Ship Constructors and Shipwrights Association

  

Badge of the Ship Constructors and Shipwrights Association.

As shipbuilding made the switch from wood to iron and sail to steam, the old established shipwrights’ associations found themselves a minority union behind the United Society of Boilermakers and Iron and Steel Shipbuilders.

Their answer was to federate, and in the decade from 1872 onwards an Associated Society of Shipwrights largely succeeded in bringing together most of the local and specialised societies under a single banner.

But despite growing rapidly in private dockyards and establishing a 48-hour week for its members in 1894, the society proved unable to win recognition in the naval dockyards, where a separate Ship Constructive Association was formed.

Between 1900 and 1910 the Associated Society succeeded in consolidating union organisation further by absorbing local organisations in Newport, Gloucester and on the Wear – and taking over smaller national bodies, including the Ship Constructive Association.

Amalgamated Society of Woodcutting Machinists

Amalgamated Society of Woodcutting Machinists badge.

The Amalgamated Society of Woodcutting Machinists took its name in 1877, having grown out of the Birmingham and District Mill Sawyers and Planing Machine Workers Trade Society.

The Birmingham society had been founded in 1866 by a group of 80 sawyers. By the time it changed its name, it had more than 250 members, and by the end of the century it had grown large enough – partly through absorbing other local societies – to appoint its first full-time secretary.

By the turn of the century the union had changed its name once again, becoming the Amalgamated Society of Mill Sawyers and Woodcutting Machinists. The name would be changed back again within a few years, and after 1919 settled into the form of words shown on the badge pictured here.

In 1971, the society merged with the National Union of Furniture Trade Operatives to form the Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union (FTAT). FTAT itself merged with the GMB in 1993.