Chartist Convention 2023

The annual Newport Chartist Convention will take place on Saturday November 4th at St Woolos Cathedral, beginning at 10 o’clock. 

Tickets are now available, price £15.00 including tea, coffee and lunch

Full agenda for the day to be announced. Confirmed speakers to include:

Mapping Chartists and the importance of locality.

Katrina Navickas

This paper is about the potential of digital tools for examining Chartism. It maps the locations of Chartist activists, nominations to the National Convention, and subscribers to the Land Plan using Geographic Information Systems software. It argues for using such digital tools to map networks of activism, the long history of political activity in particular districts of towns, and the material and spatial elements of protest and procession routes. In so doing, digital tools can help illuminate the significance of locality and place in Chartist activism on a day-to-day level.

Poor Negroes and White Slaves: Chartism and Abolition

S.I. Martin

Join writer and curator S.I. Martin for a nuanced look at the dynamics underpinning the Chartist movement's varying attitudes to race, enslavement and its abolition.

'Very bad feeling was shown by the lower orders': The Newport incident of November 1831

Steve Poole and Roger Ball

In October 1831, after the defeat of the Second Reform Bill in the House of Lords, a wave of protests and riots swept across Britain and Ireland. Major unrest in Derby and Nottingham were followed at the end of the month, in Bristol, by the most serious riot of the nineteenth century. British army units, stationed in Wales in the aftermath of the Merthyr rising, were called upon to suppress the rioters in Bristol. On Monday 1st November after marching from Cardiff, a unit of infantry arrived in Newport and were confronted by a hostile crowd of the ‘lower orders’.

This presentation will explore the context and details of the ‘Newport incident’ and try to identify who the protesters were and their motivations in opposing the British Army. It will also consider whether the Newport event represents a particular form of the spread of ‘riots’.

This presentation is part of the ESRC funded project Intergroup Dynamics within the 1831 reform riots led by the Regional History Centre at the University of West of England.

Dr Roger Ball and Steve Poole  (University of the West of England)