On the morning of 21 January 1870, many miners from coal pits around Worsborough near Barnsley were absent from work. This was not the only village in the locality where the workforce was sparse that morning. Around 7.15 am, while it was still dark, a crowd of 600–1,000 miners converged on Thorncliffe Colliery at Tankersley. What followed was an appalling incident in 19th-century British industrial history and a miscarriage of justice.

Relations between workers and employers in the mid-Victorian period were tinged with mutual distrust. Trades unions were attracting numerous members. Some workers saw solidarity with colleagues as essential for protecting their livelihood but employers considered unionism a pernicious development which threatened the profits they could make.

In March 1869, Newton and Chambers, the company which ran Thorncliffe colliery, dismissed the workforce and immediately offered to re-employ the men on lower wages. Supported by the Miners Union, the sacked men refused, and colleagues at other pits contributed financially to enable them to stay at home, although with a much reduced standard of living. The owners sought new workers, even ones with no experience of mining, and hastily built a row of cottages to rent to non-union men who were prepared to move from other towns.

The dispute at Thorncliffe was of great concern to miners, and to union organisers. Fearing for their own livelihoods, miners from the Barnsley area wanted to deter other owners from following Thorncliffe’s lead. Feelings had been running high in the days before the riot between the ‘white sheep – union men who had been dismissed – and the ‘black sheep’ who had taken their jobs. The homes of some non-union men had been attacked. With serious trouble anticipated, a police guard, which included officers drawn from across West Yorkshire, had been stationed at the colliery for several days.

The early morning march to Thorncliffe was timed to arrive when the police guard changed. The probable aim was to exploit the handover, push past the guards and disrupt production by damaging the pit machinery. As news of the approaching mob had arrived in advance, the police were able to prevent anyone from getting to the mine, holding them at bay in a nearby field as they waved makeshift weapons and threw stones at the constabulary. What they were unable to stop was a group of around a hundred men who attacked the cottages where ‘black sheep’ workers were housed.

The short-lived assault on the cottages lasted only a few minutes but it was brutal and designed to intimidate the newcomers into quitting their jobs. No physical violence was used against the occupants, who were mainly women and children, but verbal threats abounded and fearsome makeshift weapons were brandished in what would have been a terrifying experience for them. Money and goods were stolen and food, household goods and clothes smashed, torn or burned.

Identifying the rioters
Only two of the mob could be definitely identified. George Gosling had been captured in the field by Superintendent Sykes when he tried to hit the policeman with a chair leg, and Joseph Yardley had been badly injured in the fight in the field. The violence provoked a wave of anger across the country with newspaper editors and men of authority demanding that all those involved be found and punished severely.

Calls for the rioters to face the full force of the law were understandable, but put the police in a difficult position because it was not possible to identify anyone. The men had converged from several villages and obscured their faces with soot, masks or scarves. They were strangers to the occupants of the cottages and to many of the police. Most significantly, day was just breaking when the trouble flared, the half-light further reducing the chance of a stranger being recognised.

Within hours, the investigation focused on Worsborough from where three police constables had seen groups of miners setting out from the village towards Tankersley early that morning. This was not proof that those men had been ringleaders of the violence, but it gave the police some names. At the time some newspapers thought it odd that men from four miles away had taken leading roles whilst the ‘white sheep’ whose livelihoods were directly affected apparently took no part.

Over the next days a procession of men were brought before the magistrates at Barnsley courthouse, which was protected by a regiment of soldiers as it was feared that angry miners would try to rescue the accused. Several prisoners were released by order of the magistrates as they had only been identified by a single witness but 23 were sent for trial in York and remanded to York Castle prison.

The prosecution strove to make the charges as harsh as possible. They argued that the actions were felonies, which would have attracted a much greater sentence than the misdemeanours they were in law. An attempt was made to bring manslaughter charges because one Sarah Hughes had died in one of the cottages the day after the riot. As an inquest jury had decided that the cause of death was consumption, the argument failed, but it clearly indicated an intention by the authorities to try to deter union activity, rather than focusing on the offences that had actually taken place. Individual cases show how weak much of the evidence was.

Police Constables Goodall, Tyler and Schofield swore that they had observed Joseph Briggs at the front of the rioters, brandishing a stick and throwing stones. Briggs had a strong alibi. A doctor had visited his sick wife on the morning of the riot and went into the witness box to say that Briggs was in his home. He was acquitted. In a confused situation, the policemen might all have made a genuine mistake, but there was suspicion at the time that the police were co-ordinating their stories. A complaint was raised about a policeman who visited the cells where the accused were being held to see who was there, prior to giving evidence.

Another problem lay with timing. Several Worsborough residents appeared as witnesses stating that they had seen an accused man in Worsborough at a time which made it impossible for the person to have been at Thorncliffe. Prosecutors dismissed this as fabrication, sometimes by multiple witnesses, scoffing at how precise the memory had been. As the first arrests were made within two days of the riot, it is unsurprising that plenty of detail was recalled. Unlike some of the ‘black sheep’, whose identifications of prisoners became less reliable under questioning, none of the witnesses for the defence were shaken in their evidence by questioning from experienced barristers, which suggests that they were speaking truthfully.

A different anomaly was the property that had been stolen from the cottages. If the accused men had been involved, it seems probable that some of the goods would have turned up in Worsborough, or some people would have had money they could not account for. No searches were made in the homes of those who were arrested, which was seen as unusual, as finding stolen items would greatly have strengthened the evidence against them.

By the end of the hearings, 11 men had been convicted and received prison sentences ranging from five years’ with hard labour to nine months, and 12 walked free. A few months later, William McDonald was pardoned part way through his sentence, after an appeal pointed out that his alibi was exactly the same as that of others who had been acquitted.

Despite having alibis that placed them in Worsborough, John Beevers, George Darley and Joseph Tipping were convicted as leaders of the riot. In April 1872 all three were released from five-year sentences, supposedly a gesture of goodwill after the Thorncliffe dispute had been settled on terms which were more favourable to the employers than the workforce.

In its day the Thorncliffe riot was the 19th-century equivalent of the nearby ‘Battle of Orgrave’ in the miners’ strike of 1984 and left a legacy in Worsborough that was not blunted by time. In 1927, octogenarian William Winder, a mining union member for over 60 years, said that Thorncliffe remained a powerful memory alongside the mining disasters which he had lived through.

Unless any snippets have passed down the generations as family history, the names of those who wrecked the cottages at Thorncliffe were lost to posterity even as the damage took place. Only two men can be proved to have been with the crowd of hundreds which fought the police. Around 150 years later, despite the inexcusable violence against non-union workers and the police, the convictions of men whose alibis placed them elsewhere show that the mid-Victorian legal process could be as ugly as any riot.