I doubt if the Birmingham manufacturer Richard Tangye ever met a Chartist.   When he arrived in Brum in 1852, the Chartists of the town were meeting at Wild’s Temperance Hotel in Hill Street. Now Tangye didn’t like meetings of any sort & usually managed to wriggle out of them.  He didn’t spend his evenings in Hill Street talking over ‘The Charter and Something More’, but in his lodgings, his only treat being apple pie on Sundays.  Yet Tangye had more in common with the Chartists than he ever knew.  You see,  just like them, he believed that the things that the educated elite enjoyed, the people should also enjoy.  Things like the beautiful artifacts bought in Italy to stock the new art gallery in the town. … things like books … things like Shakespeare’s plays … these were the things that Tangye believed should be made available to the people.  If we were writing a PhD, we’d call this the democratization of culture. Whatever we call it, Tangye believed in it & so did the Chartists.

Richard Tangye made a number of visits to Australia.  He did this because his doctors advised him that the sea air would do him good.  He also went because Australia was an important market for his jacks & pumps.  And, of course, he was keen to see how they were getting on down under with the democratization of their culture.  When he was not flogging his pumps or scoffing baskets of peaches & grapes – he loved fruit, did Tangye – he was inspecting their museums & libraries.  On an earlier visit he had presented a number of items relating to Captain Cook to a museum in Sydney. So, when he returned, he popped in to have a look at them.  They were nowhere to be seen.  Eventually they were found … in a cupboard covered in dust.  A greatly irked Tangye stalked off to the public library.

He hatched a plan.  Back in England he was going to lay his hands on a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio & put it on a boat to Australia.  The librarian, the plan went, would open the package & be stunned by what he found.  First, though, Tangye had to acquire a copy of the First Folio.  He went to Bernard Quaritch, the best-known antiquarian bookseller in the country. Getting a copy of the First Folio wasn’t that difficult … if you had the cash.   Tangye had the cash. He  never revealed how much he coughed up for this copy of the First Folio.  The Sydney Evening News ( 3 November 1884) put the cost £126, but the Northern Territory Times (14 February 1885) estimated that he had paid ‘close upon £500’.  Years later the Sydney Morning Herald (23 April 1923) said that he’d laid out £750.  What Tangye had got for his dosh was an almost perfect copy of the First Folio.  There were just two pages missing, but Quaritch supplied facsimiles of these.

This was going to be a special present for Oz and it needed a special casket made.  Tangye commissioned the Birmingham furniture makers Marris & Norton to do the job.  And what a splendid job they made of it..  The oak came from the Forest of Arden & the casket was beautifully carved in Elizabethan style & lined with blue velvet.  A small silver plaque recorded that this First Folio had been presented by Richard & George Tangye of Birmingham in 1884.  Meanwhile Tangye had been keeping the copy of the First Folio in the safe at the Cornwall Works in Smethwick.  Customers who popped in to see him about an order for his famous hydraulic jacks were also treated to a glimpse of the precious volume.

Tangye’s First Foilio was sent to New South Wales in November 1884.  It arrived in January 1885.  Though there were number of copies of the First Folio in libraries in England, Germany, Italy & South Africa, most copies were in private collections.  Tangye’s generosity really was the democratization of culture, the application of the civic gospel internationally, a First Folio for the people.  Perhaps a few elderly men who had involuntarily made their homes in Australia in the 1840s saw it in Sydney.  There is no harm in thinking they did, is there?

Why not read more about the remarkable Sir Richard Tangye?

Sir Richard Tangye: A Cornish Entrepreneur in Victorian Birmingham by Stephen Roberts is available from Amazon, priced at £4.99.

They keep popping up these Chartists.  Another week, another Chartist.  Another Chartist, another blog post.  It’s not that I think about the Chartists all the time.  I do think about other things.  The new album that is coming from Bob Dylan.  Detective novels.  Shepherd’s pie. Aston Villa.  And Victorian Birmingham quite a lot.  I don’t often meet Chartists in the detective novels that I devour (though I do sometimes … they’re there in M.J. Carter’s The Printer’s Coffin).  But I do meet them when I am researching Victorian Brum.  A lot.  Yes, there were a lot of old men in the last decades of the nineteenth century who were able to proudly look back on their involvement in Brum Chartism.

I came across one such chap recently.  J.S. Manton was his name.  I’d heard of J.S. Manton, the button manufacturer.  But I’d never heard of J.S. Manton the Chartist.  Turns out they were one and the same.  This interesting discovery happened when, in one of the Birmingham newspapers, I came across a short article about J.S. Manton the button maker.  It was based on an autobiography he’d written.  An autobiography that was never published and is now sadly lost.  And there it was: at the age of nineteen Manton had been a Chartist, chaired meetings, signed the great petition, read the Northern Star and all that sort of thing.  He’d been warming up to it for a few years, I learned.  He’d been present at the great meeting on Newhall Hill in 1832 when huge numbers of Brums dressed up and demanded the passing of the Reform Bill.  Young J.S. remained glued to the rad cause.  He was there when the charismatic and much-loved rad preacher George Dawson cut the first sod for his new Church of the Messiah.  Dawson, J.S. recalled, ‘digged furiously.’  A few years later Dawson introduced J.S. to Mazzini in London.

I call him J.S. Manton.  His full name was John Shakespeare Manton.  Shakespeare?  Yep, he loved Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and all that stuff so much that he added Shakespeare to his own name.  The no. 1 fan of Shakespeare amongst the Chartists, surely?  Well actually, no.  He was eclipsed by my old friend Thomas Cooper, who could recite all of Hamlet and made a trip to Stratford just so he could kneel on the poet’s tomb.  Anyway, back to J.S.  He wasn’t short of other people to talk to about the Bard.  For Victorian Brum, you see, loved Shakespeare.  Dawson loved Shakespeare.  Dawson’s best friend Sam Timmins loved Shakespeare even more.  These chaps got together and had long chats once a month in the smoke room of the Hen and Chickens on New Street,  They called themselves Our Shakespeare Club.  ‘Our’ …the Bard was theirs.  And, they also believed – very strongly, as it happens – that he belonged to the people of Birmingham.  So they set up the Shakespeare Memorial Library to collect together everything they could lay their hands on to do with Shakespeare. The 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday in 1864 was marked by dinners across the land.  In Brum it was marked by the establishment of a library  (though these energetic men managed to fit in a dinner, too).  Soon they had got their hands on a First Folio.

This desire to share culture and knowledge was all part of Birmingham’s famous civic gospel.  Lots of men and women joined in.  And now I’m co-authoring a book about them with Andrew Reekes. They’ll also be contributions from Ewan Fernie & Nicola Gauld – who are involved in an ambitious project to revive interest in Brum’s world-famous Shakespeare collection called ‘Everything to Everybody.’  The book will be out next year.  The civic gospel was a Birmingham thing.  But, as John Shakespeare Manton, tells me, it was also a Chartist thing.

In truth I wouldn’t have been surprised to have learned at any point during the last twenty years that the Dictionary of Labour Biography was no more.  It was a project born of the heyday of labour history when there were undergraduate special subjects on the origins of the Labour Party & the General Strike & reprinting Chartist journals was worthwhile.  Those days are gone now.  Yet the DLB survives.  Indeed, 47 years after the first volume, the fifteenth is now with us. Launched all those years ago by John Saville, it is now edited by Keith Gildart & David Howell.

I am not sure what John Saville said he was seeking to achieve at the outset of this project in 1972.   It isn’t difficult to guess, though.  We had the DNB, with its entries on eminent politicians, writers & scientists etc.  A local activist of the SDF or a co-operator from Lancashire had little – well, let’s be honest, no – chance of getting in that.  So giving these people their due was clearly Saville’s motivation.  One of the foundation beliefs of labour history is that recovering the stories of local activists who had as much influence on their communities as national leaders is a vital task.  Editing the DLB cannot be easy.  It is full of minute information, with bibliographies featuring previously unheard-of publications.  The Peculiar Sanctity of the Christian Sabbath (1839) by the Revd. William Hill, the editor of the Northern Star, anybody?  So hats off to Gildart & Howell for having taken on this weighty task.  And we should be grateful too to Palgrave Macmillan who have stood by the DLB since its inception.

I have contributed seven entries about Chartists to the latest volume.  To be honest I am surprised that it has taken so long for William Hill to appear.  But he is now done (& thanks to Malcolm Chase for sending me a copy of his notes from Hill’s forgotten journal the Lifeboat).  Amongst my other contributions are entries on James Arthur & Isaac Jefferson.  Arthur was the owner of a book shop in  Carlisle & a highly principled man: he refused to buy salt all his life because the government derived revenue from its sale & he refused to use his vote until all men had a say in lawmaking.   Jefferson drilled men on the moors near Bradford in 1848 & was forced to go on the run from the authorities.

All the other usual suspects, the trade unionists, the communists, can be found in the latest volume.  There are, for example, extremely interesting essays on Victor Grayson & Monty Johnson.   And soon the DLB will be 50.  Fantastic that.  There should be a party. Let’s hope Gildart & Howell & Macmillan are already saving up for the snacks!

Stroll into a Victorian cemetery and more than likely than not you will find yourself in the company of a Chartist.  There were a lot of these Chartists around in those times, you see.  The funeral of a Chartist in the second quarter of the nineteenth century was not an unusual thing.  These men stayed true to their beliefs, proudly remembering the great Chartist struggle until the end of their days. And they were remembered by those who followed them, Liberals and socialists alike, who made sure they attended these funerals.

Stroll into Lister Lane cemetery in Halifax and you’ll find yourself in the company of a gaggle of Chartists.   That admirable stalwart of the cause Ben Rushton is interred there – his funeral in summer 1853 was the last great display of support for Chartism in the West Riding.  Near him is Kit Shackleton, widely admired for his speeches before Chartist crowds.  And now we know that Thomas Kitchenman is also there.  There is no headstone: his family and friends simply could not afford one.  But he’s there, in grave 4411.

Kitchenman was a determined chap.  His support for radical principles were evident long before the publication of the People’s Charter.  He was a rad back in 1820, causing the ruling elite all sorts of bother.  And he was a Chartist in 1839.  He’s mentioned in the famous Northern Star (21 December 1839).  These local activists were so important in the Chartist campaign – scurrying from one meeting to another, collecting signatures for the petitions and funds to support arrested men, flogging the Star.  Kitchenman believed in the cause so passionately that he was involved in Chartism to the end.  In 1848 he was arrested for organising drilling by working men.

Kitchenman stayed in Halifax for the rest of his life.  His neighbours would have known what he had once been, and respected him for it.  He died on 7 November 1874, aged 83.  There were no obituaries.  But he was interred not far from his old comrades Rushton and Shackleton in Lister Lane cemetery.  This talented and unswerving champion of the rights of the people  would have wanted no more.

Homage to Thomas Kitchenman!

Thanks to Stuart Wilkinson for drawing my attention to the burial place of Kitchenman.  You can find out more about Thomas Kitchenman in John L. Baxter Armed Resistance and Insurrection: The Early Chartist Experience (Our History pamphlet, 1984).

Thomas Cooper was one of the most well-known of the Chartist leaders.  Every Chartist in the land had heard of Thomas.  He was always Thomas.  Never Tom and never, worst of all, Tommy.  “Don’t dare call me, Tommy”, he’d say to his friends.  Thomas, after all, was a chap with a serious purpose in life.  He was going to write a big poem, A Paradise Lost for the Victorian age.  You wouldn’t get a Tommy writing such a poem.  Yes, it had to be Thomas.

Thomas prepared himself with extraordinary commitment for the ambitious task that lay ahead.  He became one of the most remarkable autodidacts of the nineteenth century.  This man could recite by heart the first four books of ‘Paradise Lost’.  Ditto ‘Hamlet’ and masses of other poetry by Shelley, Byron & the rest.  He read every historical and theological text he could get his hands on.  He even taught himself to read French and Latin.  He did all this stuff by getting up at 4am in the morning – and, as he sat at work as a shoemaker during the day, he recited the lines of verse he had learned.  E.P. Thompson once gave me a demonstration about how a chap might cobble shoes and recite poetry at the same time.  A fantastic memory.

But what was Thomas to do with all this knowledge before the time came to write his great poem?  Well, Thomas became a journalist.  He got paid twenty quid and then eventually a ton for writing the Lincoln column for the Stamford Mercury.  Why did Thomas’ pay rise so much?  Because he was very, very good at his job.  Thomas’ column created a real stir in Lincoln each Friday the newspaper appeared.  He was a partisan, spiky and highly lucid journalist.  He drew attention to the interests of the cathedral clergy in playing whist and going to the races.  He lampooned the ultra-Tory MP Colonel Sibthorp … ‘the gallant colonel’ became known as ‘the gallant wearer of moustaches, the buffo of the House of Commons’.  But there was also great sympathy in Thomas’ contributions … alongside  the deaths of prosperous tradesmen in the obituary column, he made sure he recorded the names of those who had not been so lucky in life, the inmates of the workhouses.

Thomas did write his long poem.  He found time whilst in the nick for two years for addressing huge meetings of striking potters.  But The Purgatory of Suicides is a long poem.  944 stanzas.  You might not have the time to read all that.  So how about instead a little book based on Thomas’ journalism?   For an hour or so take your mind off Brexit and find out how Thomas Cooper learned to be a Chartist:

LINCOLN IN 1837 by Stephen Roberts can be ordered from Amazon, priced at £3.99.

The famous Northern Star was published each Saturday, in several editions.  Wherever you lived in Britain, if you called yourself a Chartist, you read, or heard read aloud, this newspaper over the week after its publication.  It was your newspaper, the people’s paper.  And the reports from Chartist centres across the country made you fully aware that this was a national struggle.  What you were doing, others, hundreds of miles away, were also doing.  The reports that appeared in the Star were sent in by local secretaries.  These men, the local leaders who sent in the reports, organised the meetings and the collection of signatures and put up the placards, were vital to the Chartist campaign.  Without them, Chartism would have been nout.

These local organisers were mostly in their twenties or early thirties, energetic, optimistic, defiant.  They had years yet ahead of them. (Most of those who found themselves in the nick seem to have suffered no long-term health issues).  Organising Chartist campaigns gave these working class politicians self-belief and skills that they carried with them into their later lives.  They went on to set up co-operative stores, become councillors, journalists, even preachers.  Abel Hinchcliffe became the editor of the Grimsby Observer and converted a Tory  newspaper ‘into a democratic organ of the most advanced type.’   George Holloway was a councillor in Kidderminster for over forty years; the people called him ‘Honest George’

James Whateley was a prominent member of Arthur O’Neill’s  Chartist Church in Birmingham.  He put in the hard work for the Chartist cause – pasting up posters, distributing handbills, that sort of stuff.  Of course he got nicked, but was not charged.  Whateley never forgot what he had learned as a Chartist.  As a councillor, he called for extended opening hours of polling stations so that working men could vote in the evenings and he campaigned on behalf of postmen who made eight deliveries a day (knocking on each door because most houses did not have letter boxes).  In 1885 he organised a reunion in a Birmingham coffee house of the men who had been Chartists.  (And then he went off to watch Aston Villa – his son Olly was their star striker!)

Charles Clarke was a Chartist lecturer in the West of England.  He travelled and he travelled, he wore out his boots, in advocacy of the Six Points.  Later in life he became a Unitarian minister.  Those speaking skills he had learned as a young Chartist served him well in the pulpit.  He complained that working people were ‘entirely at the mercy of the capitalist’ and he spoke out for improved schooling for working class children.

Abel Hinchcliffe, George Holloway, James Whateley, Charles Clarke and many others … once a Chartist, always a Chartist.

I have written up the stories of eight forgotten Chartists for the next volume of the Dictionary of Labour Biography, but in the meantime …

JAMES WHATELEY AND THE SURVIVAL OF CHARTISM is available from Amazon, priced at £4.99.

Newhall Hill.  It’s a trendy part of Brum these days.  A cool place to live.  Apartments, coffee shops, that sort of thing.  But once it was different, so very different.  Brum, you see, was full of rads in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Troublemakers they were.  Agitators banging on about a say in law making for all the people.  And these unsavory types used to meet on Newhall Hill.  Not to drink lattes but to make outrageous speeches.  How they used to make the Tory sheet Mrs Aris spit blood!  That George Edmunds was a particular nuisance.  Radical opinions came tumbling out of that big mouth of his.  No wonder they called him ‘The Frog.’

On summer’s day in 1819 George was chairing a meeting on Newhall Hill.  50,000 working people were there. They were dressed in their best. They’d brought their colourful, homemade banners.  This was a good day out.  Major John Cartwright was the main draw.  That day Cartwright was like a veteran rock star appearing before his fans at the Symphony Hall.  He was 79 years old and most of those years he had devoted to the radical cause.  He was there to play all his hits. The support act was pretty good, too.  His name was T.J. Wooler, editor of the famous Black Dwarf.  George had certainly signed up some top-notch guests for the gig.  The key event of the day was to elect an MP for Brum.  But Brum didn’t have any MPs, you say. Well, no it didn’t.  It was places like Old Sarum, where no one lived, that had MPs.  Industrial towns like Brum weren’t represented in the House of Commons.  But there was a point to be made here.  And the crowd made it.  They elected an MP.  He was another well-known rad called Sir Charles Wolesley.  He actually wasn’t there on the day, but the crowd decided to send him a deputation.  He’d be delighted, they were sure.

It is surprising that no one has ever told the story of George Edmunds. He never gave up on the reform cause.  Whenever there was a radical meeting in Brum, George was on the platform.  Whenever a reform sheet needed an editor, George was sharpening his pencil.  For sure George was one of the good guys.

The good news is that George is now getting his historical due.  Sue Thomas has been studying him and on 11 March 2019 at the Birmingham and Midland Institute she will giving a public lecture about the great Newhall Hill demonstration of June 1819.  It starts at 1pm so make sure you’ve finished that very good latte on Newhall Hill in time …

The Chartists could definitely be a scary lot.  They’d march through the streets, making the most dreadful racket.  They’d meet in market squares and then , one after another, their leaders would mount a wagon and start speechifying and waving their arms about.  They’d enter churches and nod off or smoke pipes during services.  They’d set up stalls and badger people passing by into signing their petitions.  And you’d read in the newspapers about how they were up on the moors, drilling and marching.  And then, even worse, they’d really go too far and start a riot …

This is how some contemporaries did indeed view the Chartists.  They were frightened of the power of the Chartists.  Mrs Sewell, the wife of a Bradford silversmith, had nightmares about them. One night, in summer 1839, she woke in terror, convinced that the Chartists were knocking at her door.  She took refuge in the cellar, and that is where she died.  Mary Ann Jones was the 21-year old daughter of a Newport butcher and her death was said to have been caused ‘by a fright during the late Chartist riots.’   And there was Theophilus Hall of Birmingham who ‘drowned himself through fright during the Chartist riots.’   It was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for coroner’s juries to attribute the cause of death, when nothing else presented itself, to fright.  It seems likely that the three individuals mentioned here did have first hand experience of violent confrontations between working people and soldiers.  Bradford was one of the most militant Chartist centres in the land, where a few streets were no-go areas for the police and where pikes were manufactured.  And Birmingham and Newport were, in 1839, the scenes of major clashes.  In Brum the disturbances lasted a fortnight, with shops set ablaze and mounted cavalry with swords drawn dispersing protesters.  In Newport  soldiers firing from the upper windows of the Westgate Hotel shot dead over 20 demonstrators.  It is perhaps little wonder that, living in these situations, people became alarmed … and that their deaths, when medical expertise could offer no other explanation, were attributed to fright.

When I was writing a book about the Birmingham Chartists I decided that, though I could find out nothing else about him, that Theophilus Hall should not be forgotten.  He’s part of the story too – I dedicated the book to him.

JAMES WHATELEY AND THE SURVIVAL OF CHARTISM CAN BE ORDERED FROM AMAZON, PRICED AT £4.99.

Fancy a day in the company of Feargus O’Connor and his Chartist chums?  Ernest Jones will be there, scribbling away at his poetry … John Frost will be there, letting you into the secrets of the Newport Rising … Bronterre O’Brien will be there, having a good think about socialism … Thomas Cooper will be there, rowing with Feargus …

What a day it will be at the Birmingham & Midland Institute on Friday 26 October from 10.30  in the morning until 4 in the afternoon when we gather to think and talk about the Chartists.  In that six or so hours we plan to look at the whole story – why Chartism erupted, its leaders, its strategies, its journals, its poetry, the role of women and the key events from the strikes of summer 1842 to the great Kennington Common demonstration of 1848.

What a day it’ll be!  They’ll be letters and volumes of poetry signed by actual Chartists to peruse, newspapers, portraits & pamphlets to pass round,  readings of poetry, the singing of Chartist songs …

Sadly the planned appearance of Rebecca the Chartist cow won’t be taking place on account of the fact that she is no longer around … but other than that the day will be an A-Z of Chartism.

The Birmingham & Midland Institute is a beautiful late Victorian building located just 10 minutes walk from the city’s central railway station.  There is a cafe in the building where sandwich lunches & drinks  can be obtained.

The day will be led by Stephen Roberts, who has spent many years researching and writing about the Chartists.  Copies of his recent publication James Whateley and the Survival of Chartism will be available at 50% off for attendees … that is just £2,50!

This event costs £25 (£22 for members of the BMI)

Birmingham and Midland Institute, 9 Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BS

0121 236 3591

enquiries@bmi.org.uk

What can you buy for a fiver?  A pint & a packet of crisps?   A latte & a copy of the Guardian?  A pair of nice red socks?

Yes, all of these things.  And now also …

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHARTISM 1995-2018 …

which  can be ordered from Amazon for just £5.02.

That’s reduction of 35%!

With its attractive crimson cover, featuring the signature of Feargus O’Connor himself, this book will be an ornament on any book shelf.  But there’s an even better reason for ordering a copy … what you’ll find inside!

The new bibliography contains …

a listing of all new manuscript material discovered in the last two decades, including a mass of material relating to the Newport Rising and the papers of two Chartist leaders

details of the obituaries of c. 150 Chartists

every book, article and thesis written on the subject between 1995 & 2018

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHARTISM … £5.02 from Amazon.  That’s 35% off!  You know it makes sense!