Black History Month: the Leader of London Chartism in 1848, William Cuffay
Below is a summary of a talk I gave to a group of Westminster socialists on 26th October 2022.
The life of William Cuffay was first detailed in Peter Fryer’s landmark book, Staying Power. Since then Martin Hoyles has produced a biography but there is still a good deal that remains unclear about Cuffay’s life (1788-1870)
The criticism is made that some of BHM is commercialised and sometimes more about broader culture than history but popular history which allows the raising of questions like, imperialism, race and racism, is something the left has struggled to achieve for decades.
One of the greatest black historians and activists CLR James wrote on the subject in 1969 that it was ‘history that black people & white people & all serious students of modern history..have to know’
The general details of the life of William Cuffay are now quite well known. Indeed his Wikipedia entry is tolerably accurate. Born in Chatham, his father was from St Kitts and a cook on a British navy ship. He was apprenticed as a tailor moved to London around 1819 and by the 1830s he was an active trade unionist and Chartist.
Cuffay became a leading figure in London Chartism in the 1840s. He was the Secretary to the Chartist Land Company which aimed to allow workers to opt out of industrial capitalism and return to the land as smallholders in Chartist settlements.
By 1848 Cuffay had become the leader of London Chartism. He organised the Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common on Monday 10th April 1848. In he Chartist delegate meetings that followed Cuffay argued for a more aggressive challenge to the Government on the vote than the national leadership was prepared to entertain.
He was tried and convicted for his alleged part in a revolutionary conspiracy in August 1848. Transported to Australia, Cuffay remained politically active in Tasmania until his death in 1870, aged 82.
Cuffay left no papers and wrote no autobiography so what we can recover of his life comes from newspaper reports and a few official records.
Mark Gregory has done excellent work about Cuffay’s activities in Tasmania. In the UK the digital version of the Chartist Northern Star paper- available free on-line- has made trawling for reports of Cuffay a good deal easier.
How we can make sense of Cuffay’s life.
There are two key points.
Firstly to see Cuffay in the context of the ‘Black Atlantic’ a concept developed by historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in their book the Many Headed Hydra. The point is that there is an imperial link between the Americas, the Caribbean and the UK in the nineteenth century.
That link is slavery, slave ships and the British navy. In the 1790s around a quarter of the British navy was black.
Cuffay the son of a black sailor on a British ship was born in one of the central points of the British naval empire- Chatham.
He found his way to the very centre of that Empire in London, where he organised as a Chartist to try and bring it down. Prevented by the State, he found himself shipped to another part of the Empire-Tasmania, where he continued to be active.
The second point- something pointed out to me by Lord Bill Morris is that Cuffay was the organiser of London Chartism, the man behind the great demonstration of 10 April 1848.
Perhaps Cuffay’s imperial background uniquely fitted him for that role. It may explain why he continued to be active into old age when others did not.
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