Notts R eb el s words: Ashley Carter and David Yancy
Peter Wyncoll once described Nottingham as a “banner town, always at or near the front of Reform Movements,” and with good reason. As a city, we can boast an illustrious history of rebellious acts, fighting injustice and righteous activism. In collaboration with the Nottingham Castle Trust’s Voices of Today campaign – which aims to inspire residents to get creative and represent their experiences or perspectives on activism, protest and rebellion – we’ve launched a brand new weekly online series celebrating the very best of Nottingham’s rebels. Here’s a rundown of the events, people and acts of protest we’re including... J eremiah Brandreth
Nipp er R ead
‘The Nottingham Captain’, as he came to be known, was an out-of-work stocking maker who lived in Sutton-in-Ashfield. After getting involved with the Luddite movement – a radical faction who protested industrialisation by destroying textile machinery – Brandreth was one of the leaders of the 1817 Pentrych Rising. With Britain in a deep depression following years of warfare against Napoleon, the ultimately doomed armed uprising intended to take control of Nottingham, creating a new currency and wiping out the National Debt. With the plot foiled by a hidden Government spy, Brandreth was caught, and has the dubious honour of being the last man to be beheaded by axe when he was executed outside Derby Gaol.
Being deemed too short for the Nottingham police force, Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read moved to London to join the Metropolitan Police in 1947 after a spell working at Players cigarette warehouse and serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. Moving his way up the ranks, he gained promotion to Detective Sergeant by 1958, and went on to cement his legacy as one of the most important figures in the history of the British police force. After being involved in the Great Train Robbery investigation, it was his leadership on the Met’s Murder Squad that eventually led to the conviction of The Kray Twins. Sadly, Read died of COVID-19 last month, just one week shy of his 95th birthday.
Alan Sillitoe The impact of a poverty-stricken childhood in 1930s Nottingham clearly made a lasting impression on Sillitoe. The writer would have hated being called a ‘Nottingham rebel’ just as much as he loathed being labelled as one of the so-called ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s. But it’s impossible to overlook the rebellious and anti-establishment sentiments in his work. From Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, his writing captured an authentic rawness of time and place, and a palpable sense of frustrated disillusionment within his anti-heroic leading men.
Lucy Hutchinson Born in 1620, Lucy Hutchinson boasts a pretty impressive CV that includes diarist, combat medic, poet, translator and biographer. Perhaps best known for translating Latin poetry into English (including the first ever full translation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things), she was wife to Colonel John Hutchinson, one of the signatories on King Charles’s death warrant following the Civil War. Her writings paint a vivid picture of Puritan life in Nottingham during the war, which the Hutchinson’s successfully held despite repeated Royalist raids from nearby Newark. Although her work was neither circulated or appreciated during her lifetime (publishing female-penned work was deemed unsuitable) the importance of both Hutchinson’s Civil War accounts and translations were integral to later generations.
Ge orge Africanus The exact details on George John Scipio Africanus’ early life are lost to history, but he was probably born in the early 1760s in a Sierra Leonean village. As a victim of the transatlantic slave trade, George arrived in England in early 1766, before settling in Nottingham as a free man at the age of 21. Together with his wife Esther Shaw, he started an employment agency, operating out of their home in what is now the Lace Market. As Nottingham’s first black entrepreneur, it’s impossible to over-state Afraicanus’ legacy, which is remembered with a blue plaque on his former residence, another on St. Mary’s churchyard railings and a tram named in his honour.
Brian Clough What can you say that hasn’t already been said about Ol’ Big Head? His management career with Forest might be defined by silverware, but his reputation as being outspokenly honest and fearlessly controversial off the field is what makes Brian Clough a rebel. Wildly charismatic and always ready with an opinion, Clough consistently marched to the beat of his own drum, and suffered no fools in the process – just ask the lad who caught a mean right hook from him during a 1989 pitch invasion.
Henry Garnet
The Nottingham R eform Riots
It was the most ambitious assassination attempt in British history, and one whose consequences are still with us today, four centuries later. Celebrated every November, the story of the Gunpowder Plot is well known, and catapulted a certain Guy Fawkes to lasting notoriety – yet despite Fawkes’ enduring infamy, he was far from the only one involved. Much less well remembered is the arrest of a Nottingham local, Henry Garnet, who the authorities executed for playing an instrumental role in the plot’s fruition. But was Garnet truly guilty of involvement, or was he the victim of something darker?
It’s been said that the true history of Nottingham can be defined as a series of social struggles fuelled by the economic distresses of the city’s working class residents, and never was this more evident than with the events following the rejection of the Second Reform Bill in 1831. The failure of the bill – which sought to create a fairer electoral system – saw Nottingham erupt into serious rioting and systematic destruction. Over three days, a mob targeted property owned by prominent reform opponents, sacking Colwick Hall, setting fire to Lowe’s silk mill in Beeston and, on 10 October, surrounding Nottingham Castle and burning it down. 26 men were eventually arrested for the riots, of which eight were found guilty and three were hanged.
Margaret Humphreys It’s hard not to be impressed by the magnitude of what Margaret Humphreys CBE has achieved in her time. The Nottingham-born social worker has dedicated her entire life to bringing attention to the British Government programme of Home Children, the widespread policy of forcibly relocating poor British children to Commonwealth countries. After uncovering the scandal in 1987, she worked tirelessly to bring justice to the surviving victims, which included a landmark apology from then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2010.
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