BROTHERHOOD IN BUSINESS.
South Metropolitan Gas Co. 1889.
George Livesey: Chair of the Board, gas works manager, temperence activist, strike breaker, pioneer of worker participation and share ownership.
More info to come.
The Gas workers of South
London
by
Mary Mills
"One Wednesday morning
in October 1889, Charles Tanner the head foreman ... said to me 'the stokers
are all in the Union and we have lost all authority in the retort houses ...
unless you do something to attach them to the Company we shall be completely in
the power of the Union'... in a quarter of an hour the scheme was set out ...
and the same afternoon it was offered to the workmen. The Union men refused
it... and on December 4th demanded that it be abolished ... then the
memorable strike began; thus was our co-partnership born.'"
So George Livesey, then
Chairman of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, described events before the gas
workers strike of 1889 and his Company's formation of a profit sharing scheme —
afterwards known as 'co-partnership'. South Met. was the gas company which
covered South, London in 1889 — it was innovative, ambitious and controlled by
George Livesey.
He had arrived at the Old
Kent Road works aged four when his father was appointed manager. He became
office boy at 14 and Managing Director at 50. His background was not that of a
'capitalist' but a professional manager from a family background of small
business- men. He had a reputation as a brilliant, innovative gas engineer, an
involvement in gas politics which had changed the financial structure of the
industry, and a proven flair for administration and negotiation. A life long
temperance advocate, he achieved a precarious balance between pragmatism and
idealism. He believed in partnership and brotherhood but he intended to stay in
charge himself.
This piece is about his
attempts to mould the lives of workers in his industry. He did this by using
the strike and that is a different story. (In essence it followed a summer of
industrial unrest which included the 'Great Dock Strike' and a series of
disputes in provincial gas works, culminating in achievement of the 8 Hour
Shift System through the Gas Workers Union, led by Will Thorne).
The quotation at the start
of the page illustrates the atmosphere of confrontation in South Met. at the
time, and there is little doubt the strike was 'really' about the rise of trade
union power on the retort house floor. The trigger was the inauguration of a
profit sharing scheme — the Company had already granted the eight-hour day in
its retort houses. The scheme was introduced together with the condition that
participants must sign an agreement which would have had the effect of making
strike action impossible. Essentially it was a dispute about the right to
organise. Because the Company was able to use enormous numbers of blackleg
workers housed in siege conditions the strike and the Union in South London was
broken.
THE COMPANIES AND THE WORKS
First we shall look at South
London Gas workers and put them into the context of their everyday lives. Who
were their employers? Where did they work? The first gas works to open in South
London had been Bankside in 1814. Early works were very small — and probably
workers there would have been adventurous people prepared to put up with bad
working conditions to be involved in this glamorous new technology. Through the
next twenty years many gas works were built — but to quote the title of a
recent article — many promoters of the early gas industry were 'Rogues, Speculators
and Competing Monopolies'. As Companies varied in their honesty towards the
public so they varied in the treatment of their workers. Early companies were
private concerns competing for custom with others. A constant debate — which
persists to the present day — concerned the ownership and controls over this
source of power. In the middle years of the century there was a movement
towards 'consumer' companies which were to be owned by shareholders who were
also customers of the company. This was followed by a movement towards public
ownership where local authorities either acquired existing private concerns or
started works of their own. The London local government was not powerful enough
to overcome the private owners' lobby and gas remained in private hands. This
situation persisted until the formation of the LCC in 1889 which re-opened the
debate on ownership with the election of Progressives committed to
municipalisation. It is no coincidence that industrial disputes erupted in that
year as it is also no coincidence that George Livesey's solution included moves
towards share ownership by the workers in the gas company in which they worked.
Where were the
works? In the early 1820s the Bankside Works (on the site of the present Tate
Modern gallery) belonged to the Phoenix Company which went on to build other
works at West Greenwich (Creek mouth) and Vauxhall. In the 1850s the Surrey
Consumers Company (Rotherhithe) was started. These companies bought out smaller
ones — for example the Deptford Company itself a successor to the Greenwich
Railway Gas Company was acquired by Surrey Consumers in the 1860s (its site,
alongside the railway at Deptford, is still derelict). The Lewisham area was
covered by the Crystal Palace (later South Suburban) Company at Bell Green and
was only incidentally party to these events. The other – and ultimately
dominant - gas company in the area was the South Metropolitan founded in the
late 1820s and operating from its works in the Old Kent Road. In the late
1870's Government intervention forced gas companies to amalgamate with each
other in the belief that larger companies would be more efficient. South
Metropolitan took over the Phoenix and the Surrey Consumers, closed down two
companies in Woolwich and built the East Greenwich Works as a new 'super' works
to supply a much larger area, using new technology and incorporating a chemical
works to handle by-products profitably (including the biggest gas-holder in
Europe, demolished in 1986). Our view of work in the gas industry has been
shaped by pictures like that by Dore of the Lambeth Gas Works (1872) or by
Flora Tristan of her 1840 visit to Westminster gas works 'misery and apathy
depicted on every countenance and apparent in every movement the poor wretches
made'. In complete contrast to this are the almost lyrical accounts of life at
the Old Kent Road written in the 1900s by retired workers. The works was near
the countryside on the Surrey Canal; workers, they said, could bathe, fish and
tend their gardens in slack periods. Children played in the works, and men's
wives brought dinners in — hot in a basin. This rural atmosphere can still be
sensed looking across the Chaffinch Brook to Bell Green works. Whatever
conditions were really like there was a deterioration in working conditions
throughout the century as encroaching urbanisation, an escalation in size and
increasing mechanisation destroyed the domesticity of a suburban works like Old
Kent Road - an element which had made the exhausting work and long hours more
bearable.
THE WORK AND THE
WORKERS
What did gas workers actually do? Labour historians
have sometimes used the word ‘stoker’ as a synonym for ‘gas worker’. ‘Stokers’ were some of the men employed in
the retort houses. The number then employed changed with the time of year – a
major feature of the industry was that many workers were only be employed in
winter although they might well be seen as permanent employees albeit seasonal. A 1910 study cites about 1,000
stokers employed in June to about 1,500
employed in December in a total December workforce of about 6,000.
Stokers were those without whom the works could not
function. It was a job with
a measure of 'macho' glamour. Stokers needed to be big men at the peak of their strength. The work
was heavy and undertaken in high
temperatures. The basic tasks did not change in essentials until the 1900s. Will Thorne; writing
about the 1880s could have been
describing the 1820s. 'Ordinarily the work was agonising —12 hours a day in heat and steam and
draughts, bending and straining the
back and arms, taxing the muscles until they became numb'. Twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week,
were usual and although work
was not intensive throughout the shift, there was a fortnightly eighteen-hour changeover shift. Retort
house work was not badly paid —
a 1906 study reported 45/- a week as being usual in London (compare this with incomes described in Round
about a pound a week for
manual workers in the same area).
Retort House men were known as heavy drinkers and so
was formed a strong link
between temperance activists in both management and workforce. Management attempted to promote a strong
Christian ethic —
reinforced by the temperance movement deeply embedded in the local culture. This is the South London of
Spurgeon's Tabernacle, of the Band of Hope, and the Good Templars.
Who were the other gas workers? Many were general
labourers — like coal porters.
These had much in common with other port workers — were often organised by the same unions. Gas Company
minute books record more
disputes with coal porters than with stokers. In addition there were general labourers doing a
variety of jobs and specialist
tradesmen — carpenters, blacksmiths, and so on together with numerous specialist gas workers with skills
relating to the processes outside
the retort house. They became more important in the 1900s with new processes, mechanisation and
diversification into chemicals.
Companies also employed storemen, watchmen, office workers, etc. All until the First World War were
men.
About a quarter of gas workers were 'outside men' —
many of them lamplighters. The
great-grandfathers of the men in the SEGAS van with their pneumatic drills on the street comer were
around and about with their
cart and shovels. Indeed in the 'good old days' of competition in the gas
industry, in the 1830s and 40s, they may well have been engaged in some
activity involving another company's mains — like putting a lump of mud in
them! A growing number of gas workers were engaged in work in customers' houses
— fitters, meter readers etc — a group which an employer must keep happy for
good customer relations.
Gas workers were ordinary people living in South
London — and part of the great increase in population in the area in the last
century. Men travelled to London to get jobs. Some of them had worked in the
provincial gas industry — Will Thorne, for example, came from Salford to the
Old Kent Road in the 1880s as an experienced gas worker. Many returned to the
country in summer — links with the Newington, Kent brickworks are well
established. In obituary and retirement notices the South Met. house magazine
(published in the 1900s) outlines details of the lives of workers who migrated
to London in youth, worked as labourers, retort house men, acquired a skill on
the district or in the chemical works and perhaps made it to a supervisory
grade. Often their sons followed — gas was a 'family' industry. They had become
South Londoners and part not just of a culture of pubs, knees-ups and the Old
Kent Road but of aspirations to 'better things' — education, Sunday Schools,
Institutes, better housing through Building Societies, security through the
Foresters or Buffaloes. It was to these aspirations that management reached out
in 1889 and on which they tried to build a structure which they hoped would
change the world.
THE UNIONS
Gas Worker unionisation is
too often described as something that started with Will Thorne in 1889. There
is plenty of evidence of unionisation before that. Major disputes in the 1860s
and 1870s ended in debacle — then as in 1889 industrial action originated north
of the river. South London workers do not seem to have been so ready either to
join or to initiate action.
A history of the 1872 strike
has not yet been published. A cross- London union started in North London led
to a strike of stokers about the right to organise. Both strike and union were
smashed by management, followed by prosecutions of strikers and sentences of
hard labour. Among others workers at Rotherhithe and West Greenwich came out.
What happened at Old Kent Road is perhaps more interesting. South Met. had
given wage rises to match those through- out London in the year before the
strike, and had in addition given workers double pay with the weeks holiday 'in
order to attach them further to the Company'. They involved themselves no
further in London-wide management discussions stressing that 'the men in this
Company's employ have made no complaint'. Old Kent Road workers did not come
out with the rest of London. It was usual in times of industrial dispute for
the mains of gas companies in dispute to be connected to others who were not
and there is considerable evidence that South Met. connected its mains to
supply other Companies' areas during this strike. There is also evidence that
they disconnected them because of pressure from their own workers. This
incident is illustrative of South Met. methods and also shows the existence of
workers' organisation within the Company.
WELFARE WORK
Employers' welfare provision
in the last century is under-researched In the gas industry many companies
provided welfare facilities and it was argued that workers should be encouraged
to administer their own organisations - like sick clubs, "to render
themselves independent of eleemosynary in their seasonal afflictions'.
Employers financial support for these was sometimes necessary - for example the
Phoenix Company were obliged in 1878 to supplement the workers sick fund during
a flu epidemic. At Old Kent Road superannuation scheme had been set up in 1855
on management initiative which provided the initial finance and administration
- 'the foundations of a superstructure'. A meeting was held with workers to
discuss this - it is interesting that a similar scheme for company officers was
turned down at a meeting set up for them. In 1860 a Widows and Orphans Fund was
set up to support the families of dead employees. It has often been assumed
that industrial workers did not get paid holidays until much later, in some
cases in the 1930s, but in 1881 when the
three South London Companies amalgamated arrangements for holidays were
standardised. Rotherhithe Consumers Co and the Phoenix had given in kind -
double pay at Christmas and Easter; Phoenix had given clothes and gratuities
worth about £3 each. and had paid for a beano. South Met. with its strong
temperance policies abolished the beanos to substitute a weeks summer holiday
for all workers 'who have conducted themselves well during the past year with
double pay after three years on condition that the holidays were taken in a
visit to the country or seaside - to encourage them to improve themselves and
stay out of the Old Kent Road pubs. In the 1850s lectures were laid on by the
Phoenix for workers at Bankside - but only one or two attended 'even when they
weren’t religious' - more popular were the washing facilities and the lobbies
equipped with papers and games materials. The standards of these facilities
have been questioned by subsequent commentators.
Gas was a continuous process
industry which meant Sunday working. In the name of religion, Livesey had tried
to cut this at Old Kent Road. Before 1860 management there had tried to
persuade workers to take time off to go to church although men were not paid
for these Sundays off. By 1871 Livesey was working with the Lords Day
Observance Society and was trying to find ways to abolish Sunday working.
Livesey believed in
incentives to self-help and betterment. So the wage structure at South Met.
included a system of bonuses. The best retort house gang of the week with the
highest output, for instance, got a payment. He wanted to install a profit
sharing scheme for workers, often speaking on his beliefs in a partnership of
capital and labour. If men were treated well they would work well and they must
be rewarded for that. 'The men must have the motive of self interest'. The
Board were not impressed and refused to implement his ideas until in 1884 they
agreed to a limited profit sharing scheme for officers and this was
implemented.
The formation of the Union
in 1889 was the chance which Livesey had wanted. The Board was persuaded that
profit sharing might be the factor which would woo the men from the Union and
the scheme was set up. The scheme was based on the relationship of Company
profits to the price of gas. Gas companies could only put then- dividends up if
the price went down — so too the bonus to the workers went up if the price went
down. Those who joined first got a lump sum which they couldn't touch for a
given length of time. Men had to sign a 12-month agreement (which implied they
could not strike); if this was broken the bonus was forfeit. A meeting was held
between management and those who had signed from the start to discuss the
scheme. Many objected to punitive clauses but others said that the 12 months
agreement also gave them much needed job security. One worker called for an
extension of the scheme to cover share ownership. This was Henry Austin, later
to become a worker director.
After the strike the scheme
was extended and over the years altered considerably. A consultative process
was set up by which Depart- mental Representatives met regularly with
management to discuss complaints and matters in the workplace. Workers were
able to buy shares. Five years later the Company put in hand a scheme to
reserve three Board places for directly elected members of the workforce. This
met with considerable opposition — not just from members of the existing board
but also from government bodies and the LCC. The Company began to extend the scheme
in such a way that the workers' lives were controlled by it. The scheme,
described as a 14 'bulwark against
socialism' ran as a snakes-and-ladder like system of rewards and punishments —
over the years it became harder and harder for workers to get their hands on
any of the cash held in their name unless they were prepared to invest it in
property. A company building society was started in which workers were
encouraged to invest. However a bad or uncooperative worker could lose his
bonus and agreement, and soon be on his way to losing his job. Up the ladder
lay the possibility of a directorship and property ownership, down was
degradation.
The Company extended its
range of welfare benefits until the pro- vision covered workers' lives 'from
the cradle to the grave'. Pension and sick schemes multiplied and flourished to
include convalescent homes, dental and maternity schemes and so on. Wide social
provision was made with most works having an 'institute' complete with theatres
and extensive sports facilities. Once in the South London gas industry — and it
was a firm in which son followed father — workers' lives were taken care of.
The South Met. Share
Register has never been released by the Department of Trade so it has not been
possible to discover the extent of share ownership by employees by the time of
nationalisation in 1947 but workers felt that it was their industry and that
they had a chance of their views being represented in it.
THE PHILOSOPHY
Livesey was not involved in
an intellectual debate on the future of the working class — but he was
influenced by the general debate in the media of the time which saw many
working class "people as 'the dangerous classes' and the conditions under
which they lived and worked as morally degrading. Such ideas were influenced by
Livesey's own ideological background in the Church of England (St Jude's,
Brixton), the Band of Hope, the Lords Day Observance Society, etc. He said in
1888 that increasing urbanisation worked to the detriment of local workers — it
was a process he daily witnessed.
Better paid workers were
able to form institutions of respectability — Friendly Societies, Building
Societies etc. By 1889 unskilled workers were being recruited into trade unions
which also challenged workers' loyalties to their employer. This challenge was
also being taken up in political life through the formation of the LCC.
Livesey, living and working in South London, could not fail to be aware of
workers' aspirations towards 'respectable' status. He wanted to mould workers
to that Victorian ideal of 'Christian observance, sobriety and thrift,
orderliness and cleanliness'. We must not assume that they did not want to be
so moulded.
George Livesey saw socialism
as a great evil and undoubtedly had links with some of the more unsavory
elements in anti-union organizations. He
did have ideas which were more sophisticated than mere union bashing. His
Anglican and temperance background was supplemented by his admiration of the
Italian patriot, Mazzini In the years up to his death in 1908 - years in which
copartnership spread widely in the gas industry - he wrote extensively on his
ideas involving himself in the Labour copartnership movement. To quote some of
his views:
"I do not think
property is divided properly ~ the minority has nearly all the property and the
majority are property less."
"the right to property
is the foundation of liberty and if a man is not allowed to own the product of
his labour he I not a free man.
"thousands of millions
of capital are invested in joint stock companies from the middle classes - the
twentieth century should do as much for the working classes as the
nineteenth for the middle Classes.
Eric Hobsbawn cited
co-partnership schemes as 'outbidding' the unions. In truth they could offer in
terms of material gain more than any union - what they took away was the
freedom to organise on the shop floor. Management would have argued that they
substituted a different freedom and it is this argument that has become a
paramount on in 1987- A hundred years later these competing definitions of
freedom are still with us; the quotation above will find many echoes today.
This article first appeared in South London Record in 1988 (and ideas and my research has probably changed quite a bit since then)
