Thomas Spence (1750-1814) made a major contribution to revolutionary and reform movements, both in Newcastle and across Britain.
List of events
High Bridge Street was the site of an independent chapel, established in 1765-6 by the friends and admirers of James Murray (1732-82), a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister who used his pulpit to a
‘Rudolf Abel’ (Willie Fisher), the Soviet spy exchanged for the American U2 pilot Gary Powers in 1962 (after having been in prison in the USA since 1957), was born at 140 Clara Street, Benwell, on 11 July 1903. He was the son of immigrants from Russia to Newcastle.
The Italian patriot and revolutionary Guiseppe Garibaldi was already a living legend and symbol of radical politics when he arrived on board of the ship Commonwealth in South Shields on 21 March 1854.
Lajos Kossuth (1802–1894) became an international icon following the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49. Having initially served as finance minister, Kossuth pushed for full independence from Habsburg rule and became Regent-President of the Hungarian Republic in April 1849.
On the 10 May 1926 a group of striking miners from Cramlington in Northumberland removed a section of railway a few miles north of Newcastle in order to stop any further movement of trains.
During the Anglo-Irish War, units of the Irish Republican Army operated in England, conducting propaganda, fund-raising, gun-running, and sabotage campaigns.
The development of socialism and socialist parties in the North East matched the remainder of the country. In 1911 the British Socialist Party (BSP) set up their regional headquarters in Newcastle at 2...
Elizabeth Spence Watson was a social reformer who played a key role in Tyneside politics and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Dr Ethel Williams, Newcastle's first female doctor, radical suffragist and pacifist, moved to the city in 1896. Her initial home in Newcastle was on Ellison Place; she then lived on Osborne Terrace in Jesmond (1910-1924) and eventually settled in Stocksfield on Tyne.
Over a century before one internationally renowned American peace activist, Martin Luther King Jr, visited Newcastle Upon-Tyne, the city played host to another on the 13th of November 1846.
On December 5th 1846 a remarkable set of papers were filed in Baltimore County (Maryland, USA). The papers themselves gave the abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass freedom from his American owner Thomas Auld.
The atrocities in the Congo Free State – the private kingdom ruled by the Belgian monarch Leopold II – gave rise to an international humanitarian campaign, with Britain as a particular hub of activism. Campaigners lobbied the government to help end Leopold's regime, which they denounced for its use of violence and force labour.
Dr Ethel Williams, Newcastle's first female doctor, radical suffragist and pacifist, moved to the city in 1896. Her initial home in Newcastle was on Ellison Place; she then lived on Osborne Terrace in Jesmond (1910-1924) and eventually settled in Stocksfield on Tyne.
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was an American journalist and social reformer best known for campaigning for the abolition of slavery, not through gradual reform but by 'the immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves'.
High Bridge Street was the site of an independent chapel, established in 1765-6 by the friends and admirers of James Murray (1732-82), a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister who used his pulpit to advocate the Enlightenment principles of religious and civil liberty.