Robert Pinkerton was just fourteen years of age and his younger brother Allan a mere child of ten when their father, succumbing to the injuries inflicted on him during the riot on Glasgow Green, died - the finale coming "more than a year and a day" after he had been attacked, so that neither his widow nor family could seek any form of compensation.

It was a bleak and terrible time for Isabel and her little brood and Allan, in his published memoirs, makes no bones about the extent of the penury and hardship they suffered. At the outset, Robert, with some assistance from young Allan, carried the main burden of helping William junior to keep the smithy going and like all the Pinkerton family became expert smiths and coopers at a tender age.

The family's plight was such, however, that Isabel had no recourse but to take up her old occupation and return to work in a spinning mill. Allan was taken away from school and was apprenticed to pattern-making at the shop of a man called Neil Murphy, an old friend of his father's. The lad's income, of course, was a matter of pennies and scarcely enough to learn him a crust. Each night the future millionaire waited on the corner of Muirhead Street for his mother to come home from the mill and he later detailed one instance of just how poor they were when he recalled what a tremendous moment it was when his mother arrived carrying a fresh egg.

By this time, the youngster's unruly half-brother James had disappeared and the half-sisters had gone off to get married while John, the full-brother, had emigrated to America. Young William was a much easier person to get along with but even so, relations between Isabel and her two younger sons, Robert and Allan, became extremely close; they felt, indeed knew, that they had only themselves to depend upon against a hard and terrible world.

Luckily, both Isabel's two younger sons showed every sign of possessing that hard and enterprising vigour which had characterised at least one side of the Pinkerton family - a streak which had enabled John and other Pinkertons to make themselves rich men in the canal business. While still only twelve years of age, Allan, for example, decided that pattern-making would, at best, offer him only the dreariest of existences and right off his own bat, gave his father's old friend, Murphy, notice and instead apprenticed himself to a Glasgow cooper called William McCauley. In later life December 26 1837 remained a red-letter day for him; it was on this date that at Richard O'Neill's public house in Glasgow he was admitted a full member of the Coopers of Glasgow and Suburbs Protective Association and received his journeyman's card. He was now able to set up on his own and began tramping around the countryside earning just enough money through making barrels and kegs to keep himself and even have enough to spare to send home to his mother. It was a precarious living and Allan was soon casting about for other ways of adding to his income. Altogether, he spent about a year - from 1837 to 1838 - as a "tramp" cooper before finding more suitable employment with Robert Fergus, a radical printer who had been a friend of old William's.

This was to prove an important turning point in Allan's life and a great deal of it was due to the influence of Robert who by this time had left home to plunge into the world of commerce and business. Following in the footsteps of earlier Pinkertons, Robert went to work on the canals with the intention of learning the contracting side of the business and possibly making a fortune as had his great uncle John. Although the canal-building business had, by now, passed its zenith, the same crews and contractors were at work preparing for the great railway boom of the nineteenth century. Robert was not slow to discover the harsh realities of manual labour which at best provided a man with an income little better than if he had not had one at all.

The old England was changing rapidly and a new economy known to later ages as the Industrial Revolution, was rapidly evolving. In the end, this would provide a standard of living for everyone in Britain beyond their wildest dreams but at the time, the changes brought not only great wealth to the more gifted and enterprising but a hard and penurious life for the great mass of manual toilers suddenly bereft of the traditional work of the fields.

The new network of canals, the rise of mills and factories, the establishment of new towns and villages created havoc with the traditional English countryside and the landowners, in their drive to maximise income and partake of the burgeoning prosperity of Britain were, on occasions, ready to evict tenant farmers which, in turn, meant unemployment for common labourers. At that, of course, many farm workers and tillers voluntarily quit their jobs to enjoy the higher wages available in the new manufacturing enterprises. For some, perhaps the greater proportion, the changes taking place were entirely beneficial (and were, indeed, reflected in the increased number of early marriages and a rapid explosion of Britain's population) but for others, as is inevitable, there was only hardship and despair. Homelessness and unemployment became a severe problem. The unfortunates were interviewed by the Poor Law Guardians and allocated shelter in degrading surroundings. Families were thus split up - men were boarded in one building, their wives in another and their children in a third. As demand for labour in the cotton mills of Lancashire grew in crescendo, the men got work - and homes - in that county, often far from where they had been born.

The attraction was the promise of wages of twelve shillings a week enough in those days for a working man to provide the staple diet of the times of bread and cheese and meat once a week for his family. Unfortunately, such high wages proved illusory and men had to be satisfied in most instances with only nine shillings a week. The housing provided, too, proved worse than adequate and far from the comfortable cottages men had been used to when working on farms. The fact was that as men poured into the newly-industrialised urban areas employers and contractors were quite unable to cope with the housing demand and were forced to run up shelter of a standard which would probably not have been tolerated in less hurried and frenzied times. Many houses were little better than hovels with earthen floors; for beds, families slept on straw bales which in themselves cost half a week's wages. When their children reached the age of seven, they were immediately sent out to work to supplement the family income although in general, they could earn no more than three pence a day. At that, the children were often made to undertake adult work with the result that in certain pursuits, the fathers of families found themselves undercut in wages and thrown out of work.

Although out of this mad scramble for wealth (and Britain rapidly became the richest and most powerful country on earth) the manual toilers of the country were to be raised to a level of subsistence beyond the dreams of a Roman Emperor, the enormous gains then being made and yet to come were not achieved without a great deal of hardship and injustice along the way. Turbulent scenes were common and outright rioting far from rare. The authorities responded with the usual mixture of concession and coercion. A notable example of the latter was when a legilised "murder" took place at Westhoughton in 1812. During a riot by workers demanding increased wages, a mill was set on fire. A nine year old orphan boy was chosen as scapegoat and publicly hanged beside the burnt out mill as "an example to the rats".

The inadequate housing conditions under which most of the newly-industrialised workers had to live was reflected in one of the major demands put forward by the Chartists - "That each man shall have the right to live in a house with a garden of not less than ten rods to grow his food", a demand of such a Utopian nature that even today, a century and a half later and when British workers are enjoying a standard of living once only enjoyed by the aristocratic few, such a condition of existence has yet to be achieved. Yet although the Chartist movement was eventually to peter out, many of the reforms it demanded in the 1830s and 1840s must have sounded reasonable and attainable even then - and certainly, in their generality, sound very far from bizarre today.

Chartism, in essence, was a movement by Britain's working classes to secure a measure of political representation which had long been denied them - and the irony is that those who fought for its stated reforms never lived to enjoy them although in a relatively short period all but one of their demands were approved by Parliament. The movement, of course, began in England but spread rapidly to Scotland where, however, there were such fundamental differences of approach that the movement as a whole became disunited and thus ensured its own destruction.

Chartism had never one clear objective and ideas on representation varied from a franchise based on education alone down to extremists who wanted a vote for everybody over eighteen, "including lunatics". It was a movement which had been boiling up in Britain for almost two hundred years. As late as 1793, outright Republicanism in North Britain had been advocated by the group known to history as the Scottish "political martyrs". More often than not, however, the demands were merely for parliamentary representation - the aim of the Ayrshire disturbances of 1819. To this end, the manual labourers of the country joined forces with the new industrialised middle class who hoped to break the stranglehold of the old aristocracy on the parliamentary processes. It was, after all, the new commercial classes who had largely created the Industrial Revolution (although the influence of the Duke of Bridgewater should never be underrated) and now finding themselves the most important stratum in British society felt with some justice that they had every right to share in government. They argued, too, that only they understood the needs and demands of the manual classes through their partnership in industry. It was in this spirit that manual-class and middle-class agitated together for a Reform Bill, the understanding being that once the middle-class had been admitted to proper Parliamentary representation, then the battle for similar rights for the manual-classes would commence.

This social compact between the two strata was the driving force behind the various mass demonstrations throughout Britain, including Scotland, which preceded the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. The Bill itself admitted large numbers of the middle-class whose "liberal" ideas tended to fade once they themselves had achieved their objectives. The resultant disillusionment of the manual classes expressed itself in class hatred which in itself had a crippling effect upon the course of Chartism.

There were two courses of action open to radicals after the passage of the Reform Bill; they could press ahead with Political agitation or they could take direct industrial action. England chose the latter course - which turned out to be a hopeless battle by the incipient trade unions against authority (the idea of replacing Parliament itself by a Workers' Co-operative was only one of the more lunatic and impracticable schemes put forward). But firm action by Government, a series of reprisals by employers, soon put an end to this style of "warfare". Far from improving the lot of the manual classes, the Chartist agitation resulted in worsening of conditions and even acute hunger in manufacturing areas. A new Poor Law Amendment Act crushed those whose only option to employment was outdoor relief. Chartism fell apart - its paradox being that it sought to remedy economic problems by taking political action, believing that the solution to low wages and insecurity was political power rather than a problem which lay within the laws of economic life itself.

Whatever the reason, when it was realised that there would be no further concessions from Parliament, fresh political agitation began. Prior to the Reform Bill, a network of political clubs had been established, most of which became moribund after the passing of the Reform Act but following the cessation of industrial strife in 1834, fresh associations suddenly sprang to life. What happened was not merely a movement of the manual classes. The artisans of the London Working Men's Association sought a brave new world through the medium of education. The Birmingham Political Union was a middle-class movement aimed at reform of currency and electoral bases. The fight of the lowest strata was led by the fiery Irishman, Feargus O'Connor. In 1838, all these threads were drawn together by William Lovett of the London Working Men's Association when he drafted a "Peoples' Charter". Almost simultaneously, the Birmingham Political Union drew up a National Petition along similar lines. The Six Points which emerged were:

1) Manhood suffrage

2) Vote by ballot

3) Annual Parliaments

4) Abolition of property qualification for MPs

5) Payment of MPs

6) Equal electoral districts

Clubs and associations immediately sprang up all over Britain in pursuit of these aims and soon coalesced into a national movement, a movement strong enough to hold a convention in London dubbed "a Parliament of the Industrious Classes".

Chartism proved most dangerous to the established order in 1839, 1842 and 1848, three periods all coinciding with times of severe unemployment. Scotland suffered from unemployment and distress almost as much as England, yet it never quite plumbed the same depths. This was because between 1830 and 1850, Scotland was undergoing her second Industrial Revolution, the creation of metallurgical industries, a stage which had been almost completed in England. Up till 1830, Scotland's main industries had been textiles, mainly linen and cotton, organised on a factory basis but far from being yet converted to use of power. After 1830, however, cotton manufacturers began to install power and shortly afterwards there was a spate of railway construction to keep up with the opening of new coal mines and the exploitation of minerals. Ship owners were already working with ideas of steam propulsion. All this ferment meant an increasing demand for new machinery and increasing momentum in both the iron and coal industries.

Two important discoveries changed the course of industry; it was soon discovered that the native blackband ironstone, which contained coal as well as lime, could be smelted by the hot blast method which had been developed in 1828 by James Neilson. As a result the Scottish Iron industry grew rapidly and its ability to produce cheap goods gave it a tremendous advantage over its rivals. The result was the burgeoning of new cotton mills in Glasgow and hosiery and woollen factories in Hawick. The invention of steam propulsion and the growing trade with India led to great prosperity in the shipyards and ports. Scotland boomed with the price of goods continually falling and becoming more plentiful and there was work for everybody.

Destitution in the Highlands however, led to a rapidly-increasing flux of population into the towns - a flux initially welcomed as there was plenty of work. But as the supply of labour increased, wages in some industries tended to stay low; coal-mining, in particular, at best offered a meagre living. The advent of Irish manual labourers who had first come to Scotland to work on the farms, also depressed wages in certain trades but on the whole Scottish artisans continued to do well and the Irish, who took care not to compete for jobs but to snap up those which Scottish workers themselves did not want, were not at all resented. Scottish poor law relief was non-existent almost, what funds there were being intended merely to supplement a man's own efforts and in no way to supply enough money to maintain life. So there was no agitation in Scotland over poor law relief. Nor were there concealed subsidies to industry nor were wages kept artificially low so that for artisans, anyway, it was a period of relative prosperity.

The Act of Union had also seen a great improvement in Scottish farming methods, as Scots" farmers imitated English methods; in short, there was an agricultural revolution to match the industrial one. There were no mechanical reapers available at this time but fortunately for Scotland, Ireland could provide a large and mobile workforce - conditions in Ireland itself were so atrocious that the Irish were glad to do the job. Indeed, Irish labourers also built the Crinan, Union and Caledonian canals and as conditions in Ireland grew even worse, more and more settled in Scotland working in spinning, weaving, mining, building and railways.

While the influx of Irish undoubtedly played a major part in assisting Scotland's economy to grow, the sheer numbers involved might easily have led to a disastrous fall in wages for the manual classes. The Irish, however, refused to compete unfairly, despite their plight, and made no attempt to force wages down. Again, the influx of Irish labour, physically big and strong men, meant that Scots were able to pursue the skilled jobs and leave general labouring to the Irish, so that there was never any real conflict of interest in most industries. The possible exception was the mining industry where employers often used Irish labour as strike breakers - but on the whole, the Irish even at an early date showed all those qualities which were later to make them such effective trade unionists. In general, the Irish, who remained a race apart, even to this day, were always determined not to rock the boat and to accept what they could get without demur on the grounds that almost anything was better than what they had left behind in Ireland. They promised to be the most explosive element in Scottish labouring and ought to have been most open to the arguments and agitation of the Chartists yet because of their special position, they tended to remain quiescent and so Scottish Chartism never bore the same militant face that it did in England.

In Glasgow itself there was, of course, a large body of men in favour of physical force but the movement of the manual classes never achieved a unity of purpose in the same way that it did in England.

There were violent outbreaks of course. In 1837, a commercial crisis and panic swept the country and Glasgow's prosperity abruptly nosedived. Prices of all kinds of manufactured goods sank to almost one-half; men were thrown out of work, others had their wages reduced. The reaction of the trade unions was predictable; they called strikes, first among the cotton-spinners in and around Glasgow and then among the colliers and iron-miners of Lanarkshire. As a result over eighty thousand people were let loose on a community already under stress and in a state of almost utter destitution. Bands of a thousand men began marching through the streets and to keep order there was a force of only two hundred and eighty policemen. Indeed, the numbers were so menacing that the police gave up the struggle; the only way to disperse such mobs was by military force. Assaults became common, particularly on "new men", workers who took the place of the men on strike. In July, the violence reached a climax when a "new hand" was shot dead in a Glasgow street.

The employers immediately met and offered a �500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderers. Two informers came forward and disclosed a "plot to assassinate all the new-hands and master-manufacturers in Glasgow, one after another, until the demands of the combined (trade union) workmen were complied with", adding that the new-hand shot dead three days earlier was merely the first victim and that Mr. Arthur, a master-manufacturer was to be the next. A meeting of the committee of the conspirators had been arranged for Saturday July 29 in the Black Boy Tavern, Gallowgate.

On that night, therefore, the Glasgow Sheriff, armed with nothing but a walking stick but accompanied by two military officers, a police captain and twenty constables, descended on the Black Boy and in a room to which access could only be gained by a trap-door, found the committee whom they arrested at once. On the following Monday, the cotton spinners met on Glasgow Green and decided to return to work, the stoppage having lasted three months. The trial of the committee was later held in Edinburgh and all the would-be assassins were sentenced to transportation for seven years.

* * * *

Less than eighteen months later, both Robert and Allan Pinkerton had become heavily involved with the Chartist movement which, from the beginning, was split between those who advocated "physical force" up to and including rebellion and insurrection and those who favoured "moral force" only - political demonstrations, meetings, demands, national petitions to the monarchy and parliament. Robert, who had to make his living in canal work, had less time to spare for this political work than Allan who, as a self-employed cooper, based in Glasgow itself, could more or less arrange his owing [sic] working time-table but it is clear, particularly from a perusal of the Glasgow newspapers of the time, that both brothers for all their quiet and serious mien, were active and militant members. In keeping with Pinkerton family tradition, both men were not easily diverted from an aim or a cause.

Both started out prepared to push hard for the principles of the Peoples' Charter along constitutional lines, but it seems clear that from the outset, in that tradition which never refused a physical fight if one became necessary to secure justice, both were prepared to go as far as was necessary, even to the point of insurrection, to secure an objective in which they both zealously believed.

In the spring of 1839, Allan was appointed by the Glasgow coopers to be their representative to the big Chartist Convention in Birmingham. Amid scenes of wild emotion, a general strike was voted. The "combined men" or trade unions had little practice in such ambitious matters however, and displayed a perhaps understandable incompetence. The strike was badly, even ineptly organised and plans had to be called off. When in July, the House of Commons discussed the demands of the Chartists, they were in no mood to give way to "extreme" demands of such a "wild nature" and refused any such measures. From then on, the advocates of physical force took control.

During the Convention, a secret military Organisation had been formed, directed by a committee of five; its plans for insurrection were completed at a private conference held in the Autumn at Heckmondwike. Its first opportunity to strike occurred when a decision was made to free Henry Vincent, a smooth-tongued Chartist speaker who had been incarcerated in Monmouth Castle at Newport on the Welsh-English border. It was arranged that a military expedition, led by the ex-mayor and Justice of the Peace, John Frost, should attack the castle and release Vincent as the first stage of a movement of violence - the other great centres of potential revolt were in Yorkshire and Lancashire where feelings had been whipped high over the preceding months by a series of torchlight meetings held on the windswept moors. At this time, it should be noted, the Welsh miners were the most dedicated to insurrectionary behaviour, the Scottish Chartists most committed to moral force.

Both Robert and Allan Pinkerton were outstanding exceptions to this rule. Robert's need to earn a living on canal work continued to hamper his work for the movement but young brother Allan, able to exercise his talents in Glasgow and a representative of the coopers of the city, rapidly forged into a leading position; indeed, years later, Allan was to describe himself as the "most ardent" Chartist in Scotland (by which, apparently, he meant the one most determined to see the affair through, even to the point of bloodshed). Robert, however, still as robust and forceful a personality as Allan at this period, was in no mood to be left out of the action and the two brothers were among the delegation from Glasgow who met on the Welsh moors to listen to the impassioned pleas of Frost and the other national leaders for justice and for the establishment of the Convention as an alternative to Parliament.

The attack on Monmouth Castle was to have been in three columns on the night of November 3, 1839, the columns uniting at Risca, six miles from Newport before making the final thrust. The brothers were among the column who marched behind the mounted Frost through a night's downpour and who, the following morning, huddled in sodden fields, listening to more speeches, while they waited vainly for the other two columns to appear. When they finally failed to materialise, Frost raised his collier's pick in the air and announced that his column would attack the Castle on their own.

He had some 3,000 men armed with rifles and mandrils (collier's picks) under his "command" and at his announcement, the men and boys got up from the fields and filled the road, shouting and singing the Chartist song:

May the Rose of England never blow

The Clyde of Scotland never flow,

The harps of Ireland never play,

Until the Chartists gain their day!

The column was ill-equipped for a serious military affray - Allan Pinkerton, for instance, was armed with his cooper's hammer and Robert had only a pick-axe - but the Chartists had the element of surprise in their favour; or so they thought. Indeed, when they reached an eminence above the town, Newport lay quiet and sleeping and apparently an easy prey for this rabble of an "army", most of them sodden, some of them with wet blankets around their shoulders and none of them properly equipped with anything much more than an ancient musket.

A warning to the authorities had, however, already been given and a trap awaited the only vaguely disciplined marchers. The King's 42nd Foot had been summoned by the mayor of Newport from nearby barracks and had taken up concealed positions behind the shuttered windows of the Westgate Hotel which faced on to the main square. Once the insurrectionary "army" had flooded into the square, the redcoats flung open the shutters and without warning, poured a volley of musket fire into their ranks. The Chartists courageously returned the fire despite the surprise and then, emotions still high, charged the soldiers with their mandrils and hammers. They were, of course, hopelessly outclassed and the affray rapidly became a rout with the cobbled square soaked in blood as insurrectionists lay dead and dying.

Suddenly, the Chartists broke and fled. Both Robert and Allan had to flee by the back streets of Newport, with volleys of shots ringing round their ears. In the end, they somehow managed to scramble their way back to Glasgow.

Frost, Jones and Williams, leaders of the "revolt" were rapidly captured and sentenced to death - a decision later reduced to transportation and even that was never carried out. There was, however, a round-up of nearly every other ranking Chartist leader and most were sentenced to terms of imprisonment. Both the Pinkertons appear to have gone "on the run" for a period, Robert, at least, managing to "lose" himself among the canal workers. Both were soon active again in Glasgow, however, as battle joined between those who still favoured physical action to secure the movement's aims as against those who remained committed to moral force.

Robert and Allan, full of the Pinkerton vigour and resolutely single-minded, had lost any faith they had ever had in achieving success through constitutional agitation and were soon committed to the physical force method. Two months earlier, they had joined the Glasgow Universal Suffrage Association of which Allan, as leader of the coopers, was elected a director. At this stage, both were prepared to go along with the idea of moral force but newspaper reports of the time indicate that this was a most reluctant agreement and that they both wanted real action.

The two brothers attempted to defeat a resolution which came before the Association committing the Scottish movement to the idea of the national petition on the grounds that Scotland should not make up its mind independently of England; if the English were prepared for action, then the Scots might be prepared to follow. When the resolution was defeated, Robert and Allan indicated that they were resigning to join the Northern Democratic Association, composed of more militant members of the Suffrage Association. Allan told a meeting of the Suffrage people that "the Democratic Association coming into the field was not intended to divide, but to unite Radicals" and added that its motto would be "We are determined to carry the People's Charter peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must" - an observation which earned him some "hear hear's' but also a hiss.

There can be little doubt but that the two Pinkerton brothers who had been embittered by the poverty they had experienced in their own home and by the misery they had seen all around them in the Gorbals were prepared for violent, even reckless behaviour. They understood with very considerable clarity the evils of the time - that for some life was not just a question of living a paradise on earth but of grinding the faces of the less fortunate, of depriving them not only of rightful liberties and proper justice but of actively forcing them even lower and lower in the subsistence scale.

It is clear that Allan had more time and opportunity to play a prominent part in the Chartist movement than had Robert although both brothers shared the same ideals. Allan, indeed, had become quite prominent in Glasgow radical circles by now and when he wrote a letter to a newspaper attacking the directors of the Suffrage Association, it caused quite a sensation. Clearly ambitious, he was soon in the news again when he invited one of the national Chartist leaders, G. J. Harney, assistant to Feargus O'Connor on the Northern Star, to address a meeting in the Lyceum Theatre in Glasgow. Along with O'Connor, leader of the "physical force" movement (who was opposed by Lovett and Bronterre O'Brien, the latter of whom took the view that the working-class did not have the strength alone to force changes and needed to call in the assistance of the middle-classes) Harney was one of the most picturesque of all the Chartist leaders. Friend of Marx and Engels, he was a born agitator and revolutionary, a street demagogue with a terrific flow of language who would address any crowd in any street at the drop of a hat. Half-deaf and suffering from what was then described as "congenital quinsy", this frail, dedicated radical had been jailed several times in London for his reckless language. Together O'Connor, whose flow of invective, if anything was even more superb than Harney's (O'Connor's manner was thus: "You - I was just coming to you when I was describing the materials of which our spurious aristocracy is composed. You, gentlemen, belong to the big-bellied, little-brained, numskull aristocracy. How dare you hiss me, you contemptible set of platterfaced, amphibious politicians?") and Harney were eventually to dominate the Chartist movement and overthrow O'Brien and the moral force men. This outcome, however, still lay in the future when in February 1840, Harney stood up to address the Lyceum meeting.

The moral force men from the Suffrage Association had turned out in force to give Harney a hot reception and at one stage, the meeting seemed set to degenerate into an undignified brawl. A speaker demanded to know by what right the meeting had been called and on whose authority had Mr. Harney been invited to address them. Allan Pinkerton stood up to reply that Harney had been invited by the Democratic Club, an announcement greeted by cheers and hisses.

Harney was then allowed to continue. As a contemporary newspaper report put it: "Mr. Harney, who is a smart, good-looking little gentleman, and rather showily dressed, was received with cheers, and slight marks of disapprobation. His address occupied upwards of two and a half hours, and abounded with quotations from Byron, Moore and several of our best poets. Mr. H speaks with great fluency and has a very good delivery".

Neither Robert nor Allan ever became front-ranking leaders of the Chartists in Glasgow but for three years following the debacle of Newport, the name Pinkerton figured frequently in newspaper reports of the radical movement and its doings in Scotland. Both remained committed to the physical force ideal and the Pinkerton home over the blacksmith's shop in Muirhead Street became a regular meeting place for radicals of all descriptions. As Robert was forced to spend more and more of his time on canal work, Allan became more and more the focal point of groups from the local factories in Gorbals.

Meantime, the Chartist movement as a whole began to pull itself together and establish some sort of unity of conduct. In 1842, the radicals of Britain formed an organisation called the National Charter Association (from which Chartism gets its name) and rapidly secured the allegiance of a number of trade union branches, eventually promoting a second petition which received the startling number of 3,315,752 signatures. This proved to be Chartism's high-water mark. When the petition was rejected in May that year, the Chartist executive turned a small strike at Ashton in Lancashire into a general strike. Several industrial areas responded and workers went about knocking plugs out of boilers where any resistance was offered (an episode known as the Plug Riots). Unfortunately for the Chartists, the strike spread slowly, mainly due to poor communications. Then O'Connor lost his nerve and declared that the strike was a plot by the anti-Corn Law League. As a result the strike collapsed and from that moment on, Chartism steadily declined.

Sometime during the winter of 1841-42, a series of warrants were issued in Glasgow for men connected with the radical movement. Many leaders quickly slipped away to America while others put themselves on the alert. Robert decided to leave Glasgow altogether, confident that he was unlikely to be found among the canal workers. Like his younger brother, a sturdy, vigorous, young man of medium height, he had no difficulty earning a livelihood by sheer physical hard work. Extraordinarily enough, although both young men knew by now that their liberty was in jeopardy, both, almost simultaneously, fell in love.

Robert fell for Alice Isabella Seddon, affectionately known as Bella, daughter of a canal contractor while back in Glasgow, Allan began paying court to Joan Carfrae, a girl apprentice to a bookbinder in Paisly. Both brothers, like all the Pinkertons, were fond of music and quite coincidentally both fell in love with girl singers. Robert and Bella met at a camp concert while Allan and Joan first set eyes on each other during a concert given in O'Neill's public house to raise funds for striking spinners.

It seems clear that the brothers by now were hoping against hope that they would escape arrest although both had also taken the decision that they, too, would flee to America if necessary rather than go to prison. One of their closest Gorbal friends, Robbie Fergus, who had been active with them in the Chartist movement learned that he was about to be put on the list for arrest and as a result had decided to head for Chicago where he hoped, with the help of other Chartist exiles, to set up a printing business.

Robbie, in fact, had been tipped off by a policeman named Miller who knew both Fergus and the Pinkertons well. Fergus's name was to appear on the list because he had been responsible for printing many of the Glasgow radicals' newsheets.

Warrants for the arrest of Robert and Allan had, in fact, already been issued in London but because of the strong support and sympathy for the radical cause in Glasgow, these warrants had lain neglected in the offices of the Glasgow police. It was only when news came that an officer was being sent up from London to find out why Glasgow had done nothing about a number of warrants that Miller finally disturbed himself. He began flicking through the bundle and came across the names of the two Pinkerton brothers. He thought he knew where to find them and left the office to implement the warrants only to discover that neither Robert nor Allan were at home. He then set off to see Robbie Fergus whom he suspected would know where they were but drew a blank when Fergus denied all knowledge of their whereabouts. Warning Robbie that it was his duty to report where they were as soon as he knew, Miller also revealed that Fergus's own name was shortly to appear on the list - and then cleared off.

News was sent to Robert that his name was on the "wanted" list and that under no circumstances should he return to Glasgow. Allan, however, stayed on in the city "on the run" - that is, staying in the house of a different friend each night; he was to stay like this, in fact, until he arranged to leave for America.

Even while fugitives, both brothers had taken firm decisions affecting their future lives; they had decided to get married before fleeing to the United States.

Early in January 1842, Robert Pinkerton and Alice Isabella Seddon were married and almost immediately set up "home" in a family cart covered with "harding" (jute or hessian) Alice cooking the meals over a camp fire. Apprised of Robert's difficulty and his decision to emigrate, Bella's father, John Seddon of Bolton, readily agreed to a wedding without fuss. The ceremony itself was performed in the "cut" (canal trench) near Wigan on which both Seddon and Robert were then working. The ceremony was carried out by a wandering parson, one of those "missionaries" who paid regular visits to the various "cuts", holding outdoor services and officiating at baptisms and marriages. Such marriages, although perfectly legal, were frequently never registered and it seems that under the special circumstances, this marriage escaped the official records.

Two months later, Allan and Joan Carfrae were married in Glasgow. This marriage too, was celebrated in secrecy but because it took place in the city, it was duly entered in the Glasgow Marriage Register.

By this time, Robert had already sailed for America. Sometime in February, he and his bride, along with Robbie Fergus, learned that a ship coincidentally also called the Isabella, was due to sail for America from the Clyde where she had been undergoing repairs. Fearful of their apprehension by the police if they managed to book their passages, all three stole aboard the ship the night before she was due to sail and hid themselves as stowaways in the steerage section of the craft.

Some six weeks later, on April 9, Allan, Joan Carfrae and Isabel Pinkerton (nee McQueen) sailed aboard the Kent. They too were smuggled aboard, this time with the help of Neil Murphy, for whom Allan had first worked. Allan signed on as a crew member; (he described himself as a cooper, which was certainly fair enough) but was careful to give a false name. His wife and his mother travelled steerage. By contrast, when next he crossed the Atlantic, Allan travelled first-class, a millionaire and a famous man. Robert, alas, never saw the sea again.