Kennington 1848: the women in white bonnets, the man in the dustman's hat and the coachman

The daguerreotype images of the famous Chartist Kennington Common meeting on 10 April 1848 have fascinated historians since they first came to light in the Royal Collection in the mid-1970s. Though not the first crowd photographs, as is sometimes claimed, they are the first such pictures of a protest meeting, and they provide a real glimpse into this historic moment in time.

Professor Fabrice Bensimon, historian of the nineteenth century and a noted expert on the Chartist movement at Sorbonne Université, has spent many hours pouring over the two surviving daguerreotypes in an attempt to shed light on the people who made up the crowd. His research appears in a recent article in the Journal of Victorian Culture¹.

In search of Tothill Fields Bridewell

Up in London today I thought I’d have a look at what remains of Tothill Fields Bridewell - the Westminster prison where the Chartist leader Ernest Jones was imprisoned in 1848 for sedition.

Here, just a five-minute walk from what is now Victoria Station, he and other Chartist prisoners refused to pick oakum and were put in solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water. Amid unsanitary conditions, and an outbreak of cholera in London, Jones was lucky not to share the fate of Joseph Williams and Alexander Sharp, two imprisoned Chartists who did not live to complete their sentences.

Palmerston and the publican: a tale of betrayal

Plans for an armed rising in London during the summer of 1848 were compromised from the start. Infiltrated by police informers and hopelessly ill-prepared, the Chartists and Irish Confederates who planned to seize the capital and spark a revolution never stood the slightest chance of success.

A slim folder of Home Office correspondence now in the National Archives reveals just how a capable and experienced police officer was able to keep tabs on the conspirators by entrapping a Seven Dials publican into betraying his comrades for small financial reward.

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.

A quick trip to Snig's End Chartist settlement

Fenced off, boarded up and long-since closed for business, the Prince of Wales pub in the Gloucestershire village of Corse is in a sorry state. Back in 1848, though, this building was the pride of the Chartist movement: a purpose-built schoolhouse intended to serve the new Chartist settlement of Snig’s End.

The schoolhouse turned pub at Snig’s End, now boarded up

Sadly, the dream did not last. The building never served its original purpose, although it did provide some sort of community hub for the newly arrived smallholders, and in 1849 it was the venue for a conference of delegates representing land company branches from across the country. But even then, the dream was turning sour, with arguments over what rent might be due, at the conditions the Chartist settlers had found when they moved in to their new homes, and at the financial management of the Land Company.

It was not for want of effort on the part of Feargus O’Connor. Snig’s End was to be the fourth of five Chartist land plan communities, and it was his personal energy that had made much of it happen. With a finger in every pie, from the financial arrangements, never satisfactorily disentangled by the subsequent parliamentary inquiry into the Land Company and associated Land Bank, to the purchase of the 268 acre estate, the design of the eighty or so cottages, and their construction, O’Connor was involved at every stage. He lived on site, and while delegating much of the construction work, took personal responsibility for the teams of horses required to move building materials from place to place. All while having oversight of his Northern Star newspaper, serving as MP for Nottingham, and rallying the Chartist movement - at least, those who still looked to him for leadership.

Many of the cottages at Snig’s End are still visible, as I discovered when paying a quick visit in May 2022. Driving from Gloucester along the A417, you come across the first of what are still clearly Chartist cottages on the left-hand side of the road somewhere between Corse and neighbouring Staunton. Others lie along the narrow lanes that head off to left and right, along School Crescent to one side of the main road, and Prince Crescent to the other. Walk up Prince Crescent, which is to the left of the former schoolhouse and the lane eventually runs out into what is still a working farm.

For the most part, the cottages have been modernised and extended - not surprisingly, as few people would now settle for three rooms and a back yard lined with buildings for small-scale agricultural use (see plan). There has, too, been an enormous amount of in-fill house-building all over the estate, which undoubtedly robs it of much of its charm. But the Chartist buildings are still generally easy to identify, even where porches and extensions have been unsympathetic to the original design. Among the best and nicest surviving examples is the house shown below, which is on Prince Crescent and even has a plaque explaining the Chartist Land Company to those who stop to look. 

Really nice example of a Chartist cottage at Snig’s End.

There is, too, a small exhibition in the nearby St Margaret’s Church, Corse - a short but necessarily slow drive all the way to the end of another very narrow lane. Watch out for tractors coming the other way. The villages seem understandably proud of their Chartist history, and it is mentioned on a number of signs in the area.

As to the former schoolhouse, Alice Mary Hadfield, who wrote a book, The Chartist Land Company, published in 1970, included a photograph of the building, commenting that it was probably only the fact that it had found a second life as a public house that had saved it from demolition years before. Half a century further on, I wonder what the future holds. The walls appear solid enough, though there are now holes in the roof as slates slip over time, and it is many years since drinks were served in either of its bars: public bar to the left, saloon to the right. If anyone knows of any plans for the schoolhouse turned pub, I’d love to know what they are. My hope is that no one is going to call time on the Prince of Wales.

More on the Chartist Land Plan.
Chartist land company officials in 1849 (with an Illustrated London News picture of Snig's End, 1850)

The former schoolhouse at the end of the 1960s, then a working pub

Spy story: what a police informant claimed to have overheard in a Drury Lane pub on 10 April 1848

It is not every day that you find an account in the official record of an ancestor threatening to crush soldiers opposing a Chartist monster meeting “like toads” – even if, as seems likely, the evidence was a fiction concocted by a paid police spy.

So I am immensely grateful to Dave Steele, who came across a document in the National Archives making precisely this accusation and kindly sent me a copy.

The document, filed with similar reports on Chartists in Home Office records (TNA HO45/2410/531-532), claims to recount “A conversation between two Chartists which was overheard in a public house near Drury Lane Theatre on the evening of Monday April 10”. If it actually happened, the two speakers, named as Mr Stokes and Mr Anderson, had spent that Monday at the Kennington Common rally before the 1848 Chartist petition was taken to Parliament and were reflecting on the day's events.

Talking Chartism: the video is here

I recently spent a very enjoyable hour and a half chatting about all things Chartism with professional genealogist Natalie at Genealogy Stories. You can watch the first hour of our conversation below.

This was a completely unscripted and unplanned talk (at least on my part), so please excuse the ums and ahhs, and any stories I launched into before getting sidetracked.

In part two, which you can access through Natalie's website, we talked a little about what happened to Chartism after 1848, and rather more about some interesting Chartists, including William Cuffay and Susanna Inge.

On the whole, I am really pleased with how it came out - although there are so many things I didn't get round to talking about, and of course if I'd prepared an answer to every question I might well have looked at alternative interpretations of some events. 

Natalie herself did a great job, and was very easy to talk to. Do check out Genealogy Stories where she has a growing collection of interviews along with some other great family history resources.

The incomplete life stories of David Duffy and Benjamin Prophett

Neither Benjamin Prophett nor David Duffy cuts the same heroic figure within Chartism as William Cuffay.

However, the fact that both men were arrested and brought to trial (along with more than 20 others) just days before the great Kennington Common Chartist meeting of 10 April 1848, does demonstrate that Cuffay was hardly unique as a black man in early Victorian London.

In the Tasmanian footsteps of William Cuffay

William Cuffay

The following blog post was written after a visit to Hobart in March 2020.

Twenty-first century Hobart is a magnet for cruise ships. Tourists have only to step ashore to enjoy the vibrant outdoor market at Salamanca Place, while the historic convict sites and natural wonders of Tasmania attract vast numbers of visitors.

But 170 years ago, when Tasmania was still Van Diemen’s Land, the deep natural harbour that now makes it possible for ocean liners to dock was equally attractive to those operating a rather different type of passenger shipping.

Join the great Chartist day out - 7 July 2018

The Kennington Chartist Project culminates on Saturday 7 July 2018 with a day of workshops, participation and action in Kennington Park. It looks great – so if you are free on the day, please go along.

In fact, if you know a bit about Chartism or could otherwise help out, the project’s organisers are looking for volunteers. Find out more about volunteering.

Video: London Chartism author David Goodway on the events of 10 April 1848

Great to see Dr David Goodway, author of the first (and only) full-length study of London Chartism speaking at Kennington Common on Chartism Day 2018. Here's the video...



Find out more about Dr Goodway's book London Chartism 1838-1848.

Read the Illustrated London News account of the Kennington Common monster meeting of 10 April 1848.

Read about the Orange Tree conspiracy of 1848.