ON Friday September 17 2021, a crowd of over 25 people attended a Calderdale Trades Council meeting in Halifax to remember the Great Strike of 1842 in the town, and to begin making plans to build for next year’s 180th anniversary. 

It was in August 1842 that striking industrial workers in Halifax were attacked by 150 soldiers and 200 specially sworn in constables.

Workers were participating in a nationwide general strike that combined demands for better pay with an extension of the right to vote – the working class wanted to elect its own representatives to Parliament.

Proceedings were started by Catherine Howe, whose excellent book Halifax 1842: A Year of Crisis has been essential in bringing to light the history of how workers and the community resisted their exploitation by capitalists in this 19th-century textile town. 

Howe told of how workers joined the national strike on August 15 1842 and by removing the plugs from boilers they brought production in the mills to a standstill.
 
Then on August 16 an attempt by strikers to rescue their friends who had been arrested and were being sent to York for trial, where they faced imprisonment and transportation to Australia, saw a small number of soldiers roughed up. 

This was too much for the military and the strikers faced great violence that afternoon after what Howe called a “revenge attack” was ordered. This led to the deaths of at least four strikers, though in all likelihood many more. Hundreds were severely injured.
 
Next to speak was Labour councillor Jenny Lynn, who drew connections between the struggles of the Chartists and working people of Halifax in the past and those of today. 

Her talk referenced the works of Dorothy and EP Thompson, both of whom lived in Halifax and wrote about the town’s radical history. 

She ended by reading from a recent front cover of the Morning Star to remind those gathered that whilst much might have changed in the intervening years, the working people of Halifax remain largely on the receiving end of exploitation and oppression as far as the capitalist system is concerned.
 
NUJ member and event co-organiser Mark Metcalf then drew parallels between the actions of the military on the streets of Halifax in 1842 and the role of the police in putting down labour movements and radical protests ever since. 

Taking the audience right the way through to the ongoing Spycops inquiry, in which he is involved, Metcalf left his audience in no doubt that whenever labour movements have effectively challenged the status quo they have been met by the kind of state-sanctioned violence seen on the streets of Halifax in 1842.
 
Finally, historian Matthew Roberts of Sheffield Hallam University spoke about why the events of 1842 have been so easily forgotten. 

Roberts outlined the importance of Chartism, but also the divisions within the movement that meant that not all leading Chartists had been in favour of backing the Great Strike.

He also spoke of how “official histories” have sought to remove the radicalism from Chartism, neutralising it and making it fit for use as part of a broader narrative of “British values” and democratic progress.
 
Following the talks, those gathered discussed a range of issues including the diversity of the Chartist movement, the importance of technology and the naming of the events of 1842, with the term Great Strike preferred over the alternative “Plug Plots” because of the way that it foregrounds the strategy of withdrawing labour. 

There was general agreement that the streets of Halifax remain as “living history,” and a commitment that when a plaque is erected next year to remember the 180th anniversary of the Great Strike in Halifax it is accompanied by a range of events that bring this history, and its radicalism, back into popular consciousness.