DR. WADE AND THE WORKING CLASS

Abstract

On Saturday, 24 November 1934, a group of trade-unionists assembled in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Warwick, where they planted a willow tree and unveiled a small tablet in memory of Arthur Savage Wade, vicar of that church from 1811 until his death in 1845. They remembered not the clergyman, but the man who, in the words of the tablet, ‘fought for the freedom of all workers’. In this cause Wade abandoned his church for the last 14 years of his life and drew upon himself the odium of many fellow clergymen, who found his behaviour and his motives impossible to comprehend. Now some of the people of Warwick belatedly recognised the quality of the man who, a hundred years before, had been ridiculed by his fellow townsmen for marching with the workers during one of the most emotional episodes in English labour history, for this commemoration marked the centenary of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Wade's association with the working class covered a much longer period than that occupied by the Tolpuddle incident, although he is probably best remembered as the portly figure ‘in full canonicals' heading the procession from the Copenhagen Fields on 21 April 1834. Even when acknowledgment is made of the part which Wade played in the Chartist movement, the two episodes together do less than justice to one who devoted much of his life to the cause of liberty.