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King’s Cross campaigner Diana Shelley and Labour councillor Rupert Perry |
Flags, and waving goodbye to history
AS my eye caught a man dangling a St George’s flag from a third-floor window in a block of flats in Caledonian Road, Islington, I wondered how much he knew about England’s history.
He may be able to rattle off the names of kings and queens and when our armies defeated the French and the Germans, but had he heard of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, for instance?
That was why I had joined nearly 500 people on Saturday on a historic march from Market Road, Caledonian Road to Edwards Square to commemorate a much greater procession 175 years ago when 150,000 people demonstrated in the same area in support of the Martyrs – a group of six poor West Country farm labourers deported to Australia for daring to join a trade union.
The original march was amazing in size. Imagine, that somehow this staggering number of people had come together drawn mostly by word of mouth. There was no radio, TV, newspapers or YouTube in those days!
There was a jolly, almost carnival atmosphere, on the procession – yesterday the courts could sling trade unionists into the clink but it wouldn’t be possible to do it so easily today. Progress, albeit painfully slow, had been made.
As I marched alongside Islington Labour councillor Gary Doolan we chatted about the Englishness of the protest nearly 200 years ago, the same Englishness that lies behind the St George’s flag, and he smiled, too, when he glanced at the flag fluttering from the window.
Banners galore coloured the procession, but one made me smile. “Historians for the right to work,” it said. “We demand a continuing supply of history.”
Diana Shelley, an amenity campaigner, who had made it for a CND march nearly 30 years ago, told me she had found it again in a plastic carrier bag at her Islington home. |
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