Following our post on Working women in Brighton, this post focuses on the historically more male-dominated trades.
The economy of Brighton and Hove in 2024 shows that the city remains attractive to tech companies, digital/creative start-ups and small businesses, and – despite the tough economic circumstances – the hospitality industry is a key part of city life. Catching Stories, a QueenSpark Book that captured the stories of the dwindling fishing community in 1996, tells us about one of Brighton’s very first industries, why it changed and how Brightonians used their relationship with the sea in a different way to make a living:
Why did the ancient settlement of Brighthelmston grow up on an inhospitable sweep of coastline open to the prevailing south-westerly gales and without a natural harbour? Was it because there used to be a small inlet at Pool Valley from which boats could be hauled up to the safety of the Steine? What’s certain is that from very early times fishery was an important part of the local economy. In 1580 the fleet boasted eighty fishing boats, four hundred mariners and ten thousand nets.
From the 1740s and through the Regency period, as the town developed into a popular resort and regional centre, with better communications, the fishing community gradually lost its importance within the Brighton population. Even so, one hundred boats and three hundred men were involved in 1770, and the fishery continued on the beach alongside the new resort activities. Bathing machines appeared on the beach. Some of the town’s fishermen and their families turned to bathing visitors for a living. By the early 1800s pleasure-boating was also well established.
In 1837, the London to Brighton railway lined opened, making the seaside town accessible and affordable for many more visitors. This development also offered plenty of job opportunities and apprentices often started in their early teens, taking almost a decade to learn their trade and a lot more about the world. In Always a Layman, John Langley, one such apprentice, recounts a work mate who shaped his political views and his attitude towards work;
The first man I worked with was an outcast because he was a socialist. He was called a Bolshevik and he was a terrible man as far as the workshop and the management were concerned. But he was a man I loved. He used to kick me and smack me round the chops for not doing my work right, but I don’t think I ever loved a man more because he taught me my trade, and he taught me how to live too. He was a rank socialist. How he became one I don’t know. He told me to start reading the Daily Herald. He used to say, “Sit down and read that before you start work.” That was at six o’clock in the morning. You couldn’t get on with your work because there was no light at that time in the morning. So I used to read the paper and then he used to have his read. He made me a socialist. He used to tell me two of the very important things. One was that Russia would be the salvation of the world. The other was that the Co-op movement would help towards the salvation of the world. If we developed co-operation internationally within the socialist movement, everything would work out and the evolution of socialism would come right in the end. The reason he said that Russia would save the world was that Russia had two crops of wheat a year, so in a time of famine everybody would be dependent on them. He was the one who really started me off being a socialist which I have never got out of, because the more I got involved, the more I grew until I was on every committee I could be.
In Hard Work and No Consideration, Albert Paul’s experiences as a carpenter in the interwar years, illustrates a little agency in choosing not to work for unscrupulous bosses and also the precariousness of being a working-class man during the transition from WW1 to a peacetime economy:
Owing to the fact that during the 1914-1918 war no houses had been built and maintenance work on all large and public buildings had been badly neglected, the building trade became very busy. The Council decided to build working class houses on various vacant sites – such as Pankhurst Avenue and Queen’s Park, Moulescoomb, Whitehawk etc. All good experienced carpenters, plasterers, brick-layers and plumbers would not work on these Council house schemes (unless we were forced to) because the various building contractors employed foremen (who wore bowler hats) who were terrible task masters and wanted 1 1/2 day’s work carried out in one day.
Well, as the local work eased up, unemployment began to step up and the local employment exchange, which was situated in Western Road at the corner of Montpelier Road became very busy, with long queues of men all lined up to sign on for dole and also hoping to get a job.
The nine day General Strike of 1926, presented a dilemma for some, desperate for work but unprepared for the consequences:
Spring came, football finished, and cricket was almost getting going, and with it came the greatest upheaval since the war. The General Strike started. All transport stopped, buses, trams, railways, ships, docks, mines, engineering firms, theatres, picture palaces and the Stock Exchange. Everything to do with workaday life stopped. It was as thought the whole of Britain was cut off from the rest of the world, and like war time again. Only this was worse, with no rationing and nothing moving.
Young men and women started volunteering to drive transports, buses, trams, coalcarts etc., and were immediately rounded on by strikers, called scabs and blacklegs, and jostled, and in some cases severely beaten up. Buses, trams, lorries, the underground etc. started having wire netting put around the front and windows, for protection against stones, bricks, and clubs wielded by strikers.
A lot of the volunteers, when the strike was over, were kept on. It must have been hell for them, because the original workmen who had been on strike and were back working, shunned them, as if they had the plague. For years afterwards they called them scabs, blacklegs, job stealers and home breakers and many more things, besides, and an occasional good punch for good measure.
(Bert Healy, Hard Times and Easy Terms)
By the 1940s, The Trade Union Congress had been in existence since the Victorian era and Trade unionisation was very much part of the workplace:
Joe: In the workshop committee we did get some safety measures through that were outstanding. Shunting was carried out in the body shop, and there was nothing on the end of those roads to prevent a car taking right off. So they gave us stop blocks. Also outside the shop, there were a set of rail stubs set in the ground with a sleeper, or a heavy timber, on a loose chain across them, which protected the shop from anything coming into it. But it was best to be out the way when anything was shunting. There was a shop fund for all this. A penny a week was the regular fee. Nobody ever complained about that, as far as I can recall. It was to pay for the Shop Steward, or any other union business. There were regular meetings of the committee.
These extracts from Who was Harry Cowley? show that it was life in the trenches that shaped the expectations of this passionate social activist and anti-fascist – that working people deserved better:
I remember sitting in the trenches one night at Christmas time when I was a drum major in the Royal Fusiliers. I was sitting in the dug-out and it was raining hard. When it came to stand-to, at dawn, our feet were stuck in the mud. And there was a chap – an old London totter I s’pose he was – and he says, “I dunno ‘Arry, whatever we done to deserve this? There’s the aristocrats at home, their feet under nice tables. And there’s all this shot and shell, and here we all are smothered in mud.
I thought from then onwards that if there was a party that would assist the working classes, I should join it.
I came back from France thinking I was going to be alright for a job, but it was worse than ever. You knew if you was used to work you couldn’t keep going to the Labour Exchange.
Harry Cowley and thousands of other ex-servicemen were rewarded for their war service with useless decorations and unemployment. This desperate state of affairs became Harry’s first cause. He revealed himself a barn leader and a natural orator. He lead direct action at a local level.
Outside the old Exchange there was a sandbin. So I got on it and addressed the boys. It was the first time in my life I ever got on a platform. I was so fed up with coming back and no work.
“Well now boys, it’s no good of us messing about with the Labour Exchange. Let’s go where we can get a job. There’s only one place we can go in this town and that’s down the Town Hall. I’ll go down and I want you to come with me.”
Confronted by the police for disturbing the peace, Harry cheekily replied, “They’re nothing to do with me. They’re following me about.”
Harry won this first battle with the authorities. He secured work for 600 men on the widening of Ditchling Road. But he was not happy when he discovered that “his boys” were receiving below the union rate:
I said, “Well down tools boys, and straight down to the Town Hall.” I went before the Council and put the case and got the trade union rate.
A men’s unemployed centre in Tichborne Street was one successful result of these protests. The club gave unemployed men a respectability that they were fast losing as the vacant days crept by. They organized lively campaigning marches, where banners were waved and bugles blown.
Despite the high unemployment rate, these men were accused of being unskilled and lazy. When a Brighton councillor announced, “Harry Cowley is the leader of a bunch of unemployables”, Harry and “his boys” set out to prove him wrong by marching along the Sussex coast looking for work. Day after day the column of unemployed tramped from one Sussex town to the next. By day they badgered employers, at nights they slept in barns and sheds. After a couple of weeks they were back in Brighton. One man only had been left behind, humping coals in Bexhill. “Now”, said Harry, “you dare call us unemployables again’.
Many QueenSpark books feature stories of working lives – you can read them for free on our archive, or browse a selection of free downloadable pdfs in our bookshop.