Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Page 5
Merthyr Tydfil was one of the most urban and industrial parts of the United Kingdom, with one of the biggest ironworks in the world during the Regency period. In 1802 Nelson himself had visited to see cannon for HMS Victory produced, but the end of the war had reduced the demand and their product was no longer wanted, but profit was still required. In October 1816, owners of the ironworks tried to reduce wages to a level that maintained their profit margins.
At least 1,500 people were involved in mining coal and the production of iron in the Merthyr area. Many were relatively unskilled but there were a smaller number of iron puddlers, who stirred the molten iron in the furnace and used their skill and experience to know when the iron was exactly ready.
The disturbance started on Friday 18 October, with workers from Nantyglo, Blaenavon and surrounding villages converging on Merthyr and successfully disabling the furnaces by removing the blast from them as they marched. Armed with skilfully made iron weapons, they overpowered the small number of special constables sent to stop them. At this point, some protesters seemed to have been killed while trying to take control of a blast furnace and the next-door house, although many papers afterwards claimed that there had been no fatalities.
On the first evening of the disturbance, the Riot Act was read to the protestors by the magistrate and they were warned that they would be fired upon, but they stood firm. Annoyed by the language of the mob, the magistrates ordered the Cardiff yeomanry to charge, using their bayonets and the flat side of their swords. The workmen, armed with only a few sticks and clubs, were no match for the soldiers, and after around thirty of them had been seized, the rest dispersed quietly. By evening the town of Merthyr Tydfil was peaceful, the climax of the disturbances had passed without bloodshed. On Sunday three of the ringleaders, Rawlins Haddock, a 22-year-old labourer, and Thomas Jones and Steven Jarrett, aged 44 and 36 respectively, were escorted to the county gaol by the Cardiff cavalry. An anonymous letter from a member of the Light Dragoons was published in Bell’s Weekly Messenger. He reports that he had arrived in Merthyr after a forced march over the mountains and was welcomed by the local people, ‘There is nothing to fear from the rioters; they have no plan, no arms, and flee at the sight of a soldier.’ However, most of the crowd control had already been done by the local volunteer militia.
Monday was quiet in Merthyr. The Light Dragoons were battle-hardened Waterloo veterans who had ‘the cruel gleam that is only won only where blood flows like water’.3 The soldiers also impressed the locals with their full moustaches and beards, a rare sight in South Wales.
At this point the riot changed into a strike. It proved difficult to maintain any solidarity between the different groups of workers however, and difficult to recruit other workers, such as the local colliers. Some of the more skilled men seemed to have gone back to work first – mostly the iron puddlers, who worked four to a blast furnace and were essential for the ironworks to operate. There was sufficient stock of materials to allow the owners to wait until the labourers ran out of money so, effectively, the strike became a lock out. The Hampshire Chronicle could not help sounding pleased. ‘The higher class of mechanic employed in the ironworks continue in their occupation; but the other classes do not seem ready to return.’
In the pragmatic tradition of British criminal law, one ringleader bore the brunt of the retribution for the thousands of others whom the state did not have the resources to capture and punish. Rawlins Haddock received a oneyear prison sentence for rioting, breaking into the Cyfartha Ironworks and sabotaging the blast furnace. He defiantly pleaded not guilty.
The owners of the ironworks put out a public statement about the dispute – one that was helpfully republished word-for-word as far away as York. They rejected the assertion in the newspapers that labourers were to have their pay reduced to one shilling a day and then went on to publicise the new pay rates; nobody would be on less than ten shillings a week; the best paid would still earn a guinea. They claimed that, even after the wage cuts, many rural workers would have envied these pay rates. It was an attempt to divide and rule. The owners also wondered, in print, why the workers had failed to return even though the riot had finished and the mob had been dispersed. They concluded that they were aware that their workers could not feed their families on the new wages, but they could do nothing about it. What they meant in reality was that the workers could do nothing about it. It was a terrible indictment of life in 1816.
There were similar riots all over the country, bearing strong similarities to the ones described. In Bury, Lancashire and Calton in Scotland, machines were destroyed that took employment away from spinners. In October, there was a riot in Sunderland that was very similar to that in Bideford, with women leading the fight against price rises by intimidating retailers. In Preston there were riots against wage reductions similar to Merthyr, and the Newcastle miners struck against wage reductions in May. In Great Halstead in Essex there were ‘freedom riots’ to release from prison four men who had been breaking machines. In December 1816 there was violence in Dundee over the price of bread, with the plundering of one hundred food shops.
Bread did not reach the 1815 price of 65 shillings per quarter until 1820 and traditional riots continued. Despite the ferocity of the 1816 rioting, it was the final flourish of ‘bread and blood’ riots that had been common in Georgian England. William Cobbett understood the 1816 riots, pointing out that the poor man would risk his life because he gained so little enjoyment from the living of it, but he did not support them. He told his readers that their suffering was caused by corruption and lack of political representation. In 1818, Cobbett took the credit for the lack of further riots. His advice was to organise rather than riot. Many people listened and the nature of protest started to change into something novel and even more worrying to the government.
Chapter 5
Bread and Potatoes
The price of bread mattered to everybody in the nineteenth century, not just those who were obliged to eat it in large quantities to survive. High bread prices allowed rich landowners to charge high rents. These rents enabled their consumption of luxury goods and fine new houses. Luxury goods and construction provided employment for urban tradesmen, allowing them to eat the overpriced bread that the rich were profiting from. Apart from bread, the diet of the Regency poor consisted of potatoes, oatmeal, cheese, meat, and seasonal domestic fruit, usually in that order. Meat meant scraps of ham, bacon, and offal such as pigs’ ears, cow heel, sheep’s trotters, and fruit meant apples and pears.
A nineteenth century agricultural labourer who required 4,000 calories a day would need at least one quartern loaf of slightly more than 4lbs pounds; a family loaf today is less than 2lbs, so a lot of bread, whether from wheat in the south of England or oats or barley elsewhere, was eaten during the Regency. In 2016 the Grocer magazine reported that bread consumption had sunk to a new low with less than half of the British population eating it daily and average consumption measured in slices per day.
Britain was running out of bread by 1800. High grain prices caused by Napoleon’s attempted blockade had not yet been mitigated by increased domestic production. The government response to the crisis was the Stale Bread Act of 1800. This was not an attempt to protect the consumer against old bread. On the contrary, it made it go further by ensuring that all bread sold was stale when it was eaten. Parliament believed that half of all bread bought in London was bought fresh and eaten immediately. This was no longer a luxury that the lower classes should be allowed to indulge in. Under the new law, bakers had to leave bread for twenty-four hours to dry after being produced, or face a fine of 5s per loaf. Stale bread was believed to add twenty per cent to the stomach filling capacity of the loaf; overall bread consumption would also fall due to the final product being less appetising. The difficulty in applying this law effectively was hinted at when a reward of 2s 6d was offered to anybody who informed on the bakers.
The Act lasted less than a year. The government understood that not
hing undermined their authority more than a law than cannot be enforced. It was expected instead that the poor would keep their bread for three days to increase its ability to fill the stomach. This was as unreasonable as the original law, and by the Regency period there were shops selling cheap, stale bread products to meet the demand for cheap food.
At first glance, it seems that well-established medieval customs protected the consumer from high prices. Bread sizes and weights were controlled. Bread was made in three main sizes: the peck, the half peck and the quartern loaf, with a half peck being exactly twice the weight of a quartern loaf. In most jurisdictions, no other sizes were permitted and hawking bread on the street was illegal. The price was also fixed by the Assize of Bread, first established in 1315, which regulated prices but brought little relief to the poor.
The weekly assize was led by the magistrate or the mayor. Its job was to determine the cost of bread based on the market price of wheat, and add an allowance for the profits of the miller and baker. It was assumed that about ninety per cent of the price of a loaf was made up by the ingredients. The assize of bread was a de facto control mechanism on millers and bakers and put a local limit on their profits. It did not stop the price rising; it merely suggested the highest possible price and this was still based on the market-determined price of the ingredients and the cost of labour. The protection offered to the poor was a mirage.
Bakers were watched by government and public because they had more power than they do today. The alternative – baking your own bread – was less viable than it might seem. The scarcity of fuel, especially in the south, made it economically unjustifiable to produce bread at home, or indeed any other foodstuffs that needed heat to prepare. Even the Sunday lunch, which may have involved the roasting of meat, was often done in the local baker’s oven. In the early nineteenth century, as flour prices rose, the poor also found it more difficult and expensive to buy small amounts, as it was now more profitable for producers to sell larger quantities to middlemen.
Suspicion continued despite regulation. In Cheltenham in 1811, the local principal citizens advertised their crusade against bakers in the newspaper. They resolved to print a handbill listing the punishments available to those who sold underweight or overpriced goods. They asked the clerk to the market to do ‘no notice’ raids, to inspect the bakers’ weights and measures. In Derby the same year, the Assize ordered bakers to bake their initials into their product so they could be tracked down if necessary.
Most people who believed that market forces increased prices made an exception when it came to bakers, who were simply blamed for their greed. William Cobbett, the radical observer of Regency life in his newspaper The Political Register knew the truth about the new market system. He pointed out that bakers who raised their price out of greed would soon lose custom to those who sold at a fair price, and that the rise in prices was caused by taxes and scarcity. This did not impress people; most of them had a notion of a ‘fair price’, both for their labour and their necessities, and were increasingly perturbed that these rules did not seem to apply any more.
The end of the war brought no relief to the suffering of the poor. The 1815 Corn Law banned the import of wheat until the very high price of 80s per quarter was reached. Bakers and millers still suffered, despite the blame that people placed on the government and landlords for this selfish law. There were accusations of both profiteering and adulteration in the newspapers. Conspiracy theorists commented that bakers had been receiving secret deliveries of potatoes to add to their bread. Bakers were often one of the first victims of rioters after the introduction of the Corn Law. The Spa Fields protesters of November 1816 smashed shops and paraded the streets with loaves on the end of a stick. The Downham rioters of 1816 attacked the bakers first and the butchers second.
Bakers were forbidden by law to adulterate their product to make it go further or taste better. Alum was the major illegal ingredient used. It was usually only discovered when officials or informers found it on the premises. It had no legal use in the baking process, and even possessing it was an indication of guilt. The Rex v Dixon ‘bad bread case’ of 1814 gave some examples of the extent and technique of adulteration. John Dixon, master baker, had been accused of selling 257 loaves of alum-laced bread to the Royal Military Asylum in Chelsea. This was an orphanage for children of soldiers who had died whilst fighting the French. In 1814, it contained a depressing 1,200 children:
It appeared from the evidence of the Quarter-Master of the Institution, of the Commandant, and seven of the children, that the bread delivered by the defendant on the day in question was served out to the children. They found it so rough and dry, that the majority of them rejected their breakfast, and complained of the badness of the bread, chewing lumps of alum of the size of a horse-bean, which they found sticking therein. The Commandant caused half a dozen spare of the loaves to be cut, and found them taste very sour. The Commandant took the piece of bread, with a lump of alum in it (which was produced in Court), to the Lord Mayor, for whom the defendant said he did not care. His Lordship attended in Court to identify it. Mr Mac Gregor, surgeon to the Asylum, testified as to the unwholesomeness of alum in bread, particularly to children, some of whom were of the age of only five years. Its tendency was to produce nausea on the stomach, and constipation in the bowels.1
The defendant was the baker’s foreman and was in no personal jeopardy – his master was on trial. He was therefore able to give revealingly honest evidence. He had been putting alum in bread for eleven years. It was general usage. Half a pound of alum in a sack of flour would not be noticed by the consumer. It sped up the process, saved fuel, and made the loaves look more attractive. He knew it was not allowed, so he bought the alum himself and smuggled it in under his coat. This would seem to be a straightforward case. As the master was responsible for the actions of his servant, the foreman went free but the master baker, John Dixon, was found guilty.
Dixon appealed. He did not know about the alum. He had received no bill for it. Alum was not harmful in small quantities. The judges pointed out that this was a contradictory position. If alum was no problem, why did they not advertise the fact that they used it? If they were to do that, the judges suggested, the defendant would soon have no large complex business to oversee, which was Dixon’s next excuse. The judgement and the punishment stood – a fine of £100 and six weeks in the King’s Bench prison.
Adulteration was illegal, but eking out bread with legal substances and new ideas was encouraged. The quality of flour fell after 1815, and flour that would have been formerly thrown away was now consumed. The Royal Navy, as part of its post-war disposals, offered defective flour for sale after 1815, clearly advertised as such. Recipes suggested that the poor could turn the worst quality wheat into nutritious ships’ biscuits instead; one correspondent suggested that adding carbonate of potassium to poor quality flour would render it ‘less black, damp and tenacious’. Mr John Saines of Masham seemed to have written to newspapers all over the country in 1816 with his plan to make bread out of unsound corn.2
Some commentators suggested adding rice to eke out the bread. For the rich of Regency Britain, rice went into a dessert. One expert suggested that boiling rice for ten minutes would make the bread go further. He had probably never seen the highly inefficient fireplace of the average poor person, and did not take into account the price of the fuel needed. However, he did have time for sarcasm; you could save 2d per loaf, while still ‘paying the baker amply for his trouble’.
Others suggested the poor should eat less expensive grains. The plan was to feed oats of the cheaper variety to the king’s horses, and leave the better ones for purchase by the poor. The drawbacks were obvious. The cavalry would need the same amount of oatmeal, and therefore the price of the cheapest oatmeal would rise, as the king’s subjects went into direct competition with the king’s horses for food.
Cheap salmon and oysters were another suggestion. A religiously inspired letter in the newspaper ju
stified the use of more fish in the labourers’ diet, with the biblical reference: ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’3 It was true that in certain places and times of the year, fish were a cheap supplement to the diet of the poor, the best example being the salted Cornish pilchard. However, they tended to be a cheap luxury with some bread and butter, not the basis of a diet. Only in public houses were salted fish and a slice from a quartern loaf offered as a snack – this is because the fish could be cooked in large, economically viable quantities in a large establishment.
The newspaper editorials suggested that the populace should eat more ‘household’ bread that contained more bran; and if the people would not eat it (especially those in cities who had a loathing of the coarse brown bread), then at least it could be used to feed those in the workhouse. King George III himself ate a slice of brown bran bread every day with his lunch, which earned him accusations of tokenism and the new, unflattering nickname of ‘Brown George’.
Petitions were made to parliament to stop the distillation of grain to produce spirits. The rich sent letters to the papers asking people not to waste bread – as if this was the main reason for the problem. The concerned citizens of Cambridge organised subsidised household bread for the poor, with a stern warning for those who tried to buy better quality bread with their charity ticket.
Poor people were spending all their available income on feeding themselves and their families. Here are some 1816 prices for the quartern wheaten loaf, which would be the same weight as two family-sized loaves today. All figures are for Leicester: