News Feed - Bristol Radical History Group

Behind the Screen

Monday 7th March to Monday 28th March, 2022

A series of talks given by filmmakers and artists on their craft, with film illustrations, at the Cube cinema. Featuring some of most experienced filmmakers in the city along with emerging talent, a must for documentary lovers and students of film alike. The four events are organised and supported by the Cube and Bristol Radical History Group. Tickets £5. Each event is at 8.00pm on a Monday in March at the Cube cinema, Dove Street South (off top left of King Square) Kingsdown, Bristol BS2 8JD. […]

The 1970s Counterculture in the West Country

The story of the Bath Arts Workshop

Front cover of Bath Arts Workshop: Counterculture in the 1970s with people in fancy dress in front of shop in Walcot Street, Bath

From the late 1960s through the 1970s the counterculture helped to make the West Country fizz with creative ideas and events. One of the most successful ventures, locally and nationally, was the Bath Arts Workshop. As a spin-off from London’s influential Arts Lab, BAT was a loose collective of artists and community activists. To describe it as a community arts group, however, would be to under-explain its work. It was that and much more as it proliferated into festival organisation, media […]

Downs row – Merchants hit back over criticism

By Randell Brantley

In a report in the Bristol Post of Wednesday 26 January 2022, the Society of Merchant Venturers [SMVs] hit back at critics who want them to give up their half of the Downs and their role in managing the public common. The article, Downs row – Merchants hit back over criticism, was based upon the outcome of a meeting of the Downs Committee that was held on Monday 24th Jan, where campaigners in the ‘Downs for People’ [DfP] pressure group, backed by a Green councillor, demanded that the ancient […]

Bath Workhouse Burial Ground Project

By Richard White

Trees will grow and a wildflower meadow bloom at Bath’s Union Workhouse Burial Ground. A place of memory and reflection is emerging thanks to the work of local residents, artists and descendants of those buried there, unmemorialised, in unmarked graves. As the official memorial to a slave trader was toppled in Bristol, people in Bath sought to memorialise those officially forgotten. Bath Workhouse burial grounds do not exist on any modern map, there is no signage or plaque. Following a long […]

Some insights into the lives of the crew onboard the slave ship Hannibal

By Rosemary L Caldicott

An often overlooked but essential element of a slave ship, such as the Hannibal, was the requirement for a large crew in comparison to the number of sailors usually required to man ordinary merchant shipping. Sailors who were to work on slavers would be recruited by any means possible. For example, some men were offered the option by a magistrate or judge of going to prison, transportation, or work as crew on a slave ship. John Newton, author of The Journal of a Slave Trader, described his crew […]

Again with One Voice: British Songs of Political Reform, 1768 to 1868

By Dick Holdstock. Ed. Patience Young

This ‘supremely singable’ collection of 120 songs with musical settings should ‘enlighten and enliven our discussions and our singing in equal measure’ (Oskar Cox Jensen, Historian, UEA) At the heart of ‘Again with One Voice’ are the words and melodies of a remarkable collection of one hundred and twenty British songs from the turbulent hundred years that culminated with the Second Reform Act of 1868. The collection charts a century of working-class struggle for democracy and political reform […]

From Lewis Hamilton to Jemima (age 12)

Comments on the fall of Colston

TEAR THEM ALL DOWN. Everywhere. Lewis Hamilton (seven time F1 World Drivers Champion) Black Lives Matter X heart X heart. Jemima (age 12) This is the third in a series of articles written in the wake of the fall of Edward Colston's statue in June 2020. The previous articles consisted of two fully referenced timelines, the first covering more than a century dissent and protest concerning Colston's leading role in transatlantic slavery and the second considering the local, national and […]

The Book of Trespass

By Nick Hayes

…the fences that divide England are not just symbols of the partition of people but the very cause of it. Bristol Radical History Group subscribers will find inspiration in Nick Hayes’s book. He sets out to trespass on a range of properties and rivers throughout England, defiantly ignoring the fact that he – and we - are excluded from 92% of the land in England and 97% of its waterways. In the course of his walk descriptions, Nick Hayes reveals some surprising historical heroes – […]

Congratulations Barbados

Ripples across the Pond

By Rosemary Caldicott

On Tuesday 30 November 2021, marking the 55th anniversary of independence from Britain, Barbados proudly became a Republic. In 2020 the then governor-general of Barbados, Sandra Mason, now president and head of state, stated that "the time has come to fully leave our colonial past behind. Barbadians want a Barbadian head of state." The former Barbadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom Guy Hewitt, stated in an interview that many Barbadians believe that the country was due for "a […]

Solidarity With The Colston Statue Topplers In Court

It's taken the vindictive British state and it's imperfect judicial system 18 months, but on Monday 13 December 2021 they will finally start the prosecution of just four, of the hundreds of protesters, who allegedly participated in the toppling of the Colston Statue way back on 7 June 2020. That statue toppling happened in the midst of Bristol's huge Black Lives Matter protest, as once again angry Bristolians made history and kicked over the statues. Now it's time to stand again in support of […]