Not A BRHG Event
Bedminster Library, 4 Bedminster Parade, Bristol BS3 4AQ Earlier this year, a group of local people worked with Otherstory and Remembering the Real WW1 to discover untold stories of Bedminster people in the First World War. Together we created Steps Against War, a history walk with puppets to tell these stories: The 40 Bedminster men who refused to fight: who went to jail, or who took to the hills; the local detective always on their tracks; the women running networks of resistance - and the […]
“We want out” - Bristol and the British armed forces strikes of January 1919 Roger Ball The massive wave of discontent which swept through the British armed forces at the end of World War One remains a hidden history, hardly mentioned by establishment historians or regimental records. Beginning first in France and Belgium in December 1918 and then crossing to mainland Britain the following month, strikes and protests spread rapidly through the Army, Navy and even into the Flying Corps. The […]
'England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity': How Irish Nationalism responded to the Great War Joe Mooney (East Wall History Group, Dublin) This talk will outline the difficulties of the 'Irish question', the movement towards Home Rule and the rise of armed bodies in 1913/1914. How did these conflicting groups react to the outbreak of war - and why did some Nationalist support the war effort while others opposed it? The Irish rebellion of 1916 saw revolutionary nationalists, radical Trade […]
At the start of World War One Bridport was essentially a one industry town: rope and net making. The war brought opportunities to the town but also challenged paternalist employers with a revival of trade unionism and state pressure to improve low wages. With the Armistice, the sense of a collective national interest on the home front began to ebb away revealing long-standing as well as new tensions in the town. This talk explores the origins of these tensions in the war years and the range of […]
This talk will explore the various tensions that existed within the Cabinet’s Industrial Unrest Committee, and its various sub-committees, as government officials sought to confront the different challenges thrown up by the national Railway strike of late September 1919. Reading the files and documents from the National Archives reveals the extent to which Government departments and quasi governmental agencies struggled to contain the strike within its original industrial bounds. In an age when […]
From the late sixties to the mid-eighties, small, co-operatively produced local and neighbourhood papers played an important role in grassroots radical politics across the British Isles. Some achieved passing prominence with occasional news scoops, but most are unremembered now and their history is overlooked. This project, led by Phil Chamberlain (University of Bath) and Steve Poole (UWE) seeks out those papers, reconnects with the people who produced them, and re-evaluates their impact on […]
Hot-foot from Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Bristol’s Pete Bearder will be sharing perspectives on the radical history of performance poetry, based on his recent performance work. His ground-breaking new book Stage Invasion: Poetry & the Spoken Word Renaissance: ‘Explores the unwritten history, science and skill of spoken word and answers some strangely under-explored questions: What is the history of performance poetry in the UK? How does emotional contagion happen in live literature? What has […]
Not A BRHG Event
David Bollier will give an overview of the latest thinking on the commons, based on his new book Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, which presents a foundational re-thinking of the commons – the self-organized social system that humans have used for millennia to meet their needs. It offers a compelling vision of a future beyond the dead-end binary of capitalism versus socialism that has almost brought the world to its knees. The talk will be followed by a Q&A and […]
Not A BRHG Event
Bristol Harbour Festival Bristol Harbour Masters Office, Underfall Yard, Cumberland Road, Bristol, BS1 6XG By kind invitation of the Blue Schooner Company and introducing their ethical trading ship De Gallant. Rosemary Caldicott will talk about extraordinary women sailors in history taken from her recent BRHG book Nautical Women: Women sailors and the women of sailortowns: A forgotten diaspora c.1693 - 1902. Rosemary will be accompanied by the Rum Do Crew, traditional sea shanty singers, to […]
A storytelling that demonstrates, however benign the technology, it is who owns and controls it that matters. A narrative that recounts the conflict between the rich landowners who want to tame and exploit a marginal place and those whose subsistence is rooted in this rich wilderness. This tale of Whittlesea Mere in the Fenland starts in 1605 and ends in a few years into the future ...when the environment strikes back. Story lasts approximately 40 minutes.
