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Sheffield Troublemakers: Rebels and Radicals in Sheffield History with David Price - Ep 42
771 Plays2 years ago
Archaeology & Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. This month we are proud to host David Price from the University of Sheffield speaking on "Sheffield Troublemakers: Rebels and Radicals in Sheffield History ". This talk took place on Thursday, October 28th, 2021, online via Google Meets.
David Price
David Price studied history at Cambridge. He then went into the civil service. He was private secretary to Willie Whitelaw who later became Deputy Prime Minister. For some years, he worked on the transformation of old employment exchanges into modern Job Centres. In 1980, he moved with the Manpower Services Commission from London to Sheffield. On his retirement he took up history again. His first book was called Office of Hope and was the history of the Job Centres in the UK - originally founded by Winston Churchill and William Beveridge in 1910. Recently, he has been interested in helping asylum seekers in the city which has led him to write a book about migration to Sheffield called 'Welcome to Sheffield: A Migration History'. However, his best known book is about the radical tradition in Sheffield and is called 'Sheffield Troublemakers'. This is the subject of today's talk. In his talk, David will trace Sheffield's long history of radicalism and the important role that Sheffield has played on the national stage. This is a story of dissenting middle classes, independent minded artisans, champions of the weak and an unwillingness to be pushed around.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Impact of the Pandemic on Sheffield's Radical Talks
00:00:28
Speaker
calling all rebels and radicals. Welcome to episode 42 of Archeology Nail, a free monthly public archeology talk, brought to you by Archeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archeology. This time, our guest speaker is David Price, talking about Sheffield troublemakers, rebels and radicals in Sheffield history. Due to the ongoing COVID pandemic, this talk is taking place online via Google Meets. So maybe some background noise or audio feedback in our recording. Enjoy.
00:01:11
Speaker
Well, it's very nice to be with you this evening. I'm very keen on archaeology and I was very sad to learn the future of your department is not good at all. But perhaps we can put that on one side tonight and think about Sheffield history. And I'm going to start you off, not in Sheffield actually, but on Weymouth Beach.
00:01:33
Speaker
Now this man is King George III. The year is 1800. He's not mad. He's perfectly sane. And he's walking on Weymouth Beach. And he sees some children playing, looked after by a nurse.
Sheffield's Radical Reputation Post-French Revolution
00:01:47
Speaker
And he asks the nurse, and whose children are these?
00:01:52
Speaker
And the nurse replies, she's rather nervous. May it please your Majesty, they are Mr Shaw's of Norton near Sheffield. At that point, the King's face changes and grows dark, and he exclaims, ah, Sheffield, Sheffield.
00:02:11
Speaker
damned bad place Sheffield. What an extraordinary thing for a king to say about one of the towns in his kingdom. But his view would have been shared by many people in his government at the time. Sheffield was just about the most radical place in England.
00:02:27
Speaker
after the French Revolution of 1789 and this made it very unpopular with the ruling class in London and Sheffield's radical tradition continued with fits and starts right up to the 1980s and my book Sheffield Troublemakers traces this tradition over 200 years
00:02:48
Speaker
Now my talk this evening will have to be selective, and I can only cover a fraction of what is in my book, so if you want to know more, have a look at my book. So let's go back to the French Revolution. In 1789, Sheffield was a middling-sized town of some 30,000 inhabitants.
00:03:07
Speaker
It was already the leading cutlery town in Britain. But why was it so receptive to revolutionary ideas? And I think there were three reasons. First of all, Sheffield wasn't controlled or dominated by a powerful town corporation or a powerful aristocrat. The Duke of Norfolk, Lord of the Manor, lived far away in Arendelle.
00:03:32
Speaker
Secondly, radical dissent was a force. Now, radical dissent, those two words together are interesting. Dissent means rejection of the established Church of England in favour of other non-conformist churches.
Joseph Gales and the Rise of Radical Journalism
00:03:50
Speaker
And the most influential congregation in Sheffield of the dissenters was Upper Chapel and
00:03:58
Speaker
This is Upper Chapel today. It didn't look like that in those days. It was a bit smaller, but the brickwork underlying what you can see here is the same. The dissenters were very strong in Sheffield and Upper Chapel was particularly strong. A lot of the most prosperous business people worshipped at Upper Chapel and their minister was this man, the Reverend Joseph Evans, who was there for 40 years.
00:04:25
Speaker
Now, he's holding a book, isn't he? Now, if you look more closely at that book, you probably can't quite make this out. But actually, the word on the book is not the Bible. The word is loc, L-O-C-K-E. And loc was the philosopher who justified the glorious revolution of 1688. Dissenters like the Reverend Joseph Evans,
00:04:50
Speaker
were radicals who felt that the glorious revolution of 1688, glorious though it was, was incomplete because they were excluded from political power by the Test Act. Now this Minister Evans
00:05:06
Speaker
had an adopted son, who was the famous Sheffield historian Joseph Hunter, and Hunter described his adoptive father Evans like this. His opinions were extreme on the side of freedom. He was a hearty well-wisher to the French in their revolution.
00:05:25
Speaker
He had the most cordial hatred of the Ministry of Mr Pitt, who was then Prime Minister. This dislike was extended to the Crown, and he would gladly have seen a revolution at home. And then, Hunter adds, most significant, that many dissenting clergy and laity shared these sentiments.
00:05:47
Speaker
So this was a large group of middle class people who were really strongly critical of the government. And the third reason why Sheffield was a radical town was to do with the working class, the Cutlers. They were independent minded, well organized and very fed up with the Cutlers company, actually.
00:06:09
Speaker
Here is a cutler in 1814. You'll notice he's in quite a small workshop, not a large factory like the cotton factories that were developing in Manchester at the time. These cutlers were basically self-employed and they had freedom to come and go so they could join in demonstrations and protests.
00:06:30
Speaker
From 1784, there was a bitter dispute in the affairs of the Cutlass Company.
Embrace of the French Revolution and Democratic Ideas
00:06:36
Speaker
Now, you probably know the present Cutlass Hall opposite the Cathedral. Well, this is what the Cutlass Hall was like in 1831 and would have looked much the same in 1789 or 1784.
00:06:50
Speaker
The Cutler's Company was not democratic. It was run by a small group. They were fairly rich merchants and they'd stopped enforcing the rules of the Cutler's Company, for instance, restricting the number of apprenticeships or refusing to admit what were called foreigners from outside Hallamshire.
00:07:09
Speaker
As a result of these policies by the ruling group in the Cutlass Company, the ordinary Cutlass felt very insecure. They could lose their jobs, and they actually went to the court of King's Bench to challenge the leadership of the company, but they failed.
00:07:27
Speaker
When news of the French Revolution reached Sheffield in 1789, most Sheffield people of all classes welcomed it, and no one more than this man, Joseph Gail, editor of the Sheffield Register, which was the main local newspaper not only in Sheffield but for miles around Sheffield.
00:07:48
Speaker
And here is his home and newspaper office in Hart's Head. Hart's Head is a road that continues along from Campo Lane, very near the Anglican Cathedral. This building, alas, rather pretty building, is no longer there, but it was both his home and his printing office and his shop.
00:08:10
Speaker
Joseph Gales came from Ekington near Sheffield. He married a well-educated, somewhat upper-class woman called Winifred, and they were both Unitarians and they attended Upper Chapel. Joseph Gales was an able journalist. He provided Sheffield with a powerful commentary on current events.
00:08:29
Speaker
In 1791, he recommended to his readers a new book called The Rights of Man, which I think must surely be one of the most influential books ever written. It was by this man, Thomas Paine. Now, Thomas Paine
00:08:45
Speaker
was in Rotherham for several months in 1788, designing an iron bridge. And I think it's extremely likely that Joseph Gales, the newspaper editor, met him because these radical thinkers met for dinner in those days. Gales certainly supported Payne's ideas about democracy and the rights of man, and he spread them through his newspaper across the north of England.
00:09:13
Speaker
Then in 1791 Sheffield experienced a major riot over the enclosure of 6,000 acres of common land to the northwest of Sheffield. This included Fullwood and Stannington. You may know these areas, I expect you do, and stretching right up into the moors above. Parliament passed this legislation
00:09:34
Speaker
and three commissioners were appointed to carry out the enclosure, including this man, the Reverend James Wilkinson, vicar of Sheffield for 50 years, the leading magistrate in charge of law and order, the richest man in the town. He'd inherited money from his mother through his mother, and he was awake and he did advocate moderate parliamentary reform. Anyway,
00:09:58
Speaker
He pinned the notice about the enclosure and the meeting of the commissioners on his church door. And soon afterwards, he was most alarmed because a mob, as he said, menaced him and his fellow commissioners with the greatest personal danger. Wilkinson called in the cavalry from Nottingham to restore order. But by the time they arrived, the mob had proceeded to Wilkinson's grand house
00:10:26
Speaker
Broome Hall and set it on fire. Fortunately, the fire was put out, but poor old Wilkinson lost his library, which he was very fond of. The Sheffield mob failed to stop the enclosure. Far from bowing to the crowd, the government sent troops in permanently into this unruly town and built barracks in Shalesmore to house the troops. And these barracks later moved to Hillsborough.
00:10:55
Speaker
This disturbance had all sorts of effects. One was that it politicised the working class. We've seen that the Cutlers were already very unhappy about the Cutlers company. Now they were unhappy about the way the country was run by a very narrow, narrowly elected parliament in which they had no say.
Government Repression and Gales' Escape
00:11:16
Speaker
So they formed a society called the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information. It sounds a bit boring, doesn't it? But in fact, it was a momentous development. It's been described as the first working class organization of any consequence in the whole country.
00:11:34
Speaker
Within six months, the society had 2,000 members, and they were organized in cells of 10 people, perhaps drawing on the Methodist classes. And they promoted Payne's ideas of the rights of man, not only in Sheffield, but all around Sheffield.
00:11:49
Speaker
and similar organizations started to rise up in London, Leeds, Birmingham, copying the Sheffield model. Joseph Gales supported this new movement. He founded a new radical paper called the Patriot. The government didn't like this at all. They were very alarmed by these new associations, condemned the spreading of subversive doctrine.
00:12:09
Speaker
They encouraged the formation of a new party in Sheffield called the Church and King Party. And one day, a hundred people met in the Cutlass Hall to pass a resolution of loyalty to the king. Now, you try and imagine this rather wonderful engraving. It gives you an idea. This is the parish church, later the cathedral. And the Cutlass Hall is on the left.
00:12:37
Speaker
and the mob must have been around here and they threatened to pull down the Cutlass Hall and Joseph Gales was in his editor's office not very far away and he heard the commotion and he rushed out without his hat and came to see what was going on and somebody yelled out Mr Gales take the chair so he stood probably on a wall rather than a chair
00:13:01
Speaker
And he called the mob to order. He succeeded in calming and dispersing the crowd. But the fact that the crowd obeyed him must have made the local magistrates think that he might be a dangerous radical leader. In February 1793, Britain entered the war against France that was going on on the continent. The national move became patriotic and bitterly anti-French. Thomas Paine fled to America.
00:13:29
Speaker
Sheffield remained radical. Gales risked being branded a traitor, but he intensified
The Chartist Movement's Challenge to Authority
00:13:35
Speaker
his campaign. He chaired a public meeting on Castle Hill and launched a great petition for parliamentary reform, which obtained 8,000 signatures. It was delivered to Parliament, but the House of Commons dismissed it as disrespectful.
00:13:50
Speaker
There were months of demonstrations and counter demonstrations, and the radicals were fearful that they might be violently attacked by thugs in the Church and King Party. So one of them started to organize the making of pikes, P-I-K-E-S, pikes, long blades on a long stick for self-defense. And this chap actually wrote to the London radicals offering them pikes.
00:14:18
Speaker
Gales maintained he never knew anything of this. Unfortunately in May 1794 the authorities raided the headquarters of the London Radicals and found this letter and then that gave them an excuse for arresting the Sheffield radical leaders. Joseph Gales was away in Derby when they came to arrest him and he was tipped off and he fled
00:14:42
Speaker
to stay with a Quaker friend in Watha-Pondern and then he fled by ship to Germany to Hamburg. He left behind his poor wife Winifred. She had four children to look after and was expecting a fifth. She found herself responsible for a newspaper and 18 employees. She was short of money and accepted money from a Unitarian banker called William Shaw. Now, interestingly, he
00:15:08
Speaker
was Florence Nightingale's grandfather. Winifred managed to sell off the newspaper and then went by boat with her children to join Joseph in Hamburg and they sailed to America where they set up a new life in North Carolina. He again became a printer and publisher and mayor of Raleigh in North Carolina and he published one of Payne's books
00:15:33
Speaker
The newspaper was taken over by Gales Abel No. 2, this man, James Montgomery, then aged only 23. He renamed the newspaper the Aris and he remained editor for 20 years. But in this turbulent decade of the 1790s, being an editor
00:15:53
Speaker
was very high risk. Poor old Montgomery was twice imprisoned in York Castle. On the second occasion, he'd published, in good faith, an account of an incident in Norfolk Street, where St. Marie's Cathedral, the Roman Catholic Cathedral, is now. Colonel Aethorpe, rather belligerent, bad-tempered
00:16:15
Speaker
magistrate came on horse when there was a crowd and troops in a square there and he came rushed into the crowd with his sword and then later because the things were they thought things were getting out of hand he told his troops they could fire and they shot two people dead
00:16:34
Speaker
Montgomery put an account of this in his newspaper, and for that he was accused of criminal libel, found guilty, and put in York Castle, where he became very ill. After that he was never so radical. But he did look after Joseph Gayle's three sisters. They lived with him for the rest of their lives.
00:16:51
Speaker
He was a very talented man, a poet, a hymn writer, a philanthropist, and became Sheffield's most famous citizen. I'm now going to leap forward to the 1830s. In 1832, Parliament was at last reform and Sheffield had its own two MPs for the first time. The population had risen to 90,000, but only three and a half thousand people had the
Samuel Holbury's Insurrection Attempt
00:17:16
Speaker
vote. It was only the
00:17:17
Speaker
upper and middle classes who had the vote, the working class were very dissatisfied. There were other causes of anger in the working class. The Whigs in their government introduced a very harsh and unpleasant workhouse regime for the very poor. The Corn Laws were pushing up the price of bread and from 1837 there was a deep economic depression.
00:17:42
Speaker
So in the late 1830s, a new working class movement known as Chartism arose. It was a mass working class movement, national movement for democracy, for manhood suffrage. I'm afraid women had to wait a lot longer.
00:17:58
Speaker
There were great Chartist rallies of up to 20,000 people in Paradise Square. Say a word about Paradise Square. John Wesley discovered that it was a superb place for a public meeting. Because it was enclosed, people seemed to be able to hear the speaker very well. And it could take a meeting of as many as 20,000. This is, of course, a 20th century photograph
00:18:23
Speaker
But you have to imagine a whole lot of people there in 1838, 1839. In 1839, the Parliament rejected the national petition of the Chartists. And this presented the Chartists with a huge dilemma. What should they do next?
00:18:40
Speaker
The authorities were scared of things getting out of hand. They banned meetings in Paradise Square, but they couldn't stop them taking place elsewhere in places like Sky Edge or Hood Hill near Wentworth. The leadership in Sheffield fell into the hands of what was called the physical force party, the people who favoured a violent solution to these problems. And one of these physical force chartists was a 25-year-old young man called Samuel Holbury.
00:19:09
Speaker
And this is the only image we have of him. It's in the Western Park Museum. And he looks a bit like a poet, but in fact, he was a tough guy. He was a former soldier. He was in touch with chartists in other towns about organizing a military insurrection. They planned to act on the night of the 11th of January, 1840. They would start on the outskirts of Sheffield by setting fire to the houses of magistrates and the barracks, placing a bomb in the police office
00:19:39
Speaker
and assassinating any magistrates they saw riding into the town. Then they would seize two central key buildings. This, the Tontine Inn, was the hub of the coach network. Very important place, it's a pity. It was demolished after the railways replaced the coaches. And the other building nearly opposite it is the old Town Hall, which is still there, needs a lot of tender loving care at present. These two buildings would become chartist forts.
00:20:09
Speaker
and the insurrection would then spread to other towns and hopefully the whole country and the Turk Chartists would gain power. That was their vision. What Holbury didn't know was that he had a traitor in his ranks. James Allen of the station in in Rotherham had been turned round by James Bland, the police chief of Rotherham, and at 7pm on the fateful 11th of January 1840.
00:20:38
Speaker
Alan, who was breathless and trembling with fear, reported to Bland and Lord Howard, a magistrate, what had been agreed at the final meeting of the conspirators. Howard then jumped on his horse and galloped to the Sheffield Police Office, which was, I reckon, was in this building, and they also had cells for miscreants in the basement. Cells are still there. The police and the soldiers swung into action and arrested Holbury and most of his colleagues.
00:21:07
Speaker
just before they put their plan into operation. It was a close-run thing. Sheffield had missed a violent uprising by just a few hours, thanks to Rotherham. Holbury was given a four-year sentence at North Allerton House of Correction Prison. He was very badly treated, forced to work the treadmill, and died in 1842. His funeral procession was a huge event.
00:21:30
Speaker
More than 20,000 people lined the streets of Sheffield. You can still see his grave in the General Cemetery. So this was the last serious attempt at violent insurrection in Sheffield.
Socialism and Edward Carpenter's Influence
00:21:42
Speaker
But isn't the end of the story. In the 1970s and 1980s, Sheffield was a very left-wing, radical place.
00:21:51
Speaker
and a chap called Bill Moore, a communist, and the Holbury Society persuaded the council that Holbury should be commemorated in the Peace Gardens. And if you look carefully, you can find this rather fine memorial to him. And what is Moore? The cascades in the Peace Gardens were dedicated to the memory of Samuel Holbury.
00:22:15
Speaker
Chartism remained a strong force in Sheffield throughout the 1840s but fizzled out in the more prosperous 1850s. I'm now going to leap forward to the rise of socialism in Sheffield. This is in the 1870s and one inspiration was John Ruskin, the famous art critic and prophet, a kind of Tory socialist. He was drawn to Sheffield because of the cutlery tradition of individual craftsmanship and because one of his followers lived there.
00:22:44
Speaker
and he created a splendid museum in Walkley on the top of a hill, full of objects from his own collection. This collection has now been transferred to the Millennium Gallery, and if you haven't seen it, I recommend you have a look at it. Ruskin met a group of secularists, Unitarians and Quakers who professed communism, and they persuaded Ruskin to buy St George's farm in Totley for a cooperative or communist experiment.
00:23:13
Speaker
Unfortunately, Ruskin and the Communists had completely different ideas. The Communists wanted to decide things by majority vote. Ruskin was an authoritarian and instead imposed a simple and orderly tyrant as farm manager. There was terrible dissension. The Communists withdrew and poor Ruskin later had a nervous breakdown.
00:23:37
Speaker
While this was going on, this man, Edward Carpenter, was living nearby and he sent a contribution to Ruskin of £2. He's a very, very interesting man. Over the previous 10 years, he'd been changing his whole way of life. He came from a wealthy Brighton family. He'd read mathematics at Cambridge and was a brilliant mathematician. He became a Don or a fellow of a college and also got ordained and became an Anglican Curate.
00:24:05
Speaker
working for the famous Christian socialist F.D. Morris, who was his vicar. But for various reasons, he gave all this up. He left Cambridge and became a university extension lecturer in northern towns. He based himself in Sheffield because he likes the heartiness and shrewdness of Sheffield people. He inherited money when his father died and built a house for himself in Millthorpe in Derbyshire. You can still see this house.
00:24:33
Speaker
He was famous for his simple life and his sandals. If you look carefully, you can see he's wearing sandals. It was Edward Carpenter who introduced sandals into Britain from an idea coming from India. He became a socialist and put money into socialist organizations. In the 1780s, there was a lot of hardship in Sheffield. This picture shows
00:24:57
Speaker
A poor man with children queuing up for money from some clergy and other middle-class people of goodwill, all very humiliating. Carpenter and his small band of colleagues, who were mostly working men and women, set up the Sheffield Socialist Society.
00:25:14
Speaker
And here they are. And I mean, one of the interesting things is that about half of them are women. They believed very much ahead of their time in equality between men and women. There is Carpenter. They would hold meetings on Sunday nights at the Monolith.
00:25:31
Speaker
Now, the monoliths commemorated, I think, Queen Victoria's silver jubilee, one of her jubilees, and it's now to be found in Encliff Park. But this was actually at the end of Surrey Street, and the whole area has changed dramatically. We've now got the town hall. The church on the right, St Paul's, has very sadly been demolished.
00:25:53
Speaker
The socialists would let the Salvation Army speak first and then they would stand on the steps of the monolith and preach socialism. Carpenter's socialism was vastly different from that of Marx, Lenin or Stalin. He was more of an anarchist than a socialist, perhaps. He called for freedom and fulfillment in human relationship. He wrote about the socialist revolution, the S
00:26:17
Speaker
Oh, but it was all rather vague. He wrote in a poem, I conceive a millennium on earth, a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies, shall attain freedom and joy. What's he mean by people entering into relation with their bodies?
00:26:37
Speaker
Well, he wrote prophetically about sexual liberation, possibly 100 years ahead of his time. He lived in a time of extreme prudishness. His book sold very widely, and he was in fact rediscovered in the 1960s. He was himself homosexual, and he lived openly in Milford with a working-class young man called George Merrill.
00:27:00
Speaker
He was also a feminist and wrote about the stifling social restrictions on the role of women.
The Birth of the Labour Party in Sheffield
00:27:06
Speaker
By the 1890s, Carpenter was nationally famous, a kind of socialist prophet, delivering inspiring speeches all over the country.
00:27:15
Speaker
Now I'm going to talk about a linked matter, which is the rise of the Labour Party in Sheffield. When Carpenter set up a social society, the Labour Party didn't exist. And in fact, Sheffield was run by either the Liberals or the Conservatives. They took turns in the 30 years before the First World War. But Sheffield
00:27:37
Speaker
had a powerful trade union movement. It wanted to wield political power, and at first it sought influence through the Liberal Party. There were Lib-Lab councillors, but the more radical trade unionists felt this did not give them enough influence. And in 1903, a Labour Representation Committee was formed. It got three independent Labour councillors elected and one MP, who was this man, Joseph Pointer,
00:28:04
Speaker
But right up to 1914, Labour was this insignificant force. The First World War changed. You have to remember that in the First World War Sheffield was a vitally important arsenal, producing armaments on a vast scale. And in these factories, the unions could exert influence. And this man, seen here with his son, J.T. Murphy,
00:28:26
Speaker
was a communist trade unionist. He was a shop steward at one of the biggest factories of Vickers in Brightside. In 1916, the government called up into the army a skilled fitter, and that was contrary to all the agreements they had with the unions. Murphy immediately organized a strike of 12,000 workers. Lord George's government quickly capitulated, gave in,
00:28:50
Speaker
Molly married a woman called, sorry, JT Murphy, married a woman called Molly Morris, who was a leading suffragette and later a nurse in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, of course. Murphy was a Marxist. He welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 to 18. And after the war, he went to Moscow to see Lenin several times and he joined the Communist International.
00:29:18
Speaker
I think Lenin saw Murphy as a potential leader of revolution in Britain. After Lenin's death, Murphy continued to be close to the Communist leadership, and I'm going to show you my most extraordinary picture.
00:29:33
Speaker
You can see Murphy here with his son, and this of course is Stalin. But the terrible thing about this picture is that nearly all the other men in the picture were murdered by Stalin in the purges of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, Murphy became disillusioned with communism and left the party.
00:29:57
Speaker
The Communists were a small minority in Sheffield. Sheffield Labour owned more to Methodism than to Karl Marx. Labour had a big opportunity after the war. There was considerable unrest. Unemployment was very high. From 1922 onwards, Sheffield Labour was led by this man, Ernest George Rollinson, the railwayman.
00:30:17
Speaker
A man of great patience and skill who kept the party united. Conservatives and liberals were very scared of Labour, and joined together in the Citizens Party to keep Labour out of power. But they offered nothing positive to what was a working class electorate. In 1926,
00:30:34
Speaker
came the general strike in support of the miners. Here is a confrontation between the miners and the police in Fitzallen Square. Labour and Sheffield strongly supported the general strike. We're very disappointed when the TUC called it off after nine days. Later in 1926, in November, there was an election for the council.
00:31:00
Speaker
And the Labour Party at last won a majority on the council. And here are their councillors. You can see there are a lot of them. They are overwhelmingly men, but within a few years Sheffield had recruited quite a lot of women councillors. Here they are in 1929. Sheffield was the first major city in England to be run by the Labour Party.
Sheffield's Radical Politics Under David Blunkett
00:31:24
Speaker
Now, I'm just going to finish with a brief excursion into the 70s and 80s. Some of you may remember this period, but probably most of you don't. I can't cover it properly in the time. Sheffield was led by David Blunkett. It had shifted to the left.
00:31:41
Speaker
And at one time in the 1980s, the red flag was actually raised on the town hall. And you can see the red flag up there, most extraordinary. Samuel Holbury was commemorated, as we've seen. There were Marx Memorial Lectures. Meanwhile, more significantly,
00:31:59
Speaker
The traditional steel and cutlery industries were collapsing. Mrs Thatcher was very unpopular in Sheffield. When she came to speak at the Cutlass Feast in 1983, she was protected by a thousand police. This is a poster for the demonstration that was held. As in the 1790s, at this time, Sheffield was desperately trying to follow its own agenda and resist Westminster.
00:32:23
Speaker
But in 1985, the government won two great battles. They were too strong for Sheffield. They defeated the miners in the miners strike, and they defeated Sheffield Council on capping or limiting the amounts at which the rates could be set. David Blunkett and his colleagues had to back off. And from that point on, Labour moved on to something that was called the new realism and then to new Labour.
Conclusion and Book Promotion by David Price
00:32:49
Speaker
And I would argue our city is much less radical than it was 35 years ago.
00:32:53
Speaker
So our radical tradition, what was it about? One useful guide is Professor Sidney Pollard, economic history professor at Sheffield University some years ago, and he said, look at the words underlined. He mentioned independence of spirit, the defence of the weak against the strong opposition to central authority as against the region. Well, I've
00:33:17
Speaker
rushed through quite a number of examples of Sheffield radical tradition but if you would like to know more have a look at my book you can read it in the you can get it from the library or get it at Waterston's or other local booksellers or online from the history press and search for the word Sheffield if you go onto the history press website.
Podcast Conclusion and Next Episode Preview
00:33:44
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology Nail. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us at Archeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Next month, our talk will be from Matthew Roberts from Sheffield Hallam University, speaking about a people's history of Sheffield, from the French Revolution to Chartism. See you next time.
00:34:20
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.