In this important memoir, Andy Danford brings to life his experience as a worker and senior union representative in Bristol’s arms industry during the 1970s and 80s. During these two decades life on the shop and office floors, and the strength of workplace trade unionism, shifted dramatically, as the advent of Thatcherism marked the beginning of the sustained attack on worker and union rights which extends to this day. Against this background of change, this memoir provides a rich account of the […]
Not A BRHG Event
Venue: Digby Memorial Church Hall, Digby Road, Sherborne DT9 3NL In early October 1831, the defeat of the Second Reform Bill in the House of Lords led to a wave of pro-reform public protests and disturbances across Britain and Ireland. Concurrently in Dorset, a microcosm of the national struggle over electoral reform was being fought out in a county by-election which posed Lord Ashley an anti-reformer against the pro-reform candidate William Ponsonby. In a close fought race, marked by widespread […]
Not A BRHG Event
Venue: Pill Library and Children's Centre, Crockerne House, Underbanks, Pill BS20 0AT From the earliest days of recorded history river pilots have navigated ships through the dangerous waters of the Bristol Channel and up the river Avon, with its twisting bends, shifting sand banks and strong currents. In the early nineteenth century, Bristol was granted rights to compulsory pilotage over the whole of the Channel. Mike charts the experiences, in the nineteenth century, of Bristol’s pilots, and […]
Not A BRHG Event
Bristol Radical History Group is once again supporting the Bristol Radical Bookfair. We'll be taking along our book stall, with our Radical Pamphleteer series of publications, and a choice selection of other titles designed to interest, inform and stir you into action. In addition, regular BRHG author Rosemary L Caldicott will be speaking at 12 noon, as part of a series of talks/workshops, about her book Nautical Women and the histories therein. Do come and say hello, one of the reasons we enjoy […]
The story of how we came to have this Empire is a wonderful tale of adventure and romance Major General Baden-Powell in Scouting for Boys Many children’s ‘classics’, some still in print, glorify the British Empire. In this essay, Colin Thomas argues that they help to perpetuate racist attitudes which only recent children’s books have begun to challenge.
This is an account of the case of the Shrewsbury 24, one of the longest, if not the longest, campaign to overturn injustice in this country. The Shrewsbury 24 were building workers convicted of various charges arising from picketing during the 1972 national building workers’ strike. The book takes us back to a very different time when there were 12 million members of trade unions in the country and a wave of strikes which led to the defeat of the Conservative Government by the National Union of […]
England, tobacco and forced labour Roger Ball will outline the symbiotic relationship between the colonisation of the Americas in the seventeenth Century and the production of tobacco as a commodity. The talk will consider the economic mechanisms that encouraged the expansion of landholdings and the introduction of forced labour, leading to the domination of chattel slavery based upon the use of enslaved West Africans. Nicotiana Brittanica Will Simpson tells the story of the illicit […]
This article first appeared on the BRHG Facebook page in October 2019. It is published here as a tribute to Steve Philbey who passed away in August 2022. The connection between indentured labourers in the Chinese city of Amoy (now called Xiamen) in the 1840s having the letter C burnt into their ears and a Somerset man who was for a time the richest merchant in England illuminates a story that has been overshadowed by Bristol’s involvement in the slave trade and the fortunes made by the likes of […]
Many years ago, stuck in a traffic jam on the Bath Road bridge, I looked up to see a series of massive slogans expertly pasted onto the advertising hoardings on the billboards. The first on an insurance company advert said: WHO IS SPARTACUS? The second said: ARE YOU SPARTACUS? The third over a group of 'Kwik Fit Fitters' said: WE ARE SPARTACUS And finally the last in the row... YOU ARE SPARTACUS This was one of my first introductions to the work of the Saint Just Mob, artists and subvertisers […]
In a tribute to the community theatre group acta based in Gladstone Street, Bedminster and their 2014 play Gas Girls, Christine Townsend examines the exposure of a piece of lost Bristolian history that has international repercussions to this day. Acta's research helped to publicise the top secret production of mustard gas in Avonmouth factories during World War 1, and the lives of the women who carried out this dangerous work. Come and hear about the brilliant research conducted by Acta and the […]
