This is an original research article. To cite, please use: Katrina Navickas, ‘Huddersfield’, 2015, http://protesthistory.org.uk/huddersfield

 

Spaces of a free press

The first political unions in the Huddersfield district were formed not in the town, but in the outworking-townships of Almondbury and Kirkheaton in April and August 1830.

Under the bridging leadership of the weaver George Beaumont, the Huddersfield Political Union amalgamated the branches after a meeting on ‘an open space outside the Cawthorne, Queen Street, on 28 October 1830, and public meetings were held at the Court House in March and September 1831, with Beaumont in the chair.^[1] Joshua Hobson, together with Lawrence Pitkethly and other weavers and small craftsmen, formed an active committee of the revived Huddersfield political union in the summer of 1831.^[2]

Hobson and his colleagues forged their political careers in many different campaigns, including the political unions, short time and factory reform movements, Owenite socialism and free thinking, trade unionism and defence of a free press. Historians tend to compartmentalise these campaigns, particularly parliamentary reform and the political unions between 1830 and 1832.^[3] Yet activists like Hobson were not single-issue campaigners. They thought holistically about the socio-economic and political grievances of workers and the poor, and sought a panoply of solutions. As John Halstead has recently shown, the committee of Huddersfield Political Union shared the majority of its membership with the Short Time Committee, and led the way in the struggle for a free press, developing Owenite socialism and co-operation, and supporting ‘freethinker’ Richard Carlile during his imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol.^[4] They laid the groundwork for bigger political projects later in the decade and sought both wider regional and international horizons.

^[1] John Halstead, ‘The Huddersfield Short Time Committee and its radical associations, c1820-76’, in John A. Hargreaves and E. A. Hilary Haigh, Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the Campaign Against Child Labour in the Industrial Revolution (Huddersfield, 2012), p.118; York Courant, 9 November 1830; Halifax and Huddersfield Express, 12 March, 1 October 1831.

^[2] John Halstead, ‘The Huddersfield Short Time Committee and its radical associations, c1820-76’, in John A. Hargreaves and E. A. Hilary Haigh, Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the Campaign Against Child Labour in the Industrial Revolution (Huddersfield, 2012), p.118; York Courant, 9 November 1830; Halifax and Huddersfield Express, 12 March, 1 October 1831.

^[3] Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780-1850 (Cambridge, 2003), p.41.

^[4] Halstead, ‘Huddersfield Short Time Committee’, p.107.

 

Swan Yard in Huddersfield was the centre of a vibrant and bold range of political campaigns in the early 1830s. It acted as both the physical and a symbolic nerve centre of free speech and its distribution. Should we call this a counter-public sphere? Situated across Kirkgate from the Swan Inn and the adjoining Pack Horse Inn, the yard was enclosed by workshops and used for carts and the other items of everyday working life. The Pack Horse was the venue for the headquarters of the Political Union, dubbed ‘Union Hall’.

On Monday 19 August 1831, the Huddersfield Political Union held a public meeting in the yard, chaired by Thomas Hirst, a local Kilhamite Methodist preacher, to petition parliament, ‘to put a stop to prosecutions for theological and political opinions’, and for the release of Reverend Robert Taylor, and the publishers of the Poor Man’s Guardian, Carpenter and Hetherington, as well as relief for Richard Carlile.^[1]

During the final tense ‘days of May’ in the lead up to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, the Political Union planned a meeting there for Tuesday 15 May to petition parliament to withhold supplies. The Political Union continued to hold meetings there and in the yard in 1833, as did the local branch of John Doherty’s National Union of the Working Classes and the co-operative society.^[2]

Joshua Hobson operated a ‘Union Free Press’ from his shop in the yard, printing handbills and posters for the Huddersfield Short Time Committee and the Political Union, together with the first eight issues of The Voice of the West Riding newspaper in 1833.^[3] Its place at the heart of radical networks continued: the Radical and Chartist newsroom was based at Swan Yard, kept by Samuel Binns, in early 1839.^[4]

Swan Yard was condemned by the Huddersfield board of health in 1847 for being unsanitary. They complained it was part of the poorer districts and ‘a space open to the public street, there is but one privy for 109 persons, and that one stands in an open space exposed to public view’.^[5]

The placards and handbills of the Union Free Press were material objects changing the symbolism of the spaces but they also served as symbolic weapons of resistance to war on the unstamped. The censure and closure of radical presses was, of course, not a new development of the Six Acts, but had been a priority for both national government and local loyalists from the first days of Paine’s Rights of Man in the 1790s. Though ‘Church and King’ violence against printers did not resurface during the 1830s, government actively pushed its Stamp Office agents to investigate and close down presses publishing unstamped material and the works of Richard Carlile amongst others. Hobson was prosecuted under the Six Acts by the Stamp Office in August 1833 and sentenced to six months in prison.^[6] Elsewhere, in March 1832, at the height of the reform bill crisis, Joseph Swann of Stockport was imprisoned for three months for selling unstamped publications, and Abel Heywood, bookseller and newsagent of Oldham Street, Manchester, (and future Chartist), was fined forty-eight pounds for a similar offence.[7] The ‘war of the unstamped’ was therefore not just about words and the freedom of speech but about places and the spaces of speech: the physical operation of the presses and the yards and buildings that held them, and the individuals that took the risk and the expense to print them.

^[1] Poor Man’s Guardian, 17 September 1831; Halstead, ‘Huddersfield Short Time Committee’, p.121.

^[2] Halifax and Huddersfield Express, 19 May 1832; Voice of the West Riding, 15 June 1833, 10 August 1833; E. Haigh, Huddersfield: a Most Handsome Town (Huddersfield, 1992), p.178.

^[3] Halstead, ‘Huddersfield Short Time Committee’, p.120; John Halstead, ‘The Voice of the West Riding: promoters and supporters of a provincial unstamped newspaper’, in Chris Wrigley (ed), On the Move: Essays in Labour and Transport History Presented to Philip Bagwell (Continuum, 2003), pp.30, 48.

^[4] Leeds Mercury, 2 February 1839.

^[5] PP House of Commons papers, vol 30, 1847-8, Reports from commissioners, p. 10.

^[6] Halstead, ‘Huddersfield Short Time Committee’, p.122.

[7] Poor Man’s Guardian, 10, 17 March 1832.