IF you’ve ever thumped a TV set, or unplugged a computer (just to annoy it), or had a heated conversation with that woman in the automated supermarket check-out who keeps claiming that there’s an “unexpected item in the bagging area”, then chances are you qualify for at least associate membership of an organisation that marks its bicentenary this week.
Yes on Friday, March 11th, it will be exactly 200 years since a group of machine-knitters in Nottingham, angry at falling wages, set upon their stocking frames with axes and hammers. They struck at night, in disguise, and afterwards affected to be followers of a mythical leader called “Ned Ludd”, sometimes promoted to “General” or “King Ludd”.
Ever since which, Luddites of the world have united under the same banner. Or – at least as often, perhaps – have been lumped under it, for minor misdemeanours, by contemptuous technophiles. For the likely truth is that, even from the start, members of the movement were unfairly caricatured as hating machines.
It was poverty, not new technology as such, that drove the original Luddites to such extremes. Those were grim times in the hosiery industry. One commentator notes that, during the month before the first attacks, “numerous bands of distressed framework-knitters were employed to sweep the streets for a paltry sum, to keep the men employed [and] prevent mischief”. Then they lost patience anyway.
Besides, the stocking frame was not new, even in 1811. On the contrary, it had already been around for more than two centuries. Since 1589, in fact, when, according to the story, it was invented by a clergyman with his own axe to grind.
The Rev William Lee is said to have been besotted by a young lady who, at least once too often, used her knitting as an excuse to avoid him. Consequently – in a fit of constructive rage, maybe – he invented a machine to usurp her. And his machine was “so perfect in its conception that it continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years”.
Thus the Nottingham desperadoes must have been well used to the technology by 1811. Nor was their idea of smashing it new either. In fact they took their leader’s name from a rebellious young knitter who had achieved notoriety more than 30 years earlier for a similar act, in defiance of his father. Ordered by the old man to “square his needles”, the youth instead “took his hammer and beat them into a heap”.
In any case, from 1811 onwards, the movement named after him flourished. Acting in groups of up to 60, the Luddites swore oaths of secrecy that made their circles hard to break. They defied curfews and military guards. In time, they also flouted an Act of Parliament that made frame-smashing punishable by death (in his maiden speech to the upper house, Lord Byron spoke against the measure).
The militants also took to plundering farmhouses for money and food, declaring that they would not starve while there was “plenty in the land”. Their signature activity, however, eventually destroyed more than 1,000 stocking frames in Nottinghamshire alone, having also spread to neighbouring counties. The rampage did not end until October 1816.
Byron was so enamoured of their cause that, later that year, he wrote from overseas to his friend Thomas Moore inquiring how the Luddites fared. He even included a verse in their honour, although he thought better of publishing it elsewhere during his lifetime: “As the Liberty lads o’er the sea/Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,/So we, boys, we/Will die fighting, or live free,/And down with all kings but King Ludd!” The call to blood aside, Byron’s romanticism set the tone for later, less violent generations of Luddites. Today, still, many who would proudly accept the designation see themselves as followers of a romantic world-view constantly threatened, under the guise of progress, by mad boffins.
Or as the film-maker Marcel Pagnol put it: “One has to look out for the engineers. They begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.” Ranged against which is the reverse snobbery of the technophiles, quick to brand with the L-word anyone who admits to even slight unease about their creations.
Back in the 1970s – when the aforementioned atomic bomb was a bigger threat than it seems now – US philosopher Robert Pirsig thought that a lot of the world’s problems derived from the inability of these two groups to understand each other. So he wrote a book proposing a solution, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , and it sold millions (although it also holds the world record for the most rejection slips, 121, earned by a future bestseller).
Which reminds me: the original stocking-frame smasher of 1779 – the young man who got mad with his father – is thought to have been named not Ludd, but Ludlum. A surname most famously possessed in modern times by the late writer Robert, author of such thrillers as the Bourne series, later an equally successful film franchise.
Ludlum’s recurring theme, as chance would have it, was that of the individual battling against the machine. Not the literal machine, usually. Faceless but powerful bureaucracies – and sometimes global conspiracies – were more the author’s thing.
Even so, the cause is broadly similar. And whatever their literary worth, his books’ enormous popularity suggests there’s life in Luddism yet.
Nice to see a thoughtful well balanced description of the Luddites for a change. Well reasearched Mr McNally. There will be a article on the Luddites (or Redressers) in Priory Historical Society’s next Newsletter due out early April (Price £1 available at meetings/post or eventually Worksop Library)
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