From Cinderloo 1821 to Shrewsbury Pickets 1972 - Keith Flett

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 72 (Spring 2021)]

From Cinderloo 1821 to Shrewsbury Pickets 1972: Employers and the law in North Wales and Shropshire 

The first week of February 2021 saw a couple of labour movement occasions which were centred on Shropshire and North Wales. 

It was the 200th anniversary of the event known as Cinderloo, where miners protesting about wage cuts were attacked by the Shropshire Yeomanry. Several were killed and others put on trial at Shrewsbury.

 Over two days in the same week the long overdue appeal by building workers convicted as part of the 1972 national building strike, where the matters at issue also took place in the Shrewsbury area, took place.

The events of February 1821 whose anniversary was marked with a range of virtual activities took place at Cinderhill near Telford. Local ironmasters had been engaged in an attempt to cut the wages of workers. Fearing that the same would happen to them, miners called a protest which took place over two days on 1st and 2nd February 1821. The occasion was known as Cinderloo as a conscious echo of Peterloo in 1819. On both occasions local Yeomanry, armed men on horseback, were deployed and attacked protesters.

Several of the key figures in the Shropshire Yeomanry were ironmasters. A 2017 article by local historian Neil Clarke underlined this. The Yeomanry had been formed at a meeting in a Shrewsbury pub in 1785 by the then mayor, William Cludde. His son Edward Cludde was in charge at Cinderloo in 1821. They were landowners as were numbers of other members. Local ironmasters Henry Williams and Joseph Reynolds were also part of the armed troop as was wine merchant Thomas Jukes Collier. In short the Yeomanry were the armed force of the local ruling class. They were last used in the 1842 General Strike before the policing framework we know today developed. 

If we fast forward to the Shrewsbury Pickets’ arrests in 1972, which occurred in the same area of the country, we find some interesting parallels. Of course the local ruling class was no longer required to ride around armed on horseback cutting down any working class protests they found. They still maintained however a key interest in defending their wealth and using the law and its agents to do it. 

In 1972 it was the well-known construction family the McAlpines who exercised great influence in the area as the Shrewsbury 24 campaign website underlines. 

The website notes that McAlpines were the main contractor at the Brookside building site in Shrewsbury which was a focus of charges against pickets. The McAlpine family were a cornerstone of ruling class politics in North Wales. Prior to the events of 1972 the post of the most senior law officer in the area, the High Sheriff, had been held by members of the McAlpine family on nine consecutive occasions. Even when the succession was broken in 1974 the occupant, Peter Bell, was in fact a director of McAlpines and the son-in-law of Sir Alfred McAlpine. 

As the Shrewsbury pickets’ appeal underlined, there was probably more at play in the case than the McAlpines, with the direct influence of the security service and Heath’s Tory government suspected.

 Political influence also existed at Cinderloo with the home secretary, who had found nothing problematic about the Peterloo Massacre, Lord Sidmouth, writing to the Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire praising the ’exemplary forbearance’ of the Yeomanry. 

E P Thompson noted in The Making of the English Working Class that the state learnt from Peterloo that it could never use armed force against protesters again, but that the same did not apply to industrial disputes. Cinderloo underlined that and Orgreave in 1984 reminds us that it remains true. 

Keith Flett