This is the first in a short series of posts on the role of porter in the fight for working class rights.
I was motivated by the thoughts of E P Thompson on porter which I found disappearing down a research rabbit hole in the British Library recently
There are several mentions of porter in the Making of the English Working Class (1963). The most interesting is the below
At the beginning of the nineteenth century a Seditious Meetings Act had banned all national political organisation and any local meetings of a national structure. Local discussion groups and petitions to the King were legal.
The Leeds Mercury in 1802 reported:
(societies and clubs of tradesmen) meet nightly in taverns and public houses. Almost every street in a large town has a little senate of this description; and the privileges of sitting in council over the affairs of the nation, and a pot of porter, has long since been claimed by free Britons, and acknowledged by all administrations.
There was some comment in the 1970s and 1980s that Thompson (who himself liked a beer- not I think porter) was promoting a tavern drinking school of social history. Even so the role of porter in the fight for democratic rights that led to Peterloo in 1819 and the formation of Chartism in 1837 should be noted.
Leave a Reply