Sheffield Outrages

Sheffield's early success in steel production had involved long working hours, in conditions which offered little or no safety protection.

In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Friedrich Engels quotes[1] a local doctor, Dr. Knight, regarding the so-called "Grinder's Asthma" suffered by the Sheffield cutlery workers in the mid 19th century: They usually begin their work in the fourteenth year, and if they have good constitutions, rarely notice any symptoms before the twentieth year.

Their voices become rough and hoarse, they cough loudly, and the sound is as if air were driven through a wooden tube.The city became one of the main centres for trade union organisation and agitation in the United Kingdom.

[citation needed] Social and working conditions in industrial England were not showing any significant improvement and the - as yet unrecognised - trade unions struggled to protect the interests of their members.

In some isolated incidents, workmen even began to use violence to punish employers and also those fellow-workers who would not become union members: the so-called "Sheffield Outrages".