“REMEMBER the past, fight for your future,” is — as it is every year — the rallying cry at Derby’s annual Silk Mill Festival.

Derby’s Silk Mill Festival marks the year-long struggle of Derby and Derwent Valley silk mill workers from 1833-34, against oppressive and ruthless owners and managers who routinely ripped off their already low-paid workers through spurious pay cuts  — and denied them trade union rights with the threat of instant dismissal.

Does this sound familiar 190 years on?

The silk mill lockout was a sustained and bitter battle. It is commemorated today not only by the annual march, rally and festival but by the mural on the Silk Mill pub next to the Mill itself — now Derby’s Museum of Making  — which illustrates the story.

From the local newspaper the Reporter, on November 21 1833: “On Tuesday last, Mr Frost, the silk manufacturer, discharged one of his hands for refusing to pay a fine.

“As soon as it was known in the manufactory, every member of the union left his employment, and refused to return unless the discarded workman was taken on again. With this, Mr Frost refused to comply, and his works have been standing ever since.”

The worker concerned had refused a fine for “shoddy work” — a routine device used by “the master” to cut pay. Following the walkout when he was sacked, all the workers were locked out permanently by the bosses in an attempt to force them to reject the trade union.

The dispute spread quickly to other mills down the Derwent Valley, to other trades and factories and became a regional, Derby-centred general strike.

As the silk mill workers and other trade unionists said directly to the “masters” in their address to the people of Derby: “Keep what you have got. We want none of it. We would be satisfied with the legitimate fruits of our own industry. We have hitherto worked for you and more fools we. We would henceforward work for ourselves. Our object, therefore, is not to rob you, in violation of the law, but to prevent you from further robbing us …  as the law permits.”

Solidarity spread wide and support came for the silk mill workers and others involved in the year-long struggle. This show of solidarity inspired the trade unions of Britain to form a national body with its prime objective being the support of the Derby locked-out workers but with explicit rules committing it to the ultimate fundamental change of society.

But the repression and attacks by the “masters,” the ruling class nationally and all aspects of the power of the state — the military, the 24-hour police patrols, the courts, the church, the schools — could not finally be overcome.

In April 1834 the workers, after five months of lockout, persecution and violence, were forced to return to work on the masters’ terms, with many “ringleaders” refused jobs altogether.

This was a struggle for strength in the workplace as both the masters and trade unionists made clear in published manifestos.

As Derby historian Bill Whitehead points out: “This pivotal event is often portrayed as a spontaneous act of individual rebellion, but this is far from the truth. Both sides, workers and masters, had been preparing for such a confrontation.

“A large proportion of the town’s workers had joined a trade union by November 1833 and the masters took fright and demanded their workers abandon this ‘great power of darkness.’ The trade unionists refused to comply and a five-month lockout ensued.”

This was Britain’s first industrial workers’ dispute, taking place immediately before the struggle of the agricultural workers in Tolpuddle and immediately followed by the strike of the well-organised London Tailors Union.

While the workers were forced back to work by poverty, hunger and state violence — the longer term proved it was not “lost”  — it led to the development of the Grand National Consolidates Trade Union, in which the trade union movement of today has its origins, and to the development of Chartism with its reformist and revolutionary wings.

And today, the struggle continues along many of the same lines.
 
The Derby Silk Mill march will take place on Saturday June 8 from 10.15am, starting at the Derby Market Place with the rally and commemorative chaplet laying at Cathedral Green from midday and the People’s Festival from 1pm.
 
See www.facebook.com/DerbySilkMillRally.