Chartist Lives: James Leach

Leach[1] was born in Wigan, Lancashire. His family origins and early years are entirely unknown, although it may be that he was an Anglican and that he had worked as a hand-loom weaver. He moved to Manchester in 1826; and in 1839, when he led the resistance to a cut in wages, he was sacked as a power-loom weaver after twelve years in the same employment. According to Friedrich Engels, however, who described him as ‘my good friend’, Leach had ‘worked in various branches of industry both in factories and coalmines’[2].

Leach was to claim in 1851 that he had been politically active for twenty years. By 1836, he was chairing meetings of the Manchester Radical Association, in 1838 he was elected to the council of the Manchester Political Union, and during the following year he began to represent Manchester at regional Chartist meetings. Given this local radical prominence, it made excellent sense for him, on losing his job, to set up as a bookseller and printer in Oak Street, Manchester. It was at this time, however, that his Chartist career moved on to the national level. In July 1840, he chaired the delegate conference in Manchester at which the key organisation of Chartism, the National Charter Association, was established. He was subsequently appointed provisional president and in both 1841 and 1842 came second only to Peter Murray M’Douall in the national elections to the executive. He sat as a delegate in the 1842 convention, of which he acted as vice-chairman.

According to Gammage, the Chartist activist and historian, Leach “never attempted to play the orator. In addressing a public meeting he was just as free and easy as in a private conversation; but for fact and argument there were but few of the speakers at that period who excelled him.”[3]. His reputation was as a ‘terror, not only to the cotton lords, but every other humbug’[4]. To O’Connor, he was a ‘plain blunt man’; and Engels considered him ‘upright, trustworthy and capable’[5] and drew extensively upon his 84-page pamphlet Stubborn Facts from the Factories by a Manchester Operative (1844) in The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Leach played a prominent part in bringing Chartism and the trade unions together, notably in support for the general strike movement of August 1842, and was one of the fifty-nine defendants in the mass trial at Lancaster in March 1843, although, like the others found guilty of conspiracy, he was not sentenced. He continued as a leading Chartist throughout the 1840s, but was also active in the co-operative movement (while not an Owenite) and in the agitation for a ten-hour limit on the working day. It had been in a series of open letters to Leach that O’Connor had, during his imprisonment of 1840–41, begun to develop his ideas about the centrality of land ownership to the emancipation of the working class, and in due course Leach too became an enthusiastic advocate of the Chartist Land Company, serving from 1845 as one of seven trustees. In 1848, he was a member of both the national convention of April and the national assembly of May and the latter appointed him to the militant provisional executive. A committed supporter of collaboration between English Chartists and Irish confederates, he had represented the Chartists in Dublin on 12th January at the first meeting between the two movements. From July 1848, he was printer, publisher, and co-editor of the English Patriot and Irish Repealer, which ended with his prosecution in December on another charge of conspiracy, for which he was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment in Kirkdale gaol.

After his release, from late 1851 Leach came to favour an alliance with the middle-class radicals, a startling U-turn for one who had displayed continuous personal and ideological hostility towards the Anti-Corn Law League. This phase was short-lived as he soon retired from politics and returned to the obscurity from which Chartism had lifted him. His wife, Hannah, who died on 17th August 1865, may have been the Hannah Hurst who married a James Leach in Burnley, Lancashire, on 4th September 1826. It is known that they had five children, of whom the first son was named Alexander. Leach gave up his printing and bookselling business to manufacture soft drinks, and on his death at Eagle Street, Hulme, Manchester, on 4th July 1869 his occupation was given as ginger beer maker.

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[1] Sources: E. Frow, R. Frow, and J. Saville, ‘Leach, James’, Dictionary of Labour Biography, volume 9 and S. Roberts Radical politicians and poets in early Victorian Britain: the voices of six chartist leaders, 1993.

[2] F. Engels The condition of the working class in England, ed. and trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, 2nd edition, 1971, pages 151–2, 342.

[3] R. G. Gammage History of the Chartist movement, 1837–1854, new edition, 1894, page 211.

[4] P. A. Pickering Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, 1995, page 199.

[5] F. Engels The condition of the working class in England, ed. and trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner, 2nd edition, 1971, page 152

Chartist Lives: Samuel Kydd

Kydd[1] was born on 22nd February 1815 in Arbroath, Forfarshire, the second son of James Kydd. He first came to public attention in 1837 in York when he issued a pamphlet which contributed to a national debate about joint-stock banks; his arguments that such banks should issue paper money were an early indication of a deep interest in financial and economic matters. Kydd’s circumstances had dramatically changed by the early 1840s when he featured in the Chartist press as a Glasgow shoemaker. He was soon in demand as a Chartist lecturer. Throughout the north of England in 1843–4, he sought to refute the arguments of the Complete Suffrage Union and the Anti-Corn Law League. Having established himself as Chartism’s most persuasive protectionist lecturer, Kydd relocated to London. As secretary of the Chartist executive in 1848–9 he was at the centre of the movement’s activities. Unlike other executive members, he managed to escape arrest, and, without going to the official polls, was twice (in Greenwich in 1847 and the West Riding in 1848) a Chartist parliamentary candidate. During these years, Kydd continued to undertake extensive lecture tours, especially in the north and in Scotland.

Though greatly liked and respected by the Chartist rank and file, Kydd decided to realign himself. By 1850 he was a close associate of Richard Oastler and a fully fledged Tory radical, arguing in his lectures and journal articles for factory reform and the reintroduction of tariffs. He became Oastler’s secretary, and, using the memorabilia he now had access to, produced, under the pseudonym ‘Alfred’, a History of the Factory Movement (1857); it remains a valuable document for students of the subject. Kydd had long desired to enter the legal profession. In 1858, he was admitted to Gray’s Inn, and in 1861 was called to the bar. Kydd lived during the second part of his life with his wife, Mary Ann Appleford (d. 1898), in Sutton, Surrey, and operated from chambers in the Middle Temple. Until the late 1880s, he practised on the northern circuit and appeared at the York assizes. Shortly before his death, he published A Sketch of the Growth of Public Opinion (1888). A man of outstanding ability, Samuel Kydd died at his home, Holly Cottage, Sutton, on 21st December 1892. He left no children.

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[1] Sources: S. Roberts ‘Samuel Kydd’, in S. Roberts Radical politicians and poets in early Victorian Britain, 1993, pages 107–27, Arbroath Herald, 19th January 1893, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 14th January 1893 and J. Foster Men-at-the-bar: a biographical hand-list of the members of the various inns of court, 2nd edition, 1885. Archives: Newcastle upon Tyne Central Library: letters.