ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on dockyardmen as independent and self-confident workers, whose engagement with labour relations did not necessarily translate into the negativity of subservience and deference. Dockyardmen had constituted a very early industrial workforce and many of their workplace practices retained the style of medieval craft traditions and of the early parliamentary method of protest through petition. The Chatham Dockyard Committee appears to have been a final unification of the workshop committees which had operated for petition purposes for centuries; it was obviously recognized by Admiral-Superintendent Anson. Within the Whidey Council system, which preserved the connection between the workshop floor and government policy, the paternalistic relationship between the Admiralty and the employee was, arguably, removed. The experience which the dockyardmen obtained in handling issues at the workshop level was an important contribution to forms of political and industrial organization then being discussed in trade union circles.
