ABSTRACT
Agricultural trades unionism in the Marches had pioneering nineteenthcentury antecedents. These illustrate a mushroom-like growth and a similarly rapid and drastic decline, dwindling to virtually a handful of activists. This pattern is typical of British rural radicalism. It blighted any attempt to organise prior to the establishment of a structured national union, and continued to dog it thereafter. Nineteenth-century movements also underline the local nature of trades unionism between Joseph Arch's NALU in the 1870s, and the establishment of effective national unions at the end of the Great War. Shropshire examples of union activity are amongst dozens chronicled by Reg Groves for this period, which could only ever have hoped to make limited impact locally and which at best survived only by incorporation into a larger body.1
