Our current series of Chartist portraits finishes with John
Skevington, the working class radical leader from Leicestershire who
represented both Derby and his home town of Loughborough in the First Chartist
Convention of 1839.
The series ends here because this is the point at which The
Charter newspaper drew to a close its own run of 12 profiles of delegates to
the First Chartist Convention (more properly, the General Convention of the
Industrious Classes).
Skevington was among the most capable and committed of the
local working class leaders thrown up by Chartism. Already an established
radical figure in Loughborough at the beginning of the Chartist era, he would
go on through thick and thin to serve the movement until his death in 1850.
It can hardly have been easy to be a prominent Chartist in that
county. Tensions between Thomas Cooper, a Wesleyan Methodist preacher and
journalist who arrived in Leicester in late 1840, and the town’s more established
radical leadership were disastrous.
For a period, there were two Chartist factions which held separate
meetings at different venues. Skevington, however, appeared to retain
sufficient good will among both groups to be asked to chair a meeting at which
the two sides could air their differences.
Although Skevington played little enough part on the
national political stage after 1839 (other than as a conference delegate), his
commitment to the cause earned him the respect of thousands
who flocked to the Chartist banner in Leicestershire.
