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. The family left for Manchester about 1808, the boy aged ten, in the standard Irish economic-migration of the period, and he was put to the spinning frames at a Manchester mill at ten, working up from child piecer to full operative spinner by sixteen.

He took an active role in the Lancashire cotton-spinners' trade societies from sixteen and emerged as one of the spinners' organisers of post-1815 Manchester. He effectively ran the Manchester cotton-spinners' strike of 1818 at twenty as the unpaid working-class organiser of the strike fund and committee, and was imprisoned for two years at Lancaster Castle for it, the political-organising apprenticeship in which he wrote the tracts that became foundation literature of the British trade-union movement.

He resumed the Manchester trade on his release and, as senior unpaid Lancashire cotton-spinners' organiser, brought together at Manchester in December 1829 the delegates of the cotton-spinning trade societies of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Glasgow and Belfast as the Grand General Union of Operative Spinners, the first general trade union in British history to span all the organisations of a single trade across the United Kingdom and Ireland.

He founded the larger organisation at the Manchester Lyceum on 28 June 1830: the National Association for the Protection of Labour, the first general trade union in British history to span the organisations of multiple trades across multiple regions, the precursor of the modern Trades Union Congress. It reached about a hundred and fifty thousand members across the cotton, weaving, iron, building and mining trades, and he edited its organ The Voice of the People, the first national trade-union newspaper in British history.

He ran the Ten Hours Movement campaign through the 1830s and 1840s and supported Lord Ashley's Ten Hours Bill of 1847, which limited the working hours of women and young persons across the British textile industry, the foundational labour-legislation achievement of his organising career. He died at Manchester on 14 April 1854, fifty-six years old, and is buried at the Hulme Roman Catholic cemetery. The Doherty name, the Inishowen patronymic Ó Dochartaigh, he carried from a Buncrana cotton-spinner's family into the foundation of the modern British trade-union movement.