Venue: 12 Station Road, Ashley Down, Bristol, BS7 9LA A blue plaque for Walter Ayles will be unveiled on Sunday April 17th – the centenary of the date that Ayles was first arrested. Please put this date in your diary. The unveiling will take place from 3.30pm at the house where lived with his wife Bertha in Station Road, Ashley Down. Generous donations have enabled us to raise over £600 to pay for the plaque. Full details will be circulated nearer the date. Come along and help us honour all […]
Hesitant Comrades is the first book to explore the actions and attitudes of the British working class towards the Irish Revolution of 1916–21.With sources ranging from newly discovered writings to reports of police spies, Geoffrey Bell brings to light new evidence. He shows how the leaders of British trade unions were complicit in Belfast loyalist sectarianism and he explores the troubled nature of the Labour Party's relations with its Irish community, and how the Bolsheviks criticised British […]
With Since the descent into civil war in Syria, revolutionary forces have seized control of the Kurdish region of Rojava. This talk aims to assess the strengths,challenges and vulnerabilities of the revolutionary project under way there. In terms of strengths, I will focus principally on four: (1) revolutionary discipline and the power of ideology; (2) consciousness-raising, collective mobilization, and assembly democracy; (3) gender emancipation; and (4) attempts to accommodate ethnic and […]
Steve Mills will give a talk on the contents of his recent BRHG pamphlet/'Poaching in the South West'/ which considers the poaching wars in rural areas in the 18th and 19th Centuries and the arms race conducted between the poaching gangs, landowners and game keepers. He will also look at the development of the 'poaching' laws in the period and the famous Berkeley Case. More information here. Watch this talk
This talk will focus on an on-going research project into the anarchist elements of the wider Spanish community in Dowlais and Abercraf, c.1900-1920. Following a shortage of labour during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) the management of the Dowlais Iron Works used its subsidiary company in the Basque region to encourage Spanish labourers and their families to move to South Wales. By 1911 there were 264 Spaniards in the borough of Merthyr Tydfil, part of an international community which also […]
In 2012 some radical historians poring over old maps of East Bristol came across a disused burial ground at Rosemary Green close to the site of Eastville Workhouse at 100 Fishponds Rd. Over the following years a team of local researchers revealed that more than 4,000 men, women and children, inmates of Eastville Workhouse, were interred in unmarked graves in Rosemary Green from 1851-1895. 100 Fishponds Rd: Life and death in Victorian Workhouse is a summary of their research and a history of […]
Members of the Eastville Workhouse Memorial Group have used death registers at Bristol Record Office to identify the people given pauper's burials at Rosemary Green adjacent to the site of Eastville Workhouse. They found the names of over 4,000 men, women and children buried in unmarked graves and evidence of how Poor Law Guardians kept the cost of burying inmates as low as possible. As part of Explore Your Archive week, join us at this free drop-in session to see these interesting archival […]
On Rosemary Green, Eastville, BS5 6LB. Residents of East Park Estate are to unveil a memorial to more than 4,000 men, women and children who died in Eastville’s notorious Workhouse between 1851 and 1895 and were buried in unmarked paupers’ graves in what is now Rosemary Green. A six foot Welsh slate standing stone, carved by local stone mason and sculptor Matthew Billington using designs from pupils of May Park Primary School, will be erected on the disused burial ground which has remained […]
When both levees and governments failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the anarchist-inspired Common Ground Collective was created to fill the void. With the motto of 'Solidarity Not Charity', they worked to create power from below; building autonomous projects, programs, and spaces of self-sufficiency like health clinics and neighborhood assemblies, while also supporting communities defending themselves from white militias and police brutality, illegal home demolitions and […]
In 1917, socialist, feminist and anti-war activist, Alice Wheeldon, her daughter Winnie and husband Alf Mason were given long prison sentences for supposedly plotting to kill the Prime Minister Lloyd George and Arthur Henderson, the leader of the Labour Party. The evidence was flimsy, their accuser an MI5 agent provocateur so dubious the prosecution kept him away from the trial. It was a time when Britons were increasingly vocal in their opposition to the continuing and pointless carnage of the […]
