Passing the torch of Liberty-

“Passing the torch of liberty” - James Wolstenholme’s “second

coming” and the 1839-40 Chartist postscript to the Sheffield

revolutionary tradition

I In what seemed at the time a “mind expanding” study of

the English Working Class published in the 1960s, Edward

Thompson spoke of a revolutionary tradition ‘from Despard

to Thistlewood and beyond’. He lyrically map referenced

it as ‘lying unexplored, a tract of secret history buried

like the Great Plain of Gwaelod’. In 1975 a jointly

authored article responded establishing firm continuities

in revolutionary personnel, ideas, strategy and

organisation through a case study linking historical

episodes occurring in Sheffield and its wider hinterland

linking the years 1795-1802, 1811-12, 1816-17 and 1819-

20. Baxter and Donnelly also provided sidelong glances

at similar linkages in nearby West Riding communities.

This article was not the last word written on the subject

of the submerged history of early 19th Century British

insurrectionism and the thrust of mainstream

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Hillsborough College

interpretations towards recognition and more respectful

treatments owes much to subsequent research of others.

What follows here thirty years on, is an attempt by one

of the original authors, in the light of later research

and new evidence obtained, to concentrate on some

evidence of linkages “beyond”. In the process of

reconstructing a new more detailed picture of Sheffield

Chartism’s ‘left turn’ in the summer of 1839 and the

subsequent January 1840 attempted rising, the actions of

one of Sheffield’s post war radical leaders, who had

apparently remained inactive for twenty years was

discovered to play a critical role in galvanising the

rising Chartist generation. In 1839, the “Sheffield

Captain” James Wolstenholme, an unwilling six month long

guest of His Majesty, George III, in Winchester gaol

during the suspension of Habeas Corpus Act in 1817,

returned to active political life. As a key local leader

and national convention delegate (he also chaired

National Convention sessions) he relit the

insurrectionary torch which was to be carried forward by

Samuel Holberry and the revolutionary men, women and

youth of Sheffield in the tumultuous late summer, autumn

and winter of 1839-40.

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The subsequent sections of this article firstly provide a

brief general introduction to the historical setting and

then explore in chronologically ordered sections the

developing revolutionary trajectory of the Sheffield

Chartist movement from the spring of 1839 to the

attempted mid-winter rising of January 12th 1840. This is

a reconstruction which throws some new light on the

complexity of social divisions and social tensions in

communities dominated by artisan trades. It is an

account which acknowledges the role of what Karl Marx

emphasised as the weight of past history upon present

events. The immediate history surrounding the Reform

bill’s passing and ‘experience’ from a more distant past

stretching back to Sheffield’s ‘Jacobin’ past provided a

life source for actions taken in 1839-40. Written by a

historian living in the city that has recently

commemorated Holberry and the “class of 39” through

naming the water features dominating its “Heart of the

City” central square, this is also a reconstruction that

further reconnects the actions of 19th century working

class revolutionists to the present.

II Sheffield in 1839 was still the cutlery and metal ware

metropolis whose economic focus had widened little since

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1820. The population was little removed from the

official 1841 census figure of 110,000, which contrasted

the 40,000 census figure for 1821 and the local estimates

of 25,000 for 1790. Sheffield commanded a wide economic

hinterland that extended in a 10-12 mile radial sweep

into the south western tip of the West Riding and through

parts of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Here were a

scattering of cutlery and related artisan metal ware

manufacturing and significant pockets of concentrated

capitalist employment in coal, iron stone mining,

quarrying, iron furnaces and foundries amid rolling acres

of significantly capitalist agriculture. Throughout the

region proto-industrialisation co-existed with developed

industrialisation.

The majority of Sheffield’s workers were still

classifiable as ‘dependent artisans’ whose craft skills

were as yet only marginally challenged by mechanisation.

‘Little mesters’, their journeymen and apprentices

swarmed the town’s industrial beehive of workshops and

small factories working ultimately for merchants or

increasing numbers of merchant-manufacturers. These last

were hybrid merchant-industrial capitalists putting out

work to dependent artisans but also directly employing

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some worker in smaller scale (though occasionally large)

factory premises. Proletarianisation, the process

characterised, by among other things; the growth of a

more permanent journeyman/wage employee labour force, the

greater and growing dependence on tools and equipment

provided by the employer, the decline of formal

apprenticeships and the firm imposition of capitalist

notions of ‘work-time’, moved inexorably, if unevenly

through the town’s traditional trades.

There were growing numbers of industrial capitalist

employers in evidence by the later 1830s in high value

tool firms which combined cutlery ware production with

crucible steelmaking in vertically integrated businesses.

High value metal wares like silver and silver plate, as

well as manufacturing in other metals like Britannia

metal, iron and brass, involved more factory style

production with unambiguously waged workforces. Coal

mining, agriculture and railway construction, even

allowing for the widespread systems of sub contract being

used, reinforced the tendency towards creating larger

concentrations of proletarian wage employment.

Using occupational classification from the 1841 census

for Sheffield it is possible to see some of the outline

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contours of the occupational make-up of the town and its

immediate village hinterland as they were in early

Chartist times. The jobs of 43,000 people (75% of them

male) grouped functionally, reveal the relative

importance of key industries in the own and its out

townships.

Fig 1 Larger groupings (>0.5%) of occupational categories

for Sheffield Parish in 1841.

Cutlery, ancillary and related metal ware 36%

Mining, heavy industry and capital goods 3.5%

Building industry (but not including

labourers)

3.5%

Clothing trades 7%

Food and drink providers 4.5%

Miscellaneous town crafts 7%

Labourers (building, agriculture and

industry)

5.6%

Farmers and graziers 0.7%

Transport 0.6%

Clerical 1.3%

People of independent means 4.9%

Servants 10%

Receivers of alms, pensions and poor relief 2%

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Indeterminate classification 1.4%

Major and minor professional services 2.7%

These occupational descriptions undercount the economic

role of women and young people. The contours suggested

here give little away as to changing social relations of

production. Proletarianisation was at work but there was

huge potential for complex and contradictory social

relations. A local commentator, Ebenezer Elliott, best

known for his Corn Law Rhymes, but also a successful

employer planning retirement on the basis of a long hard

working career working up his way from journeyman and an

early patron of Sheffield Chartism, stated in the autumn

of 1839

“There are in this parish about 6,000 adult

labourers and 8,000 great and small capitalists.

There are also about 10,000 skilled workmen, who

(being themselves capitalists and more dependent for

their well- being than any other capitalists in the

conservation of public peace) would because they

must, whatever their inclinations might be, in any

case of tumult or convulsion (short of a general

overturn) join other capitalists.”

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Aside from its gender blindness, Elliot’s political

economy and social arithmetic may not have been so far

off the mark. The minimalist recording of census

household data by enumerators makes it difficult to test.

Elliot was in a good position to comment on the “fuzzy

lines” of social demarcation and his overall observations

provide a useful yardstick for testing the realities of

class tension and struggle in 1839-40.

III Sheffield had established a reputation for streetwise

popular radicalism in the early 1790s. Historian, Gwyn

Williams, convincingly compared it with the Faubourg St

Antoine in Paris. Historians subsequently documented

linkages in this northern Jacobin “storm centre” to the

revolutionary “underground” of 1797-1803, political

“Luddites” in 1811-12 and the militancy of Union Society

- Hampden Club movement activists making common cause

with Spencean Philanthropist associated revolutionaries

during 1816-20.

The following decade and a half saw more concrete open

expressions of a shared working class political identity

in the economic and political solidarities of the town’s

numerous craft trade unions. Prototype trade council

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arrangements dated from the year 1818 in the post war

radical period and morphed into an Owenite influenced

Trades General Union organising support for a radical

alteration candidate in the 1832 General Election. These

work based structures, sometimes transcending jealously

guarded occupational status boundaries, appeared to be

the determining model for future class action rather than

the cellular revolutionary structures clandestinely

seeking to organise “general risings” as in the Jacobin-

radical past.

This did not however leave Sheffield’s streets free of

what local magistrates designated “riot” and “affray”.

Of some significance for some of the Sheffield Chartist

street insurgents of the summer of 1839 was the massive,

seemingly spontaneous, political protest after the

declaration of the result of the first parliamentary

election for the Borough of Sheffield in December 1832.

At 10.15pm on the evening of the 14 December 1832 two 14

year old youths and three adult men were shot dead when

they stood at the front of a protesting crowd fired on by

the front rank (20 men and corporal) of a platoon of the

18th Regiment of Irish Foot.

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For the organised working class this period saw continued

evidence of a political conjunction between trade

unionism and radical political activism. Key activists

inhabited the socially fluid boundary between skilled

waged elite artisans and small capitalist producers.

Unlike nearby Barnsley and other West Riding textile

communities, this high level of collaboration made the

setting up of a new local Radical Association less

necessary when Feargus O’Connor toured northern and

midland industrial areas in 1835.

IV Developments in the next eighteen months, including the

establishment of the London Working Men’s Association and

the re-establishment of the Birmingham Political Union,

led to the forming of a local Chartist organisation, the

Sheffield Working Men’s Association in the autumn of

1837. Henry Hetherington addressed a meeting convened by

householders’ signatures on 16 October 1837. By early

December, fired up no doubt by the 7th November “finality”

speech of Lord John Russell and aided by the considerable

presence of Feargus O’Connor, it made its presence felt

in a public meeting to debate on the franchise questions.

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This meeting was got up by ‘respectable’ middle class

‘Reform Whigs’ once associated with the now defunct

middle class led reform bill agitation organisation, the

Sheffield Political Union.

At the start of the New Year 1838, undaunted by its

failure to win the debate vote on an amendment to add

‘annual parliaments’ and ‘universal suffrage’ to the

“Ballot” proposals, the SWMA’s Committee issued an

address. Statements made in spoken and published form by

its leading spokesmen, Ebenezer Elliot (a medium sized

employer), William Gill (a waged journeyman) and in the

name of its journeymen dominated committee, hinted at

dualistic class referencing. Gill, the journeyman,

referred to the existence of ‘productive’ and

‘unproductive’ cases in society. This was the inherited

language of earlier radical political generations. There

was however indictment of ‘the aristocracy’ and

‘capitalists’ from the speakers and in the address. This

statement, too, had begun with traditional

categorisations. Their organisation it stated ‘had

emanated from the people’ and it ‘was for the people’.

Their message however was directed to the ‘working

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classes of this kingdom who produced the wealth which is

at the disposal of the capitalists … and the glory that

belongs to the nation’. For the committee, the ‘working

classes were oppressed by the degrading forms and customs

of the entire system of society’. At the top of the

system sat the ‘aristocracy’ or ‘aristocracy of wealth

and power’. Their political oppression was described as

being matched by economic oppression. The New Year

Address reached a crescendo of Old Testament fuelled

indignant moralism:

“Tyranny in a thousand hateful shapes still stalks

the land,

and makes the hearts of men desolate. Extortion

has been

reduced to a science”.

Extortion still included the traditional bugbear of

taxation (Elliot claimed working people were robbed of

two thirds and Gill claimed nine tenths of their incomes

by this) but it was much more than this. There was a

wider take on capitalist exploitation. Instead of, as

with earlier generations, a focus on idle, inactive

parasitic ‘fund holders’ there was a direct focus on the

actions of financiers and bankers (money mongers) and

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their responsibility as capitalists utilising financial

resources and further intensifying exploitation by other

capitalist players like merchants and manufacturers.

Gill consistently employed the unambiguous word “screw”

as a verb to establish his points.

The linguistic dualism played as a dialectic of old

language and new language. It reflected an understanding

of social complexity. It mirrored developments in the

social relations of production and which were themselves

tensioned by severe economic hardship in the town.

Potentially this should have added greater momentum to

local Chartism in the next eighteen months but Sheffield

Chartists experienced sluggish progress, always seeming

to need the boost of outside speakers as a magnet to

build meetings.

The sympathetic local weekly newspaper, the Iris,

described Chartism as ‘weak’ in April 1838. The WMA met

weekly using rented premises in the Mechanics Institute.

It was involved in the Dorchester Labourers’ campaign and

starting to sound out links with the town’s numerous

local trade union. They failed to persuade J.R.

Stephens, the national anti-Poor Law agitator to visit,

but obtained the services of Feargus O’Connor at a 1st May

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meeting at the Town Hall. Gill’s introduction talked of

throwing off ‘lethargy’. The Northern Star’s account

revealed tensions with moderates like the founder member,

Michael Beale, a clockmaker, displaying antipathy to the

way the meeting was used to float the possibility of

making links with the militant West Riding textile area

Chartist federation, the Great Northern Union. No links

developed and it took till September to organise another

significant public meeting. This was to be in Roscoe

Fields, an open space adjacent to new factories on the

northern edge of the town.

Estimates of the Roscoe Fields meeting’s audience varied

from 4,000 to 40,000 and was probably best reported by

the Iris which claimed 20,000. Again accounts of the

organisation of this meeting indicated weakness. There

was an ill-organised pre-assembly for a procession of the

town centre involving both Sheffield and Rotherham

Chartists.

There was some dependence on a good showing with the help

of outsiders with visitors invited from Birmingham and

Manchester. The meeting itself appeared poorly co-

ordinated with a very limited presence of banners and

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bands, with signs of interruptions and at one point the

collapse of a platform.

One of the key outcomes was the election of William Gill

as Convention delegate and linkage of Sheffield to

national petitioning and National Rent collecting. The

following months saw some progress, but in the winter

months of 1838-39 there was much more certain progress

made by Sheffield’s leadership in the peripheral

hinterland areas - Rotherham, Chesterfield, Brampton and

Gainsborough. Fifteen thousand signatures were collected

in the period. The Convention (commenced its sittings in

February 1839) sent out ‘missionaries’ to collect more.

Sheffield’s Gill had been sent to East Anglia in March

1839, but returned to establish more new centres in the

Don Valley industrial communities east of Sheffield.

The Sheffield Chartists in the town itself were now at

least better organised in terms of a base. They used

identified public houses to meet in a variety of

districts of the town to make Chartist “rent” collecting

more efficient. The build up in active membership was

slow as Gill’s letter and reports to the local WMA

secretary confirmed. The evaluations included one from

James Wolstenholme reporting as secretary of the local

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Stephens Defence Fund through the pages of the Northern

Star. Wolstenholme’s letter in April 1839 was pregnant

with significance. It claimed

“the cause is sleeping …. we want an agitation with

the powers of the Old King to awaken the dormant

sympathies, and to arouse the energies of the men and

the women of Sheffield.”

The writer, a small master file maker in his mid 50s, was

no ordinary local Chartist functionary. His appearance,

as part of the public face of Sheffield Chartism was to

be of some significance in the leftward turn towards

militant physical force Chartism. Wolstenholme was a

‘ghost’ from the radical past. He had been the leading

figure in insurrectionary planning to bring about radical

political reform in 1816-17. Arrested with other

‘delegates’ including his father and brother at a

clandestine meeting at a grinding wheel near his then

home in the hamlet of Owlerton two miles north of the

town, a hostile source at the time emphasising his

leadership role and nominated him the ‘Sheffield

Captain’. Powerful political language attributed to him

then marked a radical ideologue whose formative

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adolescent years were in a Sheffield Jacobin family whose

head, his father William, was implicated in ‘underground’

insurrectionary planning with a group of local United

Englishmen linked in with the Despard plot in the years

1800-02. The family were then active ‘democratic’

Kilhamite Methodists and members of the Scotland Street

Chapel where their political skills were regularly fine-

tuned.

Wolstenholme, like his father, spent the second half of

1817 locked up in Winchester gaol but was released in the

aftermath of the revelations about ‘Oliver’ and the ‘Spy

System’ generally. After his brush with the State

Wolstenholme seemed to ‘disappear’ politically though

local directories and rate books reveal his modest

progress from Owlerton grinder to a small workshop

business making files in Dun Fields nearer the town in

1830.

Now this man appeared to have re-activated his political

career and was playing a key role in the political

campaigning. He wasn’t the only contemporary link to

Sheffield’s earlier militant street level insurrectionism

picked out by the local press that spring. In mid April

local papers reported the death in Sheffield’s Workhouse

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of its own ‘Old King’, John (a.k.a. Jackey Blacker)

Blackwell a tailor, who had three times (in 1812, 1816

and 1820) led street risings. His idolisation by the

patrons of the cheapest seats in the theatre for speaking

out on numerous occasions had earned him the lasting

title “King of the Gallery”. Now seemingly he was

unmourned in a pauper’s grave. Very soon the defiant

“rough music” in Sheffield’s streets of thousands of men,

women and youth were about to give him a worthy carnival

send off.

V Sheffield’s Chartists worked hard to build the local

movement in the late spring and summer of 1839. There

were key underlying difficulties facing them in the town.

The well-organised local trade unions, at least thirty

could be identified with an estimated 8,000 members, were

influenced by long standing leaders who had shaped local

class traditions of collective organisation. Some of

these had “democratic” pedigrees linking back to the

organisation of local trades protests about “Peterloo” in

1819. However experience made them wary of the new

Chartist political movement. In the teeth of economic

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crisis they were more preoccupied with ‘instrumental’

economic matters including the means for potential for

immediate economic amelioration with the repeal of the

Corn Laws. While some of these leaders and many of the

individual members of the trade unions were openly active

in the Chartist cause, other leaders particularly in the

grinding trades discouraged organisation and individual

affiliation with the Chartists. Gill and O’Connor were

soon forced to confront this group.

The additional problem occurring at this time was that

the Sheffield Chartists were drawn into robust exchanges

of views with the influential and popular local Corn Law

repeal campaigner, Ebenezer Elliot. Gill’s role as key

local spokes person for local Chartism also had a

downside. Hostile contemporary accounts and folk memory

provide evidence that he was a ponderous and monotonous

speaker. As significantly a negative factor, was

knowledge his father was an “agriculturalist” as a small

farmer and this clouded opinion as to his integrity in

arguing for the primacy of political agitation for the

Charter over single issue agitation for cheap corn.

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Sheffield Chartists took the field on Whit Monday, 20 May

1839. A joint demonstration led by the Sheffield and

Rotherham WMAs, accompanied by their respective banners

and hired bands, paraded the northern end of the town and

then congregated on a fine warm afternoon in Paradise

Square. Press estimates varied from 3,000 to 20,000.

The hostile Sheffield Independent grudgingly admitted

more than 3,000 but 10,000 was ‘too liberal’. The

Northern Star’s partisan correspondent plumped for ‘above

15,000’. The bilious Independent editorial made an

interesting comment. It noted that the day has seen a

platform with ‘a change of personnel … a total change of

speakers’. This had some validity. There were none of

the ‘democratic’ trade union leaders that had spoken in

Roscoe Fields. James Wolstenholme had been called to the

chair, a further stage in his ‘second coming’. Despite

being let down by the non-attendance of Convention

delegates (O’Connor had written the S.W.M.A. an

apologetic letter because he was required at the Peep

Green rally in West Yorkshire and John Frost had been

detained by Vincent’s persecution in South Wales), the

local speakers following Gill made some forceful

speeches. These included William Barker, the maverick

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bricklayers’ leader and a rotund baker called Peter

Foden. Gill, himself, aired the key issue of trade union

lukewarmness with a barbed remark about an ‘aristocracy

among the trades of Sheffield’.

After the meeting local campaigning continued in a more

positive vein with successful ‘rent collections’ and the

formation of a Female Radical Association (earlier

advocated by Wolstenholme). There was a rising sense of

expectation for the National Petition’s hearing in

Parliament but there was also apprehension at the actions

of the authorities at national and local level in terms

of arrests of high profile leaders and military

preparations by military and civil bodies to challenge

Chartist organisations.

Feargus O’Connor finally returned to Sheffield on the

evening of Thursday 27 June. Even the Independent

conceded a sizeable crowd had gathered. Wolstenholme

again chaired the proceedings. His opening remarks rang

with political confidence born of experience. He was

described as exhorting the people that if any of Lord

John Russell’s (Home Secretary) ‘armed association men

should appear among them they should hand them over to

the civil power’. He equated the Government’s current

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actions with that of the Pharisees persecuting Christ.

O’Connor cleverly interplayed with this introduction by

challenging the threat of interference in such meetings

from local magistrates with ‘the higher authority’ he saw

derived from ‘the immaculate people’. O’Connor’s speech

was particularly significant for its treatment of the

moral-physical force issue. He expanded views on

Sheffield’s particular local difficulties of unifying

support stating that:

‘There was an aristocracy among the lower classes.

Did the trades of Sheffield suppose that when the

lowest were crushed, they should be able to protect

themselves? After those below them, their turn would

come’.

Using middle class arming as his starting point, with a

rhetorical flourish, he then explored his own role in any

future use of Chartist counter-force brought about by the

sort of armed provocation they were facing.

‘Do they think him so bad a general as to bring men

into the field, armed with shuttles, saws and

hammers?….. if they fired on the people, the people

would fire on them. The first shot that was fired upon

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them, in the prosecution of this, legitimate object,

would be the signal of general revolt.

VI Early July saw a dramatic turn in events nationally with

the Convention (misguidedly as it turned out) moving to

Birmingham to be in a ‘safe’ Chartist heartland.

Disturbances including the violent arts of ‘imported’

Metropolitan Police personnel led to the arrest of key

national leaders (William Lovett and John Collins). As

this information filtered through to Sheffield the local

response was focussed by the issue of replacing Gill who

was now mentally exhausted by trying to represent

‘disunited people’ and financially drained and in need of

returning to work as an artisan scale cutter. A public

meeting was called on Monday 15th July. A small crowd of

a few hundred swelled tenfold in half an hour to fill out

Paradise Square. A young journeyman, James Birks, took

the chair for reasons which became apparent when James

Wolstenholme stepped forward to be unanimously elected as

the ‘districts’ (this covered the towns of Sheffield,

Rotherham, Doncaster, Chesterfield and Brampton)

Convention delegate. Speakers followed each other in

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maintaining a militant tone. Barker, the bricklayer was

the most cautious surveying past relations of ‘middle’

and ‘working classes’, the issue of the petitions

rejection in Parliament and the recent events in

Birmingham. He feared that in the end change could only

now be brought about by the efforts of the working

classes and that ‘it would be by revolution, which he

could never view with delight’. He wished their rights

could be obtained peacefully but he recognised that ‘the

conduct of the authorities in Birmingham, interfering

with the meeting of the people, had led to exciting the

people to tumult and blood’.

Peter Foden, an Independent Chapel Sunday School teacher

as well as successful small baker now turned militant

Chartist, opened with invective towards the authorities

as ‘vagabonds’ and ‘villains’ and equating the people

with ‘slaves’.

William Ashton, an industrial and political leader from

nearby Barnsley (a recent returnee from exile in Van

Damien’s Land for his activity in a weavers’ strike in

1829) relayed the decision of Barnsley’s Chartists three

days earlier to ‘repel force by force’ if anybody

attempted to break up their meetings and he intimated

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this was the position in other Yorkshire towns,

continuing:

I am of the opinion that every man ought to be

armed. I request you to put yourself in the same

position, that you may not be ground down by the

tyranny of Government, nor submit to their attacks, but,

if they make an attack, be in a position to take ample

vengeance.

Ashton raised issues relating to the Convention Manifesto

which was now calling for ulterior measures - including

withdrawal of money from the banks, exclusive dealing and

arming. To great acclaim James Wolstenholme took the

reins of the meeting working his way through the list of

measures and eliciting crowd responses.

This Monday meeting signalled a week of significant

activity in the town. There had already been Chartist

‘preaching’ meetings held on the day before led by Foden.

On the evening of Wednesday 17th Paradise Square was

almost full to hear another Foden oration. This

continued later in the evening in the New Haymarket. On

Thursday the exclusive dealing campaign appeared in full

flow as Foden publicly read out the names of 46 trades

people to be boycotted because they refused to pay the

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‘Chartist Rent’. On Friday night after work the

Chartists gathered in Paradise Square and a letter

dispatched by Wolstenholme from London (where the

Convention had re-grouped) was read out. It gave advice

on involving trade unions by sticking to a policy of

openness.

The letter, detailing instructions for the present

moment, involved a personal inversion of Wolstenholme’s

political past in 1816-17. He strictured:

‘If you are secret in your conduct, it can only be

known to those who are with you in secret …. in secrecy

you are open to the betrayal of the designing’.

VII By mid July so intense was the new level of Chartist

street campaigning that the town’s magistrates met on the

morning of Saturday 20 July. Through the office of the

Town Clerk, Albert Smith, they issued a warning letter

concerning the illegality of using Paradise Square for

further meetings. The Chartists replied by calling a

meeting in the New Haymarket that evening. The following

day Foden organised a sequence of street preachings in

three parts of the town, Barker’s Pool in the town centre

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in the morning, at the Old Workhouse site on the northern

edge of the town in the afternoon and finishing at the

Old Sugar House (a disused sugar refinery site) in the

Moor district on the southern edge of town. Several

hundred people attended each of these ‘decent’ and

‘orderly’ gatherings as the Sheffield Independent

grudgingly conceded them.

These demonstrations continued into the following week.

Foden, assisted by young Birks, organised and attracted

several thousand to fill Paradise square defiantly

(claimed to be three quarters full with enough space for

female Chartists to rattle collecting tins). The meeting

took on a tentative, nervous character. It was chaired

by a rank and file Chartist, Cook, who claimed he had

been arrested late in the previous week and his presence

produced a long exposition on peaceful, legal ways of

proceeding from a subdued Peter Foden. At one stage a

section of the crowd scattered when he cast an anxious

look in the direction of one of the entrances to the

Square. The meeting dispersed without any sign of

magisterial intervention.

The following night 23rd July a smaller meeting was held

in the Haymarket on a large open space outside the Corn

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Exchange. It was addressed from the top of a cart by one

of the emerging new leadership figures, James

McKetterick, a brush maker. He was followed by Foden. A

long letter from Wolstenholme, still in London at the

Convention, was read out. The letter revealed their

delegate had visited the House of Commons to view at

first hand the institution that had recently ignored

their petitioning. Wolstenholme’s language conveyed a

sense of impending political apocalypse. He gave a

warning to a government which he claimed, ‘ will hurry on

needlessly to the brink of the precipice; and still

goading the people until they turn upon them; and hurl

them headlong to destruction’.

He implied the inevitability of social conflict with some

characteristic Testament comparisons, stating:

‘I know this movement has taken such deep roots,

that we either must have the Charter or England’s

fate will be that of Babylon, Egypt, Tyre, Sidon,

Judea, and all other countries that have been destroyed

because of tyranny, injustice and oppression ….. The

Government may coerce, it will only hasten on

destruction to themselves, if they are not stronger

than the people when the time comes’.

JB1204/GRB 28

The letter continued with a strong inference that he had

been in the company of like-minded fundamentalists.

These included political refugees from Europe. He

observed:

‘The French and the Poles take great interest in the

movement, they are working with us. There is deep

work going on; every move I believe is known on the

Continent. I dined, on Saturday, with Dr Taylor and a

French Major (probably the Pole, Major Beniowoski) and

his lady’.

On the strengths of reports regarding Chartist arming

given to the Convention and letters he had seen, as well

as the enthusiasm of new friends, Wolstenholme warned his

Sheffield constituents not to believe the press denials

about arming. His letter carefully phrased a covert

message in question form. He asked “Are you organising

yourselves?” The subtext reads “are you getting armed?”

He recommended agitating the out-villages to the north of

the town and to divide the town with district

organisation in preparation to support the Convention’s

impending decision on the “holiday” planned strike for

the Charter. Foden’s speech that followed asserted that

locally arming was progressing. He stared into the crowd

JB1204/GRB 29

claiming, ‘he had seen them (arms) today, and hoped he

should see more tomorrow’.

Another evening meeting in Paradise Square followed on

Wednesday, a night on which some members of the WMA

attended a meeting in the south-eastern out village of

Heeley convened by local ‘radicals’. The following night

in the town Foden publically read another letter from

Wolstenholme which was more circumspect in the matter of

speaking openly about arming. The letter reported on

divisions at the Convention over the Sacred Month but

called on them to be firm and committed if called on to

support it. Foden recommended deferral of fuller

discussion to a planned meeting for the following Monday

where he hoped he would have 35,000 hearers as he had the

previous Monday (this was optimistic). Another week of

intense street level activity finished with a small

evening gathering in the Haymarket. The street

preachings continued again on Sunday.

By now Wolstenholme had returned to the town from London

to get a better sense of what support there was locally

for the Sacred Month. Heavy rain in the early evening

drove the meeting organisers back to their rented

headquarters in the nearby Fig Tree Lane Association

JB1204/GRB 30

Rooms. The rain eased, a crowd started assembling in the

Square and the planned public meeting began but was soon

adjourned till the following Monday because it was

reported that so far the Convention’s decision making was

inconclusive.

Small scale recruiting and propaganda street meetings

took place in parts of the town on some evenings of the

week following. The most significant one was held on the

Friday (2nd August). Wolstenholme presented plans for

circularising the Trade unions in the town on the issue

of supporting a political general strike. On Saturday

(3rd) the street meeting involved readings of the news hot

off the Northern Star’s presses advocating abandonment of

the full Sacred Month strike plan. Some consternation

was expressed by activists.

Still defying the local magistracy, a large crowd

materialised in Paradise Square on Monday to hear Rev

William Thornton, the radical Bradford Church Minister

and leading West Riding Chartist speak. Foden added some

fiery phasing of his own, declaring that they should

determine, ‘at all hazards to have the Charter’.

Beyond the headline speakers there was deep significance

in the putting of a resolution. It was proposed and

JB1204/GRB 31

seconded by two more of the rising cadre of militant

proletarian Chartists which emerged in this period of

Wolstenholme’s tutelage. Thomas Bradwell, a painter,

moved that:

‘This meeting, while it believes that nothing less

than a universal stand can get the Charter, we believe

that this town and district are not sufficiently

ready’.

His speech underlined lack as yet of full preparedness

with less, as he claimed, than a third of Chartists being

armed. He carefully qualified his encouragement saying:

‘he did not advocate them to have arms to fight, but

they should have them as of right’.

He was followed by James Boardman, a bricklayer.

Wolstenholme also spoke on the resolution in a long

speech that focussed on the increase in the size of the

army, the arming of the police, the violence of the

authorities in other towns and he recalled the killings

in their own town in December 1832 with a bitter

backhanded reference to the official ‘justifiable

homicide verdict’ on the killing of five people. ‘That

job would not have been wrapped up if the person killed

had been middle class men’, he observed. Amid shouts of

JB1204/GRB 32

“Universal Suffrage and No Surrender”, the meeting

finished with recommendations that as some masters had

persuaded their work people to enrol as special

constables during the present convulsed stated of the

town, that all departing attenders should volunteer to be

similarly sw1orn in. ‘We shall get armed for nought

then’ voices were reported saying.

He was followed by James Boardman, a bricklayer.

Wolstenholme also spoke on the resolution in a long

speech that focused on the increase in the size of the

army, the arming of the police, the violence of the

authorities in other towns and he recalled the killings

in their own town in December 1832 with a bitter back

handed reference to the official ‘justifiable homicide

verdict’ on the killing of five people. ‘That job would

not have been wrapped up if the persons killed had been

middle class men’, he observed. Amid shouts of

“Universal Suffrage and No Surrender”, the meeting

finished with recommendations that as some masters had

persuaded their work people to enrol as special

constables during the present convulsed state of the

town, that all departing attenders should volunteer to be

JB1204/GRB 33

similarly sworn in. ‘We shall get armed for nought then’

voices were reported saying.

VIII Sheffield Chartists now with little time moved to execute

a plan to maximise activity for the three days of action

which the Convention called for 12 - 14 August as a

substitute for the full month of industrial abstinence.

Monday 12 August proved to be a dramatic day to Chartism

in the town. A rally commenced at 9.00am with a few

thousand people in Paradise Square. Foden and visiting

speakers (Thornton from the West Riding and Clark from

Ashton under Lyne) were the principal speakers. The main

message transmitted was to resist the repressive acts of

government. A young and inexperienced local Sheffield

community Chartist Leader, a Heeley cabinet maker called

Charles Fox, supported by Wolstenholme, moved an address

to the Queen on these weighty matters. Fox was reported

openly advocating arming using thinly disguised

euphemisms as he told the crowd to obtain “biscuits”,

“flitches of bacon” and “bags of flour” (muskets, ball

JB1204/GRB 34

and powder). The meeting then adjourned till 4pm with

the majority of the crowd dispersing.

Activity however did not stop at this point. Some of the

active elements in the main Chartist crowd took up a

collection in order to hire a band. This led to the

organisation of a procession through the middle of the

town at midday. Around a thousand people were involved,

led among others by Foden and Birks. The procession

continued in a circular route for some time and in the

early afternoon when passing the Town Hall they were

confronted by the town’s unpopular senior magistrate

Parker who told them they were acting illegally. The

procession continued on to the Corn Exchange where it

finally stopped, heard speeches and then dispersed

agreeing to return and re-assemble in Paradise Square

between 5 - 6 pm.

The evening rally finished without problems and a large

crowd of several thousand (possibly anything between 8 -

12,000 people) adjourned till the following day. On

Tuesday the authorities pre-empted events. Foden and Fox

were arrested in their respective homes just after

midday. They were taken to the Town Hall to be examined.

JB1204/GRB 35

Crowds gathered and meeting took place outside the Corn

Exchange.

Surrounded by a dense mass of Chartist supporters,

Wolstenholme read out a statement issued by Albert Smith

forbidding meetings. The meeting, chaired by Birks,

continued then ended with a decision to postpone the

evening’s planned meeting till Thursday. At the end of

the meeting a pistol was fired in the air from the crowd

and cheers echoed out. These shots appeared as if a

counter-command as numbers from the dispersing meeting

moved back in the direction of the Town Hall and gathered

on its steps. They remained there shouting, hooting and

the more forward set up rallying calls of “All in a Mind”

and “All of a Mind” (language used in the political

riots in the town in 1812, 1816 and 1820) trying to

encourage the collective tearing down of doors to release

the prisoners earlier in the day. Crowds milled around

for several hours.

They were still there when some of the town’s largely

non-resident magistracy arrived on the scene at 8.00pm.

They had sent word for Dragoons to come from the nearby

barracks at Upperthorpe (built in 1792 to intimidate the

Sheffield Jacobins). The magistrates read the Riot Act.

JB1204/GRB 36

Odd stones flew in the direction of the magistrates and

their legal advisers. Events started to mimic the

happenings of 14 December almost seven years previously.

Research on court records established that in the crowd

was Isaac Howard whose brother was killed on December 14

1832. Mr Palfreyman, a local lawyer prominent for the

authorities in the 1832 events was again a target for

violence and was hit by a stone.

The Dragoons arrived. This time there was no shooting as

the crowd chose to scatter. There were however calls to

rally and numbers stood their ground in silent angry

protect till 9.00pm. Out of the lengthening shadows more

stones came. A final dispersal ended with a melee

ensuing as members of the local police force working in

squads of ten and aided by soldiers from a recruiting

party currently in the town joined in the effort to clear

the streets. It took two hours for the streets to be

emptied. Over seventy arrests were made including

numbers of women. The Iris newspaper later emphasised in

its report on the proceedings that, ‘never had so many

women been present before’. They also spoke of

significant numbers of ‘youth, boys, women and girls’.

JB1204/GRB 37

The events of the day provided the authorities with a

large legal-administrative hangover. The bench minimised

the destruction by discharging a third of the ‘rioters’,

some with conditions attached. Foden, Fox and a small

but selected number of ‘disturbers of the peace’ were

committed the following day and sent off to York to await

trial.

Chartist activity was muted for a few days after the 13th

August. The authorities mobilised the local Yeomanry

troop to come to support the Dragoons in the town. The

Chartists however switched to a new tactic -

churchgoings.

On the 18 August the Sheffield Chartists sent a note to

the Vicar of Sheffield requesting he preach for them on a

selected text. They warned they were coming to the

Parish Church in their thousands. Prior to their

attendance Chartists and sympathisers gathered in

Paradise Square. They then marched the short distance to

the Church singing hymns. The Parish Church was filled

to overflowing with many of the town’s respectable,

regular Church attenders forced to sit in other then

their own normal pews (many former rented pews were

actually owned outright by the town’s middle class). An

JB1204/GRB 38

overspill of Chartists held a Chartist political

religious service in the Churchyard. This stratagem to

assess the right of public meeting was repeated equally

effectively on the following Sunday (25th). The scale was

even larger with three overspill popular ‘pulpits’

organised in the open air.

The ‘new’ leadership within the local movement revealed

itself further with the ‘churchgoings’/ Later testimony

revealed that a 25 year old former soldier, Samuel

Holberry, was a key figure. He particularly inspired the

younger Chartists recruited from apprentices and

journeymen artisans. An exceptionally tall man, his

bearing and forceful disposition propelled him as a

natural leader of street level action.

Not entirely co-incidentally, the local Chartists now

adopted a ‘class’ (or cell-like) structure across the

town. This had been an established practice among

Methodists for decades but cellular organisation was also

a practice of the United Irishmen and United Englishman

at the turn of the eighteenth century. Over one hundred

local “classes” were established with at least ten

members in each, but some were larger. The Fig Tree Lane

rooms remained a headquarters meetings place and the

JB1204/GRB 39

contested public spaces in the town remained places for

defiant open meetings.

The authorities finally took action to stop the

churchgoings the following Sunday. The town’s police

force was sent to the Square and occupied it as a

preventative measure. Numbers of Chartists managed to

defy them and by an alternative route proceeded to the

Church. The church going took place on a limited scale.

The Chartists responded the following week (8 Sept),

Holberry marshalled a group ready to do battle with the

police in Daisy Walk adjacent to an area of fields on the

north-western edge of the town only half a mile from the

Church. The group marched into town and defiantly

entered the Church and occupied its gallery where they

stayed for the duration of the service.

This action was to herald a dramatic week where Chartists

either gathered nightly in Paradise Square for ‘silent

meetings’ or met in their Fig Tree Lane rooms where

visiting speakers from Tyneside and the West Riding.

They also briefly and dramatically became hosts to an

energetic full time professional political agitator,

William Martin. Martin, an itinerant Irishman, was the

brother of the nearby Chesterfield WMA’s secretary and

JB1204/GRB 40

this partly explained his appearance in Sheffield.

Martin openly urged the use of armed force and the

authorities monitored his speaking activity by employing

spies sent to Chartist indoor meetings.

X Away from the level of a campaign to assert the right to

meet in public places, whilst seeking to know which

direction the movement was heading in nationally via

contact with other areas and the rump of Convention

delegates in London, Sheffield Chartists were working on

the other part of a twin track strategy by trying to

engage with the town’s politically lukewarm trade unions.

Before the August holiday Wolstenholme had sent a

circular to local trade unions. It led to a meeting in

early September of trade union delegates open to twenty-

seven trades still paying their affiliation fees to a

body which was effectively a trades council in everything

but name and whose ancestry stretched back twenty years.

The meeting represented a showdown between the Chartists

and some of the older functionaries of the town’s trade

union movement. Even the ‘democratic’ veterans Thomas

Booth (Britannia Metal smiths) and Joseph Kirk (File

JB1204/GRB 41

cutters) while showing sympathy for the Chartist cause,

refused to sanction individual or collective trade union

affiliation to the SWMA. The ‘aristocratic’ faction

including the saw grinder, William Broadhead, and other

grinding branches, were more hostile. William Gill, a

former scale cutters’ delegate, who had been the

Convention delegate and was deputising for Wolstenholme,

now back in London, took the brunt of the trade union

leaders vigorous defence of their economistic

justification of restricting political campaigning to

ridding the working class of the burden of the Corn Laws.

Wolstenholme had met some of them at a botched Chartist-

trades preliminary meeting a fortnight previously. His

suggestion that the unions should organise political

‘classes’ among their members, his apocalyptic language

and the recommendation of the use of force had frightened

them. Gill was eventually able to get a fuller hearing

in the smoke filled meeting room in the London Prentice

pub. The majority voted their support for the principles

of the Charter but only a minority (12 out of 30 voting)

endorsed a resolution about affiliation.

As the more sedate forces of organised labour in the town

prevaricated, the street militants, heirs of Jacky

JB1204/GRB 42

Blacker, were left political space to occupy. Their

moment was there to be made. It would lead to the

staging of Sheffield’s last rising.

XI The events at the start of the second week of September

1839 represented the peaking of the ‘above ground’

militancy of Sheffield Chartism. Local Chartists filed

their most positive report with the Northern Star for

weeks. Exclusive dealing was hitting non-Chartist

shopkeepers and it was reported that £7,000 had been

taken out of the Savings Bank by trade societies and

other working class organisations.

After the tumultuous Sunday churchgoing where a number of

arrests were made including Thomas Mason, a tailor and

one of the new through-the-ranks street leaders, the

weekday meetings built a momentum. During the evening of

Monday 9 September a crowd of between 3-5,000 held a

‘silent meeting’ in Paradise Square between 7-8pm then

marched to nearby Westbar Green before dispersing. One

interesting feature was the crowd being swelled by a long

procession from communities outside the town including

the village of Ecclesfield. This was described as a mile

JB1204/GRB 43

long and two to four persons deep. Many, described as

carrying ‘walking sticks’, had come ready armed to defend

public space.

The ‘silent’ meetings were successfully repeated on the

two following nights. Anger boiled up when Martin was

arrested. On the Wednesday night the ‘silent’ meeting

was punctuated with a pistol fired in the air and served

again as a signal, this time for a march and

demonstration about Martin’s treatment. This built

pressure on the authorities and the following night they

acted. Magistrates and police armed with cutlasses led

by the local military commander and a troop of Dragoons

went to Paradise Square where a crowd of several thousand

waited, some of them armed and ready to repel any attempt

to stop the silent protests.

Although the authorities had to make sure the area’s gas

lights were lit many had been extinguished by Chartists

realising that darkness was their friend.

A battle began as the police and military pushed into the

square. A barrage of stones was directed at them and the

Chartist crowd pushed its way out of one of the Square’s

entrances. Running fights with the police continued into

the area of the churchyard a hundred yards away. Many

JB1204/GRB 44

dispersed but significantly a group of around a thousand

persons with almost military style precision moved in an

organised fashion across the town avoiding further

skirmishing until they concentrated their numbers on a

piece of rough ground half a mile away south east of the

town centre. This unlit site was known as Doctor’s

Fields (after Dr Browne who owned a lead mill, then

disused). They ‘occupied’ the site and formed a giant

human ring inside which were seen its leaders. There was

a discussion of tactics for the following night when they

planned to continue the fight. The police and military

were too concerned about the difficult terrain and

injured to challenge them. When there was finally a

dispersal two hours later, some fighting took place in

streets adjacent to the site.

This was a serious act of muscle flexing by Chartist

militants. The circle arrangement was interesting. It

might have been an obvious formation in political and

military terms but it was also a feature of the town’s

revolutionary past. Wolstenholme’s father a confirmed

United Englishman and possibly James as a young man not

past twenty could have been present in the circle or the

JB1204/GRB 45

night meetings like that 2nd December 1800 in the vicinity

of Sky Edge.

The Doctor’s Field “stand-off” was serious enough but the

local press reports picked up the humorous side. Press

report continued amusing stories of Chartist escapes. In

one report a Chartist, chased by the police ran into a

house and sat down with an amazed working class family,

pretending successfully to be one of them. A group of

armed Chartists found temporary escape into a cellar and

next day went back to somewhat sheepishly request their

weapons from the occupants. Less amusing for Chartists

and inhabitants were accounts of police and military

attacks on several homes and thirty six arrests made

(including several people not present at the Doctor’s

Fields event).

Some Chartists returned to Doctor’s Fields the following

night but there was no challenge from the authorities.

The muscle flexing was then postponed until Sunday (15

September) another attempt at a ‘churchgoing’. Several

thousand people gathered to attempt entry into the

Churchyard but police armed with cutlasses barred their

way behind closed church gates. Dozens more police sat

inside the church protecting the middle class citizens.

JB1204/GRB 46

The afternoon saw a switch of location to a location not

used since the era of the United Englishmen. This was to

Sky Edge, an area of rocky outcrops a mile outside the

town to the east. It provided a vantage point to observe

the town. Here in a disused quarry, with lookouts posted

above, an afternoon ‘political-religious’ gathering was

held. Many left afterwards but some returned with others

and a further similar meeting was held at 6.30pm.

XII What was going on in Sheffield? What was the

significance of the actions in a bigger context? A

militant group had taken the reins. They wanted to

defend the right to meet for political discussion. They

were being forced to meet outside the town. They could

see the ability of the authorities to coerce them in

daylight in the town’s precincts. In the Chartist world

outside, the petition had been dismissed and the

Convention, having failed to deliver with its ulterior

measures, was in the process of dissolving. They wanted

to continue the struggle for the Charter using direct

action.

JB1204/GRB 47

Several of the more experienced leading Chartist figures

in the town had drawn negative conclusions about

continuing a political struggle. Emigration to America

began to be an attractive alternative. James

Wolstenholme became one of these. He had been the local

Chartist link with the outside world of the Chartist

Convention. His letter to his constituents and reports

of the Convention proceedings published in the Chartist

press hinted he was active in the diminished circle of

delegates remaining in London in the last days of the

Convention from late August - early September. This is

when there was discussion about risings (though this was

probably not the period of origination of such a strategy

which David Jones convincingly located in the spring of

1839 in the text of Henry Vincent’s speeches).

Wolstenholme had played an important role in the

Convention’s sessions despite his late election to

replace Gill. He had chaired sessions (a further clue he

was recognised as a man with a past to be proud of, as

one of Oliver’s victims a former prisoner of the State)

and been listened to with respect whenever he had spoken.

For a man approaching sixty pledging a significant amount

of money (£100) for Peter Foden’s bail put his financial

JB1204/GRB 48

future at risk, it was the time to go. He had stepped

back into political limelight with Gill’s withdrawal. He

had played a key directional role in building stronger

foundations for the local movement. He had tried to

overcome the difficulties with the trades. He had

shuttled between Sheffield and London with the pressures

of leadership. It was over for him. He now feared

arrest and at his age probably feared dying in prison.

The greatest determination of the authorities, he

witnessed on his return from London possibly gave him a

final push.

Wolstenholme, Chatterton, the current SWMA Secretary and

half a dozen other Chartists hurriedly put their affairs

in order and in the third week of September set off for

Liverpool from which port they emigrated to the USA on 26

September.

XIII The remaining militant leadership of Sheffield Chartism

was grouped around Holberry and various associates, some

of whom had military experience. Key figures were Birks,

Mcketterick, Boardman, Marshall, Hands, Bradwell and

Wells. The movement wasn’t paralysed by the loss of

JB1204/GRB 49

experienced leaders. They remained defiant over the

right to meet and innovative in working with others to

find new ways to express their political feelings.

A new phase in ‘politico-religious’ Chartism began on

Sunday 22 September with the first of a series of three

“camp meetings” (open air preachings and ostensibly

religious services in the fashion of the Primitive

Methodists).

Between 10-15,000 Chartist sympathisers - men, women and

children from Sheffield, Barnsley and their wider village

hinterlands assembled at Hood Hill on the edge of the

Fitzwilliam estates eight miles north of Sheffield. A

surviving specially produced hymn sheet provides evidence

of the words people sang during this political

demonstration. A specially written composition by

Ebenezer Elliot (inspired by the hymn of Rebecca in

Scott’s Ivanhoe) as well as Chartist anthems and a

powerful extract from Southey’s Wat Tyler verse were

included.

The camp meeting could be interpreted in different ways.

Did it represent a cathartic emotional release with the

rural surroundings a lightening conductor for pent up

urban political frustrations? Alternatively was it a

JB1204/GRB 50

return to the countryside for sources of emotional

energy? Was it just half-way between Sheffield and

Barnsley but interestingly close to the seat of a

powerful aristocratic family who had once shown sympathy

for working class protest (Earl Fitzwilliam had resigned

his Lord Lieutenancy to protest about Peterloo).

The camp meeting was an inclusive protest serving the

interests of both moderate and more militant Chartists.

The hymns continued social and political messages about

inequality and oppression of working people. They

invoked a higher authority and emphasised solidarity in

struggle. There were no explicit messages indicating

using force in the hymns or speeches delivered but there

was some interesting ambiguity about “arms” in Hymn III

verses 2 and 3.

“Yea there are men in higher spheres,

who mock our prayers, insult our tears,

Great God, convince their haughty clay,

thou made use men the same as they.

Teach then that we have hearts and arms,

Hearts - that the voice of friendship warns

Arms - that no nobler pleasures know,

JB1204/GRB 51

Than to embrace, a friend, or curb a foe”

This camp meeting was followed in the Sheffield area by

smaller versions on two subsequent Sundays at Loxley (a

hamlet five miles NW of the town) and Attercliffe (a

village a mile NE of the town). Through these the

Chartists managed to maintain the right to hold public

meetings throughout October.

The struggle to use Paradise Square now appeared lost,

although on the evening after Hood Hill, Feargus O’Connor

arrived in Sheffield on a speaking tour advocating his

candidacy for the West Riding election but not mentioning

an emerging new Convention/alternative parliament

strategy (echoing 1819). The meeting provided clues as

to the hiatus, in local Chartism, particularly with

Wolstenholme and Chatterton’s departure. There was

limited public organisation and promotion. Gill, the

former Convention delegate, welcomed him and just before

5.00pm O’Connor entered Paradise Square and took the

platform. He rattled out his speech in a half filled

public arena and was heading away in his coach and four

by 6.30pm. The authorities were prepared but chose to

JB1204/GRB 52

let the meeting take place. Police and troops were on

standby if violence occurred.

XIV For the next six weeks, other than the local camp

meetings, the Sheffield Chartists met indoors in the

former school room in Fig Tree Lane. They presented an

official face going through the motions of discussing

practical alternatives like co-operative schemes

including a joint stock provision store as had been began

on Tyneside as the logical extension of exclusive

dealing.

The female Chartists were also strongly in evidence. A

Monday afternoon soiree in October reported in the Star

gave an interesting insight into local Chartist culture.

Decorative arches with evergreen leaves interwoven with

white muslin, framed a sitting area where the group took

tea. The ‘president’ sat at the head of a table in a

seat canopied as a temple and three hundred guests took

tea. Around the walls the names of “patriots” - Paine,

Cobbett, Robert Emmett, Jeremy Bentham, Benjamin

Franklin, Watt Tyler, Henry Hunt, William Tell, De Witte,

JB1204/GRB 53

George Washington, Feargus O’Connor and Edward Fitzgerald

were commemorated.

The restrained ‘indoors’ meetings continued into

November. Later on in the day of the Newport Rising in

South Wales (4 November), William Gill lectured on ‘the

Evils of War’ and new plans were laid for another type of

political - religious strategy to continue meeting -

organising a love feast. All this however, was on a

surface level. While later testimonies give no hint of

Sheffield Chartists having prior specific knowledge of

the Welsh Rising and emphasise it was in the following

weeks that local insurrectionary planning began, prior

knowledge cannot be ruled out. Wolstenholme would have

known about the ongoing discussions in London in the late

summer and autumn and he would in all likelihood been

trusted with detail because of his unique past. It is

likely he would have shared confidences with Holberry and

his circle before he left for America.

What was fairly effectively concealed in Sheffield from

the September churchgoings to early November was that a

militant inner circle was holding the reins. By November

they had used the ‘class system’ of organisation to turn

JB1204/GRB 54

a core of 10-12 classes into proto-revolutionary cells.

Some of these classes had many more than ten members.

Their support was wider than the class members and drew

on journeymen artisans from the more depressed cutlery

branches and town crafts trades. They were particularly

enthusiastically supported by younger journeymen and

apprentices.

After the news from Newport arrived and in particular the

news of Frost’s arrest, the insurrectionary die was now

cast for the leading figures in the class network. They

represented a minority of members but as moderate support

ebbed away with the growing sense of national defeat and

failure they became a majority.

On Monday 11 November Holberry’s “circle” played leading

roles in a defiant Paradise Square lunch time meeting.

Monday in Sheffield still was a “saints day” holiday for

many workers and recently unemployment had started to

rise again in the town after a lull. The meeting was

wilfully defiant. They made no attempt to gain forty

householders’ signatures to petition the Master Cutler to

grant the meeting. They held it at 12.15pm Holberry (so

unused to reporting this shadowy leader were the local

press they miss spelt his name Holbein) chaired the

JB1204/GRB 55

meeting which grew to four hundred. The ostensible

purpose of meeting was to memorialise the Queen

concerning Frost and the Welsh prisoners. It was

intended as a defiant signal to arms. James Mitchell

(probably Irish) as edge tool maker from the village of

Eckington (8 miles SE of Sheffield) made a maiden public

speech proposing a motion that warned ‘the peace of the

kingdom was not safe so long as the Chartists were

confined to prison”. He emphasised they were

memorialising now but,” a day would come when they should

want the men of Sheffield to support them with something

else” (loud cries of ‘Aye, lad, thou’t right)! He called

on them to “arouse themselves and make themselves the means

of relieving the distressed’. James McKetterick, a

brushmaker supported the motion stressing using “legal

means”. These speakers and the resolution appeared to be

part of a gambit to find a way to express firmer views.

A “mechanic”, who none of the press reporters named,

moved an amendment emphasising that:

“ After

seven years petitioning it was inconsistent for working

men who must be

considered the bone and marrow of the State, to petition

JB1204/GRB 56

for that which

they had a right to demand’.

James Boardman, a bricklayer spoke and expansively talked

about poverty, destitution and the uselessness of

petitions declaiming “they had far better buy coats and

warm themselves during the present severe weather”. He

pointed to his own home where his aged father “who had

done much more for the country than ever the Queen did,

toiled for one shilling (5p) a day and 16 hours”. He

affirmed, ‘he would never be tyrannised over by a set of

people that would not work’. He continued in a similar

vein

“They had

petitioned for year after year, and what had they got?

Why they got the Reform Bill after a great many meetings

and plenty of humbugging, and firing, and threats of

physical force, but what has the Reform Bill done for

working people? Nothing. The oligarchy and the

shopocracy now told those who they formerly flattered

that they would be willing to give all the people the

franchise; if they had knowledge enough to exercise it.”

JB1204/GRB 57

The last speaker, a painter Thomas Bradwell, in an almost

stage managed final outburst, delivered the “circle’s ’’

bottom line. He stated;

“so exasperated were the people of Wales at the conduct

of the aristocracy; that they determined to resort to

physical force. But they acted wrong, they were

premature and not united and determined, or they might

have done it. Now, I tell you, do not rush madly into

the field, but be prepared to do it effectively when you

do it. The laws of this country allow you to get aims. A man has

been taken into custody (in August) for using in this

square the word “biscuit”. I will not be at the trouble

of using any such epithet. I tell you it is your duty and it is your

privilege to get muskets (loud cheering)”.

The amendment was passed with three cheers for John Frost

and the Welsh prisoners and followed by a rapid

dispersal.

XV Over the next few weeks the insurrectionary circle’s work

involved procurement and manufacture of arms, mainly

shells, grenades, significant numbers of daggers, smaller

JB1204/GRB 58

numbers of pikes and, pistols and muskets. The Chartists

still met as the SWMA in Fig Tree Lane but as a self-

styled “new association” commenced within the old one.

Meetings now involved “doorkeepers” and ever changing

passwords used to restrict participation. There were

meetings held after meetings.

Holberry was the leading military strategist though he

had some old soldiers to share his thinking with. His

cramped three room back-to-back in Eyre Lane was

regularly frequented by his lieutenants and devoted young

supporters like William Wells, a chapel going warehouse

clerk who was trusted with message taking and doorkeeping

duties. The other key class leaders and the location of

the class included McKetterick (a brush maker) whose

group met at the house of Penthorpe a shoemaker in

Westbar, Samuel Powell Thompson (an engine tenter)

whose group met at Bennison’s public house in the Park

district, Daniel Hands’ group who met at Clayton’s house

in Porter Street, John Marshall who led a group in

Coalpit Lane, James Birks group in Mill Lane and

Boardman’s group in St Philips Road. There was also a

class in a back street called Forty Row and another in

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the Bridgehouses district. The leaders of these were

never discovered. Mitchell was the leader of a group in

the nearby Derbyshire village of Eckington. Cooper

(possibly Holberry’s father in law) was the leader of a

group in Attercliffe and James Allen, a stove grate

worker and beerhouse keeper led (or latterly pretended to

lead) a Rotherham group. It was the last named, blowing

hot then cold politically, who was to betray the rest

possibly because he was put under pressure from

intensified police surveillance.

As the local preparations took shape in November links

with likeminded groups in other parts of the wider region

and further a field were being strengthened. The

Northern Star and increasingly the Northern Liberator

newspapers were providing key information. There had

already been visits from Newcastle with a speaker at a

Fig Tree meeting in early September - possibly explaining

the joint stock co-operative venture plans but maybe

bringing other ideas into focus. Links with West Riding

Chartists wider afield than the Barnsley area, with whom

links were long established, were made. Here there had

been some fore knowledge of Welsh plan. Sheffield

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Chartists now promoted ideas of their own outwards. Post

Newport they offered to host a gathering of delegates

from northern Britain but eventually Newcastle was

chosen. Here a somewhat misleadingly labelled gathering,

the “District and Border Convention, was eventually held

as part of a co-ordination process.

While this remained in preparation, the Sheffield

Chartists collected money for the Frost Defence Fund.

Some of this was spent on arms. There were other likely

sources of funds; pawning possessions, outsiders

(mysterious well funded foreigners), their own money and

donations from well wishers (Peter Foden had at one stage

£500 in savings most of which was spent on political

activity). Dates for a general rising started to be

circularised in local and regional Chartist circles to

begin in Northern England. One strong rumour was for a

few days after Sheffield Fair (25 November).

The only big local bang heard in November came in the

form of Chartist testing of their explosive shells on

dark hillsides or secluded valley bottoms outside the

town. Several attempts were made to test fireballs on St

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Mary’s Church in Bramall Lane (appropriately one of the

“Million Churches” built by state finance after the

French Wars) on the night of 25-26 November.

Coincidently the Chartists were active in the town both

on the 25 and 26. A handbill was issued calling a Monday

evening Fig Tree Lane room meeting to elect a delegate to

the northern convention planned in Newcastle. The

meeting room was visited three times by the police in an

attempt to interfere with proceedings that appeared to

involve 40-50 men and youths. The meeting didn’t succeed

in making nominations and a leaflet was issued to

advertise a torch lit meeting the following night on a

nearby hillside to ‘consider the case of Mr Frost’.

This took place in the near darkness (the crowd had

burning rope candles to light their activity) in a field

close to Sky Edge in the early evening of 26 November.

The authorities were more circumspect about interfering

with this gathering because of the location and the dark.

They sent out scouts to try and spy on the meeting and

some got very close.

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Seventeen torches were reported sighted by two policemen

hiding in the relative comfort of the Shrewsbury Hospital

buildings several hundred yards away. A lamp lighter

tramping across fields towards his business on the

eastern edge of the town claimed he saw 400-500 present,

shouting, clapping and singing. Subsequent press

reports, including Chartist ones dealing with the

Newcastle meeting, reveal that the main business of the

night gathering was electing James Boardman, a

bricklayer, as the Sheffield delegate.

Eventually the Dragoons from the barracks rode nearer the

meeting site but the meeting had ended. Groups of

departing Chartists on passing them mocked them with cat

calls of ‘you’re too late’. The authorities remained on

alert that night and six arrests were made. Three young

men were arrested for walking up Spital Hill, a street in

the north of the town some distance from the meeting

carrying the remains of burning rope torches that they

had picked up. Three more young men were apprehended in

the town that night for being suspected of being scouts

or lookouts (‘pikers’ was the local word). All were

given warnings as to their future conduct.

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A week later Boardman had travelled to Newcastle where

between 2nd and 4th December there was a ‘pre-convention’

meeting which brought together representatives and

information about the state of Chartist activity in

Northumberland and Durham but also attracted delegates

from further afield. William Jones from the West Riding,

Boardman from Sheffield and an unnamed Welsh delegate

were also in attendance. Sheffield’s initiative offering

to host the meeting in the first instance was

reciprocated by Boardman chairing the second, third and

final day’s proceedings and signing the “Address to the

People of Great Britain” it endorsed in his capacity as

Chairman. Hints were given, even in press accounts of

the public proceedings, of a determination for an armed

response to save Frost . The meeting also provided an

impetus for the calling of a new London based Chartist

Convention.

XV1 Militant Chartist activity in Sheffield and its immediate

hinterland cloaked itself in secrecy. This was not

maintained entirely successfully at the time as events

proceeded and nor in terms of later penetration and

JB1204/GRB 64

evaluation by historians aided by access to subsequent

statements including the availability of surviving later

19th Century locla” oral tradition”. Class meetings,

usually twice a week, were synchronised with early

evening public meetings in the Fig Tree Lane rooms.

These were open meetings but then followed by restricted

entry later evening meetings. Trusted, dependable

members were identified by the Committee and sworn

(‘making promises’) into an inner organisation (‘new

association’). Signs and passwords were adopted for

entry into the late evening gatherings. Holberry and

Boardman seemed to be the pivots of the action. With

Holberry it was his youth, vigour and determination

coupled with a confidence of military matters (there was

also utilisation of Macerone’s book and strategic lessons

from a history of the late rebellions in Ireland) proven

by his direction of street based confrontation in the

late summer and autumn. Several of the older members of

the inner circle of class leaders and some of their

middle aged deputies also drew on practical experience of

fighting on land and sea going as far as the siege(and

burning of ) Washington in 1812.

JB1204/GRB 65

The links with the militant movement in the West Riding

became firmer. The powerful Great Northern Union

delegate body, which Sheffield had never formally

affiliated to, now gave Sheffield endorsement and

recognition by supporting Boardman as one of the three

West Riding delegates to go to London to the Convention

recommended by the Newcastle meeting (Dewsbury and

Bradford representatives were also to be sent forward to

London with him). Wider afield other national regions

discussed nominations and the implied support for

forceful measures - a rising to set in motion the freeing

of Frost and a challenge for the Charter’s achievement.

Sheffield had established links in other directions. On

15-16 December the appearance of Edward Brown, a

Birmingham militant leader at the Fig Tree meeting room

on successive nights seems to reciprocate Birmingham’s

warm feelings for Sheffield activists.

Boardman was now on his way to London leaving a town

where a range of contemporary sources, press, magistrates

communications and military reports emphasise a

significant worsening of economic conditions. A

contemporary claimed:

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“manufactures were closing, others were working 2-3 days

a week … two thousand

workmen had been thrown out of work”.

The same picture of further economic deterioration was

now continuously profiled in the press. It coloured some

of the desperate political action that was about to

follow.

Boardman arrived in London 0n 23rd December but found to

his disappointment only a handful of other ‘district’

delegates (7 or 8). Others including people like Brown

were expected. The early meetings were frustratingly

spent attempting to resolve the issue of the funds of the

previous Convention which had closed leaving a

restrictive condition as to the use of its money in the

formation of a successor. The representatives there

included delegates from Nottingham, Bradford, Sheffield,

Hull, Newcastle, Bolton, Tower Hamlets and Surrey (London

South of the Thames). There was clearly a sub-agenda but

for those wishing to develop it, only bureaucratic

frustration.

JB1204/GRB 67

Boardman’s actions suggest his impatient viewing of the

agenda. He left London and travelled to Birmingham and

may have also visited Manchester at the end of December.

It was expected he would bring Brown with him when he

returned south. There is no evidence he returned for the

post New Year second week’s reconvening and the

likelihood is he had received orders to return north to

help proceed the action that had been planned in

Yorkshire.

Meanwhile Holberry had been out of Sheffield on a

mission. He later admitted to have ‘travelled twice’ in

the period of late December - early January 1840. He was

with the West Riding leaders at the delegate meeting held

in the Wellington Inn, Dewsbury where he spend some time

before the 28 December. He returned late on Saturday 4

January. He may have travelled further afield in this

period, possibly linking up with Boardman bringing news

from London and Birmingham. Holberry was later cited as

having communication with or from Beniowoski, the Polish

major whose earlier experiences were of warfare in

Eastern Europe (he was a surgeon by training and his

JB1204/GRB 68

combatant experience included the Russian army which he

left and the Polish nationalist forces he defected to).

This London-based internationalist, a member of the East

London Democrative Association, had been a centre of

attention to delegates to the National Convention. He

was also a direct representative in the December-January

Convention. Holberry later gave opinions on Dr Taylor

which implied some familiarity. Wolstenholme, had met

both and may have thereby brokered subsequent contact.

XVII It was not just through emissaries but also postal

correspondence that was relaying messages along inter-

regional communication lines. The lack of security along

one of these lines was later claimed to have

significantly jeopardised the impending role Sheffield

militants sought. Parker, a Birmingham Chartist was

later blamed for giving vital clues about Sheffield’s

intentions in correspondence the authorities intercepted

and read. That was not the only weak link as was soon to

be revealed.

The Chartist plans were set in the West Riding. The

centre of gravity had shifted to the regions while

JB1204/GRB 69

developments in London diminished in significance. The

plan was for a northern rising to begin on the night of

11-12 January. There may have been an earlier start date

(4 January) but this was countermanded. There was some

expectation of action elsewhere but the debt of honour

the English Chartists felt they owed to their Welsh

counter-parts would be met by a strong push in the West

Riding but with some supporting action developing in

other areas in the North.

Holberry was now the dominant figure establishing

Sheffield’s pivotal role when he met his grizzled textile

district counterparts in the West Riding delegate

planning meetings. He returned to Sheffield late on 4

January. So anxious were his Sheffield colleagues for

his return that two leading activists were organising a

horse drawn trap to go and pick him up when he returned

in the dead of night. With him was Francis Law, a

Dewsbury area Chartist leader taking a message to London.

Law was seen off on midday coach on Sunday 5

January.

JB1204/GRB 70

The Sheffield activists meet in Fig Tree Lane or in the

classes during the first three nights of the following

weeks. The preparation of the munitions of war continued

with stock piles built up in several locations. The

security measures relating to admittance to the central

meetings were stepped up. A new password was given to

the door keepers (tilers or tellers) and was introduced

on Wednesday.

Holberry went away on a trip into the North Midlands in

midweek. In all probability he visited active or

sympathetic small groups in Nottingham, Sutton in

Ashfield, Mansfield, Leicester and Loughborough. These

were old Luddite heartlands. He gave news of the

Convention and what the West Riding delegates had

declared as to them leading a start to a rising for the

Charter. Sheffield was playing a key role spreading the

work of the imminence of action. One of Holberry’s

trusted aides, ‘Old’ Booker, a Waterloo veteran, was also

travelling ostensibly on ‘family business’ and was in all

likelihood entrusted with taking the same message to the

‘Eckington friends’, whose leader was James Mitchell and

to Chesterfield and Brampton. Holberry and other key

JB1204/GRB 71

figures including Boardman, Bradwell and a late recruit,

local Irish community leader and ardent O’Connellite

repealer, James Duffey met in a ‘secret’ meeting on

Thursday 8th. Holberry reported on his visit to

Nottingham and Midlands towns. After the meeting

Holberry and some of these figures went to a public house

in Dixon Lane where they met Francis Law on his return

from London and who was now returning home. Also present

with Law was William Ashton, the Barnsley leader who had

spoken at an earlier public meeting in Sheffield. He had

been for several months in France with his family trying

to ear a living. He had returned and, in London, may

have become party to discussions about a rising. It was

oddly circumstantial he was travelling with Law.

Discussion went on into the early hours. The die was now

cast, Sheffield they agreed would be the scene of a

rising within 48 hours.

The following night Fig Tree Lane was the scene of

another gathering and late night secretive assembly.

Duffey was in the chair and leading figures from the

revolutionary classes Holberry, Bradwell, Birks,

Marshall, Boardman and McKetterick were there. They were

JB1204/GRB 72

joined by Peter Foden, the rotund militant baker who was

on bail. Holberry, pistol in hand, stood on a wooden

form and issued instructions. An unarmed Frenchman was

present (some were surprised at his excellent English)

and inspected their arms.

The orders given out were that class members were to be

in their class meeting places by 10.00pm on Saturday

night. The rising was to actually begin at 2.00am on

Sunday morning 12 January. In the first phase there

would be an incendiary attack on the barracks and then

physical attacks on the police office, Town Clerk’s house

and the isolated homes of magistrates which lay outside

the town. These latter were to be assassinated if they

were seen riding towards town while the insurgent groups

moved in this direction.

The centre piece was to be the seizure of the Tontine

Coaching Inn and the adjacent Town Hall (particularly the

ground floor and roof). These would be held as Chartist

‘forts’ and defended by lines of scattered ‘night cats’

(small spiked obstacles) and from the buildings guns and

huge numbers of already prepared and primed grenades and

JB1204/GRB 73

shells would be hurled towards any of the military or

police who had the temerity to challenge them.

Preventing the mail coaches leaving the Tontine was a

stratagem to signal success and incite reciprocal actions

in other West Riding towns and in Nottingham and other

north and east midland localities. There would in any

instance be risings centering on Dewsbury and in all

probability Bradford. These might have transmitted their

own signal messages.

The revolutionary alarm clock ticked towards the hour.

Saturday afternoon saw the calling together of a group to

put the final touches to the plan. This was in an

upstairs room of a Lambert Street public house usually

used by an Oddfellows organisation. Active Chartists met

again in larger numbers at the Fig Tree Lane room at

7.00pm and then dispersed to class meeting places to

await the moment to move to final assembly points before

then finally moving on pre-selected objectives.

The Sheffield based classes provided the core of two

attack groups and other groups were linked in to the

attack plans with expected groups from Attercliffe,

JB1204/GRB 74

Rotherham (from the north east) and Eckington (South)

joining up.

By now the authorities knew a great deal. James Allen,

the Rotherham leader whose beer house some later accounts

claim had been used for some planning meetings attended

by delegates from wider afield to deflect attention from

Sheffield activity, had been ‘turned’. He had been

actively and genuinely involved but had in December lost

his nerve. However, the local Rotherham police put

pressure on him and persuaded him to become re-involved.

He gave in to pressure and had become accepted again as a

serious player effectively now taking on a role that was

partly that of an agent provocateur.

In the last hours before the rising, Allen was very close

to the key decision making. He had been at the Saturday

afternoon meeting in the Reuben’s Head in Lambert Street.

He left for Rotherham and gave his report to the police.

By early evening the aristocratic local magnate, Lord

Howard of Effingham was galloping furiously towards

Sheffield to rouse the dilatory local magistracy to get

the Dragoons out of the barracks and into the streets.

JB1204/GRB 75

The later 19th Century folklore tradition had it that some

of the Sheffield class leaders received a sufficient

warning of what was about to happen to stop them leading

their classes who they dispersed to their homes with an

adequate time to cover their tracks. The police and

Dragoons were moving in the direction of some of the

suspected class leaders’ homes. Holberry’s home in Eyre

Lane was visited first at around 10.00pm. Holberry was

behaving in an ambiguous fashion with some indication he

had only just been warned. His wife Mary was forced to

let the police in. He was in the upstairs room resting

on a bed but dressed. The attic was full of grenades and

shells and a horse pistol was hanging within reach. His

arrest prevented his leading a small hand picked group of

around 8 to 10 people to fire the barracks and then move

on some of the magistrates’ homes. Later, under

interrogation whilst refusing to talk about his comrades

actions and only his own role, he talked as if when

arrested warnings had led to him giving a countermanding

order to call the action off.

JB1204/GRB 76

The countermanding hadn’t (if it occurred) been entirely

successful. Some Chartists rose. Several of the 8-10

‘attack groups’ involved were activated and met and tried

to keep to their parts of the plan. There was some

movement to pre-agreed assembly points but clearly not

the continuation of a plan to seize more guns from

various gun shops in the town. Members of the groups led

by Birks, Boardman, Hends and Thompson and some of

Duffy’s Irishmen were on the streets. One group set off

towards a distant magistrate’s home on the rural south

western edge of the town.

Leaders in the early hours of Sunday were all too soon

aware of the mobilisation of Dragoons, police and special

constables in the town centre. Mustering of armed

Chartists still occurred and some new orders were issued

including the ultimate order to “Moscow the town”. The

early hours however saw no flames licking the town’s

skyline. Those ordered baulked at starting the fires by

burning their own homes. It became in no time more a

tragic comedy of ‘cat and mouse’ as in the darkness knots

of armed Chartists tried to re-convene in new assembly

points whilst avoiding scouting parties of Dragoons and

JB1204/GRB 77

police. Two under strength classes effected a meeting at

one point and the authorities reports suggested as many

as fifty Chartists were seen at one location on the

western edge of the town, the moon glinting off polished

pikeheads.

A series of apparently bizarre incidents occurred in the

early hours. In a moment of bleak comedy, a Chartist who

had been diverted from his military duties to seek

medical advice for his sick wife was shot in the backside

by sceptical insurgent Chartists. He was not seriously

hurt. Neither were the isolated watchman and police

fired at by various insurgent groups. Throughout the

night only a limited amount of direct contact between

Chartists and the authorities occurred.

XVIII The early

hours brought daylight and clear viewing of the chaotic

mobilisation. A mass of discarded weaponry littered open

areas on the north-west and western fringes of the town -

particularly in the vicinity of the Crookesmoor

reservoir, the Botanical Gardens and the St Philips Road

area.

JB1204/GRB 78

The authorities continued the search for weapons and

systematically made arrests. The town took on the form

of an armed camp with pickets of troops ringing the Town

Hall where captured Chartists and piles of their weapons

waited for interrogation. All this led months later to

trials, sentences and prison but not for all.

Despite the belated vigilance of the authorities, some

key leaders slipped the net. Foden escaped to Wales

where he continued agitating but was re-arrested when he

returned to Sheffield late in 1840. Boardman escaped

along the Sheffield road past an armed picket of

expectant Barnsley Chartists at the town’s turnpike gate.

He never returned and remains to this day an enigma.

Bradwell and McKetterick also escaped but there is

evidence they returned and with other insurrectionaries

who were released after imprisonment like Wells and Old

Booker’s son, played important roles in the continuing

movement in the post 1840 National Charter Association

branches. Mary Holberry escaped permanent imprisonment

by the skin of her teeth and became a respected figure in

the local Chartist community not just because she was

JB1204/GRB 79

Holberry’s dignified widow but in her own right. She

married again and with her Chartist husband Charles

Pearson, ran the ‘Seven Stars’ public house. Her son

with Samuel died while he was in prison but her first son

with Pearson was christened Holberry Pearson.

X1X Holberry had died in the summer of 1842 in York Castle.

Holberry was an instantaneous martyr who was mythologised

in verse and song. A bust was produced by a York

Chartist who had visited him in his last days and for

years remained in the Chartist rooms. His short robust

active life fired thousands of young Chartists for the

next ten years and he was not forgotten in Sheffield in

the century that followed. Oral history work carried out

in the 1980s revealed surviving popular memory in the

childhood world of the early C20th and it survived in

local trade union mythology. The door keeper(a modern

day tiler) of a National Society of Painters’ branch in

the town was still lecturing trade unionists about

Holberry as they registered for branch meetings in 1948.

A Holberry Society was founded in 1977 by a group of

trade union activists and for ten years was involved in a

diverse energising projects relating working class

JB1204/GRB 80

history to contemporary struggles. The bust was renovated

and placed in storage .A functional steel plate

dedication was placed on the edge of the city’s main

public space in the early 1990s. The Chartists of 1839

were still talisman to the then still defiantly leftish

local labour movement in the harsh 1980s. Alan

Barrow ,one of the local leaders of the 2000 activists of

the vibrant local anti poll tax movement ,addressed the

largest anti poll day rally in 1989 in the city’s

Barker’s Pool with charged references to the actions of

1839 - the spirit of Newport and Sheffield in 1839-40.

In the new century a huge plaque mounted on huge

sandstone pedestals announces the Holberry Cascades, a

vast series of city centre ornamental water channels in

the central “Heart of the City” public space. In a

recently renovated civic museum the bust ,as if a death

mask, glowers outwardly with more certainty of its own

significance in these “modern times” juxtaposed against

realia from the 1984-5 Miners’ strike.

XX A verdict on

James Wolstenholme has never been given. In his American

exile he was forgotten. His sojourn in Connecticut supposedly

JB1204/GRB 81

ended in the late 1840s and there are claims he returned home.

There is scant evidence, no collective memory and no civic

tribute. Worse there is false memory in apparently mistaken

Chartist biographic reference. This article has hopefully

gone some way to establish his full contribution. In summary,

James Wolstenholme and Samuel Holberry did meet. There is

little doubt of that. If, in the scale of political time, the

meeting was fleeting, it was sufficient for the torch bearer

from the Jacobin - radical past to reach out to the next

generation recipient. They would never meet again but their

flame still flickers on even in these ‘new times’. This

article represents a activist historian ‘s testament in

exploring the extensive context of their meeting which itself

scripted the epilogue to Sheffield’s nineteenth century

insurrectionary tradition.

John Baxter

14/5/04/ 18-6-07 update

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