Category: Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries Page 1 of 2

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.

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.

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.

One hundred and ten years ago, on the 4^th of June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison suffered a fractured skull following a collision with George V’s horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. She died four days later in a room hung with bunting in the green, white, and purple colours of the suffragette movement.

Emily had studied at Royal Holloway College, London, and St. Hugh’s Oxford where she had gained first class honours, but being female was not allowed to take a degree. In 1906 she had joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). This militant wing of the female suffrage movement had emerged in 1903 after decades of peaceful lobbying by the law-abiding suffragists had failed to obtain voting rights for women. The WSPU embraced direct action, and Emily was at the forefront of this, disrupting political meetings from which women were barred, breaking windows and daubing slogans on the walls of buildings where these meetings were held.

In 1911 suffragettes boycotted the census, reasoning that, “If women don’t count, neither shall they be counted.” Some returned incomplete or “spoilt” forms covered in suffrage slogans. Others avoided being at home on the night of the census and held  outdoor gatherings including a midnight picnic on Wimbledon Common. Emily hid overnight in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster. Ironically when she was discovered she was recorded on the census as a “resident” of the House of Commons. In 1990 the Labour MP Tony Benn mounted a plaque in the cupboard  commemorating  her commitment to feminism and socialism.

But the consequences for the militant suffragettes were severe. They were arrested and faced solitary confinement in prison. When they went on hunger strike protesting the government’s refusal to classify them as political prisoners they were force fed. Rubber tubes inserted into their mouths or nostrils passed through their throats and oesophaguses to transmit liquid food to their stomachs. This painful process resulted in broken teeth, bleeding, vomiting, and the risk of regurgitated food passing into their lungs.

Emily was arrested nine times. She was imprisoned eight times and went on hunger strike seven times. She was force fed forty-nine times. On one occasion  when she barricaded herself in her cell  to avoid this abuse the cell window was broken, and a fire hose turned on her for fifteen minutes. By the time the door was wrenched open her cell was six inches deep in water.

In a further attempt to end the torture of force feeding she threw herself from one of the inside balconies of the prison. She wrote, “The idea on my mind was that one big tragedy may save many others.” She was severely injured but saved from death when she landed on the wire netting instead of the stone staircase. Force feeding continued.

Public disquiet eventually brought the practice to an end. Under the provisions of the The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, commonly known as The Cat and Mouse Act, however the suffragettes were released from prison when hunger began to affect their health, only to be rearrested without trial to serve out their sentences once they had recovered.

On the day of the Epsom Derby, Emily had ducked under the railings and run into the path of the King’s horse. Film footage of the event shows her apparently reaching for the horse’s reins. She had not discussed her plans with anyone and left no note, so we cannot be certain of her intentions. She may have sought to attach the two suffragette banners which she was carrying to the horse’s bridle so that he crossed the line waving the suffragette flag. She may have decided  to throw herself in front of the horse in a suicidal attempt to provide the WSPU with a martyr and to expose the abuses happening in prisons.

There had been the previous suicide attempt in prison, and in The Price of Liberty Manuscript she had written: “To lay down life for friends, that is glorious, selfless, inspiring! But to re-enact the tragedy of the Calvary for generations yet unborn, that is the last and consummate sacrifice of the militant! She will not hesitate even unto this last.” The coroner however rejected the possibility of suicide on the grounds that she carried in her purse a return train ticket to Victoria, was attending a suffrage event that evening, and had a diary full of appointments for the following week.

The press and the establishment ridiculed her actions, but for the WSPU and their supporters she was indeed a martyr. 6,000 women accompanied her coffin to the funeral service at St. George’s, Bloomsbury and 50,000 people lined the route. Afterwards her coffin travelled north to Morpeth in Northumberland where she was buried in the family plot in the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin. Her headstone bears the suffragette watchword “Deeds Not Words.”

Emily’s friend, Mary Leigh (1885-1978 ), visited the grave every year taking with her one of the suffrage flags which Emily had carried on the fatal day. Later she carried the same flag on the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march to Aldermaston in 1958.

Whatever her intentions Emily must have known the risk of stepping into the path of a racehorse moving at full gallop, and there is little doubt that she would willingly have given her life to ensure female suffrage “for generations (then) unborn.”

Female suffrage was not obtained on equal terms with men in Britain until 1928.

When Parliament seems a sordid place and many politicians at best meretricious and out of touch with the electorate, at worst criminal and cruel, remember Emily Wilding Davison died for our right to vote. And if with  heavy hearts we fear that we can only cast our ballots for the lesser evil, we owe it to her at least to do that.

At  Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol a magnificent chattri towers incongrously above the angels, crosses, and obelisks which line the Ceremonial Way. Made from Bath stone but based on a traditional Bengali funeral monument, and much the grandest of the Victorian memorial sculptures, it marks the grave of Raja Ram Mohan Roy.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy, often referred to as The Father of Modern India, was a linguist and philosopher, committed to female rights, education, and religious reform. He was born into the Kulin Brahmin, those Bengali Brahmins designated Kulina or superior. They advocated the prevailing systems of polygamy, dowry, sati, caste rigidity and child marriage. In his childhood he witnessed the burning to death of his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law in a sati ceremony. Mohan Roy championed a social reform Hinduism which opposed all these practices, leading to conflict with the authorities of the day and with his own family. Committed to monotheism, he co-founded the Kolkata Unitarian Society in 1822 and the Brahmo Samaj in 1828, the latter specifically seeking to reform Kulin Brahminism tempering it with Unitarian beliefs.

For Mohan Roy, education was the key to social reform, and he established schools where teachers incorporated western learning into Indian education, believing that modern subjects were vital to prepare young people for success in the world. This integration of eastern and western culture brought further criticism,  as did his emphasis on the particular importance of education for girls.

He travelled widely, learning many languages, and defying the Hindu prohibition on crossing the Kala Pani, the Black Water, or the seas which separate India from foreign lands. Such journeys resulted not only in loss of social respectability but also, it was believed, precluded reincarnation when individuals were cut off from the regenerating waters of the Ganges.

Roy had been instrumental in obtaining a ban on the practice of sati which the British East Indian Company had long condoned to facilitate their own trading and colonial expansion. In 1830 he came to Britain, acting as Ambassador for the Mughal emperor, and successfully pressured the British government  into upholding the ban.

While in Britain the Raja visited his Unitarian friends in Bristol including Lant Carpenter and his daughter Mary. Influenced by her contact with him, Mary was to become a political and social activist campaigning against slavery, for prison reform, female education, and latterly for female suffrage.

Sadly, the Raja was never to leave Bristol,  for in 1833 he died of meningitis while staying at Beech House, the home of Unitarian friends in the suburb of Stapleton. According to Hindu beliefs he should have been cremated  but in the England of 1833 this was still illegal. Non-Christian burials in  Christian graveyards were also prohibited. And so, at a silent service, his friends buried him in the grounds of Beech House.

Ten years later new owners had purchased Beech House. Consequently, William Carr and William Prinsep, businesspeople who had worked in Kolkata, bought a plot in the new cemetery which the Bristol General Cemetery Company had established at Arnos Vale . They  moved Mohan Roy’s coffin to a brick lined vault in an unconsecrated section of the cemetery. The chattri was designed by  Prinsep and funded by Dwarkanath Tagore.

There is a celebration of the life of Raja Ram Mohan Roy  every year at Arnos Vale on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of his death  on 27th September 1833. This year marked  the 250^th anniversary of his birth in 1772. Anyone is welcome at the ceremony and so  I joined members of Brahmo Samaj, Unitarians, a representative of the Indian High Commission, The Lord Mayor of Bristol, staff and volunteers at Arnos Vale, and other members of the public to honour the life and achievements of this remarkable man.

There are other tributes to Mohan Roy in Bristol:

In Bristol Art Gallery, a magnificent portrait of the Raja provides a burst of colourful magnificence dominating a room of Victorian art.

In 1998 the Indian government presented a bronze statue of Raja Ram Mohan Roy to the City of Bristol in celebration of fifty years of Indian Independence. It stands  outside the cathedral on College Green.

There is a plaque on the wall of Beech House in Stapleton.

Next year the ceremony at Arnos Vale will be on 24^th September.

https://arnosvale.org.uk/remembering-the-raja

Arnos Vale Cemetery  closed and fell into neglect in the 1980s. With no room for new burials, the income of the private for-profit company which owned it disappeared. With fewer descendants left to care for graves the cemetery  become overgrown and vandalised. In 1987 the company  proposed to clear away the graves and use the land for commercial development. The Friends of Arnos Vale Cemetery led a successful campaign to save it, and in 2003 Bristol City Council made a compulsory purchase order. Today volunteers have cleared away brambles and overgrown paths, restored monuments, and cleaned graves. They host tours, talks, film, theatrical and musical productions. And they have a great café where in fine weather you can sit outside with the forty-five green acres of the new Eden stretching before you. If you find yourself in Bristol pay them a visit.

https://arnosvale.org.uk