News Archive

The March - celebrating the 170th anniversary of the Chartist Uprising in Newport 

On Thursday 15th October 2009 at the Newport Centre, the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, read out a poem commissioned by the Bevan Foundation to celebrate the 170th anniversary of the Chartist Uprising in Newport.

The March
For my late father-in-law, Glyndwr Thomas, miner, Oakdale colliery

Boots and rain drummed the tram-roads,

that bitter night in eighteen-thirty-nine,

potholed and stumbled with mud and stones.

Five thousand men, workers in iron and coal

from mine and furnace, Sirhowy, Ebbw, Rhymni,

heads bowed against the storm like mountain ponies.

 

Their bones ached from the shift, wind in the shaft,

the heat of the furnaces, yet on they marched,

their minds a blaze because their cause was right,

through darkness from Ebbw Vale, Blackwood, Pontypool,

faces frozen and stung by the lash of rain,

trudging the roads to Newport through the night.

 

At the Welsh Oak, Rogerstone, betrayed by daylight,

Frost’s men from the west, Williams's from the east,

Jones’s men never arrived. The rest struck on

to stand united, of one heart in the square

before the Westgate. Had they stood silent then,

had they not surged forward, had not been shaken

 

by rage against injustice, had they muzzled

the soldiers’ muskets with a multitude

of silence, had reason spoken,

those steely thousands might have won the day.

But they stormed the doors to set their comrades free,

and shots were fired, and freedom’s dream was broken.

 

A score dead. Fifty wounded. Their leaders tried,

condemned, transported. The movement, in disarray,

lost fifty years. Then came, at last, that shift

of power, one spoonful of thin gruel at a time,

from strong to weak, from rich to poor,

from men to women, like a grudged gift.

 
Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales
 

For further information on the Bevan Foundation click here.