The actual origin of this initiation ceremony is not certainly known John Tester, who had been a leader of the Bradford Woolcombers in 1825, afterwards turned against the Unions, and published, in the _Leeds Mercury_ of June and July 1834, a series of letters denouncing the Leeds Clothiers’ Union. In these he states that “the mode of initiation was the same as practised for years before by the flannel-weavers of Rochdale, with a party of whom the thing, in the shape it then wore, had at first originated.... A great part of the ceremony, ... particularly the death scene, was taken from the ceremonial of one division of the Oddfellows, ... who were flannel-weavers at Rochdale, in Lancashire; and all that could be well turned from the rules and lectures of one society into the regulations of the others was so turned, with some trifling verbal alterations.” In another letter he says that the writer of the “lecture book” was one Mark Warde. Tester is not implicitly to be believed, but it seems probable that the regalia, doggerel rhymes, and mystic rites of the unions of this time were copied from those of an Oddfellows’ Lodge, with some recollections of Freemasonry. In his _Mutual Thrift_ (1891), the Rev. J. Frome Wilkinson describes (p. 14) the initiation ceremony of the “Patriotic Oddfellows,” a society which merged in the present “Grand United Order of Oddfellows” before the close of the century. The ceremony so described corresponds in many characteristic details with that of the Trades Unions. All the older friendly society “Orders” imposed an oath, and were consequently unlawful. [228] Home Office Papers, December 29, 1832, 40--31. [229] At Birmingham, when the builders’ strike presently extended to that town, the following was the manifesto drawn up for adoption by the Builders’ Union, for presentation to the leading building contractor who had just undertaken to erect the new grammar-school. (No record of its adoption and presentation has been found.) “We, the delegates of the several Lodges of the Building Trades, elected for the purpose of correcting the abuses which have crept into the modes of undertaking and transacting business, do hereby give you notice that you will receive no assistance from the working-men in any of our bodies to enable you to fulfil an engagement which we understand you have entered into with the Governors of the Free Grammar School to erect a new school in New Street, unless you comply with the following conditions: