News Feed - Bristol Radical History Group

Greetings from across the Atlantic

By Randell Brantley

Dear Bristol Friends, The evening that I shared a platform with Richard Hart and spoke at one of your meetings last year was a high point of several weeks I spent in Britain. To see so many people interested in--and knowledgeable about--radical history was a thrill. I know of no equivalent to the BRHG in any city in the United States--not even in San Francisco, where I live, which has long had the reputation of being one of the strongest labor union towns in the country. Good luck in your many […]

Welcome To The Bristol Radical History Blog

By Randell Brantley

This is the BRHG blog. A number of people who have been involved with our events have been asked to contribute to our blog. Hopefully this will build into an interesting collection of articles, musings and rants about history and current affairs.

English Abolition: The Movie

By Adam Hochschild

Amazing Grace, a film directed by Michael Apted. First Published In The New York Review Of Books Volume 52, Number 10, June 14, 2007. Reproduced by kind permission of the author. Two hundred years ago this spring, Britain ended its Atlantic slave trade, an event of immense importance, because the country then dominated the traffic in human beings. From the mid-1700s on, roughly half the captive Africans taken to the Americas had been transported in British ships. Ever since, Parliament's vote to […]

Seven Stars, Slavery and Freedom!

By Mark Steeds

The Seven Stars pub in St Thomas Lane (next to the Fleece and Firkin) is without doubt a remarkable pub. It has survived the Blitz, post and pre war planners, new roads (such as Victoria Street) and all of the brewery ‘re-organisations’ and changes in fashion. It even lost the community that surrounded it, but it’s still there, a beacon on our past. The reason its survival is so important is due to one man, Thomas Clarkson, and if it wasn’t for Bristol Civic Society nobody would have been aware […]

A Celebration of St. Wulfstan

In between the howling gales, we had a day of calm which coincided with a spur of the moment event; 'A Celebration of St Wulfstan', on his saints day, the 19th of January. After a brief rendition of his life was published in last months magazine, a number of people got together to try and celebrate the great man's life, in the actual church in which he served, as a contribution to Abolition 200 year. Several people had stated that we ought to do something, and contact was made through the […]

Branscombe Bay and the Sea Commons

By Roger Ball

The slides from Roger Ball's talk Branscombe Bay And The Sea Commons which was part of Bristol Radical History Week 2007 – Pirates, Witches & Smugglers. Download the pdf file here.

Cotswold Tobacco Growing

By Jim McNeill

Not Exactly A Digger Thing? Notes from Jim McNeill's lecture during the Smugglers 1 events at Bristol Radical History Week 2007. 1598: In the House of Lords by Lord Harris, asked that English and Irish farmers might be permitted to test whether tobacco could be produced in this country at a profit. 1619: A London merchant, John Stratford, purchased spare land in and around Winchcombe and planted tobacco. See next section of these notes. 1619: Act banning Tobacco growing in England passed — just […]

Some Thoughts And Observations On Bristol Radical History Group’s Summer Party

By Roger Ball

Reclaim the Hill!: A celebration of the radical history of Brandon Hill and Stop the College Green Dispersal Order Despite the vagaries of the English summer of 2007, a small but feisty mob of radical historians, skate boarders and cider drinkers gathered on Brandon Hill in Clifton on August 19th. We were both celebrating the 175th anniversary of the invasion of the Great Reform Dinner and protesting against the dispersal order served on Bristol citizens this summer. What is the connection? […]

The Seven Stars Pub & Thomas Clarkson

By Mark Steeds

A Transcript taken from a document found behind the bar at The Seven Stars Pub. It was an inn in the latter half of the Seventeenth Century, for in the Reign of Charles the Second, Richard Pope, Linen Draper, one of the sons of William Pope, merchant, granted to the feoffoes of Saint Thomas a yearly rent of 30/-d. out of the tenement called “The Starrs then in the possession of Michael Jaine, victualler, in accordance with his father’s will.” IT is interesting from its connection with the slave […]

A Brief Political And Economic Introduction To Bristol Glass

By Jim McNeill

There were a number of economic and political changes during the 16th and 17th centuries which prepared the ground for the establishment of the glass industry in Bristol. In 1522 the ‘Society of Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol’ was incorporated. It grew in power and influence through the 17th century during which the Society revitalised and effectively reorganised itself to allow Bristol’s maritime merchants to take the fullest advantage of the Britain’s developing colonial […]