Category: Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries Page 1 of 2

“You should come to Newport in November,” urged the lady on the Chartist bookstall at Tolpuddle, “You’ll love it.” In the height of summer, Tolpuddle was putting forth its chocolate-box best: a Dorset village of plump thatched cottages, a riot of flowers in the gardens, tea and cakes served outside the village hall, pints drunk in the pub’s beer garden, and Songs of Praise being recorded in the twelfth century church. Newport, I knew, had been a major port in the nineteenth century for the export of coal from the South Wales Valleys, but the decline of the docks had begun in the 1920s, and whenever I had viewed Newport from the train the river Usk had looked bleak and deserted, brown water flanked by huge, oozing, brown mudbanks.

The Newport I had often seen from the train

This in November, one of the darkest and dampest of months? But the lady on the bookstall was adamant, enticing me with words as seductive as the Sirens’ honeyed song: “Torchlit Procession” and “Chartist Uprising.”

For Tolpuddle and Newport have a radical history in common: Tolpuddle has the agricultural labourers persecuted for attempting to form unions, and Newport has the greatest of the Chartist uprisings seeking political reform. And both host festivals to remember and celebrate those who gave their lives and their freedom to advance democracy.

Chartism rose out of bitter disappointment with the 1832 Reform Act. The latter had adjusted the boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies, removing political corruption in the form of rotten boroughs in the pockets of local aristocrats, and creating new constituencies in the cities of the industrial revolution. A very modest extension of the franchise however still left the right to vote dependent upon a substantial property qualification: only one fifth of adult males could vote and women were specifically barred. The working class had been betrayed by the middle class.

The London Working Men’s Association, and in Wales the Carmarthen WMA, were founded in 1836, and in 1838 the WMA drew up the six points of the Peoples’ Charter: a secret ballot, votes for all men over 21, payment for MPs, equal size constituencies, no property qualification for MPs, and annual parliamentary elections.

Chartism, the first mass movement driven by the working class, flourished as its members sought to implement their goals by constitutional means, believing that representation in Parliament as well as being a democratic right would also furnish them with an agency to alleviate their economic distress. Circulating Chartist papers and periodicals, they held meetings in the East Midlands, the Potteries, the Black Country, Glasgow, the north of England and the valleys of industrial South Wales where Chartism gained widespread support in the iron and coal mining villages. At contested elections Chartists gathered at the hustings where their candidates won by a show of hands but were disqualified from standing in the actual election. In 1839 they took their first national petition, signed by 1.3 million working people, to Parliament. MPs rejected the petition, and Chartists, including the leading orator Henry Vincent, were arrested and imprisoned for making “inflammatory speeches” and using “seditious language.”

Against this background, attitudes hardened and there was rioting. John Frost, a former mayor of Newport, planned the Newport Rising. Sources differ as to whether this was a peaceful protest petitioning for the release of imprisoned Chartists or an armed uprising with the aim of taking the town as the first step towards a nationwide rising. Surely both objectives must have existed in the minds of different men. Of the 10,000 who marched from the valleys of S.E. Wales, some were carrying homemade weapons. They marched through heavy rainstorms during the night of 3^rd November 1839 seeking to converge on Newport from three directions at dawn on the morning of the fourth. The column from the west was led by John Frost, that from Blackwood by Zephaniah Williams and that from Pontypool by William Jones.

In Newport the authorities, informed of the marches by government spies, had already arrested local Chartists, and imprisoned them in the Westgate Hotel. Armed soldiers were also concealed in the hotel. When the first marchers arrived, they surrounded the hotel demanding the release of their comrades. No one knows for certain who fired the first shot, but when the soldiers with their superior arms opened fire, they killed more than twenty men, injuring around fifty. The Chartists were forced to retreat.

Ten of the dead were buried in unmarked graves in the churchyard of St. Woolos parish church, now Newport Cathedral. Two hundred Chartists were arrested and twenty-one charged with high treason. The three leaders were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, the last time this sentence was passed in England and Wales. Nationwide protests and petitions, combined with the fear of uprisings elsewhere – there were attempted risings in Sheffield, the East End of London and Bradford – led to the sentences being commuted to transportation for life.

In November 2018, on the anniversary of the rising, the first Chartist Festival was launched. Newport Rising! celebrates Chartism and seeks to inspire action and engagement in democratic processes to promote positive change, as part of the ongoing struggle for liberty, humanity, and equality. There is music, film, performances, workshops, a Chartist Convention with historical and academic talks, a radical book fair, and… A Torchlit Procession Through The Streets.

And so I went to Newport in November, 185 years after the Chartists marched into town, and it was glorious. On the Saturday evening, following music, fire and speeches in Belle Vue Park, a momentary stillness and quiet witnessed the lighting of the first torches, and, as the flame was passed on, a 2,000 strong procession began to wind around the serpentine paths, pouring out into the streets and down Stow Hill with torches blazing, to the Westgate where more speeches and music culminated in an exuberant, joyful rendering of the Welsh National anthem. The people of Newport did their Chartist ancestors proud.

Two days later, on the anniversary of the original march, primary school children paraded around the town with their hand made Chartist banners, and in the evening a ceremony was held in St. Woolos churchyard where a plaque honours the ten Chartists buried there. Again, there were speeches and readings, in Welsh and English, before everyone laid a flower on the memorial. For those of us unfamiliar with the tradition, the organisers, with the gracious and generous spirit of inclusivity which epitomized the celebrations, had brought extra red roses.

Stone in Saint Woolos churchyard dedicated to the memory of Chartists shot at the Westgate Hotel, Newport

Preparations have been made for the evening ceremony

What Happened to the Chartists after the Newport Rising?

Two more Chartist petitions were presented to Parliament. In 1842 a petition with over three million signatures was again rejected by Parliament. There were riots, strikes, and arrests. In 1848 a mass meeting of Chartists was held on Kennington Common in London, but the government prohibited the planned procession to Parliament to present a third petition. Fearful of demonstrators being killed and wounded if soldiers opened fire, O’Connor cancelled the procession; he and other Chartist leaders walked alone with the petition. This third petition was also rejected.

But the Chartists had sown the seeds of change and by 1918 five of the Charter’s demands had been enabled. The Reform Act of 1867 extended the vote to some working men; the secret ballot was introduced in 1872; payment of MPs came in 1911; and full manhood suffrage at twenty-one, plus a vote for women over thirty and subject to a property qualification, was achieved in 1918.

The three leaders who had been transported from Newport were pardoned in 1856. William Jones remained in Australia where he worked as a watchmaker. Zephaniah Williams remained in Tasmania where he mined coal. John Frost returned from Tasmania but went to live in Stapleton in Bristol where his wife and children had moved. He continued to publish articles about reform until his death in 1877 at the age of ninety-three.

In the 1980s Newport historian Richard Frame learned from Frost’s will that he had requested to be buried in the grave where his son, who had died in 1842, lay in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Horfield, Bristol. Frost had buried his wife, who died only a year after his return, in the same grave. Frame located a badly weathered and partially buried stone bearing the name of Frost’s son, Henry Holman Frost. Newport Council paid for a new headstone of Welsh slate with a granite surround. It bears a quotation taken from a letter which Frost wrote to Lord Tredegar;

“The outward mark of respect

paid to men merely because

they are rich and powerful…

hath no communication

with the heart”

The original headstone is in Newport museum along with other artefacts from the Newport Rising.

New headstone for John Frost, Holy Trinity, Horfield, Bristol

Remains of original headstone with name of John Frost’s son, Henry Holman Frost, just discernable. Newport museum.

Reproduction of wording on original headstone, Newport museum.

And in Newport now?

The Newport Rising Hub is open at 170 Commercial Street, Tuesday-Saturday 10am -4pm

www.newportrising.co.uk

There you will find an exhibition of radical history, leaflets on the Chartist trail, books and other Chartist merchandise, and details of more events in Newport.

William Cobbett and the Great Need for Parliamentary Reform

By Gravedigger

On September 29, 2024

In Politicians, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Writers

Of course I did not have high expectations of the new government. Labour in name only now, the party has moved, save for brief anomalies under Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn, steadily further towards the right since the post war years of the Atlee government. Blair jettisoned the party’s socialist past when he rewrote Clause Four, ending the historic commitment to common ownership of industry, passively accepting the results of Margaret Thatcher’s contemptible sale of shares in privatised utilities. With equal passivity the Starmer government has accepted the results of the 2016 referendum on the EU despite the lies told by the Johnson administration to promote Brexit. There is little sign of any attempt to tackle inequalities of wealth and income, save a half-hearted commitment to end the use of offshore trusts to avoid inheritance tax. Blair lied in Parliament and to the public, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, to justify his decision to invade. The current Labour government has been at best equivocal over Gaza: in an early interview Starmer argued that Israel had the right to cut off necessities of power and water in Gaza. 146 countries recognise the existence of Palestine – Britain is not one of them. 137 member states of the United Nations recognise Palestine – Britain is not one of them. Instead, Britain is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council apart from the USA not to support Palestinian membership of the UN. Starmer was even slow to join countries calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and will not suspend arms exports to Israel. Indeed, arms sales around the world continue to be a pivotal part of the British economy as much under Labour as under Conservatives. In relation to asylum seekers Starmer voices the same “stop the boats” rhetoric as his recent Tory predecessors, only choosing to send them to Albania instead of Rwanda for “processing.” It was not anyone’s enthusiasm which brought this government to power but antagonism to fourteen years of Tory rule, a low turnout, the collapse of the SNP in Scotland, and Farage’s Reform Party taking votes from the Conservatives.

But if all this is enough to drive the iron into anyone’s soul, it is sometimes the relatively trivial which leaves us spluttering with incoherent rage. Having pledged to run a government of high standards, and end cash for access scandals, the Prime Minister, his wife, the deputy prime minister and the chancellor have been accepting freebies from the Labour peer Waheed Ali (appointed a life peer by Blair in 1995). It began with “Passes for Glasses” when Waheed was revealed to have unrestricted access to Downing Street after buying the prime minister £2,485 worth of spectacles. Then followed revelations of £107,145 spent by Waheed on Starmer’s wife’s clothes, £40K on tickets for him to watch the Arsenal football team, and £4k for tickets to a Taylor Swift concert…Starmer declares all this to be perfectly legal since he declared the gifts, albeit belatedly, but even his own MPs have found it morally questionable. Nor did it help when he whined that the security issue meant that he would never be able to go to an Arsenal game again unless he accepted corporate hospitality in a private box. But the utterly risible last word (or probably not) came from Foreign Secretary David Lammy suggesting that the freebie clothes were justified because the Starmers sought to look their best when representing the UK on the world stage.

Anyone incensed by this level of hypocrisy and political idiocy, can do no better than to spend a little time in the empathetic company of the furious, irascible William Cobbett (1763-1835). For no one does splenetic fury like Cobbett, he is never rendered speechless with indignation. Cobbett had little interest in politics beyond England, he was no citizen of the world, but he more than made up for his narrowness of focus with the passion he brought to bear on the question of rural poverty. By the time he published his Rural Rides in 1830 he could not write a paragraph without a vitriolic outburst expressing his utter contempt for those responsible, most notably successive Whig and Tory governments, for the proletarianization of agricultural workers.

William Cobbett did not begin life as a radical. Indeed, as a young man he was conservative to the point of being reactionary, and his later views developed in an idiosyncratic, unsystematic way. The son of a farmer and publican, he received little formal education and began work as a ploughboy before, desiring to see the world, he joined the army and found himself between 1784-1791 in New Brunswick, Canada. He used the time to study English and French grammar. Seeing his senior officers appropriate some of the pay of the common soldiers, he began to question authority, and on his return to England published his first pamphlet exposing their peculations and charging the officers with corruption. In The Soldier’s Friend he described the low pay and harsh treatment of the enlisted men. Then, fearing that he was about to be indicted and imprisoned in retribution, he fled to the USA. And during this period the most unattractive side of Cobbett emerges. He became a rabid British loyalist, an anti-Jacobin critical of Jefferson’s support for the French revolutionary government, a supporter of war against the Franco-American alliance. He denounced democracy and reviled his radical compatriot, Tom Paine. Cobbett was unashamedly xenophobic and bigoted, critical of any country which rivalled Britain, outrageously antisemitic, with a deep-seated loathing of Irishmen and of abolitionists like Wilberforce. When his writing came to the attention of the Tory Prime Minister, William Pitt, he was welcomed back to England, and in 1800 Pitt offered to subsidise his writing as an apologist for the Tory government and a polemicist against radicalism. How then did this monster come to be admired by Karl Marx, Michael Foot, EP Thompson?

Well, he changed: while many people move politically to the right as they grow older, Cobbett moved the other way. At first supporting Pitt, he was nonetheless incorruptible, refusing Pitt’s offer, and publishing his own views in his one-man weekly paper, The Political Register*, produced from 1802 until his death in 1834. And those views became very antiestablishment as Cobbett looked around him at the state of England in the early nineteenth century and saw corruption, cruelty, venality, and injustice. The Register, dubbed Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash by his detractors, a designation which he enthusiastically embraced, became increasingly critical of the war with France, the military, the church, big landowners, rotten boroughs – the “Accursed Hill” as he refers to the notorious rotten borough of Old Sarum – and, the spawn of those rotten boroughs, the Parliament and government at Westminster.

For his pains Cobbett found himself in Newgate prison between 1810-12 after being convicted of sedition. Between 1817-19 he fled to the USA again to avoid a further incarceration as radicals like himself were rounded up. This was a very different Cobbett from the man who had vilified Tom Paine, and when he returned to England, he brought Paine’s bones with him. Paine, once a hero in the USA, had become an outcast on account of his negative views on organised religion. He died in poverty, and his grave had been neglected until Cobbett sought to make amends for the injustice, he had done him. Cobbett wanted to build a mausoleum and memorial for Paine with money raised by public subscription, but Paine’s bones met with the same lack of respect in England as in the USA and the appeal failed. Cobbett kept the bones until his death when they were lost.

Meanwhile Cobbett’s radical beliefs coalesced around the plight of agricultural workers and small farmers. Cobbett loved the rural England he had known in his childhood and youth. He yearned for a golden age when every farmer brewed his own beer and fattened his own hog; when farmers lived, worked, and ate alongside their labourers. But Cobbett was no mere nostalgic dreamer, for alongside his journalism he was a practising farmer. His knowledge of agriculture, crops and soil was encyclopaedic. And between 1821-1826, travelling on horseback round the counties of southern England, he built up a portrait of rural life. He studied the farms, the fields, the crops, the animals, he talked to the farmers and the farm labourers. He visited the markets and fairs. Cobbett published his findings in Rural Rides. He had an emotional link to the countryside and his vivid prose is lyrical and romantic, but it hard hitting too. For Cobbett did not like what he found.

Farm workers had sunk into poverty, their families were starving. Who was to blame? Cobbett was a good hater, a one-man protest movement, and he turned the full force of his anger on those whom he held responsible.

The Enclosures, begun by kings seeking to extend their hunting grounds, and completed following the 1801 General Enclosure Act, which enabled big landowners to enclose land without a Parliamentary Act, left agricultural workers deprived of common lands and grazing. Small farmers could no longer afford to pay their labourers properly.

Then came the “tax-eaters”: after the Napoleonic Wars, Parliament abolished income tax, replacing it with increases in indirect taxes to pay the interest on the national debt. These taxes fell on necessities for which there was an inelastic demand: salt, hops, malt, tobacco, sugar, beer, and tea, shifting the burden of taxation from the middle classes to the poor, with small farmers paying proportionally more tax than higher economic groups and unable now to pay their labourers at all. Their fields were neglected, and crops went ungathered. The decline in production caused higher prices for food. Small farmhouses and labourers’ cottages, whole hamlets, and villages, fell into disrepair. Big “bull-frog” farmers gradually swallowed up the smaller ones. Rapacious landlords evicted tenants. The “bullfrog” farmers, unlike those of old, no longer fed and lodged their workers, for it was cheaper to pay them wages: wages which were inadequate for their basic needs. And such former agricultural labourers who were now unable to find work on the land at all were employed by the parish at stone breaking to build new roads for the benefit of those big farmers and landlords.

Cobbett was not convinced of the need to service the national debt, and he loathed the stockbrokers and jobbers, bankers, financiers, and fundholders, parasites who took everything and produced nothing. Moreover, he noted that taxes were also being used to support the “deadweight”, the “half timers”, army officers on half pay but with no duties, and the standing army which in peace time was used, not against a foreign threat, but against impoverished people seeking redress as at Peterloo:

One single horseman with his horse costs 36s. a week…that is more than the parish allowance to five labourers’ families at five to a family…so the one horseman and his horse cost what would feed twenty five of the distressed creatures… take away the army which is to keep distressed people from committing acts of violence and you have, at once, ample means of removing all the distress and all the danger of acts of violence.

Adding to the “deadweight” were the tax gatherers themselves, the sinecurists with their government jobs, and Anglican parsons. Cobbett did not care for parsons, “sponging clergy”: they took the revenues of their livings, subsidised with tithes and the rent from glebes, but were absentee clergymen, not even living in the parish. Nor did he care for those who issued religious tracts “which would if they could make the labourer content with half starvation.”

And then there were the Corn Laws, restrictions on importing corn and other foodstuffs to protect landowners’ interests, raising the price of bread for an already impoverished population. Potatoes, cheaper than bread under the impact of the Corn Laws, were a particular anathema to Cobbett, as was tea, replacing beer as cottage brewing declined. Potatoes were in Cobbett’s view “debilitating fare” and “soul degrading.” Tea was “a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and a maker of misery for old age.” His own preference was for the traditional three Bs – bread, beer, and bacon, and he would regularly set off on his rides with a bacon sandwich in his coat pocket for breakfast. Frequently the bread and meat would be handed over to a hungry soul whom he met along the way.

The Trespass Act and Game Laws, protecting the hunting rights of landowners, also raised Cobbett’s ire. For they forbade the “poaching” of wild animals, even rabbits, on the landowners’ estates thus depriving the local community of food they desperately needed. Moreover, mantraps were set to catch the “poachers” and punishments included imprisonment and transportation.

Cobbett hated the middlemen too, the dealers and shopkeepers who had replaced the old country fairs and markets, and who produced nothing but added to the cost of living.

He yearned for a return to cottage technology independent of wage labour and the capitalist market which saw the accumulation of capital in ever fewer hands. Big farmers and landlords were “conspirators against labour,” capitalist agriculture had proletarianized the farm workers,

Is a nation made rich by taking the food and clothing from those who create them and giving them to those who do nothing of any use? Why should the people work incessantly when they now raise food and clothing and fuel and every necessity to maintain five times their number?

While the poor creatures that raise the wheat and the barley and the cheese and the mutton and the beef are living upon potatoes, all the good food is conveyed to the tax- eaters in the Wen!

In Cobbett’s view London was a sebaceous cyst, a Great Wen, which along with lesser wens was encroaching onto the countryside, and he detested it.

But above all Cobbett hated the Establishment, “The Thing,” which presided over all this, the political, economic, military and church elites, taking the surplus value of the countryside and manipulating the markets to their own advantage. Misgovernment, the unreformed Parliament was the ultimate source of all evil. In the end he hated the Whigs even more than the Tories because their hypocrisy was the greater.

William Cobbett warned that rural poverty would lead to riots, and he defended agricultural labourers who organised public protests. He endorsed the rick burning and machine breaking of the Swing Riots in the 1830s. For why should the near starving labourers “live on Damned potatoes while the barns are full of corn, the downs covered with sheep, and the yards full of things created by their own labours.”

But whilst fully supportive of direct action, Cobbett worked for Parliamentary reform as the ultimate remedy for economic problems: he advocated the abolition of rotten boroughs and the extension of the franchise, so that radicals could be elected to Parliament where they could raise wages, repeal the Corn Laws, lower taxes, and reverse enclosures.

Following the Great Reform Act 1832, Cobbett was elected to a newly created seat in industrial Oldham. His support for the Reform Bill had been a compromise because it still left his beloved agricultural workers without the vote. In Parliament he sought to represent both his northern constituents and the southern agricultural workers. Sympathetic to the Luddites and deeply appalled by the Peterloo massacre, outraged by conditions in the factories, he nonetheless thought that the best recourse was a return to the land and self-sufficiency within an agricultural economy. And if this sounds a little odd today, we should remember that rural workers in 1835 were still the largest occupational group in England.

Cobbett, along with Hume and Wakley, maintained agitation in Parliament, first for the release and then for the pardon of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. He fought the brutal 1834 Poor Law Amendment which replaced outdoor payments with indoor relief: to save money all financial support for the poor was withdrawn and they were discouraged from seeking any help since their only recourse under the new system was to the workhouse, where children were separated from their parents and wives from their husbands.

But his time in Parliament was short lived; he died in 1835 and was buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Farnham, the Surrey town where he was born. The following year John Russell announced an official pardon for the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The Poor Law system was not officially abolished until 1948.

Located in St. Andrew’s Churchyard, Farnham, Surrey

It may be impossible not to smile at Cobbett’s dyspeptic outbursts against tea, potatoes, and the Great Wen. And he was no revolutionary, he had no problem with hierarchy so long as workers were fed, accommodated, had their fairs, sports, and harvest homes; his belief in noblesse oblige sits a little uncomfortably today. In the words of GDH Cole, “he was a conservative in everything except politics,” but what a magnificently angry, opinionated, choleric thorn in the side of the self-serving establishment he was.

******************

From 1803 Cobbett was also the first person to collect and publish all parliamentary debates in Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates. His printers were Luke Hansard and his son Thomas, who also did work for the House of Commons. In 1812 Cobbett, overwhelmed with fines for seditious behaviour, sold the publication to the Hansards who renamed it. “Hansard” remains the title of the official record of parliamentary proceedings although the family connection ended in 1889.

Memorial to Luke Hansard, Many Years Printer to the House of Commons, St. Giles in the Fields, London

*******************

William Cobbett, Rural Rides, Penguin Classics, 2001. First published 1830.

“We Raise The Watchword Liberty. We Will, We Will, We Will Be Free.”

By Gravedigger

On July 21, 2024

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

Red-Letter Days marked on the calendar commemorate religious and royal anniversaries. They do not resonate with me, but in their stead, I measure the year through secular and socialist festivals. This, the third weekend in July brings the Tolpuddle Festival, celebrating Trades Unionism and remembering the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Rural poverty was endemic in nineteenth century England. Between 1770 and 1830 landowners annexed the common land on which villagers had grazed their animals and the plots where they had grown vegetables. The Enclosures brought wealth to those who owned the land and hardship to those who worked it. The latter became casual labourers, a precarious existence where they were hired and fired by the day or the week with no guarantee of work.Their impoverishment was exacerbated after 1815 when the rural labour market was swamped by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars, enabling employers to keep wages low while raising rents. Alongside this the mechanisation of farming, particularly the advent of the threshing machine, increased unemployment, facilitating further wage cuts, and bringing farm labourers to the brink of starvation. In 1830 wages of only nine shillings a week had left agricultural workers struggling to survive on a diet of tea, bread, and potatoes. Yet year by year these wages were successively reduced to eight shillings, to seven shillings, and in 1834 to six shillings.

In southern and eastern England desperate men organised the Swing Riots, destroying threshing machines, firing hayricks, and damaging property, in a bid to pressure employers into improving wages. But the riots were put down by the militia, and executions, transportation, and prison sentences meted out.

Against this background in 1833 six men gathered under a sycamore tree on the village green in Tolpuddle. George Loveless, James Loveless, James Hammett, Thomas Standfield, John Standfield, and James Brine founded the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, a benefit society and self-help group seeking to improve their conditions and reverse the wage cuts without resort to violence. Already rattled by the Swing Riots and made nervous by the French Revolutions the reaction of their employers, supported by the government, was swift. The six men were arrested on 24th February 1834, tried at the Dorchester Assizes in March, and sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. The Home Secretary, Melbourne, wrote with satisfaction to the king that this would strike a mortal bow at the root of Unions.

There were no legitimate grounds for the trial and punishment. Trade Unions were by this time legal; the Combination Acts had been repealed in 1824. A spurious argument that the men had administered an illegal oath of allegiance as part of their ritual initiation was the basis of the sentence. Part of the preamble to an Act of 1797, which designated the swearing of oaths of allegiance to anyone other than the king as treason, was invoked to establish their guilt. But this Act had been specifically designed to prevent mutiny by sailors press-ganged into the navy. Outside the navy the swearing of oaths remained widespread in societies, charitable organisations, and clubs of all kinds, confirming new members, and establishing contracts where standards of literacy were low. Certainly, the government never questioned this practice when employed by Free Masons or the Orange Order.

At the end of their trial George Loveless voiced the men’s defence: “We have injured no man’s reputation, character, person, or property. We were uniting together to preserve ourselves, our wives, and our children, from utter degradation and starvation.”

As they left the court following the conviction Loveless threw a paper into the crowd bearing verses he had composed, The Song of Freedom:

God is our guide! From field from wave,

From plough, from anvil and from loom,

We come, our country’s rights to save,

And speak the tyrant’s faction doom:

We raise the watchword “Liberty”

We will, we will, we will be free!

God is our guide! No swords we draw,

We kindle not war’s battle fires,

By reason, union, justice, law,

We claim the birthright of our sires;

We raise the watchword “Liberty”

We will, we will, we will be free.

In chains the men were transported in hulks to Botany Bay as convict labour for landowners there.

Almost immediately Robert Owen instigated a meeting of the General National Consolidated Trade Union, and a national protest attended by 200,000 people was organised in London. Melbourne responded by turning out the Lifeguards, Household Troops, detachments of the 12^th and 17^th Lancers, two troops of the second dragoons, eight battalions of infantry, twenty-nine pieces of ordnance and cannon, and 5,000 special constables. He found no excuse to use them as the peaceful march proceeded in absolute silence from King’s Cross to Whitehall, to the Elephant and Castle and on to Kennington Common. The marchers presented a petition bearing 800,000 signatures requesting a pardon for the Tolpuddle men. Melbourne refused to accept it. But in Parliament William Cobbett and Joseph Hume continued to exert pressure and eventually the new Home Secretary John Russell recognised the force of feeling and persuaded the king that it would be wise to grant a pardon.

After their return to England in 1837 five of the men moved first to farms in Essex where they organised a Chartist association leading the local squirearchy to alert the Home Office to the fact that they were “still dabbling in the dirty waters of radicalism.” Later they emigrated to Canada with their families.

Only James Hammett remained in Tolpuddle where he became a builder’s labourer. As a new agricultural depression swept the country in the 1870s villages like Tolpuddle lost between a quarter and a third of their population as their inhabitants chased work in the industrial Midlands and the North, in Canada and Australia. Men continued to be sacked and evicted if they joined unions. Dying in the Dorchester workhouse in 1891, Hammett was buried in the churchyard of St. John the Evangelist in Tolpuddle. It was stipulated that there should be no speeches at the graveside.

The Trades Union Congress began to organise annual gatherings at Tolpuddle in the 1930s, and in 1934, on the anniversary of the arrests, erected a gravestone carved by Eric Gill and unveiled by George Lansbury. Six memorial cottages and a library were built for retired agricultural workers, the cost born by the unions paying a farthing per member for two years.

Since 1998 the TUC has held a festival alongside the rally, and today thousands gather from Friday to Sunday in the tiny Dorset village. But this is no commercial Glastonbury with extortionate prices and dubious sanitation. Entry fees for Friday and Saturday are deliberately kept low to ensure that the festival is accessible to all, no profit is made, and any deficit is covered by the TUC. Entry on Sunday is free. There is music, of course, but also drama, artists, talks, discussions, lectures, debates, stalls of socialist literature,and rousing speeches from Union leaders and sympathetic MPs. There is beer in the pub and tea and cake in the village hall. In 2015 the first Tolpuddle wedding took place, the couple surrounded by union banners and photographed under the martyrs’ tree. But the high point is always on Sunday afternoon when the unions process along the village street with banners and brass bands, and lay wreaths at the grave of James Hammett remembering the role that he and the other martyrs played in the long struggle for fair wages, freedom of association, justice, and liberty.

James Hammett, Tolpuddle Martyr, Pioneer of Trades Unionism, Champion of Freedom. Born 11 December 1811, Died 21 November 1891

James Hammett’s grave after the wreath laying

Procession of Trade Union Banners at Tolpuddle

Dorset Rail Branch Salutes the Tolpuddle Martyrs

General Municipal Boilermakers and Trades

National Association of Schoolmasters, Union of Women Teachers

Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen

Theodoros Kolokotronis, The Old Man Of Morea

By Gravedigger

On January 7, 2024

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

England, January: looking out at a leaden sky, a vicious wind battering the window, the garden sodden and sulky from weeks of rain, it is hard to believe that six months ago I was hesitating to leave the comfort of an air-conditioned hotel for the sweltering streets of Athens. With the temperatures exceeding 40 degrees, fires lapping at the margins of the city, heat rising from the pavements and trapped between the buildings, and bottled water turning warm in minutes, the prospect was not welcoming. But I knew where to seek refuge, and a short walk took me to the First Cemetery of Athens.

While my fellow tourists slumped, sluggish and irritable, in the cafes of Plaka, waiting for the torrid hours to pass and the Acropolis to reopen, I wandered beneath the pines and cypresses, a world away from the traffic and turmoil of the city. The cemetery opened in 1837, soon after the founding of the modern Greek state. Built with marble from Mount Pendeli, it houses eminent Greeks and foreigners beneath magnificent sculptures. Such is the quality of the work and the prestige of the inhabitants, that it resembles more an open-air sculpture park and museum than a graveyard. Easily rivalling Pere La Chaise and Highgate cemeteries, it has the additional attraction of being less known, and that day I had it to myself, save for the cats stretched languid and lethargic amongst the monuments.

The absence of plans and guides to the cemetery might have been a disadvantage, but I had all day, and find an extra satisfaction in locating my targets unaided. My list of notable internments was long, and I did not encounter every individual I sought, though some, proudly located in prime positions, came easily, and others appeared serendipitously as I meandered along the side paths.

Theodoros Kolokotronis was impossible to miss: a larger-than-life figure, he sits with legs planted firmly apart, hands with splayed fingers resting on his knees, knives and pistols thrust into his belt, gazing out from under bushy eyebrows above a luxuriant moustache. He is every inch a romantic revolutionary. A jumble of Greek flags, flowers, fading wreaths and candles at his feet confirm his status and enduring popularity as the archetypal hero of 1821.

Theodoros Kolokotronis, General in Chief, 1770-1843

Kolokotronis spent his childhood on the Mani Peninsula in the Morea Eyalet, a Peloponnesian province of the Ottoman Empire. He came from a family of klephts, highwaymen, bandits and brigands living in the mountains. Descended from those who had retreated there in the fifteenth century to avoid Ottoman rule, they waged a continuous guerilla war against their oppressors. Unable to control these mountainous areas themselves, the Ottomans employed armatoles, irregular, semi-independent, local soldiers, to enforce their rule. Kolokotronis was one of many who alternated between the roles of klepht and armatole, pragmatically and opportunistically reversing roles and allegiances. Men like him were to form the nucleus of the Greek fighting forces during the War for Independence.

In 1806 when the Ottomans attempted to eliminate the klephts of Morea, Kolokotronis escaped to the Ionian islands where he joined the revolutionary Filiki Eteria (Society of Friends) which coordinated the launching of the Greek War of Independence. In 1821 he returned to the Peloponnese and participated in the liberation of Kalamata under the leadership of Mavromichalis. Already 50 years old, hence the soubriquet The Old Man of Morea, he was appointed to take charge of the Peloponnesian troops, and laid siege to Tripolitsa which fell to the Greeks after five months. In 1822 his guerilla forces routed the Ottomans at the Battle of Dervenakia and went on to take Nafplion, Corinth and Acrocorinth. At Nafplion, in swashbuckling style, he rode his horse up the steep slopes of Palamidi to celebrate his ascendancy, claiming, “Greeks, God has signed our liberty and will not go back on his promise.” His victories, destroying a large part of the Ottoman forces, were instrumental in establishing the revolution.

But between 1823-25 disagreements between central Greece and the Peloponnese precipitated civil wars alongside the War of Independence, and Kolokotronis was imprisoned on Hydra. He was amnestied and restored to his position when Egyptian forces reconquered a large part of the Peloponnese in support of the Ottomans. Nonetheless, with the aid of the large and well organised Egyptian army, the Ottomans took Missolonghi and Athens. Reluctantly, the Greeks called on foreign aid. By the Treaty of London (1827), Russia, France, and Britain, conscious of their own geopolitical interests, called on the Ottoman Empire to grant Greece autonomy. They were ignored. At the subsequent Battle of Navarino Ottoman and Egyptian forces were defeated, but it took two further military interventions before Greece was recognised as an independent state in February 1830.

Kolokotronis died in 1843, the crowds attending his funeral lauding him as a symbol of the Greek War of Independence, and Yannis Makriyannis in his Memoirs hailed the klephts as “the yeast of Liberty.”

And yet, there is little doubt, that as well flamboyant freedom fighters, the klephts were callous thieves, running personal fiefdoms with exhortation, and directing violence as much against the local peasantry as against their Turkish overlords. Motivated during the war not just by national aspirations and patriotism, they also sought economic gain and the expansion of their personal influence in the Peloponnese. Nor can it be forgotten that the fall of Tripolitsa was followed by the massacre and torture of civilians on a scale mirroring the Ottomans’ own atrocities. Mary Shelley however thought the Greeks justified: “Our friends in Greece are getting on famously. All the Morea is subdued, and much treasure was acquired with the capture of Tripolitsa. Some cruelties have ensued. But the oppressor in the end must buy tyranny with blood – such is the law of necessity.”

Two hundred years have passed, so time perhaps to leave Kolokotronis in peace as his epitaph requests:

Softly wayfarer

For here sleeps the old man of the Morea

His slumber do not disturb.

But one last thing: despite the inscription, widespread claims, and the splendid grave, Kolokotronis is not here at all. In 1930 Venizelos authorised the removal of his bones to Tripolis where they were placed in a crypt beneath a memorial to the Heroes of the Revolution of 1821. During the German/Italian occupation of Greece in 1942 Italians desecrated the memorial and scattered the bones. They were rescued by thirteen-year-old George Tsutsanis and his father, and replaced in the crypt which today lies beneath an equestrian statue of Kolokotronis.

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The First Cemetery of Athens is a Box of Delights full of interesting people, and, unlike Kolokotronis, most of them really are there. I recommend a visit if you are in the city, but go equipped with mosquito repellent, the mosquitoes love those trees too. I was forewarned and, slathered in Deet, survived almost unbitten.

Robert Tressell and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

By Gravedigger

On October 1, 2023

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries, Writers

The bus headed north from the centre of the city, and as it reached Walton the lack of investment in this deprived and battered suburb of Liverpool was apparent. Through the dirty windows I watched the shuttered shops and red brick terraces passing by. Walton is mentioned in the Doomsday Book as a town in its own right but by the late nineteenth century it had been swallowed up by the advance of Liverpool. Not quite sure where I was going I got off at the Clock Tower. It is an impressive, if daunting and forbidding structure, built in 1868 as the centre piece of the Union Workhouse. In the twentieth century the workhouse became Walton Hospital. Since the latter was demolished the clock tower building alone remains looming over a new housing estate.

But this was not what I had come to see. I knew that somewhere nearby was the Liverpool Parochial Cemetery, opened in 1851 as the growing population overwhelmed the central churchyards, and that there Robert Tressell was buried.

As I turned down Rawcliffe Road an unexpected delight awaited me, for the cemetery is no longer in use and has been taken over by the Rice Lane City Farm. The graves have been tidied up and the farm, established by the local community 40 years ago, is open to all every day of the year. Small children ran around delighted by the ducks, pigs, sheep, goats, and Ness, the donkey. Scattered groups sat in the weak spring sunshine eating picnic lunches, and Walton suddenly seemed a happier, more cheerful place.

But what of Robert Tressell? The man I was seeking was born in Dublin but emigrated to South Africa where he was employed as a housepainter and sign writer. Following a failed marriage, he returned to England with his daughter Kathleen, and they settled in Hastings where he pursued his trade. He was a founder member of the Hastings branch of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation but is most remembered for writing what has been described as the first working class novel in England: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It was as author of this book that Robert Noonan assumed the pen name Tressell, a word play on the trestle table with which painters work.

Set in 1906, the partly autobiographical novel is a clarion cry for Socialism. It describes a group of painters and decorators employed to restore a house in a world of stagnant wages and soaring profits. The poverty and near starvation in which the workers live, without proper food and clothing for themselves or their children, in cold cheerless homes, a prey to sickness, the workhouse, and early death, contrasts with the wealth and ease which their employers enjoy. Such is the precarious nature of the workers’ existence that a man murders his children rather than see them starve, an incident which Tressell based on a real case.

Owen, the main character, refers ironically to his fellow workers as philanthropists because they hand over the results of their labour to their employer without question, accepting that there is a natural order of rich and poor, of rulers and ruled. They are working class Conservatives, voting in ignorance, relinquishing self-respect and dignity, accepting that they should have only the necessities of existence, that “leisure, books, theatres, pictures, music, holidays, travel, good and beautiful homes, good clothes, good and pleasant food” are not “for the likes of them.”

Owen tries to explain Socialism to his fellow workers, to make them understand that the pathetic measures, such as smoking in the bosses’ time and minor pilfering, by which they attempt to “get some of their own back,” will change nothing. Revolutionary change, the proper valuing of labour power and the elimination of hereditary wealth is needed, he argues, to alleviate inequalities for good. But even Philpot, a good man who would happily pay another halfpenny on his rates to provide food for hungry school children, cannot countenance the possibility of changing the system.

Sometimes the novel becomes didactic as Owen lectures his fellow workmen on Marxist theory. At other times it is sentimental. But the chapters which portray the men’s home lives, their troubled relationships, their children’s games, their friendships, their weaknesses, the accidents at work, the lure of the public house, and the annual beano, are vivid and real. And with echoes of William Morris, he portrays the frustrated craftsmanship with which the workers seek to express their personalities in lieu of the “scamping,” the cheap, rushed jobs required by their employers to maximise profits.

Tressell hoped that by publishing the novel he might convert his fellow workers and, knowing that he had tuberculosis, provide money for his daughter if he died. But the handwritten manuscript was rejected unread. In 1910 he decided to emigrate to Canada in search of a better life, aiming to send for Kathleen once he was established. Aged forty, he fell ill and died of TB in Liverpool Infirmary while waiting for a ship. Kathleen had neither the money to pay for her father’s funeral nor the means to attend it. Tressell was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

In 1914 Kathleen sold the novel to a publisher; since then it it has never been out of print, and it is frequently credited with helping to win the 1945 election for Labour.

In 1970 the historian Alan O’Toole used cemetery records to locate the grave where Tressell lay with twelve other paupers buried on the same day. Local Socialists and Trade Unionists unveiled a stone in 1977. Made of Swedish granite donated by Swedish Trade Unions, it bears a portrait of Tressell, the names of the twelve others buried with him, and an extract from William Morris’ poem The Day is Coming.

Robert Tressell’s grave surrounded by woodland on the edge of the cemetery,which now houses a city farm

The stone bears the names of twelve others buried on the same day in a paupers’ grave

and an extract from William Morris’ poem *The Day is Coming*

Through squalid life they laboured, in sordid grief they died,

Those sons of a mighty mother, those props of England’s pride.

They are gone; there is none can undo it, nor save our souls from the curse;

But many a million cometh, and shall they be better or worse?

It is we who must answer and hasten, and open wide the door

For the rich man’s hurrying terror, and the slow-foot hope of the poor.

Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Category: Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries Page 1 of 2

Newport Rising! John Frost and the Newport Chartists

William Cobbett and the Great Need for Parliamentary Reform

“We Raise The Watchword Liberty. We Will, We Will, We Will Be Free.”

Theodoros Kolokotronis, The Old Man Of Morea

Robert Tressell and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists