‘The true history of the Chartist movement has yet to be written’

Robert Gammage was a great admirer of the Chartist orator Henry Vincent, describing him in his History of the Chartist Movement (1854) as ‘the young Demosthenes of English Democracy’ It would appear, however, that Vincent was rather less enthusiastic about Gammage. 

I recently bought a first edition of Gammage’s book online to use as a working copy. A former library copy, listed as being ‘in poor condition’ and with the spine attached only by sellotape in one corner, I didn’t expect much from it or from the ‘ink inscription on the front page’. It cost only a few pounds. When it arrived, however, I was delighted to see that the inscription read, ‘Lucy E. Vincent, from her husband Henry Vincent’, and even more excited to discover that two pages of the fly leaf were covered in handwritten notes. Having seen other examples of Vincent’s handwriting and of his signature, I have no doubt that all of this is in his hand.

Henry Vincent had been one of the six working-men entrusted by the London Working Men’s Association with drawing up the People’s Charter. He was a delegate to the General Convention of the Industrious Classes in early 1839. And he published the Western Vindicator, an important Chartist newspaper aimed at radicals in Wales and the West of England. 

Greetings from Abney Park: John Cleave, Henry Vincent, Lucy Vincent and a family at rest

One January day in 1879, a Trowbridge man living in London read about the death of the old Chartist Henry Vincent and ‘resolved to go on the morrow to see his grave’. As he told his local newspaper: ‘I went, and as I looked on the newly-turned sods of earth, I blessed the memory of him beneath, for having given a political thirst to Wiltshiremen forty years ago.’[1]

Memorial to Cleave and the Vincents.

One hundred and forty five years later, almost to the day, I made that same pilgrimage to Abney Park Cemetery, getting off the train at Stoke Newington and walking the short distance down Stamford Hill to the cemetery’s main gates. Much has changed since 1879. Reports of Vincent’s funeral mention the Quakers to be seen on Stamford Hill in their distinctive clothing; these days, it has a large and equally distinctive Hassidic Jewish community. The cemetery gates, which forty years after the cemetery had opened were probably already blackening from London smogs in Vincent’s time, have recently been cleaned and refurbished, and now look magnificent. And the cemetery itself, once a neat parkland and carefully kept arboretum, has since it was abandoned to nature by its private owners in the 1960s become a wild woodland of self-seeded trees and of ivy that grows around and sometimes through the thousands of memorials, tombs and gravestones of long-dead Londoners.

The life of Henry Vincent

Henry Vincent was without doubt the great orator of the Chartist movement. An early member of the London Working Men’s Association, he was soon sent off on tour to establish similar bodies across Yorkshire, before moving to Bristol where he also launched the Western Vindicator newspaper.

If he had not already been arrested and imprisoned for his seditious speeches at Newport in South Wales, he would almost certainly have suffered the same fate as his friend John Frost and found himself transported to Australia following the Newport uprising. As it was, he emerged from prison in 1841 to marry and forge a new life for himself.

I’ve written a biography of Vincent for the main Chartist Ancestors website. You can find it here.

Henry Vincent and the 'Welsh republic'

Chartism appears to have become something of a hot political issue in Wales, where Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price has laid claim to the Chartist legacy, invoking the Chartist orator Henry Vincent (left) as an early advocate of Welsh independence.

The move has, predictably, angered local Labour politicians, who point out that the labour and trade union movement celebrated and commemorated Chartism and the Newport uprising for decades before Plaid developed a belated interest.

Here is a newspaper report on the spat published in the Western Mail.

The row was sparked by Price in a speech in Newport last week in which he claimed that Vincent, who worked extensively in Wales for the Chartist movement but was born in London and brought up in Hull, had told local radicals in a speech on 26 March 1839: “Wales would make an excellent republic.”

In fact Vincent never said it in this or any other speech.

He did write it – in his account of a journey through Wales to Newport where he was to speak later in the day, and as a reflection on the geography rather than the politics of the area.

The full text of what Vincent wrote – and his own account of what he said later that day in Newport – can be found in an article from the Western Vindicator now republished on the Vision of Britain website.

Assuming the Western Mail report to be accurate, Price has added Vincent’s written reflections on Welsh geography to a spoken regret that he was unable to understand a fellow orator’s speech in Newport, to create an imaginary proto-nationalist speech that Vincent never made.

More teetotal Chartist names

The names of signatories to Henry Vincent’s teetotal Chartist address of 1840 have been added to the Teetotal Chartism page on Chartist Ancestors.

For many activists, total abstinence from alcohol was an essential part of Chartism since it proved that working men could be trusted with the responsibility of the vote. Following Vincent’s lead, a number of teetotal Chartist organisations were established, either alongside local branches of the National Charter Association, or by changing the name of existing organisations to incorporate a rejection of alcohol.

Yet this move was not universally welcomed within the Chartist movement. Feargus O’Connor, among others, was a strident critic of teetotal, Christian and knowledge Chartism alike, seeing them as distractions from the cause, or likely to suggest that the vote was not a right but had to be earned by those proving themselves suitable through abstention from alcohol, religious fervour or education.

Indeed, a decade after the teetotal Chartist address, the Chartist leader Ernest Jones would declare: “Some will tell you that teetotalism will get you the Charter: the Charter don't lie at the bottom of a glass of water.”

See the page on Teetotal Chartism.