Chartist Lives: Richard Marsden

Richard Marsden[1] was born in humble circumstances in or near Manchester in 1802 or 1803. Nothing is known about his early life, but he was a hand-loom weaver by trade. He left Manchester in search of work during the slump of 1829 and settled with his family in the weaving township of Bamber Bridge, near Preston. Marsden became the most prominent representative of the Preston Chartists, and played a significant role in the national movement for democratic reform in the late 1830s and 1840s. He was secretary of the Preston committee that submitted evidence to the royal commission on hand-loom weavers and was the principal witness before Commissioner Muggeridge during the latter’s visit to Preston in May 1838. He chaired the first Chartist demonstration in the town in November of that year, when he introduced Feargus O’Connor to a large and enthusiastic audience. After making a fiery speech supporting the Charter, Marsden was elected to represent north Lancashire at the national convention in London. He was a consistent and unyielding advocate of ‘ulterior measures’, urging the need to prepare direct action for the day when the Chartist petition would be rejected by parliament. During the spring of 1839, Marsden travelled as an official ‘missionary’ for the convention in Sussex and the Welsh borders, toured Ireland on his own initiative and made a speaking tour of north Lancashire, continually asserting the people’s right to armed self-defence.

Although he became known nationally as a spokesman for ‘physical force’ Chartism, Marsden seems to have believed that its use would never be necessary. In August 1839, he returned to Preston for the unsuccessful general strike in support of the Charter, vanishing almost immediately to avoid arrest on a warrant relating to a violent speech he had made in Newcastle earlier in the month. Marsden was in Bradford during the abortive Chartist rising in January 1840 and then moved to Bolton, where he lived under an assumed name and worked at his trade. Arrested there in July, he was soon released, and eventually returned to Preston as a full-time itinerant lecturer for the Chartists. He was again arrested in a confrontation between strikers and the military just outside Preston in August 1842, but this time no charges were laid against him. In the mid-1840s he rarely left Preston, but remained an active Chartist and exerted a wider influence through a series of letters to the Northern Star.

Unlike many more prominent regional figures, Marsden became less liberal and more vigorously anti-capitalist after 1839, coming increasingly to stress that Chartism was a class movement aiming at the emancipation of working people and opposed to all middle-class involvement. He took an active part in the Ten Hours movement, in the campaign of 1844 against proposed changes to the master and servant laws, and in promoting trade unionism in the cotton mills. At the end of 1845, he was appointed secretary of the newly established Preston Powerloom Weavers’ Union, and in 1847 moved to Blackburn to take charge of the weavers’ union there. Chosen again to represent north Lancashire at the Chartist national convention of 1848, Marsden was sent out once more as a missionary to the north-east and the midlands. His speeches were now subdued and pessimistic, in keeping with the dismal prospects for the Chartist movement as a whole. With its virtually complete collapse in north Lancashire after April 1848, Marsden’s withdrawal from political life was immediate and almost total. There is no further record of his presence at public meetings, and his flow of letters to the local press ceased. Unlike many old Chartists, Marsden played no part in the great Preston strike of 1853–4. He died in obscurity, from chronic bronchitis, at 16 Club Street, Bamber Bridge, on 28th January 1858; he was fifty-five. Nothing is known of his private life; the mark of Jane Moss, who was present at his death, is on his death certificate.

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[1] J. E. King Richard Marsden and the Preston Chartists, 1837–1848, 1981 and People’s Paper, 27th February 1858.

Chartist Lives: Robert Lowery

Lowery[1] was born on 14th October 1809 at North Shields, was the eldest of a sailor’s four sons; his mother was the daughter of a local master shoemaker. Educated at North Shields, Banff, and Peterhead until aged nine, he took a pithead job when illness threw his father out of work. His mother, who opened a school for girls, encouraged ambition in a son who was mischievous as a child but alert and inquisitive as a teenager. Lowery was thirteen when his father died and got himself apprenticed as a sailor, but within two years a rheumatic illness had lamed him for life.

Long convalescence brought wide reading, which was carried further with the encouragement of his wife, a cousin whom Lowery married at eighteen. With two daughters before he was twenty-one, he was apprenticed to a Newcastle tailor, trained himself in public speaking, and became secretary to the North Shields Political Union. An active trade unionist, he was secretary to the tailors’ branch of the Consolidated Trades’ Union, lost his job, and was at times very poor, but published his pamphlet State Churches Destructive of Christianity and Subversive to the Liberties of Man in 1837.

After being elected Newcastle delegate to the Chartists’ Palace Yard meeting of 17th September 1838, he became a Chartist lecturer. Over-optimistic and somewhat stagy in style, he displayed the provincial Chartist’s jaunty irreverence and delight in taunting authority. Fascinated by history and admiring the seventeenth-century puritans, he was proud of his class. As Newcastle delegate to the Chartist convention at Christmas 1838, his actions were more moderate than his speeches. His autobiography (penetrating on the art of oratory and alert to regional contrasts) vividly describes a Chartist missionary’s experience in Cornwall and Dublin. In 1839, his published address recommended exclusive dealing and he opposed physical force during the Frost rising and at the Chartist convention’s second session in 1839–40. He relished Scottish intelligence and religiosity and lectured there, managing to evade arrest.

Serious illness in 1839-40 launched Lowery on religious conversion, political quietism, and commitment to moral reform. Urquhartites, influential in Newcastle, with a programme that required class harmony, helped him through this personal crisis and sent him on a Russophobe mission to Paris in autumn 1840. Defeated as radical candidate at Edinburgh and Aberdeen in the general election of 1841, he was persuaded by Aberdeen teetotallers to take the pledge and temperance lecturing became his new route to respectability. He supported the Complete Suffrage Union in 1842 and drifted away from Chartism via Lovett’s moralistic and gradualist ‘new move’. In 1848, he was first secretary to Lovett’s People’s League, which aimed to head off revolution through a wider franchise and lower taxes. Less prominent as a temperance reformer than as a Chartist, Lowery was a respected lecturer for several temperance organisations until rheumatism and a failing voice compelled him to retire in 1862. With a public subscription raised for his support, he emigrated in September to his daughter Sarah Edwards in Canada and died at Woodstock, Ontario, on 4th August 1863. He was buried in the Baptist cemetery there, together with his daughter, son-in-law William Edwards, and some of his grandchildren.

In his public life, Lowery was neither as distinctive nor as prominent as some, but no Chartist published an autobiography of such quality so soon after the event. Vivid, evocative, and reflective, the thirty-three anonymous instalments of his ‘Passages in the life of a temperance lecturer … by one of their order’ in the Weekly Record of the Temperance Movement for 1856–7 recount his life up to 1841. Somewhat wistful in tone, his autobiography shows zest for dramatic scenery, historic events, and the Romantic poets, and displays shrewd insight into personality. Lowery’s taste for anecdotes, his ear for dialect, and his fine visual memory reveal an attractive personality who consistently pursued the Chartist aim of justifying his own class to society at large, fair-mindedly and without apology. Chartism, he insisted, was a respectable movement and its supporters’ actions should be judged in contemporary context. But his career fitted awkwardly into the pedigree that led from Chartism to socialism and the Labour Party, so he sank from public view until he was rediscovered in the 1960s.

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[1] B. Harrison and P. Hollis (eds.) Robert Lowery, radical and chartist, 1979, B. Harrison and P. Hollis ‘Chartism, liberalism and the life of Robert Lowery’, English Historical Review, volume 82, (1967), pages 503–35 and B. Harrison and P. Hollis ‘Lowery, Robert’, Dictionary of Labour Biography, volume 4.