Old statesmen: John Arnott (1799-1868) Chartist leader and poet

John Arnott, 1799-1868
General Secretary, National Charter Association

By the time of his death, John Arnott had been largely forgotten. Impoverished and ill, he entered St Pancras Workhouse at the end of April 1868, and within a week was dead. His body was buried in a communal pauper’s grave without ceremony or memorial.

Yet less than 20 years earlier, he had been one of the best known political organisers of the age. As general secretary of the Chartist movement, and secretary of the committee that organised the great Chartist rally of 10 April 1848 on Kennington Common, Arnott had been an indefatigable driving force behind the first truly working class political party in Britain.

John Arnott was born on 22 October 1799, at Chesham, Bucks. He married there in 1819, and worked as a cordwainer (shoemaker), apparently moving to London some time around 1835. He would spend the rest of his life in the Somers Town area of St Pancras, in and around the area now occupied by the British Library. What sparked his political involvement is unknown, but he appears to have been a member of the National Charter Association (established 1840) from its earliest days. As a Somers Town branch delegate, he was by 1844 chairing meetings of the Metropolitan Delegate Council covering all of London, and in October that year he was made secretary.
The Chartist movement had a strong social and cultural element to it, and Arnott was a noted singer. A soiree reported in the Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, records that among the toasts and addresses delivered by leading figures including Feargus OíConnor and George Julian Harney, Arnott sang ‘a patriotic song‘ amidst much applause.

Arnott also contributed a poem to mark the launch of the National Land Company, set up by O’Connor in 1846 as a co-operative venture intended to provide small holdings to industrial workers. The upbeat poem was printed and sold in aid of the venture, which though doomed to failure was seen at the time as a viable way forward for the Chartist movement. Further poems followed, many of which appeared in the Northern Star. But Arnott also had more serious political work in hand, as chair of a Veterans, Orphans and Victim Relief Committee, set up to support the families of Chartists who had been imprisoned or transported overseas in the oppression that had followed the last Chartist petition in 1842.

In August 1846, he joined the Fraternal Democrats, which served as the internationalist left-wing of Chartism working closely with political exiles including Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and which would develop a socialist programme for the Chartist movement under the slogan ‘the Charter and something more’.

Over the coming year, Arnott would throw himself into organising what would turn out to be the Chartist movement’s last attempt at a national petition of Parliament, and the rally and march planned to deliver the document to Westminster. In that capacity, he would have to make clear the NCA’s determination to put on a ‘peaceable, orderly, and moral display of the unenfranchised toiling masses’.

In the official crackdown that followed 10 April 1848, however, hundreds of Chartists were arrested on charges ranging from seditious libel to riot and treason, and Arnott was once again busy as secretary to the National Victims Fund, raising funds on behalf of the ‘law-made widows’ and their children, more than 100 of whom were reliant on their efforts. Giving 3 shillings each to the widows and one shilling for every child under 12, left the committee liabilities of £10 a week, and on some weeks it had been reduced to giving just 2 shillings a week to the mothers of five, six or seven children. In August 1849, it was reported that the balance sheet over 17 weeks showed receipts as £103, expenditure £102. This amount was divided among 31 families and Arnott made a further appeal the following month.

Despite this desperate relief effort, Arnott found time to be active on the committee of the Fraternal Democrats, and to put forward a demand at a public meeting in March 1849 for the separation of church and state, arguing that it further impoverished workers to pay taxes for the upkeep of the Church of England. With the release from prison of Ernest Jones in July 1850, Arnott was at the forefront of the celebrations, and of efforts to reunite the National Charter Association, Fraternal Democrats and the more middle class National Reform League. From this, Arnott emerged in November 1850 as general secretary of the NCA at a salary of £2 a month.

As the NCA became more socialist in its orientation under the leadership of Jones and Arnott, dissent grew, however, and internal disputes became more acute. By early 1852, the organisation was unable even to pay its secretary’s expenses, and Arnott was forced to hand over the position and find paid work in his old trade.

The last recorded instance of any political involvement by Arnott came in 1853, though in 1862 he was present at the funeral of another popular Chartist organiser, Thomas Martin Wheeler at Highgate Cemetery. Although Arnott whttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifould play no further role in politics, the radical journalist W E Adams later recalled in his Memoirs of a Social Atom:
"Some time about 1865 I was standing at the shop door of a Radical bookseller in the Strand. A poor half-starved old man came to the bookseller, according to custom, to beg or borrow a few coppers. It was John Arnott! Chartism was then, as it really had been for a long time before, a matter of history."

More online at Chartist Ancestors
* Read a more detailed biography of John Arnott
* Find out what happened on 10 April 1848
* Read the Duke of Newcastle’s hostile account of 1848
* Discover more about Chartism and the Chartists