Doherty, John (c.1798–1854), trade union pioneer, radical activist, journalist, and factory reformer, was born in Inishowen, Co. Donegal; nothing is known of his parents. His birth place and date are uncertain. A son said it was ‘Buncrana, Inishowel’ (sic) in 1797 (Kirby & Musson, Voice of the People, 2). John Doherty's death certificate suggests he was born in 1798. His own account in 1838 indicates 1799. Doherty had little opportunity for education, noting in 1832 that he never ‘had for twelve months together the advantages of regular education’, and telling the 1838 select committee on combinations of workmen that he had worked from the age of ten. It is from this inquiry that we learn most about his early years.
He moved from Donegal to ‘near Larne’, Co. Antrim, and worked as a cotton spinner. At ‘about 17’ years; old he moved to Manchester's cotton industry. Shortly afterwards he joined the outlawed cotton spinners’ trade union in the city. This placed him at the fulcrum of the mechanical revolution that was transforming the industrial landscape. There he embraced the discontents of the factory workers as a trade union advocate and innovator. He led the cotton spinners’ efforts to extend local and national trade unionism in ways that prefigured later developments. He addressed the factory workers’ plight among the competing claims of radical, anti-capitalist, parliamentary, and factory reforms, becoming associated with the leading campaigners of these movements, including William Cobbett and Francis Place. Doherty entered the public record with a conviction for picketing in the 1818 city-wide cotton-spinners’ strike against wage reductions, and was sent to prison in 1819 for two years. On release he rejoined the cotton-spinning workforce, and supported campaigns for parliamentary reform and against the combination acts that outlawed trade unions.
In 1828 Doherty was elected secretary of the Manchester cotton spinners’ union, a considerable achievement for an Irishman and a Roman catholic in the heightened national and religious climate hostile to immigration and catholic emancipation. He combined his new duties with running a weekly trade union newspaper, the Conciliator or Cotton Spinners’ Weekly Journal (1828–9), which was the first of a series of weekly titles he edited to complement his organisational initiatives. The same year he became secretary for two years of the Society for the Protection of Children Employed in the Cotton Factories, holding public meetings, writing to the home secretary, and prosecuting manufacturers who broke the new legal limits on the working hours of young people. He continued this work in the Lancashire Short-Time Committee, a network of local societies campaigning to shorten the industrial working day.
In 1829 Doherty headed the Manchester cotton spinners’ six-month strike against wage cuts. Its duration and collapse spurred him to launch the Grand General Union of Operative Spinners of Great Britain and Ireland (1829–30), which met on the Isle of Man in December. His choice of a meeting place central to the principal cotton districts, and away from Manchester's industrial ascendancy, allowed English, Scottish, and Irish delegates to attend on an equal footing, and illustrates his innovative approach to organisation and fair representation. In 1830 he published the United Trades Co-operative Journal from March to October.
When the Grand General Union collapsed Doherty launched the National Association for the Protection of Labour (1830–32). This ambitious project brought different trades into a single representative body (modelled on the Catholic Association of Daniel O'Connell (qv)), anticipating a national trade union organisation by nearly forty years. In 1831 its membership of 100,000 represented 150 trade unions of mechanics, weavers, potters, miners, and builders. In December 1830 Doherty launched the Voice of the People (1830–32), and in 1831 he attended the co-operative movement's first conference, along with Robert Owen and William Thompson (qv). The co-operators hoped he might move his journal to London, though Doherty stayed in Manchester. When the Voice was suppressed in 1832 Doherty opened a bookshop as a radical meeting place, publishing house, and reading room, and from there edited the Poor Man's Advocate (1832–3). A libel charge against him led to another term of imprisonment on remand for failing to appear at court; he was sentenced to one month's imprisonment and bound over. In 1833 he joined the Society for Promoting National Regeneration, with John Fielden and Robert Owen, backing their plans for a general strike in January 1834 for an eight-hour day. Remaining in touch with events in Ireland, he highlighted Irish grievances in his papers and in 1834 was secretary of Manchester's Repeal Association.
He maintained close links with the cotton spinners’ union, joining their protests against the poor law and the corn laws, and editing the Herald of the Rights of Industry. In 1834–6 he served a second two-year term as secretary of the Manchester cotton spinners’ union, offering a rigorous new plan of union reorganisation. In 1838 he attended the select committee on combinations of workingmen, a parliamentary inquiry into trade unions, as a cotton spinners’ delegate, though having become a bookseller he was no longer a union member.
Doherty continued as a publisher to campaign against child labour and for the ‘ten hours bill’ to shorten the industrial working day. In 1832 he published a memoir of Robert Blincoe, a workhouse orphan who was sent to work in the cotton mills, and was said to have inspired Harriet Martineau's A Manchester strike (1832). He helped Frances Trollope with background information for her novel on child factory labour, The life and adventures of Michael Armstrong (1839). From 1828 until 1834 Doherty's series of weekly newspapers, covering factory and parliamentary reform, and co-operative schemes, changed titles regularly and were short-lived, often ‘unstamped’, defying the government tax on political newspapers. His journals were essential tools of his organising as well as his advocacy. Among the last of his campaigning pamphlets was an appeal to Manchester workers to petition parliament for the ten hours bill in 1845. Doherty's extensive publishing history displays his personal commitment to working-class education and activism, which he encouraged in others throughout his work as a trade unionist, editor, bookseller, and publisher.
Doherty married (1821), shortly after he was released from prison, Laura (maiden name unknown), formerly a milliner and probably English; they had four children. Like most working-class families the Dohertys moved home regularly, according to changing employment or financial circumstances. They lived in Ormond St., Port St., in Withy Grove (the premises of the bookshop) in the 1830s, and afterwards in Devonshire St. and finally in New Bridge St. In 1835 his wife barred Doherty from the house. Charged with assaulting her, he counter-claimed against her, and was discharged when she did not give evidence. Doherty died of heart disease on 14 April 1854 at 83 New Bridge St., Manchester, aged 56 years.