Deploying the troops

Around 2.30 am, Rede mobilised nearly 300 police and soldiers, more than double the number of miners left in the Stockade. There were 77 men of the 40th under Captain Wise and 65 men of the 12th Regiment under Captain William Meade. Lieutenant Charles Hall led 30 men of the 40th Regiment’s mounted company accompanied by 24 police on foot and 70 police mounted commanded by Sub-Inspector Taylor. [1] Thomas commanded the force and Pasley acted as his aide-de-camp. The remaining 200 men were left in the camp under Captain Atkinson in case reinforcements were needed and to guard against surprise attack from the rebels not in the Stockade. They were armed with 1842 muskets, with an average rate of fire of two rounds a minute but notoriously inaccurate and carried around sixty rounds of ammunition. The 17 officers were armed with British Pattern 1845 infantry swords and did not carry firearms in the battle. The weapons at the disposable of the military and police may not have been superior to the diggers’ rifles and crudely manufactured pikes but they were in the hands of professionals. [2]

The precise route of Thomas’ march has been unclear since the event. [3] The Government Camp was about two miles from the Eureka Stockade and the troops fell into their ranks between the Camp and Soldiers’ Hill. They remained there in complete silence until 3.10 am when they began silently marching southeast, hiding behind Black Hill before striking out towards the Stockade. They halted near the Free Trade Hotel about 250 yards from their objective and then advanced from behind the hotel towards the Stockade. By this time dawn was breaking, Captain Thomas and Charles Hackett and their men marched towards the Stockade on their horses. When they were around 150 yards from the Stockade, firing began. There has been much controversy about who fired the first shot. [4] Lalor was always adamant that ‘The military fired the first volley, which one company of the insurgents returned much sooner than I wished…’ [5] Ferguson later wrote:

The Fortieth regiment was advancing, but had not as yet discharged a shot. We could now see plainly the officer and hear his orders, when one of our men, Captain Burnette, stepped a little in front, elevated his rifle, took aim and fired. The officer fell. Captain Wise was his name. This was the first shot in the Ballarat war. It was said by many that the soldiers fired the first shot, but that is not true, as is well known to many. [6]

Charles Hackett, who according to Carboni, was the only government official at Ballarat not detested by the diggers testified that ‘No shots were fired by the military or the police, previous to shots being fired from the stockade’.[7] According to Withers, one of the Eureka leaders later stated ‘The first shot was fired from our party’. [8] Desmond O’Grady claims that it was a sentry, Harry de Longville, who noticed the troops and police and fired the first shot around 4.20 am, although possibly he may be referring here to a warning shot to rouse the diggers left in the Stockade. [9] Indeed, a letter from a soldier at Eureka, John Neill of the 40th Regiment, said:

The party had not advanced three hundred yards before we were seen by the rebel sentry, who fired, not at our party, but to warn his party in the Stockade. He was on Black Hill. Captain Thomas turned his head in the direction of the shot, and said ‘We are seen. Forward, and steady men! Don’t fire; let the insurgents fire first. You must wait for the sound of the bugle’. [10]

It seems probable that the first shot, fired either as a warning or directly at the advancing troops came from the Stockade. This was followed by a volley fired by the diggers as the soldiers and police advanced. At this point Captain Thomas gave the order to commence firing and the police and military moved forward rapidly in an attempt to maximise the confusion among the miners caused by the surprise attack:

…At about 150 yards we were received by a rather sharp and well directed fire from the rebels, without word or challenge on their part. Then, and not till then, I ordered the bugle to sound the ‘Commence Firing’. For about ten minutes a heavy fire was kept up by the troops advancing, which was replied to by the rebels. During this time, I brought up the infantry supports and foot police. The entrenchment was then carried, and I ordered the firing to cease. [11]

The attack on the Eureka Stockade, Ballarat, drawn December 1854; Source: from the map by S. D. S. Huyghue in Withers, W. B., History of Ballarat, 2nd ed., Ballarat. 1887.

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[1] The 12th Foot East Suffolk Regiment served in Australia between 1854 and 1867 and the 40th Foot (2nd Somerset) Regiment between 1823 and 1829 and 1852 and 1860.
[2] Ibid, Smith, Neil C., Soldiers Bleed Too, is a valuable corrective on events.
[3] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 113-121.
[4] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 127-134, considers the evidence.
[5] Argus, 10 April 1855, reprinted in ibid, ‘Eureka Documents’, Historical Studies, p. 12.
[6] Ferguson, Charles D., The Experiences of a Forty-Niner in Australia and New Zealand, (Gaston Renard), 1979, p. 60.
[7] Currey, C. H., The Irish at Eureka, (Angus and Robertson), 1954, pp. 68-69.
[8] Ibid, Withers, W. B., The History of Ballarat, p. 109.
[9] Ibid, O’Grady, Desmond, Raffaelo! Raffaelo, p. 159.
[10] Ibid, Withers, W. B., The History of Ballarat, pp. 123-124.

[11] First Report from the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Ballarat Outbreak Petition, 1856, Appendix A: Claims for Compensation, pp. ix-x, evidence taken, 6 July 1855, printed in Anderson, Hugh, (ed.), Eureka: Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Votes and Proceedings 1854-1867, (Hill of Content), 1969.

Writing Reconsidering Chartism

When I retired it was my intention to write a book on Chartism…one volume that distilled much of my teaching of the subject into a narrative history of the movement. That was ten years ago and it’s only now that I have managed to complete what started as one volume into a series of six books.  The reason for the delay was that I side-tracked myself into other projects that were to inform my later volumes on Chartism.  So a book that looked at rebellions in Canada, South Wales and Australia, my Three Rebellions grew into the Rebellion Trilogy with the addition of Famine, Fenians and Freedom 1840-1882 and Resistance and Rebellion in the British Empire, 1600-1980 that were finished by 2011 though the final volume was not published until early 2013.  These books in turn were in 2012 and 2013 expanded into Rebellion in Canada 1837-1885, ‘A Peaceable Kingdom’: Essays on Nineteenth Century Canada and Settler Australia, 1780-1880. Parallel to this I had been working on six Kindle books on Nineteenth Century British Society and a synoptic volume Coping with Change: British Society, 1780-1914 and Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1914 and a second edition covering 1780-1945, on translations and commentaries of some medieval texts and Breaking the Habit: A Life of History, a book combining some autobiographical musing with essays on history in education.  Never one to use one word when I can use a paragraph—according to one of my students—these are substantial pieces of work;  Coping with Change, for instance, comes in at over 700 pages.   Some of this work represented a break from Chartism, an interlude in a project that lasted nearly four years from beginning to end. 

The delay in getting down to the Chartism series actually proved to be advantageous.  Researching and writing the other series meant that I allowed myself time to think about how best to approach the movement.  My conclusion was that it needed four volumes.  One of my major concerns about existing books on Chartism was that its context was, at best, condensed into an opening, often short, chapter.  So, yes there needed to be a contextual volume.  Since I had been involved in the early 1970s in the Local History Classroom project, an innovative and very early project on using computers in the classroom, I had developed a view of history as a continuum from local to national to global—what I called ‘a micro-macro approach’ and this view called for three volumes on Chartism from local, national and global perspectives.  That was the plan which, for a variety of reasons, was modified as the research and writing progressed.  Four volumes became six and 850,000 words.

31 December 2013: 100,339 words	22 May 2014: 177,875 words
9 July 2015: 141,158 words	13 December 2015: 143,452 words
10 January 2016: 241,015 words	1 July 2016: 134,879 words

Having worked out what I planned to do, the next step was to make decisions about research approaches.  Getting to research libraries and archives proved an impossibility as I was the sole carer 24/7 for my wife.  This meant that I had to rely on material on the Internet that I could access at home such as the British Newspaper Archives, the National Archives online, EthOS, Google Books and so on.  Fortunately, I have an extensive collection of material on Chartism that I have accumulated over several decades. 

I started writing the first volume in May 2013 so it has taken just over three years to complete.  There was little problem with the first two volumes but it was the volume on Chartism from a local perspective that proved most challenging.  My decision to include discussion of the nature of radical politics in the decades before Chartism was established in each chapter meant that a single volume would have been too long.  So I divided the subject into two--the first dealing with London and the South; the second on The North, Scotland, Wales and Ireland—and then produced an abridged version The Chartists, Regions and Economies.  The final volume effectively examines the global impact of Chartism and also considers some of the themes than run through the remainder of the series—the historiography of the movement, Chartist leadership, women, radicalism and Chartism, the state and Chartism and how Chartism has been memorialised. 

This volume completes the Reconsidering Chartism series. What began as a plan for four books—context, national narrative, local narrative and global history—expanded into six volumes . While these books, in their printed and Kindle manifestations, form my most considered examination of Chartism, whether they are my last word on the subject is possible but I suspect unlikely. I keep being drawn back to the issues raised by O’Connor, Lovett and the like and by the political challenges faced by the working-classes in the decades round the mid-nineteenth century.