Welsh Journals

The Chartist Endurance: Industrial South Wales, 1840-68 Angela V. John 'Englishmen! Scotchmen! Copy the example of our Welsh brethren and Chartism will soon awaken to a glorious future'. The Peoples Paper, 30 October 1852. The Chartist rising of 4 November 1839 lasted barely twenty minutes, but its reverberations have echoed amongst the Welsh hills ever since. About 5,000 Chartists descended from those hills and attacked the Westgate Hotel, Newport, Monmouthshire, where the soldiers of the 45th regiment were stationed. Twenty eight soldiers defeated the vast body of Chartists, leaving nine or ten dead and fifty wounded. Its purpose has never been firmly established. Its results were the death sentences (commuted to life transportation) for its three leaders, Frost, Williams and Jones, prison for its supporters and ridicule and contempt for the Chartist movement. This movement was the first national expression of the newly articulate political consciousness of the working class. Its origins lay in earlier radical movements such as the London Corresponding Society, but all grievances and former demands were now coalesced in this one vast organisation. Chartism combined elements of Jacobinism and Owenism, it reflected disgust and distaste at the sordid results of industrialisation. It expressed the omnipresent desire for liberty, an elusive quality cruelly handicapped by oppressive laws, such as the obnoxious paper tax. It culminated in the reaction against the Whig reforms of the 1830s. The policy of 'pacifying a wild beast with a bite" demonstrated by the Great Reform Act was condemned and deplored. The Poor Law Amendment Act merely confused retrogression with reform. By the mid 1830s all the earlier experiments were threaded together in one vast organisation. From 1836 until the end of the 1850s, Chartism captured the