On this day … 13 June 1868

The Preston Guardian reported plans to form a Working Men’s Political Association in the town, and by October it was formed and flourishing, to judge by the three columns that the rival Preston Chronicle devoted to one of its meetings that month.

At the meeting at the Temperance Hall, a fierce attack was launched on the Conservative party, and the trade unionists present were urged to give their support to the Liberals in the forthcoming general election.

Yet the reason that Preston’s trade unionists had the vote was thanks to the Conservatives, and, in particular, Benjamin Disraeli, who had pushed through a second reform bill the previous year to give the vote to skilled workers. He recognised that most socially conservative working-class men were politically Conservative. Preston’s skilled workers rewarded him by helping to vote in Tory MPs for nearly half a century.

Those attending the meeting at the Temperance Hall, however, did not seem likely recruits for the Tories, to judge by their response to the speaker, George Potter, who had come down from London to address them. Potter was a prominent leader of the trade union movement nationally.

He told them, ‘Are we to be enfranchised and then to be intimidated and discharged if we do not vote as our employers wish us? Perish such intimidation!’

When he recalled Shelley’s poem (see the picture for the correct lines), written following the Peterloo massacre in 1819, he was greeted with loud cheers:

Rise like lions from your slumber
In unvanquishable number;
Strike off the chains they forged for you;
Ye are many, they are few

Potter knew how to wind up his audience:

‘Now, I speak to intelligent men, and I ask, Are our circumstances what they ought to be?
(“No.”)
Are your children educated as they ought to be?
(“No.”)
Are your children clothed, clad, and fed as they ought to be? They are not.
Are your homes what those of decent and honest mechanics ought to be. Is it not a fact that, while we are the richest country in the whole world, that whilst we are supposed to be the most advanced and progressive nation in the universe, I ask is it not a fact that our working masses of the people are worse off than any of the civilised countries of the world?’

He ended his speech to loud cheers.

He had clearly done his job. The association pledged its support for the two Liberal candidates for Preston in the forthcoming election. And it was decided to send a deputation to the mayor to get him to persuade the town’s employers to leave their workers free to vote as they chose, with no repercussions.

This last was very important, since at the time there was still no secret ballot, one of the Chartists’ key demands from earlier in the century. It did not come until 1872.

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Sources
For George Potter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Potter_(trade_unionist)
For the Shelley poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masque_of_Anarchy