Charles Smith lies in the graveyard of St John the Baptist church in North Baddesley. It wasn’t often a poor man had a gravestone in those days, let alone two side by side. In the early 1800’s country gentlemen and wealthy merchants controlled society. As Justices of the Peace in the local courts they ruled the common people. It was a time of unrest in the countryside. Perhaps the most famous case is of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, six farm workers from Dorset. In 1834, they were convicted of swearing a secret oath as members of the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers and transported to Australia.
AN ANNUAL art gathering moved online this year - with students showcasing their artwork in an online gallery and taking part in educational and creative sessions run by professional artists. The Friendly Society of Artistic Labourers (FSAL) launched this year’s event on March 5 - and the artwork featured is now free to access on their website. The event brought together over 130 creative art students at Weymouth College, their teachers, local artists and Weymouth’s historic Nothe Fort for an exciting collaboration centred on protecting society and surviving as human beings in uncertain times. Founded in 2019, and taking its lead from the Tolpuddle Martyrs, FSAL had their very first event and exhibition at the Shire Hall in Dorchester in 2020 featuring a march of artists through the streets of Dorchester extolling the virtues of a creative life.
Red lights, forgotten celebrities and life in up and coming Millbay
Once a glitzy celebrity-spotting area, Millbay has seen it all. Now it s shaking off its reputation as a magnet for hard drinkers, prostitutes, and druggies and welcoming in a new dawn
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Engels’ original sin?
Mike Macnair reviews Marx, Engels and modern British socialism: the political thought of HM Hyndman, EB
Bax and William Morris by Seamus Flaherty
British socialism has a history before the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 (or, for that matter, before the 1918 extension of the franchise allowed Labour to break through into double figures in percentage support). This history was one of small groups, single-issue campaigns, fairly weak trade unions and miscellaneous intellectual influencers. It issued out of the heavy defeats of Chartism, and of the European revolutions of 1848.
In that sense the history of socialism between the defeat of Chartism and the rise of the Labour Party has some limited similarities to the left politics of our own time - also one of small groups, single-issue campaigns, weak trade unions and so on, and also issuing out of a very serious defeat for left projects: not just the fall of the Soviet bloc, but also the abandonment o