They were one of the most exploited groups of workers, who relied upon casual labour and an inhumane system of crowding around the dock gates to see who would be hired. Ben Tillett stated: ‘we are driven into a shed, iron-barred from end to end, outside of which a foreman or contractor walks up and down with the air of a dealer in a cattle market, picking and choosing from a crowd of men, who, in their eagerness to obtain employment, trample each other underfoot, and where like beasts they fight for the chances of a day’s work’.
It was one of the last aspects of an earlier era to remain beside the Thames. But it was soon removed. For the first time since 1797, the Port of London was closed. Cardinal Manning, and the Salvation Army, became involved in the negotiation; Manning became a familiar figure in incidents of social dispute and G. K. Chesterton gave a memorable description of him resembling ‘a ghost clad in flames’ as the people in Kensington High Street dropped to their knees before him. We may presume that some of the kneeling crowd were the Irish poor, hoping for some measure of wage reform to alleviate their bitter poverty. The crisis was settled in September, with the unanticipated emergence of the dockers’ union as a force for the new century. Once again the conscience of the middle class was awakened and £18,000 was contributed to the union funds. And then the strike was finally won when £30,000 was sent by the labour unions of Australia to their comrades in need.
Engels wrote in December 1889: ‘the people are throwing themselves into the job in quite a different way, are leading far more colossal masses into the fight, are shaking society much more deeply, are putting forward much more far-reaching demands …’ The Annual Register put it differently: ‘For … almost the first time the representatives of the skilled workmen showed a readiness to throw in their lot with, and to support, unskilled labour …’ This was essentially the face of new unionism. It was designed to assist those who obtained no help hitherto, and it combined an economic with a political message. The old union leaders dressed like the employers; they wore expensive overcoats, gold watch-chains and tall hats. The new unionists simply looked like workmen. It was said that it was easy to break one stick, but not fifty sticks in a bundle. And the cry went up, from Liverpool to London: ‘Unionism for all!’ The movement even affected life at Westminster. A group of seventy radical Liberals voted together on social issues and even elected their own whip. It was in the spring of 1890 that the first ‘May Day’ demonstration was held in England, with ‘dense crowds as far as the eye could see marching up with music and banners, over a hundred thousand …’ That, at least, is what Engels saw. This was the period, too, when Joseph Chamberlain recommended a united Unionist front against the threat of socialism as well as of Home Rule for Ireland, and by the time of the next general election he had formed a coalition under the Conservative leadership of Lord Salisbury.
The Gladstonian Liberals had compounded the confusion by concocting a group of radical measures that was known as the Newcastle Programme. They included an act for Employers’ Liability for Accidents, Home Rule for Ireland, triennial parliaments, a local veto on the sale of alcohol, the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland and Scotland, as well as various other assorted measures which were designed to increase the Liberal vote for the election of 1892. It was significant only in the sense that, despite Gladstone’s sense of righteous mission on the subject, Home Rule was only one among other issues. It might seem, in fact, that the whole subject had been forgotten by everyone except the immediate protagonists. In a speech at the Mansion House Salisbury announced that he had never seen Ireland so peaceful. The vigour and calculation of Balfour’s rule as Irish secretary impressed all, at least all those who were ready to be impressed, as a great token of imperium in action. The majority of the English, as usual, treated the whole business with indifference.
In the 1880s and 1890s, too, the advent of socialist tracts and pamphlets marked a change of political tone. Engels connected the new dispensation to the gradual collapse of Britain’s imperial power. He insisted that the loss of Britain’s industrial and trade monopoly, so much a feature of the 1850s and 1860s, was ‘the secret of the present sudden emergence of a socialist movement here’. This was by no means the principal or only explanation, but it was part of the transvaluation of all values that characterized the years before the First World War. The poorly paid or the unemployed were really no longer viewed as a threat; they were being socialized, and those who had become attached to a union were also becoming part of the community. That may be one of the reasons why the middle class furnished the new unions with funds; it may have been done out of pity and charity but there may also have been an iota of self-defence. This covert form of self-preservation was one of the elements in what sceptics called ‘claptrap morality’.
In one of Gladstone’s speeches an observer noted that ‘his head looked like a white eagle perched on a black stump’. He refused all talk of resignation. He did, however, decide to migrate to the South of France for a holiday. When Gladstone returned from Biarritz in February 1892, his ministers were eager for news of his intentions, but he ‘talked almost entirely of trees’. His ministers were now impatient for him to be gone, as soon as possible, but he remained aloof. Rosebery said that he was in a condition of ‘righteous wrath’ and was still resolved to lead his party into the election of that summer. There were many, including the queen, who were astonished by the spectacle of a man in his eighties wishing to administer the nation and the empire – and this was for the fourth time. At the beginning of June 1892, Gladstone refused to take up the cause of legal eight-hour days because he was too busy with Irish affairs. Yet all was not well. He was being driven through the streets of Chester a few days later, when an old woman hurled a piece of hard gingerbread at him; it struck his left eye, and from the time of that blow his eyesight began to diminish. The election campaign was about to begin.
He did not win the election of July 1892, but he did not lose it; he gained the largest number of seats but did not command a majority without the support of the Irish Nationalists. Salisbury refused to resign and ensconced himself in the Commons waiting for a parliamentary vote of no confidence to eject him. In the middle of August he eventually received his quietus, and Gladstone returned with a minority government which he regarded as ‘too small’. Victoria was in any case horrified at the result. She declared that the incoming government would be filled by ‘greedy place-makers who are republicans at heart’. She could not yet bring herself to ‘send at once for that dreadful old man … whom she can neither respect nor trust’. Of course she had to resign herself to the situation and to the constitutional proprieties, but she disliked him. She thought the relationship between them was a sham, and that he was a sham.
Nevertheless, his inner will, combined with external victory, seemed to revive him a little. A contemporary journalist, Henry Lucy, noted that ‘in appearance he looks younger rather than older as the weeks pass. His voice has gained in richness and vigour, while his mind seems to have grown in activity and resource.’ In effect Gladstone ran a government with Irish Nationalist support, a most difficult position to maintain. Yet this late bloom could not last. He grew angry and on more than one occasion threatened to resign. Lord Acton described him as ‘wild, violent, inaccurate, sophistical, evidently governed by resentment’.