19th Century 1800-1899
Peterloo Massacre
The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 was a tipping moment in British history. The event that came to be called the Peterloo Massacre did not begin with the intention of being a pivotal point in history. On the 16th August 1819 tens of thousands of ordinary citizens of Manchester met in a place called St Peter’s…
Read MoreSir Thomas Lipton
Sir Thomas Lipton, the very embodiment of the cliche, ‘Poor boy makes good’, was born in 1850 of working class Northern Irish parents in Glasgow. Lipton started work as n errand boy and became a millionaire through the vast chain of grocers shops that he had created and by 1908 he was one of the…
Read MoreStale Bread Act 1801
What did the act say? This was an Act imposed at a time of panicked desperation by a British Government trying to keep the lid on an explosive and fed up population. The bread shortage of the previous five years had not abated and so the Government, in its wisdom decided that the population would…
Read MoreHyde Park Riot 1866
There is nothing new in Governments facing opposition to the passage of bills over which there has been much heated debate. During the 1860’s and following on the heals of the Chartists, there emerged in 1864, a Reform League. The Reform League wanted fundamental changes to the voting rights of ordinary working class men and…
Read MoreOctavia Hill
Octavia Hill, social reformer and one of the founders of the National Trust. Octavia Hill was born in 1838 into a family of social reformers, her grandfather was Thomas Southwood Smith a public health reformer and her father was a friend of Jeremy Bentham so from an early age she was exposed to the need…
Read MoreThe Framework Knitters Declaration 1812
The issuing of this declaration by the framework knitters was in response to the machines that as the workers saw it was bringing down wages and producing inferior quality goods. The framework knitters (also called stockingers), launched the Luddite protests in Nottingham in 1811, justifying their actions by referring to the 1663 Charter of the…
Read MoreThe Framework Knitters 1821
Almost ten years on from the 1812 ‘Declaration of the Framework knitters’, conditions for the framework knitters of the counties of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester has not seen any sign of improving. The pay for these workers, of whom there were estimated to be about 15,000 in these three counties, was insufficient to keep them…
Read MoreChimney Sweeps Act 1834
The Chimney Sweeps Act 1834 was enacted in an attempt to protect the children employed by the ‘sweeping’ masters from cruel exploitation. The act forbade the apprenticing of any boy under the age of 10 years and the employment of children under 14 in chimney sweeping unless they were apprenticed or on trial. There seemed…
Read MoreGeorge Vulliamy designs on Victoria Embankment.
George Vulliamy was the designer of the iconic lamp posts and benches on the Victoria Embankment in London but what is his link to the Society of Women Artists?
Read MoreHenrietta Vansittart Engineer
Henrietta Vanstittart b.1833, was a woman who seemed to flout convention. She was a self taught engineer, a married woman with a high profile lover, Edward Lytton.
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