 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
'Honeycombe - My opinion, and I think I can answer for that of the Directors, is, that the fellow
should be dismissed at a day's notice. How stands the rent of his house? As to purchasing the
stone of the Company, he should not be served at any price. He has been spoilt by Whitaker;
and from the lenity shown that person you see the fruits thereof. I am, dear Sir, Yrs truly, J Bigg,
Sec.'
What are we to make of all this? And what was William's actual job?
It seems that he was a foreman in charge of a gang of men in a Haytor quarry, managed by a
Mr Bayley, and that the masons were working on various contracts, making granite curbstones,
plinths, arches, etc, for use in London. William Honeycombe, it seems, was on the make, like
many a tradesman, extracting whatever extras he could get from his employment at his bosses'
expense.
We also learn from the letters that his wife, Elizabeth, was pregnant, and that they lived in a
cottage whose roof needed some total or partial repair.
As usuaf, such a correspondence raises several questions and leaves us with few satisfactory
answers. But suddenly we glimpse the real man. And the antagonism that Mr Bigg evidently felt
towards the company's employees reminds us that trade unions, legalised in 1824, were a
growing force in the land, as workers sought to establish their rights through various self-help
and co-operative organisations. Local strikes and lock-outs occurred frequently at this time.
One such little union of agricultural labourers in Dorset, formed to protect
themselves against falling wages, was prosecuted ill USt&i 1834 fflf administering 'unlawful
oaths' in their initiation ceremonies. The six Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they became known, were
sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia. Two years later the Chartist movement
took wing. At the same time the government were themselves making various changes in the
way parliament, businesses, towns and counties were run, with Reform Bills, Factory Acts, the
Poor Law Amendment Act and so on. The impetus for social change, especially in conditions at
work, was immense.
Charles Greville, Clerk to the Privy Council, wrote of the first Reform Bill in 1831: 'Nothing
talked of, thought of, dreamt of, but Reform. Every creature one meets asks, What is said now?
How will it go? What do you think? And so it is from morning till night, in the streets, in the
clubs, and in private houses... The country will have it.'
The Bill was passed by one vote on 23 March. Lord Macauiay, then the Whig MP for Calne,
was in the House of Commons. He wrote: 'You might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon
read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears... We shook
hands, and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying and huzzaing into the
lobby... All the passages, and the stairs were thronged by people who had waited till four in the
morning to know the issue. We passed through a narrow lane between two thick mazes of
them; and all the way down they were shouting and waving their hats, till we got into the open
air.'
it was a turning-point. Three years later, a new word entered the political vocabulary and the
consciousness of the nation - 'socialism'.
If William Honeycombe was sacked, as Mr Bigg wished, in August 1834, where did he go?
Apparently he remained in Devon. For we find him in the ancient city of Exeter in 1838. His
daughter, a second Elizabeth, was born there, in the parish of St David, on 7 February. The
family were then living at Little Silver, St David, below the hill on which the cathedral stands,
 |