WORK has been under way on next week's column for a few days now, and it is great when readers pick up a throw-away line.

A couple of weeks ago, when discussing the building of Darlington's Covered Market between 1864 and 1867 I noted that building was delayed because of the strikes of 1866. Even Darlington tailors were on strike, I said, and 15 German tailors were shipped in to replace them.

Reader Colin Bainbridge picked up on that because deep in his family tree is a German tailor, Dietrich Nottger, who married at St Cuthbert's on July 18, 1865. Was he somehow connected with the striking shennanigans?

It would appear that there was a national tailors' strike in 1866-67 for seven months, partly about wages and partly about the introduction of mechanisation. In Manchester in August 1866, 700 tailors were locked out and foreign labour was brought in to replace them. The London end of the strike is noted as the first time that Karl Marx and his First International workers' union were involved in a British industrial dispute: he placed adverts in newspapers in France, Belgium and Switzerland urging tailors there not to come to London to takeover jobs. The union claimed that instead tailors from these countries sent monetary donations to London tailors as a gesture of solidarity.

1866 was a notorious year for strikes in many industries, partly because of recession and partly because of mechanisation. Bishop Auckland shoemakers, for instance, were out for most of the year and involved in several interesting incidents with labour brought in from outside.

Darlington tailors were particularly uppity. Outside the Station Hotel in Sept 1866 there was a gathering of up to 30 of them all desperate to get at the German tailors stuck inside with the master tailors. It ended in fisticuffs and the master tailors' leading, a George Stephenson, had his beard badly pulled!

I can't find, though, how the Darlington dispute came to an end. There's a brilliantly dismissive letter in the Darlington and Stockton Times of 15, Sept 1866 from the Master Tailors' secretary saying that no Darlington tailor would ever be taken back on. He wrote that the master tailors have "not only succeeded in getting men (from abroad), but they have got better workmen - such as know now to treat an employer with civility".