Ned Ludd mythical leader of the Luddites

0:00My guest today is the author and popular historian Alex von Tunselman, who appeared most recently on this station presenting the Lucan obsession. Alex, welcome to Great Lives. Whose life have you picked and why? Not Lord Lucan, who may possibly not yet be dead, and one of our rules on this programme is we don't do people who are still alive. Who would you pick? Yes, he's been declared dead, but we don't know it for sure. So I've picked somebody from earlier in history, an 18th century figure. If he was born at all, it was probably around 1760. In the Midlands, he was a knitting frame operator.

0:42And the reason we know of this man is that he gave his name to a movement, the Luddite movement, and the man is known as Ned Ludd. Why was he so significant? So the Luddite movement existed in the early 19th century, ran really between about 1811 and 1817. And I think it's a movement that really deserves more attention today because I think it's much more relevant to us than we perhaps imagine it to be. We have this sense now, if you call someone a Luddite, that's quite an insulting, derogatory word. That means they're very opposed to any kind of technology, that they don't like progress. Perhaps they're quite scared of machines.

1:19And the Luddites were famous for smashing up machines. But actually, when you look into them, they were really much more of a workers' rights movement. They were very worried that the Industrial Revolution was allowing the concentration of money in the hands of bosses and factory owners and so forth, and actually eroding labour rights. Now, of course, as we're now in a technological revolution, we're finding that with things like AI, there's a very similar process going on. So I think perhaps many people today might have more sympathy for the Luddites than they imagine. I wonder who today's Luddites would be as regards AI.

1:52Did they have an organisation, the Luddites? Was it like a big trade union? Not so organised. I mean, it was a completely decentralised movement. It was mostly sort of across the Midlands and the north of England, although there were little uprisings in places like Bristol as well. But the interesting thing about it seems to have been very much like a modern movement on social media, that it sort of spread by reputation and that people were inspired and did their own thing. So it wasn't being directed actually by Ned Ludd or sometimes signing, you know, there were letters that appeared at protests signed Ned Ludd or Captain Ludd, General Ludd, even King Ludd sometimes.

2:29A bit like Extinction Rebellion in some ways. Yes, a bit like that. But effectively, similarly, people were just picking up on these ideas. There must have been somebody called Ned Ludd, mustn't there? The story was that when he was a boy in the factory that he slacked off at work, as perhaps some young people sometimes do, fair enough. And for this, he was whipped. And the next day, he broke into the factory and smashed up the machine with a hammer. And then the legend has it, he went and hid out in Sherwood Forest. So the Robin Hood parallel is very, very strong. Convenient. Yes, what's happening here.

3:03And a lot of the early Luddite movement was centred in Nottingham. So if he existed, he was a young man who was a worker in these kind of new industrialised cloth industry. But really, there seems to be very little evidence that he popped up again after this possibly legendary story. If he existed, we have an idea of what he might have looked like. I've got an engraving here, which I'll pass around. An extraordinary looking character in a kind of polka dotted coat. Remarkable boots. One shoe doesn't match the other. Have a look. It's actually so I love this picture. And I think something perhaps rather modern and interesting about the Luddites is that they did do quite a lot of cross dressing.

3:46They were very into this. So some protests were led by men in drag like this. He's wearing a lovely polka dot dress in this picture. Some were also led by women. And often these either men or women were referred to as Lady Ludd or the wives of Ned Ludd or General Ludd or so on. So there's something very interesting going on about gender here and identity, which I would love to hear more from from an actual expert. Also here, we have not one but two other guests. The professor of history, Katrina Navicas, best described, I think, as a historian of protest. Plus the writer, Joe Ward-Monroe, whose latest play revolves around the mythical leader of the Luddites and is staged in an unusual, unique way.

4:31But first, Katrina. Katrina, I'd love to ask you what was the symbolism of the dresses, of the men wearing drag to lead the Luddite movement, as well as, of course, some women leading it? This is an era when folk costume, folk culture is still very prevalent in villages and towns across the country. So it's actually quite common for this practice of men wearing dresses to symbolise a world turned upside down. The Europeans call it sharivari. In plain English, it's rough music. And it entails community justice, a sense of enacting community rights against someone who's done wrong. There's a contemporary engraving very similar to that, showing a man in a polka dot dress jumping over a plough for the start of the agricultural season.

5:22It seems quite shocking to us, perhaps, but then it was a symbol of, here I am, I'm doing what's right for the community. And kicking over the traces, basically. Yes. A world turned upside down. Yes. Fascinating. Important question, Alex. What do you understand the word Luddite to mean? Did it mean then what we think it means now? No, I don't think it did. I think it meant something slightly different when people applied it to themselves. I think what was quite clear about the movement was that it wasn't actually necessarily a rejection of technology or the Industrial Revolution per se. I mean, in fact, you could see that because it was joined on occasion by people like coal miners or railroad workers whose jobs only existed because of the Industrial Revolution.

6:09What it was really was much more of a movement directed at workers' rights and labour rights. Yes. So, you know, and against the depression of wages and against the concentration of the fruits of labour in the hands of bosses and factory owners and mill owners and industrialists. And it was their claim that machines were not as good as people at making things. Is that right? There is certainly some suggestion of that. I mean, stocking frames were a particularly strong target of the Luddite movement. And stocking frames made stocking cloth, but it was rather cheap and low value compared to the stuff that was woven by hand.

6:49So there is an element of you will reduce, of course, the sort of quality of the material. You also reduce safety, of course, with machines and so forth. It's not necessarily a rejection of the technology in and of itself. it's a rejection of who gets to control it and who gets the benefits from it. Katrina, who were the Luddites do you think? The Luddites were skilled workers and I think the important thing to remember is that what they were defending was their sense of pride in their work. I think that's what connects all these different groups of workers who ended up breaking various types of machinery.

7:28We think the first attack was in a village called Arnold in Nottinghamshire and they can be grouped into three different industries, if you like. The stocking weaving industry in the East Midlands around Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, the woollen industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire, as it was known then, and the cotton industry in Lancashire and Cheshire. They operated from 1811 to 1812, although there's arguments that they continue after the end of the Napoleonic Wars up to about 1817. and they're united by this term, General Ludd, their imaginary leader. You think he was imaginary, do you?

8:10I think he was. I think Alex is right in that he has an origin story, like a good superhero, and he's got an extended universe of his wife Eliza and his lieutenants underneath him. But it's fascinating that they imagine these characters to lead them. They're all united under this one superhero character. So there was a Ludd family posited, was it? Eliza, was it his wife? That's who sometimes signs some of those anonymous letters. So one of their big tactics is sending threatening letters to the employers and they sign it with General Ludd or Lieutenant Ludd or Eliza Ludd. And they also have the characters in poetry and song.

8:53So it's a wonderful, rich folk culture of imaginary characters. Derbyshire is my part of the world and specifically Cromford, I live very near there, Arkwright's first mill. Did the Luddites tangle with the Arkwrights? They do later on in 1817, the so-called Pentridge Rising, which is perhaps the last burst of this activity that's associated with this movement. There's undercurrents of different motivations for breaking machinery, one of which is, as Alex has explained, concern about their economy, their working conditions, industrialisation. But there's also fear among the authorities that these groups are revolutionary.

9:38This is the period of the Napoleonic Wars and its aftermath. And so there's a sense of, are the French involved here? Are they infiltrating our working class people with these democratic views that are dangerous, that might overturn the system? So the Pentrich Rising was uncovered as a spy plot, as a conspiracy by so-called Oliver the Spy, who was paid by the government to incite the workers to try and take over that area. And the boss class, if you could call it that, would be very quick to try to associate the Luddites with revolutionary and with foreign interference of one kind or another. Definitely.

10:20One of the key incidents actually which gets pinned on the Luddites is the assassination of the Prime Minister Spencer Percival in May 1812. They eventually find out it's just an aggrieved merchant who, in a case of mistaken identity, shoots the Prime Minister in the lobby of the House of Commons. But it comes at the peak of Luddite agitation. So they associate this with revolution. They think the Luddites are behind this assassination. One of the more recent books on this subject, Blood in the Machine, was serialised on Radio 4 last year. Let's hear a clip. On Saturday 11th April 1812, well after dark had settled, the west-riding Luddites began to gather.

11:04There were dozens, then scores, then over a hundred of them. The men organised in the pitch dark, half a mile from the factory outside Huddersfield. They had come with hatchets, pikes and guns. They'd assumed military formation. As the Luddites marched through the field, the formidable Rawfolds factory came into view, obscured by a guard wall and moat. There were at least two sentries out front, a guard dog and armed guards posted inside. The only way in was through the thick wooden front door. Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, read there by Hugo Spears. How violent were the Luddites, Alex or Katrina?

11:52The Luddites had to use violence. This is a period when trade unions are effectively banned. The Combination Acts from 1799 prohibit people from collective bargaining. So violence is one of the few means that Luddites have. So they do attack factories in their hundreds. They do threaten the manufacturers and employers. and on one occasion murder one of the employers. So the murder of William Horsfall on a moorland just outside Huddersfield as he's coming back from market is a deliberate cold-blooded attack because he'd boasted that he wanted to ride up to the saddle girths in Luddite blood and in revenge for that statement the Luddites shot him and several were then hanged for that murder.

12:40So it's really interesting and especially around that murder of William Horsfall It was a very shocking attack and, as Katrina says, very sort of full frontal. But the report was from a letter written two days later that when he was lying dying in the street, Horsville, people were coming up to him and berating him for his oppression of the workers. The locals weren't helping him and they let the assassins walk, not run, off and hide in the forest. So it's interesting that there was obviously quite a lot of sympathy for them. And I thought about this a lot when we recently have seen in the US the murder of a guy who worked for one of the big health companies, Brian Thompson.

13:19The suspect in that case is a young man called Luigi Mangione. I don't think he's been on trial yet. So obviously we can't say exactly what's happened. But again, that's a company that there's another case going through the courts about their use of AI to deny a lot of people's health care claims. And this, you know, the suspect, the suggestion appears to be that he was very aggrieved by having health care claims denied. And again, we saw, and I'm not endorsing this, but it was what happened, a great deal of sort of actually support for the suspected murderer, not really for the guy who had been killed.

13:51And I think there was a great deal of shock about that in the media, just as there was around William Horsfall's murder. And yet the public seemed to be rather indifferent to his fate. Let's bring you in, Joe. Your play is called The Legend of Ned Ludd. Tell us all about that. Yeah, sure. So the play basically operates in two parts. There's the main strand, which tracks two brothers who are involved in the Luddite uprising and they're not entirely sure about how they feel about this. And that's the main strand of the play. The second strand of the play is a little bit different in that we then track kind of globalised capitalism.

14:24There's 23 scenes in the script, but in performance you will only see 15 of them. And that's because in performance, a machine will randomly select some of the scenes to be played. I remember reading about this. Yeah, so that means that... Does it work? Well, yeah, you'd have to ask all the audience members. It does work. There's 256 possible permutations of the play and the actors don't know what's going to happen until the machine has made its selection. Obviously, the Luddites were talking about machines having a certain amount of control. And obviously, we now live in an age where algorithms have a, probably we are not even aware of how much control they have over our behaviours.

15:00So we're trying to embed that in the play. And then it was quite exciting in that then you got to explore different strata. So there's a scene with Marx and Engels, and that is balanced against the scene which depicts Thatcher. And then there's scenes in the USSR, and then there's scenes in America. And so the aim of the play is really to give you the sense of what globalised capitalism feels like. The frenetic pace and the kind of sorrow and the happiness and the conflicted way that we feel about capitalism and globalisation. And in some ways now, with the resurgence of this interest in the Luddites, technology itself.

15:31Do you think your audience got the thread that runs through this, which, as you explain, is almost timeless. But with this sort of weaving through 23 or 28. 23 scenes, but you only see 15 in performance. So you're always slightly dissatisfied. But that is within the. Does it work? Did the audience get it, do you think? The thing that doesn't change in the play is the Luddite strand. So we always start, we always track the Luddites. And that kind of keeps us centred. And what fascinated me about the Luddites and the Luddites is the Luddites were the first documented group of people to ask this question about, is technology going to destroy us and what it does to us?

16:07And I think what's really interesting about the Luddites is that in their letters, they're very clear that it's not only to do with the economic situation, it's also to do with an existential situation. To take away their work from them, really took away their meaning from them. And I think, interestingly, with the rise of AI, we're now in a position where many of us are wondering, what will AI do, not only to our livelihood, but especially in such a secular age where our work is kind of, you know, tied up. Take away our usefulness. Yeah, our usefulness and our identity. And then what happens after that is the question of the play, really.

16:38Is that what drew you to Ned Ludd himself? I love the idea of Ned Ludd because it's a communal act of creation. So the populace just summon this being into existence. And the interesting thing is Ned Ludd is almost like a perfect leader of a revolution. You can't catch him. You can't torture him. He is talking to people in Nottingham, Derby and then Yorkshire and Manchester. And so you cannot capture this person. And I think the thing that I found so exciting about Ned Ludd is must have been what terrified the authorities was that this person probably doesn't exist, but they might. And so therefore you have to get the army out and you have to do these things.

17:12And if he is real, and that's what's really interesting about the letters, they're so eloquent and so powerful. and then that tied to the threat of violence. It's such a powerful combination that that's what kind of made me fall in love with Ned Ludd and the Luddites. But you can understand that if you were the powers that be at that time, you would be absolutely terrified by that prospect. We have a clip here of people outside the Everyman Playhouse in Liverpool where your play was staged, explaining what they think or who they think Ned was. Ned Ludd. No idea who is Ned Ludd. Ned Ludd. Ned Ludd.

17:46Erm... Never knows of him. Oh, that's the one from Game of Thrones, isn't it? Well, actually, he doesn't actually exist. Wasn't there a TV show about him managing, like, a football club or something? I know, that was Ted. Ned Ludd was the leader of the Luddites. Erm, is he the Australian folklore hero? Nope, that was Ned Kelly. OK, so the Luddites were the movements of people. So they were the old mill workers who were replaced by machines and decided to smash the machines up. Nowadays, we are on the cusp of something similar with AI, whereby our work is being taken away from us. But the Luddites were the first group of people to struggle with this conundrum.

18:19So when the Luddites are breaking looms and breaking machines, they pin all of this stuff on the mythological leader, Ned Ludd. Is he the guy that delivers our milk? In some ways you could say that Ned Ludd is everyone and is no one. And that's what makes him so terrifying for the authorities. Ned Ludd? And so Ned Ludd is in Mansfield, he's in Nottingham and then he's in Derby. So he's not bound by time or space. He is completely bulletproof. Katrina how did the authorities respond? The authorities were at this time magistrates and army we didn't have police force in the early 19th century so they're thin on the ground and they respond harshly and punitively so the frame breaking is made a capital offence in 1812 so you can be executed and Luddites were executed for breaking frames and many were transported to Australia as well.

19:11This is the start of transportation to the penal colonies. So the government and the local authorities really want to make a show of how harshly they're treating this crime. Huge rewards, financial rewards offered for passing them over and giving them up. And the Prince Regent offering£50 for every person you turned in who was a Luddite who got convicted. and 12 ,000 government soldiers sent against these people, which Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, said was more than were sent at that point to fight the Napoleonic Wars against Napoleon in the peninsula. So, I mean, these are incredible numbers.

19:48You're listening to the great life of Ned Ludd, King Ludd, legendary and arguably mythical leader of the Luddites of the early 19th century. Joe, how much research did you do before you could write your play? So there's a really useful book, The Writings of the Luddites by Kevin Bimfield. And it's basically a selection of the letters that the Luddites wrote. And some of those letters I kind of lifted wholesale and put into the play because the writing was so good. Obviously, they were a religious community and they would say things like, you know, we're going to come to your factory and we'll do it too in spite of the devil, which for God-fearing folk is such an amazing piece of oratory and such a powerful piece of writing.

20:27I think what's really interesting as well is that I don't know if you would agree that maybe it was like the first kind of war of occupation in a way in that the army travels all this way up, but there's no one to actually that they can actually engage with because these people just melt away into the local populace and then come back. And it reminds me very much of like the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, whereby there is no enemy that you can distinguish, which must have been, again, terrifying. And the enemy, such as they are, refused to fight the conventional kind of war. And so how do you confront them?

20:57Exactly. Katrina, how did the Luddite revolt, if you can specify it, categorise it as a revolt, how did it come to an end? Partly the Luddites were suppressed by the employers themselves. So William Cartwright, another Yorkshire manufacturer, famously armed his workers to shoot against the oncoming onslaught of the Luddites in April 1812. But then through arrests of suspected Luddites, the magistrates and their spies tried to pick out individual workers. They put them on trial, almost like show trials at Lancaster, York, Nottingham and these show trials really suppressed the movement. There was certainly a sense that it was now too dangerous to smash machinery, although many of the manufacturers did pull down their own machinery out of fear.

21:53And then by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, things quietened down until the economic depression arose again in 1816-17 when we have another second wave of machine breaking. Were there any particular Luddite actions that, as it were, stung the authorities into closing the movement down? I'm thinking of the Pentrich uprising. So the government are fearful of revolution. The government are still worried about what's gone on over the channel in France. The more militant types of revolt or rebellion, like the Pentrich Rebellion, which are associated with political radicalism, are seen as even more seditious, as they call it at the time, more treasonable.

22:39So these are the incidents that the government and the local authorities really suppress through arrests and putting these radicals or these workers on trial and either executing them or transporting them to Australia. It's interesting as well to think about the end of the Luddites and then to think about the pejorative term, you're a Luddite, which is really interesting in some ways if you're talking about a propaganda war, then the authorities won because from my point of view, the Luddites were simply members of a community who cared deeply about that community and what it meant. Yes, sometimes terms which are meant abusively are actually adopted by the abused, such as Tory is one example.

23:21And sometimes, as you say, it's the other way around. Exactly. And now we have this term neo-luddite, which again means that we are re-engaging with this idea of what it means to have your life dictated to by technology. I'm curious about Captain Swing. He was 10 years later, I think. Alex? Yes. Well, this is another figure who possibly didn't exist, who again was sort of an inspiring leader of a movement. And I'm really interested actually by the comparison Katrina made with superheroes. I think in a sense, you know, the fact that you can think of these guys or whoever they are as a sort of Batman who doesn't exist, who just disappears into the night, the authorities can't touch them, does make them these very, very powerful leaders.

24:00It's really interesting. Tell us a little bit about Captain Swing himself. Can I ask Katrina to ask Katrina much more than me? So Captain Swing is the equivalent of General Ludd, but in an agricultural context. Ah, yeah, I see. He emerges in the late 1820s, early 1830s in southern England, in the Arable counties, and new machinery is also being brought in, steam-powered machinery that will, again, like the Luddites' predecessors, the Swing rioters led by Captain Swing are worried that this new machinery will take away their jobs, take away skill, bring down wages. So he's very similar. And there is another cartoon of Captain Swing, a wily lad with patched clothing and a wicked eye with a gallows behind him.

24:53And he's setting fire to a big haystack. So arson is one of their other tactics. But again, just like the Luddites, the threatening letters sent to the farmers are signed Captain Swing. It's an anonymous movement that makes it appear much larger than perhaps it actually was, but it also makes it seem more threatening than it actually was. You won't expect me, being a ghastly old free market enthusiast, to be a particular fan. But I admire, Ned, real or imaginary, more as a melancholy figure who had something real to lament, but who, like all who try to block efficiency gains, was always doomed to obstruct for a while, but finally to fail.

25:37Alex, is that fair? I certainly think it's a reasonable take on him. And I do think actually he fits and the Luddites fit within, actually, I think, a broad understanding of free markets and how they've developed. Because, of course, one of the problems, and really, again, this goes back to Adam Smith, it wasn't a new problem, was that you could have a free market in trade, but an incredibly unfree market for workers, for their labour. And that was really the issue, you know, that effectively if the workers were banned from unionising, if they were being punished by being literally hanged for breaking a machine, they were not free.

26:13Apart from Joe's play, are there other reappearances of Ned Ludd in our age? Are there songs? Are there poems? Yes, he's appeared in songs by bands like Chumbawamba and The Fall, sort of left wing bands in the 80s, particularly very fond of him. And he's appeared in poems and illustrations and everything. And I do think now, as I say, he's having quite a renaissance because of the age of AI. I think people are going back and rediscovering him. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if, like Joe, you find a lot of modern artists actually picking up on him and saying, hold on, actually, these people were saying something that perhaps we've dismissed because of the propaganda around it, but perhaps we should now be thinking about more seriously.