Bristol Radical History Meetings

Justice For Alice Wheeldon!

Date: Monday 28th September, 2015Time: 6:00pm-8.00pmVenue: Studio 1 & 2, First Floor, MSHED, Princes Wharf, Wapping Road, Bristol BS1 4RN
Map: http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/m-shed/getting-here/
Speakers: Chloe Mason and Sheila Rowbotham
Price: Donation

In 1917, socialist, feminist and anti-war activist, Alice Wheeldon, her daughter Winnie and husband Alf Mason were given long prison sentences for supposedly plotting to kill the Prime Minister Lloyd George and Arthur Henderson, the leader of the Labour Party. The evidence was flimsy, their accuser an MI5 agent provocateur so dubious the prosecution kept him away from the trial.

Last autumn as part of our Women Resisting the Great War meeting, Sheila Rowbotham, renowned historian and feminist, spoke about the case. Since then Sheila's book Friends Of Alice Wheeldon has been re-published and Chloe Mason, great grand-daughter is visiting the UK as part of her campaign to clear the name of Alice and other family members. Sheila and Chloe will discuss the new evidence they have uncovered, the issues it raises and its bearing on the ongoing campaign.

Full details on our website: here For more information email rememberingtherealww1@gmail.com

This meeting is organised by the Bristol Remembering the Real World War One Group

Pauper deaths and burials in Victorian England
Date: Thursday 15th October, 2015Time: 6:00pm-7.30pmVenue: Studio 1 & 2, First Floor, MSHED, Princes Wharf, Wapping Road, Bristol BS1 4RN
Map: http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/m-shed/getting-here/
Speakers: Di Parkin and Roger Ball (BRHG and Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group)
Price: Free

Funeral ceremonies were very important to middle class Victorians, with detailed and often elaborate rituals to mark the passing of cherished family members and those deemed ‘important’. But for paupers who died in the workhouses, things were very different. Building on continuing research into the unmarked graves behind the site of Eastville workhouse, Bristol, this talk exposes the contrast in treatment between rich and poor in death.
This meeting is organised by UWE Regional History Centre as part of its M Shed Seminar Programme, 2015-16

Update on World War I in Bristol

THE Remembering The Real World War 1 events in the current programme have all been well-attended with interesting presentations and discussions. Below are details of the remaining events. Try to come along if you can.

Tuesday 4^th November - hear Sheila Rowbotham talk about Alice Wheeldon who was framed and imprisoned for opposing the war and June Hannam talk about Bristol women who campaigned against the war in 'Women Resisting the Great War'. Full details here

Wednesday 5^th November– come down to the Central Reference Library for 'Opening the Archives: Resistance to World War One in Bristol'. See primary sources relating to resistance and reaction during World War One. Highly recommended. Full details here.

Thursday 6^th November - hear the story of Alfred Jefferies, the Bristolian shot for desertion in November 1916, and how people in Bristol organised and campaigned against the war in 'Deserters, Conchies and Reds: Bristolian Families in the Great War'. Full details here

Saturday 8^th November– historian Kevin Morgan discusses trades union opposition to the war and Ian Wright explains how divergent attitudes to the war affected the Forest of Dean Miners’ Association in 'Trade Unions and Resistance to the Great War'. Full details here.

Wednesday November 12^th– following on from David Olusoga's recent documentary, writer-director Dominic Rai brings to life the experiences of Indian soldiers in Flanders, popularised in the acclaimed novel Across the Black Waters by Mulk Raj Anand in 'The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire'. Full details here.

Full programme details here

For more information email rememberingrealww1@gmail.com
_______________________________________________ Brhmob mailing list Brhmob@brh.org.uk

CELEBRATING ALICE WHEELDON

*7.30pm, Thursday 2 October 2014*

*Torriano Meeting House,
99 Torriano Avenue,
London
NW5 2RX
(tube: Kentish Town)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/735166689889273/

An evening celebrating the anti-war activists of 1914-1918 with pictures,
poetry, song and talks.

Featuring *Chloe Mason* - the great granddaughter of socialist, pacifist,
suffragist and second-hand clothes dealer Alice Wheeldon, an opponent of
World War 1, imprisoned in 1917 for the alleged attempted murder of Lloyd
George, who will be joining
us to talk about the campaign to clear Alice's name, as well as that of
Alice's daughter Winnie and son-in-law Alfred Mason (who were convicted
alongside her).

http://theworldismycountry.info/2-oct-celebrating-alice-wheeldon/

Free event. All welcome.
www.theworldismycountry.info

A Peace News project: www.peacenews.info

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Northernradicalhistory@lists.aktivix.org
https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/northernradicalhistory

World War I & the job of the historian

Adam Hochschild's interview with Stephen Jackson:              

Renowned author Adam Hochschild’s most recent work To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) presented a heartbreaking tale of the mass slaughter of the First World War and a sympathetic portrayal of those who opposed the conflict. In this Q&A, he gives his thoughts on the book and offers his perspective on the role of the publicly engaged historian. 

Stephen Jackson: What was it about the subject that inspired you to write it, and what would you argue was your most important contribution to the historical discussion on the First World War?

Adam Hochschild: I’ve always been deeply fascinated by those who resisted the First World War, ever since I read a biography of Bertrand Russell as a teenager, and then later Sheila Rowbotham’s work on Alice Wheeldon. To have had the courage to speak out so boldly when there was such jingoism in the air deeply impressed me.  I also found a very strong echo in those times of something I had been deeply involved in:  the movement against the Vietnam War here in the United States.  Then, too, a war divided members of families from each other; hence I was intrigued to see the divided families of Britain in 1914–1918, and used that as a narrative structure for my book.  In the Vietnam era, too, we had an epidemic of government spying on citizens—when much later, using the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to get the records of surveillance on me by the FBI, CIA and military intelligence, they amounted to more than 100 pages – and I was a very small fish in that movement.  Hence it fascinated me to read the government surveillance records from Scotland Yard and military intelligence on the UK dissenters of 1914–1918.  I felt I was seeing at work the same mindset as that of the FBI agents who reported on me.

 

I’m by no means the first person to write about those brave British dissenters.  I certainly hope my book, and those of others, helps put them in the foreground as we remember the war. Paradoxically, most people today would agree that the First World War remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way, yet all our traditional ways of remembering it – parades, monuments, museums, military cemeteries – celebrate those who fought and not those who refused to fight.

 

Stephen Jackson: In the years since the publication of the work, what sort of feedback from the scholarly community and the general public did you receive?  How do you think that contemporary events, especially a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, shaped the response to your work?

Adam Hochschild:  I’ve always believed that you can write for a general audience and at the same time meet the highest scholarly standards for accuracy and the documenting of sources. This book got good reviews and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; at the same time many university history departments have been kind to me.  I was writer-in-residence at the history department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst this past spring and will be doing a speaking tour of some half dozen campuses in the US and Europe this fall, talking about the war.

 

I’ve also heard from several descendants of people mentioned in the book – one of the great pleasures of writing history, I’ve found.  And sometimes, unexpectedly, I’ve heard from other people as well who are connected to this patch of history.  After the book came out, an American mining company official whom I’d met a few years before in a godforsaken village in eastern Congo, wrote me that in 1917 his grandfather, a conscientious objector, had been hanged in effigy in his home town in Iowa.

 

And yes, I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show what tragic mistakes one can make by not studying history more closely.  How similar the illusion of President George W. Bush when he landed on that aircraft carrier in 2003 in front of the sign 'Mission Accomplished' to the illusion of Kaiser Wilhelm II when he told his troops in August, 1914:  'You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees.'

 

Stephen Jackson: This year marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.  What do you think is or should be the place of conscientious objectors and leftist anti-war activists in the public memory of World War I?

Adam Hochschild: None of these people were perfect, but on the central issue of their time, they were essentially right, and should be honored.  Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the war to die – 5 years ago, at 111 – said it best: the war 'was not worth it.  It was not worth one life, let alone all the millions.'

 

Stephen Jackson: How can scholars teaching undergraduate or graduate courses in British History or Modern European History incorporate non-traditional themes such as anti-war activism into lessons on the Great War?

Adam Hochschild: There are rich primary sources: the writings and speeches of outspoken war opponents, like Bertrand Russell and E.D. Morel in Britain, or Jane Addams and Eugene V. Debs in the United States.  Periodicals that these anti-war movements published. Letters and memoirs by war resisters who went to prison, not just in the U.S. and Britain, but in other countries as well. I hope someone is thinking of pulling a collection of material like this together into a reader!  And there are fine secondary sources as well. That list could be a long one, but I’ll just mention Jo Vellacott’s Bertrand Russell and the Pacifists in the First World War, a careful, well-written book I learned a lot from.

 

Stephen Jackson: The 19^th century German historian Leopold von Ranke famously said historians can 'merely tell how it really was,' and should not judge the past nor attempt to give moral guidance for the present.   To End All Wars, and your work more generally, compellingly does just that. How would you describe your underlying philosophy for writing history?  What role do you think that the historian — as an historian — should play in engaging in contemporary political and ethical discussions?

Adam Hochschild:  Well, I’m certain in favor of telling it how it was – and with the highest possible standards of accuracy. In real life, seldom are one’s heroes totally heroic or one’s villains totally villainous.  In To End All Wars, for instance, the fiery pacifist Charlotte Despard had a kind of knee-jerk far-left reaction to everything that would have made her difficult to talk to, although I agree with her about the war.  But her brother, Field Marshal Sir John French, though he exemplified the worst type of unthinking generalship in the field, seems to have been a warm-hearted person of great charm whom it would have been delightful to spend an evening with. One should enjoy such paradoxes and not try to deny them.

 

But beyond that, I think sometimes an historian can provide something that’s relevant to contemporary political discussions without having to hit people over the head with it. In my book, for example, I don’t talk about the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.  But whenever I give a talk about the First World War, the first question anybody asks is:  do you see an analogy?

ALICE WHEELDON: DAUGHTER OF DERBY!

Talk about Derby's Suffragette, sentenced for an 'assassination threat'

In August, the descendants of Alice Wheeldon will be visiting Derby. As part of their itinerary there will be a lecture at Derby Central Library, plus a short play.

Alice Wheeldon, Derby's Suffragette


For almost a century, Derby's Alice Wheeldon and her family have been vilified as the Peartree conspirators. Accused of attempting to murder Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, they were imprisoned and Alice herself died soon afterwards.


But didn't they campaign for workers' and women's rights, as well as support conscientious objectors to the slaughter of WW1? And were they innocent or guilty?


This meeting will review significant new evidence and ask whether we should, in fact, be proud of this Daughter of Derby.


Venue Derby Central Library,
Derby DE1
Time 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Date Thursday 30 August 2012
How to book: Cost £6. Early booking is advised. Please contact Derby Local Studies Library on 01332 642240 or email localstudies.library@derby.gov.uk Minicom 01332 380712.

Web link http:// www.derby.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/derby-libraries/local-studies-library/

derby.gov.uk/leisure-and-culture/libraries/derby-libraries/local-studies-library/

From Family History & Socialism with a Northern Accent to the Conspiracy Against the Person's Act

NORTHERN RADICAL HISTORY NETWORK

THE seats almost ran out at the Town Hall Tavern in Manchester last Saturday for the Northern Radical History Conference.  The attendance had a good geographical spread across the North from Cumbria in the North West to Derby and Sheffield in the South East, with Leeds, York, Huddersfield, Liverpool and Shropshire in between, not to mention Greater Manchester and Salford:  no-one came from Northumbria alas, unless we count Martin who is in exile from Durham.  There was a good mix of political tendencies including the SWP, the Labour Party as well as anarchists and libertarians , and a quarter of those present were women.  People sent in over a dozen apologies for none attendance.

As Steve Higginson from Liverpool, who was down to speak on 'Writing on the Wall', had been called to London on union business his spot was filled by Martin Bashford doing an item entitled 'Can Family History be Radical?'  Martin claimed that this kind of history could represent 'history from below'.  He said that from the 1950s there had been an evolution of family history alongside that of radical history and he referred to Raphael Samuel as hitting on the idea of studying family history and oral history.  Martin gave an example of Louise Rawe's study of the 'Match Girl's Strike' as an example of family history and likened it to investigative journalism.

Paul Salveson, as a well known northern historian living in Golcar near Huddersfield, argued that there was a distinctive Northern Socialism which, unlike the London socialists, was less influenced by Marx and more  by John Ruskin.  Paul said that Northern Socialism owed more to Carlyle, Robert Blatchford, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Edward Carpenter, the Bolton lad Alan Clarke as well as Ruskin, and he insisted that socialism up here had a more environmental content.

The star turn of the day was Karen Springer (Derby People's History Group) speaking on 'The Alice Wheeldon Case'.  This strange First World War case, which seems to have slipped off the political and historical radar, involves a woman of working class origins, Alice Wheeldon, who became a radical and whose family living at 12, Pear Tree Road, Derby, sheltered conscientious objectors in 1916.  This ultimately led to her and her kids becoming of interest to both MI5 and the Russian KVD.  Alice was ultimately charged under the Conspiracy Against the Person's Act in 1916 and sentenced to a term of imprisonment.  This followed a trial involving witnesses like the 'amateur spy', Alex Gordon, who couldn't 'For Reasons of State' be cross-examined by the defence.  The prosecution had alleged Alice Wheeldon had acquired a quantity of poison with the intention of assassinating David Lloyd George, the then Prime Minister.  She was released from prison in late 1918 and died in early 1919.