Meet the Bethnal Green Chartist Martyrs

The threat posed by London Chartism in 1848 died not at Kennington Common on 10 April, but over the course of a bloody fortnight at the end of May and beginning of June, in battles fought out largely in the streets and fields around Clerkenwell Green and Bethnal Green.

Here, Chartist and Irish Confederate speakers brought huge crowds to a fever pitch of rhetoric and riot, and on one occasion marched not just thousands but tens of thousands of disciplined supporters out of the East End and along Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square where they sang the Marseillaise and sounded alarms at the heart of government.

The official response was to send in police backed by the military, responding to the threat of insurrection with baton charges and riots of their own, which led to the death of one young Chartist in the streets and of two more in the brutal prison conditions at Tothill Fields.

The events of May and June 1848 are not unknown, thanks in large part to David Goodway’s excellent London Chartism, 1838-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 1982). But I think the stories of these three ‘Bethnal Green Chartist Martyrs’ deserve to be more widely known, and better remembered.

So I have brought together on the Chartist Ancestors website a small collection of pages which try to do that. I have written about:

• Henry Hanshard, a poor weaver who died after an unprovoked attack by three police officers;
• Alexander Sharp, a printer and rising star of Chartism, who died in Tothill Fields Bridewell;
• Joseph Williams, a baker and long-time Chartist activist, who similarly died in a prison cell; and
• A monument to the three men erected at Victoria Park Cemetery to mark their shared resting place, but now, alas, long since gone.

I am wary of using the word ‘martyr’. It can take away the agency of those actively and consciously involved in political activities and present them as passive sufferers. It is, too, rather over-used to describe those who have been locked up for a couple of days.

But the Bethnal Green Chartists deserve the accolade - and that is certainly how they were referred to by the wider Chartist movement at the time, not just once but repeatedly.

Hanshard was simply unlucky enough to be the victim of police violence, with no suggestion that he had done anything wrong, let alone illegal, to provoke the beating that killed him.

And as political prisoners, both Sharp and Williams might under other circumstances have been treated rather better in gaol than other convicts; instead they were subject to a prison regime that did for them both.

Tens of thousands of Londoners knew about Hanshard, Sharp and Williams at the time, and their funerals were great public events. But today they are largely forgotten.

Their deaths came at a time when Chartism was in crisis and facing its end as a mass movement. As the revolutionary 1840s gave way to the passive politics and class co-operation of the 1850s and beyond, there was no place in radical political memory for men involved in such activities.

And the great monument erected by the movement at the time failed to offer a lasting memorial when the cemetery in which it stood was closed down and cleared.

The Bethnal Green Chartist Martyrs collection can be found on the Chartist Ancestors website.

The forbidding walls of Tothill Fields Bridewell, painted 1851 by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd