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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
‘half-dressed, but not half-fed, to the Worsted Mills’.‘Short Time Committees’ were set up in Yorkshire to mobilise public opinion against the factory conditions. The committees soon began to agitate against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, under which the system of outdoor relief administered by the Parish Vestry was gradually replaced by the Workhouse, administered by Commissioners. Richard Oastler, along with the Rev. J. Stephens, the Rev. G.S. Bull and Feargus O’Connor, led the protests. Strong oratory was soon matched by demonstrations to halt the meetings of local Poor Law Guardians in Bradford, Keighley, Dewsbury and Todmorden, but the New Poor Law was eventually enforced. The Board of Guardians was established in Leeds in 1844, 10 years after the Act was passed.Many of the people who protested against the New Poor Law were weavers who continued their radicalism with the Chartist movement. The Chartists’ campaign for parliamentary representation for the working class had strong roots amongst workers in Yorkshire, where the leaders supported physical force as a means of achieving their aims. Feargus O’Connor edited the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star in Leeds, which had a weekly circulation of 50,000 copies by 1839. One of the largest Chartist demonstrations was held on Whit Monday 1839 at Peep Green, when a crowd of 200,000 people was addressed by O’Connor. Chartism collapsed after 1848 but many of its supporters led the development of the trade union and co-operative movement in Yorkshire.Mid-Victorian prosperity, typified by the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal
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