Events Archive - Page 23 of 56 - Bristol Radical History Group

Film Screening – Greece: The Hidden War

Part One – The Battle for Athens

A rare chance to see the 1986 Channel 4 documentary that explored the clash between British forces and the left-wing Greek Resistance against the Nazi occupation in 1944, which led to the 'Battle for Athens' and into a bitter three year Civil War. The defeated Greeks fled into exile and waited more than 30 years for the PASOK Amnesty in 1982 that allowed them to return home. In the documentary they tell their story for the first time, alongside the British protagonists. The British Establishment […]

How did World War One end?

And how is this remembered?

The centenary of the end of WW1 in 1918 will be widely commemorated across the country on Remembrance Sunday this year. However, the military style parades and ceremonies send a mixed message. On the one hand they are a moving display of mourning for the dead. On the other they tend towards a celebration of British military virtues, the heroic defeat of Germany and recent claims that WW1 was a 'just' or 'necessary' war. The popular memory in the UK of an allied 'victory' in 1918 leaves many […]

Film Screening: Niemandsland – No Man’s Land – Hell on Earth

“One of the most effective anti-war films ever produced” New York Times

During World War One, five soldiers from different nations end up together amongst ruins in no man’s land and decide to stick together. Shot in 1931, this is the first international ‘talkie’, with music by Hans Eisler, the composer of “The Threepenny Opera”. One of its main characters was played by Lewis Douglas, a black American actor, and this made the film especially hateful to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels who ordered every copy of the film to be destroyed. But one survived, hence the […]

Otherstory puppet show: Taking a Holiday

Taking a Holiday tells the amazing story of the secret beneath a Bedminster bike shop. It is a story of struggle in wartime – full of intrigue, escapes, comradeship…and bikes. What does it mean to be a refugee and on the run in your own country? Who will give you a bed for the night, a job… or a means of escape? A table top and shadow puppet show based on the true stories of ordinary people in 1916/17, and the hidden history of the resistance to the war machine. Otherstory will be performing […]

‘The Lion of the Occasion’

Frederick Douglass in Bristol

In the summer of 1846 the famous American abolitionist Frederick Douglass took to the stage of the Victoria Rooms in Bristol, enthralling his thousands-strong audience with vivid denunciations of slavery. He was feted by the mayor and received great support from the people of the city, maintaining friendships with many of those he met for the rest of his life. Douglass biographer Laurence Fenton will discuss the background to and details of the great abolitionist's visit to Bristol in a talk at […]

Film Showing: Make More Noise

The suffragettes in struggle

This fascinating British Film Institute compilation of original footage highlights the passion and media savvy of the suffragettes in struggle, offering a fascinating portrait of British women during this time. “You have to make more noise than anybody else” said Emmeline Pankhurst. A special Bristol Radical History screening to mark the centenary of some women in Britain getting the vote, it will be introduced by Dawn Dyer, librarian at Bristol Central Library, who will provide a Bristol […]

Swords Into Ploughshares, Arms To Renewables

“To inflame the imagination of others” – that is the way shop steward convenor Mike Cooley saw the Lucas Aerospace Alternative Plan. The Plan had arisen out of the threat of massive redundancies at Lucas Aerospace in 1976 where half of its output depended on military contracts. Why, asked its workers, can’t we use our skills in creating socially useful products instead of making killing machines? And wouldn’t it make more sense spending money on things that society needed rather than on […]

History Walk 3: Degrees of Dissent: Bristol’s radical educational history, and what we can do to take learning back…

Bristol Radical History Festival 2018 Poster Light

Join collective bread, print & roses on a tour through Bristol’s radical past, present and future. Together we will bring to life the city’s dissenting history, its rich tradition of self-help and mutual aid, from the intellectual and political ferment of radical taverns, to pamphleteering, popular education collectives, the neo-liberal assault on education today and the radicalising impact of the UCU strike and ask what kind of education we need for all our futures.

Studio 1 & 2: Pressure Drop? What did the protests of ’68 achieve?

Professor Bush offers a critical reassessment of the events of 1968 and their aftermath. He will look at May '68 in Paris in a broader context of global protest and changing narratives of political analysis and authentic action. He will give a brief account of his own experiences of the summer of 1968 at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X. Thirdly, Professor Bush will examine a late echo of the sixties in the […]

Studio 1: On the run – Remembering the men who went away

From the introduction of conscription in 1916 to the end of the war each year at least 80,000 men were reported missing as deserters or absentees from the British home forces. Among them was an unquantifiable number of men who identified themselves as Conscientious Objectors. Their stories of temporary or permanent escape are a part of the history of 1914-18 war resisters which has been largely ignored.