He was right as to the factory districts, but not quite right as to Lancashire.  In Prescot, a small Lancashire town on the fringe of the factory district, the watchmakers in 1871 were being paid in watches.  The masters alleged that they only gave watches to the workers when the latter had orders for them, but the evidence showed that these orders only came to hand when the men were asking for fresh work.  The pawnbrokers explained what happened.  ‘Watches’, said a pawnbroker’s clerk, ’pass from hand to hand as a circulating medium until they get very low in the market and are pawned.’[62] The pawnshop in question had 700 watches on pledge, most of them belonging to workmen in the town.

In railway contracting truck was prevalent in the forties.  In roving employment of this type it is difficult to see how some form of contractor’s shop could have been avoided.  The navvy needed canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts, but such things had not been thought of then.  However, when the big period of railway construction came to an end, the question lost its importance.

South Staffordshire and the Black Country were the ancient strongholds of truck.  The campaigns against truck originated here.  The nailers, the cash-paying masters, and the respectable ratepayers joined together to promote the Truck Act of 1820.  Lord Hatherton, a Staffordshire nobleman, after three years hammering at the House of Commons, obtained the Truck Act of 1831.  But in 1843, the year of the Midland Mining Commission, truck was still rife in the coalfields.  The well-known Tommy-shop scene in Disraeli’s novel Sybil, which was published in 1845, is taken direct from the Commissioners’ Report.  Diggs, the butty of the novel, is Banks, the coal proprietor of the Report.  In the novel the people say of Master Joseph Diggs, the son:  ’He do swear at the women, when they rush in for the first turn, most fearful; they do say he’s a shocking little dog.’  In the Report, page 93, the miner’s wife says:  ’He swears at the women when the women are trying to crush in.  He is a shocking little dog.’  One touch is Disraeli’s own.  He makes the miners keen to purchase ‘the young Queen’s picture’.  ’If the Queen would do something for us poor men, it would be a blessed job.’  In the Report there is nothing about this, but there is a section dealing with Chartism.

However, the truck-shop was gradually disappearing.  Every year it became easier to expose evasions, and in good times the workers used their prosperity to slip away from the Company store.  In 1850 a final campaign was initiated by five local Anti-Truck Associations, backed by the National Miners’ Association under Alexander MacDonald.  Truck-masters were prosecuted and truck was steadily dislodged from the coalfields and adjacent ironworks.  Only in the nail trade did it survive, for the reason that the complete subjection of the nailers made it possible to practise the essentials of truck without a formal violation of the law.