“Hands across the sea”: Strikes,solidarity and diverging outcomes in port cities in Britain and Australia in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

This article advances the historiography of port cities, waterfront trade unionism and imperial solidarity by comparing two distant places that, despite their colonial connections, are rarely juxtaposed: Britain and Australia. It investigates the relationship between the metropole and the periphery via the Great Dock Strike of 1889 in London (a 5-week dispute that ended in victory for the dockers) and the Australian Maritime Strike of 1890 (a 12-week strike that ended in defeat for the workers). This research shows how the responses to the strikes from the other side of the world reflected the characteristics of port cities and their waterfront workers. They were also largely determined by three neglected themes - the extent of colonial ties, the uses of the new telegraph network, and the impact of trade cycles - and how these themes influenced each other. The first theme develops and complicates Bernard Porter’s argument that Britons were indifferent towards imperial affairs. On the one hand, this article confirms his position by showing the asymmetry of imperial relations between the outward-looking Australians and the mainly inward-looking Britons. On the other, it demonstrates how imperial connections led to solidarity, and how Britain’s working-class leaders embodied an elitist imperial mindset. In doing so, this article draws new parallels between Britain’s working-class leaders and colonial administrators. Despite their different roles and educational backgrounds, both groups - imbued with a sense of imperial superiority - demonstrated a similarly paternalistic approach in their work overseas. Therefore, imperial solidarity in port cities is a prism through which the prevalence and impact of the British imperial ethos - a far wider subject - can be illuminated and assessed.

London’s 5-week Great Dock Strike of 1889 and the 12-week Australian Maritime Strike of 1890 were both major waterfront disputes of international significance. Mobilising 150,000 and 50,000 strikers respectively, ¹ they exemplified a new scale of trade unionism in the late nineteenth century. Both events were also crucibles for new types and new degrees of imperial solidarity. Around £37,000 was donated by Australians and sent by telegram to London’s strike relief fund, ² yet the British public only gave around £4000 to support the Australian Maritime Strike a year later. ³ Nevertheless, the capital’s strike leaders participated in trade union activity in the Antipodes before and after the strike, thereby demonstrating a non-financial type of imperial solidarity. The victory for the London dockers - they won their 6d per hour pay claim - has been recognised as a milestone in the history of trade unionism. ⁴ Likewise, the Australian Maritime Strike, which concerned union affiliation rather than pay, has been described as “by far the most serious industrial dispute in Australian history” and a “turning-point in labour history”, ⁵ albeit for different reasons. Defeat led to new political tactics, served as a catalyst for the formation of the Australian Labor Party, and contributed to the international “employer counter-attack” against employees. ⁶

However, despite the parallels and connections between Britain and Australia, and between the Great Dock Strike and the Australian Maritime Strike, comparisons have rarely been made (and if they have, they have not been comprehensive). ⁷ Historians have preferred to focus on individual countries and individual strikes (and often only in limited ways). ⁸ They have not convincingly explained the discrepancies in the flows of solidarity between Australia and Britain and vice versa. The under-researched strikes also serve as microcosms for a wider exploration of the colonial and asymmetrical relations between the metropole and the periphery, and the impact of the British imperial ethos. This article, therefore, seeks to advance the historiography by adopting a comparative analytical framework to investigate the interconnected themes at play in both London in 1889 and the following year in Australia. In broad terms, the themes are the extent of colonial ties, the uses of the new telegraph network, and the impact of trade cycles (both national and global).

Before outlining the themes, it’s important to recognise the characteristics of port cities and the interconnectivity of their communities. This context highlights the similarities and shared experiences between ports and their workers, and why a degree of interest and support was understandable in Britain and Australia in 1889 and 1890 respectively. However, it does not account for the specifics of what happened in these important industrial disputes. If major port city status were the overriding factor in generating solidarity, it would have been as likely to originate in New York, Hamburg or Rotterdam (as Sydney or London), and this did not happen.

Port cities are, and always have been, hubs for the international exchange of people, goods and ideas. They share connections beyond national borders, and are home to distinctive cultures and identities. ⁹ These factors mean that port cities and their communities are well disposed towards engaging in long-distance solidarity with each other. This was especially true for Britain and Australia in the late nineteenth century. Links between these islands and their ports grew as trade increased due to shorter journey times (as steam replaced sail) and refrigeration, which facilitated Australian meat exports. Dockers in Britain and their counterparts, known as wharfies in Australia, both handled the same goods, albeit at different ends of a long voyage. They were connected by the same experiences of loading and unloading cargoes – hard and dangerous manual work – and they adopted a similar outlook to their work and identities. Consequently, it was unsurprising that Australian wharfies sent support to the dockers in London, rather than other strikers in the metropole during this period, such as the Bryant and May matchwomen in 1888 and the gas workers led by Will Thorne in 1889. Similarly, it is no accident that Henry Champion – a prominent figure in the Great Dock Strike – spoke at early gatherings of the Australian Maritime Strike, rather than during the Great Shearers’ Strike of 1891 in Australia. Port cities, therefore, were crucibles where solidarity could develop, but this would not happen automatically. Other factors were required to interact with this enabling context to produce solidarity in particular places at particular times.

This article argues that the extent and type of colonial ties was the most important theme influencing imperial solidarity. Australia’s trade – both imports and exports – depended upon British producers and customers. ¹⁰ In addition to such economic interdependence, many Australians had strong links with Britain through their family connections, consumption of telegraphed news, and their identity within the British Empire. These bonds all contributed to their sympathy for London’s dockers. Conversely, the British public, as shown by Bernard Porter, were uninterested in imperial affairs ¹¹ (although, as shown later, this was not the case in terms of Britain’s working-class leaders). Such lack of concern, combined with stereotypes about wealthy Australian workers, led to limited donations from Britain for Australian strikers. However, British working-class leaders did try to assist in other ways by travelling to Australia to give their advice about industrial relations. Unsupported by financial generosity, such paternalistic actions by British trade union leaders reflected their imperial elitism – a trait more commonly associated with colonial administrators. These attitudes and reactions explained why the British responded to the Australian Maritime Strike unlike the way in which the Australians responded to the Great Dock Strike.

The second theme affecting international solidarity revolved around the new telegraph network. The communications revolution unleashed by the telegraph meant that Australians were able to receive up-to-date news from the metropole, and that they were also able to send time-critical remittances to support the strike relief fund in 1889. Although the telegraph continued to function in the same way in 1890, it was not used as extensively to transmit news during the Australian Maritime Strike. Telegrams to Britain lacked detail following the walkout by marine officers (after shipowners objected to Melbourne’s branch of the Mercantile Marine Officers’ Association affiliating with Melbourne’s Trades Hall Council). This had a knock-on effect as it generated less sympathy and fewer remittances.

The third theme concerned the impact of trade cycles. Australia’s economic boom from 1872–1889 also meant that Australia’s trade unionists and public were in a position to support London’s dockers at the time of the Great Dock Strike. The following year, with the world experiencing the onset of a global depression that was to last for much of the 1890s, the British were not able to donate to the same degree, despite the best fundraising efforts of British trade union leaders.

Above all, these three major themes interacted with each other to accentuate trends. On the one hand, Australians were able to demonstrate their solidarity because they had the mechanism to do so via the telegram and the means given their booming economy. On the other hand, the British were less inclined to support their colonial counterparts, and they had less resources to do so because of the global depression. This article analyses how colonial ties, the telegraph network and trade cycles all intermingled to determine the degree, and composition, of international solidarity.

This article seeks to address the inadequate and sometimes inaccurate historiography of the Great Dock Strike and the Australian Maritime Strike, particularly the lack of comparative studies. Despite the obvious parallels between both events, only R.B. Walker has compared both disputes, and his study only focuses on media and money in relation to the strikes. ¹² Passing comparisons are made elsewhere, but often these refer to R.B. Walker’s analysis (as in Waterman’s study of internationalism among Spanish dockers), ¹³ and others are problematic, including the short “London Dock Strike” entry in The Oxford Companion to Australian History. It referred to the strike providing a “precedent for the Maritime Strike in Australia the following year, to which sympathetic English strikers reciprocated the donation of funds”. ¹⁴ However, this entry is misleading as reciprocation implies equivalence, yet the British only donated around £4000, compared with £37,000 sent the year before by the Australians. Moreover, Melissa Bellanta’s 2009 work on the Australian Maritime Strike failed to mention the Great Dock Strike. This is surprising, especially as she recommended referring to the Australian Maritime Strike as the “Great Strike”, in keeping with how contemporaries described it. ¹⁵ It’s highly unlikely that such a moniker would have been chosen by Australians without an awareness of the Great Dock Strike the previous year.

Comparative studies of Britain and Australia do exist and Australian case studies appear in collections of international studies, ¹⁶ but they offer few or no insights to explain the connections between the Great Dock Strike and the Australian Maritime Strike. The links between British trade unionists and socialist intellectuals, including Ben Tillett, Tom Mann, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and their Australian counterparts have been studied, but these accounts refer to the late 1890s and early twentieth century ¹⁷ – years after the strikes examined in this article. The shortage of comparative studies reflects the wider preference for nationally-focused studies. In an article about the British Empire, Maria Misra referred to academics preferring “fine-grained area study” over comparative accounts. ¹⁸ Frank Broeze highlighted how labour history “still suffers very much from the nationalist approach which, in principle, must be regarded as its very antithesis”. ¹⁹ Rare and broader studies include Jonathan Hyslop’s work on “White Labourism”, in which he identified an “imperial working class”, rather than working class groups delineated by nation, before 1914. ²⁰ This article seeks to redress these imbalances by adopting a comparative analytical framework to understand the Great Dock Strike and the Australian Maritime Strike.

Despite the limited literature, it is important to assess what exists regarding these events, what is contentious or misinterpreted, and what aspects are under-researched. Regarding the Great Dock Strike, R.B. Walker described how the Australian labour movement was “interested, perhaps for the first time, in international solidarity”. ²¹ Andrew Thompson summed up much of the historiography by writing: “In fact, most historians agree that it was the intervention of Australian workers that made the difference between victory and humiliation for the London dockers”. ²² P.F. Donovan referred to the “overwhelming support” from Australia, ²³ and Ron Todd (general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, admittedly not an impartial author), wrote: “What an amazing fact of history then was the arrival of the solidarity money from Australia, just at that very difficult moment”. ²⁴ Frank Broeze recognised the pivotal role of Australian funds in sustaining the strike, but also noted how an underappreciated reliance upon remittances led to a misleading assumption about “permanent progress” having been made. ²⁵ However, not all historians agree. Derek Matthews downplayed the role of Australian donations and regarded the “main factor in the men’s victory” as being the inability of the dock companies “to find sufficient blacklegs to keep the port going”. ²⁶ There is also nearly a complete absence of discussion about support from other countries. Donovan cited figures from Ann Stafford’s research, in which she calculated that the strike relief fund of £48,736 3s 1d was supported by £30,423 15s from Australia, £4473 11s 2d from British trade unions and societies, and £13,730 2s 4d from the British public. ²⁷ Only £108 14s 7d was raised from “foreign” sources. ²⁸ Why was there such limited support from other countries, and why has this not been remarked upon in more detail by historians?

Australian historians referred to British financial support in their studies of the Australian Maritime Strike. Kenneth Walker calculated that a total of £70,000 was raised to support the Australian Maritime Strike, with the vast majority, £60,000, contributed by Australian trade unionists. ²⁹ The rest came from British trade unionists and the Australian public. The figure widely cited for donations from Britain was around £4000. ³⁰ R. B. Walker calculated that the British unions collected £4060 or 10.9% of the total, the colonial unions donated £28,662 or 76.7%, and the colonial public gave £4549 or 12.3%. ³¹ In contrast to the Australians the year before, R. B. Walker noted that the “British public donated little”. ³² R. B. Walker also showed how the “press played almost no part in collecting donations” in 1890, in contrast to 1889. ³³ Without adequate funds, the Australians could not sustain the strike, especially as it had escalated to include miners and shearers.

Historians have attributed different emphases to the various motivations for Australian generosity, and they have admitted that their explanations – from altruism to self-interest – are still insufficient. Donovan acknowledged that there were “many motives” ³⁴ and he highlighted the difficulty in pinpointing “precise reasons for the massive aid”. ³⁵ Above all, news about the impoverished dockers and their families in London provoked an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy:

The wretched condition of the dockers, an ill-fed, poorly-clad crowd of casual labourers who thronged each day in hope of a job at fivepence an hour, was such as to draw broad humanitarian rather than merely proletarian support…Cabled news of the struggle aroused the Australian public’s feelings in a way that had no precedent. ³⁶

Many trade unionists in Australia had recently emigrated from Britain and they had “feelings of solidarity” for their former waterfront colleagues back home. ³⁷ Loyalty to kith and kin, including those directly involved in the dispute, was another important factor. ³⁸ Yet sympathy for the suffering dockers was in itself insufficient to explain Australia’s generosity, especially when America and Canada sent messages of sympathy to the dockers without accompanying donations. ³⁹ Above all, such links, and identity, with the metropole were strong – most of Australia’s non-indigenous population regarded themselves as British citizens. ⁴⁰ Historians of Australia have underscored the impact of the British Empire upon Australia, and the often blurred and multiple identities held by its peoples during this period. ⁴¹ In his study of Melbourne, Hunt wrote of Australia’s “shared, imperial identity” and how Victoria – the Australian colony – and its capital Melbourne were “part of a Greater Britain” based on “blood loyalties”. ⁴² Although Porter did not refer to the Great Dock Strike, Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, or the Australian Maritime Strike in his seminal work The Absent-Minded Imperialists, he referred to the imperial outlook of emigrants moving to the colonies:

There is even an argument for saying that the most imperialistic people, in most senses of the word, were many of those who actually went to the colonies, leaving the metropole relatively bereft of them, and with a less imperialistic society and culture, therefore, than if the imperialists had stayed at home. ⁴³

We can extrapolate from this that emigrants, including to Australia, would have been enthusiastic about maintaining connections with the imperial motherland. So they proved, with Empire Day (24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday) being celebrated from 1899 in Canada and from 1905 in Australia – years before its official creation in Britain in 1916. Such a position runs counter to Porter’s overall thesis about British indifference towards imperial affairs, and this shows us that we must adopt a more nuanced reading of Porter’s work.

Historians have also discussed the role of self-interest when explaining the Australian response. According to Luke Trainor, “Australian wharf labourers and other members of the working class” demonstrated solidarity to help ensure that their counterparts in Britain would not emigrate elsewhere to find work. ⁴⁴ In an era of global trade and long-distance journeys, Australia’s working classes feared pauper emigration from Britain to Australia if conditions for British workers did not improve. This would then lead to an oversupply of labour, and a reduction in wages in Australia. However, R.B. Walker disputed such thinking, asking: “How could the penniless dock labourer come to Australia when assisted migration, except for Queensland, had practically ceased?” ⁴⁵ Philanthropic gestures also conferred status, which was sought after in the Australian colonies, especially given their peripheral and distant position in relation to the metropole. According to R.B. Walker:

Giving relief expressed not only sympathy with British kin but also implicitly asserted the superiority of the colonists as donors over the British as receivers, for in nineteenth-century philanthropy the generous patron gained and the deferential beneficiary lost status. ⁴⁶

Such one-upmanship also asserted Australian pride in its own “prosperity and democratic egalitarianism”. ⁴⁷ By assisting “the unfortunate serfs still oppressed in the imperial parent nation”, Australians were able to claim the moral high ground, and, according to Phyllis Peter, invert imperialism. ⁴⁸ As well as providing an opportunity for Australians to advance themselves on the imperial stage, the Great Dock Strike also fostered competition between Australia’s six British colonies (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, and Western Australia. Federation and Australian nationhood followed in 1901). Donovan highlighted such colonial rivalry in the fundraising appeals to support the dockers. ⁴⁹

On the contrary, the British were regarded as less well informed and had fewer reasons to donate, thereby explaining their lower contributions. British remittances during the Australian Maritime Strike were far less generous, equivalent to around 11% of the Australian donations the previous year. ⁵⁰ R.B. Walker explained this discrepancy by referring to multiple factors: “...the British were not so well informed about the colonies, or so interested in them, as the colonists were about Britain”. ⁵¹ They were also less sympathetic because of the stereotypical view of a paradisiacal Australia – “the ‘Land of Arcady’ in which the workingman prospered”. ⁵² This case study proved Bernard Porter’s wider emphasis that the British population showed indifference to imperial affairs. ⁵³ He wrote: “For most of the nineteenth century British ‘culture’ at all levels avoided colonial subjects and settings almost perversely. Popular interest in the empire was not often – and never unambiguously – expressed”. ⁵⁴ However, certain groups were generous, particularly the unionised dockers in London. Peter Waterman calculated that, based on their immediate £1000 donation plus levies per union member, each member paid 30 pence, “equivalent to 5 hours’ pay each from what were still amongst the poorest workers in Britain”. ⁵⁵

Aside from their donations, historians have shown how British trade unionists did intervene and influence the Australian Maritime Strike and Australian trade unionism more generally in other ways. Their involvement stretched back to the mid-nineteenth century when members of the British Amalgamated Society of Engineers formed a new branch when they were emigrating to Australia aboard the Frances Walker. ⁵⁶ This was a typical beginning for an Australian trade union. Many were “started by a nucleus of workers recently arrived from Britain”. ⁵⁷ According to June Philipp, “nineteenth century English Liberal thought” was “one of the most powerful influences on the Australian Labour Movement” before 1890. ⁵⁸ Such influence was embodied by Henry Champion – a socialist journalist, and chronicler of the Great Dock Strike. He arrived in Australia just a few days before the Australian Maritime Strike began, and became one of the regular speakers at mass meetings. However, his conciliatory approach and offer to mediate failed to endear him to the strikers and “seemed like surrender”. ⁵⁹ His lack of local knowledge and aristocratic background undermined his credibility, he was denounced by Australians as “a traitor and capitalist stooge” ⁶⁰ , and L.E. Fredman described him as “an earnest and rather ineffectual man on the fringes of literature and reform”. ⁶¹

Surprisingly, no parallels have been drawn between British trade unionists operating overseas and the activities of colonial administrators. Both demonstrated an imperial elitism forged by formative years in the metropole. In many respects, their education and training were very different, ranging from prestigious and exclusive (despite their name) public schools to trade union activism and self-education. Anthony Kirk-Greene showed how colonial administrators were “conditioned by their education (not so much learning as socialization) and taught to adopt shared values and respect a common code”. ⁶² Giorgia Grilli described how “public schools were the traditional training ground of the British élite” and how “public school pupils…were groomed to become worthy officers of the Empire”. ⁶³ Schools were “factories for gentlemen”. ⁶⁴ In contrast, future working-class leaders, including Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, were self-educated and learned their craft in the factories, docks and workplaces of the late nineteenth century. However, working-class leaders and colonial administrators were also similar as they grew up in a country recognised as the heart of the largest empire ever seen. Paschal Preston noted that Britain was “the global hegemon”, and many British writers demonstrated a “strongly imperialist tone” in their “internationalism”. ⁶⁵ Unsurprisingly, given the imperial context and the dominance of the British, both working-class leaders and colonial administrators shared an imperial elitism and paternalistic outlook when interacting with foreigners.

The historiography has broadly focused on how, and to what degree, the British and Australians were connected to each other, and how these links expressed themselves in terms of imperial solidarity. The historiography has not convincingly explained why these connections existed, and why they were stronger in one direction. This article will now address these oversights and explain why waterfront trade unionism and imperial solidarity materialised in the way that they did. In particular, this article will develop and challenge Porter’s argument that Britons were indifferent towards imperial affairs.

Firstly, this article explores the influence of the colonial ties between Britain and Australia during the late nineteenth century as they largely explain the responses to the strikes. During the 1880s, Britain was Australia’s most important trading partner, providing 70% of the Antipodean island’s imports and purchasing 80% of its exports. ⁶⁶ Australians were economically dependent upon the British and were inclined to support the dockers in London because of their colonial ties to the metropole. This was largely because they saw the struggling dockers as their kith and kin in the imperial motherland, rather than an unknown and distant group on the other side of the world. By speaking the English language and also by being subjects of the British Empire, trade unionists from London and Australia shared – to a certain degree – the same identity and history. Such familiarity may have motivated solidarity and helped to explain the minimal support for the trade unionists from other major countries, including France and the United States. Writing in the late 1880s, the journalist Arthur Patchett Martin referred to the origins of the Australian population as being “three-fourths British and one-fourth Irish” (his exclusion of the Aborigines is a glaring omission). ⁶⁷ He embodied such fluid and dual identities of many with Australian connections: his family migrated to Australia from Britain when he was a child, and he grew up, studied and worked in Australia before moving to London in his early thirties in 1883. In Australia and the Empire, Martin mentioned how the colonists in Australia gave £95,000 to relieve the Irish famine of 1879. ⁶⁸ As the Australians had a track record of giving generously to causes linked to their ancestral connections, it is not surprising that the Australians donated so generously to the London dockers’ strike relief fund.

While Australia was brought closer into the imperial orbit in the late nineteenth century, the British outlook on imperial affairs remained largely and stubbornly indifferent. This reflected the asymmetry of imperial networks, and helps to explain why the British only gave minimal support to the Australian Maritime Strike. Therefore, without a strong sense of belonging, obligation to, and even interest in, Australia, it could have been predicted that the British would not respond by making significant contributions to Australia’s trade unionists during the Australian Maritime Strike. The British contributed 11% of the funds for the Australian Maritime Strike, compared with the 66% donated by the Australians for the Great Dock Strike. ⁶⁹ The lacklustre response of the British to the Australian Maritime Strike shows that Porter’s thesis is correct in this instance and that the British were disinterested in imperial affairs, although it is surprising that Porter does not refer to such a major event in an important colony in his study. While the British gave significantly less than the Australians (around £4000 compared with around £37,000), there are no records of other countries donating to the Australian Maritime Strike. Similarly, the contributions from other nationalities for the London dockers were negligible. The Germans gave £51, the Americans gave £29, the Belgians gave £21, and the French gave £6. ⁷⁰ These facts show that donations were predicated on colonial links, and generous donations were predicated on strong colonial links.

The muted financial response from the British, however, was surprising to the Australians. They regarded the strength of their colonial ties as reciprocal, and there was an expectation that generous support would be forthcoming. On 27 August 1890 a report in The Argus, a newspaper in Melbourne, read:

It was regarded as a certainty by many that money would be cabled from the trades in England in the same manner as the sinews of war were supplied by the people of Australia to the London dock labourers during the dock strike. But, so far, no money has arrived. ⁷¹

Similarly, leading British trade unionists assumed that their fellow trade unionists would match the donations sent from Australia the previous year. The annual meeting of the Trades Union Congress in 1890 in Liverpool (then Britain’s second port city) began on 1 September with the passing of a resolution in favour of “sympathy and support” for their “fellow working men” in Australia. ⁷²

At the gathering, John Burns thanked the Australians for their help in 1889 and he called upon British trade unionists to do the same. The TUC report of his speech read:

He believed in holding out the right hand of fellowship to those who had buttressed their position at home. A great deal had been talked about federation of the empire, but they as working men looked forward to what was more important – to the international federation of the working people of all countries...he hoped that every one of them, old and new, young and old, would do their best to send across to Australia that measure of help and sympathy it was in their power to give. ⁷³

Likewise, addressing a meeting of trade unionists at the Great Assembly Hall in Mile End, London, on 2 September 1890, Ben Tillett expressed gratitude for previous support for Australia and his expectation that such generosity would be reciprocated. A report in The Times summarised his opening remarks as follows:

Above all men he thought he ought to be grateful to the Australians who had enabled the object he had worked for to be attained so speedily. The dockers would never have made the stand they did, and the dockers’ strike would not have been one of the most glorious of labour’s battles, had it not been for the help from Australia. The assistance the London dockers received from the colonists they would never be able to repay…It was therefore the duty of the English unionists to assist their colonial brethren…From Australia the dockers received over £40,000, and he hoped that the unions on this side would be able to send back that sum. He believed he could guarantee for the Dockers’ Union £15,000 or £20,000. ⁷⁴

At the same meeting, a committee was elected to organise the Australian Strike Fund Council – Tillett was the chairman, John Burns the treasurer and Tom Mann the secretary. A week later Mann addressed dockers and told them that it was their duty to support strikers in Australia, despite his reservations about the ongoing dispute. ⁷⁵ However, his sincerity could be questioned given that the Australian Maritime Strike only garnered one paragraph in his memoirs, and fundraising in Britain was not mentioned ⁷⁶ (although he also may have wanted to distance himself from the unsuccessful fundraising campaign).

Reports reached the Australian press, and there were even hopes, expressed in the Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, that British donations would exceed the support from Australia the previous year: “Money is being generally subscribed in such amounts that it is believed the British dockers’ contributions to the Australian Strike Fund will surpass those sent by Australia to London last year”. ⁷⁷ The Australians’ struggle also featured in the progressive press in Britain. The Australians requested £20,000, and, by 9 November 1890, the “efforts” of London’s labour organisations had “not relaxed” according to an article in Reynolds’s Newspaper (whose motto was “Government of the People, By the People, for the People”). The moral obligation to help was also clear from the same article:

…there remained the honourable responsibility to repay to the workmen of the colony, by timely help, the debt of gratitude the dockers of London owe to the Australian workmen for what they did for them last year, and through them for all British workers. ⁷⁸

These examples show that leading British trade unionists and sections of the British press were fully supportive of a fundraising campaign, and did their utmost to motivate their members and readers. However, these efforts were largely a failure – they did not reach their target and were nine times less successful than the Australian fundraising drive the year before. This article suggests that the reason they failed was not because of a lack of awareness of the Australian Maritime Strike, but because the appeal, by and large, did not resonate to the same extent with British trade unionists and a British public largely unconcerned with Australian affairs.

Although not as strong as vice versa, there were still colonial ties between the British and Australians. They just manifested themselves more obviously in non-monetary ways. Prominent trade unionists from the metropole were interested in the labour-capital struggle in the Antipodes. Many of Australia’s trade unions were started by recent migrants from Britain. ⁷⁹ British trade unionists were involved in the Australian Maritime Strike and labour’s struggles in the Antipodes in the following years. Henry Champion, described by Ben Tillett as a “Socialist journalist” and the “principal press officer” for the Great Dock Strike, was even able to play a prominent role on the ground in both disputes. ⁸⁰ He arrived in Australia just a few days before the Australian Maritime Strike and became one of the regular speakers at mass meetings. Addressing the Trades Hall Council in Melbourne on 22 August, he provided an update on the trade union movement in Britain. Nine days later, when speaking in Melbourne’s Flinder’s Park, Champion thanked Australian workers for the support they had given London’s dockers the previous year. However, Champion’s controversial support for “freedom of contract”, which allowed employers to hire at will, and offers of mediation offended the Australian workers. His aristocratic background, alongside his Tory financial connections, led to distrust and suspicion from Australia’s trade unionists. Whereas Champion was initially welcomed in Australia because of his role in the Great Dock Strike, by the end of the Australian Maritime Strike he was denounced as “a traitor and capitalist stooge”. ⁸¹ The Trades Hall Council refused to hear him defend himself, “owing to the injury Mr Champion had done the Labour cause”. ⁸²

One of the important colonial ties that the British and Australians shared was a common language. This undoubtedly helped both groups understand each other and helped engender solidarity. In contrast, when a language barrier intervened, communications were challenging and weakened solidarity and its effectiveness. In his memoirs Tom Mann described the challenges of arriving in Bilbao without knowing any Spanish and being unable to find the local trade unionists. ⁸³

British trade unionists continued their efforts to assist labour in the Antipodes after the Australian Maritime Strike. However, their long-term impact and popularity failed to match their ambitions. Tom Mann, for example, left Britain for New Zealand in 1901, and after working as an organiser for the New Zealand Socialist Party, he arrived in Australia in September 1902. His “greatest influence” was assisting the expansion of the Political Labor Council in Victoria, yet “he failed to persuade it to adopt a socialist platform”. ⁸⁴ He then founded the Victorian Socialist Party in 1906, but it was not accepted by the wider labour movement. In 1909, Mann left Australia to return to Britain, “perhaps disheartened by the parochialism of the Australian labour movement and its resistance to his industrial advocacy”. ⁸⁵ Ben Tillett gained “international fame” because of his involvement in the Great Dock Strike. ⁸⁶ He visited the Antipodes twice, with his first visit being a lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1897 and 1898. However, just as Australian solidarity was partly motivated by self-interest, this was also a factor that influenced Britain’s prominent trade unionists. A trip to Australia was seen as ideal for convalescence, particularly for the often-ill Tillett.

Given the imbalance between the level and type of support shown by the Australians for the Great Dock Strike and the British for the Australian Maritime Strike, this article suggests that the assistance provided by the British trade unionists reflected the mindset of the metropole. Although they represented a different class to the elites running the British Empire, they still adopted a similar and imperial approach to their activities overseas. The British trade unionists provided advice, delivered lectures, and were involved in trade unionism and political campaigning in the Antipodes. They acted in a patriarchal way (like the British Empire’s colonial administrators), and they accepted money from the colonies for their strike relief fund (again, just like the Empire extracted raw goods and resources). When the Australian workers required financial help, the British trade unionists failed to provide sufficient support (again, echoing the exploitation of the imperial system). As shown by Ronald Hyam in Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914, the “Anglo-Saxonist ‘magic’ sense of superiority” underpinned the British Empire. ⁸⁷ He also emphasised that, in general, “the British felt the problem of running the world was not particularly difficult. It was something which any school prefect could manage”. ⁸⁸ I suggest that British trade unionists also demonstrated this sense of superiority and believed that they could easily influence industrial relations overseas. In his memoirs, Tom Mann echoed such a sense of superiority, writing: “I am Britisher enough to experience in reasonable measure the pride of race, and am not wholly unmoved when I think of the truly wonderful achievements that have been wrought on the small area called the British Isles”. ⁸⁹ The very fact that Mann spent 8 years in the Antipodes, and Tillett toured the continent twice, shows their commitment to the far-flung parts of the British Empire, rather than other countries. Their skills could arguably have been deployed more effectively on the international stage closer to home, where trade unionism and the labour movement were gaining momentum. London and other European capitals were prominent in the international trade union movement, with the First International being established in London in 1864, and the Second International in 1889 in Paris. Trade unionism was also well advanced in Germany. Mann became the chairman of the International Federation of Ship, Dock and River Workers when it was founded in London in 1896, and he worked in Germany and France over the next 2 years. However, the efforts of the British working-class leaders had mixed results, and their solidarity overseas was more symbolic than real, especially in relation to the Australian Maritime Strike. William Murphy – an Irish-born trade unionist, who migrated to Melbourne in 1865 – highlighted British support for the Australians when he spoke of “Hands across the sea” when addressing a mass rally in Flinder’s Park, Melbourne, during the Australian Maritime Strike. ⁹⁰ Nevertheless, what the Australians really needed were significant donations for the strike relief fund – “Hands across the sea” were not enough.

This is where Porter’s thesis about Britons being disinterested in the British Empire requires some adjustment. Britain’s working-class leaders were interested in the British Empire, particularly in trying to influence industrial relations in Australia. They believed they could effect change, although they fell short of their goals to provide equivalent assistance a year after the Great Dock Strike. They operated in a superior and critical manner characteristic of colonial administrators. Porter described how education in the metropole was geared towards each class knowing its obligations towards the other, with the working classes “taught to work hard, obey, and so on, and the upper classes to rule and serve”. ⁹¹ In the case of the leaders of the Great Dock Strike, they strayed beyond the working-class boundaries defined for them as they demonstrated a “rule and serve” mentality when working with their working-class counterparts in Australia.

The second major theme that explains why the Australians gave generously and the British did not revolves around new communications technology. The revolution in global communications began in the mid-nineteenth century when the first submarine cable was laid between Britain and France, but Australia’s connection to the new infrastructure was still relatively recent. Before the telegraph network reached Australia in 1872, news and money could only travel as fast as the fastest ship (40 days in the case of a steamship, and 50–70 days in a clipper - the fastest type of sailing ship). ⁹² The telegraph network – an unrivalled source of international news for newspaper editors – increased the Australians’ inclination to give even before the Great Dock Strike because it catalysed greater familiarity and closer connections between the British Empire’s metropole and its periphery. The grinding poverty facing dockers and their families in London was covered in detail by the Australian press, including in 1887 in a series of articles called The Pinch of Poverty by George Sims, author of How the Poor Live and Horrible London. Sims referred to the “hard and exhausting” work undertaken by waterside labourers in the capital, workplace injuries and drownings, and the chronic lack of work; “one gaunt famished-looking fellow” only had 2 days’ work in 4 weeks. ⁹³ The House of Lords Committee on Sweating also attracted attention, with reports about the desperation faced by dock labourers, including the dangerous scramble for a ticket to work – a practice described as a “scandal and disgrace to a so called civilised country”. ⁹⁴ Familiarity with these reports meant that parts of the Australian public were aware of the dockers’ plight and primed for the coverage of the Great Dock Strike and its associated fundraising appeals.

The speedy telegraph network enabled the Australians to receive sympathy-generating up-to-date news and enabled them to respond by sending funds rapidly to London. In 1889, a telegram could be relayed from London to Melbourne, on average, in less than 6 hours. ⁹⁵ After the first week of the Great Dock Strike, news about the dispute was telegraphed to the Antipodes. ⁹⁶ From 29 August 1889, Australian newspapers included in-depth coverage of the strike based on their subscriptions to cable services, ⁹⁷ and the dispute was headline news in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and other major cities. ⁹⁸ Donations for the strike relief fund arrived in London by telegram the day after they were collected in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. ⁹⁹ On 29 August, a leader in the Age (Melbourne) referred to “starvation wages” and the “pitiable” lot of the docker. ¹⁰⁰ A reader’s letter (signed by “One of you”) the following day emphasised the depth of solidarity:

…let the voice of the Australian workman ring out across the sea in clarion tones in denunciation of wrong and injustice, and in sympathy for oppressed and ground down humanity, in such volume as shall be heard throughout the world. ¹⁰¹

Such coverage gained momentum, and clear fundraising appeals followed, both to support London’s dockers, but also to advance colonial pride. On 5 September, the South Australian Register declared:

Every man who believes in the rights of labour, and who has a shilling to spare, should subscribe it to the relief of his suffering fellows in London. The other colonies have set us a noble example, and we ought, if possible, to better it. ¹⁰²

Self-interest and the immediate impact of the strike upon Australia were also of concern, and these were relayed via the media. The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) mentioned the delayed departure of Australian vessels from London because of the strike. A leader in the Age explained that Australians were “not entirely uninterested spectators” as the dispute was likely to disrupt postal communications with the “mother country”. ¹⁰³

Glen O’Hara described how “perceptions of distance had changed” and how the telegraph contributed to the colonies becoming “less ‘national’, and more British” during the late nineteenth century. ¹⁰⁴ London’s role was supreme, and it was able to project imperial messages. According to Simone Müller and Heidi Tworek: “London became the nerve centre of global telegraphy for logistical, financial, and technical reasons”. ¹⁰⁵ Without fast and daily telegrams, the Australians would not have received news about the progress of the strike and they would not have been able to make their donations in a timely way. The strike relief fund would have run out and the 5-week strike would have ended before news could have reached Australia by ship about the strike. The telegraph network can, therefore, be considered an underlying cause because it contributed to generating sympathy for London’s dockers and it enabled Australian generosity to reach London.

Conversely, the Australians did not maximise the use of the telegraph in 1890 during the Australian Maritime Strike. In order to minimise the cost of telegrams, their communications with Britain were short and confusing, unlike the lengthy press cables sent during the Great Dock Strike. For example, G.A. Edwards, secretary of Sydney’s Labour Defence Committee, sent the following telegram on 22 August: “ACUTE STRUGGLE CAPITAL AND LABOUR AUSTRALIA ASKS SUPPORT EDWARDS”. ¹⁰⁶ The British sent another telegram to clarify what was needed, and Edwards later replied with a request for a £20,000 loan. More informative telegrams would not have fundamentally altered the limited inclination of the British to donate, but timely and clear messages might have energised the campaign and created more momentum.

Momentum was a key ingredient of success in the fundraising campaign for the Great Dock Strike. In the dockers’ hour of need and when their relief fund was running dangerously low, donations suddenly started flooding in from their counterparts in Australia. By 29 August, the situation for the striking dockers and their families had reached crisis point following the collapse of the latest talks with the directors of the dock companies. Sustaining the walkout imposed a daily burden of £1250 upon the strike relief fund, ¹⁰⁷ which only began with a kitty of 7s. 6d. and was soon called upon to support 500,000 people ¹⁰⁸ (dockers and their large impoverished families). The demand for meal tickets quickly rose from 4000 a day to a peak of 25,000 per day. ¹⁰⁹ Writing at the time, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, a civil servant and social investigator, and Vaughan Nash, a journalist, spoke of a “counsel of despair”. ¹¹⁰

On 29 August, the Brisbane Seamen’s and Wharf Labourers’ Unions telegraphed £250 to the dockers in London. ¹¹¹ According to Henry Champion, the chronicler of the strike: “The first cheques from our kin beyond the sea arrived in the very nick of time”. ¹¹² The donation, although small when compared to the total later raised by the Australians, gave a much-needed psychological boost to the strikers. The strike’s leaders in London were ecstatic and effusive in their praise for such practical solidarity. Champion added:

As every one knows, this first instalment was rapidly followed by much larger contributions from Australia, but the subsequent tens of thousands were not really anything like so useful in putting heart into the men as those first few hundreds. I am at a loss to discover how we over here can adequately express our gratitude to the men who gave such timely aid. ¹¹³

The donation from Brisbane set a precedent that was to be followed and exceeded by other Australians. Australians raised money in various different ways, including via donations, subscriptions, demonstrations, and even a fundraising football match between the Melbourne Wharf Labourers’ Union and the Port Philip Stevedores’ Society. ¹¹⁴ The Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union gave £1000, the Sydney Wharf labourers donated £5,000, and a 10,000-strong demonstration in Sydney raised £1000. ¹¹⁵ Stevedores, gas stokers, furniture makers, and tailors, among others, all raised money for the dockers on the other side of the world. Tom Mann, one of the strike’s leaders, described the contributions as “a godsend”. ¹¹⁶ He added: “How it delighted the men; how it encouraged the leaders; and how it must have told the other way on the dock directors”. ¹¹⁷ His counterpart Ben Tillett said the support saved the movement from “riot and despair”. ¹¹⁸ John Burns, another of the strike’s leaders, shared the welcome news during one of his Tower Hill speeches, declaiming: “Here’s a thousand pounds from Australia, lads”. ¹¹⁹ In total, £37,272 – 66% of the total for the strike relief fund – was raised from the Australian colonies, according to Burns. ¹²⁰

The third theme to explain the responses to the strikes is related to trade cycles (both global and national). Above all, the Australians were in a favourable position to donate in 1889 because of long-term and rapid growth in their land, whereas the British struggled against entrenched poverty and the onset of a global depression in 1890. Averaging about 5% per year (much higher than in Britain), economic growth was nearly continuous in Australia between 1850 and 1890. ¹²¹ The impact of the Australian gold rushes, which began in the 1850s, the shortening of global trade routes following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the increase in exports of wool and meat all fuelled the expansion of the Australian economy. Living standards in Australia were probably better than anywhere else in the world, apart from the United States. ¹²² Ian McLean’s chapter on this period was simply entitled “Becoming Very Rich”. ¹²³ Australia was seen to be a lucrative investment opportunity, and, when conditions were right, money could easily be borrowed from the London market. ¹²⁴ As shown by Hunt, Australians were the “principal imperial borrowers of funds from the City of London, rising from £400,000 in 1873 to £10.8 million in 1879 to £51.4 million in 1883–6”. ¹²⁵

Port workers in Australia were an integral part of this expanding economy, and they also benefited from its riches and rapid growth. In their account of the Great Dock Strike, Hubert Llewellyn Smith and Vaughan Nash highlighted the discrepancy in pay between dockers in Australia and in London: wharf labourers in Australia were a “well-paid body of men”, with dockers in Sydney earning 1s. 3d. an hour and 1s. 6d. for overtime. ¹²⁶ These rates were more than two times more than the hourly and overtime pay demands (6d. and 8d. respectively) made by the strikers in London. Both writers acknowledged the lower value of money in Australia, but they concluded: “…the difference of wage is very startling, and serves partly to explain the tide of sympathy for the dock labourers of London, which rapidly rose throughout the Colonies”. ¹²⁷ The contrast between Australian wharfies and London’s dockers in 1889 was stark. Slum conditions, hardship and the casual labour system all undermined the lives of dockers and their families, and were widely documented by the press and social reformers. Important publications, such as The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) by Andrew Mearns and How the Poor Live and Horrible London (1889) by George Sims, gained coverage in the British and international press, including in Australia. ¹²⁸ Nearly one-third of the capital’s population was living in poverty, according to Charles Booth’s pioneering survey Life and Labour of the People in London. ¹²⁹ The conditions in the dockside communities of the East End were particularly troublesome. The situation in Britain had not improved by 1890, when the Australian and world economies were plunged into a depression. The Australian boom ended as investor confidence collapsed and immigration slowed. Britain was still suffering from low agricultural prices, which had troubled the country since the 1870s, and Baring Brothers and Co – the world’s largest merchant bank – had to be bailed out by the Bank of England following its overexposure to the ailing Argentine economy. Given this national and international context, British trade unionists and the British public were not in a position in a declining economy to be generous towards their Australian brethren.

It was the compound effect of these three themes interacting with each other which determined the degree and type of imperial solidarity shown by Australia to the London dockers and vice versa. The Australians, for example, were inclined to support London’s impoverished dockers given their familial and colonial ties to the metropole. They had the resources to do so, and the mechanism (via the telegraph network). Their British counterparts, in comparison, were not as interested in Australian affairs, were less well informed by erratic telegraphic communication, and lacked the disposable income to do so the following year. British trade union leaders pursued ambitious fundraising targets to help Australian workers, but rank-and-file trade unionists and the British public failed to meet their expectations. The ability to help was based on a combination of motivation and financial capacity – one factor alone would not suffice.

This article challenges and supplements the limited historiography comparing the Great Dock Strike and the Australian Maritime Strike. It interrogates why there were uneven flows of donations between Britain and Australia, which has not been done before, and identifies three themes to explain why imperial solidarity showed itself in different ways. By analysing the asymmetrical colonial ties between Britain and Australia it explains the many reasons why the Australians were more motivated to help their British counterparts than vice versa. In particular, it shows the often false distinction between Australians and Britons as many Australians had recently emigrated from Britain and they were proud of their imperial identity. While on the one hand recognising the value of Porter’s thesis about British indifference towards imperial affairs, this article shows that a more nuanced approach is required. British working-class leaders, for example, were interested in imperial connections, and, as a result, they spent years travelling in the Antipodes to share their advice about trade unionism and political campaigning. This article also makes new parallels between the imperial elitism shown by British working-class leaders and colonial administrators. The second theme underscores the short- and long-term impact of the telegraph as an enabler of international solidarity, especially how it strengthened colonial ties between the periphery and the metropole before 1889 – a connection not made in the existing historiography. The third theme emphasises how individual events cannot be understood without an appreciation of the fluctuating national and global economic landscape – a comprehensive approach that is often neglected in favour of narrow or national studies. Above all, this article highlights the insights that can only be gained from the rare, but important, practice of comparative imperial history.