Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries' Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism

Travelling Brothers: The Six Centuries' Road from Craft Fellowship to Trade Unionism

More than a Century before the welfare state and comprehensive social services took shape, the early trade societies and unions had worked out an elaborate method of coping with unemployment that the industrial revolution made a constant feature of working life. This was the tramping or travelling system under which craftsmen who were out of work were sent off to tramp the country. En route they were greeted by their fellow members, given bed and board in society inns, and offered help in finding a job. This system, which only died out with the 1914-18 war, often saw thousands of men (and sometimes their wives) on the road. Hitherto it has remained an obscure area of trade union and industrial history. Travelling brothers, however, the full study of the subject, describes it in detail, drawing upon a wealth of craft lore and tramping custom. This includes the tramp’s “ blank” or passport; the “ house of call”; the rise of the “good” tramp in the days when strikers left the workshops one by one to take the road, bundle on back; and fall of the “bad” tramp when unions sometimes disciplined men who left their work too readily or stayed away too long, thus bringing into disrepute organizations' which were seeking public respectability.

Travelling brothers seeks also to pinpoint the origin of the tramping system and find it in the development of the organized crafts of centuries earlier. Mr. Lesson, with the fine grasp of his subject which only deep research can create, traces the system forward through transformations of artisan gold and craft company to the breakup of the old organizations under the shock waves of the industrial era, the Journey man's club and the trade and friendly societies.

As a result of his pioneering study, the authors can assign to the tramping system a crucial place in the History and the creation of trade Unions. He offers controversial new ideas on the origins and development of early union organizations and challenges received orthodoxies. His book is of special interest therefore to historians and students; it is also attractively and persuasively written to appeal to historically minded readers in general and to members of the labour movement in particular, part of the history of which is enshrined in these pages.

R. A. Lesson

George Allen & Unwin LTD

1979

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English

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