Note 19 — Chapter I

Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by George Unwin, 1904, p. 201. In this connection may be mentioned the London watermen, who have always dealt directly with their customers, and who possess a tradition of having been continuously organised since 1350. Power to regulate the trade of watermen was, in 1555, conferred by Act of Parliament upon the then incorporated Thames Watermen and Lightermen’s Company, the administration of which appears to have been, from the first, entirely in the hands of the master lightermen. The watermen, who had no masters, were compelled to take out the freedom of this Company, and the existing Trade Union, the Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen, was established in 1872 for the express purpose of obtaining some representation of the working watermen and the journeymen lightermen on the Court of the Company. Previous associations of working watermen for trade purposes seem to have been in existence in 1789 (a Rotherhithe Society of Watermen) and in 1799 (Friendly Society of Watermen usually plying at the Hermitage Stairs, in the parish of St. John, Wapping); and Mayhew describes, in 1850, local “turnway societies,” regulating the sharing of custom, and a Watermen’s Protective Society, to resist non-freemen (London Labour and the London Poor, 1851).