In April 1986, a group of women drawn together by their experiences of trauma, self injury and punitive psychiatric treatment started the Bristol Crisis Service for Women. An explicitly feminist user-led and volunteer-run listening service for women suffering mental health crises, it offered callers space to talk about their pain and how they endured it. Through listening without judgment, BCSW showed women a solidarity they had rarely experienced. Amplifying their voices, it began to forcefully […]
In recent years, Bristol Radical History Group and the Remembering the Real World War 1 group (RRWW1) have been working with teachers in Bristol on resource material about resistance to World War 1 and, lately, workhouses. This session will set out what has been achieved so far and invite debate about what we, and others involved in education, can do in the future to introduce radical histories, histories ‘from below’ and 'hidden histories' to young people.
The Bristol #WithMyanmar Group will briefly introduce their support and solidarity work with people in Myanmar, and also now living in Bristol and the UK. This is both in the three years since the latest military coup in February 2021, and previously, when it was possible to visit Myanmar. A Myanmar speaker will then reflect on Myanmar's history since liberation from British colonial rule in 1948 (then known as Burma), which has included over 60 years of brutal military rule, and numerous […]
The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act aimed to prevent the mentally afflicted from being incarcerated in workhouses for long periods. However, studies across the country have demonstrated that large numbers of people with mental health issues were being held in these institutions, sometimes in appalling conditions, throughout the Victorian period and even into the twentieth century. Data for Eastville workhouse (constructed in 1847) in east Bristol supports this trend, despite the fact that after 1845 […]
Catch Bristol’s wonderful Red Notes Choir, who will support the Bristol Radical History Festival by performing at 11:30am. They’ll be singing in the Ground Floor Foyer by the M Shed main entrance. The Red Notes Choir is a Bristol-based socialist choir. They have a repertoire of songs from around the world on historical, union, peace, green and human rights themes. We use the streets of Bristol and further afield to spread our message of fighting for the rights of working people, those who are […]
The Bristol Radical History Group has produced seventy publications, mostly within the Radical Pamphleteer series, with several more pending. These honour and continue the tradition of the troublesome chapbooks, broadsides, and seditious tracts from the earliest days of mass printing. The series was launched in 2008, with Mark Steeds’ Cry Freedom, Cry Seven Stars, a tribute to the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson, active in Bristol during the 18th century. Since then, a collection of […]
Just over thirty years ago the world woke up to the news that in Chiapas, South East Mexico a revolution had occurred. The Zapatistas rose up in January 1994 against 500 years of injustice and oppression of indigenous peoples, against neo-liberal economics and specifically the Mexican government’s recent signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) entered the largest city in the state, San Cristobal, and briefly took another six […]
On 7th June 2020, hundreds of Black Lives Matter demonstrators pulled down the 125-year-old statue of slave trader Edward Colston, who had been put in a place of prominence in Bristol City Centre; sending shockwaves around the world. Commentators at the time thought that the act had happened in a vacuum, but the truth was that many knew that the statue was inappropriate, and that the authorities had failed them for the preceding century. The first to uncover the slavers true story was the […]
Journalist, Fishponds Voice History columnist and Bristol Radical History Group author Mike Jempson will reveal some of the fascinating facts his research uncovered about the private madhouse which dominated Fishponds in the eighteenth century. His talk includes some of the institution’s more startling treatments, the sensational public inquiry and the shameful end of the Mason dynasty - the family firm that ran this biggest private asylum outside of London for 120 years. Drawing on museum […]
Producer/directors David Parker and Colin Thomas have both challenged conventional approaches to television history in their productions: David by tapping into home movie archives and by seeking out 'history from below' contributors in West Country series like Reel Lives; and Colin by including different historical perspectives within the same programme. Michael Sheen described The Dragon Has Two Tongues, a series on Welsh history which Colin made for Channel 4, as “one of the greatest history […]
