ABSTRACT
See Vol. 2, p. 70 onwards. The Board of Trade in 1891 suggested that worker organisation in this area dated back to 1825. In the case of the shipwright’s trade, it goes back far earlier but the picture is one of local craft unions which vigorously defended their own independence from one another. Many other trades such as mast and block makers and sailmakers struggled to survive as the technology of shipbuilding changed from wood to iron and steel and from sail to steam. The Boilermakers, formed in 1834 consciously set out to be a national body, an ambition achieved quite rapidly, whereas the other major specifically shipbuilding craftsmen’s organisation, the Shipwrights failed to create any real national organisation until the 1880s. A federal body, the United Kingdom Amalgamated Society of Shipwrights was set up in the 1850s but this was deliberately hamstrung by local societies and failed to become more than a talking shop as the Webb’s point out. It was only when the dynamic secretary of the Glasgow Shipwrights Society, Alexander Wilkie, set up the Associated Society of Shipwrights in 1882 that a national organisation for shipwrights truly emerged.
