Showing posts with label Chartism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chartism. Show all posts

Monday, September 17, 2012

Comrades for the Charter by Geoffrey Trease (Brockhampton Press 1934)






Dark and lonely are the Black Mountains, as befits their sombre name. From afar off, in the pleasant orchard-lands of Herefordshire, or on the wooded hilltops which hem the River Wye, you see this huge mass of earth and rock sprawling under the sky like some stranded sea-monster. On a rainy-day, you can hardly tell which is mountain and which the cloud above.

Dark and sombre, too, was the year 1839. Dark with the misery of the people, starving upon tiny wages to make a few rich men even richer, toiling sixteen hours a day so that those few rich men might sit idle.

Victoria was newly Queen. In London the bands blared, the flags flew, and the gentry trotted their beautiful horses in the park.

In England at large there was no music but the hum of machines, No flags streamed in the breeze - only the long streaks of foul smoke, belched from the factory chimneys. The people owned no palaces with proud turrets mounting to the sky. Their only towers were the same chimney-stacks and the skeleton structures of the pithead, with their great wheels turning to send men into the depths.

Over England and Wales rose the murmur of the people, faint yet forbidding, like the rumble of approaching thunder. But the Queen and the Parliament, deafened by the bands and the choirs and the opera choruses, heard nothing.

Yet the storm was coming . . . 

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

O'Connorville and after by Ian Walker (New Society 7 May 1981)

Today's choice of Ian Walker article is for no other reason that the fact that one of my favourite history books is Stan Shipley's 'Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London', and O'Connorville ties in with that.
 O'Connorville and after

Slowly, the grey Cortina bumps through the narrow lanes of this settlement near Rickmansworth, Herts, which was hailed as the holy land when the first workers arrived from the industrial north on May Day 1847. On that day Fergus O'Connor, the Chartist leader who gave his name to the community - O'Connorville it was called - welcomed his pioneers to their plots of land. "Damn the factory bell." he said.

"Costs a bomb to get a place down here," says the taxi driver, who wears a back peaked cap to make himself look like a chauffeur. I suppose that sort of thing goes down well in Heronsgate, as O'Connorville was re-named after it was closed down by an act of parliament after financial collapse, and auctioned off at the Swan in Rickmansworth in May 1857.

The roads are named after the towns from which the first 35 settlers came - Stockport and Bradford. Halifax and Nottingham. "Costs a bomb," continues the taxi driver, "because, as you can see, you're isolated from everybody."

Postwar redbrick castles with gravel driveways and bungalows with picture windows, stand among the original one and two-storey cottages. These all have the logogram of the Chartist Land Cooperative, the lower half of a capital H, mounted in a block under the gables.

"All the famous people live down here," says the taxi driver. "Mickey Finn. His wife sang Pussyfoot, the song for Europe. And another pop star who lives here is Julie Felix. The sons of Jack Jackson, the band leader. Remember him? They live here too."

Stuck to some of the gateposts are small posters showing Heronsgate, a heart, shot through with the M25. A motorway may be coming through.

The driver pulls a faded brown pamphlet out of the glove compartment. It is a programme for the Lillie Langtry Ball, held on 16 March 1979, a benefit for the local campaign against the extension of the north orbital of the M25. This is planned to run through Ladywalk Wood, on the edge of Heronsgate, but there was an inquiry which is publishing its findings in September.

A woman on horseback comes towards us. The mock-chauffeur puts the Cortina into reverse.

The taxi driver, who has worked hard for his tip this slow Tuesday, drops me outside the local pub, the Land of Liberty. The original sign was fatally damaged by a passing truck. It showed a forlorn Chartist, pointing to a teetotal badge on his lapel, and standing next to a beaming beer-swiller. The new sign shows two top-hatted men before a crowd. One holds a handbill saying, "Vote by ballot."

The Land of Liberty is the sort of pub where shorts sell better than beer, where tables can be reserved for lunch, and where the landlady can recommend the Stilton. "What about the Brie?" inquires the pinstriped stockbroker on my left at the bar. "Not splendid," she replies. He'll go with the Stilton.

The landlord, who says the pub is "about 400 years old," says that the Chartists used to sneak over here for a quick pint after their work was done. "They were Quakers, you see, weren't officially allowed to drink."

The settlers, anyway, cannot have had many pennies left over for the drink. Used to working in mines and mills and factories, they found it hard to make a living from their plots of two, three and four acres. When they ran out of the £87 per acre they were first given for tools and seed, most of them sold off the tilling rights and were forced on to the parish relief. Others returned to the cities. A Poor Law commissioner, after an inspection of O'Connorville in 1848, reported that matters were made worse by the women not knowing how to bake their own bread.

Partly hidden by a foursome at the bar is an engraving of the plans for the utopian community. It was one of four such estates bought by O'Connor to make the workers "independent of the grinding capitalist." I order another light ale. The landlord tells me that Burgess, Philby and Maclean drank in here. "Used to a spy school. Over the road," he says.

I walk the 100 yards down the road to Heronsgate itself. Aeroplanes overhead, descending to nearby Heathrow, and the low hum of traffic on the existing north orbital a mile away, complicate the Disneyland English village ambience.

A man kills the engine on his lawn mower as I walk across to him. No, he's just the gardener, he says: he doesn't know anything about Heronsgate or the M25. I'll have to wait till his gaffer gets home. He yanks the mower back to life.

I ring the bell at one of the original dwellings, called Chartist Cottage. Mrs Nockolds holds the door open: "You want to speak to Mrs Jackson down the bottom, or Mr McCullough up the top," she says.

Further along the lane, two old women stand talking to each other. A third, weeding the hedgerow, joins in the conversation now and again. "Had a heck of a lot more burglaries since we've had the motorway," says one, who has lived in Heronsgate 45 years. Robbers, she says, can nip straight down the motorway to Heathrow. There's a plane waiting. And Bob's your uncle.

It starts raining, and the group splits up. I walk along with a woman who has lived here 53 years. Her dog looks for action in the hedgerows. I suppose Heronsgate hasn't changed much in 53 years?

"No. That's the beauty of it. It's unique. It's like a village, and we cherish it . . . Listen," she says, stopping in her tracks, raising a finger to her ear. "Cuckoo."

The schoolhouse, at the bottom of the lane, near Ladywalk Wood, was built by the Chartists. Later it became a prep-school. Now it is the private residence of the Jackson brothers (sons of the band leader) and their families. I walk down the driveway, past the tennis court in the front garden.

Vesna, the Swedish au-pair, opens the door and invites me in. Mr Jackson is out, but I can wait and have a cup of coffee. Vesna has worked here for eight months. She says it's lovely, and everyone who comes here thinks it's lovely. But doesn't it get a bit boring? She smiles and says, yes, it can get a bit boring.

We are sitting in this huge kitchen, which Vesna says used to be a classroom. Out of the back window, long lawns blur into fields. No other buildings in sight. Hamish, a small boy in a green uniform, sups his tea and keeps asking for biscuits. Vesna doesn't have the kind he likes, so he tells her to go fecth the Easter egg from the other room.

Mr Jackson, who runs a recording studio in Rickmansworth, comes in and shakes my hand, then shows me the door. His wife was on the north orbital committee and she would call me tomorrow, maybe, though she was very busy. Maybe I could call her? No, she's a Cordon Bleu chef, very busy. "Even I can't call her," he says, before shutting the back door.

Walking back, I meet Harold Nockolds, who has lived in Chartist Cottage ever since the war. His wife is in the garden, weeding in the rain. "This cottage," he says, pointing at his property, "was the very first one out the hat when the draw was made at Manchester town hall. Plot 25." That draw - for Chartist members who had subscribed for shares at the rate of threepence, sixpence and a shilling a week - was in April 1846.

Nockolds was the motor racing correspondent for The Times before the war and, afterwards, he became motoring correspondent, too. He was also editor of the special supplement, did one on the ascent of Everest and another on the death of King George VI. He finished his career as deputy chairman of IPC Transport Press, and retired in 1972.

When he bought this place it was called Hollycroft. And there was a bit of a commotion, he says, when he changed it to Chartist Cottage. Some residents thought he was claiming exclusive rights to the settlement's history. He laughs. It's raining hard now.
A hundred years, a thousand years,
We're marching on the road,
The going isn't easy, yet
We've got a heavy load.
That was the chorus of the Chartist hymn, sung on all the protest marches. Fergus O'Connor was certified insane in 1852, and put in Dr Tuke's Asylum in Chiswick. Over 50,000 attended his funeral in 1855.

A fading poster for some Julie Felix poster is stuck up by the bus stop. A woman in a blue Mercedes, cigarillo limp in her mouth, sweeps out of Heronsgate. She gives me the kind of look that people who drive Mercedes give to people who wait at bus stops.
7 May 1981

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Mixing Pop and Politics (10)

Quick one.

NM over at Castles in Space music blog has just posted 'Kingdom', the wonderful 1993 single by Ultramarine, which featured Robert Wyatt on lead vocals.

Without a shadow of a doubt, it stands up as one of my favourite political pop songs from the the last twenty years and, of course, it took pride of place on the 'The Secret Melody of the Class Struggle' mixed cd that we took down to Glastonbury in 2003 to sell on the SPGB stall that year.

NM already provides the background to the recording over at his blog, so I don't even get the opportunity to use the word 'plaintive' when describing Robert Wyatt's voice because he already beat me to the publishing button. However he's on safer ground with his mention of "folktronica". What the hell is that? Oh, that's "folktronica". OK, I'll have some Beta Band, Beth Orton, Goldfrapp and The High Llamas. The rest can kindly leave the post. The Dance Village is that way.

NM mentions in passing that the lyric was adapted by Wyatt from a "Nineteenth Century protest song", but the underreporting is perhaps doing the original a slight disservice. The lyric was adapted from Ernest Jones's poem, 'The Song of the Lower Classes', which dates from 1852.

Originally from a highly privileged background, Jones - who was on the left wing of the Chartist Movement at its height - was as well known as a poet and a writer as he was an orator and Chartist leader. The strange old days when radical politicians also provided their audiences with popular music and poetry, as opposed to nowadays when whoever's on the front cover of the current issue of the Rolling Stone tries to give us their half-baked politics tucked neatly inside their newly released box set.

If you want more background on Jones, this essay by (the late) Edmund and Ruth Frow of the Working Class Movement Library fills in a lot of the detail.

In the meantime, cut and posted below is Jones's original poem. Be sure to have a read of it whilst listening to Ultramarine and Robert Wyatt's late twentieth century re-interpretation:

Song of the Lower Classes

We plow and sow, we're so very, very low,
That we delve in the dirty clay;
Till we bless the plain with the golden grain,
And the vale with the fragrant hay.
Our place we know, we're so very, very low,
'Tis down at the landlord's feet;
We're not too low the grain to grow,
But too low the bread to eat.

Down, down we go, we're so very, very low,
To the hell of the deep-sunk mines;
But we gather the proudest gems that glow,
When the crown of the despot shines;
And when'er he lacks, upon our backs
Fresh loads he deigns to lay:
We're far too low to vote the tax
But not too low to pay.

We're low, we're low -- we're very, very low --
And yet from our fingers glide
The silken floss and the robes that glow
Round the limbs of the sons of pride;
And what we get, and what we give,
We know, and we know our share;
We're not too low the cloth to weave,
But too low the cloth to wear.

We're low, we're low, we're very, very low,
And yet when the trumpets ring,
The thrust of a poor man's arm will go
Through the heart of the proudest king.
We're low, we're low -- mere rabble, we know --
We're only the rank and the file;
We're not too low to kill the foe,
But too low to share the spoil.

Notes to the People,  1852

Monday, February 18, 2008

Bronterre O'Brien Again

Just noticed that the latest issue of the Socialist Standard carries a short review of David Black's book on Bronterre O'Brien.

On cue, a gentle reminder to the reader that the blog has a link to Steve Coleman's 1982 talk on Bronterre O’Brien and Working Class Radicalism. Read the review whilst listening to the talk.

That's me done.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Bronterre O’Brien and Working Class Radicalism 10/10/82

Back To The SPGB Basement Tapes

As promised, another old SPGB talk/lecture spirited from the vaults.

The following talk on the Chartist leader, James Bronterre O'Brien - split into three audio files for some reason - was, I think, the first lecture in a seven part series of talks which were grouped together under the title of, 'Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made', and dates from early October' 82. (A time when Musical Youth was number one; Luther Blissett was the most prolific striker in English football; and I was coasting headfirst into my worst ever School Report Card*).

Once again, the SPGB speaker is Steve Coleman - who gave all the talks in the lecture series - which suggests that I've got some sort of political man-crush on the bloke that knocks Will's love-blog to Christopher Hitchens into the bleachers**, but probably owes more to the fact that once upon a time I was a labour history nut, and that was Coleman's field of expertise.

On the subject of O'Brien himself, I can't pretend to know a hell of a lot about him beyond what I've read in the past in the general histories of Chartism. He was always there or there about in the books about that tumultous period, but obviously the likes of Fergus O'Connor, Ernest Jones and Julian Harney always seemed to take top billing in such narratives.

What I do find interesting about O'Brien is that from what I remember of Stan Shipley's 'Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London', he had a dedicated group of supporters/followers who carried the mantle of his politics and legacy long after the slow political death of Chartism in the early 1850s, and this group of radicalised workers were one of the few groups who tried to sustain any sort of genuine independent working class politics during the difficult times of the 1850/60s.

Before I forget, an old quote from O'Brien that I dug out once upon a time:

“Lift up your democratic heads, my friends! Look proud and be merry. I was at a meeting on Tuesday night which does one's heart good to think on. I have been present at all sorts of political meetings, Whig, Tory and Radical, but never was it my good fortune to witness so brilliant a display of democracy as that which shone forth at the Crown and Anchor on Tuesday night. I often despaired of Radicalism before; I will never despair again after what I witnessed on that occasion.” London Mercury, 4th March 1837

Christsake, doesn't matter if it's 1837, 1977 or 2007, it looks like us lefties will always fall victim to the 'After The Pub Shuts' syndrome. I'll have a Vodka and Red Bull, thanks.


First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Bronterre O’Brien and Working Class Radicalism

FILE NAME: part 1.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~44.70 megabytes

LENGTH: 48:31

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Bronterre O’Brien and Working Class Radicalism

FILE NAME: part 2.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~15.17 megabytes

LENGTH: 16:28

Third Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Bronterre O’Brien and Working Class Radicalism

FILE NAME: part 3.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~20.97 megabyte

LENGTH: 22:46

More lectures in the same series to follow*** when I'm in need of a blog-filler to mask the bloggers block.

*If memory serves me right, out of nine subjects taken: five C minuses; two Cs; one B minus; one C plus; and one A plus. Happy days.

**"bleachers"? Can't stand baseball, but its terminology has invaded my vocabulary for some reason.

***Featuring such oddballs as Kautsky, Dietzgen, Bax and Plekhanov amongst others.