News Feed - Bristol Radical History Group

The guillotine, knitting and terror…

So you think you know about the French Revolution?

By Roger Ball

A demonstration of the ‘humane’ guillotine

Introduction The last few years I have been playing word association games; asking people at work and at the pub to say the first thing that comes into their head about a particular historical event or figure. So typically the English Civil War carries mental images of 'laughing cavaliers', 'miserable roundheads' and blood-thirsty executions of kings, World War I produces 'mud, blood and barbed wire' and recently, PC Blakelock elicits 'brutal mob violence'. Of course some people and events […]

Bristol Anarchist Bookfair Press Release

By Randell Brantley

Saturday 26th April, Bristol Anarchist Bookfair @ Trinity Centre Bristol Anarchist Bookfair Collective invites all Bristolians and others living in the South West to the 2013 Bookfair. Find out everything you ever wanted to know about anarchism but didn’t know where or who to ask. The Bookfair sees most of the diverse strands of Bristol’s growing anarchist and radical movements gather together, along with many of the UK’s major anarchist publishers and distributors. Alongside an enormous range […]

Owen Glendower

By John Cowper Powys

Are all the events in the great world… so different from what the historians say? Although it’s a contradiction in terms, it seems accurate to say that John Cowper Powys is a novelist who has more than a single magnum opus, maybe even several. For me The Glastonbury Romance is his great work among the Wessex novels but it is difficult to think of Wolf Solent, Maiden Castle or Weymouth Sands as in any way lesser works. The vast and panoramic Owen Glendower looks and reads like his magnum opus […]

Street Farming

By Randell Brantley

Coming soon: £12 • 262 pages • 215mm x 140mm Isbn: 978-1-906477-44-8 • Available April 18, 2014 Distributor: Central Books • 0208 986 4854 • www.centralbooks.com Sales: Richard Jones • 0117 972 0645 • richard@tangentbooks.co.uk Stephen E Hunt has produced the definitive account of Street Farm (Graham Caine, Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart), a London-based collective of anarchist architects working in the early 1970s. The three friends put together Street Farmer, an underground paper that, […]

No Glory: The Real History Of World War 1

Presented by 'Remembering The Real World War 1' - Bristol's campaign to commemorate the real World War 1 – all welcome This meeting represents an opportunity to hear different views about the war and discuss how we can ensure that the real World War 1 is remembered by people across the city. How the war is remembered is as much about the future as the past – while past conflict remains discredited, future foreign military interventions and occupations will remain difficult to sell to the public. […]

Bristol Radical Film Festival

By Randell Brantley

Bristol Radical Film Festival 2014 starts tonight with Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Enemies of the People at The Cube. The full programme for 2014 can be found on their website.

Uomini contro – (Many Wars Ago)

Uomini contro (Many Wars Ago) Directed by Francesco Rosi, 100 mins, Italy 1970, Italy 1917 -- society is violently split down the middle over the question of whether to continue intervention in the war. Anarchists and socialists are intent on causing so much trouble that continued intervention is impossible. Railway lines are ripped up, battle lines are drawn. On the Isonzo front a General smells socialism behind the troops reaction to his orders and a disastrous Italian attack upon the Austrian […]

Wiltshire Radical History Day

By Randell Brantley

White Horse (Wiltshire) Trades Union Council Wiltshire Radical History Day Saturday 29th March 2014 10am-4pm The Cause 42 The Causeway, Chippenham SN15 3DD Free entry Bar and buffet lunch Speakers throughout the day include: Jeremy Corbyn MP from Wiltshire to Westminster Professor Steve Poole from the University of the West of England on The gallows, the gibbet and the rural poor Melissa Barnett, Curator of Chippenham Museum on Dame Florence Hancock Nigel Costley, South West TUC Regional […]

A Map of the Parish of Bitton 1842

This is a map of the Parish of Bitton from 1842. Cock Road can be see just to the right of Hanham. Note that the original is marked 1842 however, the map shows the Midland Branch Line (now the Bristol-Bath cycle track) which was not opened until 1869. See the Avon Valley Railway website for more details. A full version of The History of The Parish of Bitton in the County of Glousceter. by Rev. H. T. Ellacombe can be found on Archive.org.

Troubles

By J.G. Farrell

Set in 1919-21, years of conflict when the struggle for Irish independence raged, Troubles is the first in J.G. Farrell’s 1970’s trilogy of historical novels dealing with the decline of empire. Troubles follows the fortunes of Major Brendan Archer who, traumaticised and lacking purpose after serving in the First World War, crosses the Irish Sea to the fictional town of Kilnalough to meet with his fiancé, Angela Spencer, to whom he’d almost unwittingly become engaged following a brief, scarcely […]