• 2 George Rude (1964-1995 pp. 237-259) describes the patterns of behaviour of the pre-industrial crowd (...)
• 3 No action, of course, can ever be considered inherently legitimate, but has that status conferred u (...)
• 4 Community law existed at all times, in so far as it was a collection of customs and informal regula (...)
• 5 See Allott (1980, pp. 24-25) and also Henry (1985).
• 6 See Samuel, Bloomfield, Boanas (1986, pp. 118-121).

1Sociologists have for some time debated the existence and nature of the temporary codes of collective behaviour that are sometimes formed when competing groups join in significant and prolonged disputes. Historical studies of community-wide disturbances (involving local social, occupational or political groups) have also shown that participants often develop common value systems that persist for the duration of a dispute with the participants taking actions that are legitimised by those shared common values2. This article will suggest that the normative values that are engendered during a dispute can be considered to have assumed ‘community legitimacy’3. This, in turn gives authority to a normative coda with its own rules and boundaries – a community ‘law’- which in extraordinary circumstances generates alternative structures of authority over local areas4. This phenomenon could be imagined as a sphere of authority (akin to Allott’s spheres of morality and law), which is capable of partially replacing or eclipsing parliamentary legislation to an extent determined by social and political conditions5. In 1980 Allott discussed what he termed ‘spheres’ of morality and ‘spheres’ of law that sometimes overlap (in that they share common normative values in particular regard to some issues of social or personal action but are divergent on other issues). This is, of course, hardly a novel concept. It would be easy to list a number of moral positions e.g. abortion rights, mercy killings, and so on, which the law prohibits, but which some groups in society regard as morally correct and vice versa. Allott’s (1980) contribution is to theorize ‘law’ as being itself capable of being eclipsed when community beliefs are strong enough to do so. In other words, to insist that law is not the final arbiter of judgement over contentious moral issues, but can be replaced by a moral code which derives its power from contextual, contingent and local areas of authority. When the replacement or over-lapping of the law is short in duration, as is usually the case with vigilantism, for example, the phenomena is normally inchoate, insubstantial, and disorganized. However, when community law is in place for an extended period of time, it is possible that a kind of stability and semi-permanence is created – which in itself aids the acceptance and establishment of community norms over national laws (ie. legislation passed in parliament, or case law devised by judges). For example, this coda or community ‘law’, can perhaps be seen to have operated in many of the longer industrial disputes of the later twentieth-century6.

• 7 From 2,565,000 in 1910 to 4,135,000 in 1913 (Pelling, 1992, 5th ed., pp. 261-262; 294).
• 8 Remarks of Sir Edward Grey quoted in Wigham (1976, p. 28). See also Meacham (1972, pp. 552-570). Ho (...)

4The years preceding the First World War witnessed industrial strife on a grand scale in England. The number of days lost due to ‘stoppages’ grew from around two-and-a-half million in 1909 to nearly forty million by 1912, and union membership in Britain rose by two thirds between 1910 and 19137. Over the same three-year period, 30,000 miners in South Wales clashed violently with police and soldiers; troops fatally shot two strikers in Liverpool; and, together, over half a million miners, railwaymen, engineering workers, Lancashire textile workers, and London dock workers went on strike. The government prepared for the start of a revolution which never came8.

• 9  High Wycombe was the largest centre of chair production, although it was beginning to be substanti (...)

5However, industrial discontent was not confined to the major industrial regions. In 1913, a small dispute in a country town twenty miles west of London, which originally concerned only tens of furniture workers, eventually led to the locking-out of thousands of the employees of this single industry town. Low wages and long hours constantly inspired new disputes in the major structural industries and it is not surprising that similar concerns were prevalent in the minor and craft industries. It was the strength of those concerns that provided an opportunity for the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association (NAFTA) to launch an ‘offensive’ strike designed to raise High Wycombe chairworkers’ wages to the levels of their London colleagues9. This article is not concerned with the causes of the strike, or the development of industrial relations in the chair industry. Nevertheless, in order to determine how community law was created, the article will first examine the processes by which a community of strikers was constructed and symbolically reproduced.

• 10 South Bucks Free Press (hereafter SBFP), 5th December, 1913. See also the Social Service Committee (...)
• 11 Women and boys were placed most disadvantageously in the chair industry. Most of the women were emp (...)

6As with many industrial disputes, a sense of fellow feeling arose from notions of collective grievance – the belief that the participants in the dispute shared relative or real deprivation caused by people or conditions external to that community. In High Wycombe the most keenly felt sense of grievance arose from the extremely low wage rates. Workers insisted that they could not afford to work for the low wages provided by a system of ‘industrial slavery’ that ensured that even very experienced and qualified workers toiled for very low pay10. The wages varied on a scale based upon the levels of craftsmanship involved in the work but the average wage for the industry was only twenty-one to twenty-five shillings for anything up to a sixty hour week – figures which reflected the uncompetitive labour market in a single industry town with a captive workforce and a large reservoir of available labour11.

• 12 SBFP, 5th December, 1913 and TheReading Observer, 20th December, 1913. These figures were disputed (...)
• 13 Board of Trade Inquiry (1904, p.5).
• 14 One main reason for the relatively well-balanced diet of Manchester millworkers was that female wea (...)
• 15 Board of Trade Inquiry, 1904.

7Poverty arising from low wages was not a temporary, but a permanent, feature of workers living in small single industry towns such as High Wycombe12, but hardship was especially cutting in the pre-war period. Residents had been faced with a considerable increase in their rents in the first decade of the twentieth-century, and together with a nine per cent rise in the cost of living between 1909 and 1913, these increases had resulted in a lower proportion of the weekly wage being spent on food. Nationally, the average worker who earned 21s. a week spent around 14s. on foodstuffs, an amount which was itself more than the weekly wage of many High Wycombe chairworkers13.Indeed, some in Wycombe struggled to maintain, feed and clothe their children on 6-7 shillings per week. Therefore, whilst Lancashire cotton operatives in 1913 could have enjoyed a nutritious diet – of, say, breakfast of coffee or tea, bread, bacon and eggs; a dinner of potatoes and beef; an evening meal of tea, bread and butter, cheap vegetables or fish- the main components of the unskilled High Wycombe worker’s diet were rice, bread, potatoes and oatmeal14. Meat was a luxury and milk consumed sparingly15.

• 16 In order to prevent employees ‘wasting’ time by looking out of the windows.
• 17 Sparkes (1973, p. 53).

8Wage deductions, euphemistically termed the ‘customs of the trade’, were a further and more insidious cause of wages being reduced still further. Employees were required to pay for bench room and for the use of lighting (which, as a result of the windows of the workshops being covered with calico or hessian, could amount to between 8d. and 2s. per worker per week in the winter months)16. The rental for a bench at which to work was 2d. per week, as was the tariff for using the grindstone, and a further half-penny per week per worker was levied to pay for the services of the errand boy who cleaned the shop17. The employee also had the not inconsiderable expense of providing his own tools. To counter these hidden costs, the employers argued that the workers enjoyed advantages peculiar to High Wycombe, such as healthy surroundings and allotments in which to grow fresh food. Not surprisingly, the unionists rejected the reasoning that low wages could or should be supplemented by home-grown vegetables.

• 18 Steinberg (1995).
• 19 SBFP, 19th December, 1913.

9Once the union had articulated the workers’ sense of grievance, representation of the community’s aims could be symbolically constructed through visual and vocal media. Mark Steinberg conceptualises industrial and other struggles as: “an ongoing dialogue between powerholders and challengers. To a large extent this is accomplished through public and collective dialogues, in which moral boundaries for interaction are produced in the tug of ideological domination and resistance18”. Rhetorical devices, exhortations to victory, and stories of ‘union-smashing’ by employers were used by the union to compete in a discursive competition of claim, counter-claim, and the moral justification of actions. The dialogue of dispute expressed in public speeches by union representatives and reported in local newspapers was also joined by symbolic expressions of solidity of purpose. The formation of a strikers’ brass band, the mass meetings, the processions and marches, and so on, were all intended to both keep up the morale of the strikers, but also to demonstrate to the employers the workers’ determination to carry the dispute to victory whatever the cost. Expressions of solidarity, therefore, became bargaining chips in negotiations perhaps expressly provided for the consumption of the employers. For example, there were periodic and well-reported ‘show of hands’ ballots held at mass meetings in the Town Hall and:‘when polled about the employers’ offer, not a hand went up; but when an appeal was made against acceptance... the audience rose in a body and held up their hands and cheered enthusiastically19’. However, perhaps the most dominant factors in establishing a cohesive community of strikers were the tactical strategies of the groups involved in the dispute.

• 20 See Tilly (1995, pp. 33, 39); see also Tilly, Tilly (1981). There are some interesting thoughts on (...)
• 21 For example, Green noted that attitudes towards the police changed very quickly during the 1984-198 (...)
• 22 See, for a description of strategies during industrial disputes, Brown (1981, p. 133).
• 23 SBFP, 19th, 27th December, 1913.
• 24 SBFP, 19th December, 1913 and 2nd January, 1914.

10The strategic and operational responses of competing groups have been the subject of recent debate amongst historians and sociologists. Some have suggested that a repertoire of actions existed, from which combatants chose the most appropriate weapon – in other words, that practices and strategies used in past disputes, were re-employed when they again seemed useful20. However, although past historical events, such as the success or failure of previous forms of action, may have informed their choice of action, the personal philosophies of the participants, police policies and chance events were also very influential in shaping the form of the dispute21.In this case, market conditions were key. The manoeuvrings of both the chairworkers and the employers centred around the basic premise that to succeed they must make it unprofitable for the other side to continue the dispute. The hope of the employers was that either the union would run out of strike funds, or that the workers would find strike pay (between one-third and one-half of their average weekly pay) unacceptable and insufficient for their needs over a long period of time. The avowed aim of the union was to drive the employers into bankruptcy by stopping production in the factories. Their implicit aim was to make the spectre of profits loom so large over the employers that they would be forced to negotiate a settlement. However, NAFTA’s preferred policy of supporting a limited number of members on strike at particular firms was thwarted by the chair manufacturers collectively deciding to lock-out of the factories all NAFTA members, thereby forcing the union to take on a large financial commitment. Once that had happened, the union decided to `turn out’ as many unionist and non union chairworkers as they could, and to try and ensure that ‘scab’ replacement labour could not enter the factories22. The employers brought in non-union labour from the East End of London, and local agricultural workers for the unskilled tasks in order to maintain production23. However, the pickets that were organised outside factories at the beginnings and ends of shifts (and at other more unusual times – by the ‘Midnight Territorial Gang’ for instance) were successful in deterring a large proportion of non-unionists from entering the factories, to such an extent that the South Bucks Free Press reported that High Wycombe had become ‘a prohibited area for black-legs24’. The extensive nature of the striker’s actions against chair employers can be seen in the following newspaper report:

• 26 SBFP, 7th February, 1914.
• 27 Sparkes, (1973, p. 55).
• 28 The Metropolitan Police were called upon to reinforce the borough constables at a cost of £25 per d (...)
• 29 Reactions of the community are often forged in response to actions of outside agencies. The police (...)

11As well as keeping the non-union men out of the factories, the picket lines achieved a second objective of preventing raw materials entering and finished goods leaving the factories. This aim was also pursued away from the workplace. Pickets were set up at the railway station, where trains were stoned, and chair delivery vans were stopped at street barricades and set alight26. The Borough police found themselves protecting chair loads bound for London, and as cycling pickets for many miles pursued the vans, this involved large numbers of policemen27. So much so, in fact, that the borough constabulary had to be reinforced with two divisions of foot and mounted Metropolitan Police28. The visible presence of the police in itself helped to solidify community coherence29. However, more important than the fact of their opposition to community aims (through the policing of pickets) was the means of their opposition.

• 30 See Critchley (1970, p. 159). For a history of the policing of industrial disputes in early twentie (...)
• 31 For example, the definition of ‘peaceful picketing’ remained indistinct, being largely determined b (...)
• 32 The Secretary of the Federation of Women Workers, for example, wrote to the Home Secretary about an (...)
• 33 Possibly because of the repertoire of reaction based on folk memories of previous contests between (...)

12At the turn of the twentieth-century, union activists generally believed that, in response to particular conditions, the police made operational decisions that were outside of the law they were supposed to uphold30. Despite the considerable discretionary powers of the police, it appears that policemen felt their constituted powers were insufficient to control mass disturbances, and that in High Wycombe too they resorted to illegal and semi-legal activities31. Although many of the rumours of police brutality given written form in the local press may have been exaggerated or even wholly invented to stimulate a sense of outrage in the workers, and to justify the actions of strikers, many of the reports had a factual basis32. Partly because of the local indignation aroused by these incidents, the presence of the police at picket lines heightened expectations of violent disorder, which became self-fulfilling prophesies33. Indeed, many of the violent incidents were coincident with the arrival of the police, especially upon the arrival of the Metropolitan Police officers. The police were seen not just as the force that was inhibiting the workers’ aim to picket factories successfully, but also as representatives of a competing value system, and the hostility shown towards the police in part represented the symbolic rejection of the lawful authorities.

• 34 In the 1984-5 miners’ strike, for example. See Green, pp. 83-107.
• 35 SBFP, 13th February, 1914.

13The last external factor that assisted the creation of a “community” was the perceived biases evident in locally administered justice. Tactical use of the law by the employers and by the State was not as advanced in the pre-war period as it was later in the twentieth-century34. Nevertheless, the administration of justice was deeply contested in High Wycombe. For example, the Inspector in charge of the Metropolitan Police publicly criticised the leniency of the courts35. His remarks had been prompted by the cases of three men who had been on trial for assaulting policemen. One of the men had attacked a mounted officer with a poker, and when his swing missed it caused a six-inch gash on the side of the police-horse. The evidence was strong, and the statement of the officer involved was unambiguous:

• 36 This category includes only those offences committed by chairworkers which are described in the cou (...)
• 37 The number of cases forwarded to the courts during the dispute was six times higher than those sent (...)
• 38 A fine of £1-00 was equivalent to one month’s wages for the average chairworker.
• 39 The contextual details of a case, the aggravating and mitigating factors which might raise of decre (...)

15Analysis of the eighty-four cases of violent crime (assaults on non-strikers, assaults on police officers in the course of their duty, and the criminal damage of factories by throwing bricks and missiles) committed by chairworkers during the dispute, and in the immediate pre and post strike periods, can begin to explore the reality of each side’s fears36. The conviction rate in the pre-strike period (September 1912 to September 1913) was 81.8% (22 cases); and in the strike period (October 1913 to February 1914) it dropped to 71.4% (57 cases); falling again to 63.6% (11 cases) in the immediate post-strike period (March 1914 to August 1914). It would only be possible to carry out a full quantitative analysis with larger numbers of cases than we are presented with here. Unfortunately, the small sample sizes preclude conclusive statements. Moreover, valid reasons can be found to explain the differing rates37. For example, it was possible that a disproportionately high number of relatively weak prosecution cases were sent to the courts during the strike, thereby depressing the conviction rate. Secondly, although impressionistic evidence suggests that the courts increased the severity of their sentences after the Metropolitan Inspector complained in February 1914 (for example, an assault on a non-unionist warranted a £1-00 fine in January, but a £4-00 fine in February), such assumptions cannot evaluate nuanced differences in particular cases38. For example, contextualising details, or the seriousness of the assault, could both influence the severity of the sentence39. Unfortunately, those details were not recorded by the magistrates’ court clerks, and are only recorded in a few newspaper reports.

• 40 SBFP, 19th December, 1913.

17As previously stated, the chairworkers’ first objective was to end production in the factories. The union declared that their real opponents were those men and women who maintained factory production. They were less clear, at least publicly, about the methods that were to be employed in persuading these men not to enter their place of work. Fred Bramley, the NAFTA president who later became Chairman of the Trades Union Council, many times advocated peaceful persuasion, rather than intimidation or violence. At other times, however, both he and the sole Labour Party councillor in High Wycombe used phrases whose invitation to violence could not be misunderstood by their audience. For example, Bramley asserted that: ‘The workman who sold himself to an employer during a trade dispute was about the lowest form of animal life they had on the surface of the earth... poor, miserable, backboneless, unprincipled example of humanity who undertook to sell his soul and play the part of a traitor to his own class40’. His thoughts were reinforced by a handbill (often circulated in disputes at this time) that left no doubt to the status of the non-unionists:

• 42 The clauses of this Act were reprinted in the local press. SBFP, 2nd January, 1913. For more inform (...)

18The process of persuading non-unionists not to enter the factories was subject to the 1906 Trades Disputes Act (6 Edw.7 c.47)42. If the picket obstructed the street, there was also the Highway Act to contend with, yet hundreds of previously law-abiding citizens routinely broke these laws. The two newspaper reports below give some indication of the number and type of offences being committed, and the scale of participation in violent and threatening activities:

• 44 In a letter to the editor of the SBFP, 14th February, 1914.
• 45 SBFP, 8th January, 1914. The process of conferring legitimacy, or the cultural development of behav (...)

19Union leaders did not (and could not legally) admit that they encouraged these forms of action, which had been termed by some ‘the government of the dispute by terrorism and mob-law’44. Nor did they explicitly state that physical attacks on men and property were in any way acceptable. Nevertheless, there was implicit support for acts of violence. When union leaders spoke of the town being ‘infected’ or ‘infested’ by blacklegs, ‘germs worse than smallpox’ from which the town had to be ‘disinfected’ or ‘purified’ they empowered a culture which enabled certain criminal actions to be reinterpreted as defensive measures which deserved and received communal commendation and approbation45.

• 46 Councillor Forward jocularly announced that: ‘they had appointed a new official. He was the Chief P (...)
• 47 See Bostock (1979, p. 16).

20The second factor which suggests that community law was supplanting parliamentary legislation was the rejection of locally administered justice. At first the fines imposed by the courts on strikers convicted of intimidating non-unionists, or of assaulting policemen, were treated with some levity46. The social stigma attached to court appearances in ‘normal times’ appears to have been absent, and was instead replaced with the approval of the community. Indeed sanctions imposed by ‘outsiders’ actually strengthened the feelings of legitimacy in the minds of the law-breaking strikers47. However, after February, the union became increasingly frustrated with the justice distributed from the courts. Although the sentences imposed by the courts carried little social stigma, they did involve considerable financial cost. At first the fines were paid from the union coffers, but in January the union refused to pay any more fines. This reversal of policy may have been prompted because the union was short of funds, or possibly because they wished to avoid giving their enemies any advantage, as Bramley stated:

• 49 Rose (1982) The Sociology of Collective Behaviour (London: PUB) p. 16.

22In his studies of collective behaviour, J.D. Rose identified ‘the need of every social system for mechanisms to ensure that members act in ways consistent with the established norms of that social system. Communities require, for example, police and courts to arrest and convict persons whose behaviour is perceived as a threat to the lives or well being of other persons in the community49’. During times of prolonged upheaval, when new norms of acceptable behaviour have been forged, there may have been a tendency for new structures to emerge to protect the new normative codes. Just as the police and courts were needed to preserve the rights of parliamentary legislation, new structures of authority were required to uphold the new normative dictates of communal law. In Wycombe, this structure took the form of the Anti-Violence Brigade (AVB), which was formed in December 1913.

• 50 The Territorial Army was the British Army of Home Defence originally instituted (on a territorial o (...)
• 51 SBFP, 27th December, 1913.
• 52 SBFP, 7th February, 1914.
• 53 SBFP, 16th January, 1914.
• 54 SBFP, 13th February, 1914.

23Organised on a military models, the tallest and strongest of the striking men, many of whom were Territorials, were selected and divided into sections under the command of ex-military men50. Each man carried a weapon similar to a policeman’s truncheon, and swore an oath stating that: ‘We, members of the High Wycombe Anti Violence brigade hereby swear our solemn allegiance to the Union, and hold ourselves in readiness to put down, by every means in our power, any violence that may appear in the dispute51. The AVB was designed to be perceived as a foil to police violence, but also to govern the activities of the pickets. Feeling against the police was strong, even murderous, and the police sometimes had cause to be grateful for the AVB calming down confrontational situations52. For example, when one arrested striker collapsed, the crowd began to shout that he had been killed by a policeman, but an AVB man reassured the crowd that the man had only fainted. In court the policeman concerned thanked the AVB for their intervention (without which that officer would have been in serious trouble)53. The Brigade also ensured the safe delivery of chairs made by ‘fair’ firms who paid their workers the union-approved rate, in imitation of the protection offered by the police to chair vans of Federation members54. In many of their functions, therefore, the AVB usurped or imitated the traditional roles of the police force. However, it must be remembered that they were concerned with the preservation of community law. The AVB allowed ‘illegal’ acts such as stone throwing at factories and blacklegs, but also restrained actions not condoned by the community. In other words they preserved disorder to a certain extent, but no further.

• 55 Randall in Rule (1993, p. 40) gives many examples of self-policing during eighteenth-century food r (...)
• 56 SBFP, 13th February, 1914.
• 57 For example, during the 1849-50 Cardiff miners’ strike, shots were fired at non-unionists, and one (...)

24Although the AVB were necessary to control the occasional excesses of some individual strikers, in the main, the body of strikers observed the boundaries of community law55. However, two serious incidents threatened the consensus of community opinion and also, therefore, the preservation of community law. In December 1913, four youths were arrested for possession of firearms and four hundred rounds of ammunition. Nothing was heard of the other eleven pistols the police suspected had been hidden in the town until February when the police were ambushed, and came under fire outside the Temple Chair Works56. It was unusual, although not without precedent, for guns to be involved in serious industrial disturbances, but it was certainly an escalation in the level of violence which was desired by neither the union, the police or the chair manufacturers57. Denounced by union leaders and other opinion formers in the community, the introduction of armed conflict overstepped the boundaries of community law. It may have revealed to the strikers a vision of a possible future – violent, entrenched, and possibly involving military intervention. From then on violence was increasingly condemned by union spokespeople, and the certainties of ‘community law’ became more unsteady. The incident at Temple Works may have had a cathartic effect, promoting negotiation and conciliation to a far greater extent than any other action taken during the strike period, and preparing the ground for the settlement which was agreed on the 23rd of February 1914.

• 58 By mid-February, Bramley had determined that window-smashing was counter productive. He may have di (...)

26The reasons why the strike ended in February cannot be explained simply, but some significant facts can be noted. First, the picket lines were causing financial hardship to the employers, although some extra-legal activities were discovered to have less pecuniary ‘bite’ than was first thought. For example, although window-breaking outings continued throughout the dispute, it became apparent that, although fulfilling a symbolic or entertainment function for the participants, they were causing little financial damage to the chairmasters58.

• 59 SBFP, 27th February, 1914.

27Second, many workers found it hard to manage the household economy over the five month strike period, which may explain the unrestrained joy of the workers when the final settlement was announced59. As for the employers, pressure was probably brought to bear by the borough council, who faced a police bill of over £1,000, and by government, who established a mediation process between the parties. It was not in the government’s interests to leave lengthy industrial disputes dragging on, and it was not in the employers’ interests to alienate a potential customer (approximately three-quarters of the High Wycombe chair companies tendered for government contracts.)