New book fest to shine a local light on weavers’ fight for reform
The first Paisley Book Festival will explore the town’s radical past as well as its present and historic literary talents
It was one of the biggest shows of working class might in Scotland with 60,000 men downing tools in a call for better pay, better conditions and better government.
Now, the bicentenary of the role of the Paisley weavers in the 1820 Radical War is to be marked in the Renfrewshire town, which became a hotbed of protest and anti-government feeling as living standards sharply declined and calls for reforms went unnoticed.
The Paisley Book Festival, the first of its kind, will next month explore the town’s radical as well as its literary talent. It was claimed that every third Paisley man was a poet with most of the verse organised in songs sung to the rhythms of the loom.
The Paisley weavers, famed for their patterned shawls that were modelled on fine Indian muslins, were at the “vanguard of this new radicalism”, according to historian Sir Tom Devine.
Families of artisans had been employed in “high-earning fancy trades” but over time suffered a “catastrophic decline from their old ascendancy as an aristocracy of labour,” wrote Sir Tom in The Scottish Nation.
“A great influx of labour had destroyed their traditional standard of living as number of weavers rose from around 25,000 in 1780 to approximately 78,000 in 1820,” the historian added.
In Glasgow, handloom weavers experienced a drop of real wages of around a third with the crash in pay exacerbated by the hard times that followed the Napoleonic Wars.
The radical tone of the Scottish workers sharpened immeasurably following the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester when 18 workers were killed and up to 700 injured when cavalry charged into a group of unarmed civilians who had gathered in their thousands to hear calls from Parliamentary Reform.
By then, the Corn Laws, which restricted imports of grain, were pushing up food prices. People were working, but could barely afford to live.
A month after Peterloo, around 15,000 workers gathered on Meiglemoss Moor on the outskirts of Paisley to protest against events in Manchester. Flags were flown, pipes played and drums beaten.
Later, the Glasgow division returned to the city in a “menacing manner” with police officers attacked with brickbats and windows smashed.
Word was swiftly sent to Glasgow for back-up and the military arrived with canons guarding the bridges. Some calm was restored but “outrage and confusion was renewed” the following day. Magistrates were hissed at as they went to church and, later, open violence erupted once again. Innocent bystanders were wounded, windows broken and street lamps torn down.
As post-peterloo fervour intensified, committed radicals began to meet in secret in counties from Ayrshire to Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, Sir Tom wrote.
Union societies were transformed from “discussion clubs into insurrectionary cells bent on achieving the overthrow of government by physical force,” Devine added.
On 1 April, 1820 an Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland compiled by activists who formed a Provisional Government called for workers to “desist from labour” until their rights as free men were recovered.
Almost immediately, around 60,000 people took part in the strike in Paisley and Glasgow where the ‘almost the whole population of the working classes’ obeyed orders.
Widespread unrest failed to materialise post-strike but the occupation of Carron Ironworks a few days later led to the Battle of Bonnymuir when workers clashed with solders. The ringleaders, Andrew Hardie, James Wilson and John Baird were executed. A memorial to them stands in Woodside Cemetery in Paisley.
Paisley Book Festival will celebrate Radical Stories and Rebel Voices across the town from 20-29 February 2020.