Reform & Reformers Flashcards

Cavalry charged a peaceful crowd at St Peter's Field, Manchester, who had come to hear Henry Hunt demand parliamentary reform; about 15 people were killed. The government responded with the Six Acts restricting meetings and the radical press.

Gave the vote to wealthier middle-class men and gave seats to the growing industrial towns; the electorate rose from about 400,000 to about 650,000. Fear of violence like the French Revolution of 1789 lay behind the concession.

False. Only about one in seven men could vote; the vote went to wealthier middle-class men, not the working class.

The Second Reform Act 1867 (vote for many urban working men), the Secret Ballot Act 1872, and the Third Reform Act 1884 (vote for rural working men).

Votes for all men, secret ballot, no property qualification for MPs, payment of MPs, equal constituencies, and annual parliaments.

All three (1839, 1842 and 1848) were rejected. After rejection some turned to Physical Force Chartism, such as the Newport Rising of 1839 and the riots of the late 1840s.

Moral Force Chartists, led by William Lovett, used peaceful methods — petitions, newspapers and processions; Physical Force Chartists, associated with Feargus O'Connor, were prepared to use violence.

It abolished slavery in most of the British Empire from 1834, with compensation paid to the slave owners; most freed people had to work as unpaid 'apprentices' until 1838.

The leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League, who campaigned with speeches, pamphlets and petitions against the Corn Laws; the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846.

Banned children under 9 from working in textile mills, limited the hours of older children, and appointed factory inspectors to enforce the law.

A factory and social reformer whose campaigning led to the Mines Act 1842 (banning women and boys under 10 underground) and the Ten Hour Act 1847.

Both used mass meetings, petitions and newspapers to put pressure on Parliament to change the law.

The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, founded in 1834 by Robert Owen to unite all workers in one union; it collapsed within a year.

Six Dorset farm labourers transported to Australia in 1834 after forming a trade union to resist falling wages; they were pardoned in 1836 after mass public protest.

False. They were convicted of swearing a secret oath when they formed their union — trade unions themselves were legal by 1834.

Unions of skilled workers from the 1850s, such as the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (1851), with high subscriptions, sickness and unemployment benefits, and respectable, peaceful negotiation.

Women and girls at Bryant and May's London match factory struck over low pay, unfair fines and 'phossy jaw'; they won better pay and conditions, a key success of new unionism.

London dockers, led by Ben Tillett, struck for better pay and won the 'dockers' tanner' (sixpence an hour), showing unskilled workers could organise successfully.

Both were working-class movements that challenged authority to improve the lives of ordinary workers: the Chartists through the vote, the unions through better pay and conditions.

False. Five of the six were eventually adopted; only annual parliaments never became law.

A constituency with very few voters that still elected MPs before 1832, often controlled or sold by a wealthy landowner, while big industrial towns had no MP.

In public at the hustings, announcing their choice aloud, so landlords and employers could pressure or bribe them.

Men occupying property worth at least £10 a year in rent, which mainly meant the middle classes.

Riots broke out in towns such as Bristol, Nottingham and Derby; fear of further unrest helped get the Reform Act passed in 1832.

The Chartist newspaper published by Feargus O'Connor; cheap and widely read aloud, it spread the Chartist message across the country.

The Chartists held a mass meeting before taking their third petition to Parliament; the government prepared troops and special constables, and the petition was rejected.

Better economic conditions in the 1850s: with more work and cheaper food, fewer working people were driven to support it.

In 1807, when Parliament banned British ships and merchants from trading in slaves. Slavery itself continued in the colonies until the 1833 Act.

A leading abolitionist who helped found the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787 and travelled the country collecting evidence against the trade.

An MP who led the campaign against the slave trade inside Parliament, repeatedly bringing motions until the trade was abolished in 1807.

Boycotting slave-grown sugar; others included petitions, public lectures and Josiah Wedgwood's medallion of a kneeling enslaved man.

Laws banning imports of foreign wheat until the British price reached 80 shillings a quarter, to keep grain prices high; this helped landowners but made bread dearer for workers.

Dear bread meant they had to pay higher wages, which raised their costs; they also believed free trade would sell more British goods abroad.

The Conservative Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, in 1846, partly because of the Irish Potato Famine. It split his party.

It targeted by-elections and helped supporters register as voters, for example by buying freehold land worth 40 shillings a year, which gave a county vote, so as to elect MPs who backed repeal.

A factory reformer who in 1830 compared children's work in Yorkshire mills to slavery, and campaigned for a ten-hour working day.

Free schools for the poorest children, often giving them meals; Lord Shaftesbury became president of the Ragged School Union in 1844.

Laws banning workers (and in theory employers) from combining in groups such as trade unions; they were repealed in 1824.

Unions of unskilled workers from the late 1880s, with low subscriptions and a readiness to strike, unlike the craft unions of skilled men.

A socialist journalist whose article on conditions at Bryant and May helped start the match girls' strike of 1888; she helped the women organise.

An eight-hour working day, after forming a union and threatening to strike; their success encouraged the dockers.

The Trades Union Congress, set up in 1868 as a national meeting of delegates from different unions to coordinate their work.

It made trade unions fully legal and protected their funds, though another 1871 law made picketing illegal.

A farm labourer who in 1872 founded an agricultural labourers' union, which became national with tens of thousands of members.

Union leaders decided workers needed their own MPs; the Independent Labour Party was formed in 1893, led by Keir Hardie.

PS: Germany

PS: America, 1920–1973

WDS: First World War

WDS: Inter-War Years

WDS: Cold War

TS: Health & the People

TS: Power & the People

BDS: Norman England

BDS: Elizabethan England

PS: America, 1840–1895

PS: Russia

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WDS: Gulf & Afghanistan

TS: Migration, Empires & the People

BDS: Edward I

BDS: Restoration England