John Gravener Henson, (1785 – 15 November 1852) was a workers' leader from Nottingham, England, and a historian of the framework knitters. E. P. Thompson saw him as one of three outstanding figures in the early English working-class movement.
Early life
Henson was born in Nottingham in 1785, the son of James Henson and Mary, née Gravener. The only hint of his religious sympathies occurs in a brief acknowledgement to the Wesleyan sect in his writings, which might indicate that he was educated at one of the town's Wesleyan Sunday schools.
He was first noticed on 8 October 1808, in the Nottingham Quarter Sessions Records, when as John Gravenor [sic] Henson, he was the subject of a bastardy order for a female child born to Elizabeth Bradwell.
Henson married Martha Farnsworth at St Mary's Church, Nottingham, on 23 December 1813. They are not known to have had any children and she predeceased him in 1850. A contemporary described him as "thick set with a short neck, keen small eyes, and a head very broad at the base, rising angularly to an unusual height".
Workers' leader
Henson was first apprenticed to the stocking frame, and in about 1802 or 1803 became a journeyman and moved into the lace branch of the trade, the only branch of silk and cotton hosiery to prosper during the war years. An 1809 dispute over an agreed standard of measurement as a basis for payment in the lace branch caused the workmen to approach Henson, presumably seeing him as an articulate spokesman. Later he told a Parliamentary Committee, "They compelled me to act, in a good-natured way... they stopped my machine." Led by Henson, the men struck in 1810, but due to weakening exports, the strike collapsed, and he probably spent some time in prison in 1810 as a result of the part he had played.
Rising fear of revolutionary movements was creating conditions unfavourable to understanding between the burgeoning urban working class and employers, on whom a growing number depended for their employment. In 1811 Henson tried unsuccessfully to prosecute four hosiery employers under the Combination Acts, which were intended to cover employers as well as workers, and in 1812, as "Deputy" of The United Committee of Framework Knitters, he made the first of several attempts to obtain parliamentary regulation of the hosiery and lace trades and the organization and cooperation of their workers throughout the country. Because of (or in spite of) these activities, he began to be suspected of being connected in some way with the Luddites or even being Ned Ludd himself. As a result, when the writ of habeas corpus was suspended in England in 1817, he was arrested on a warrant signed by the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth and imprisoned in April for seven months in Coldbath Fields house of correction. The London Courier noted, "This man Henson has long been an object of dread to the well-disposed inhabitants of Nottingham and its neighbourhood, both on account of the leading influence he was thought to have with the Luddites, and his supposed political principles." Even Francis Place, "the radical tailor of Charing Cross", accepted the popular view that Henson was in fact "King Ludd". This confinement in jail, however, gave Henson an alibi for the Pentrich rising on 9 June 1817 and for the weeks preceding the uprising, and he was released in November of that year.
Henson later maintained he had urged the Luddites to form "clubs and combinations" as "an alternative means of securing their ends", and he claimed that his own life had been threatened repeatedly by some of the more desperate Luddites "for counteracting their designs, and for the freedom of language I have used at various times against their practices." Henson later pulled the leg of Francis Place by suggesting to him that Luddism was a put-up job by the government of the day, to give it an excuse for grinding the people under the heel of military despotism. Francis Place solemnly recorded this conspiracy theory as a piece of serious comment.
E. P. Thompson thought that because Gravener Henson was involved in all the workers' activities of the time, he was most likely involved with Luddism, and that the roles of machine-breaker and Parliamentary petitioner were not incompatible. R. A. Church and S. D. Chapman, however, felt that the two roles could not have coexisted, and that Henson stood for the more sophisticated approach of the urban radicals, contrasting it with the cruder behaviour of their rural cousins, and that Nottingham, unlike the countryside around it, was a political environment in which he could identify with the radical leadership of the town, and so had no need to resort to machine-breaking.