History
Venue: Please call or email for venue and time.
Dates: 1st week of the month
Times: Thursday Morning
To give a flavour of our approach I will let you know about some of our recent work. We look more closely at the lives of ordinary people rather than what the Royals were doing or for that matter what the “upper classes” got up to. However, there were clearly times when ordinary people were powerless to deal with the laws put in place to control their lives.
Recently we studied the period following the French Revolution and found there had been serious repercussions for most of the English population. Returning soldiers found themselves with no work and their families starving. This led to demands for changes to how work was managed and to the rise of groups such as The Luddites, The Chartists and “votes for all” which led to great anxiety among the upper classes and of course The Peterloo Massacre, followed by the Swing Riots.
The 1830s was a period when the "powers that be” were able to get rid of anyone that challenged their cosy little world by hanging or transportation to Australia. Some might recall learning about the Tolpuddle farm labourers who ended up in Australia for asking for a pay rise so that they could feed their families.
The 18th and 19th centuries were not all gloom and doom there were many amazing developments most of which we have not even touched on yet.