John Doherty(1798–1854)

John Doherty was born at Buncrana on the Inishowen peninsula in north-west County Donegal in 1798, son of a Buncrana cotton-spinner and tenant cotter who lost the Buncrana cotton-spinning business to the post-Union industrial collapse of Irish textile manufacturing across the first decade of the nineteenth century. The family left Ireland for Manchester in or about 1808 with the boy aged ten, walked from Buncrana to Derry on foot, took the steam-passenger boat to Liverpool, and walked the further forty miles to Manchester to enter the Lancashire cotton-spinning trade as the standard post-1801 Irish economic-migration sequence of the period. He was put to the spinning frames at one of the Hulme mills in Manchester at ten on the Lancashire-cotton-spinning child-labour rates of the time, and worked at the mills as a child piecer, then as a junior spinner, then as a full operative spinner from sixteen.

He took an active role in the Lancashire cotton-spinners' trade societies from sixteen onwards in 1814, and emerged as one of the spinners' organisers of the post-1815 industrial Manchester at twenty. The Manchester cotton-spinners' strike of 1818, the four-month industrial action that the Manchester cotton operatives took against the Hulme-and-Salford cotton-spinning masters in the summer of that year on the wage-rate dispute that the post-war deflation had produced, was effectively run by Doherty at twenty as the unpaid working-class organiser of the spinners' subscription fund and the strike-committee strategy. He was arrested by the Manchester town authorities on the unspecific common-law conspiracy charge in August 1818, tried at the Lancaster Castle Assizes in 1819, and sentenced to two years' hard labour at Lancaster Castle prison. The two-year sentence was the foundational political-organising apprenticeship: he wrote in his Lancaster Castle prison cell the tracts that became the foundation literature of the British trade-union movement of the next decade.

He came out of Lancaster Castle in 1821 at twenty-three and resumed the Manchester spinning trade for the next six years as a operative-spinner at the Birley brothers' Chorlton-on-Medlock mill, with the parallel role of senior unpaid Lancashire cotton-spinners' trades-society organiser. He took the initiative of forming an association of all Lancashire cotton-spinners (as distinct from the individual trade-society at each mill) in 1828, and at the Manchester Tib Street meeting of December 1829 brought together the delegates of the cotton-spinning trade societies of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Glasgow and Belfast as the Grand General Union of Operative Spinners. The Grand General Union of December 1829 was the first general trade union in British history that spanned all the organisations of a single skilled trade across the United Kingdom and Ireland. It ran for about eighteen months, foundered on the organisational problem of the dispersed-by-mill membership and the employers' counter-association of the period, and dissolved in 1831.

He founded the second and larger organisation at the Manchester Lyceum meeting of 28 June 1830: the National Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL), the first general trade union in British history that spanned the organisations of multiple trades across multiple regions. The NAPL was the precursor of the modern Trades Union Congress and the first organisational attempt at the inter-trade general union that the British labour movement of the next century would be built on. The NAPL ran from 1830 to 1832 with a membership of about a hundred and fifty thousand operatives across the cotton-spinning, weaving, iron-founding, building, mining and shoemaking trades of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Scotland. He edited the NAPL's official organ *The Voice of the People* from 1831 to 1832, the first national trade-union newspaper in British history, and ran the NAPL's working political committee on the Ten-Hours-of-Labour-per-Day campaign that the working-class movement of the period was conducting alongside the parliamentary reformers.

The Reform Act of 1832 and the subsequent agitation produced the political conditions that broke the NAPL through 1832 and 1833. The employers' counter-organisations took the cotton-spinning blacklist apparatus to the Manchester cotton-spinning mills and the NAPL operatives were effectively driven out of the trade. Doherty himself ran a Manchester bookselling business at 31 Withy Grove from 1833 onwards, continued to write trade-union and ten-hour-day pamphlets across the period (about thirty-five small pamphlets across 1833 to 1847 survive in identified provenance), and supported Lord Ashley's Ten Hours Bill of 1847 from the Manchester platform. The 1847 Act, which limited working hours of women and young persons to ten per day across the British textile industry, was the foundational labour-legislation achievement of his working-class organising career, even though by 1847 he had been long out of the organised trade-union work and was running the Manchester bookshop on a failing-business basis. He died at the Manchester bookshop's residence above the shop on 14 April 1854, fifty-six years old, of accumulated chronic illness from the physical-and-organising overwork of the previous thirty-five years. He is buried at the Roman Catholic cemetery at Hulme. The Doherty name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Dochartaigh* (descendant of Dochartach, the troublesome one), the foundational Inishowen surname of the medieval Cenel Conaill of north-west Donegal; he carried the Buncrana cotton-spinner's-family variant of it into the foundation of the modern British trade-union movement.