Sabotage

Having a November birthday seems to give me licence for a little extravagance during this miserable month. Recently I blipped a glass barometer that I spotted in the window of an antique shop. It was way beyond my price range but while in the shop I fell for another item that wasn't. It was this pair of wooden clogs that had been brought in for sale by someone who'd found them in his old family farmhouse.  Obviously made for female feet, I can just about squeeze in my own size fives but walking even a step was agony. The leather uppers  have become as hard as metal and they are now closer to instruments of torture than the once everyday footwear of  a farmer's wife or a servant girl. I wish I knew who she was.

Clogs like these  were made in vast numbers all over Wales until well into the 20th century, either by local cobblers or by itinerant clogmakers who would set up temporary outdoor workshops in the willow or alder groves that supplied their material.  Sycamore was the wood of choice in this area: a delightful 1933 newspaper report quotes
“When the Lord was travelling in Jerusalem, Zacchaeus, being a small man, climbed up a sycamore tree to see Him passing by.  The Lord beheld him on the tree and told him to come down.  He did so and became a follower, and ever since that day the sycamore tree has been consecrated for the making of clogs.”
The one remaining maker of traditional Welsh clogs Trefor Owen of Criccieth recommends springy ash clogs for the dancers who are his main customers.

Although with their leather uppers these particular wooden shoes don't much resemble the familiar all-wooden clogs or sabots of France and the Low Countries, they share their subversive history  as the putative means by which Luddite or disputatious  workers would sabotage machinery - bring it to a halt by flinging a wooden shoe into the workings.  It's now suggested this derivation is a myth and the term  was invented in the 1890s by the anarchist Émile Pouget, from the French word saboter to clatter around in clogs. By extension, slow and clumsy workers were known as  sabots and their inefficient pace could be adopted to hinder production and put pressure on employers. Sabotage  subsequently  became a military tactic too.
There's more about all this here, and you can find, among other interesting material on the subject, an extract from the radical American feminist and labour leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's book Sabotage: the conscious withdrawal of the workers' industrial efficiency (1916).

Finally (!) anyone who listened to Ed Milliband's selection of Desert Island Discs on Sunday will know that his third choice was Paul Robeson singing Joe Hill, the tribute song to the legendary American labour activist.
Joe Hill wrote the following Rebels' Toast:

If Freedom's road seems rough and hard,
And strewn with rocks and thorns,
Then put your wooden shoes on, pard,
And you won't hurt your corns.
To organize and teach, no doubt,
Is very good, that's true,
But still we can't succeed without
The Good Old Wooden Shoe.