The rise and fall of Robert LeBlond

Robert LeBlond was a leading member of the National Charter Association in its final days, and an important link with middle class reform organisations. But his real interest was in secularism - still a quite shocking idea for many people.

LeBlond supported the secularist cause with the wealth generated by his print business, and promised to do more. But then things went badly wrong for him.

Although a little-known figure in the history of Chartism, I’ve been researching his life story - and, thanks to his three times great granddaughter and her assiduous work on family history, have even been able to include a photograph with the biography I’ve put together for Chartist Ancestors.

Give it a read.

Emma Miles: the life of a female Chartist activist

Born in 1819, Emma Miles was one of a number of female activists in their early twenties who made the City of London Female Chartist Association something of a media sensation with their unashamed views on political reform and the place of women in public life.

The daughter of a well known London clockmaker (whose work today sells for thousands of pounds and can be found in museums), Emma dismissed the very idea that women should be content to be ‘an ornament to the domestic hearth’ and declared that she would remain a Chartist to the end of her life.

Emma would later marry a fellow Chartist activist and emigrate to Ohio.

I’ve been digging into Emma’s story a little after identifying her with some certainty in the baptism and marriage records to be found on Ancestry (others sharing her name being too young or too old, too far from London, or too married). 

Frustratingly, however, I have not yet managed to identify the right Mary Ann Walker in the records. 

Emma’s life story can be found here.

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.

Whatever happened to Ruffy Ridley?

 Ruffy Ridley is one of those mid-ranking Chartist activists who seem to appear in the movement out of nowhere and to disappear comprehensively as it fades. He led the procession taking the 1842 petition to Parliament, and could always be relied upon when meetings needed a speaker or London Chartists were looking for a convention delegate. But that seemed to be the extent of it.

However, thanks to a chance mention in the Northern Star that he sometimes went under the name Daniel Ruffy (picked up but not probed further by historians with bigger fish to fry), I have been able with the help of a little research on Ancestry and in contemporary newspapers to uncover his origins as the descendent of Huguenot refugees, add more colour to his life story, and trace his final days in Australia. There is even a portrait of him.

None of this will be new to Ruffy’s descendants, who have assiduously researched his life on Ancestry and elsewhere; but I think it is new to those of us with an interest in Chartism.

I must admit I have no idea why Ruffy switched identities. Possibly he hoped to separate Ruffy Ridley, the outspoken advocate not just of Chartism but of socialism, from Daniel Ridley the rising man of business. But if so, he did a pretty poor job of maintaining the dividing line. As often when I begin investigating Chartist lives, Ruffy’s story is far more interesting than I might have anticipated.

Read the full story of Daniel Ruffy Ridley on the Chartist Ancestors website.

John Cleave - Chartist and campaigner for a free press

John Cleave was one of the great names of London radical publishing. His book shop at 1 Shoe Lane, just off Fleet Street, stocked all manner of risky and risqué publications, while Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette may have sold as many as 40,000 copies a week at its height. It earned him a significant income - and two brief spells in prison for his refusal to pay stamp duty, the 'tax on knowledge'.

But his origins have always been slightly mysterious. Some biographers have suggested that he came from Ireland, or that his family at least did so. But this appears to be based on his long and unwavering support for the cause of Irish independence rather than on documentary evidence. And even his date of birth has been so uncertain that biographers have given it variously as 1790 or 1795.

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.

Minute book of the Democratic Committee for Poland’s Regeneration: an exciting Chartist discovery

Minute books are absolutely central to the collective memory of any organisation. They record who was there, what they discussed and agreed, often what financial assets they had, and what they decided to do to advance their cause. No less so the Chartist movement.

Extract from the minute book

Alas, of the many hundreds of minute books that must have at one time recorded the activities of local branches of the National Charter Association, its delegate bodies, its central executive and its satellite organisations, barely one has survived. So the news that the original hand-written minute book of the Democratic Committee for Poland’s Regeneration has come to light is hugely exciting.

The 62-page vellum-bound quarto notebook, hand-written by the prominent Chartist George Julian Harney, recorded the life of the committee between 1846 and May 1847. It includes a list of the 29 founder members, and of 70 later members, in alphabetical order by town of residence, followed by minutes of the committee’s meetings, and newspaper cuttings.

In addition to Harney, other leading Chartists involved in the committee included Feargus O’Connor, Ernest Jones, William Cuffay, Thomas Martin Wheeler and Philip McGrath. Among the European exiles taking part were the German radicals Karl Schapper and Heinrich Bauer, and Bartłomiej Beniowski, a veteran of the 1831 Polish uprising and himself an active Chartist.

The story of the book’s discovery by the historian David Goodway (author of the classic London Chartism 1838-1848 [Cambridge University Press, 1982]) and of what it can tell us about the committee and its place in London radicalism is told in an article for Cairn International Edition by Fabrice Bensimon, Professor of Modern British History at the Sorbonne University. His article was translated by Adrian Morfee.

The full text of this fascinating article can be found (in English) here.

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.

In remembrance of William Lovett

Chartist memorabilia is getting harder to find. But I was delighted to come across this death/remembrance notice for William Lovett.

Working on behalf of the London Working Men's Association, Lovett was the author of the People's Charter and secretary to the First Chartist Convention. But he was sidelined in later Chartism by Feargus O'Connor and his supporters, and moved on to devote his energies to secular education.

The remembrance notice is typical of those produced at the time (Lovett died in 1877). Interestingly, it gets a mention in trade union newspaper The Bee-Hive's report of Lovett's death, and its text is quoted there in full.

Unlike some of those who went to their graves before him, Lovett was no populist and was never a great platform orator. Similarly, his funeral was quiet and attended mainly by those who had known him well - in contrast to the great outpourings of popular grief that attended the funerals of O'Connor and others.

I have written more here about the simple and secular funeral of William Lovett, and the tragic death and magnificent funeral of Feargus O'Connor.

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.

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.

Big upgrade to the Chartist Ancestors Databank

The Chartist Ancestors Databank has had a major update. Thanks to the addition of a three big new data sets listing Chartist women, Londoners and France-based Chartists, the running total of names now exceeds 14,000.

You can find out more about the Chartist Ancestors Databank and download the full databank itself in Excel format here.

Chartism Day 2018: programme and registration

This year’s Chartism Day conference takes place at University College London on Saturday 9 June 2018, with speakers covering a wide range of topics, from the place of song in Chartism to the role played by the Polish émigré Bartłomiej Beniowski in the early days of the movement.

The day is open to all, with a fee of £10 to include tea/coffee breaks and lunch. But you will need to REGISTER HERE.

Analysing the Chartist Land Company registers

In his second guest blog post, Peter Cox explores the occupations and locations of Chartist Land Company subscribers uncovered by a U3A project to transcribe the identities of Londoners and women found in the original documents held at the National Archives.

I have already explained what led to a group of seventy-somethings trekking to Kew on and off for three months. We were transcribing all the Londoners and women who subscribed to the Chartist Land Company, which meant painstakingly combing through three massive volumes containing thousands of lines of name, address and occupation.

Now we’ve completed the job, we’ve been able to analyse what we found.

Chartism Day 2017: from biscuits and salt pork for the troops to surrealist Chartist images and a lost letter

Some 20 years on from the first ever Chartism Day, each year’s event still brings word of archive discoveries, exciting new images and innovative ways of “doing history” that shed light on the people who made up the Chartist movement and how they thought and acted.

Chartism Day 2017 was no exception. Organised by Dr Katrina Navickas and colleagues from the University of Hertfordshire history department, this year’s conference visited Heronsgate – better known to those with an interest in Chartism as O’Connorville.

George Julian Harney on "something of vital importance"

In the summer of 1839, George Julian Harney found himself under arrest in Warwick Gaol and facing trial for his use of “seditious language” to foment the “Grand National Holiday” or general strike called for by the Chartist Convention.

A shared view of the Chartists: L'Illustration and the Illustrated London News

It is interesting to note that the great Chartist rally of 10 April 1848 made news across Europe at a time when many European radicals had other things on their mind. This was, after all, the Year of Revolutions, during which, it has rather unfairly been suggested, other countries overthrew their monarchs and proclaimed constitutions while in Britain we organised a petition.

The Chartist who crossed the road and his father the special constable: one family's radical heritage

Chartists must have travelled long distances on the morning of 10 April 1848 to take part in the Monster Meeting on Kennington Common that was to precede the presentation to Parliament of the third great petition for the Charter.

But for Henry William Street, it was just a matter of crossing the road on which he lived to join the throng.