer he occupied and exploited it, the more troublesome
and expensive it would be to dislodge him. Skill could indeed have been
toppled. Skilled men were defeated in pitched and apparently decisive battles
between the early i83os and the early i85os-even the powerful engineers.
Yet what followed in the i85os and i86os was, in most industries, a tacit
system of arrangements and accommodations between masters and skilled
labour which satisfied both sides. The position of the skilled men was
reinforced to such an extent that the much more systematic later attempt to
displace them by a new and more sophisticated mechanization and by "scien-
tific management" also largely failed. The nineteenth-century artisan was
indeed doomed. Except on some small if crucial patches of the industrial
economy, and in the undergrowth of the black economy, he-for even in our
days it is very rarely a she-no longer counts for much. But then, neither
does British industry.
The history of the artisan is thus a drama in five acts: the first sets him in
his pre-industrial heritage, the second deals with his struggles in the early
industrial period, the third with his mid-Victorian glories, the fourth with his
successful resistance to renewed attack. The last sees his gradual but far from
smooth decline and fall since the end of the first post-war boom.

I
I shall begin with a simple observation. In most European languages the word
artisan or its equivalent, used without qualification, is automatically taken to
mean something like an independent craftsman or small master, or someone
who hopes to become one. In nineteenth-century Britain it is equally automatic-
ally taken to refer to a skilled wage-worker, or indeed sometimes initially (as
in Gaskell's Artisans and Machinery) to any wage-worker. In short, artisan
traditions and values in this country became proletarianized, as nowhere else.
The term artisan itself is perhaps misleading. It belongs largely to the world

3 J. Zeitlin, 'The Labour Strategies of British Engineering Employers, i890-I922' in H. C. Gospel and
C. Littler, eds. Management Strategy and Industrial Relations: An Historical and Comparative Survey (i983).
My reference is to p. 20 of the original paper at the SSRC Conference on Business and Labour History,
23 March i98i.

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 357

of nineteenth-century social and political discourse, probably entering the

public vocabulary in the course of the ill-fated campaigns, almost the last
collective endeavours of both craft masters and journeyman-the latter already
vastly predominating-for putting life back into the Elizabethan labour code
at the end of the Napoleonic wars. The term seems rarely to be used for social
description or classification in the eighteenth century. The actual word almost
universally used in working class circles is "tradesman". While in nineteenth-
century middle-class usage it came to mean almost without exception a,
generally small, retailer (a man who was "in trade"), in working-class usage
it retained, and perhaps among older men still retains, the ancient craft usage
of the man who "has a trade": here language and the differentiation of the
estate of artificers into those who make and those who sell, go together. We
may note in passing that while "being in trade" develops connotations of
contempt or deference, "having a trade", at least for those who have it or
compare themselves to its possessors, maintains its connotations of self-
satisfaction and pride.
As the word "master" shows an analogous development, becoming in
nineteenth-century usage a synonym for "employer", so conversely "journey-
man" becomes synonymous with a wage-working tradesman. Indeed, in the
dawn of industrialization it was sometimes used for any wage-worker. Trade
societies and trade unions, in which the name of the old artisanate survives,
are now not only bodies of traditional crafts like hatters or brushmakers, but
unprecedented ones like journeymen steam-engine makers and boilermakers.
While unions gradually dropped the word "journeyman" from their titles,
the word itself continued as a description of the skilled man, no longer in
contrast to the "masters" in his trade, but rather in contrast to the apprentices
whose numbers he sought to control, and especially the "labourers" or
"handymen" against whom he defended his job monopoly. Nineteenth-
century class differentiation and stratification is thus deeply rooted in the
vocabulary, and hence the congealed memories, of the pre-industrial craft
world.
What is more, the term "the trade" becomes essentially identified with the
skilled workers who practise it. "The men of every trade speak of their trade
among themselves as 'the trade'. "4 "In connexion with labour affairs" says
an early twentieth-century labour dictionary, "this term denotes either (I) a
specific craft or occupation in the field of manual employment, or (2) the
collective body of workers engaged at a single specific craft or occupation. "5
Indeed, "the trade" may actually become a synonym for the union. Thus as
late as World War II we find a cooper's apprentice, outraged by seeing a
labourer doing skilled work, successfully threatening the boss to bring the
matter to the attention of "the trade", if he is not told to stop.6
I do not wish to labour the linguistic point, though the question of language
is significant and would repay systematic research. At all events, it is clear
that not only the vocabulary and institutions of pre-industrial craft organiza-
tion passed over to the working class almost en bloc, but the basic Victorian
4 Working Men and Women, p. I02.
5 Waldo R. Browne, What's What in the Labor Movement: A Dictionary of Labor Affairs and Labor
Terminology (New York, I92I), p. 497.
6 Bob Gilding, The Journeymen Coopers of East London (Oxford, I971), pp. 56-7.

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 358 E. J. HOBSBAWM

classificatory distinction within the working classes also derived from craft
tradition. It is common ground that the Victorian division of workers into
either "artisans" (or some similar term such as "mechanics") and "labourers"
was unrealistic, and had always been descriptively inadequate. Yet it was very
generally accepted, and not only by skilled workers, as representing a real
dichotomy, which caused no major classificatory problems until the expansion
of groups which could not be realistically fitted into either pigeon-hole, or
neglected, and who, from the i89os, came to be known vaguely as "semi-
skilled".7 From the masters' point of view it represented the difference
between all other labour and skilled labour, i.e. "all such as requires a long
period of service, whether under a definite contract or agreement, and in a
single firm, or with no such agreement, the learner moving about from firm
to firm."8 This was also essentially the men's definition.9
From the men's point of view it represented the qualitative superiority of the
skill so learned-the professionalism of craftsmanship-and simultaneously of
its status and rewards. The apprenticed journeyman was the ideal type of
labour aristocrat, not only because his work called for skill and judgement,
but because a "trade" provided a formal, ideally an institutionalized, line of
demarcation separating the privileged from the unprivileged. It did not
much matter that formal apprenticeship was, almost certainly, not the most
important gateway to many trades. George Howell estimated in i877 that less
than io per cent of union members were properly apprenticed.10 They
included as firm a pillar of the crafts as Robert Applegarth, secretary of the
Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners [ASCJ]. The basic fact was
that good fitters-even good carpenters and bricklayers, who were much more
vulnerable to interloping-were not made in a day or a month. So long as
genuine skill was indispensable, artisans-the kind who would never be out
of a job if jobs were going-were less insecure than has been sometimes
suggested. What they had to protect themselves against was not so much
labourers or even handymen who could immediately take over their jobs, but
a long-term oversupply of trained tradesmen-and of course the insecurity
of both trade cycle and life cycle. In many trades-e.g. in engineering-the
risk of an uncontrolled generation of a reserve army of tradesmen was small,
though in some of the building trades, with their large influx of country-
trained men, it was significant.
Such, then, were the artisans we are dealing with. I may note in passing
that they are not to be confused with the so-called "intelligent artisan" of the
mid-Victorian debates on parliamentary reform, or of Thomas Wright, that
"hero of a thousand footnotes", to quote Alastair Reid. Artisans were indeed
apt to be more adequately schooled than most non-artisans and, as the history
of most labour movements shows, far more apt than the rest to occupy
responsible and leading positions. Even in the I950S skilled workers provided

7N. B. Dearle, Industrial Training: With Special Reference to the Conditions Prevailing in London (I914),
Pp. 3I-2.
8 Ibid. p. 3I-
9 Royal Commission on Labour (P.P. i892 XXXVI/i) Group A, Q. i6064. Evidence of J. Cronin, Secretary
of the Associated Millmen of Scotland.
10 George Howell, 'Trade Unions, Apprentices and Technical Education', Contemporary Review xxx
(i877), p. 854.

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 359

the same proportion of full-time union officials-about 95 per cent-in former

craft unions with a heavy admixture of the semi-skilled, as in unions still
described as skilled unions.11 Yet, as Thomas Wright correctly observed, the
reading artisans with intellectual interests-at least in England-were a
minority among their mates whose tastes did not differ notably from the rest
of the proletariat.12 An analysis of a sample of what might be considered
"intelligent artisans" by definition confirms the point. In the first three years'
intake of the London Mechanics' Institution such groups as, say, hatters,
coopers, and shipwrights were grossly under-represented, though they would
scarcely have considered themselves less skilled, or lower in the artisanal
pecking-order than, say, the somewhat over-represented wood-working
trades. 13 The truth, confirmed by later attendance statistics at evening
schools14 is that some trades found it professionally more useful to make
written calculations and use or produce designs than others, and therefore
tended to be more studious. We may therefore safely leave the "intelligent
artisan" to one side.
What did they derive from their pre-industrial craft heritage? Academics
should have no difficulty in grasping the assumptions behind the thinking
and action of corporate crafts, since we largely continue to act upon those
assumptions ourselves. A craft consisted of all those who had acquired the
peculiar skills of a more or less difficult trade, by means of a specific process
of education, completed by tests and assessments guaranteeing adequate
knowledge and performance of the trade. In return such persons expected the
right to conduct their trade and to make what they considered a decent living
corresponding to its value to society and to their social status. It is quite easy
to translate this last requirement into the terms of market economics, and
indeed much of what the crafts did served to restrict entry to the trade, to
exclude competition by outsiders (possessing their own trade or not) and to
restrict output and labour supply in such a manner as to keep the average
income at the required level. In our days market economics have indeed taken
over, but the basic assumptions of crafts had only a peripheral relation to the
discourse of business schools. They spoke the ancient language of a properly
structured social order, or, in E. P. Thompson's terms, a "moral economy":
The obvious intention of our ancestors in enacting the Statute (of Artificers) ...
was to produce a competent number and perpetual succession of masters and
journeymen, of practical experience, to promote, secure and render permanent the
prosperity of the national arts and manufactures, honestly wrought by their ability
and talents [my emphasis], inculcated by a mechanical education.
And this in turn meant that they had "an unquestionable right . . . [to] the
quiet and exclusive enjoyment of their several and respective arts and trades
which the law has already conferred upon them as a property."'15 That labour
H. A. Clegg, A. J. Killick, Rex Adams, Trade Union Officers (Oxford, i96i), p. 50.
12 Cf. Alastair Reid, 'Intelligent Artisans and Aristocrats of Labour: The Essays of Thomas Wright' in
Jay Winter, ed. The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge,
i983), pp. I75-6.
13 The Registers of the Institution are preserved in Birkbeck College, University of London, to which
I am obliged for access.
14 N. B. Dearle, Industrial Training, pp. 566-7.
15 'Report of the Committee on the Petition of the Watchmakers, i8I7', cited in A. E. Bland, P. A.
Brown, R. H. Tawney, eds. English Economic History: Select Documents (I914), pp. 588-go.

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 360 E. J. HOBSBAWM

was the working man's "property" and to be treated as such, was, of course,
a commonplace of contemporary radical political debate.
Conversely, the duty to work properly, was assumed and accepted: the
London Operative Tinplate Workers who left their job, were obliged to return
to complete any unfinished work, or to pay for it to be completed, on pain of
fine by their Society.16 In short, the trade was not so much a way of making
money, but rather the income it provided was the recognition by society and
its constituted authorities of the value of decent work decently done by bodies
of respectable men properly skilled in the tasks which society needed. The
ideal, and indeed the expected, situation was one in which the authorities left
or conferred these rights on the body of the trade, but in which the trade
collectively ensured the best ways in which they were carried out and safe-
guarded.
In the classical, or if you prefer the ideal-typical, corporate crafts of the
pre-industrial period, this regulation and safeguarding was essentially in the
hands of the craft masters, whose enterprises formed the basic units of the
collectivity, as well as of its educational and reproductive system. It is clear
that artisan interests represented essentially by hired workers would be
formulated rather differently. It is less evident that a "trade" so identified
would not be the same as a self-contained stratum of craft journeymen
within a craft economy, even when organized in specific journeymen's gilds,
brotherhoods or other associations. The difference between the latter type of
organization and the British "trade society", which developed directly into
the craft union, deserves more analysis than it has received, though some
recent work has advanced it significantly. It has been suggested that such
forms of collective journeyman action tended to stress "honour" and the social
prestige of the journeymen outside, and often at the expense of, their economic
interests, often by a sort of hypertrophy of symbolic practices such as the
well-known journeymen rituals, fights and riots.17 All we need note here is
that this road of journeyman development-which has no British parallel, so
far as I know-could not easily lead directly into trade unionism.

II
The economic interests of wage-workers were clearly fundamental in British
journeyman trades' organizations even before the industrial revolution. That
is to say, they were designed to safeguard them against the primary life risks
to manual workers, namely accident, sickness and old age, loss of time,
underemployment, periodic unemployment, and competition from a labour
surplus.18 Whereas the core of German or French journeyman collectivity
was to be found outside the workshop-in the institutionalized period of
travel, the journeymen's hostel or lodging-house where the rituals of initiation
took place-the essential locus of the British apprentice's socialization into
16 A. Kidd, History of the Tin-Plate Workers and Sheet-Metal Workers and Braziers Societies (I949), p
28.
17 Cf. Andreas Griessinger, Das symbolische Kapital der Ehre: Streikbewegungen und kollektives Bewu
stsein deutscher Handwerksgesellen im i8. Jahrhundert (Berlin, i98i), for an extensive discussion.
18 Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times
(Folkestone, I979), pp. 27-8.

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 36i

the ways of the journeyman was patently the workplace. There he was "taught
both by the precept and the example of his mates, that he must respect the
trade and its written and unwritten laws, and that in any matter affecting the
trade generally he must sacrifice personal interest, or private opinion, to what
the trade has rightly or wrongly ruled for the general good."19 There was
thus no clear distinction between the "custom of the trade" as tradition or
ritualized practice, and as the rationale of collective action of workers on the
job or the sanction of concessions won by it. Thus some formalized rituals
could be allowed to atrophy without weakening the force of the "custom of
the trade".
The basic journeyman institutions, as Prothero's Artisan Politics shows,
were the friendly benefit society, the house of call, the tramping system-
which gave artisans a nation-wide dimension-and apprenticeship. To these
research has rightly insisted we must add the unorganized, yet by no means
totally informal, work group in the shop or on the site.20
They protected the interests of hired men-yet it must never be forgotten
that this was seen to be "the trade", composed essentially of hired men, that
is to say a specific body of respectable and honourable men defending their
"craft", i.e. their right to independence, respect, and a decent livelihood
which society owed them in return for the proper performance of socially
essential tasks which required their education in skill and experience. The
"right to a trade" in the original constitution of the ASE was compared to the
right belonging to the holder of a doctor's diploma.21 The qualification for
the job was identical with the right to exercise it.
The artisan's sense of independence was, of course, based on more than a
moral imperative. It was based on the justified belief that his skill was
indispensable to production; indeed on the belief that it was the only indispens-
able factor of production. Hence the artisan's objection to the capitalism
which, in the early nineteenth century, increasingly denied the moral economy
which gave the trades their modest but respected place, was not so much to
working masters, whom they had long known, or to machinery as such, which
could be seen as an extension of hand tools, but to the capitalist seen as an
unproductive and parasitic middleman. Masters who belonged to the "useful
classes" both insofar as-to quote Hodgskin-"they are labourers as well as
their journeymen" and insofar as they were needed "to direct and superintend
labour, and to distribute its produce"22 were fine: only, unfortunately, "they
are also"-Hodgskin again-"capitalists or agents of capitalists, and in this
respect their interest is decidedly opposed to the interests of their workmen".
Small masters raised no problem at all, and indeed could often be, or remain,

19 Thomas Wright, Some Habits of the Working Classes (i867), p. I02. See also the account by F. W.
Galton in S. and B. Webb, History of Trade Unionism (i894), pp. 43I-2, and, for the importance of rituals
attached to the workplace, John Dunlop, Artificial and Compulsory Drinking Usages of the United Kingdom
(7th edn. i844), passim.
20 See R. Price, Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour (Cambridge,
1g80), ch. 2, for references.
21 "It is our duty then to exercise the same control over that in which we have a vested interest, as the
physician who holds his diploma, or the author who is protected by his copyright." Preface to the Rules
of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, i85I, cited in J. B. Jefferys, ed. Labour's Formative Years (I948),
p. 30.
22 Cited in G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, i983), pp. I36-7.

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 362 E. J. HOBSBAWM

members of unions. The theoretical foundations of early socialism, misnamed

"utopian", are to be found in this attitude. Essentially it envisaged the
elimination of competition and the capitalist by means of co-operative produc-
tion by artisans. Prothero has shown how artisans who began simply by trying
to defend or re-establish the old "moral economy" could find themselves
driven, under the pressure of the economic transformations of the early
nineteenth century, to envisage a new and revolutionary way of re-establishing
the moral social order as they saw it, and in so doing to become social
innovators and revolutionaries. And Prothero has also, rightly, drawn atten-
tion to the fact that in this respect the evolution of the British journeyman
artisans runs parallel with that of the continental, or rather French, ones.23
Both tended to become politically active as artisans and in doing so to
transform themselves into the "working classes" or essential sectors of these.
Yet there is a vital difference. Utopian socialism, or rather mutualism
and producers' cooperation, became and long remained the core of French
socialism. But in Britain, in spite of occasional surges of popularity and an
attraction for journeymen cadres, cooperative socialism was always a periph-
eral phenomenon, on the way to oblivion even as Chartism swept the country,
the first mass working-class movement, in which journeymen artisans, like
all others under economic pressure, took their share. Socialism declined in
the Britain of the i840s, as it rose on the continent. Whatever the reasons
for this difference-and they remain to be fully explained-they will probably
have to be sought partly in the political conditions of the country, but chiefly
in the very advance of the British capitalist economy over the rest, which
already made an economy of small commodity producers, individual or
collective, somewhat implausible or economically marginal. Journeymen were
workers. They lived in a world of employers. Characteristically, the only
form of cooperation which proved to have genuine appeal from the start was
that which sought to replace an economic sector of small independents, namely
the co-op shop.

III
Thus the tradesman had no difficulty in coming to terms with an economy
of industrial capitalism, once that economy decided to accept his modest
claims to skill, respect and relative privilege, and plainly offered expanding
opportunities and material improvement. And this clearly came to be the case
in the i85os and i86os. Their position may be symbolized in the anniversary
dinner of the Cardiff branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and
Joiners in i867, in the Masons Arms,
nicely decorated with evergreens etc. and over the head of the president's chair was
a design portraying the friendship existing between employer and workman, by
their cordially shaking hands.
This iconographic theme appears frequently at the time.24
In the background was represented the commerce of all nations and in the corner
23 Prothero, Artisans, pp. 337-8. For a clear statement, see William H. Sewell Jr., Work and Revolution
in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to i848 (Cambridge, i980), p. 283.
24 See the description of banners in W. A. Moyes, The Banner Book (Gateshead, I974).

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 363

were busts of ancient philosophers etc. This design bore the following inscription:
"Success to honourable competition" and "the prosperity and wealth of nations are
due to science, industry and a just balance of all interests."25

It would be an error to suppose that such sentiments were incompatible

with going on strike. It may be worth noting, as Richard Price reminds us,
that if the artisan certainly required collective organization, his collective
force is normally not yet to be measured by the membership of trade unions.
The general assumption, by Mayhew and others, was that "society men"
represented perhaps io per cent of all but exceptional trades. Powerful bodies
like the masons had perhaps I5 per cent of the trade organized in i87I, the
carpenters and joiners perhaps II-I2 per cent, the plasterers under io per
cent.26 The Amalgamated Engineers with perhaps 40 per cent in i86i were
quite exceptional.27 Whether or when society men in unorganized trades acted
as pace-makers of economic advance is today a re-opened question. At all
events, in wage and hours movements there was no sharp distinction between
the organized and the unorganized, inasmuch as both had the same interest
in restriction against non-tradesmen. Thus, among the bricklayers of poorly
organized Portsmouth, where there were no indentured apprentices and 70
per cent of the men had just "picked up" the trade, there was nevertheless
no piece-work, and the advancement of labourers, once frequent, had become
rare.28 In Glasgow, where the Webbs found poor relations with employers,
no working rules, no limit on apprentices and far-from-dominant unions,
there was no piece-work, and labourers did not "encroach".29 The truth is
that craftsmanship was not only the criterion of a man's identity and self-
respect, but the guarantee of his income. The best men, said a student of
unemployment in the London building trade, always get work.30 In the
Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners it was taken for granted that "the
success of the society depends on the members being invariably competent
workmen",31 and they were recruited accordingly, and indeed kept up to the
mark. "If a man's not worth 36 shillings a week" said the ASE Monthly Record
proudly, though perhaps in i9ii no longer with total sincerity, "the union
has rules to deal with incompetence."32 Just so James Hopkinson had observed
in the i830s: "Our shop was a strong union shop and the leading workmen
in the town worked there."33 The small-arms fire with which the artisans
fought the big guns of the employers derived its effectiveness from the
ramparts of skill which protected it as well as from the solidarity of the
marksmen.
The skill, and the artisan's independence, were symbolized by the posses-

25 Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and joiners (hereafter ASCJ) Monthly Report, January i868, p. 25.
26 Price, Masters, Unions and Men, p. 62.
27 M. and J. B. Jefferys, 'The Wages, Hours and Trade Customs of the Skilled Engineer in i86I', Econ.
Hist. Rev. XVII (I947), pp. 29-30; but the inclusion of members of other skilled unions would raise this
percentage.
28 LSE Library, Webb Collection, Coll. EA 3I, pp. 245-9.
29 Ibid. pp. 3II-22.
30 N. B. Dearle, Problems of Unemployment in the London Building Trade (i908), p. 93.
31 ASCJ, Monthly Report, Feb. i868, p. 63.
32 Amalgamated Society of Engineers (hereafter ASE), Monthly Record, June i9ii, cited in M. Holbrook-
Jones, Supremacy and Subordination of Labour (i982), p. 68.
33 J. B. Goodman, ed. Victorian Cabinet Maker: The Memoirs ofjames Hopkinson, i8i9-94 (i968), p. 24.

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 364 E. J. HOBSBAWM

sion of personal tools,34 those small but vital means of production which
enabled him to work anywhere at his trade. Broadhurst, the union leader and
Lib-Lab MP, kept his mason's tools packed and ready throughout his time
of political eminence: they were his insurance.35 Many years later, in I939,
when the boilermaker Harry Pollitt was deposed from his post in the Commu-
nist Party, his mother proudly wrote: "Your marking-off tools are here, and
I have kept them in vaseline, ready for use at any time."36 At a more modest
level, when Jess Oakroyd, in J. B. Priestley's Good Companions, lost his job
and went on tramp, the most important thing he took with him was his bag
of tools.
The highest skills did not necessarily require the most expensive or elaborate
tool-kit, though proud tradesmen-notably in wood-working-spent heavily
on tools and luxury containers as status symbols. The ASCJ in i886 limited
benefit for the loss of a tool-chest, on the grounds that "if a member takes a
more valuable chest to work [i.e. than is necessary] he should do so at his
own risk."37 Tool insurance by the union was usual among woodworkers,
though less so among metal-workers, presumably because their personal tools
were ancillary to shop equipment.38 The "tool benefit" of the ASCJ was
clearly intended as a major selling-point for the union-it insured against
theft, and not only against fire and shipwreck-and its importance is indicated
by the frequency of branch resolutions and notices on the subject.39 Indeed,
in their first thirty years the amount of tool benefit paid per member was
roughly comparable to accident benefit, and amounted to c. 55 per cent of
funeral benefit.40
Yet the value of implements was secondary to their symbolic importance.
London shipwrights, than whom few were more skilled, owned perhaps 50
shillings' worth in i849, according to Mayhew,41 and in the i88os the union
paid 50 per cent of replacement costs up to a maximum of ?5.42 Mayhew
estimated cabinet makers' tools at ?30-40, joiners' tools at up to ?30, coopers'
at ?I2. These figures, except for carpenters and joiners, are rather higher than
those quoted in the Royal Commission on Labour or derivable from the lists
of stolen tools in the carpenters' reports; and according to both Mayhew and
34 "That if the Central Association of Employers carry out their threat of a Masters' strike . . . it is the
duty of working men to . . . begin manufacturing for the public . . . . That inasmuch as many of our
members have lathes and other tools in their possession . . . it is to be hoped that they will . . . communicate
their intention of lending such tools for the benefit of those persons who may be thrown out of employment
by the masters' strike." Announcement by the Council of ASE in The Operative, 23 Dec. i85I.
35 Henry Broadhurst, The Story of his Life from Stone-mason's Bench to the Treasury Bench (i90i), p. 2.
36 Harry Pollitt, Serving my Time (I94i edn.), p. I4.
37 ASCJr, Monthly Report, July i886, pp. I37-8.
38 The Boilermakers appear to have had none (D. C. Cummings, History of the United Society of
Boilermakers and Iron & Steel Ship Builders (Newcastle, I905), pp. 36-7, 52. The ASE Annual Reports
included expenditure for "loss of tools by fire" in an item of the accounts covering miscellaneous grants,
from which its relative insignificance may be inferred.
39 Following branch pressure, lists of tools stolen from members were published in the Monthly Report
from October i868 on.
40 Total benefit per member of ASCJ i860-i889 inclusive: Funeral, ?3 2S. 8d.; Accident, Li I5s. iold.;
Tool, Li W4s. 61d. (G. Howell, The Conflicts of Capital and Labour Historically and Economically Consid-
ered, being a History and Review of the Trade Unions of Great Britain etc. (2nd edn. i890), p. 5 I9.
41 Henry Mayhew, The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts
(Horsham, i982), v, p. 225.
42 David Dougan, The Shipwrights: The History of the Shipconstructors and Shipwrights Association
I963 (i968), pp. I9, 30. See also Royal Commission on Labour (P.P. i893-4, xxxiv), Group A Q. 20,4I3,
2I,398.

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 365

probability, tools were bought piecemeal in a man's last years of appren-

ticeship, and usually second-hand to begin with.43 But they symbolized
independence. Hence the disputes about "grinding-time". Since the tradesmen
brought to the job his skill and his tools, both must be absolutely ready for
action. He and only he must sharpen them-at a weekly expense which was
not negligible.44 Logically the moment for this was at the end of the last job,
and in the employer's time, which (or money in lieu) was expected to be made
available.45 Even today, as Beynon shows for Ford's, tools still imply some
independence for tradesmen as against production workers.46
But if personal tools symbolized independence for the artisans, control of
the tools symbolized, conversely, the superiority of management. We know
that management was about to transform its plant organization, when emery
wheels were taken from the shop and workers were no longer allowed to
sharpen tools in their own way and to their own specifications, but must have
this done to angles determined by others in a special tool-room.47 And,
characteristically, the tool-room was to remain the last stronghold of the
craftsman in the semi-skilled mass production engineering works of the
twentieth century. Even in the non-union motor industry between the wars,
management would be careful of the susceptibilities of the tool-room and turn
a blind eye to the unionism of toolmakers. In the nineteenth century such
control was most visible in the giant railway companies, enterprises which
employed and trained numerous artisans and, though recognizing that their
foremen were essentially drawn from among them, and hence were likely to
have the artisan view,48 saw no need for a symbiosis with partly autonomous
labour. Thus the Great Western and the Great Eastern turned craftsman's
pride into an obligation, by obliging workmen, in the unilaterally imposed
working rules, to buy and insure their personal tools. Foremen in Stratford
were to examine the men's tool-chests before they were taken out of the works,
and in Derby they needed a special pass to do So.49 The labour policies of the
railway companies, which deserve more study than they have so far received
in Britain, sometimes look as though they had been specifically designed to
replace craft autonomy and exclusive control by managerial control of hiring,
training, promotion to higher grades of skill, and workshop operations.
For tools symbolized not merely the relative independence of the artisan
from management, but, even more clearly, his monopoly of skilled work.
The standard expression for what the unskilled or the not specifically trained
43 Mayhew, v, p. I93. For data on tool costs from the Royal Comm. on Labour (Group A), see P.P.
i892, XXXVI/ii, Q. i6,848, I9,466, i9,8I2-3, 20,367-9.
44 Mayhew, ibid. pp. 94, 96, I55, i67, 2I4 estimates the weekly cost at between 6d. and 2S. a week.
45 S. and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy (I9I3 edn.), p. 3I3.
46 Huw Beynon, Working for Ford (Harmondsworth, I973), p. I45: "On the assembly line one man is
as good as the next man .... In a skilled work situation things are slightly different ... by virtue of the
fact that [the men] control the tools, or the knowledge, vital to the completion of the job. The foreman
has to ask them."
47 Zeitlin, 'Labour Strategies', pp. 2I, 26.
48 "The shop foremen will be men who are skilled in the work of their respective shops. Probably as
workmen they showed especial ability and skill, which led to their promotion from the ranks." James
Clayton, 'The Organization of the Locomotive Department', in John Macaulay, ed. Modern Railway
Working: A Practical Treatise by Engineering Experts (I9I2-I4) II, p. 57.
49 Kenneth Hudson, Working to Rule: Railway Workshop Rules: A Study of Industrial Discipline (Bath,
I970).

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 366 E. J. HOBSBAWM

men must be prevented from doing at all costs, i.e. "encroaching" or "follow-
ing the trade", was some variant of the phrase "taking up the tools", or
"working tradesmen's tools" or "getting hold of the tools for himself '.50
Bricklayers' labourers, in more than one set of working rules, were prohibited
specifically from the "use of the trowel" .51 Coopers' labourers were only
allowed to use some specified coopers' tools such as hammers.52 Conversely,
artisans recognized each others' status by lending each other tools.53 In short,
they may be defined essentially as tool-using and tool-monopolizing animals.
The right to a trade was not only a right of the duly qualified tradesman,
but also a family heritage.54 Tradesmen's sons and relations did not only
become tradesmen because, as among the professional middle classes, their
chances of doing so were notably superior to the rest, but also because they
wanted nothing better for their sons, and fathers insisted on privileged access
for them. Free apprenticeship for at least one son was provided for in many
a set of Builders' Working Rules.55 The formidable Boilermakers' Society was
largely recruited from sons and kin,56 and in Edwardian London hereditary
succession was considered usual among boilermakers and engineers, in some
printing trades, though among the builders only for the favoured masons,
plasterers, and perhaps plumbers. Here it was also pointed out that the
attractions of office jobs for tradesmen's sons were small.57 This is confirmed
by the analysis of some 200 biographies from the Dictionary of Labour
Biography58 (mainly of those born between i850 and i900) which shows that,
though the number of sons of non-tradesmen was only c. 75 per cent of that
of tradesmen, the number of tradesmen's sons who went into white-collar or
similar jobs was not much more than half of that of non-tradesmen's sons. In
short, for the Victorian artisan, workshop education rather than schooling was
still what counted, and a trade was at least as desirable or better than anything
else effectively on offer. Indeed, the largest single group in the Dictionary
sample (from which I have excluded the overwhelmingly self-reproduced
miners) consisted of c. 70 sons of tradesmen who took up trades, in about half
the cases, their father's. And we know from Crossick's study of Kentish

50 Working Men and Women, p. 66; ASE Quarterly Report, Dec. i893, pp. 48, 59; Dearle, Industr
Training, p. 25.
51 Cf. the collection of builders' "working rules" in the Webb Collection (LSE Library, Coll. EB xxxi-
xxxvi and Coll. EC vi-xviii); for instance Bridgnorth i863, Loughborough i892, Worcester i89i (Coll.
EB xxxiv). Shrewsbury (Coll. EC vii).
52 Gilding, Journeyman Coopers, p. 56.
53 Thomas Wright, The Great Unwashed (i869), p. 282: shopmates will lend a long-term tramping
artisan "their best tools". Charity Organisation Society, Special Committee on Unskilled Labour: Report
and Minutes of Evidence, June i908, p. 98: "In the case of mechanics who have been out of work for any
time, how far are they short of tools . . . ? There is a lot of freemasonry among them, and they lend each
other tools. If you looked into their baskets you would find ten per cent of them deficient in tools." Note
that the witness, a building foreman, claims to be merely guessing. He does not look into the artisans'
baskets. For the penalty of losing tools, namely lapsing into unskilled labouring, see Mayhew, Morning
Chronicle Survey, v, p. I30.
54 J. B. Jefferys, The Story of the Engineers (i945), p. 58 on second and third sons, and sons of fath
out of the trade, joining the trade.
55 Webb Coll. EB xxxiv: Hull, Redditch, Wakefield; Coll. EC VII: Bristol, Dudley, Gornal, Kiddermins-
ter, Leicester, Rotherham, Stourbridge, Wigan.
56 Keith McLelland and Alastair Reid, 'The Shipbuilding Workers, i840-I9I4' (unpub. paper), p. i8.
57 Dearle, Industrial Training, p. 241.
58 Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville, eds. Dictionary of Labour Biography, I-VI, (I972-i982).

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 367

London in i873-5 that 43 per cent of the sons of engineering craftsmen were
sons of men in these crafts, and 64 per cent came from skilled fathers in
general; 64 per cent and 76 per cent of shipbuilding craftsmen came from
shipbuilding and skilled families respectively; as did 46 per cent and 69 per
cent respectively of building tradesmen. I leave open the question whether,
as Crossick suggests, the links binding artisans together and separating them
from the unskilled, actually tightened during the mid-Victorian period.59
This does not mean that entry into the trades was closed. It could hardly
be, considering the rate of growth in the labour force, not to mention powerful
enterprises like the railways, which deliberately saw to the training and
promotion of unskilled labour, and provided a significant road for its upgrad-
ing; in the Dictionary sample this is very noticeable. What it does suggest is
the relative advantage the stratum of tradesmen had in reproducing itself, and
the significance within the skilled labour force of this block of self-reproducing
artisans; and not least their capacity to assimilate the non-artisans who
succeeded in joining their ranks, so long as artisan status meant a special and
lengthy education in skill, essentially conducted by artisans in the workshop.
And in i906, according to one estimate, about i8 per cent of occupied males
beween the ages of I5 and I9 were still classified as apprentices and learners.60
In industries and regions dominated by artisans-the north-east coast immediat-
ely comes to mind-their ability to assimilate new entrants was clearly
enormous. One recalls that even in I9I4, in spite of considerable efforts, 6o
per cent of the workforce of the Engineering Employers' Federation were still
classified as skilled.61 Under these circumstances the artisans, or the bulk of
them, were both privileged and relatively secure.

IV
The crux of their position lay in the economy's reliance on manual skills,
i.e. skills exercised by blue-collar workers. The real crisis of the artisan set
in as soon as tradesmen became replaceable by semi-skilled machine operators
or by some other division of labour into specialized and rapidly learned tasks,
i.e. broadly speaking in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This
phase of artisan history has been fairly intensively investigated, at least for
some industries,62 and it is at this point that the main attack on the concept
of an "aristocracy of labour" has concentrated. Apart from a diminishing
minority, the craftsman's position was no longer protected by the length of
training and practice, by skill and the willing toleration of employers. It was
protected primarily by job monopoly secured by trade unions and by workshop
control. Yet the jobs now monopolized and protected were no longer skilled
jobs in the old sense, though those who were best at protecting them were
usually formerly skilled trades, like compositors and boilermakers, which

59 Geoffrey Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840-1880 (I978), p. ii6.
60 Charles More, Skill and the English Working Class (i980), p. I03, Table 5.I3.
61 M. L. Yates, Wages and Labour Conditions in British Engineering (I937), p. 3I, Table 6.
62 E.g. A. Reid, 'The Division of Labour in the British Shipbuilding Industry, i880-I920' (unpublis
Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, i980); J. Zeitlin, 'Craft Regulation and the Division of Labour:
Engineers and Compositors in Britain, i890-i9I4' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick,
i98i).

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 368 E. J. HOBSBAWM

insisted on their members' monopolizing the new de-skilled jobs. But even
this undermined the special position of the artisan. For, as we all now know
from the Fleet Street printing trade, when skill and privilege or high wages
are no longer correlated, artisans are merely one set of workers among many
others who might, given the right circumstances (generally the occupation of
a strategic bottleneck), establish such strong bargaining positions.
Speaking generally, at the end of the nineteenth century the trades found
themselves, for the first time since the i83os and i840s, threatened by
industrial capitalism as such but without the hope of by-passing it. Their
existence as a privileged stratum was at stake. Moreover, the employers' main
attack was now against their craft privileges. Hence, for the first time, their
key sectors turned against capitalism. Thus, unlike some of the traditional
trades, the new metal-working crafts of the industrial economy had not been
given to breeding political activities. There are few if any engineers and metal-
shipbuilders among the nationally prominent Lib-Lab politicians before the
i89os. Yet almost from the start, engineers were prominent among the
socialists. At the ASE's Delegate Meeting in I9I2 more than half the delegates
present appear to have been advocates of "collectivism" to be achieved by
class war.63 The small argumentative Marxist sects like the Socialist Labour
Party were full of them. Engineering shop stewards and revolutionary radical-
ism in World War I went together like cheese and pickles, and metal-
workers-generally highly skilled men-later came proverbially to dominate
the proletarian component of the Communist Party, to be followed a long
way after by builders and miners.64 The left attracted them for two reasons.
In the first place, a class-struggle analysis made sense to men engaged in battle
with organized employers on what seemed to be the crucial sector of the front
of class conflict; and by the same token the belief that capitalism wanted "a
just balance of all interests", was plainly no longer tenable. In the second
place, the radical left in the unions, ever since the i88os, specialized in
devising strategies and tactics designed to meet precisely those situations
which appeared to find traditional craft methods wanting.
I do not wish to underestimate this shift to the left, which now gave to the
British labour movement a political outlook fundamentally different from
that of Chartist democracy, which still prevailed amid the sober suits of
Liberal radicalism-a new political outlook which, some might argue, was de
facto more radical than many continental socialist movements. At the same
time this shift should not be identified with the various brands of socialist
ideology which now sprang up, and, naturally, attracted young artisans
conscious of their new predicament: in the i88os men in their mid- to late
twenties, from Edwardian times perhaps men in their late 'teens. For most
tradesmen the shift to anti-capitalism began simply as an extension of their
trade experience. It meant doing what they had always done: defending their
rights, their wages, and their now threatened conditions, stopping management
63 B. C. M. Weekes, 'The Amalgamated Society of Engineers, i880-I9I4: A Study of Trade Union
Government, Politics and Industrial Policy' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, I970),
pp. 3i8-20, 322. As early as i895 four ASE members stood as parliamentary candidates under Independent
Labour Party auspices: David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888-1906
(Manchester, i983), p. 88.
64 Kenneth Newton, The Sociology of British Communism (i969), Apps. II, III.

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 369

from telling the lads how to do their job, and relying on the democracy of the
workplace rank-and-file against the world, which, if need be, included their
unions' leaders. Only now they had to fight management all the time, because
management was permanently threatening to reduce them to "labourers",
and now had the technical means of doing so.
They were far from revolutionaries, but how did this constant confrontation
differ from the class struggle which the revolutionaries preached? If the
masters no longer recognized the interests of the skilled men, why should the
men recognize those of the masters? I do not believe that many tradesmen
were as yet affected by the drastic renunciation of old craft assumptions
suggested by some of the ultra-left, who recommended fighting capitalism
with its own market principles, by working as little or even as badly as possible
for as much money as the traffic would bear. Such ideas were put forward in
the syndicalist periods. However, at this stage there is no evidence that
tradesmen-still often suspicious of payment by results, though increasingly
pushed into it-thought in such terms which, as the Webbs pointed out,
undermined their basic principle of pride in work, rewarded by a wage which
recognized ther standing.
Yet the period from i889 to I9I4 introduces us to an artisan predicament
which is similar to that of the British economy as a whole, because it is one
aspect of it. Just as there were men in business who recognized that fundamen-
tal modernization was needed in the British productive system, but failed to
mobilize sufficient support to achieve it, so also in the field of labour. The
left, including the artisan left, knew that craft unionism of the high Victorian
kind was doomed. It was the target of all critics. The mass of proposals for
trade-union reform between i889 and I927, ranging from federation and
amalgamation to a complete restyling of the union movement along industrial
lines,65 were all directed against a position which was barely defended in
theory even among the leaders of old-style craft unions. Yet no systematic
general union reform was achieved, though craft unions recognized some
need to expand, federate, and amalgamate. They also accepted that elite
organization must henceforth be part of the mass unionization of all workers,
and that in such mass unionism the craft societies would inevitably be less
dominant, either numerically or strategically. Yet attempts at general reform
failed so clearly, that after I926 they were de facto abandoned.
Railways and engineering are obvious examples of this failure. The new
National Union of Railwaymen, designed as the model of a comprehensive
industrial union, never succeeded in integrating most of the skilled footplate
men, and the engineers did not even try, though their left-wing leadership
time and again committed them to broaden their recruitment: in I892, in i90i
and again in I926. But as late as I93I the Amalgamated Engineering Union
told the Transport and General Workers:
With regard to the organizing activities of the AEU, whilst it was true that
the constitution of the union was amended to permit of all grades of workers
being organized within the union, this had not been operated, the AEU confining
its organizing activities strictly to those sections of the industry which it had always
organized. It was not the intention of the AEU to depart from this policy.66
65 Cf. the Resolution of the Hull TUC, I924, in W. Milne-Bailey, ed. Trade Union Documents (I929),
p. I29; for the abandonment of systematic reform, ibid. p. I33-4.
66 J. Zeitlin, 'The Emergence of Shop Steward Organization and Job Control in the British Car Industry',
History Workshop, io (i980), p. I29.

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 370 E. J. HOBSBAWM

For, just as the British industrial economy appeared to enjoy its Edwardian
Indian summer, so did the artisans. Did they need to reform themselves out
of existence? Sheer bloody-minded shop-floor resistance reversed the total
victory won by the Engineering Employers' Federation in the i897-8 lock-
out, incidentally driving the union's socialist general secretary George Barnes
into the wilderness.67 It had so far restored the position that buying off the
craftsmen became the major task of the I914 war economy. Their position
had actually been strengthened, because the system of payment by results,
which employers preferred to Taylorist and Fordist strategies, laid the base
for endless shop-floor conflicts and, in consequence, shop-steward power.
Moreover, during the war the industry was flooded, not with promoteable
semi-skilled machine men, but with 650,000 women, virtually all of whom
rapidly disappeared from the labour market after i919. The union had to be
defeated once again in frontal battle in I922. After that, unions were virtually
driven out of such new sectors of the industry as motors and electrical goods,
even though once again employers in general found the costs of systematic
plant rationalization too high, and the foreseeable profits insufficiently attrac-
tive to justify such heavy outlays.
Once again the artisans therefore had their chance in the I930s, as recovery,
rearmament and war made times more propitious for labour organization.
This was the last triumph of the Victorian trades. The men who brought the
waters of unionism back into the desert of non-union shops were largely,
perhaps mainly, craftsmen, like the tool-makers and the men who built the
aircraft of the I930S and I940s, and whose role in the growth of mass metals
unionism was crucial. They were the first nucleus of the revived shop-stewards'
movement. These men were craftsmen, or at least, even when engaged on
what was in effect semi-skilled work, craftsmen by background and training.
They were now also largely Communists, or became Communists.68

V
Yet, whether they wanted to or not, they were initiating their own liquidation
as a special stratum of the working class. This was largely because the
mechanized engineering industries they organized no longer rested on artisan
skill, though they still needed it. But it was also partly because the left no
longer had a coherent union policy. Given the failure of general union reform,
it lacked a practicable "new model" of union organization. It benefited from
a government policy, particularly from I940 when Ernest Bevin took over the
Ministry of Labour, which favoured unionism; but it neither controlled, nor
often understood or usually even approved it. Its major weapon (leaving aside
the production-oriented unionism of the Communists in I94I-5) was much
the same as in I889-I92I: sheer blinkered, dour, stubborn, defence of "the

67 Zeitlin, 'Labour Strategies', pp. 30-2.

68 For this part of the paper I am especially indebted to the as yet unpublished research of Ms Nina
Fishman on the Communist Party and the Trade Unions in the I930s and I940s. See also R. Croucher,
Engineers at War, i939-i945 (i982), esp. pp. i68-74, and James Hinton, 'Coventry Communism: A Study
of Factory Politics in the Second World War', History Workshop, io (i980), pp. I00-2.

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 ARTISAN OR LABOUR ARISTOCRAT? 37I

custom of the trade" in the shops. It is irrelevant that some of the left may
have identified this in some way way with the road to revolution or at least to
political radicalization. De facto, the left had no specific union strategy, but
merely pursued the old tactics with intelligence, dynamism and efficiency-
in a situation quite unlike that of i889-I92I.
What they achieved was the generalization of the old craft-monopoly
methods to all sectors of the trade-union movement, and in industries where
tradesmen formed a diminishing minority among the mass of semi-skilled
operatives. And in doing so the artisans became merely one set of workers
among many others who were in a position to apply such methods, and not
necessarily the ones who could strike the best bargains. In the Fleet Street of
the late twentieth century, not only has the qualitative difference beween
compositors and "printers' labourers" disappeared, but the chapel of the
National Graphical Association is not necessarily a more powerful bargainer
than that of SOGAT 82. There is no longer anything special about being a
tradesman.
Some are clearly on the way out, like the locomotive drivers of the old craft
union ASLEF. Some survive, but in a world they no longer quite understand.
Some work for as much money as they can get, and for nothing more.69 This
is a fundamental break in craft tradition, which, as has been argued, aimed
at an income corresponding to the craftsman's status as a group, as professors
still do.70 Hence the persistent historical distrust of piece-rates. A Communist
engineer, interviewed by a researcher, recalls his amazement when he discov-
ered during the war that workers in Coventry not merely could, but were
expected to push their earnings into what seemed the stratosphere. And,
indeed, the famous Coventry Toolroom Agreement of I94i reflected this
curious intermingling of old and new principles, until its breakdown in
the I970s. Whereas in the past the toolmakers' earnings had provided the
measuring-rod of their "differential" over and above less favoured groups,
this differential was henceforth fixed against the entirely undetermined level
of what non-toolmakers on piece-work could earn. Craftsmanship, good work,
was no longer the essential foundation of good earnings. If anything, it was
now a liability, since it stood in the way of the sky-high wages which could
be earned by the men who deliberately and consciously put speed and skimping
before sound work. Financially the "cowboy"-the term is of uncertain origin,
but seems to emerge in the building trade during the hey-day of "the lump"
in the i960s-could do better than the good tradesmen.
Finally, the possibility of training as a craftsman grew less. In i966 the

69 Beynon, Working for Fords, p. I45.

70 "Perhaps the most interesting point about the shipwrights' powers of work control was that they did
not use them to maximize their earnings or to create differentials. The shipwrights were willing to accept
wages unrelated to the effort or skill of individuals and which tended towards a single rate." (David
Wilson, 'A Social History of Workers in H.M. Dockyard during the Industrial Revolution, particularly,
I793-i8I5' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick, I975, p. i88). For Edwardian skilled
builders' insistence on standard rates for standard output, see Charity Organization Society, Report on
Unskilled Labour, Q. 25I-72, pp. I04-5). The Webbs argued, Industrial Democracy, p. 7I9, noting the
parallel with middle-class professional corporatism approvingly, that "The progressive raising of the
Common Rule, by constantly promoting the 'Selection of the Fittest', causes an increasing specialization
of function, creating a distinct group, having a Standard of Life and corporate traditions of its own which
each recruit is glad enough to fall in with."

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 372 E. J. HOBSBAWM

number of apprentices was only about three-quarters of what it had been sixty
years earlier, or indeed in I925, and by I973 it had plummeted to 25 per cent
of the i966 figure.71 And so did the incentive to follow one's father into a
proper trade. Book education and not skill is now the road to status and, with
diminishing exceptions, even skill has moved into the world of diplomas.
And, of course, the road into that world has broadened. There was a time
when miners might want their sons out of the pit at all costs, but engineers
were content to offer their sons a presumably improving version of their own
prospects. How many of the sons of toolmakers today are content to become
toolmakers?
The artisans no longer reproduce themselves or their kind. The generation
of men who grew up with artisan experience and artisan values in the I930s
and I940s, still survives, but is growing old. When the last men who have
driven and cared for steam locomotives retire-it will not be long now-and
when engine-drivers will be little different from tram-drivers, and sometimes
quite superfluous, what will happen? What will our society be like without
that large body of men who, in one way or another, had a sense of the dignity
and the self-respect of difficult, good, and socially useful manual work, which
is also a sense of a society not governed by market-pricing and money: a
society other than ours and potentially better? What will a country be like
without the road to self-respect which skill with hand, eye, and brain provide
for men-and, one might add women-who happen not to be good at passing
examinations? Tawney would have asked such questions. I can do no better
than to conclude by leaving them with you.

Birkbeck College, London

71 In absolute numbers: i906, 343,200 (More, Skill, p. I03); i966, 27I,650 (Min. of Lab. Gazette, J
i967), I974, 66,ooo (Min. of Lab. Gazette, May i974). The statutory school leaving age was raised to i6
from Sept. I972. Only male figures are given, in view of the insignificance of female apprenticeship.

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