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Commemorating the Newport Rising of November 4, 1839
Today marks 184 years since the greatest armed rebellion in 19th-century Britain when Chartist workers fought bloody gun battles with the police and army in the heart of industrial Wales, writes STEPHEN ARNELL
A sketch of the huge crowd in Newport in 1839 as it surrounded the Westgate Hotel hoping to free captive Chartist comrades (via the People’s History Museum).

“Come hail brothers, hail the shrill sound of the horn
For ages deep wrongs have been hopelessly borne
Despair shall no longer our spirits dismay
Nor wither the arms when upraised for the fray;
The conflict for freedom is gathering nigh:
We live to secure it, or gloriously die.”
— Chartist song of the South Wales miners

UNLIKE our friends across the channel in France, the inhabitants of Britain appear a remarkably supine people in the main, usually preferring well-organised demonstrations to anything that whiffs of pre-planned armed revolt, no matter how righteous the cause.

Yes, there have been mass meetings, marches and spontaneous events that took a wrong turn and descended into riots, but we seem singularly ill-equipped by nature to contemplate anything more serious.

But this would be doing this island race a disservice; to paraphrase the emperor Tiberius, there was a time when the British were not a people “fit to be slaves.”

A sketch of Chartist leader John Frost on trial at Monmouth after the uprising

Weapons from the Newport Rising are displayed in the local museum.

Kenneth Budd’s mosaic, sadly demolished in 2013
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