Note 511 — Chapter VII

See the History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis, of which two volumes have been issued by the Parliamentary Committee (1910 and 1916). William John Davis, one of the most successful Trade Union administrators, was born in 1848, at Birmingham. In 1872, when the National Society of Amalgamated Brassworkers was established in a trade hitherto entirely unorganised, he became General Secretary, a post which, except for one short interval, he has ever since retained. Within six months he obtained from the employers the 15 per cent increase which they had refused to the unorganised men, and established branches throughout the kingdom; and presently he completed the difficult and laborious task of constructing a list of prices for all brasswork, for which he obtained the employers’ recognition. He was elected to the Birmingham School Board in 1876, and to the Town Council in 1880. In 1883 he accepted appointment as Factory Inspector, but six years later returned to his former post at the urgent request of the workmen, whose Union had in his absence sunk almost to nothing, a condition from which he was able quickly to restore it to far more than its highest previous strength; and to take on, in addition, the secretaryship of the Amalgamated Metal Wire and Tube Makers’ Society. He was made a J.P. in 1906. Since 1881 he has been elected twenty-six times to the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress. He is the author, in addition to the History of the British Trades Union Congress, of The Token Coinage of Warwickshire and Nineteenth-Century Token Coinage(The Life Story of W. J. Davis, by W. B. Dalley, 1914).