ABSTRACT
On 5 May 1900 Zachariah Walker died. His local world lay to the north-west of George Rix’s and they were as often antagonists as comrades, yet his death marked the end of an era for Rix and the men and women of 1872 as firmly as if Rix himself had died. Walker ‘passed over’, as his contemporaries in the Primitive Chapel would have had it, at a meeting of the Christian Endeavour Society in Kings Lynn. 1 His funeral brought together, perhaps for the last time, all the elements of the unionism of the period 1872–96. There, apparently at ease with one another, marched the Oddfellows, the Primitive Methodist chapels and Sunday schools of north-west Norfolk, Norfolk liberalism and what remained of rural trade unionsim, in total 600 or 700 people at the graveside. 2
