Did Chartists die before their time?

Some years after Chartism had passed into history, the editor of the Miner’s Advocate rejoiced that despite ‘the havoc death has made among the Reformers of our time, especially among those connected with the Chartist movement’, the Leeds radical William Rider was ‘still clear-headed and strong’ (18 February 1865). Rider was all of 60 years old. A decade and a half later, after Henry Vincent’s funeral, the Daily News reported that, ‘mingled with the little groups that lingered after the mourners had departed were some old Chartist friends of the deceased, now grey and bent with years’ (3 January 1879). Vincent had been 65. 

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.

A Rye request for women canvassers

In 1867, the Liberal MP John Stuart Mill moved an amendment to the Reform Bill which would have given the vote in parliamentary elections to women. It was defeated by 196 votes to 73.

But while politicians continued to resist women’s suffrage for a further half century or more, they were clearly happy to call on women’s help in getting elected provided that they confined themselves to cheer-leading on behalf of male parliamentary candidates.

Chartism and the Labour Parliament of 1854

The Labour Parliament of 1854 was one of the last significant Chartist gatherings. A page on the Labour Parliament which also lists the 40 delegates who attended has now been added to Chartist Ancestors.

There is no clear date at which Chartism came to an end. For many, the disappointments and state backlash of 1848 were enough; others struggled on to 1858 when the National Charter Association held its final convention. A few still continued to describe themselves as Chartists for decades more.

But there is some sense in which 1854 marked the demise of the Chartist movement. It was both the year in which Chartism’s first historian, Robert Gammage, ended his account, and the year in which a Chartist Labour Parliament met and signally failed even to discuss Chartism’s political demands.

By the winter of 1853-54, the fight was clearly industrial and economic. Strikes and the first systematic use of lock-outs by employers were rife, and it would surely have been remiss of any socialist organisation (as the NCA had been since 1851) to ignore this battleground. Most notably, the Preston lock-out of 1853-54 was seen as crucially important. The photograph here shows George Cowell, a leading figure in the events of that winter, addressing a crowd in the Lancashire town.

The Labour Parliament was Ernest Jones’s attempt to tie together industrial struggle and Chartism. Unfortunately, this was neither a totally popular move among the remaining Chartist activists, nor an especially successful one.

A furious Gammage watched in horror as Jones put forward a scheme for agricultural and factory co-operatives in place of Chartism’s political demands, recalling that Jones “had always previously pronounced such schemes as worthless”.

He went on: “The plan did not take. The contributions – which according to Jones, were to amount to five million pounds a-year – were not sufficient to pay the salaries of the Executive, who were involved in a debt of £18, which rested upon the shoulders of a single individual.”

Realising the plan was doomed, Jones now “advised the people to send no monies but what were sufficient to pay off the debt”, and, according to Gammage, declared the failure of the scheme to be evidence that the people were becoming more convinced of the need to gain political power.

“Matchless impudence! Was ever trickery more transparent?” asked Gammage.

Read more about the Labour Parliament and see a list of delegates.

A radical cause after Chartism

The disappearance of Chartism as a mass movement in the early 1850s and bitter internal battles over the future of the movement dispersed Chartists in all sorts of directions. But the continuing interest of some in international politics provided several opportunities for ad hoc radical activities.

I have now added a page to Chartist Ancestors on the Ingraham Affair, or Smyrna Affair as it is also known.

At a time when the British left saw the United States military as a force for liberty, Captain Duncan Ingraham of the US Navy became the embodiment of the cause when in July 1853 he threatened to open fire on a much larger Austrian warship in the Turkish port of Smyrna if it did not release a businessman who had emigrated some years earlier to the United States.

Ingraham’s threat succeeded, and the businessman, a Hungarian by the name of Martin Koszta or Kosta, was able to return to the United States and seek citizenship.

The US naval commander was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for his actions, but he also won the admiration of a number of leading London Chartists whose involvement with Chartism was now at an end or drawing to a close as the movement went into permanent decline.

Under the chairmanship of GWM Reynolds (pictured above), the publisher of the only surviving successful Chartist newspaper, Reynolds’s Newspaper, a group of former National Charter Association general secretaries and executive committee members formed themselves into a testimonial committee.

They then collected thousands of small donations of a penny or two a time, until when the sum of £90 was reached, they were able to buy a gold watch and send it via the US ambassador to London to Ingraham.

Chartist Ancestors now has a page recording this strange post-Chartist episode, and listing the names of some 450 of those who subscribed to the Ingraham Testimonial Fund.

John Arnott and the 1867 Reform Act

In his lifetime, John Arnott was one of the best-known and well-liked figures in London Chartism. A shoemaker by trade, he served the movement as secretary of the National Victims Fund, relieving the distress of Chartist prisoners and their families, and later as general secretary of the National Charter Association itself. But Arnott was more than simply a stalwart and reliable bureaucrat in an organisation which often seemed to have more orators than organisers, he was also known for his singing voice, and for the poems he wrote.

In later years, Arnott fell on hard times, and was last seen by the Chartist writer W E Adams around 1865 begging for pennies at a bookshop on the Strand. By then he had been all but forgotten, and Arnott was effectively lost to history. Until a few months ago, when David Shaw, who has written extensively on minor Victorian poets offered a brief life history of the “Somers Town Rhymer”. That work finally established the facts of Arnott’s later life and death in St Pancras Workhouse in 1868.

Since then, David has been doing some more digging, and has come up with a real gem with which to update our Life of John Arnott – a poem, written in his own hand, in support of the Reform League’s campaign for a widening of the franchise. After so much disappointment at the end of the Chartist era, it is heartening to know that Arnott lived long enough and retained sufficient interest to see the Reform Act of 1867 become law.