Chartist Ancestors
What did your family to in the revolution?

Millions signed the three great Chartist petitions of 1839 to 1848. Thousands were active in those years in the campaign to win the vote, secret ballots, and other democratic rights that we now take for granted.

Chartist Ancestors lists many of those who risked their freedom, and sometimes their lives, because of their participation in the Chartist cause. The names included on the site are drawn from newspapers, court records and books of the time, from later histories and other sources.

I would like to thank the many historians, researchers and the descendents of those associated with Chartism who have helped with this site since it was launched in 2003.

Mark Crail, Editor

How to...
Make the most of your visit to an archive or records office

Research your trade union ancestors

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© Mark Crail

Chartism in the localities
Manchester: at Chartism's heart

Manchester and its surrounding towns were central to the development of Chartism. The first great Chartist rally in England took place here on 25 September 1838 when a crowd estimated by the Leeds Times at an unlikely 250,000 people gathered on Kersal Moor to elect delegates to the first Chartist convention.

Two years later, the National Charter Association was founded at a Chartist conference in Manchester, putting the movement on an organisational footing that would serve it for the next 18 years, and the NCA executive was based here until Feargus O'Connor moved it to London, more for his own convenience than for any political objective.

In 1842, Manchester and the Potteries formed the twin epicentres of a general strike (often now known as the Plug Plot Riots) that combined the demand for a restoration of earlier higher pay levels with the demand for the six points of the Charter. It was as a result of these events that O'Connor and 58 other local and national Chartist leaders were arrested and tried at the Lancaster assizes .

Manchester too has a claim to be the last resting place of Chartism. Ernest Jones, the central figure in Chartism from 1850 onwards lived in the city, and made his legal reputation there in 1861 defending the Irish Fenians Allan, Larking and O'Brien. And it was here that he died in 1869. His funeral, at Ardwick Cemetery, was the occasion of the last great Chartist rally.

Manchester had a strong middle class radical tradition – in Richard Cobden, Joseph Bright and the free-traders of the Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Potter, John Shuttleworth and Archibald Prentice among them. It had, too, been the scene of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

But the support Chartism drew from Manchester and the surrounding towns came from the working men and women of the factories and mills. Their Chartism was often as much economic as it was political – the desperate demand for living wages driving them to the more violent end of the movement.

The biographies that follow are edited extracts from Chartism in Manchester 1838-58 by Edmund and Ruth Frow. They are reproduced here with the kind permission of the Working Class Movement Library.

Reginald John Richardson
Born in 1803, R.J.Richardson was a master joiner from Salford. He also kept a bookshop. When he was 23 he took part in demonstrations against the introduction of power looms. Eleven years later, he was secretary of the South Lancashire Anti-Poor Law Association and the flowing year, in September 1838, he was the chief organiser of the Kersal Moor meeting. When the carpenters contributed union funds to build Carpenters' Hall in Manchester, Richardson acted as one of the trustees for the money. He was a man of more than usual education and he was an avid reader all his life. He wrote a pamphlet in prison called The Rights of Women in which he strongly advocated female suffrage. In April 1838, Richardson issued a placard calling a meeting at which the Manchester Political Union was formed. This became the Manchester section of the National Charter Association. In 1838, Richardson was the Manchester delegate to the National Convention but was replaced by Christopher Dean. He was one of the active trade unionists as secretary of the Operatives Trade Union who took the cause of the charter to the organised workers. He was an advocate of physical force and was arrested on a charge of seditious conspiracy in 1839. He was sentenced to nine months in Lancaster Castle. On his release, he went to Scotland to work as editor of the Dundee Chronicle, a Chartist paper. He died in 1861.
Extracts from Richardson's pamphlet are available here . Please note that this link takes you off the Chartist Ancestors website.

William Henry Chadwick
Born in 1829, Chadwick was an early developer. At the age of 14 he was already an accomplished speaker and had been enrolled as a Wesleyan preacher. At the age of 19, in 1848, he was appointed as corresponding secretary of the Manchester Chartists. He continued his activity for the Charter and was one of those arrested and put on trial at Liverpool in 1848. He was sentenced to six months' imprisonment arising out of a speech in Stevenson's Square in which he told the crowd that they would “never be free men until they had a sword hung by their side”. Chadwick became active in the trade union movement and was one of those who assisted the cotton operatives in their efforts to raise their wages. Later he helped the agricultural workers when they were trying to form a union under the leadership of Joseph Arch. He died in 1908.

James Wroe
Born around 1788, James Wroe lived in Newton Lane and had a printing and bookselling business at 49 Great Ancoats Street. From June 1819 until February 1820 he was editor of the Manchester Observer. He was also superintendent of the Radical School Rooms in George Leigh Street. Wroe suffered a number of prosecutions at the hands of the notorious Joseph Nadin who persecuted him for selling the radical press. Only five weeks after the episode of Peterloo, Wroe was in custody for seditious publication and distribution when his wife, who was nursing a baby, and his shop boy were arrested and imprisoned. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, he continued to support the cause of parliamentary reform and in 1838 was elected as one of the delegates to the first Chartist convention. He died in 1844.

Abel Heywood
Abel Heywood was born in 1810 and began working in a warehouse at the age of nine. He educated himself by attending classes at the Mechanics Institute. He set up a penny news room in Oldham Street where Henry Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian was sold. For selling this and other radical publications he was twice imprisoned. In 1841, he was elected treasurer of the National Charter Association and he sat on the Executive Committee until it moved to London in 1842. He played an active part in the proceedings leading to the incorporation of the Borough of Manchester in 1838. He became a councillor and, in 1853, an alderman. He was chairman of the highways committee for nearly 50 years. He was twice mayor of the city, in 1862, the year of the cotton famine, and in 1871 when the new town hall was opened. His newspaper and publishing business prospered, and innumerable radical journals, books and pamphlets were published by him, including, for a time, Robert Owen's New Moral World . He was justifiably proud of his record as a radical and said at a banquet in his honour at the town hall in 1891: “I for one was a fierce rebel against the conditions of things which prevailed.” He died in 1893.

Peter Murray M'Douall (sometimes McDouall)
M'Douall was born in the West of Scotland into a middle class family. The family moved to Ramsbottom where he set up a medical practice. He enjoyed a successful career up to the time he was 24 when the Chartist movement interested him from a generous regard for the welfare of the ordinary people. He then sacrificed a lucrative profession to take part in the cause, the justice of which he was convinced. Gammage described him as “rather short, but possessed a straight and well erect frame; in personal appearance he was decidedly handsome; his general features were extremely prepossessing, his mouth was small but well formed, void of any unpleasant compression of the lips… The doctor was of an ardent fiery temperament, and, though naturally possessing strong reflective powers, was impulsive to the last degree, and by no means deficient in the quality of courage”. Although at first he spoke with a stammer, after a while he gained confidence and developed into a competent public speaker.

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