Tolpuddle Martyrs Research Articles

Re-formation in Action: Liberty in a Wesleyan Spirit and Praxis—The Tolpuddle Martyrs, Part II

ABSTRACT This article (in two parts) focuses on Methodist agricultural labourers who founded one of the first British trade unions in 1833. Six of them, including three Methodist local preachers, were convicted of taking an unlawful oath on joining the union. In consequence, they were sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia. Part II of this article begins with recounting the public outcry over their sentences leading to a full pardon being granted to them three years later. The article focuses on the labourers' religious motives, drawing especially on writings of George Loveless, the group's spokesman. These men demonstrated a deep scriptural faithfulness, and their Wesleyan understanding of God's liberating grace motivated their actions and commitment to social and religious liberty and justice.

Re-formation in Action: Liberty in a Wesleyan Spirit and Praxis—The Tolpuddle Martyrs, Part I

ABSTRACT This article (in two parts) focuses on Methodist agricultural labourers who founded one of the first British trade unions in 1833. Six of them—including three Methodist local preachers—were convicted of taking an unlawful oath on joining the union. In consequence, they were sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia. The public outcry was immediate, and this led to a full pardon being granted to them three years later. The Wesleyan Methodist leadership was silent and the story has received minimal attention from Methodist historians. These men demonstrated a deep scriptural faithfulness, and their understanding of God's liberating grace motivated their actions.

Comrades and curators

This article shares the findings of a visual literacy project with museum curators and film educators. The research explores the mediation of social history and politics, the interplay of personal and professional curation and the role of reflexive visual literacy in understanding mediated identities. The project connected three museums around Comrades, the Bill Douglas film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. First, this article explores the relationship between Comrades as a film text, the curation of the director’s collection of magic lanterns and other optical artefacts, the situating of a lanternist as pivotal to the representation of social history in the film and the different curations of this social history in the museums in Exeter, Tolpuddle and Dorchester. Second, it shares the findings of a visual literacy fieldwork intervention, where films were used by the three museum curators and a film academics’ network to ‘map’ their mediated identities and curational practices with a particular focus on personal and professional transformations.

We Come, Our Country’s Rights to Save: English Rural Landscape and Leftist Aesthetics in Comrades

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, representations of rural landscapes in British cinema were most notably found in what became termed the heritage film genre (as exemplified by A Room with a View). These films have often been critiqued for their alleged conservatism (political but also aesthetic) and their ideological perniciousness. But Bill Douglas’s epic film about the Tolpuddle martyrs, Comrades (1986) – uniquely for 1980s British cinema – incorporates a range of leftist aesthetic devices in order to mark the English rural landscape as a politicized space of socio-cultural conflict. The film foregrounds the fact that the English rural landscape has been the subject of a long and complex tradition of representation. But as it does this it also critiques the ideological nature of much of this representation. Therefore, this article argues that Comrades is evidently Brechtian in its desire to involve spectators in this important story of political struggle, and, as such, unlike many British cinematic representations of English rural landscape in the 1980s and 1990s, the film encourages intellectual curiosity in (and objective judgement on) the socio-cultural events taking place in the rural landscape.

‘Bill Douglas Symposium’, Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter, 23 September 2011

The Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas died young – aged 57 – on 18 June 1991. He had been suffering from cancer. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, an event was held in his honour at the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, the research facility and museum at the University of Exeter which stands as a fitting and lasting memorial to this mercurial film-making talent and avid collector of books, memorabilia and artefacts related to cinema and pre-cinema. After a thought-provoking and at times emotional day, the Bill Douglas Centre curator, Phil Wickham, was warmly and deservedly thanked and congratulated for his organisation of this event by Peter Jewell, Bill’s lifelong friend, supporter and cocollector. Peter had first met Bill in 1955 while on National Service in Egypt and they remained close until Bill’s death. This was a day that allowed us to acknowledge the extraordinary talent of one film-maker, to reconsider his legacy for Scottish and British cinema, and to acknowledge his importance as a figure who – through his extraordinary collection – has left a wonderful legacy for anybody interested in the history of cinema and popular culture. Douglas’ films – the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978), and an epic film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Comrades (1987), were released by the British Film Institute on DVD and Blu-ray in 2008 and 2009, and it is pleasing to know that these extraordinary films will now reach a wider audience.

Book Reviews

Book Reviewed in this issues. Captain Cook: Voyager Between Two Worlds. By John Gascoigne A Swindler's Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty. By Kirsten McKenzie Coming to Terms: Aboriginal Title in South Australia. Edited by Shaun Berg Paupers, Poor Relief and Poor Houses in Western Australia 1829–1910. By Penelope Hetherington The Writings of Walter Burley Griffin. Edited by Dustin Griffin Zombie Myths of Australian Military History . Edited by Craig Stockings. Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War. Edited by Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism. By John Maynard Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia. By Jennifer Clark Confusion: The Making of the Australian Two‐Party System. Edited by Paul Strangio and Nick Dyrenfurth The High Commissioners: Australia's Representatives in the United Kingdom, 1910–2010. Edited by Carl Bridge, Frank Bongiorno and David Lee When Our World Became Christian 312–394. By Paul Veyne White People, Indians and Highlanders: Tribal People and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America. By Colin G. Galloway The Tolpuddle Martyrs: Injustice Within the Law. By Herbert Vere Evatt Eat My Dust. Early Women Motorists. By Georgine Clarsen Treason on the Airwaves: Three Allied Broadcasters on Axis Radio During World War II. By Judith Keene Constructing Singapore: Elitism, Ethnicity and the Nation‐Building Project. By Michael D. Barr and Zlatko Skrbiš Ethnic Conflict: Causes, Consequences and Responses. By Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff Becoming Historians. Edited by James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis

The Whig World 1760-1837

A single word which survives as a political label for two hundred years must certainly be flexible and will suffer sea-changes. Whiggism was born during the Popish Plot and expired after the Home Rule crisis. It stood for moderate reform—a concept of which most of us would approve but which prompts the question ‘what is moderate’ and ‘what is reform’? This book does not deal with early Whiggism but with that in the later part of George III's reign. One wonders whether Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Hardwicke and the duke of Newcastle would have recognised Charles James Fox and Lord John Russell as whigs at all? Walpole did not believe in flirting with the people, Hardwicke was quite satisfied with the political settlement, and Newcastle was scarcely a libertine. Mitchell's book is a kind of spin-off from his outstanding biography of Lord Melbourne—mature reflections on the nature of Whiggism. It is beautifully written, with a splendid sense of balance, at times the author clearly exasperated with whig self-satisfaction, at others a reluctant admirer. It is a full of piquant asides—the Whigs did not see Jude the Obscure coming. There are of course considerable difficulties in getting the troops into line. Burke was bound to be awkward and perhaps the Portland Whigs—Windham, Spencer and Fitzwilliam—were given too little attention? What of Liverpool, Peel and the liberal Tories who, in Disraeli's celebrated phrase, caught the Whigs bathing and made off with their clothes? And socially, there are difficulties. If the Whigs were essentially salon creatures of London society, bored and restless in the countryside, what do we make of Lord Althorp, who was hardly comfortable out of the saddle, or even of Grey, who could scarcely tear himself away from his Northumberland retreat at Howick? If libertinism was an essential Whig characteristic, how do Tory gentlemen-about-town fit in—the duke of Queensberry, the duke of Leeds, the duke of wellington? Mitchell makes much of the Whigs' lack of patriotism—their buff-and-blue admiration for American rebels, their pitiful naïvety towards Bonaparte, and their unpleasant delight at British setbacks and defeats. Canning's jibe—the friends of every country but their own—was deadly, and finds targets even today. Part of Whig insouciance was perhaps accidental. Many of them were too rich and had too little to do: gambling, drinking and whoring filled up the day. On those rare occasions when they did take office, they sobered up with some speed, Fox discovering in 1806 in a few weeks that Bonaparte was not to be trusted; Lord Melbourne proving to be, at least towards the Tolpuddle martyrs, a determined Home Secretary. G.M. Trevelyan, reared at Wallington in the Whig tradition, believed that they had saved England from revolution. Perhaps. But it is also possible that their appalling self-indulgence helped to discredit that aristocratic rule which they admired so much, and brought about the very crisis with which they had to deal. Even then, as Mitchell points out, they seemed blissfully unaware that they were sawing off the branch they sat on. ‘Finality Reform’ proved to be yet another Whig will-o’-the-wisp. So excellent a book can withstand one tiny quibble. I do not think that Keppel was one of the ‘immortal seven’ who invited in William of Orange in 1688: he was only eighteen and a page of honour. I daresay he would have signed had he been asked.

The Tolpuddle Martyrs' Chapel

The Tolpuddle Martyrs' Chapel

Thomas Hardy, Alice Munro, and the Question of Influence

Near the beginning of Alice Munro's Carried Away, from her 1994 collection, Open Secrets, a soldier writes a letter to the town librarian, Louisa, asking her to write and send a photograph. In her reply Louisa writes: had a great deal of time to read and my favorite authors are Thomas Hardy, who is accused of being gloomy but I think is true to life--and Willa Cather (6). Ildiko de Papp Carrington picks up on the idea of Victorian writer Thomas Hardy's gloom and how it relates to Munro's story in What's in a Title?, writing that Munro suggests the nature of her plot by a self-reflexive allusion to Thomas Hardy; accidents are a major source of gloominess in Hardy's writing (556). Carrington finds a second connection between the two writers by identifying the Tolpuddle Martyrs, mentioned near the end of Munro's story, as a group who were transported from Hardy's part of England to Munro's part of Canada for their role in labor unrest (559). Carrington, however, overlooks the implication of the phrase very true to life: Munro's Louisa considers Hardy's writing very true to because her life is a variation on the life of Ella Marchmill, a character created by Thomas Hardy. Munro's allusion to Hardy evokes not only Hardy's use of accidents and the Dorset connections with the Tolpuddle Martyrs that Carrington notes, but also points to a particular story by Hardy: the story Munro tells in Carried Away is remarkably like the one Hardy tells in An Imaginative Woman, published in April 1894 in the Pall Mall Magazine.(1) Studying specific borrowings from An Imaginative Woman in Carried Away reveals Munro's conversation with Hardy in one story. Looking at the more general kinship of vision between Munro and her British predecessor helps place her work in the British literary tradition while clarifying some of the distinctively contemporary and Canadian aspects of her art. Hardy's An Imaginative Woman introduces the reader to Ella Marchmill, wife of a thriving industrialist and mother of three children, vacationing with her family at Solentsea in Upper Wessex. She finds that her room has just been vacated by a poet she has admired, and with whom she feels a coincidental connection: one of her poems appeared in conjunction with one of his in a magazine. Left much alone (the children are cared for by servants and her husband pursues an active vacation style that does not include her), she imagines more and more connection between herself and the elusive poet she longs to know personally; however, through various accidents, Ella misses meeting him each time their paths nearly cross. In a muted Victorian bedroom scene, Ella and her husband procreate their fourth child, with the photo of the object of her fantasies under the pillow. She begins a correspondence with the poet under her pen name, John Ivy. The poet, despondent over harsh critical reviews and the lack of a woman to love him (ironically, since he believes Ella to be a man), commits suicide; Ella dies after childbirth. Her husband comes to believe the fourth child to be the poet's, which the narrator explains in terms which impart a sense of folk superstition or perhaps the supernatural to the reader: By a known but inexplicable trick of Nature there were undoubtedly strong traces of resemblance to the man Ella had never seen; the dreamy and peculiar expression of the poet's face sat, as the transmitted idea, upon the child's, and the hair was of the same hue (330).(2) Munro's story builds on Hardy's story. Some of the changes Munro introduces reflect the more recent timeframe of her story. For example, whereas Hardy's nineteenth century heroine depends on her husband economically, Munro's more contemporary heroine has a job that makes her financially independent. Yet the two stories share the tale of a love affair carried on in the mind of a sensitive woman contrasted with the woman's actual marriage to a manufacturer. Both stories privilege writing and imaginative closeness over physical contact. …

The Tolpuddle Martyrs: Guilty or not guilty?

The Tolpuddle Martyrs: Guilty or not guilty?

Vice in a Vicious Society. Crime and Convicts in Mid-Nineteenth Century New South Wales

Between 1788 and 1840 about 80,000 male and female prisoners were transported from the United Kingdom to New South Wales. The social consequences of this migration were forcefully stated by British select committee in 1838. The committee sounded the death knell of convict transportation to the colony when it concluded that the system not only failed to reform criminals, but also created societies most thoroughly depraved, as respects both the character and degree of their vicious propensities. According to the committee's chairman. Sir William Molesworth, there existed in Australia a state of morality worse than that of any other community in the world. Historians concur that the credibility of the Molesworth Committee was seriously undermined by the prejudices and preconceptions of its chairman and principal witnesses. But they tend to attack the committee's motives rather than to contradict its conclusions. Indeed, Molesworth's portrayal of New South Wales represented less new departure than the climax of British perceptions of the colony. The committee shared with accounts of the colony's moral condition two basic assumptions. First, it assumed the existence of class. Persons who committed offences were believed to form class, detached from the working classes, which lived entirely off the proceeds of and which threatened social order. As fear of revolutionary violence subsided in Britain, concern with the criminal or dangerous classes faded. However, the belief that offenders were mainly drawn from professional subculture prevailed during the first half of the nineteenth century. The conception of class provided part of the rationale for transportation, since it assumed that offenders were from distinct group which could be exported. A second pervasive assumption was that criminality was contagious. Contemporaries summed up the demoralizing influence of criminals in the word contamination. According to Sydney's superintendent of police, William Augustus Miles, resulted because a convict will talk over his deeds of guilt till becomes familiar and romantic. Others believed that the process of contamination was even more insidious. Chief Justice James Dowling, while offering some fatherly advice to his son, warned that, Vice is so fascinating, that she cannot be looked upon without peril to the beholder .Some held as well that traits were hereditary. Judge Alfred Stephen stated his conviction that crime descends, as surely as physical properties and individual temperament. These same assumptions, if in less virulent form, are reflected in the works of major writers on the convict period. Studies by C.M.H. Clark, L.L. Robson and A.G.L. Shaw tend to confirm that convicts were drawn from class. All three writers associate the typical convict with city-dwelling professional criminals. Central to their argument is the high proportion of convicts (estimated at two-thirds of all those transported) with prior convictions in Britain. The hardened and habitual criminals, more or less deserving of their fate, have become the textbook view of convicts exiled to Australia. The interpretations of Clark, Robson and Shaw serve to correct romanticized characterizations of the convicts. Obvious victims, in the sense of Tolpuddle Martyrs or Canadian Rebels, comprised only small percentage of the men and women transported. But the convicts' criminality remains debatable. The statistical data available hardly justify the conclusion that convicts transported to New South Wales had prior convictions. In any case, changes in the judicial system, law, police force and definitions of offences make prior convictions very dubious indicator of the convicts' character. It should also be remembered that people transported were convicted of simple larcenies, rather than robberies, burglaries or other offences usually associated with professional criminals. A study of in England's Black Country from 1835 to 1860 indicates that persons prosecuted for offences were normally employed, and although they occasionally supplemented their incomes by theft, they were not members of class. Even assuming the reformatory nature of the transportation system, the high proportion of convicts with good records in the colonies appears as further mute testimony against their alleged recidivism. The concept of is still more problematic, both because of its vague connotations in nineteenth-century usage, and because it is more subtly translated into historical interpretations. Some historians have accepted uncritically the demoralizing influence of convicts on the honesty and moral standards of the general population. More importantly, convict vices and values such as hard drinking, hard swearing and hatred for the police are viewed as leaving lasting imprint on Australian culture.Convict becomes in effect component in the development of distinctively Australian ethos...

DR. WADE AND THE WORKING CLASS

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.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews Get access The Tolpuddle Martyrs . By JOYCE MARLOW . [ London : Andre Deutsch . 1971 . 320 pp. Hardback, £3.50.] Industrial Law Journal, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1973, Page 185, https://doi.org/10.1093/ilj/2.1.185-a Published: 01 June 1973

Tolpuddle Martyrs and Trade Union Oaths

It is paradoxical that some of the most celebrated names in the trade union martyrology?Loveless, Standfield, Hammett and Brine?should belong to unionists who, in their own time, represented no important centre or extension of trade union influence. They were farm labourers at a time when trade unionism among farm labourers was wholly unimportant; their region was remote from the northern, midland and London heartlands of contemporary trade unionism; they were not affiliated to any of the expanding trade unions of their time. George Loveless's Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers was a sport. It owed a good deal, no doubt, to the trade union ferment of the early 1830s, a ferment with which the literate Loveless could have become acquainted through the newspapers. But it owed a good deal more to Loveless's local and personal initiative. Its sole ascertainable link with outside trade union movements?apart, of course, from the championing of the Labourers by the Consolidated Union after their conviction?appears to be wholly accidental. This championing, by which the Labourers became a part of British trade union history, underlies the habit of vaguely associating the Tolpuddle men with the Consolidated Union. But they formed their union a good five months before the Consolidated came into existence; the Consolidated, in fact, was no more than a week old when Loveless and his fellows were arrested.1

British Trade Unions and the Labour Government

In order to understand the role played by British trade unions in the present political setup in Britain, it is necessary to go back some way into the history of the British Labour movement. Not many people in Great Britain besides specialist historians, and very few in the United States, realize that the British trade union movement of today is not the first but the second trade union movement to arise in this country. The first movement was revolutionary in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word. It was a reaction of the starving and downtrodden to the horrors of the second generation of the Industrial Revolution. Its best known names are Robert Owen the Socialist and the Chartist Feargus O'Connor; it thrived on secret ritual, torchlight processions, and mass enrollments which were political and even religious in their inspiration; and it was completely beaten by the triumphant bourgeoisie in the thirties and forties of the last century. The appeal of the Communist Manifesto, Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains! was in effect made to the British working class long before Marx had uttered a syllable; but those who listened to it--though their numbers ran into millions--were decisively defeated, first in 1834, when Owen's Grand National Union fell to pieces and the Tolpuddle Martyrs were sent to Botany Bay, and again in 1848, at the final Chartist fiasco on Kennington Common, only one year after Marx's manifesto had been drafted. (Author's abstract courtesy EBSCO.)

The tolpuddle Martyrs

The tolpuddle Martyrs

The Tolpuddle Martyrs

The Tolpuddle Martyrs

The Tolpuddle Martyrs

The Tolpuddle Martyrs Get access S. E. Y. S. E. Y. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 174, Issue 1, 1 January 1938, Page 11, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/174.1.11h Published: 01 January 1938

A study in British Trade Union history. Attempts at ‘General Union’ 1829—1834

The best-known episode in the early history of Britsh Trade Unionism is the dramatic rise and fall of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in 1833—1834. Robert Owen's sudden emergence as the leader of a mass movement reported to number a million adherents, the trial and transportation of the unfortunate ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ for the crime of administering unlawful oaths, the presentation of the ‘document’ demanding renunciation of Trade Union membership by masters in many parts of the country, and the complete eclipse of the Grand National within a year of its first foundation, make a story which has been told many times with effect, and does not need telling over again. But though this particular story is well-known, there is a good deal that remains obscure in Trade Union history both during this critical year and, still more, during the few previous years when the idea of an all-embracing ‘General Union of Trades’ was taking hold of one section after another of the British working classes.