DANNY BUDZAK’S WALK

RADICAL DOVER

The Radical Dover Walk took place on Sunday 12 December 2021. Twenty plus people turned up and we explored some of the radical spaces which have shaped the history of the town. Histories of resistance, rebellion and workers’ organisation are often hidden and leave few landmarks or memorials. But we can all use realistic imagination and with that all history comes alive.

Tom Paine arrived in Dover in the spring of 1758 and stayed a year in the town. Here he mixed with the Methodists at their chapel in Limekiln Street. They were radical people of their time and the establishment of a chapel would have been an open act of rebellion against the ‘parson and the squire’. Methodism and non-Conformism were popular with seafarers and agricultural labourers giving the Biblical belief a proletarian edge. Was it in Dover that Paine developed the radical ideas that were to inspire the American Declaration of Independence and take him to the streets of Paris during the French Revolution? His book The Rights of Man sold over 200,000 copies when it was first published in 1792. It remains one of the great political books of English history.

The political revolutions of the eighteenth century were accompanied by an even greater power; the industrial revolution. Production became faster, mechanised, more ordered and controlled. The centuries of agricultural and village tradition were swept away. One of England’s greatest political writers William Cobbett captured these changes. He describes in his fascinating book Rural Rides how he rode towards Dover, across the Downs and along the edges of the cliffs. Cobbett never ceased his polemics against corruption, chicanery and abuse of power by the rich and the ruling. It is at Dover that Cobbett writes his horse had better powers of decision making than the government.

Cobbett foresaw the destruction of the landless agricultural labourers and described the desperation and the hunger in the 1820s. Finally, in 1830 the labourers rose up in the Captain Swing Rebellion. This started in Lower Hardres and sparked agitation and demonstrations first in east Kent and then across south east England. Captain Swing was the signature on the first two letters which articulated the labourers grievances and demands. Those letters were sent in Dover and provides the name for how the rebellion is now known around the world. Following the defeat of the agricultural labourers a building boom took place. There are still many buildings in the town from the 1830s onwards.

In 1847 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels arrived in Dover. It was one of their first visits to England. They waited on the station platform in Dover for the train that would take them to London. They were travelling to a conference. At the end of days of debate and discussion they were tasked with writing a pamphlet. It was published in February 1848 as The Communist Manifesto. Months later revolutions tore the bourgeois order of Europe apart. Did Marx & Engels think up the opening statement while standing at the station? ‘The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles’.

Following the Revolutions of 1848 a second industrial revolution took place; one of mass production, steam ships, electricity, the telegraph, department stores. In this cauldron of change emerged the struggle for the emancipation of women.

In 1876 the Dover Suffrage Society organised a meeting in the town attended by 400 people. It was a long struggle. Mass meetings demanding rights for women were held in the Market Square in 1908. The play How the Vote was Won was performed at Dover in 1909. It suggested a general strike of all women until they were given the vote. Meetings were held on the sea front and while at first they met opposition from riff raff and hooligans, they soon won people over. When the Suffragettes met on the beach at Deal the boatmen cleared a space for them to speak.

The General Strike in 1926 involved local miners, railway workers, tram workers and dock workers. There was tension, fights and if the local papers are to be believed almost a riot. Heavy policing of pickets outside Dover Priory station led to large fines of striking workers. The conflict ran deep and didn’t end with the strike. Tram workers and railway workers were victimised and despite promises from the government several lost their jobs.

In 1972 Kent miners were some of the most militant in the first national miners strike since 1926. They helped invent the flying pickets and targeted coal depots and power stations throughout Kent and London. Their basic demand was for better wages. Not unreasonable given the importance – and dangers – of mining at the time. The picketing of coal depots in Dover by the miners led to the Dover Agreement; no coal could be moved in Britain without the permission of the National Union of Mineworkers. Only essential supplies – to the elderly, to hospitals and the needy were allowed.

In 1998 sea-farers were involved in a dispute with P&O which went on for 16 months. Again victimisations and sackings followed. The chair of P&O at the time was Sir Jeffrey Sterling, a personal friend of Margaret Thatcher. She had introduced anti-union laws and used large numbers of police to intimidate and break the strike. The implications are still felt in the town today.

As Marx & Engels stated in The Communist Manifesto history is all about class struggle. And it’s not too difficult to see that two key classes still exist today, the rulers and the workers.