CHAPTER 10

How the population had grown is indicated by a return for Midgley Township of 1763-4 which shows that there were 224 houses, seven being empty, and 217 families.  Averaging a family at five gives 1,085 inhabitants.  How were these people making a living?  Farming was still the main calling. Besides keeping livestock, they grew barley, rye and oats and consumed what they produced.  The other activities were principally associated with woollen manufacture for, as previously described, almost every home had a spinning  wheel or a loom or both.  In this 18th century, as heretofore, numerous Midgleys served in the Township as 'principal men' and churchwardens.  Later when the Luddenden Church School was built in 1825, Robert Midgley, senior and junior were made trustees.
It was during this 18th century that the practice of clipping the coinage and counterfeiting culminated in Halifax Parish in sensational fashion. No doubt as the result of the more pressing matters of England's internal domestic troubles and her active involvement in wars on the Continent, the Mint had been neglected.  Money became very scarce and coins remained in circulation until not only their faces were rubbed bare, so that no inscription could be seen, but they became also lighter in weight and smaller with long usage.  Moreover foreign money was still legal tender.

Careful tradesmen carried little scales to weigh the coins and some merchants made their own
money.  For instance Robert Wilson of Sowerby Bridge had engraved brass plates which represented half-a-guinea, and Hamwel Sutcliffe in Heptonstall gave redeemable cards for change.  Most people did not know the difference between a good coin and a bad one or betwixt a light guinea and a full weight one.  Small wonder that dishonest persons took advantage of this state of affairs.
As long ago as 1682 during the reign of Charles I the coin of the realm was first milled to prevent these illegal practices.  This had not deterred te coiners, and robbery of Church plate was reported in almost every consecutive issue of the Yorkshire weekly papers.  The headquarters of the gang of coiners was in well-wooded Cragg Vale, Erringden, and the ringleader of the traffic was David Hartley, known as "King David" who lived near Stoodley Pike.  The coiners' houses were scattered in lonely situations where it was almost impossible to catch them by a surprise visit.  At the same time the Cragg farms were not far away from Halifax, a busy market town, where guineas could be obtained and returned into circulation after the clipping and tampering.  David  Hartley's father said they often treated one hundred guineas at a time.
About 1767 some Halifax manufacturers reported the unlawful practices to the Government, for outsiders were shy of accepting Halifax money. But the official reply was that they could not spend money in prosecuting the coiners.  Soon after William Deighton, an exciseman stationed at Halifax, wrote to the Solicitor of the Mint and received a promise of Government support in any action he might take to suppress the gang.  Accordingly he began to seek informers and secured the services of James Broadbent in Mytholmroyd where the Dusty Miller Inn was a resort of the coiners.
Matters soon reached a climax.  The coiners became alarmed and

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subbscribed £100 to be given to the man who killed Deighton.  The nex. move of  the exciseman was to apprehend 'King David" who was lodged in York Castle.
His brother Isaac Hartley, nicknamed the "Duke of York", then deputed Thomas Spencer to find two assassins Robert Thomas of Wadsworth and Matthew Normanton of Erringden who shot dead the exciseman near his home at Bull Close in Halifax Road, after rifling his pockets they made their way back to Mythoimroyd by the usual route through Midgley.²  A large reward of £200 was offered for the discovery the murderer, half subscribed by the Government and half by the Gentlemen  and Merchants of the Town and Parish of Halifax.  Even the Marquis of  Buckingharn came to Halifax on behalf of the Government to see the local gentlemen on.this urgent matter.

At the Spring Assizes at York in 1770 David Hartley was sentenced  to death for coining and executed after trying in vain to save his life by giving evidence against his friends the murderers.  These were tried but acquitted on the untrustworthy evidence of Broadbent, who was naturally tempted by the large reward but under pressure to recant his evidence.  At that time the prisons in England were so crowded that there was not room to keep even those charged with murder in gaol and the coiners had been released on bail.  Two years  afterwards on fresh evidence of another ringleader Thomas Clayton the murderers and Deighto were tried, covicted and hanged on the charge of Highway Robbery for having emptied the exciseman pockets, as they could not be tried again for the murder.

Altogether some comers were imprisoned, others transported and a hanged.  Isaac Hartley, brother of  "King David", lived and died at Lower White Lee in Midgley township, and how he escaped punishment for his share in the nefarious practice is not clear.  Midgley had several who dabbled in the coining practice including James Crossley, secretary of the Booth Congregational Church, who was executed   Despite the severe penalties the evil practice was  not stamped out  at once.  For instance one John Cockoroft, who was wanted for clipping guineas in 1769, was tried at Lancaster in 1778 for making half pennies, but he got off .  Finally in 1782 he was transported for making counterfeit shillings. [His descendants still farm in the Hawkesbury Valley at Wilberforce N.S.W.]
In Chapters 7 and 8 reference was made to the murmurings of dissention by Puritans and Presbyterians, not to mention Quakers, against the abolished Anglican Church which culminated in the Civfl War.  Freedom to worship as one wished was not bought cheaply.  At the Restoration 1660 the visages of the Anglican Church returned and clergy who did not comply were expelled from their livings,  It was not until the flight and overthrow of James and the passing of the Toleration Act of 1689 that all active persecution of  dissenters was stopped and penalties were no longer imposed on those failing to attend church,

In the following 18th century for over a period of forty years John Wesley was a frequent visitor to Calder Valley and preached there on several occasions his last visit being in 1786 when he was 82.  In 1747 on one of his yearly visits Wesley came from Lancashire over the mountain road passing Widdop to Heptonstall.  The next summer he spoke in the middle of the Old Market at
Halifax, but the meeting broke up in confusion when a gentleman scattered half pennies among the crowd, and stones and mud were flung at the preacher.  A few days later he was mobbed at Colne and retired to Widdop.
It was on the 1st May, 1747, that John Wesley first met Rev. William Grimshaw, the Anglican vicar at Haworth, and they soon became fast friends.
Grimshaw was five years younger than Wesley being born in 1708 at Brindle in Lancashire and at the age of eighteen he entered Christ's College, Cambridge.
After a curacy at Rochdale he moved to Todmorden and was appointed in 1742 to Haworth.  Here he served 21 years dying of a fever caught while visiting a sick parishioner in April. 1763.  His loss was deeply felt by Wesley who had held such hiigh opinion of him that he was appointed, after Charles Wesley, as the virtual head of the Methodist movement if Wesley died before him.  There could be no more striking testimony to the gifts and goodness of William Grimshaw.

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Grimshaw was a man of gigantic build and a tough evangelist of the stirring, manly sort   He may be said to have been a link between the Methodists and the unofficial evangelism of the Church of England.  He was affected by the Puritan dialectic of the preceding century and although called to account by the Archbishop of York was not maliciously persecuted, instead the latter praised him for what he had done as an itinerant clergyman but impressed upon him the need for prudence.³  Grimshaw came to have great influence upon the people of Upper Calderdale. In his own Parish of Haworth he quickly raised the number of communicants from twelve to twelve hundred.  He put a stop to the Haworth races.  Though fantastically strict he was the kindest and most humble of men. Incidentally he wrote in 1747:l
'I am venturing upon a public exhortation in a wild un-Christian
place called Midgley"!! ⁴
John Wesley often visited Haworth in the years that fol]owed their first meeting   The multitudes that came to hear him overflowed the church, and Grimshaw built platforms against the walls for the benefit of those who could not get inside.  After the preaching the Sacraments were administered in the church to one congregation after the other, and the number of communicants ran into thousands.  It is recorded that in 1753 thirty-five bottles of wine were used at a single celebration.   Nor did the fine results of Grimshaw's ministry cease with his death.⁵  In his later visits to Haworth Wesley usually found a full church and a godly audience.  During that interesting 18th century a branch of the Midgley family held the Manor of Haworth.
Wesley was again at Widdop in 1766.  At such places as Widdop, Heptonstall and Midgley the people became eager to listen to his preaching and he grew fond of this district.  On 28th June, 1770, his sixty-seventh birthday and two months to the day after David Hartley was hanged, and while many coiners of the district were then out on bail, he courageously preached at Hoo Hole near the bottom of Cragg Vale.  At Ewood, in Midgley township where Grimshaw's son was a tenant, the two preachers during their association often used to rest after days of travelling and speaking,

Methodism was essentiafly a democratic organisation.  In addition to the unquestioned value of popular preaching there was another factor of vital importance, namely that the Methodist congregation was a singing congregation, with a vast repertory of original hymns.  These hymns, sung often to lively and well-known tunes, brought into the movement that cheering element of concerted praise which has, always been a strong and attractive feature in Protestant churches.  Nothing tends more to unite a simple people in loyalty and affection than the common knowledge of a chorus.  You can measure the fervour of a revolution or a religious movement by the fervour of its popular music.⁶ Charles Wesley was the author of the geatest number of verses in the hymnal. This
Revival of the 18th century had a wonderful effect for good.  Small chapels were started in each hamlet as the preachers - the lay preachers were simple, fervent, rough men - worked hard to make better men and women.
Throughout the 18th century loud complaints were made about the condition of the local highways (sic) which meandered along the hillsides.  Their maintenance was the responsibility of the surveyor of each township, but the method was unsatisfactory as ratepayers refused to pay and money for roads was alwavs in short supply.  Moreover the surveyor had no power to compel men to work on the roads.  Following on the opening of-the first turnpike road in the district over Blackstone Edge in 1734, other turnpike roads were gradually introduced along the Valley bottom to take the place of the old pack-horse tracks on the hillsides in order to facilitate the transit of merchandise.  in due course the completion of the Rochdale Canal between Sowerby Bridge and Manchester (1794 - 1802) and its extension to Halifax in 1828 opened the gate to concentrated  industry in the Calder Valley.  One horse could pull as much weight on the canal as a string of 600 pack-horses could carry.  Pack-horses were still working at various upland places in the middle of the 19th century.  With the introduction of a Mail coach service in 1820 followed by the Railway in 1840, the transformation

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of the Valley was completed.
The story of the shifting of the population can be read in the place names of the Calder Valley.  The principal town at the western end of the Parish was Heptonstall, but Hepton (Hebden) Bridge took its place when trade descended fom the hills to the valley.  Ancient Luddenden was outstripped by Luddenden Foot.  Sowerby, once the richest township in the Parish, saw its trade and people descend to Sowerby Bridge.  Rastrick, set on a hill at the eastern end of the Parish, had looked down on the insignificant house by the bridge over the Calder which afterwards gave its name to the busy town of Brighouse.  The names of these industrial centres of Calder Vale show that they stand at a lower altitude than the older towns.
The low-lying lands on the bottom along the riverside, that had been considered useless in the earlier centuries, provided the best sites for works and mills.  Their steam driven machinery produced much more yarn and cloth than the old way of hand labour, and put out of action the early mills that had depended upon water-wheels driven by moorland streams for their power. Mytholmroyd mill built in 1792 was for many years the largest spinning factory in the Parish.  Thus the Age of steam and railways doomed the ancient hill towns to stagnation and gradually the mills in the moorland cloughs had to close.
With the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 18th century the natural romantic valley of the Calder with its abutting townships became somewhat spoilt by a multiplicity of mills in the area, though Midgley is perhaps the least changed in character.  Of course, the same applied to the Aire at Keighley.  Where the Calder flows into the Aire at Castleford there was once a saying
"Castleford maids must needs be fair
Because they wash both in Calder and Aire".
To wash nowadays at Castleford, in either Aire or Calder, would be an exceedingly dirty business
The Industrial Revolution and its inventions of the second half of the 15th century onwards induced much hardship and discontent. Accompanying this new manufacturing era there was a rapid fall in wages, while there was an equally accelerated rise in prices.  The rich were growing richer and the poor, poorer. Thousands of spinners and weavers in the West Riding, hitherto their own masters, were forced into a hopeless contest with the machine.⁷  Many could not secure even the inadequate wages that were offered. Preferring anything to the workhouse · 'Poor law Bastilles" they were later called - many migrated to the growing cities or betook themselves to the open road.  England had formerly been in a very real sense a community bound man to man and class to class by the .humanities. Now came the exploitation of the artisan and the labourer by the unsympathetic employer and capitalist mill-owner, with the tragic consequences of the abuse of child and female labour obliged to seek employment in the mills and factories and mines,  Social estrangement and economic depression of the working classes were bound up with political dissatisfaction and the need for reform.
New ideas had been taking hold of English minds, ideas set loose by  Thomas Paine's 'Rights of Man', and by the philosophers in France culminating in the Revolution there and given currency and resonance in America with the loss of the American Colonies.  The common man was thinking, asking questions and demanding answers.  Why should the people not be fairly represented in the
House of Commons?  Why should the teeming cities of Birmingham, Manchester and of the West Riding have less voice than the 'Rotten Boroughs'?  Why should members of Parliament be bribed?  Why should the House of Commons not be elected annually instead of every seven years?
Across the North Atlantic the ten amendments to the American Constitution of November 1791, guaranteed the freedom of the press and trial by Jury and provided safeguards for personal liberty.  In England, on the other hand, the rulers in church and state were opposed to change and had sought to hamper free discussion with the stifling hand of power, especially by prosecution

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for criminal or seditious libel until Fox's famous Libel Bill became law in 1792.⁸ The excesses of the French Revolution and the execution of Louis XVI and his Queen shook Conservative England to its core and induced Pitt to adopt an "anti-Jacobin" coercive and reactionary policy lest similar outbreaks occurred in England.  There had already been bread riots and at several towns, including Leeds and Sheffield in the West Riding, mobs had protested against low wages and want of work.  There had been rejoicing at the French victories e.g. Valmy in September, 1792, and agitators preached of the coming French millenium, when churches would no longer stand when property would be divided, and aristocracy and monarchy would all be overthrown -
"Let us like Frenchmen live or e]se like Frenchmen die".
The seriousness of the situation was conceivably exaggerated nevertheless the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended the Treasonabl Practices Act and the Seditious Meetings Act were passed, and trade combinations and unions were prohibited.
'The popular constitution" sums up Sir Erskine May.
"was suspended".
The deterioration in the lot of the textile workers led to the Luddite movement involving direct destructive action against power-driven machines. It spread from Nottingham in 1811 into neighbouring industrial areas.  The identity of the leader 'General Ludd' was never established.  The Luddite risings in the West Riding occurred in 1812· 13 in a period of English history when the conditions of the labouring classes were more dismal and hope]less than at any time since the 13th century.  Britain was engaged in the exhausting war with France.  Napoleon had closed European ports to her trade which was almost at a standstill.  A series of bad harvests forced up grain prices to a record high of 155s a quarter, a price very much in contrast to 69s in 1802 and 52s 6d in 1832.
In these conditions of high food prices, food scarcity and unemployment many workers, especially hand loom weavers whose earnings had fallen from 13s l0d a week in 1802 to 6s 4d in 1812, had been reduced to a ruinous state. Bread was scarce, meat was a rare luxury and oatcake and porridge was the staple diet for a family without a wage earner.  In Yorkshire the condition of the industrial workers had sunk to the lowest depth of poverty and degradation. In the industrial areas a quarter of the population was being supported by the overseers of the Poor on meagre allowances which barely kept the unemployed man and his family alive.
For nearly five centuries laws had existed for the regulation of wages and were still in force in 1812 when wages were fixed by Magistrates at Quarter Sessions Courts as they had been since the 14th century. This system of wage control and the Combination Act of 1799, which made it illegal for a man to form any kind of organisation for improving his wages or condition of employment  were very oppressive.  In the Yorkshire woollen industry the products from power-driven machinery were having a depressing effect on domestic producers some of whom suffered from low prices for their cloth and others from unemployment through inability to compete with machine produced fabrics.
In and about Huddersfield many mills and workshops were forcibly entered and machinery destroyed by armed men.  There were cases of arson at Leeds, and at Halifax at a big meeting in Saint Crispin Hostelry the chairman' made an impassioned attack on the aristocracy which revealed that he was more concerned with social and political revolution than machine breaking exploits. In an attempt to deter these Luddites a bill was rushed through Parliament to make machine and mill breaking capital offences,  Previously the punishment had been transportation overseas.  In a maidenspeech on its second reading in the House of Lords Lord Byron strongly condemned the measure:
"I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula,  I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic governments did I
behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return
into the heart of a Christian country"

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However the deliberate shooting of a mill-owner, William Horsfall while riding home, turned all decent people against the Luddite cause, and the offer of £1,000 reward, later increased to £2,000 by the authorities for information brought disaster to the Yorkshire Luddites, whose adroitness had previously baffled the magistrates, local constabulary and the military.  The murderers were apprehended, convicted at the York Assizes and hanged. Many other Luddites were executed or transported for their part in the frightful disturbances during the risings.  Actually only a small number of the industrial population had engaged in violent actions.  The cloth croppers, expert craftsmen in the finishing process, who had been the main instigators of plans to destroy the machines which threatened to put them out of work, were in total probably not more than 8,000, and the men of action not more than 500 or so.
Later Lord Lascelles in presenting a Petition asking for statutory measures to deal with the causes of distress and anxieties of the cloth finishers in particular, told Parliament that the use of machinery in cloth finishing had increased so tremendously that in 1817 there were 72 gig mills, used for raising a nap on the cloth for the final cropping process, and 1,462 cropping machines in use.  As a result of these changes in methods the craftsmen had suffered so
severely that 1,170 had no work at all, 1,445 were working part time, and only 763 were in full employment.  The Government, however, adhering to their policy of non-interference with industry in the development of machine production, ordered the Petition to lie on the table.  Moreover Lord Sidmouth answering briefly for the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool said that there would be no help
 for displaced men wanting to emigrate. Gradually after the bogy of Napoleon had been laid the continuing distress and outbreaks of violence such as the Spa Fields riots, London, 1816, and the Peterloo Massacre. Manchester, 1819, led to a recognition of the need of reform by succeeding Governments however piecemeal and grudgingly.
It is not necessary to pursue at any length the subsequent history of Midgley Township¹⁰ By 1830 when the inhabitants totalled 2.409, a return (Crabtree's History') states that 199 families were dependent upon trade:woollen manufacture and handicrafts, as against 98 families engaged in agriculture.
There were said to be 29 families 'in the manufacture' or making of machinery. During the two decades of the 1830s and 1840s Midgley was a hotbed of Chartists. Chartism was born of the accumulated discontent and particularly was bound up with political dissatisfaction at the limited scope of the Reform Bill of 1832. In Midgley the workers held meetings of protest, obtained weapons and demonstrated by exploding bottles filled with gunpowder.  The six points of "The People's Charter' of the London Working Men's Association of 8.5.1838 and its fate need
 not detain us here,  They were an exact reproductioin of what had been adopted in 1780 by the Society for Constitutional Information; a society patronised by Charles James Fox and had been steadily frowned on by the Tories.
Outside the Township, as previously indicated, members of the family did not as a rule seek public office.  Only one has been Mayor of Halifax, S. T. Midgley, who served for two terms during
1877 - 8 and 1893.⁴ A grandson was knighted for distinguished work at Oxford University.

A man of some local note was Thomas Midgley,⁹ who for sixty years was widely known as a lay Methodist preacher, a man of real eloquence and devotion.  From this distant locality, probably using a great deal of his native dialect, he was chosen in the late 1880s to preach in City Road Chapel, London, the very cathedral of Methodism.  Accordiug to contemporary account he
distinguished himself on that occasion.  In November, 1897, coming out of Luddenden Dean Chapel in the dark, he was then 83, he stepped too far and fell over a wall, dying shortly after.

The area of the Old Township was somewhat whittled away on the formation of Local Boards at Luddenden Foot and Mytholmroyd in 1868 and 1892 respectively. Finally it lost its local authority when as from April 1, 1939 it became a ward of Sowerby Bridg Urban District Council.

NOTES CHAPTER 10
1. Keighley made woollen goods long before the introduction of the worsted trade. Incidentally the first cotton mill in Yorkshire was built at Keighley, circa 1780 under the direction of Arkwright who himself instructed the children how to use the machines..

2. Thomas Spencer was hanged on Beacon Hill, Halifax, on Saturday, 16th August, 1783, for leading a mob the previous June to break into the warehouses on Corn market when bread was very dear. This malpractice of tampering with the coinage was first perpetrated by the Jews in England. Already in Saxon times there were no doubt that Jewish merchants and slavedealers in England but they came over permanently in larger numbers with William the Conqueror and settled in London (Old Jewry off Chepside), Oxford (Moses Hall and Jacob Hall), and other parts of the country. They were not popular owing to religious bigotry and for economic reasons. They had no place in feudal organisation of society and being unable to take a Christian oath had no legal rights.. Their main source of income rose from the lending of money, but usury had been forbidden as hostile to the spirit of the Christian theology. Some indication of the savage hatred with which the 'cursed' Jew came to be regarded in medieval England is commemorated by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales (Prioress' tale) and later by Shakespeare in his Shylock of the Merchant of Venice. Nevertheless the Jews prospered under Henry II only to suffer fearful massacres at the accession of Richard I, especially at York. Vast sums were extracted from their coffers by King John and the barons.
In spite of the wealth derived from them by the Crown, in Edward I's reign an Act of Parliament (Statute of Judaism 1225] attempted to reform the Jews, forbade money lending and directed them to engage in other occupations which for practical purposes were closed to them. As their only means of livlihood was gone, many Jews took to debasing and clipping the coin of the realm. This was an easy process when the only English coin was a penny, which to produce smaller units was roughly broken into two or four halfpennies or farthings, easily reducible in size by judicious paring. The example set by the Jews was soon followed by the Christians. Many were arrested, but the Jews were denied thew right of payment of large fines, and 293 were executed in London and a large number in the provinces.
A decree was subsequently issued banishing absolutely and irrevocablly all the Jews in the realm and confiscating their belongings.. Any Jew found in the country after the time-limit of expulsion was to be executed by hanging. By October 1290 over 16,000 Jews preferring the bitterness of exile to the shame of apostasy quitted the inhospitable shore of England. It was not until the Commonwealth period of the 1650's, when Old Testament sympathies and theoretical religious toleration inspired the government of Oliver Cromwell, thast the Jews found the road of return open to them. Incidentally the wholesale prosecution of Jews towards the close of the 13th century was followed by a reform of the coinage when new pennies of superior execution took the place of the old issues, while round halfpennies and farthings were now coined for the first time.. In England in 1912 I was able to buy sweets with a farthing! Vide Volumes in the Methuen series by H.W. C. Davis, K.H. Vickers, G.M. Trevalyn and Paul Goodman's History of the Jews.

3. A Halifax Parish man, Dr. John Tillotson 1630 - 94 born in Sowerby became Archbishop of Canterbury.

4. On his demise this eccentric vicar was carried by horse litter to Luddenden where he lies buried in the Church.

5. For more details about Grimshaw see C.E. Vulliamy's study of John Wesley. His 'Round' extended to Bingley and Wyke.
This stream of Methodism flowed from Haworth.
John Wesley leader of the 'Methodist' society, a movement to promote piety and morality in reaction against the apathy of the Church of England, founded by his brother Charles while a student in Christ Church, Oxford, always wished to remain a member of that Church, but he committed a definite act of schism in 1784 by ordaining a minister for one of his American congregations.

6. Take for instance the singing of the Marsellaise during the French Revolution from 1792.

7. The pioneer power looms were broken up by the irate workers who feared for their jobs when the faster machines came to the market. This Luddism was made a capital offence. The town had its organised bodies of "Plug Drawers". These plugs were drawn to empty the boilers.

8. The judges had confined the juries to decide only on the fact of publication and reserved to themselves to decide whether there was actually libel! Now even though the Act had left to judges the right of giving their opinion on the guilt of the accused- nevertheless the jury might give a general verdict of guilty or not guilty.

9. Another Thomas Midgley (1889-1944) was an American chemist who discovered the value of tetraethyl leasd as gasoline anti-knock compound. He developed a methos of extracting bromine from seawater, patented a refrigerant for air conditioning systems and was a pioneer in research on synthetic rubber.
A sound knowledge of English history and the struggle of the ordinary man for recognition down the centuries, in spite of inevitable checks, should give the unbiased student an appreciation of the tolerance of the English speaking peoples as a whole trancending all others e.g. the right to freedom of speech and the typically constant balancing of law and common sense in search of justice, even if at times on a tightrope.
Many make sardonic remarks on the blindness of justice. But she waers a blindfold not for the obvious reason. She wears it that her judgement shall not be swayed by the mere 'appearance' of those or whatever she judges in her scales or balances in her hands. At all times she is impartial.

10. Nor is it necessary to trace the development of the relations between employer and employee in the West Riding over the past 150 years. "The getr-rich-quick" wage slavery of the early 19th century in Britain gave way to a Victorian paternalism and charitable hand-out system in the later years of that century. This was followed by the growing consciuosness of the worker of the immense power he could weild by witholding his labour and the organisation of effective trade unions. The resultant conflicts between the powerful unions and the wealthy owners eventually compelled both sides to seek better means of regulating their relationship with each other and the Government to increasingly to step in with industrial legislation. This inevitably led to a much greater control over industry being put into the hands of the workers. See Argus review of Coates and Topham's 'Industrial Democracy in Britain' 10/6/1970.
 

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