Ashton’s working class history explored by Red Flag Walks

Article published: Saturday, May 25th 2013

Chartist uprisings, bread riots and the life and times of the anti-war suffragette and socialist Hannah Mitchell will be explored this bank holiday in another of local historian Michael Herbert’s renowned Red Flag Walks.

Hannah Mitchell

The walk will take place on Sunday 26 May at 2pm outside the steps of Ashton-under-Lyne’s town hall and includes:

The Lancashire cotton strike of August 1842 when Ashton millworkers marched into Manchester

The Chartist uprising of August 1848

The Bread Riot of March 1863 when mill workers, thrown out of work by the cotton blockade during the American Civil war, rioted

The anti-Irish riot of May 1868 when the Irish quarter and St Anne’s church came under attack

The life and times of Hannah Mitchell, suffragette and socialist, whose life story was recounted in her autobiography The Hard Way Up

Herbert, a trustee of Salford’s Working Class Movement Library and author of Up Then, Brave Women: Manchester’s Radical Women 1819-1918 said, “Ashton was one of the wellsprings of the Industrial Revolution and had a radical working class movement. In this walk I will be introducing people to a number of important episodes in that history.”

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