News Feed - Bristol Radical History Group

Putting Welsh history on TV

This talk with video extracts, will look at attempts to turn the complexities of Welsh history into accessible television. It will include clips from Horrible Histories, Huw Edwards’s The Story of Wales and the ground-breaking and much-loved series, The Dragon Has Two Tongues in which Wynford Vaughan Thomas and Professor Gwyn Alf Williams offered two very different versions of Welsh history. The latter series, produced and directed by Colin Thomas in 1985, was recently described by […]

The General Strike in Gloucester and Swindon

Gloucester Docks, Sugar and Strife - Tony Conder As an industrial city Gloucester's industries were hit by the strike in 1926. The dock workers and boatmen of Gloucester played a key role in taking action and suffering in the aftermath. The business of the docks pitted powerful conservative forces who made no attempt to recognise the emergency against an almost cheeky gallantry by their striking workforce. A Railway Town and the General Strike: Nine Days in Swindon in May 1926 - Stuart Butler […]

‘Bread or Blood’ – The Merthyr Rising of 1831

The talk will cover the explosive social, economic and political reasons behind the Merthyr Rising of 1831. The Merthyr Rising in 1831, was a rising not a riot, as viewed by the status quo. It was the most ferocious and bloody event in the history of Industrial Britain. It will conclude by looking at the main legacy of May 1831 and the reasons why we commemorate the events today.

The General Strike in Bristol: an introduction

In May 2026 we mark the centenary of the General Strike. This talk will cover the events of those nine days in Bristol and put them in their national context. We will also look at the miners' lock-out which began before and lasted longer than the General Strike.

‘An industrial Red Cross’: Labour women’s support for the miners’ lockout in the south west.

This talk will describe the setting up of the Women’s Committee for the Relief of Miners Wives and Children in London by the Labour Party Chief Woman Officer, Marion Phillips. It will then focus on the efforts of Labour women to raise funds and to organise relief in the southwest and the support they gave to relief committees in Bristol and in Radstock. It will suggest that the Lockout gave them the opportunity to demonstrate that they had the necessary skills to organise relief on a national […]

Curating the Colonial Past

Decolonisation and struggles over colonial archives

In the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of documents from colonies approaching independence. This exercise was later repeated resulting in the deposit of roughly 20,000 files from over 40 dependencies in secret storage in and around London, where they remained until a 2011 court case brought against the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office by survivors of the Kenyan Emergency. This talk considers struggles to conceal and […]

BBC rebels in the 1970s

The BBC is often portrayed by critical commentators as a monolith, inherently biased and strictly regulated from within. This characterisation both denies the agency of its workers, and deserves further investigation. This talk considers the BBC in the 1970s in Bristol and London, as government intervention in the Corporation increased, particularly over the representation of the conflict in Ireland. At the same time control over programme content was increased by the casualisation of programme […]

How the news is made

Propaganda and self-censorship in the media

Seasoned media journalists Nicholas Jones and Dorothy Byrne give an inside look at how the news is made. A former BBC correspondent, Nicholas Jones reflects on the dangers of being overwhelmed by a tsunami of propaganda orchestrated by the UK’s mass media. Looking back on a 50-year career reporting on the home front, Jones describes the impact of the coverage fuelled by the British press, from the 1982 Falklands War to the 1984 miners’ strike and the Brexit referendum of 2016. All too often the […]

The General Strike in the Forest of Dean and the Somerset coalfield

Women, Rough Music, and Direct Action during the 1926 lockout in the Forest of Dean Ian Wright will discuss the use of rough music and skimmington-style protest by miners' wives against blacklegs and the police during the 1926 miners’ lockout in the Forest of Dean. The talk will then explore the subsequent occupation of Westbury Workhouse by around 300 women and children in response to the withdrawal of Poor Law relief for miners’ families. Resistance and resilience: the 1926 General Strike and […]

Reflections on the General Strike

What should we learn from the 1926 General Strike and what might the 2026 General Strike look like? Our four contributors consider what the 1926 General Strike means for us today, followed by a Q&A.