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Need a calculator that works with pounds, shillings and pence?
If you struggle to add, multiply and divide sums of money written in pre-decimal currency, then you are not alone - and you may wish to download the Excel calculator I’ve created for just that...
View ArticleMeet the Bethnal Green Chartist Martyrs
The threat posed by London Chartism in 1848 died not at Kennington Common on 10 April, but over the course of a bloody fortnight at the end of May and beginning of June, in battles fought out largely...
View ArticleGeorge Julian Harney's unfinished column
George Julian Harney spent his final years in Richmond upon Thames, where he lived in a single room surrounded by mementoes and memories that stretched back more than half a century to the high tide of...
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Three Chartist tankards: make mine a quart
'Lot 473. A set of three graduated personalised pewter tankards engraved with the symbol of the Chartists'.A larger version of this and other pictures can be found at the link below.Over the years it...
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The life of Henry Vincent
Henry Vincent was without doubt the great orator of the Chartist movement. An early member of the London Working Men’s Association, he was soon sent off on tour to establish similar bodies across...
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James Bronterre O’Brien at Abney Park Cemetery
The sort-of-annual Bronterre O’Brien Commemoration is back after a bit of a break. It’s taking place at Abney Park Cemetery, where Bronterre is buried, on Sunday 17 September 2023, and the address this...
View ArticleJohn Cleave - Chartist and campaigner for a free press
John Cleave was one of the great names of London radical publishing. His book shop at 1 Shoe Lane, just off Fleet Street, stocked all manner of risky and risqué publications, while Cleave's Weekly...
View ArticleAll about that place: the Newport Rising
I was delighted to be asked to take part in the rolling online festival organised to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Society for One-Place Studies. My ten-minute video looked at the Newport...
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If the Northern Star was a tabloid…
I thought it might be a bit of fun to reimagine the Northern Star as a modern popular newspaper. So I’ve taken the issue of 7 May 1842, which reported the procession and presentation of the second...
View ArticleWhatever happened to Ruffy Ridley?
Ruffy Ridley is one of those mid-ranking Chartist activists who seem to appear in the movement out of nowhere and to disappear comprehensively as it fades. He led the procession taking the 1842...
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Chartist women at a delegate conference, 1841
The Chartist national delegate meeting that assembled in York at the end of August 1841 was not faced with the most difficult of agendas. The sole purpose for which it had been called was to welcome...
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Ruffy Ridley and the Australian gold rush
News of the Australian gold rush did not escape the Chartist movement. Stories of prodigious finds and the enormous wealth to be had reached England soon after gold was discovered in Victoria in July...
View ArticleTen Chartist Lives you may have missed
Chartist Ancestors seems to have taken something of a biographical turn over recent months, and to be honest I am quite pleased with some of the new Chartist Lives now on the website. Here are a few...
View ArticleHow the Northern Star was published
When Joshua Hobson published his Voice of the West Riding in the early 1830s, he is said to have built the wooden frame for the printing press himself. However, the Northern Star was conceived from the...
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Greetings from Abney Park: John Cleave, Henry Vincent, Lucy Vincent and a...
One January day in 1879, a Trowbridge man living in London read about the death of the old Chartist Henry Vincent and ‘resolved to go on the morrow to see his grave’. As he told his local newspaper: ‘I...
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Will the real R.G. Gammage please stand up
When John Saville wrote his introduction to the reissue of Robert Gammage’s History of the Chartist Movement back in 1968, he struggled to pin down the author’s date of birth.R.G. Gammage, from a...
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Chartism Day 2024 - Call for Papers
Plans for Chartism Day 2024 are coming together, with a date set for 7 September, and a venue agreed at the University of Reading. Make sure it’s in your diary.All the details can be found over on the...
View ArticleWilliam Rider - one of the ‘physical force men’
‘I never thought your moral force, your rams horns, or your silver trumpets would level the citadel of corruption,’ declared the West Riding Chartist William Rider in looking back on divisions that had...
View ArticleDid Chartists die before their time?
Some years after Chartism had passed into history, the editor of the Miner’s Advocate rejoiced that despite ‘the havoc death has made among the Reformers of our time, especially among those connected...
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‘The true history of the Chartist movement has yet to be written’
Robert Gammage was a great admirer of the Chartist orator Henry Vincent, describing him in his History of the Chartist Movement (1854) as ‘the young Demosthenes of English Democracy’ It would appear,...
View ArticleIn search of Helen Macfarlane: the elusive ‘shooting star’ of Chartism
Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen Macfarlane, by David Black (BPC Publishers, 2024)On a spring day in 1860, parishioners at the tiny fourteenth-century church at Baddiley, deep in the heart of...
View ArticleThe rise and fall of the tumultuous John Dover
John Dover was a ‘noisy fellow’, a man accustomed to causing trouble on behalf of Norwich’s dominant Whig faction… if they paid him enough. But when Chartism came along, he found a cause where he could...
View ArticleChartists and special constables: the Cumberland magistrates' embarrassing...
In the summer of 1839, as tensions ran high amid rumours of general strikes and armed risings, and the Chartists of Cumberland held threatening moonlit meetings, the mayor of Carlisle and the county’s...
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More names for the Chartist Ancestors databank
I have added another 150 names to the Chartist Ancestors databank. This takes the total to 14,381.Delegates to the first Chartist convention, meeting at the British Coffee House, 4 February 1839.The...
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COURAGE: Luddites-Peterloo-Chartists-Suffragettes
If like me you were a fan of graphic artist Polyp’s graphic novels about Peterloo and Tom Paine, you will be delighted to know that he is currently working on a new project - and it includes...
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