Benny Rothman and the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass

Kinder Scout 75 years after The young man, just turned twenty-one and up on charges of riotous assembly, assault and incitement at Derby Assizes, had prepared notes of what he was going to say to the jury. He wanted to make a case, he said, for the right to go walking in the countryside. “We [...]

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Riotous Assembly – 1998-2001?

In the late 1990s open meetings called Riotous Assembly took place in the Yard Theatre in Homes for Change, a housing co-operative in Hulme, South Manchester. The meetings were intended to be spaces where people involved in radical, direct action, anarchist, ecological, autonomous and non-hierarchical organising could meet, celebrate their activities, network future events and [...]

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The arrest of William O’Brien MP in Hulme Town hall, January 1889

William O’Brien, a leading Irish nationalist MP, escaped from a court in Ireland in January 1889 and was re-arrested in Hulme Town Hall after a dramatic public meeting. After being held for a night in Manchester Town Hall, he was sent back to Ireland. O’Brien was born in 1852 in Mallow, County Cork and took [...]

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Manchester’s First Feminists – Frances Morrison

Britain’s first feminists emerged out of the Owenite Co-operative movement. They demanded equal rights and argued for a new relationship between men and women. For the first time women gave public lectures on Socialism and feminism. The members of the radical Co-operative Movement of the 1830s, inspired by the ideas and writings of Robert Owen, [...]

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Paul Rose and the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster

Paul Rose, MP for Manchester Blackley, helped to set up the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster in 1965. The campaign attempted to raise the question of discrimination and civil rights abuses in northern Ireland, largely unsuccessfully. Paul Rose was born in 1935 in Manchester and educated at Bury Grammar School and the University of Manchester. [...]

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