Voices from the Old Bailey

The new series of 'Voices from the Old Bailey' is on BBC Radio 4, Wednesday 27 July, 9am, repeated at 9.30pm. The first programme is on riots. It's presented, exquisitely as always, by Amanda Vickery.

I'll be talking about the Wilkes and Liberty Riots of 1768 (note the BBC website is a little misleading in having riot in the singular - there were many, many riots during that crazy time when John Wilkes's supporters tried to get him out his prison sentence and re-elected back into parliament). The Wilkes riots were important because they were the first time ordinary working people got involved in a mass scale in political demonstrations campaigning for reform in parliament. 'Liberty' had a very ambiguous meaning, so the agitation for the libertine and later Mayor of London Wilkes was able to encompass a wide range of grievances.

I'm not sure how much of me will be kept off the cutting room floor, but hopefully I'll also be talking about food riots too. The image of the ballad from the British Museum website is a Cheap Repository Tract, and was designed to dissuade plebeians from rioting during the harvest failure years of 1795 and 1799-1800. It's an epitome of the 'conversation between two yokels' type of propaganda that loyalists and moralists thought most effective in the late eighteenth century.

Peter King and Tim Hitchcock will be discussing the Penlez riots of 1749 and the Gordon riots of 1780. Note also although the statement 'left-wing historians of the 70s and 80s ignored the Gordon Riots because they didn't fit their ideological model of the noble rioter,' is kind of correct, this does not mean that they are the preserve of 'right-wing' historians. The classic work on the riots still remains by George Rude, 'The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and their Victims', Trans. Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 6 (1956).

Link to BBC site here

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commemoration of the execution of 17 Luddites, York, 19 January 2013

Image
On Saturday 19 January, York's Alternative History held an afternoon of talks and commemoration for the Luddites tried and executed at York. placards outside York Castle In the huge space of the Guild Hall, Adam Gutteridge , one of the organisers, introduced the themes of the day. His speech echoed the two interesting articles publicising the event in the Guardian (by local historian Paul Furness, here , and by another organiser Helen Graham, here ). They argue that now that York's industrial economy is no more (chocolate and railways), York has remade itself round the past: an economy of tourism. Yet the past as presented to tourists and indeed to residents, is a sanitised and normalised history, centring round Vikings, medieval religion, and Georgian middle-class pleasures. The recent York 800 celebrations had no place for the popular protest and resistance that had a distinguished history in the city. I began the talks by explaining the context and meaning of the
Read more

'As I tried to bludgeon Chartist demonstrators in the square'

The quotation above of course is made up by Half Man Half Biscuit, in 'Letters Sent.' Chartist demonstrations almost automatically bring to mind urban settings of protest - particularly 'monster' meetings in Georgian and early Victorian civic squares: Stevenson's Square in Manchester, Clayton Square in Liverpool, Paradise Square in Sheffield, and so on. Many of the big meetings - and conflicts - occurred in what should be 'public' space, but in fact were not freely open to all, but controlled by local elites opposed to any threats to public order. Yet Chartist demonstrations were not solely urban in character. Partly because they were being forced out of 'public' spaces in towns, and partly because inhabitants still had connections with the countryside, 'camp meetings' and demonstrations also occurred in rural areas, especially on moors and commons. Processions from towns out to the more remote moors connected urban with rural. Monster meetin
Read more