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.

William Cuffay's poetic gift from the Chartists

By October 1849, the London Chartist William Cuffay was already on board the convict ship the Adelaide, heading for Australia, where he would spend the rest of his life.

Cuffay had been arrested in the wake of the Orange Tree conspiracy of August 1848, found guilty at the Central Criminal Court of “treason felony” and sentenced to 14 years in exile. In fact, he would never return to England. But his comrades in the Chartist movement did not forget him.