Varför kallas (kallades) strejkbrytare för svartfötter?

'Blackleg' dates from the very early 1700s. Eric Partridge gives alternative uses and origins. By 1722 it is certainly being used as a description of a disease affecting the legs of sheep and cattle. Tempting though it is to suggest that the earliest organised wage workers, the wool combers, who were noted for trade union militancy, used the term there is no direct evidence that this was so.

Another version of its origins has it as a gaming term, dating from 1771. According to this view, blacklegs were firstly `turf-swindlers', the name coming from a fashion amongst them for wearing a certain kind of black boot. Another, related possibility is that gamecocks, used in the then very popular `sport' of cock-fighting, were invariably the possessors of black legs.

Yet another version of its origin is supposed to be from the mining industry. The term was certainly used in miners' songs of the 1830's. (See A L Lloyd's "Come All Ye Bold Miners - ballads and songs of the coalfields" [1978] ", published by Lawrence and Wishart, for various examples.) This raises the question of whether it is a word special to the mining industry in origin. For this was the period when the word `blacksheep' was current. It has often been suggested that in the context of the coal industry the word `blacklegs' has a double edge to it. For, in the days before pithead baths, a working miner in a strike situation could easily be found by the simple expedient of lifting his trouser leg to discover his own leg blackened by coal dust! This seems a little fanciful, whilst there is no academic backing for the notion. After all, mining strikes took place in closed communities where there was little chance of discovering a wayward spirit. There could however be some derisory value involved here and the sporting origin - especially of cock fighting - would fit the social milieu of the collier better.

From this account it may be readily seen that no racist intent or connotation is involved in the term `blackleg', arising from the use of the word `black' as a negative force. Nonetheless, modern dislike of the term arises from the method whereby the word `black' is frequently used in this way- as in black arts or witchcraft, black mood, black day, black outlook, etc. etc.