Talking Chartism: the video is here

I recently spent a very enjoyable hour and a half chatting about all things Chartism with professional genealogist Natalie at Genealogy Stories. You can watch the first hour of our conversation below.

This was a completely unscripted and unplanned talk (at least on my part), so please excuse the ums and ahhs, and any stories I launched into before getting sidetracked.

In part two, which you can access through Natalie's website, we talked a little about what happened to Chartism after 1848, and rather more about some interesting Chartists, including William Cuffay and Susanna Inge.

On the whole, I am really pleased with how it came out - although there are so many things I didn't get round to talking about, and of course if I'd prepared an answer to every question I might well have looked at alternative interpretations of some events. 

Natalie herself did a great job, and was very easy to talk to. Do check out Genealogy Stories where she has a growing collection of interviews along with some other great family history resources.

Peterloo and its place in the Chartist memory

Hunt Memorial - from the Northern Star (20 August 1842)

So much is being written about Peterloo in this bicentenary year that I am reluctant to pitch in. But I think it is worth commenting on the ways in which memories of the 1819 massacre were co-opted by the Chartists a generation later, and the lessons that they held for radicals 20 or 30 years on.

Peterloo was, of course, not just within living memory. Despite the massive political upheavals that took place in the intervening years, it remained fresh in the minds of those who had been there and those who had heard about it with a sense of horror, even at second or third hand in radical broadsheets and newspapers.

Down the years, Peterloo veterans and their supporters continued to commemorate both the anniversary of Peterloo – 16 August – and the birthday in November of “Orator” Henry Hunt, whose arrest had served as the pretext for the yeomanry cavalry charge that left as many as 18 dead and 650 badly injured.