Events

This is a list of all the events that we have ever done in chronological order. You can also see a list of Event Series, or a list of forthcoming events in the Event Diary.

Current & forthcoming Event Series:

Bristol Radical History Festival : to

‘Walter Rodney: What they don’t Want you to Know’

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BRHG are very pleased to welcome Arlen Harris (co-director) and Luke Daniels to Bristol to discuss this new documentary profiling the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney. ‘Walter Rodney: What they don’t Want you to Know’ is an original 72-minute documentary featuring a murder, Cold War conspiracies, Black Power, the end of Empire, and how that connects to the policing, surveillance practices and social movements of today. This is the first film where Walter’s widow reveals the personal impact […]

Revolution and What Happens After: Transgenerational Aftershocks

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Ellen McWilliams is haunted by the killings in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence and Civil War and in particular by the Dunmanway Massacre of April 1922 which marked the area where she grew up. Her Great Grandmother was active in Cumann na mBan and her granduncle fought for independence as well as in the Anti-Treaty IRA while her Grandfather was a scout and messenger for the West Cork IRA while still in his teenage years. Ellen will talk about why the events of those days remain deeply […]

Fighting for two Republics : Irish volunteers in the British Battalion, International Brigades

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Between 1936 to 1939 Spain was engulfed in a brutal Civil War, as the Republican government struggled to defeat a fascist military coup, which was supported by Hitler and Mussolini. Workers from all over the world volunteered to fight in the International Brigades against the fascist threat. This included a significant number of Irishmen, many of whom were veterans of the IRA and were part of the Independence struggle against British rule. In this talk the story of these Irish volunteers will be […]

News From Nowhere: The Revolutionary History of Literacy

Reflections on the past present and future of autonomous working class education

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In the UK we have been living through the dismantling of the public education system and its privatisation, with little oversight of what is replacing it. As the state retreats further from providing these and other vital community services it is useful to reflect on what preceded the current system in order to help imagine what might be created in its aftermath – with and without the involvement of the state and capital. We will look at education as an (always) a contested social space of power […]

Fighting Women: Interviews with veterans of the Spanish Civil War

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Isabella Lorusso author of Fighting Women: Interviews with veterans of the Spanish Civil War will be speaking about her collection of interviews from the 1990s with women veterans of the fight against fascism in Spain in the 1930s. Fighting women is a choral book, a set of interviews conducted with Spanish women who took part in the civil war. Some took up arms and fought on the front, others joined the POUM, Free Women or different anarchist groups. They all fought against Francoism and for the […]

Bristolians vs Blackshirts: militant anti-fascism in the 1930s

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During the 1930s in Bristol and nationally much of the working-class identified Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF) as a major threat their freedom, their organisations and to ethnic and religious groups within their number. This walk visits the venues that welcomed Mosley's Blackshirts and celebrates the community that vigorously rejected him along with Mussolini, Hitler and General Franco. It will introduce some of the flashpoints in the city-centre marking a proud history of […]

The London Recruits: undercover in apartheid South Africa

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The history of the Anti-Apartheid movement brings up images of boycotts and public campaigns in the UK. But another story went on behind the scenes, in secret, one that has been never told before. This is the story of the foreign recruits and their activities in South Africa, how they acted in defiance of the Apartheid government and its police on the instructions of the African National Congress (ANC). Ken Keable made two undercover trips to Johannesburg and Durban in 1968 and 1970 to […]

‘No Cure, No Fee, Boarding Excepted’: ‘Mason’s Madhouses’ In Old Fishponds

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Journalist, Fishponds Voice History columnist and Bristol Radical History Group author Mike Jempson will reveal some of the fascinating facts his research uncovered about the private madhouse which dominated Fishponds in the eighteenth century. His talk includes some of the institution’s more startling treatments, the sensational public inquiry and the shameful end of the Mason dynasty - the family firm that ran this biggest private asylum outside of London for 120 years. Drawing on museum […]

The Bristol Admiral who defended the Haitian Revolution

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In 1804, the former Caribbean slave colony of Haiti became the first free black republic in the world, having emancipated itself by force of arms by defeating the armies of France, Britain and Spain on the battlefield. This new nation sought international allies to help safeguard its hard-worn freedom in a world of imperial slavery. In this talk, we uncover the lost story of Thomas Goodall, a Bristolian who served as Haiti's first Admiral and tangled with the Royal Navy in the fight to defend […]

Writing and Publishing Radical History

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The Bristol Radical History Group has produced seventy publications, mostly within the Radical Pamphleteer series, with several more pending. These honour and continue the tradition of the troublesome chapbooks, broadsides, and seditious tracts from the earliest days of mass printing. The series was launched in 2008, with Mark Steeds’ “Cry Freedom, Cry Seven Stars,” a tribute to the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson, active in Bristol during the 18th century. Since then, a collection of […]

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