Sub-headings: Black History Events; Popular Politics Events; Labour Party History Events, Miscellaneous Events; 40th Anniversary of death of Paul Robeson; Easter Rising 1916 Events; Croydon History; Black History; The Cult of the Succulent Savoury
- Black History Events
Tuesday 16 February. 5.15pm. A most active, enterprising officer: Captain John Perkins, the Royal Navy and the boundaries of slavery and liberty in the Caribbean
Douglas Hamilton (University of Winchester). IHR Maritime History Seminar. IHR, Senate House.
Wednesday 20 January. 5.30pm. Francis Barber, c.1742-1801: From Jamaican Slave to Samuel Johnson’s Heir
Talk by Michael Bundock (Dr Johnson’s House Trust, London). IHR Long 18thC Seminar held at Dr Johnson’s House, 17 Gough Square, London EC4A 3DE: entry from 5.30pm with open access to DJH, followed by talk at 6pm, and then a special reception for all comers at 7.15pm. Visitor numbers are restricted to 40, on a first register/first served basis. To register, please kindly contact gswilliamson@virginmedia.com
Previous seminar series talks podcasts can be seen at:
http://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/british-history-long-18th-century
Friday 22 January. 5.15pm. Interracial Relationships and the ‘Brown Baby Problem’: White British Women, Black GIs and their Mixed Race Offspring in World War 11
Lucy Bland (Anglia Ruskin). IHR Women’s History Seminar. IHR Senate House.
Tuesday 8 March. 5.30pm. Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the Spanish American Republics during the Nineteenth Century
Marcela Echeverri (Yale). IHR Latin American History Seminar. IHR, Senate House.
- Popular Politics Events
Tuesday 2 February. 5.15pm. Political Meetings Mapper with British Library Labs: mapping the origins of British democratic movements with text-mining, NLP, geo-parsing and crowd-sourcing
Katrina Navickas. IHR Digital History Seminar. Senate House
Monday 8 February. 5.30pm. The Politics of Public Space in Nineteenth Century England
Katrina Navickas. IHR Socialist History seminar. IHR, Senate House.
- Miscellaneous Events
Saturday 30 January. 2pm. Edward Carpenter: A Utopian in North Derbyshire
Talk by Sally Goldsmith and Rony Robinson. Notts & Derbyshire Labour History Society. Friends’ Meeting House, 27 Ashgate Road, Chesterfield, S40 4AG. Tea and coffee and the Northern Herald Bookstall will be available from 1.30 pm. NDLHS, 22 Boythorpe Avenue, Chesterfield, S40 2QE. 01246 270628. Email – hilary.cave@btinternet.com. www.ndlhs.wordpress.com
Tuesday 1 March. Ships, Plants, People: Joseph Banks and the circulation of the Natural World, 1780-1820
Jordan Goodman (University College London. IHR Maritime History Seminar. IHR, Senate House.
Saturday 5 March. 2pm. Remembering Mary Barbour – social reformer, rent strike leader, women’s peace crusader and pioneering woman councillor
Mary Barbour worked tirelessly to change laws to help families in poverty. Her capacity to mobilise working class families, especially women, to challenge the power of landlords and the state during the 1915 Govan rent strike led to the passing of one of Europe’s first rent restriction acts. She also fought for free school milk, children’s playgrounds, municipal wash-houses, and an end to slum housing. Talk by Catriona Burness. This event will also feature a discussion on current related issues. Admission free; light refreshments afterwards. Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
Wednesday 2 March. 2pm. Rapper dance – its creation and what it meant to working communities
Talk by Tom Besford at Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
Wednesday 9 March. All in a Day’s Work
‘Launch’ of Britain at Work West London book. John McDonnell will be the main speaker. Further details to be announced.
Wednesday 16 March. 2pm. Justice for Alice Wheeldon!
Talk by Chloe Mason at Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
Saturday 19 March. 9.30am-4.40pm. Children in West London History
Sessions:
- The children of the poor of Victorian Kingston upon Thames (Dr Helen Goepel, Centre for the Historical Record, Kingston University)
- Daughters of the Drum: the Orphans of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum, Wandsworth Common (Simon McNeill Ritchie, Wandsworth Historical Society)
- “Once a Paulina”: the story of St Paul’s Girls’ School (Dr Howard Bailes School’s Archivist & former history teacher)
- Children’s lives. Historical documents on the theme read by the organising committee
- Writing for children: from Jessica’s First Prayer (1867) to At The Back of the North Wind (1871), Hesba Stretton & George MacDonald (Susan Bailes, former head teacher & children’s literature historian)
- Sarah Trimmer & her daughters, pioneers in educating the poor of Brentford (Andrea Cameron, Chairman, Hounslow Heritage Guides)
- Chiswick Children 1700-1851: a B&CLHS project for Hogarth’s House (presentation by members of the research team)
Conference sponsored by the local history societies of Acton, Barnes & Mortlake, Brentford & Chiswick, Fulham & Hammersmith, Hounslow, Richmond, Twickenham, Wandsworth & the West Middlesex Family History Society. Venue: University of West London, Boston Manor Rd, Brentford. Tickets £15 available only in advance, from sponsoring societies or by post from J McNamara, 31B Brook Rd South, Brentford TW8 ONN. Please send SAE & cheque to ‘West London Local History Conference’. The conference fee includes morning coffee and afternoon tea. The university refectory will open specially for us on the day, offering sandwiches for lunch, teas, coffees and soft drinks, or you are welcome to bring a packed lunch.
Wednesday 30 March. 2pm. Communities of resistance: patterns of dissent in Britain during the First World War
Cyril Pearce talk at Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
Wednesday 27 April. 2pm. Luddites’ Nightmares
Talk by Richard Milward at Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
- Labour Party History
Saturday 23 January. 10.30am-4pm. Labour Party: Where’s it been? Where’s it going?
Northern College, Barnsley, Yorkshire. £25, inc. lunch.
Saturday 6 February, 10.30am-4pm. Labour Party: Where’s it been? Where’s it going?
Ruskin House, Croydon. Full details can be seen at https://seancreighton1947.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/the-history-and-future-of-the-labour-party-wheres-it-been-wheres-it-going-6-february-croydon
IWCE (Independent Working Class Education project) Day Schools on the History and Future of the Labour Party. Places are limited. Email iwceducation@yahoo.co.uk
- 40th Anniversary of the death of Paul Robeson
You can read about Paul Robeson in the UK in my pamphlet. (£2.50 inc post)
Saturday 23 January. 7.30pm. Paul Robeson: 40 Years Dead.
Tayo Aluko’s one man show. Quaker Meeting House, Liverpool to mark the 40th anniversary of Paul Robeson’s death. He will be accompanied by Liverpool Socialist Singers and Birmingham Clarion Singers – details http://www.unitytheatreliverpool.co.uk/whats-on/paul-robeson-40-years-dead.html
Friday 29 March. Call Mr Robeson
Tayo Aluko’s show about the life of Paul Robeson in words and song – Bolton Socialist Club. More details and ticket enquiries: 07966 136169.
- Easter Rising 1916 Events
Thursdays from 21st January. 7.30pm. ‘Road to the Rising’
A series of lectures that will explore the historical, literary and political context of the Easter 1916 Rising and reflect upon its consequences. Tyneside Irish Centre. www.tynesideirish.com. The lecture series details are in the following pdf.
13 April. 2pm. Manchester volunteers in the Easter Rising
Talk by Robin Stocks at Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
Thursday 19 May. 5.30-6.45pm. 1916: Memories, Commemoration & Absences
Talk by Dr. Mary E. Daly, University College, Dublin. Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University.
‘The 1916 Rising is the most important single event in the formation of 20th century Ireland. It was also an event of international significance – a dire c t challenge to Britain and it’s Empire. The proclamation of an Irish Republic anticipated the post-war collapse of monarchy in many parts of Europe. Yet in the past the tendency of Irish historians to view 1916 in narrowly national terms has resulted in a failure to examine some of the wider dimensions. The Rising must be understood in the context of the Great War and its immediate aftermath. In Ireland the legacy of 1916 has been complicated by partition and he civil war of the early 1920s, and by the conflict in Northern Ireland post 1969. While the involvement of Irish-America has long been acknowledged, the significant role that the Irish in Britain played in the Rising has been neglected…neglect that reflects the difficulties that an independent Ireland continued to face in its relationship with the Irish in Britain.’
- Croydon History
Henry Lowman Taylor’s clash with Charles Dickens
In her continuing look at the history of buildings along Croydon’s London Rd, Kake has discovered that Henry Lowman Taylor, a wholesale ironmonger who clashed with Charles Dickens over the matter of Smithfield Market, lived in a semi-detached house that used to be where 83-85 now is. Built in the late 1890s it currently is a Turkish, Greek, and Polish supermarket. It previously housed a couple of Friendly Societies as well as a furniture shop offering “the secret of happy home comfort”. The full details can be seen at http://london-road-croydon.org/history/0083-0085-beydagi-food-centre.html
Croydon’s Black Georgians
‘Catching a glimpse of Croydon’s black Georgians’ is a posting by me on Croydon Citizen discussing the Black Cultural Archives Black Georgians exhibition and how so much more than be said in lots of areas around the country including Croydon. See:
http://thecroydoncitizen.com/culture/catching-glimpse-croydons-black-georgians
Alessandro de’ Medici, Black Prince of Florence
Catherine Fletcher’s book The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous Times of Alessandro de’ Medici is being published on 21 April. For further details see http://catherinefletcher.info/books/black-prince-of-florence
For Catherine’s 2014 discussion posting Why does Italy ignore its ‘black’ history? on Sheffield University’s History Matters website see http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/italy-ignore-black-history
New Black History information from Jeff Green
- Upper Norwood’s blind school, 1890s-1910s
- Martha Ricks visits Queen Victoria, 1892
- The English ‘Hottentot Venus’, 1840
- A South Carolina slave in Britain, 1859-ca 1865 (John Andrew Jackson)
- Andrew Bogle 1802-1877. Jamaican in Britain & Australia
- The Cult of the Savoury Succulent
‘Leek growing, according to the Daily Herald in January 1914, had become ‘a regular cult’. On the Northumberland coalfield at the height of 1913s leek show season – covering four weeks at the start of autumn – the Morpeth Herald carried reports of almost seventy competitions. The cultivation of leeks was by then well-established and continues to be routinely cited in the popular press as a long-standing North East tradition. Yet this unlikely vehicle for keen rivalry, so exceptional when considered alongside the inherently competitive pastimes of organised sport and the likes of billiards and whippet racing, has failed to attract the close attention of the historian. Brian Bennison talked about his research into the development of competitive leek growing in the Northumberland Coalfield between 1843-1913 at the First Tuesday meeting of the North East Labour History Society.
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