Chartist Ancestors
What did your family do 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

Find Chartist records in the National Archives

© Mark Crail

After Chartism
The Ingraham Testimonial Fund

Chartists later became involved in many diverse causes. This page looks at the Smyrna incident of 1853 and how it captured the imagination of British radicals.

By 1853, Chartism had long since ceased to be a mass movement. Many of those who had dedicated a decade of their lives to the cause had fallen by the political wayside, either disillusioned or out of sympathy with the small group still clustered around Ernest Jones.

Others, however, found alternative radical political causes - often coalescing around single issues, such as the campaign to repeal newspaper taxes of for the provision of free education to working class children.

The Ingraham Testimonial Fund was one such one-off rallying point for former Chartists. Though of no particular significance in itself, it is of interest for three reasons:

• It illustrates the way in which families perpetuated radical political culture from one generation to the next. See Chartism as popular culture.
• It demonstrates a surprisingly sharp interest in international politics among workers in the early 1850s. Read more about the Smyrna incident.
• It shows many of the players in Chartism's earlier internal politics continuing to work together on radical causes. Members of the Ingraham committee.

Chartism as popular culture
Chartism was always more than a demand for the right to vote. Over a relatively short period, it had been almost an entire counter-culture, with its own newspapers, family social events, Sunday schools, and churches.

Chartists often named their children after the movement's national leaders, including Feargus O'Connor, William Lovett and Henry Vincent, whose involvement in the temperance movement would ensure that his name was used long after Chartism ended.

It is obvious from the list of names below (taken from Reynolds's Newspaper) that whole families contributed to the Ingraham Testimonial Fund.

This means, first, that collections must have been made at events at which men, women and children were present, and second, that the children of Chartist parents would see their own names in print in the radical press, helping to create a sense of belonging to this culture.

Members of the Ingraham committee

The committee's membership shows a surprising degree of overlap with that of the final years of the National Charter Association's London leadership. Surprising because of the degree of acrimony which had accompanied post-1848 Chartist politics.

Many of the committtee's members had worked together previously in the cause.
• Harney had been active throughout the Chartist period and edited the Northern Star and Red Republican newspapers;
• Moore was one of the six working men who signed the original Charter and had been involved in the People's Charter Union;
• Arnott, Grassby and Kydd had all served as general secretaries to the National Charter Association;
• Milne, Le Blond and Reynolds had been members of the NCA executive at the same time in 1849; and
• Dicks, a London bookseller, had published Reynolds' novels.

Of the others:
• Cooper was a London tailor and Chartist lecturer;
• Sturgeon had contested Nottingham as a Chartist in the 1852 general election in succession to Feargus O'Connor; and
• Sturgeon would go on to be a founder member of the Reform League which did much to support the successful 1867 Reform Act.

Find out more about Chartism on this website, or browse the Chartist Ancestors Bookshop.

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