1889 London dock strike

It broke out on 14 August 1889, and resulted in victory for the 100,000 strikers when they won their pay claim of sixpence per hour, the so-called "dockers' tanner".

The strike helped to draw attention to the problem of poverty in Victorian Britain and the dockers' cause attracted considerable public sympathy.

The most notable politician to come to the fore during the strike was the Progressive Party London County Councillor John Benn.

As an increasingly prominent local politician, he was invited to stand for Parliament as the Liberal Party candidate for St George Division of Tower Hamlets.

[4] From the Catholic Church's point of view, Cardinal Manning's involvement in the strike, as a mediator trusted by both sides, could be seen as foreshadowing the encyclical Rerum novarum ('Of New Things') issued by Pope Leo XIII two years later, on 15 May 1891.

Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity".)

As retrospectively told by Belloc himself in The Cruise of the Nona (1925), the example of Cardinal Manning influenced him to become a trenchant critic both of unbridled capitalism and of many aspects of socialism.