“be afraid, be very afraid” Mayor of Middlesbrough Ray Mallon “My message to them is - Be afraid, be very afraid.”
Mr Mallon added said politics was about influencing and persuading one another, a complex interaction of many people across the town from all walks of life. “There will always be some agreement and disagreement but, when major decisions are taken, the democratic voting rights of elected representatives will prevail,” he added. He referred to “so-called community-type activists” who had been scathing about many councillors in the Council Chamber. “Such individuals had personal agendas towards some of you, both individually and collectively,” he added. “Many of these people could only criticise and could not articulate viable alternatives. “It appeared to me they did not want change in so far as the town was concerned.”
http://republic-of-teesside.blogspot.co.uk/There was, as yet, no one single socialist or republican party. Instead there were a plethora of small groups in both London and the provinces a sea within which often the same individuals acted and argued. One group however could be seen as bearing the seeds of the future - the International Working Men's Association (IWMA). The IWMA was founded by an alliance between Karl Marx and a number of British radial Trade Union leaders, and lived up to its title by setting up alliances with overseas radical movements.
At home, the IWMA established a network of local groups and one area with a high degree of organisation was on Teesside. Here, it drew on the radicalism of the Cleveland miners in areas like Eston and East Cleveland, an informal network of advanced radicals in Middlesbrough and the Fenian current that dominated the large Irish community working in Teesside's iron and steel industry. Teesside's importance was such that it provided some of the leadership cadres of the IWMA in Great Britain and was also a centre of radical publishing.
The Advocate and Record, by contrast, is a more fascinating read. It was 'ours' too - published and printed in Middlesbrough. Given this geographical proximity, it gives much information on the issues affecting the Cleveland Ironstone Miners and their Union - the Cleveland Miners and Qarreymen's Association. Outwith of Cleveland it also covered, in great detail, detailed news from mining areas across Great Britain - from the Forest of Dean and Cornwall to Scotland - and obviously had a deep network of correspondents from these regions.
It was militantly republican, often devoting whole pages to royal excesses, and was solidly for the extension of the suffrage and for the need for working men to fight to obtain public office at town halls and in Westminster. It was also fiercely iconoclastic and did not defer to the leaders of;labour where it felt they were failing their people (the Secretary of the Cleveland Miners Association, the liberal and devout Methodist, Joseph Sheppard once described it as a 'puerile little paper', something which the paper highlighted gleefully).
It is clear by the reciprocal swapping of articles and intelligence between the IWMA and the 'International Herald' that the 'Miners Advocate and Record', and its publisher, John Gould, based at an office and print plant in Middlesbrough's South Street, that there was a commonality of interests and an organisational overlay, an overlay shown by the fact that many of those quoted in the 'Advocate and Record' also show up in the 'International Herald's' reports of Teesside activity. It is clear that local Cleveland groups were up and running. On some occasions they were identified as being sections of the International, and at some times as 'republican clubs'. It seems both terms were mutually interchangeable.
Let us firstly turn to the International Herald and their local reports. (in italics)
They begin in mid April 1872 where it is reported by the Leader of the Middlesbrough IWMA,
Citizen Whalley informs us that an Irish branch of the IWMA has been formed at Middlesboro, and a new branch is shortly to be started in Stockton; good activity of Sunderland branch
Later that month a report of a meeting of the Middlesbrough IWMA gave us the names of some of our forbears "Middlesborough Branch of the IWMA. Scott in chair; Whalley, Quigley, Scott, Finegan, Matthews address meeting; rapid growth of branch; reported by R. Matthews, Correpondence Secretary"
In the same issue we come across a name of someone living at 19 Vaughan Street, Middlesbrough, who was to be one of the national leaders of the IWMA This was the fascinating John de Morgan. De Morgan was an Ulsterman and a dedicated republican, founding the IWMA in Ireland and running for a period, its Cork Branch. He later became a constant and colourful presence in advanced radical circles in Late Victorian Britain and was, for a time, the National UK Secretary of the IWMA. He was later notorious for organising street violence to prevent enclosure of common lands in the London suburbs for new housing and later ended his days in the US where he became a leading light in many radical and populist political movements, More on De Morgan and his life can be found in the Victorian Footnotes website on http://victorianfootnotes.net/2011/05/0 ... de-morgan/
Later in that year the alliance with John Kane, the national leader of the Ironmoulders Union was obviously beginning to bear fruit with a decision to widen links with local Trade Unions "Reports of Meetings) Middlesbrough Republican Club - decides to send deputations to the various trade societies "to press upon them the expediency of a united action upon their part, for the purpose of returning a working man representative, at the next general election for the Borough of Middlesbrough" (reported by W. G. Harrison, 88 Church Street, sec.)
Kane did, in fact, contest the 1874 General Election as 'a candidate of Labour' but lost heavily to the local Conservative Ironmaster, Henry Bolckow,
