Poster issues by the committee of the Trades' Union of Manchester and Salford on Queen Victoria's coronation, 28 June 1838

"...We assure the municipal authorities that we are not wanting in love and loyalty to the Queen, but that dear-bought experience has taught us the folly of such idle pomp and useless parade, and we can no longer as rational and intelligent beings become the dupes of our oppressors, the passive instruments for creating by shows and gewgaws a false notion of our prosperity; for the truth is, the working classes have not wherewithal to spend on glittering paraphernalia, neither have they confidence in the government of the country being willing to better their condition, and remove the embarrassments under which our merchants and manufacturers are now labouring.
We deeply deplore the present state of things, and we regret that our government should have agreed to spend so much money upon a Coronation, while so many of our fellow labourers are out of employment..."
National Archives, HO 40/38, f.692


For an excellent account of the Manchester trades' unions' boycott of the Coronation celebrations, and the formation of their own counter-processions, see John Knott, Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law (Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 1-10.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Commemoration of the execution of 17 Luddites, York, 19 January 2013

Image
On Saturday 19 January, York's Alternative History held an afternoon of talks and commemoration for the Luddites tried and executed at York. placards outside York Castle In the huge space of the Guild Hall, Adam Gutteridge , one of the organisers, introduced the themes of the day. His speech echoed the two interesting articles publicising the event in the Guardian (by local historian Paul Furness, here , and by another organiser Helen Graham, here ). They argue that now that York's industrial economy is no more (chocolate and railways), York has remade itself round the past: an economy of tourism. Yet the past as presented to tourists and indeed to residents, is a sanitised and normalised history, centring round Vikings, medieval religion, and Georgian middle-class pleasures. The recent York 800 celebrations had no place for the popular protest and resistance that had a distinguished history in the city. I began the talks by explaining the context and meaning of the
Read more

Workshopping: reflections on 'flipping' my seminars

Image
My colleagues and I have, over the past couple of years, been replacing the traditional 1 hour lecture- 1 hour seminar format with a 'workshop' of 2 or 3 hours. Of course, many of us have been teaching practical skills and 'interactively' for years, if not our entire careers, but we have come to the conclusion that we have to spell it out for our students more explicitly, both through the timing of the sessions and the activities in them. Why? We're shifting from seminars to workshops because, among other reasons: demand for increased student contact time with staff is a feature of questions at open days, the NSS, and the media; due to budget constraints and other factors, seminar group sizes are getting larger students unfortunately do not always prepare enough reading before the seminars to make discussion among them useful or continuous. No3 results from several reasons, including: a) the structure of their degree (at UH, students study 4 modules per
Read more