Tolpuddle Martyrs tried to save workers

6 English farm labourers who were sentenced in March 1834 to 7 years’ transportation to an Australian penal colony for organising trade-union activities in Tolpuddle Dorset. Leaders George & James Loveless created a Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers’ lodge during the national wave of trade-union activity in 1833–4. The Whig government, alarmed at working-class discontent, arrested the Tolpuddle labourers for administering unlawful oaths: Loveless brothers, James Hammett, James Brine, Thomas Stanfield and his son John. Actually their crime was combining to protect their miserable wages. Convicted and sentenced by a hostile judge and jury, transportation was brutal. From smoky, stinking cell below the Crown Court in Dorchester, 5 “convicts” were taken in chains to the Portsmouth prison-hulks. Hulks were condemned ships, holding 500-600 prisoners who were given coarse convict clothing and heavy irons riveted to their legs. Disease was rampant. Epidemics of cholera, dysentery and…