Events Archive - Page 3 of 56 - Bristol Radical History Group

Bristol Miners Support Campaign – 1984-85

The 1984/85 miners strike was arguably the most significant labour dispute in British history. Before the strike began, Arthur Scargill (President of the 200,000 strong National Union of Mineworkers) told his members and anybody else who would listen, that the future of the coal industry, and the people and communities whose futures depended on it were at stake. This was perfectly summarised in the strike slogan COAL NOT DOLE. The Tory Government used a combination of starvation, police […]

Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP)

Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) was set up in 1970 in London by a group of ex-prisoners and people connected with the prison service. We are very pleased to have Ros Kane speaking, one of the co-founders of RAP, along with the late Sandra Roskowski. Ros practiced as a psychiatric social worker at Wormwood Scrubs Prison Hospital before helping found the organisation. Also we have Gail Coles who worked in the organisation for several years. Ros and Gail's talk will cover why RAP was set up, […]

High-Rise Housing and Community Activism

High-rise housing has been held up in the mainstream media as the tombstone of welfare state: a symbol of the failure of state-led reform. But does this map onto residential opinion on the ground – or, more accurately, up in the air? Based on years of historical research of grassroots struggles on a range of estates, this talk explores how multi-storey housing served as a crucible for the welfare state’s reimagination. It illustrates the resilience of investments in public housing: throughout […]

Partners in crime

Collusion between Church and State in Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes

Mary Muldowney will give an overview of the appalling abuses that took place in many of the mother and baby homes in Ireland since the foundation of the state in 1922. The homes were supposed to provide safety and support for unwed mothers at a time when there was considerable stigma attached to having sex outside marriage. They were mainly run by religious bodies, predominantly Roman Catholic nuns, and the regimes they established had more to do with punishing the ‘sins’ of the mothers than […]

‘Working for your dole’

British labour camps, 1929–1939

After the financial crash of 1929 and during the years of the 'great depression' in the 1930s, the Ministry of Labour in Britain introduced a series of 'instructional camps' for the long-term unemployed, which were supported by successive governments. Over 150,000 men from 'distressed areas' were sent to do hard labour in these remote settlements. Using contemporary images and excerpts of oral history from the film Old Hands this talk explains the nature of these camps, how they functioned and […]

Short, Sharp, Shock

In the mid-1980s radical photographer Carlos Guarita gained access to two youth detention centres, Glenochil and Kirklevington Grange, part of the 'short, sharp, shock' system introduced in 1979 by the Tory Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw. Through a fascinating series of images supported by the insights of detainee Colin Adamson this exhibition exposes the living conditions for inmates subject to the harsh, quasi-military discipline. Carlos Guarita and Colin Adamson will guide us through the […]

‘Stopping business as usual’

The Dunnes anti-apartheid strike within a wider political environment

The three-year strike which followed the July 1984 refusal of eleven workers at Dunnes' Stores Henry Street branch in Dublin to handle South African goods is perhaps the most celebrated episode of anti-apartheid activism outside Southern Africa, yielding memoirs, academic scholarship, radio and television documentaries and even a play. While still recounting the essential narrative of the strike for those unfamiliar with it, Padraig Durnin's talk will explore what made it exceptional in […]

Housing the People: the Contested Role of the State from Pre-industrial Times to the 1930s

Why We Built Council Housing and How

John Boughton’s talk will cover the early history of public housing from the almshouses and parish housing of pre-industrial times to the council housing of the interwar period. As the Industrial Revolution came to transform Britain’s economy and society and democratic forces grew, Victorian elites came slowly to accept the inevitability of state intervention in housing. John will discuss the forces that shaped council housing in the later nineteenth century and the ideals motivating housing […]

The one road

From Bristol to Dublin

A walk though time and space with Mark Steeds, covering no less than 1,500 years of Bristols historic connections with Dublin and featuring Saints and Sinners, Roundheads and Royalists, Colonists and Criminals, Transportees and Treachery, Merchants and Murders… From the efforts of Wulfstan in 1090 to ban the trade in Anglo Saxon slaves with the invading Vikings in Dublin, via the Easter Monday massacre of 1209 in Killin Woods, outside of Dublin, when 500 new settlers from Bristol were attacked […]

A history of fascism and the far-right in Ireland

Ireland is one of the few countries in Europe that escaped fascist rule in World War Two and where neo-Nazi parties have never enjoyed success. Yet over the last decade Ireland, north and south, has seen a new wave of far-right street demonstrations, arson attacks, and racist violence. Historian and best-selling author Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc's new book BURN THEM OUT! A history of fascism and the far-right in Ireland exposes for the first time the hidden histories of the hate filled ideologies […]