Chartist rally at Kennington 10th April 1848. Would the weather today have made it more successful?
Most historians (there are obviously notable exceptions) have no experience of organising a demonstration and that is true of many of those who have opined about the Chartist rally for the vote on Kennington Common 172 years ago on Monday 10th April 1848.
The 170th anniversary of the event was marked by a gathering organised by the Kennington Chartist Project in what is now Kennington Park a rather smaller space than the Common was. There was one distinct similarity between 1848 and 2018. There had been heavy overnight rain and the grass was waterlogged (much to the enjoyment of numbers of dogs who were present due to some kind of dog walkers convention)
If you ever organised a protest you’ll know that if the sun is out and the temperature is OK (for Britain) it promotes a higher turn-out whereas if it’s cold and wet fewer people will show up. Who can blame them?
In his book on London Chartism 1838-1848 David Goodway suggests that one reason for the famous photograph of the rally looking the way it does (with an empty space near the main Chartist platform) is that people stayed at the edge of the Common where it was drier. There was a bit of that in 2018 too. The Times report on 11th April 1848 however notes that the ground while wet was firm.
After the rally finished many of those present sought to return to the more pleasant vistas of North and East London by going over Blackfriars Bridge where they were met, for a time, by police and soldiers who refused to let them cross. Some traditional histories have it that the crowd dispersed due to heavy April showers. Yet neither the reports of the Times or the Illustrated London News (let alone the Northern Star) mentions rain. Dispersal of demonstrators in so far as that happened was reported to be due to the deployment of police truncheons and other weaponry.
Even so with the weather warm and dry in London on 10th April 2020 one wonders if had that been the case in 1848 the Chartists at Blackfriars Bridge would have persisted and made it across the Thames
So clearly, you DO need a weatherman..
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