Newsletter
January 2022
John L Halstead Obituary
(1936-2021)
John was a friend, comrade, and colleague on the Committee of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Labour History Society. He worked at Sheffield University where he taught trade union day release courses. John had a great interest in and profound knowledge of Labour History. He played a major role in the Society for the Study of Labour History over many decades as treasurer from 1969, also served for many years as editor of Labour History Review, as chair from 2001, as secretary from 2004, and as vice-president, a role he occupied until his death.
He was a founder and active member for many years of the Huddersfield Local History Society. He contributed to publications of the HLHS on many occasions. John spoke several times to NDLHS on such varied topics as local participants in the Lenin School and the Policies of the post-45 Labour Government and also wrote for the Society Newsletter.
John will be long remembered with respect and affection as a very pleasant and unassuming person who wore his significant scholarship lightly.
Chartism in the New Industrial Village of Carrington
In 1831 Joseph Saunders, aged 22, moved to Carrington from Nottingham, and married Jane Broom from Kirton, Lincolnshire at Basford parish church, St.Leodegarius. Soon they would have three daughters, Eliza (born 1833), Ann (1835) and Elizabeth (1837). He was to find work in one of the new lace factories.
With no room for larger lace factories with steam powered machines in the already overcrowded town, manufacturers looked for sites in the industrial villages outside the town boundaries; Fishers in New Radford, Biddle and Birkins in New Basford, and, from 1831, those of Burton, Sewell and Astill in
Carrington. By 1842 Sewell employed 420, more than any other lace factory in the area other than James Fisher’s factory in New Radford. (S.D.Chapman ‘Industry and Trade 1750 - 1900’ in ‘A Centenary History of Nottingham’ Ed. John Beckett 2006)
Work in the industry was highly gendered, reflected in the Saunders family. Joseph was a lacemaker or ‘twisthand’, minding the lace machines in the factory. Boys would assist men at the machines. Women and girls provided half or more of the workforce. They did finishing, seaming, stitching, embroidering, chevening, or, like Jane, they were laundresses. Most worked from their own homes. Working hours were long (20 hours per day with two sets of workers), conditions were poor (with eyesight damaged, accidents common, lead-poisoning from graphite being used in lubricating machinery) and children were used night and day, resulting in being ‘stunted, sometimes deformed, weak and sickly’ (1843 Parliamentary Inquiry).
Lace workers’pay declined sharply after the 1820s. The Lacemakers Union, set up in 1832, demanded shorter hours and better pay. We don’t know if Saunders joined the union but the events of the 1830s would influence his later political stand as a Chartist.
On 19th March 1834, a meeting of all members of the Bobbin Net Trade, ‘the masters’ and journeymen, met at the Exchange Hall to consider the depressed state of the trade and the problem of over-production (Nottingham Review (NR) 21st March 1834). It was agreed that daily working hours be restricted to sixteen, clashing with the practice of the new factories; ‘the workmen in the factory of Messrs Burton and Sewell, at Carrington, and of Messrs Fisher at Radford, having refused to work longer hours than those proposed, had the doors closed against them and the machinery entirely stopped’. ‘A violent attack had been made upon the premises and the windows demolished. Two men were also arrested and imprisoned for two months for ‘having endeavoured to intimidate the workpeople employed by Mr Astill of Carrington into the regulation of sixteen hours’ (NR 2th March 1834). These attacks were condemned by the machine owners but also the Union representatives, who expressed ‘with extreme regret the unjustifiable outrages which had been perpetuated upon the property of Messrs. Fisher, Burton and Sewell but they were at the same time confident that such Outrage have not been committed by members of the Union’ (NR 28th March 1834). The stand continued for a week and ended as a victory for the large factory owners, who refused to agree to any restriction of working hours. Messrs. Burton refused to re-admit those who were most active in the dispute. In Radford, Messrs. Fisher was also fully back to work ‘with a new set of workmen’ (NR 4th April 1834).
This defeat reflected difficult months in 1834 for trade unionists, with harsh sentences of transportation on the Tolpuddle agricultural workers and the defeat of the long struggle of the Grand Consolidated Union in Derby. News of the Tolpuddle decision reached Nottingham on 28th March 1834 and a large protest meeting took place on the Forest on the following Monday (NR 4th April 1834). Only a few hundred yards from Carrington, lace workers locked out from their factories would have attended. During April the lockout in Derby began to have its effect and members of the Grand National Consolidated Trades’ Union were reported to be returning to work on the masters’ terms.
Through the winters of 1837 and 1838 unemployment was high, affecting Carrington lace workers as well as other trades. The ‘solutions’ offered were charitable donations from the wealthy. A meeting at the Exchange raised £3142 17s. Public works were organised for the ‘idle’, with road building on Red Lane and Mapperley Common, and the dreaded workhouses of the New Poor Law were waiting in the wings (NR 12 May 1837). It was during this time that the Saunders family moved to Middleton Place, Long Row, Lenton, in Radford parish (1841 census). Joseph could have lost his job or been evicted and going to Lenton to look for work. We do know evictions were taking place in Carrington. An ‘Association’ had been set up there ‘for the purpose of protecting poor persons from the impositions of bailiffs’ followers in making distraint for rent’ (NR 22 December 1837).
During the 1840s Joseph had returned to Carrington, still a lace maker and Jane a launderess, living at Burgess Place and then on Club Row, and recorded as a parish officer in 1847/8. He is recorded as a Chartist as were other Carrington lace makers in 1842.
• Daniel Gregory (31 in 1842), working in Carrington by 1841, lived on Union Street, then on Independent Street. Born in Belper, he followed the boom in the lace trade to Loughborough, where he married Abigail (36) from Shepshed, a lace mender. They had their first child there; then to Radford, for their second child, to Nottingham for their third, and fourth born in Carrington in 1842. All would follow into the lace trade in the 1850s, including;
William Anderson (37) lived on Independent Street in 1841 with his wife Ellen (33) and five children (11, 9,7,6,4 and 2). All were born in Nottinghamshire.
• Ambrose Williamson (26), living on Club Row (see photo). He was to be married to Louisa, a lace mender, by 1851 and living on the Market Place. Both were recorded as Chartists.
• Abraham Widdowson with his wife Elizabeth, both 36, and seven children, living at a ‘street with no name’) in Carrington (1841 Census).
All would have been involved in the ‘general strike’ of August 1842 as Carrington factories were reported to be closed on 19th August. These men may have joined those who marched to New Basford. “Here they made a strenuous effort to oust workmen from Messrs Biddle and Birkin’s factory but were prevented by Mr Sherwin, a county magistrate and a detachment of military.” (J.F.Sutton ‘Date Book’, 1880) Carrington Chartists joined the 2000 at the peaceful meeting on Mapperley Hills on the following Monday when Magistrate Rolleston ordered the arrest of 400 by the 2nd Dragoon Guards. Although only 50 were finally committed to trial for ‘unlawful and riotous assembly’ many were sentenced to hard labour for up to 6 months. Carrington Chartists were also among those who welcomed Feargus O’Connor when he came to Nottingham in July 1842. He spoke at Carrington on his way to Arnold and other villages in the county.
Carrington was among the places which donated the largest sums relative to the population to the ‘national rent’ for the National Convention and National Defence Fund, showing strong support as well as better levels of pay. They also played an important part in ‘providing the alternative cultural institutions and activities for working people’ (James Epstein 1982) which ensured Chartism’s future after the defeats and repression of 1842.
Ambrose Williamson and his wife Louisa were members of the Carrington Cooperative Society, and William Anderson acted as their auditor with Benjamin Douse, a fellow lace maker and Chartist. The Society had been registered in1840, growing out of the Chartists’ active promotion of ‘exclusive dealing’ against the middle class ‘shopocrats’ who were not supporting the Charter. The popularity of co-operatives was also rooted in anger at millers and shopkeepers who profited from selling essential goods to the poor and underpaid.
Daniel Gregory attended the Chartist meetings at the New Inn and is recorded as being their Acting Secretary in 1843. He also played this role at a meeting in December 1844 in the Town Hall in Nottingham called to establish an Operatives Hall (Chris Richardson, 2013). Earlier that month the Operatives Hall Society had been set up at a meeting at the New Inn in Carrington. The intention of the Society was to have a large room to meet the needs of ‘the labouring portion of the population’, as its Secretary James Sweet wrote in a letter to the Nottingham Review, as ‘the chapels and other large buildings are closed against them, even when they are willing to pay an extortionate price’. The promoters, with Chartists heavily represented, wanted an elementary day school, a place where children could be taught knowledge of their rights, a library with a reading room, a room for lectures in politics and history and where working people could ‘air their grievances’, all without obliging them to buy alcoholic drinks, and without the ‘ban on politics’ which was a feature of the Mechanics Institutes promoted by the middle class . Gregory was the Acting Secretary for the meeting and was also elected to the committee. Another Carrington Chartist, Abraham Widdowson, spoke but did not join the committee. The committee continued to meet through 1845 but then is no longer heard of.
The Chartist Land Plan would play an important part in holding the movement together, giving it a positive focus, before its short resurgence in 1848. National Chartist leaders Christopher Doyle and Philip McGrath both came to Carrington to promote the Plan in 1843 and 1844 and Carrington Chartists set up the first branch of the Land Company in Nottinghamshire on 6th July 1845. Meetings were chaired by William Anderson and Benjamin Douse. Abraham Widdowson was elected as the branch secretary with James Sweet of Nottingham as treasurer.
Benjamin Douse, a lacemaker, aged 24 in 1847 had moved from Nottingham to Carrington. He was not just an active Chartist in Carrington but also attended meetings of the National Land Company at the Nottingham (No.1) branch meeting at the Seven Stars on Barker Gate. He was nominated as a delegate, with James Sweet, to the National Land Conference at the Company’s estate of Lowbands in Worcestershire on 16th August 1847. Each delegate represented 500 shareholders, with 60 attending to represent 30,000 shareholders across the country. Other shareholders of the Land Company included Ambrose and Louisa Williamson, Joseph Saunders and Daniel Gregory. No one in Carrington was successful in gaining a holding on one of the Company’s estates but the Carrington supporters donated 111 fruit trees and early seed potatoes for the Tawes family at O’Connorville (Terry Fry ‘A History of Carrington’, 1998).
All these men and women had turned to Chartism as a movement offering them hope for the future. They would have attended the great meeting on the Forest in 1848 with hopes that the third petition would bring them victory but they would share the disappointment of defeat.
Postscript
All of Daniel and Abigail Gregory’s children would follow into the lace trade in the 1850s. By 1881 Benjamin Douse was a gardener, living with his wife Sarah on Knox Street. Louisa Williamson would die during the 1850s and by 1861 Ambrose, now living back in Nottingham on Saxon Place in St Mary’s parish, was remarried to Agnes Letherland, also living in Carrington. Eleven years his senior she was a lace pattern setter, with five children. The two daughters were lace menders and one son a lace maker. Several of Abraham Widdowson children had died by 1849, as had his wife Elizabeth. Their eldest son Robert had become a lacemaker by 1851 and was living on Windmill Lane in Sneinton, married to Ann, a glove seamer, with three children. Abraham followed to Sneinton in his final years after having been an agricultural labourer in Basford for some years. Joseph Saunders was still a lacemaker in Carrington in 1851 and 1861. His three daughters followed their parents into the trade. Eliza married a neighbour on Club Row, another lace worker Thomas Bish. As the lace trade lost its dominance in Carrington by the end of the 1870s, Thomas, now a lace machine fitter, moved with his family to the new suburb of St Anns’, living on Marple Street and then Great Alfred Street. Joseph and Jane would follow by 1881.
Roger TannerFascism and Anti-fascism in the UK
- some historical examples and contemporary consequences
Last October the BBC broadcast a four-part dramatisation of Jo Bloom’s 2014 novel Ridley Road. It was set amongst the neo-fascist movement of 1960s England, when the remains of Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and the version of the British National party that would become the National Front, were supplemented by the National Socialist Movement led by Colin Jordan.
The drama was named after the road that housed the headquarters of the coalition of Jewish activists known as the 62 Group who took direct militant action against Jordan’s NSM in particular. Their most famous confrontation was in Trafalgar Square in 1962, when Jordan – protected by the Free Speech Act – held an antisemitic rally during which disturbances broke out. Prominent members of the 62 Group included Harry Bidney, Cyril Paskin, Paul Nathan, and Gerry Gable, some of whom went on to form the influential Association of Jewish ExServicemen and Women (AJEX) as well as the long running anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. Also to be found amongst the 62 Group’s active supporters were Harold Pinter and
Vidal Sassoon.
A Searchlight pamphlet on the 62 Group written by Steve Silver can be downloaded here: https://afaarchive.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/62_group.pdf
The TV adaptation of Ridley Road resulted in an impressive four-part series. It was a well-researched, well written production covering important political events with a decent budget, dramatic scenes and accomplished acting. All in all, excellent Sunday night viewing.
When broadcast it attracted reasonable viewing figures however the reception from sections of the right wing commentariat was particularly interesting:
Allison Pearson of the Telegraph tweeted: ‘Ridley Road would have made a brilliant Carry On farce. The British have always treated fascists as a joke … instead the BBC lends it a seriousness it never deserved. The serious threat in UK to Jews comes from the antisemitic left. Typical BBC to make it look like it was from the right. Misrepresentation of our history as many social historians have pointed out.’
Melanie Phillips wrote in the Times: ‘Making a drama out of BBC group-think. New series implies antisemitism still comes from the right when the bigger threat is from the left.’
Ben Lawrence also from the Telegraph wrote that the series ‘created dangerous false narratives’.
And Spiked online brought all of this together in its own inimitable style with ‘All the fascists in Ridley Road speak like Brexiteers. The allusions to Brexit are not remotely subtle. This Remoaner desire to smear Brexit as fascistic is ahistorical and unhinged.’ Inevitably its dependable band of unthinking supporters faithfully retweeted this characterisation of Ridley Road as ‘a remainer fantasy’.
Well, plenty of raw nerves seem to have been touched here!
So let’s take a step back from representations of the 60s. A longstanding Tory view connected with British exceptionalism, contends that ‘what made 1930s Britain unusual within Europe was how weak fascism was here’.
But is this, in any way, true?
Martin Pugh, author of the history ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ (2013), argues that this view, though commonplace, is dangerously mistaken.
‘At its height, the British Union of Fascists had 40,000 members and the support of more than one newspaper. It’s true that they never won a seat in parliament, but Mosley’s plan wasn’t to seek power by conventional means – the party didn’t even stand candidates in the 1935 election. He expected to be invited into government at a moment of crisis, as had happened to Hitler and Mussolini. To this end, he courted right-wing politicians who were sympathetic to his outlook.’
And again as Rob Hutton has recently pointed out in ‘The Story of Britain’s Forgotten Fascists’ (New European Feb 2019):
‘There was a free exchange of ideas and people between fascist groups and the Conservative Party. For the first months of the war, it still seemed to Mosley that his moment might come, and that military setbacks and the quest for a negotiated peace – a quest that was led by the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and that enjoyed popular support – might propel him to power. And though Mosley’s party never won a seat, it didn’t mean there weren’t fascists in parliament.’
So was fascism in Britain ever a real threat? A recent contribution from Tim Tate – ‘Treason, Treachery and Pro-Nazi Activities by the British Ruling Classes During World War Two’ provides some very useful background detail.
Tate writes as a British documentary film-maker, investigative journalist and author of various non-fiction books. His latest book investigating the criminal activities of pro-Nazi British fascists during World War Two (‘Hitler’s British Traitors’) was published in the UK by Icon Books in 2018.
The paper covered here was based on the extensive and to my knowledge, unique research carried out for his book and was presented at the inaugural conference of the Berkeley Centre for Right Wing Studies, April 2019, it’s free to download at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/99w0p17j The paper presents a wealth of detail and is certainly worth reading in full but here I have, rather brutally, condensed the central evidence down from some 50 pages to just three key events or ‘conspiracies’ as Tate prefers to characterise them.
Event 1 - The Kensington Conspiracy
This involves Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, Conservative MP for Peebles and South Midlothian, antiSemite and fervent fascist. Tate details, exhaustively, his involvement in a new secretive organisation: The Right Club, the aim of which was ‘to co-ordinate the activities of all the patriotic bodies which are striving to free this country from the Jewish domination in the financial, political, philosophical and cultural sphere. The organisations in question are such as the following: British Union, Nordic League, National Socialist League, Imperial Fascists, The Link, Liberty Restoration League and a few others.”
The Right Club’s increasingly detailed plans for an armed coup d’état were interrupted in May 1940 by the arrest of Ramsay’s ‘Chief of Staff’, Anna Wolkoff. In November, Wolkoff and Tyler Kent, a clerk at the US Embassy, were convicted in a closed Official Secrets Act trial at the Old Bailey of stealing top-secret military and government documents and of sending these to Berlin; Wolkoff was jailed for 10 years, Kent for seven.
Ramsay’s wife the Hon. Ismay Lucretia, (daughter of Viscount Gormanston), had been deeply involved in Wolkoff’s actions and MI5 formally asked the Director of Public Prosecutions to charge them both.
The request was not granted: instead, Ramsay was interned in Brixton Prison under Defence Regulation 18b. Here, like his fellow Fascist detainees, he was allowed regular visits from friends and his wife who were allowed to bring their loved ones additional supplies of food and even wine. Ramsay was also permitted to retain his seat in the House of Commons, his annual MP’s salary of £600, and to lodge Parliamentary Questions from his prison cell throughout his internment. When he was finally released, in September 1944, he returned to the House as if nothing untoward had happened. “On the whole,” he wrote to his fellow Fascist Sir Barry Domvile, of The Link, about the attitude of his fellow Conservative MPs, “they have been very nice to me, and some have gone out of their way to be so”.
Event 2 - The Notting Hill Conspiracy
At the same time as the Security Service uncovered Ramsay’s conspiracy, British Government files show that MI5 agents also penetrated a second and apparently well advanced plot for another armed coup d’état by “a subversive organisation intending to establish an authoritarian system of Government” once German troops landed in Britain. Its operations included “illegal printing, a transport section to convey the members in their various activities, an extensive arrangement of accommodation addresses, and various aliases for leading members of the organization”, as well as the acquisition of a substantial armoury of Lee Enfield rifles.
The self-styled ‘Leader’ of this organisation was Dr. Leigh Francis Howell Wynne Sackville de Montmorency Vaughan-Henry, a celebrated musicologist and conductor who had held concert performances for the British Royal Family. To the general public Henry was known for his regular appearances on BBC radio; to the police and to MI5, however, Leigh Vaughan-Henry was better known as a pro-Nazi Fascist and violent anti-Semite. Throughout the 1930s he had been in regular contact with Nazi officials in Germany, had been entertained by Party leaders in Berlin and had made at least one radio broadcast for propaganda chief Josef Goebbels.
MI5 infiltrated its undercover agents into Henry’s group of British Fascists and discovered that it was indeed planning for armed insurrection. The names of Henry’s co-conspirators have never been released, but the reference to General William Edmund Ironside (subsequently ennobled as the 1st Baron Ironside) is significant. Despite being regularly associated with pro-German Fascists - he was the patron of General John Fuller, who was confident enough of his mentor’s support to advise The Link’s Admiral Barry Domvile that “Ironside is with us” – Ironside was at the time Chief of the Imperial General Staff and about to be named as Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces.
On June 10, five days after German troops invaded France, officers from Special Branch and MI5, arrested Henry at his flat in Stanley Crescent, London W11. They seized the membership records for his organisation – finding, amongst other names, that of Archibald Ramsay – they also discovered a receipt for £250,000 worth of Lee Enfield rifles.
Lee Enfield bolt-action, magazine-fed rifles were then the standard arms issued to British infantry. The apparent price of £250,000 – equivalent to £15 million today – would have purchased several thousand weapons along with significant quantities of ammunition.
Henry was detained under regulation 18b and interned for the duration of the war. Given the evidence of his conspiracy, the failure to charge him under the new Treachery Act is puzzling.
There is no official explanation available for the decision to spare him since his MI5 file – which ran to three volumes in the Security Service registry – has never been released. Similarly, the documents found in Henry’s flat, which detailed his coup plot, and the evidence that MI5 discovered concerning his purchase of firearms, are also missing.
Although they are referred to in the Treasury Solicitors’ docket, the papers themselves are absent - making it impossible to assess the breadth of his scheme, or the names of all his co-conspirators. But the surviving records indicate that the plan existed, that it was serious and that it seems to have been well advanced.
Event 3 - The Bedford/Beckett Conspiracy
The third conspiracy, appears to have been the most politically (as opposed to militarily) developed. Like those of Ramsay and Henry, it emerged during the ‘phoney war’ between September 1939 and May 1940. At its head were two prominent public figures, Hastings Russell (Tavistock/Duke of Bedford) and the former Independent Labour MP turned Fascist, John Beckett.
In February 1940 the Marquis of Tavistock chose to ignore wartime prohibitions and made arrangements to travel to Dublin for a meeting with officials of the German Legation. His aim was to negotiate peace terms between Britain and the Third Reich – a draft agreement of which he and Beckett planned to publish in the pages of the Daily Express as a means to ‘bounce’ the British Government into accepting Hitler’s terms.
MI5 got wind of the scheme, the Security Service was in no doubt about the illegality of what both men planned. An (undated) memo noted: “Beckett is fully aware that these negotiations have rendered himself … and the Marquis of Tavistock liable to proceedings for treasonable activities, and Beckett is most anxious that if there is to be a martyr, the martyr should be the Marquis of Tavistock and not himself, in fact he has already prepared for a big press campaign over ‘Tavistock’s martyrdom’.”
However, MI5 appears – at that point – to have been kept somewhat in the dark by its masters in Whitehall; it did not know that Tavistock’s mission had been given semi-official sanction, nor that some of the most senior figures in government were turning a blind eye to treason. Since the outbreak of war anyone seeking to travel outside Britain’s borders needed an official exit permit, stamped by the Foreign Office and which stated the purpose of the journey. There is no indication in Tavistock’s suspiciously heavily-redacted MI5 files that he applied for, or was granted, any such authorisation – although he and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, were clearly in frank correspondence and a subsequent internal Security Service memo suggests that the Foreign Secretary was well aware of the Dublin trip before it happened.
So was Fascism in Britain ever a real threat? Tate draws a very clear conclusion after combining all three of incidents described above:
“Contrary to the conventional history of a country united in opposition to Hitler, right-wing British MPs, Peers and senior figures in the military clandestinely worked – individually and collectively – to hasten a German victory, and to supplant the elected British Government with a pro-Nazi puppet regime. The activities of this ‘Fifth Column’ included espionage, sabotage, unlawful private attempts to broker peace deals between Germany and Britain, sending military and political intelligence to Berlin, and plans to launch armed fascist coups d’état on London’s streets”
It needs to be said that there is perhaps a downside to the salami slicing style of historical exposition offered by Tate here and that is by investigating each salami slice in such exhaustive detail it becomes difficult to fully appreciate some of the common, interconnecting themes running through the toxic sausage taken as a whole? Well possibly, all the key names are undoubtedly there – Ramsay, Domvile, Vaughan-Henry, Ironside, Fuller, Canning, Tavistock, Beckett, but the connections are often implicit and not always totally explicit.
One important reason for this unavoidable opacity, as Tate makes very clear, is down to the continuing withholding of long overdue records:
“The MI5 and Home Office files which have been made public were released to the National Archives more than five decades after the events which they document took place. This delay is inexplicable, and no British Government has ever offered a justification.” The ’50 Year Rule’ was reduced to 30 years in 1967 and abolished altogether by the Freedom of Information Act in 2000, making the delay even more blatant.”
But alongside the unacceptable delay and perhaps with even more significance, has been the extensive and ongoing suppression of certain key documents:
“It is the withholding of a large number of MI5 files on Fascist aristocrats, MPs and army officers from the National Archives which most clearly suggests a continuing suppression of evidence of treason, treachery and pro-Nazi activities by the British ruling classes. The existence of these files is disclosed – including their individual PF registry numbers – in other de-classified material; yet the dossiers themselves remain absent from the official public record.”
This reluctance to provide access to these crucial resources raises important questions for research generally and most particularly for critical, socialist and labour historians. Clearly this particular fight for the historical record continues just as the fight against Fascism in all its contemporary forms remains urgent and real.
Mike HamlinGeorge Julian Harney (1817 – 1897)
The talk by Associate Professor Richard Gaunt * on ‘George Julian Harney – the Man and the Movement’ is part of a commemoration of his speech to a large crowd in Derby in January 1839. Harney has been described as Chartism’s enfant terrible – a young enthusiast, addicted to flaunting the red cap of liberty at public meetings, a revolutionary by sentiment as well as conviction. He steeped himself in the ideas and phrases of the French Revolution, and inscribed ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ upon his banner. He liked to sign himself ‘Ami du Peuple’ or ‘Friend of the People ‘; and The Friend of the People was the name which he gave to two of his ventures into Radical journalism.
Harney was born in February 1817 in Deptford which was then an important maritime centre. As early as the end of the 18th century ship builders in the area had started to organise trade unions and from the 1830’s onwards there was an active Chartist movement. His father died while Harney was still a young boy and he entered naval college aged 11. Three years later he went to sea as a cabin boy visiting Portugal and Brazil but after 6 months at sea he returned to London taking up various jobs ashore. In 1832 he took a job as shop boy with the radical newspaper Poor Man’s Guardian where he served his political apprenticeship under the influence of leading radicals of the day and sold illegal unstamped newspapers.
Harney had been imprisoned three times for selling unstamped newspapers before he was out of his teens and by his early twenties he was a recognised national leader of left wing Chartism. He was sent to Derby from London in early 1836 to sell the unstamped Political Register and with the skill gained from his cat and mouse experiences there managed to evade his pursuers for some months. Living under an assumed
name and aided by local working class radicals he was not arrested until February 1836, when nemesis appeared in the form of a Stamp Officer from London. Charged with selling a newspaper which did not contain the name and address of its printer, he was hauled before a special sitting of the magistrates on the evening of his arrest. Here for the first time Harney appeared from the obscurity that shrouded him and the anonymous hundreds who sold illegal papers. It was only a partial emergence as he refused to give his name. Only through the testimony of a young woman tried the next week for selling the same paper is it plain who the nameless young man was. The trial was reported fully by the two local newspapers and it is apparent he used his dock rostrum effectively, defiantly declaring: ‘These laws were not made by him or his ancestors and therefore he was not bound to obey them’. He declared that knowledge should not be taxed and although he had already been imprisoned for selling these papers he was prepared to go to prison again and his place would be supplied by another person devoted to the cause ... he had no goods to be destrained from him, and if he had, neither his majesty or any of his minions would have them.
Harney was sentenced to a fine of £20 or six months in prison and for the third time in as many years he was behind bars. It is apparent from his remarks that he regarded prison as a duty although that is hardly to say he accepted imprisonment philosophically; after serving his six month sentence, he was released in such a condition that he fainted on the road to London from weakness. His reaction was one of burning resentment: ‘If I ever forgave these scoundrels who caused his misery then ... might he never forgive himself’
He was still only 21 years of age when in January 1839 following a speaking tour of the northern counties he arrived in Derby on 21 January. He had been invited by the newly formed Derby Working Men’s Association in November 1838 as someone who could rouse the town. After addressing a small group on his arrival, Harney and the Association turned to agitating the town. A Derby Chartist described ‘... his reception in Derby, even in hitherto apathetic, degraded, priest ridden Derby has been most enthusiastic’ and that the young firebrand had roused them from a ‘slavish sleep’. A week later on 28th January the mass meeting on Chester Green was held to elect him as a delegate to the first Chartist National Convention. The meeting was reported in depth in the two local newspapers. ‘ ... The members of the Association ... walked in procession ... through the principal streets of the town, accompanied by a very tolerable band of music and a large number of flags, banners ...’ They were joined by Chartists from Belper, and they ‘... assembled in the Market Place and from thence went in procession to Chester Green ... there was ... probably between four and five thousand persons ... the day was bitterly cold’. The authorities, aware of his reputation, enrolled 39 extra special constables for the occasion but there were no disturbances. Harney took up the charge that he was the spokesman for violence saying ‘Again I say we are for peace, but we must have justice ... we must have our rights speedily; peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must’. (A transcript of the speech is available and will be performed on Chester Green on as part of an event to celebrate it next year.)
Harney was elected and, with 70 delegates, took part in the National Convention held on 4th February where he argued successfully for a National Strike (‘A Grand National Holiday’) to take place in August but following his arrest for making seditious speeches in its support and a lack of organisation it was called off. After being held in Warwick Gaol the grand jury at the Birmingham Assizes refused to indict him of sedition or any other charge. Disappointed by the failure of the Grand National Holiday he moved to Ayrshire but he returned to England the next year as the Chartist organiser in Sheffield. During the strikes of 1842 he was one of 58 Chartists arrested and tried at Lancaster in March 1843 but was released without sentence. Harney then took up journalism and from 1843 until 1850 effectively became editor of the Northern Star and subsequently moving its editorial office from Leeds to London. During this period he met and corresponded regularly with Marx and Engels as well as many other international figures in the working class movement. He stood as the Chartist candidate for Tiverton in the General election of 1847 but withdrew his candidature after the hustings. In 1850 he launched the short lived Red Republican newspaper which published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto before ceasing publication and relaunching as The Friend of the People
There were many disputes about strategy between Harney and other Chartists - and with Marx – as support for the Chartist movement began its decline. In 1855 he moved to Jersey, founded another newspaper before moving to the United States in 1863 where he worked as a Civil Service clerk in Boston. He soon began writing articles highly critical of the United States and American institutions. He returned to England in 1878 to work on the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, a radical newspaper. He continued over the next two decades writing his newspaper columns on an astonishing range of subjects and his correspondence with leading figures in the movement across the world.
On his eightieth birthday he received a testimonial fund of £200 which included a very diverse list of subscribers including Joseph Chamberlain and an assortment of lords. A great number of congratulatory messages had come from all over England, as well from such distant points as Paris, Lisbon, Goa, Melbourne and Chicago. In his acceptance speech on this occasion he summed up his attitude towards Chartism: ‘It may be said that the Chartist agitation – which had for its object the reform of Parliaments – was so much energy wasted. I think not. The Chartist influence extended beyond the Six Points, and to it we owe the extirpation of innumerable, some of them abominable, abuses, and a great widening of the bonds of freedom’. Harney died in Richmond, Surrey a few months later.
Harney shares with Ernest Jones the distinction of being the first English Marxist, and the most determined to assert the cause of Chartism in proletarian terms. Of all the Chartist leaders he had the largest and most continuous association with continental revolutionary movements, and the clearest notion of the essentially international character of the working class struggle.
Acknowledgements:
A R Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge; G D H Cole, Chartist Portraits; G Stevenson, Defence or Defiance; R Key. An Assessment of the Chartist Movement in Derby: 1839 – 1842.
The event planned for Saturday 29th January has had to be postponed until later in the year.
Raise Ye Banners
Adrian PerryAshover can hardly be described as a hotbed of trade unionism, so it may come as a surprise to most that this picturesque village can lay claim to a piece of radical history. Here Lynda Straker unravels its 190-year journey.
It stands in the Amber Valley and, with its steeple church, cricket field and annual agricultural show, is seen by many to be the quintessential English village.
Yet few realise its historical significance to the wider trade union movement as, along with its Domesday book entry, 14th century church and Civil War skirmish, Ashover also lays claim to having the oldest surviving miners’ banner in the United Kingdom.
Standing at just over five feet tall and almost as wide, the silk and painted banner proudly proclaims ‘Success to Miners’ and has been painstakingly conserved by experts based at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, where it is now on permanent display.
What you see, though, is a far cry from the item initially loaned and then permanently transferred to them by the Derbyshire Museum Service back in the 1990s. According to Jenny van Enckevort at the museum, it was extremely crumpled, creased and fragile.
“Various splits and tears ran through the unpainted silk and there was considerable loss of paint from the fly edge of the banner.
“The fabric and paint were heavily soiled, with some of the stains attracting insect activity, and there were stitched repairs through the painted areas and silk parts. The silver metal thread fringe was also missing on the upper and fly edges.”
The banner is believed to date from around 1830, with the main image on the front showing a total of six miners in an oval frame beneath a white lion. At the top is the head and upper body of a miner, holding a dial in one hand and a steel-yard (measuring stick) in the other.
Beneath him is a decorated shield, part of which depicts life below ground with one miner wielding a pick and another two shovelling. Either side of the shield are two miners standing, with the figure on the left holding a long hammer and the one on the right wearing an apron and holding a long bar or stemming rod, used to push explosive cartridges into position in man-made cracks and holes.
Unusually the back of the banner is different from the front, with an image which the museum has on its records as Christ. But local mining historians believe it is more likely to be Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners.
It was made for the miners’ White Lion Friendly Society at Ashover which met at the White Lion Inn, now White Lion House, a Grade II listed building in private residence on Butts Road.
Evidence of the property’s past, though, can clearly still be seen in the carved white seated lion above its front door and the metal bracket where the Inn sign used to hang.
Back in the mid to late 1700s Ashover had one of the largest and most productive lead mines in the country, producing more than 1,500 tons a year and employing around 300 people.
The Loyal White Lion Lodge Ashover was instituted on 13 June 1792 and met in the club room (which still stands) at the side of the Inn, with a list of articles to be observed by ‘gentlemen, tradesmen, miners and others.’
Then the 1799 and 1800 Combination Acts made trade unions illegal, and many believe the Lodge may have called itself a ‘friendly society’ to avoid persecution as a trade union.
Later, in 1832, it became affiliated to the Nottinghamshire Ancient Imperial United Order of Oddfellows, often referred to as a death and divide club as its purpose was to pay sickness and death benefits to members and their dependents.
Not long after, lead mining became uneconomical in the face of Spanish competition. But it enjoyed a revival during the war years when, according to JE Williams’ book The Derbyshire Miner, the men at Ashover and Darley Dale were allowed to join the Derbyshire Mining Association - a precursor to the Derbyshire Area of the National Union of Miners - and soon became involved in disputes with their employers.
In Ashover this centred on the employers being opposed to their men joining the Association, arguing that instead they should be member of the National Union of General Workers. According to Williams, there was much unrest among the lead miners for the remainder of the war and in the years immediately following the Armistice in 1918.
But back to the banner. In 2002 the People’s History Museum, supported by Arts Council Designation Challenge Fund monies, started on trying to conserve this very fragile 170 year old piece of material in its textile studio.
This involved cleaning the silk and painted areas, adhering the loose paint fragments, and supporting the banner with a fine transparent layer cast with a conservation grade adhesive. Missing sections were filled by laying coloured silk on the backing board before stitching the banner to the board.
The end result is a single layer of fine plain weave silk with images hand painted on each side in oil-based paints bordered by a silver metal thread fringe.
It is hardly surprising, then, that it took a total of 350 hours of painstaking work, the equivalent of 50 working days patiently carried out over a number of years by museum conservator, Susanne Kristiansen, whose legacy lives on through this and other banners she spent a lifetime preserving for posterity.
Ashover is just one of 400 radical banners housed in the museum, which holds the world’s largest collection. In 1999 staff carried out a national banner survey to create a detailed inventory not only of those in its care but of more than 2,000 others scattered around museums throughout the UK.
Many provide powerful visual messages and were created to mark a specific event, promote a cause or to demonstrate pride in their trade, culminating in huge family-friendly demonstrations, galas or marches.
Chesterfield was among the first to stage such an event when, again according to Williams, on Monday 11 August 1873 around 30,000 miners and their families began arriving in the town by foot and in special trains for “one of the most extraordinary spectacles ever witnessed in Chesterfield.”
The huge procession, where all the Derbyshire Lodges were represented - so we can surmise it included Ashover - set off from the new recreation ground and headed for the Drill Field, holding their banners high and marching to the tune of one of 30 brass bands.
It is a scene that has been repeated in the town many times over the following 147 years, and even though there may not be quite so many bands or marchers these days Chesterfield’s annual People’s May Day Gala still one of the largest celebrations of its kind in the country when trade unions and other organisations gather to publicly celebrate and proudly parade their banners so that families and visitors alike can admire their colour, passion and history.
And maybe with just a thought or two of their heritage and lead mining Ashover forefathers.
Notes
The People’s History Museum (www.phm.org.uk) is situated on the corner of Bridge Street and Water Street in Manchester. Entry is free and the museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am – 4pm. The Ashover banner can be found on the second floor in Main Gallery Two, which also houses the textile conservation studio complete with viewing window so visitors can see skilled conservators at work.
Many thanks to Katy at the PHM and to local residents Stuart Band and Richard Felton for their invaluable help.
Lynda Straker
