‘Meeting Together in an Equal and Friendly Manner’: The Workplace Literary Culture of Lancashire Mutual Improvement Societies

Abstract

This article traces the progress of mutual improvement in the coalfields around Aspull beginning in the 1870s and culminating with the opening of the Garswood Hall Collieries Institute in 1893. It analyses this process in relation to Patrick Joyce’s account of the development of industrial paternalism in Lancashire. It shows how mutual improvement societies were formed primarily on the initiative of individual workers, with some assistance from local religious groups, rather than being employer-led. It also demonstrates how the Aspull Society acted as the starting point for a network of similar societies across the local area. By tracing the careers of a number of individuals closely associated with mutual improvement societies, this article shows that such societies did enable occupational and social mobility, thereby demonstrating the virtues of self-help to workers and employers alike. Next, the article traces the factors which led to the opening of the Garswood Hall Collieries Institute and argues that the formation of the Institute exemplifies the delicate social choreography on which the successful practice of paternalism in an industrial context depended. It demonstrates that local autonomous activity on the part of individual miners was combined with the use of local newspapers and delegations to employers to create the conditions for an appropriate paternalist response in the form of the ‘gift’ of the Institute to the community. The Institute thus became a demonstration of the employers’ fitness to exercise local leadership and a symbol of education as a means of achieving class harmony within the existing social hierarchy. It concludes by observing that in the case of the Garswood Hall Collieries Institute the vision of class harmony which it offered its members nonetheless remained vulnerable to the economic realities of the relationship between capital and labour.