The Irish and the Preston Lock-Out, 1853–1854

Abstract

The Irish have long featured as a central element in British social and labour history, but an idea still prevails that it was as strike breakers rather than strike makers that they influenced British industrial relations. The great Preston strike of 1853–1854 appears to have had a crucial role in cementing that idea and the role of Irish ‘knobsticks’ became a central, as well as a very visual component, of that dispute. The story of the ‘half alive and half dead’ impoverished Irish who arrived in Preston in March 1854 seems ideally suited to the famous images produced of the lock-out and knobstick figures, but they obscure as much as they illustrate. This paper examines the role of the Irish in broader perspective between the years of the Lune Street massacre of 1842 and the close of the strike in 1854 as a series of disputes in which people from Ireland featured on both sides, and where attitudes towards the strike, strikers and strike breakers were complex, dynamic and left enduring legacies.