Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - General Ludd's Rage Against the Machines

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

1812. A band of "Luddites" is laying siege to a textile mill in the North of England, under cover of night. They plan to destroy the machines that are replacing their jobs. But mill owner William Cartwright is prepared: he's fortified his factory with skilled marksmen, fearsome eighteen-inch metal spikes and barrels of sulphuric acid. Today "Luddite" is a term of mockery — a description for someone who's scared of technology. But in 1812, Luddism was no laughing matter for the likes of Cartwright. And he plans to teach the intruders a lesson. For a full list of sources for this episode, please visit timharford.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the last few decades we've adopted all kinds of new medical technologies, ventilators, IVF, brain implants, and when bioethics consider these innovations they return to the same questions, just because we can do something, does it mean we should, and who gets to make these kinds of decisions? Playing God is a new podcast about the complex decisions made in medicine and public health and the implications they have throughout everyday lives. Listen to Playing God. Pushkin William Cartwright is dropping off to sleep on an improvised bed in the textile mill he

owns near Clec Hieten, Yorkshire, England. Outside, the river's spen flows gently by. On working days, the river's current turns a wheel that powers machines that shear cloth. The year is 1812, a Saturday night in April, just gone midnight. The mill owners dog begins to growl. All at once, Cartwright is alert. He isn't sure yet if this is the trouble he's been expecting for weeks. He's posted two guards outside the yard, and he had assumed they'd be the first to raise the alarm. They haven't. And now the growling turns to barking.

Cartwright springs out of bed. He wakes the other nine men who are sleeping in the mill. Or of his workers and five soldiers borrowed from a local regiment. No time to put on clothes, the men pick up their guns. Outside, the gates of the yard are being battered off their hinges. The car tracks men are on the upper floor of the mill. They point their guns through holes that have been made in the thick stone walls.

They may listen and wait. From outside, the sound of trampling feet and murmured voices, then another crash this time of glass, a volley of rocks smashing through the ground floor windows, an almighty yell and the firing of pistols and muskets. The men in the mill open fire in the turn. Down beneath them, the door to the mill shudders under blow up a blow from hatchets, massive hands.

A voice from outside urges on the men attacking the door. In with your hands, down them, kill them, everyone! Cartwright has prepared for this. He's about to find out how well. He's had the mills wooden door reinforced with iron studs and bars. If the attackers do manage to force it in, they'll find themselves on the lower floor, and Cartwright's men will then be able to shoot at them from above, through gaps he's made in the stonework, separating the upper and lower floors.

If the attackers try to get up the stairs, they'll find that Cartwright has installed a fearsome roll of 18-inch spikes. If they get past that, he's got a barrel of sulfuric acid he can tip on top of them. But anyway, the door's holding. For now. And Cartwright's men are reloading and firing their weapons through those little holes in the wall. At least most of them are.

One of the soldiers' cartwrights borrowed doesn't appear to be doing much, just turning his gun over in his hand. What's wrong? Ask Cartwright. Is your gun faulty? No, says the soldier. Then why aren't you firing?

I might hit some of my brothers. And who are these brothers? The men attacking the mill, the men, the soldier is reluctant to hurt. Are they robbers? Looking to steal the mill owners' money? Not at all. They're followers of a mysterious individual called General Ned Ludd, or more simply, their Ludites. I'm Tim Haferd, and you're listening to Today, Ludite is a term of mockery.

What you'd laughingly say about a boomer who hasn't figured out how to listen to a podcast yet. A description for someone who's scared of technology. Who doesn't know how to use it, doesn't appreciate what it can do for them. But in 1812, in Yorkshire, Ludism was no laughing matter for the likes of William Cartwright. Three years before, Cartwright had brought new machinery into his mill. He wanted to automate a job that was hard and slow for humans, cropping, as it was called. When cloth is made, it's rough and uneven.

The cropper uses shears to make it smooth. It's a delicate task. It takes real skill to lift the rough cloth and wield the shears to get a beautiful finish. It's also painful, at least to start with. The handles of the shears dig into the wrist. In time, the skin on the wrist gets hard and calloused. You can tell if someone's a cropper with a glance at their wrist. Because the job is hard and skilled, it pays well. Young men push through that initial pain with a prospect of a gainful career. Croping is a high status profession in working communities. It's also recently become unnecessary because

machines called gig mills and sharing frames can do the job just as well and far more quickly as William Cartwright is making all too clear. Cartwright's not the only mill owner who's brought in these new machines, but he's one of the few who's daring still to use them in the spring of 1812. Most other local Milona's have been intimidated by letters signed by General Ludd. Dismantle the machines, or we'll smash them up. It's no idle threat, if the machines stay in use, mast gangs come in the dead of night. They use hatchets to break in the door and great hammers to smash the machines.

Working people argued about whether or not this would all backfire. Let's rewind to March 1812, a month before the attack on Cartwright's mill. In a cropping shop, a group of men are talking after work. Our account of this conversation comes from a 19th century historian called Frank Peel, who years later recorded the stories that local people handed down. Most of those Peel describes talking are croppers and committed followers of the shadowy figure they call General Ludd.

One is not. John Booth is 19 years old, an apprentice saddlemaker, the son of a clergyman with the Church of England. When it not be better, asks Booth, to reason with them, rather than infuriate them by destroying their machines. ''Reason with them? He might as well reason with a stone. Booth's friend, the cropper George Meller, is the local leader of those masked marauding gangs.

Meller is still working for now, but he's well aware that he can't compete with water-powered gig mills and shearing frames. He and his fellow croppers can see that the skill they've spent years perfecting is soon to be rendered worthless. It's all right for John Booth, he's not a cropper, he's a saddle maker, and there isn't a saddle-making machine. Not yet, anyway. These machines aren't taking Booth, he's not a cropper, he's a saddle maker, and there isn't a saddle making machine. Not yet anyway, these machines aren't taking Booth's trade out of his fingers, says Mella, or it happens to see things in a different light. But young Booth has thought this through, and he argues back.

Being a cropper is hard work, he points out. It's painful too, until you develop that hard-calus skin on the wrist. And have you seen those machines in action? Just have to set up the cloth, and keep an eye on them. They take away all of that hard, painful work. Seen like that, the machinery is a thing of beauty. "'I quite agree with you,' says Booth, respecting the harm you suffer from machinery. But it might be man's chief blessing instead of his curse if society was differently

constituted. You can't say the machine itself is evil, says Booth, that's absurd. No, the problem is that the mill owner gets all the benefits. If those benefits were fairly shared out, if, if, if. George Mella is not impressed. What's the use of such sermons as thine to starving men? Starving is not just a figure of speech. Another man joins in the conversation. He tells how he went to see a former workmate,

a cropper who lost his job. He can't find other work. There's a war on with Napoleon's France. It's disrupted trade, nobody's hiring, and the price of food has shot up. The man's been struggling to afford to eat. And now, his wife has died. There she lay on the bed, poor thing, skin and bone, now tells, he told his fellows. It's hard for John Booth to argue with that. He knows he's right. The machines would be a blessing, if

society were differently constituted. But he knows his friends are right too. It isn't much comfort to conceive of a different world if you're starving to death in this one. To confess the truth, says Booth. I don't see much chance of reorganising society on a better and sounder basis at present. I know not what to say. Say you'll join us," says Mellor. What to do? Booth doubts that smashing machines will achieve anything,

but it's not like he has a better plan, and who knows? Maybe he's wrong. Maybe drastic action will make people sit up and take notice of how desperate the workers are. Alright, it's Booth. I'm in. Mella wants to decide on their next target.

In the last few weeks, they've had success after success around the Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. They've smashed up some machines, and sent threatening letters to the owners of other machines and almost everyone has agreed to go back to the old ways of cropping by hand. A local magistrate is even recommending they do so, for their own safety. But two local mill owners have been loudly and publicly holding out. One is William Cartwright. He's got nothing but contempt for his peers who are taking down their shearing frames. Puse synonymous, he calls them. Instead, he's fortified his mill.

He's brought in soldiers from a local regiment. He's taken to sleeping in his mill with the soldiers every night. The other local holdout is William Horsesville. He's gone even further than Cartwright. He's installed a cannon in his mill. Just let the Luddites try to smash up his machines, he says to anyone who'll listen. Oh, right up to my saddle girth in Luddite blood. If the Yorkshire croppers are to win their battle against the new machines,

the two Williams, Cartwright and Horsefall need to be taught a lesson. Who's Mill should they attack first? They flip a coin. It's Cartwright. None of them know it, but this time, the attack will determine who lives and who dies. Corsion retails will be back after the break. Over the last few decades, we've adopted all kinds of new medical technologies. Ventilators, IVF, brain implants, and when bioethics consider these innovations they return

to the same questions. Just because we can do something, does it mean we should, and who gets to make these kinds of decisions? Playing God is a new podcast about the complex decisions made in medicine and public health and the implications they have throughout everyday lives. Listen to Playing God. In his classic book, The Making of the English Working Class,

the historian, E.P. Thompson, sees the roots of Buddhism in a failure of politics. For years, he says, organizations of workers had been sending representatives to London with policy proposals, such as attacks of six-pensayard on cloth made by machines, that money to go into a fund to support displaced workers.

But these ideas went against the mood of the day, which was a sudden passion for laissez-faire economics. Politicians were busy abolishing restrictions on what workers and factories could and couldn't do. Those old laws said Thompson were often bad for workers, but still, somewhere within them was the shadowy image of a benevolent, corporate state. There had always been an ethos of paternalism. The idea that those higher up in the social

order had some kind of obligation to those below. Workers might be low down the order, but they had a place. The new ideal was to free up markets. If machines and unskilled workers could do things more cheaply than skilled artisans, the artisans were simply out of luck. No redundancy pay, no unemployment benefit, no programs to help them re-skill and learn another trade. Luddism, Wright's Thompson, appeared with an almost inevitable logic. To the croppers, Ned Ludd was the defender of an ancient right. The upholder of a lost constitution. And who exactly was this mysterious Ned Ludd?

He was from Nottingham, a town in the English Midlands that was famous for its stocking industry, and for its centuries-old stories about another popular outlaw who was feared by the bad and loved by the good. Robin Hood was mythical, so was General Ludd. He was based on a well-known local story about a man called Ned Ludd, supposedly a young stocking maker who once smashed up his stocking frame in a fit of rage. In 1811, when masked gangs started to smash up stocking frames in Nottingham at night, people joked that Ned Ludd must have done it. The gangs picked up the joke and ran with it.

They called themselves an army, and imagined Ned Ludd as their general. When their leaders sent threatening letters, they signed them, General Ludd. Newspapers reported breathlessly about the exploits of the Nottingham Luddites. They inspired workers in other industries, in other parts of England, such as the Cropers in Yorkshire. The government responded with a legal clamp down. It was hard to get anyone to testify against the masked machine's mashes, as one magistrate complained, almost every creature of the lower order is

on their side. So they sent out spies and offered money to tempt informers, and they rushed through new legislation. Smashing machines could now be punished with the death penalty. On the night of the 11th of April, 1812, around 150 men leave their homes and make their way to a quiet country lane, three miles from William Cartwright's mill. They wear masks or blackened faces. They sort themselves by weapon. Some have got hold of muskets or pistols. Others have hatchets or hammers or bludgeons. George Meller gives them a pep talk. Cartwright's boasted he reminds them that he'll defend his mill. But we're well armed and we shall handle him. You know what to do.

They marched the three miles to Cartwrights mill and stopped just short of the gates. There'll be two guards outside, they know. A few of the men sneak up on them, grab them and muffle their cries. The hatchet men advance on the gates and batter them inwards. The men swarm into the yard, they hurl rocks through the mill's windows, and with a yell, the men with guns open fire through the shattered glass. But then, there's gunfire back from inside the mill. Hatchet mill to the front, the prize mellow. The hatchets rain down on the mills wooden door, but it's so well reinforced, they're

mostly hitting iron, sparks apply. All around George mellow his men are crying out in pain as bullets find them. And now, someone sounded in alarm, calling for reinforcements from a regiment near vine. How long will it take them to arrive? Shoot at the bell! Damn that bell! Mellie yells, get it lads! The bell stops ringing, but not for long. They've shot through the rope that Cartwright's man was pulling, but Cartwright has simply sent the man up onto the roof to ring the bell by hand. He can't have long before the soldiers get there, and the door's still holding.

Is there another way in? To the back lads? Mella commands. Some of the attackers try to find their way around the back of the mill, but the river runs right next to it. One slips and falls in, the others stop and scramble to help him out. So now there's no alternative. It all depends on getting that door down fast. And suddenly there's a breakthrough, a hole in the wood of the door, about the size of a man's head. In with your lads, damn them, kill them everyone! breakthrough, a hole in the wood of the door, about the size of a man's head.

In with your lads, damn them, kill them everyone! The men surge at the door, but still it holds, and the soldiers in the mill start to shoot through the hole. Someone cries out and falls to the ground, holding his leg. It's 19-year-old apprentice saddlemaker, John Booth. He never did think this attack on the mill was a good idea. But now the attackers with muskets and pistols have run out of ammunition. If they do get him, what then? The bells still ringing. Can't have long before more soldiers get there, attackers start to fall back.

It's clear that they failed. Spit up, Lance. Get home as quick as you can. Two men can't get home. John Booth's leg is shattered. Another man's been shot in the chest. He's lying on the ground, struggling for breath. Mella has no choice but to leave them. Inside the mill, silence falls, except for the moans of the injured men in the yard outside.

Cartwright checks on his workers and borrowed soldiers. Not one has been hurt. The defense had planned so carefully has worked exactly as intended. Except of course for that soldier who refused to shoot. They'll deal with him later. What to do about the injured attackers? It might be a trap. I'm not opening that door, says Cartwright, until the reinforcements arrive. Soon, they do, and so do other local people. They gather around the two injured men. John Booth is writhing in agony, blood gushing from his leg.

The other man is choking on the blood from his chest wound. Help me breathe. He says, lift up my head. Cartwright opens the mill's door and strides over. He recognizes the man who's been shot in the chest. The man used to work for him as a cropper before the machines came in. him, as a cropper before the machines came in. ''If you want us to help you,'' says Cartwright, telling me who's your leader. One of the locals decides to ignore Cartwright. He lifts the head of the wounded man, another puts a glass of water to his lips. The growing crowd murmur their approval, and Cartwright understands that he isn't out

of danger yet. Take the two men to the inn, he says. Look here for them there, but both men die. It's later rumoured they were tortured, to try to get them to give up the names of the local Luddite leaders. John Booth's supposed last words become legend. He calls over the priest, a well-known friend of Cartwright. Can you keep a secret? He asks.

That can, says the priest. So can I. Says John Booth. Thousands of people gather for John Booth's funeral. On the doors of local houses, a message is chalked. Vengeance for the blood after the break. Over the last few decades we've adopted all kinds of new medical technologies ventilators, IVF, brain implants, and when bioethics consider these innovations they return to the same questions.

Just because we can do something, does it mean we should? And who gets to make these kinds of decisions? Playing God is a new podcast about the complex decisions made in medicine and public health and the implications they have throughout everyday lives. Listen to Playing God. Listen to playing God. Economists have coined the phrase, Luddite fallacy, to describe the mistaken belief

that technological progress is bad for working people. It's bad for particular workers to be sure, machines do displace certain jobs. But the story of economic progress is that new jobs have always come along to replace them. And those new jobs have tended to be more productive and better paid. The problem is that those better jobs don't necessarily appear straight away. In their book Power and Progress, the economists Darren Asimoglu and Simon Johnson

describe how it took a century for the inventions of the Industrial Revolution to translate into higher wages and improved working conditions for ordinary people. The new machines created wealth quickly, but that wealth accrued to their owners, people like William Cartwright. This had happened before, say Asimoglu and Johnson. In medieval Europe, advances in agriculture created new wealth that funded magnificent cathedrals, but didn't improve the lives of peasants at all. And it's happening again now, they say.

Digital technologies are giving us new billionaires, but shared prosperity, not so much. In many rich countries, wages for typical workers have been growing much more slowly than in the 1950s and 1960s, if they've been growing at all. Perhaps then we can sympathize with the Luddite croppers. They were facing all the immediate costs of new technology, while the uncertain benefits lay decades in the future.

No wonder some risked an early death to try to prolong the status quo. Even some wealthy aristocrats sympathized at the time, such as the poet Lord Byron, who spoke out against the government's bill to bring in the death penalty for machine-breaking. The excesses of the Luddites said Byron, however to be deplored and condemned, can hardly be a matter of surprise. A week after the attack on his mill, William Cartwright rides to the town of Huddersfield. He has to give evidence that the court marshal of the soldier who would refuse to shoot at the Ludite attackers.

The regiment's commanders greet him warmly. It's not easy for the army to deal with the Ludites, they say, when the mill owners keep giving into them. What a pleasure it is to find a man who'll fight to defend his property and the law. Another local mill owner congratulates Cartwright II, William Horseful, the man who'd installed a cannon at his mill and said he'd ride up to his saddle-earth in Ludite Blood. The court-martial is over quickly. Cartwright gives his evidence, the soldier makes no defense, the sentence is passed.

Three hundred lashes. Three hundred? Cartwright mounts his horse again to ride the eight miles home. As he passes a woodland, a pistol fires from behind a tree. The bullet flies past him, his horse rears and bolts, another shot brings out, another miss. Cartwright gallops home. There he finds to his horror that the soldier's punishment is going to happen right outside his mill. A crowd of hundreds gather to watch as the soldiers' hands are tied.

His back is barehead. his hands are tied, his back is barehead. After just a few lashes, the skin is broken. Soon the whip is cutting raw flesh, and the crowd are getting restive. Cartwright pushes through them and speaks to the officer in command. Enough now, he says. Can't we leave it at that? The officer ignores him. Carry on, he says to the man with a whip. Another lash. Another. And another, the only 20 lashes in.

It's clear the soldier will die long before 300. In fact, he sees to have passed out already. A doctor checks his pulse, and nods to the officer in command. The lashing resumes. People cry out, and jostle forward, the crowd seems on the verge of a riot.

Cartwright tries again. Stop now. You have to stop. Cartwright must sense he's pleading for his own life as much as for that of the soldier and perhaps the officer understands. Because this time he nods. The soldier's hands are untied and he's led away.

The crowd calms down. William Cartwright breathes again. He's narrowly escaped being shot, and then being lynched. You might expect his fellow mill owner, William Horsful, to decide to keep a low profile for a while. Not a bit of it. Horsful keeps loudly denouncing the luddites. Every week, horseful rides into Huddersfield on business.

His routine is well known. At six o'clock, he sets off for home. He never rides quickly. And then, as he passes a woodland, an unseen marksman takes aim. A bullet rips into horsefuls flesh. He slumps forward and grabs onto his horse's neck, blood starts spurting from his leg. Horseful falls off his horse.

Passers-by help him back to the inn and call a doctor. Horseful has been shot in the stomach and thigh. One bullet has cut an artery. He's bleeding profusely. What's your opinion, doctor? Ask the injured man. Indeed, Mr. Horseful, I consider you in a very dangerous state. These are awful times, Doctor.

Horseful dies soon after. News of his death gets back to the cropping shop where George Mella works. It comes with other news too. A reward of £2,000 for information about the assassin. A fortune. George Mellor knows very well who shot William Horsful, and he knows that all his friends know it too. If I thought, says Mellor, there was one man who would whisper a single word. This day would be his last. It's hard, as I said, not to feel some sympathy with the Luddite croppers.

But then, I find it hard not to sympathise with the mill owners too. William Cartwright and William Horseful were stubborn, but they weren't bad men. They were seen as fair employers, their workers liked them. Yet Cartwright and Horseful could hardly ignore the fact that new machines could finish cloth more cheaply than human workers. If they didn't use those new machines, someone somewhere would, and they'd soon be out competed. Both the croppers and the mill owners were trapped by the same economic system. The parallels with today's economic system are all too obvious. Skilled workers in high

status jobs find that robots or algorithms can do their work as well as they can, or well enough, and much more quickly. Technologists may have some qualms about the impacts of the tech they're developing, but they tell themselves, if I don't do it, someone else will. The author, Brian Merchant, explores these parallels in his new book, Blood in the Machine. Think about policy proposals to respond to the rise of big tech, he says, such as a robot tax or a universal basic income. Such ideas seem new, but they're in the same tradition as those old proposals for attacks on cloth made by machine to keep the unemployed croppers from starvation.

Those old proposals failed. In their book Power and Progress, the economist Darren Asimoglu and Simon Johnson asked why it took so long for the wealth-creating machines of the Industrial Revolution to benefit people more widely, through higher wages, better working conditions, or social safety nets. That answer? It happened only when workers and citizens found new ways to organize, through trade unions and political parties, to force the gains from technological progress to be more equitably shared.

Today, they argue, we need to do the same again. The thought of a 2,000 pound reward proved too much for one of George Mellor's fellow croppers. Mellor was arrested, tried and convicted of the murder of William Horseful. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Five other men were condemned to be hanged too, not for killing anyone, but for their part in the attack on William Cartwright's mill. The crackdown worked. As the historian E.P. Thompson puts it, Luddism ended on the scaffold. In January 1813, Mela stood on a wooden platform, a rope around his neck.

Some of my enemies may be here, said Mela. If there be, I freely forgive them and all the world, and I hope the world will forgive me. Luddism ended on the scaffold. But the words of the young apprentice saddlemaker John Booth live on. New machines might be man's chief blessing, instead of his curse, if society was differently constituted. Quite so, but George Mellers' response also echoes down the years. If, if, if. For a list of the sources used in this episode, please see the show notes at timhalford.com. Corsion Retails is written by me, Tim Halford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Feins with support from Edith Husslo.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss. Sarah Nicks edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohn, Lietel Moulard, John Schnarrs, Carly McGlory and Eric Sandler. Corsary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It was recorded in Wardle Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Come on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. Over the last few decades, we've adopted all kinds of new medical technologies, ventilators, IVF, brain implants, and when bioethics consider these innovations, they return to the same questions. Just because we can do something, does it mean we should?

And who gets to make these kinds of decisions? Playing God is a new podcast about the complex decisions made in medicine and public health and the implications they have throughout everyday lives. Listen to Playing God. to playing God.