Collective action and courage
Text 1: The Meeting at Ringstone Edge, by Jonas Ackroyd
An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In the autumn of the bad year the masters reduced the weavers’ price by a penny a piece, which is to say by a fifth part of all we had, and a meeting was called for the Sunday on Ringstone Edge, above the town, where no hall-keeper could refuse us. I was nineteen and went because my father went. We walked up in the dark before dawn, and as the light came I saw men coming over every ridge of the moor, in twos and threes and then in long dark lines, until I could not count them. I had not known there were so many of us in the world.
The speaker was to have been a delegate from Manchester, but he did not come; it was said afterwards that he had been warned off. There was a long uneasy silence. Then old Abel Hirst, a hand-loom weaver with a voice like a rusty gate, climbed onto a rock and began to speak, not well, but plainly, of his children and his rent and his loom standing idle. He knew, as we all knew, that the magistrate’s clerk was writing down the names of any who spoke. I have seen braver deeds since, perhaps, but none that I admired more.
When the yeomanry rode up at noon, the crowd did not run. Nobody gave an order. We simply stood, thousands of us, silent, with our hats in our hands, until the officer looked at us for a long while and turned his horse about. A month later the masters restored the penny. Abel Hirst never worked in the town again. I have often thought about which of those two facts matters more, and I have never decided.
Text 2: Arms Folded, by Pat Gallagher
An original twentieth-century memoir.
In the summer of 1976 the women on the sewing floor at Hallam’s found out that the men in the cutting room, who had been there no longer than us, were paid nearly a third more for work that was, in the management’s own words, ‘of comparable skill’. We found out because a girl called Denise took a payslip off a cutting-room desk and photocopied it in the office at lunchtime. She could have been sacked for that. She knew it. She did it anyway.
For a week we talked. Some of the older women were frightened, and with reason: half of them were the only wage in their house. Then on the Monday morning, without any vote, Maureen Clegg, who had worked on the end machine for twenty-two years and never said boo to anyone, switched off her machine at ten past eight and folded her arms. One by one, down the whole long row, the other machines went quiet. I have never heard a silence like it. Eighty women sitting with their arms folded, and the foreman standing in the doorway with his mouth open.
We were out for eleven weeks. We stood at the gate in the rain, we raised money at the market, we sang rude songs about the management that I will not repeat here. Nobody could have done it alone; the company would simply have sacked her and hired someone else. In the end we got equal pay, or near enough. People sometimes call that a victory for the union. It was. But it started with one girl and a photocopier, and one woman switching off a machine.
‘Both texts present collective action as more powerful than individual courage.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
40 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 2.3.9 Explore connections across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.