On the Elland Female Radical Association and the demography of women in Chartism

Dorothy Thompson was the first historian to write about Elland’s Female Radical Association, but the story of them rolling the local poor law commissioners in the snow before sending them on their way has ensured them at least a mention in pretty much every subsequent account of women in Chartism ever written.

I have now added an article on them to the website which focuses on their opposition to the New Poor Law, and their run-ins not just with the unfortunate poor law guardians but with the London press.

Irish radicals added to the Chartist Ancestors Databank

I have added 143 new names to the Chartist Ancestors Databank, taking the total number of those included to 14,523.

This latest batch includes a significant number of Chartists of Irish origin, and is made up of three groups.

Book review: Workers of Their Own Emancipation: Working-Class Leadership and Organisation in the West Riding Textile District, 1829-1839

Workers of Their Own Emancipation: Working-Class Leadership and Organisation in the West Riding Textile District, 1829-1839, by John Sanders (Breviary Stuff Publications, 2024)

When in the autumn of 1830, two delegates from the National Association for the Protection of Labour arrived in Halifax to promote the union’s cause, they encountered an immediate problem. Having called a public meeting, they were unable to find even a single local working-class radical able to take the chair - and through want of local leadership, their cause foundered and failed in the town.

In the years that followed, everything changed. By October 1838, when the radicals of the West Riding met on Peep Green to elect delegates to the First Chartist Convention, all but a handful of the 21 speakers were local working men – among them Lawrence Pitkethly and George Barker of Huddersfield; Abram Hanson of Elland; Peter Bussey of Bradford; George White of Leeds; Thomas Todd of Dewsbury; Samuel Dickenson of Almondbury; Robert Wilkinson and William Thornton of Halifax; and Joseph Crabtree of Barnsley. And in the towns they represented, there were many other capable working class leaders able to articulate their well-developed political ideas in writing and on platforms, and to organise their friends and neighbours in support of a wide variety of causes affecting their lives.