AS 2018 marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of the TUC it’s worth remembering that two print union officials were instrumental in founding the first ever meeting of the Trades Union Congress in Manchester in 1868.

At that time trade unions were based on local trade societies — some who were able to regulate apprenticeships and working practices and a number were able to bargain with local employers.

One such group were the compositors — skilled printing workers who assembled metal type, read and corrected proofs and prepared pages ready for printing.

Printers organised themselves into “chapels” — typesetting and printing presses had originally been based in churches. Chapels still exist today among Unite members and NUJ members in the printing, media and paper industries.

Local “societies” were also created — one of the oldest was the Manchester Typographical Society, instituted in 1797.

In Sheffield, William Dronfield was the secretary of the Sheffield Typographical Society (also secretary of the Sheffield Association of Organised Trades). In 1866 he invited all national “trades” and trades councils to attend a conference of delegates with the object of creating “a national organisation among the trades of the United Kingdom, for the purpose ofeffectually resisting all lock-outs.”

All in all 138 delegates, representing 200,000 members, attended and Dronfield remarked that the meeting had “laid the foundations of the annual trades congresses.” However, it failed to unify unions.

In 1867 a royal commission of inquiry into trade unions was announced by the government. The Committee of Amalgamated Trades and the St Martin’s Hall conference committee — named after a meeting of trades council and trade union delegates convened in March 1867 by the London Working Men’s Association led by the militant George Potter — vied with each other to present the trade unions’ case to the commission.

Attending both the Sheffield and St Martin’s Hall meetings were compositors William Henry Wood, (treasurer of the Manchester Typographical Society) and Samuel Caldwell Nicholson (secretary of the Manchester Typographical Society). Wood was also the secretary and Nicholson, the president, of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council. They both knew Dronfield through the print and general trade union activity and knew it was necessary for all unions to speak with one unified and representative voice.

At the time unions were denied legal protection of their funds; they had been prosecuted as illegal conspiracies and were now threatened by a royal commission and had been “blackened by prejudice and ignorant attacks in the public press and elsewhere.”

“Why not have a congress of our own?” were the fabled words spoke by Nicholson after listening to the experiences of Dronfield who had been disillusioned by the lack of unification and progress. What was needed was an annual representative meeting of all unions.

They set to work and a circular calling the first meeting was sent out on February 21 1868 in the names of Nicholson and Wood — on the behalf of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council. A revised circular dated April 16 1868 followed.

No photos of the first Trades Union Congress, or of Nicholson and Wood, seem to have survived and the descriptions of the Congress are sparse but an account is contained in AE Musson’s The Congress of 1868: The Origins and Establishment of the Trades Union Congress, published by the TUC in 1955.

Musson, who also wrote the history of the Typographical Association, was responsible for discovering a copy of the original circular of February 21 1868 in the files of the Manchester Typographical Society, who later presented to document to the TUC.

Among the issues debated were: Trades Unions an absolute necessity; Trades Unions and Political Economy; The Effect of Trades Unions on Foreign Competition; Regulation of the Hours of Labour; Limitation of Apprentices; Technical Education; Arbitration and Courts of Conciliation; Co-operation; The present Inequality of the law in regard to Conspiracy, Intimidation, Picketing, Coercion; Factory Acts Extension Bill, 1867: the necessity of Compulsory Inspection, and its application to all places where Women and Children are employed; The present Royal Commission on Trades Unions: how far worthy of the confidence of the Trades Union interest as well as the necessity of an Annual Congress of Trade Representatives from the various centres of industry.

Many of the issues debated at the first TUC are still around today both in Britain and across the world including the need for unions; political representation; international trade agreements; anti-union laws; equality; skills and apprenticeships; health and safety.

150 years after they called the first TUC, trade unionists and printing workers, Nicholson and Wood, the Manchester Typographical Society — a legacy union of Unite — and the Manchester and Salford Trades Council all now hold a unique and special place in the history in the trade union and Labour movement.

Tony Burke is assistant general secretary of Unite.