The origins of the British Labour Party are many and complex. They have formed the subject of innumerable works of historical scholarship and of journalism, for it is possible to tell the story equally forcefully in terms either of political theory or of personalities. But no matter how much weight may be given to the role of political ideas, and no matter how much importance one may attach to the appearance of the “right” men and women at the “rightrd; time, the crucial part played by the trade-union movement cannot be denied. It was the growing support derived from the trade unions which breathed life into the Labour Representation Committee after 1900, and this in spite of strongly-entrenched hostility from within the trade unions to socialism and all its works. The stages by which the unions became reconciled to, and then enthusiastic supporters of, the Labour Party are well known. Self-interest, not socialism, prompted the unions to support separate labour representation in Parliament. Until January 1901 only 29 per cent of those unions affiliated to the Trades Union Congress had decided to back the Labour Representation Committee. In the space of two years that proportion rose to over 56 per cent.

During the last week in July 1893, the largest industrial dispute Britain had hitherto experienced was initiated when over 300,000 miners in the Federated District stopped work. The Yorkshire miners played an important part in the lockout which was the first major trial of strength which the Miners' Federation of Great Britain had to face. The significant role of Yorkshire's pitmen in the dispute was not surprising since the colliers of the West Riding had taken a leading part in the formation of the MFGB only four years earlier, and the Yorkshire Miners' Association formed the cornerstone of the new organization. The stoppage occasioned extremely little violence, except in the West Riding, where a series of turbulent incidents plunged many of the mining districts into a state of anarchy and mob rule. The climactic event occurred at Featherstone when two miners were shot dead by the army. It is the aim of this article to examine the civil disorders which resulted from the lockout in Yorkshire, and to present an analysis of the Featherstone “Massacre” together with an assessment of the way in which the authorities handled the disturbances.

The most dramatic agitations and triumphs of the “new” unionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, together with its reversals and defeats by an organised employers' counter–offensive, occurred on the waterfront at British ports. The reasons for the revival and unsteady continuance of trades unionism in the ports at this period have been well detailed, but serious analysis of the origins and growth of countervailing employer interest groupings in labour matters, at a time when shipowners felt compelled to meet organisation with organisation, has been altogether more sparse. The initial strategy of many employers was to set their face against unions “to get back to what they believed to have been the golden age of British labour”, with freedom for men to work on their own terms without union interference or, if not openly attacking unions, at least refusing to acknowledge their existence and come to terms with them as bargaining agents. Conflict was endemic in the British shipping industry at this time, and employment relations were regulated unilaterally either by the employers or, in some cases where they were sufficiently strongly organised, by the unions. Yet, by the First World War employers had granted “recognition” and arrived at an accommodation with the unions over certain clearly defined areas of interest, with the result that henceforth industrial relations in the ports would be conducted via bilateral and joint regulation on a much more orderly and stable basis.

The modern history of British deep-sea fishing begins with the railway expansion of the mid-nineteenth century. Rapid transport and the increasing use of ice as a preservative made it possible for fresh sea fish to enter the diets of the inhabitants of inland towns. Fresh sea fish was regarded as almost a luxury food before the railway age, yet by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it had become a major protein source for the working classes of the industrial towns, and the fried-fish shop had become a working-class institution. The sea-fishing industry underwent a vast market-induced expansion. The census of 1841 enumerated only 24,000 males as being employed in fishing. By 1881 there were 58,000. If the inland consumer ever gave thought to the fishermen who supplied his table, he probably conjured up a picture of a weather-beaten village fisherman going daily to the fishing grounds to return in the evening to his waiting wife and children, bringing the silver harvest of the sea. While he had been at sea his family had busied themselves baiting lines, making and mending nets, and, in the case of the fish wives, performing their traditional function of selling the catch. Such a picture may have been broadly true of the fishing villages of Scotland, Cornwall, Northumberland or the South coast, but a feature of the second half of the nineteenth century was the creation of a new kind of fisherman who crewed the sailing trawlers of the North Sea. The expansion of the market has coincided with the discovery of the rich beds of the North Sea, and to such an extent did the North Sea trawling ports come to dominate the fishing industry that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Hull and Grimsby were together receiving as much fish as all the remaining ports of England and Wales put together. Those who toiled on the grey North Sea were known as the “smacksmen”, and it is the extreme nature of their occupation which is the subject of this study.

Über Briefe Luxemburgs im Internationalen Institut für Sozialge-schichte teilt Nettl mit: “Der größte Teil der Briefsammlung im IISG ist jetzt veröffentlicht […]. Einige unveröffentlichte Briefe befinden sich noch in verschiedenen Sammlungen des IISG, zum Beispiel im Guesde-Nachlaß.”

Außer den dort ausdrücklich erwähnten Veröffentlichungen Blumen-bergs seien hier auch jene älteren Editionen genannt, zu denen sich die Vorlagen heute ganz oder teilweise im Besitz des Instituts befinden: neben den beiden von Luise Kautsky zusammengestellten Briefsamm-lungen sind dies Luxemburgs Briefe an P. B. Aksel'rod und diejenigen an H. Roland Holst. Einzelne, diese Veröffentlichung ergänzede Stücke, die Briefe an Guesde und einige Neuerwerbungen werden hier zusammengefaß und damit die noch unveröffentlichten Briefe Luxemburgs in den Beständen des IISG vorgelegt.