ABSTRACT
By 1893 Britain was a very different society from that which it had been in 1886. Relationships between the classes had changed profoundly. The relative harmony which had characterised British society in the decades following the early 1850s had given way to a social climate in which industrial conflict and class antagonism were to the fore. Beginning with the Trafalgar Square riots of 1886 and followed by the matchgirls', dockers' and gas workers' strikes of the late 1880s, a new tide of class conflict spread rapidly across the country, spearheaded by the 'new union' movement. In 1890 cavalry attacked a demonstration supporting striking Leeds gas workers. Later that year a protracted strike took place at Manningham Mills in Bradford, when over 5,000 men and women struck for almost five months in protest against pay cuts.1 In 1892 cotton manufacturers in Lancashire locked out their workers. The following year in Hull, striking dockers were confronted by naval gunboats in the Humber. Rugby's heartland of Cheshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire experienced the UK's highest incidence of strike activity in 1892 and 1893, culminating in the 1893 miners' strike, during which troops shot dead two and wounded sixteen more at Featherstone, near Wakefield.2 On a political level, indications of working-class self-confidence were seen in the growth of the Social Democratic Federation in Lancashire and the formation in Bradford of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. For the upper and middle classes, their old certainties were disappearing and the fear of the mob was rising. It seemed that Matthew Arnold's semi-ironical warning of 1869 was about to bear fruit, The working class which, raw and halfdeveloped, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.'3
