News Feed - Bristol Radical History Group

Barton Hill Cotton Work Plaque

By Randell Brantley

At 7pm on wednesday 24 june 2015 at Barton Hill trading estate, Maze Street, Barton Hill a new plaque Cottom Works plaque will be unveiled. then afterwards at St Luke's church hall for a talk with tea and refreshments.

The Lawbreakers

Ditching the Fear

The logistics workers' movement in Italy

Some AngryWorkers will be round and about England in the next few weeks showing a brand new documentary about the logistics workers' struggles/movement in Italy. Called 'Ditching The Fear', this film portrays the struggle of mainly migrant workers against the harsh labour regime of companies like TNT or IKEA. These struggles emerged in 2008 and have since then, not only won better conditions, but also put workers’ self-organisation back on the wider political agenda. Workers’ militants of the […]

Hopewell Colliery

By Randell Brantley

Some of you might remember Rich Daniels and Robin Morgan, the Free Miners who led the tour of Hopewell Colliery on our Warren James day in the Forest of Dean several years ago. Robin started work at the age of fourteen and remembers being lowered down a pit shaft in a bucket on his first day of work. Now nearly eighty years old he has decided to retire! Rich has now taken over the lease of Hopewell Colliery. Rich is planning to develop the mine as a museum and heritage centre and is keen to […]

The Evolution of City Farms

A talk followed by a tour at Bath City Farm. To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Bath City farm, come and hear author Sephen E. Hunt talk about the history of city farms. Street Farm was a part of the trend towards 'green' thinking during the 1970s and built the first ecological house. They had close links to the urban farming movement. email alexia@bathcityfarm.co.uk to book.

The Kaiser’s Black Guards

The 1915 South Wales Miners’ Strike

One hundred years ago, on July 15, 1915, two hundred thousand Welsh miners launched a strike for higher pay. Their coal was powering the Royal Navy in the midst of a world war. The miners defied the coalowners, the government, the law, the king and their own leaders. Why? And what lessons, if any, can be learnt for today? Robert Griffiths is a labour historian and currently General Secretary of the Communist Party.

A Girl Among the Anarchists

By Isabel Meredith

From its advent as a modern worldview anarchism was always too pure a faith to be properly judged by the conduct of its adherents and practitioners. Or so it would seem from A Girl Among the Anarchists, one of several novels that lifts the lid on that simmering cauldron that was the Victorian anarchist scene. First published in 1903, the University of Nebraska deemed this rare book of the belle epoch worthy of reprinting in 1992. The fact that it was written by insiders is the virtue that sets […]

Gallipoli and Bristol

By Ian Wright

A WoundedTurkish Infantryman Having A Drink Of Water

The horses, the horses, we couldn't get the horses off the beach; we should not have been there A British veteran of Gallipoli In the Autumn of 1914 a number of men from Bristol were recruited into the 7th Battalion Gloucestershire Regiment. They spent the winter in billets in Basingstoke and then moved to Aldershot in February 1915 for final training. They sailed from Avonmouth on 19 June landing at Alexandria, then moving to Mudros on 4 July to prepare for a landing at a place called […]

Arrowsmith and the ‘Bristol Revolution’ of 1831

By John Sidwell

I was fortunate enough to acquire, among a collection of books, both the 1884 and the considerably expanded 1906 edition of Arrowsmith’s Dictionary of Bristol, edited by Henry J. Spear and J. W. Arrowsmith. Concurrent with other research I have been conducting into the Bristol riots of 1831 I perused the entry in each edition and was struck by the volume of revisions. It should initially be noted that the account given in the 1906 edition is substantially longer. As such it is perhaps the detail […]

Do You Have A Conchie In The Family?

From 1916-19 many men & women in Bristol organised opposition to conscription. Dozens of Bristolians were imprisoned as conscientious objectors. These included Walter Ayles, who was a city councillor and Bristol's most prominent opponent of World War 1; the three Reinge brothers from Totterdown who were all imprisoned for refusing to join the army; George Barker who hid fugitives in the cellar of his bicycle shop in Bedminster; the Whiteford brothers from St George, one of whom refused to […]