George Black, 1817 – 1879

George Black was a Nottingham stocking knitter and Chartist who was known for his support of the Newport Chartists. After emigrating to Australia, he became a leading figure in the Ballarat Reform League and publisher of the Gold Diggers’ Advocate.

Born at Willington in Derbyshire and baptised in the parish church on 4 January 1818, George Black was the eldest of nine children born to exciseman George Black and his wife Catherine (nee Trace).

George’s early life was peripatetic: his father, from Butley in Suffolk, and mother, from Woolwich in Kent, married at Nottingham in 1815, and having evidently been at Willington in 1817, had moved on by the time George’s younger sisters were born to Mansfield in 1827 and Matlock in 1831. Later they moved to Tickhill near Doncaster.

Chartism and religion

George became a stocking knitter settling near Nottingham, where with William Tew he rented and worked four frames. But his name first appears in connection with Chartism in the period between the rejection of the first petition and the Newport Rising, when the Nottingham Review reported (25 October 1839, p4):

‘On Sunday last, Mr George Black, of Arnold, preached a sermon in the open air at Stapleford, the object of the preacher being to prove that the principles of the People’s Charter were not in opposition to the contents of the Bible.’

Religion was an important influence on the young George Black. He sometimes styled himself Rev George Black (Nottingham Review, 18 June 1841, p4), and though baptised in the Church of England, would later write that he was ‘turned out of the Baptist church’ for his political beliefs (Northern Star, 27 November 1841, p7).

Early in 1840 Black was elected to represent Nottingham at a delegate meeting in Manchester, called to draw up a memorial to the Queen seeking a pardon for the Newport Chartist leaders, and to co-ordinate a campaign of public meetings to put pressure on the government to prevent their transportation (NS, 8 February 1840, p1).

From Nottingham to South Wales

Two months later, with the Newport leaders on their way to Van Diemen’s Land, there was a further delegate meeting at Nottingham aimed at renewing the agitation. Here, Black argued against further ‘useless’ petitions, and for a general strike (NS, 18 April 1840, p2). As the Northern Star reported: ‘He wished the working men would not strike another stroke until the Charter was the law of the land.’

Some months on, however, Black found himself in dire financial straits when William Parr, from whom he rented his stocking frames, took exception to his politics and put the frames up for sale (Nottingham and Newark Mercury, 4 September, 1840, p4). Black would later claim that this had cost him the seven shillings a week that Parr would have paid him, plus whatever he might have earned for himself, leaving him ‘many a time not having more than one meal a-day, my wife and family starving’ (NS, 27 November 1841, p7).

There is no record of any political activity on Black’s part for some months after this, but he appears to have been travelling in South Wales, making a living by selling stockings while preaching Chartism and making political connections. He reappeared the following spring, when the Chartists of Newport put his name forward as a candidate for the executive committee of the National Charter Association (NS, 1 May 1841, p1). He was not successful.

Arrest and imprisonment

Soon after, he was arrested and sentenced to a month’s hard labour in the house of correction at Usk, north of Newport, ostensibly for trading and hawking without a licence. However, an account first given in the Hereford Times, and repeated with scepticism by the Northern Star (NS, 19 June 1841, p3), suggests a more interesting story.

The report claims that ‘a very suspicious package’ from Bristol addressed to Mr G. Moore, care of Mr Goodwin, a well-known Chartist shoemaker at Pontypool, had been intercepted at Newport where it was turned over to the police. On inspection, it was said to contain ‘two muskets, two bayonets, one fowling piece, two pistols, five bullet-moulds, of various sizes, a force pump for an air gun, a great quantity of inflammatory Chartist publications, one of Colonel Macarone’s books, called “Instructions to the People how to make combustible Materials”, a quantity of Cobbett’s Works, &c, with several parcels of worsted and cotton stockings, linen, drapery, and worsted yarn, so well packed round the fire-arms that no one would suspect the package of containing such goods’.

The following day, when a man called to pick up his parcel, he was taken into custody. This was George Black, ‘a Chartist agitator and orator from Nottingham, who has been very industrious in South Wales this last twelve months, particularly at Merthyr; he assumed to travel with stockings for sale’. Taken before the magistrates he was, curiously, charged under the Vagrancy Act rather than in connection with the weapons. Black admitted that he sometimes used the name Moore, and was hauled off to prison.

After his release, the ‘Council of the Association’ at Merthyr Tydvil wrote to the Star to declare that ‘a better, honester, and a more disinterested advocate of the cause, does not exist than George Black, of Nottingham’ (NS, 17 July 1841, p8). Having left the prison, they said, Black was now ‘pennyless and in want’, his goods ‘of considerable value taken from him’, and they asked readers to help him, for ‘he has done very much for the cause in Monmouth and Glamorgan’.

Sarah Morgan, whose husband David Morgan was killed in the Newport Rising, also wrote to thank Black for passing on the sum of £1 16s that he had collected for her (NS, 7 August 1841, p6).

Condemned by the Northern Star

Black returned to Nottingham, representing it at the conference that August in York to mark the release of Feargus O’Connor from prison (NS, 4 September 1841, pp 6,7,8). And in October he spoke at a public meeting in the Fig-Tree-lane meeting room of the Sheffield Chartists, where he was introduced by George Julian Harney as ‘their old and well-tried friend’ (NS, 16 October 1841, p1).

Black delivered a fiery speech that drew on his experience of the Welsh Chartists and skirted but never quite issued a call for a nationwide rising. He sat down to ‘tremendous cheering’.

But he had gone too far for the Northern Star editor William Hill, who, under the headline ‘SAVE US FROM OUR FRIENDS’, denounced him at some length for inciting what would inevitably be doomed uprisings. The paper pointed to the fate of those involved in ‘risings and outbreaks’ in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lancashire in 1817, the Cato Street conspirators of 1819, and ‘the late disturbances at Newport, and Sheffield, and Bradford, and Dewsbury, for which Frost, Williams and Jones, so nearly lost their heads’ (NS, 23 October 1841, p4).

‘What then, with these instances before him, is Mr Black about?’ it asked. ‘He must surely be demented! Does he not know that his “mighty myriads” (if they resorted to physical force) could all be routed by a regiment of soldiers? Has he not seen enough of 1838-9, to witness how the palsy of weakness comes over us the moment we outstep the law?’

Black was taken aback by the attack on his commitment to Chartism, and especially at any suggestion that he might be a spy or traitor stirring up unrest on behalf of the authorities. In a heartfelt letter to the Northern Star (NS, 27 November 1841, p7), he laid out how he had suffered for his work on behalf of the Charter. ‘All the hope I have is in the People’s Charter becoming the law of the land,’ he wrote.

Black was supported once more by the Chartists of Merthyr Tydvil, who praised his efforts on behalf of the widows of men killed at Newport and declared him ‘one of the last men that we could ever suspect of being a spy or a traitor to the cause of the people’ (NS, 4 December 1841, p1). From closer to home, and reported in the same issue, the Chartists of Old Basford near Nottingham unanimously resolved ‘That without in the least reflecting on the character of the Rev. W. Hill, as editor of the Northern Star, we consider George Black an honest and sincere advocate of the Peoples Charter’; Nottingham’s Chartists agreed that Black’s language at Sheffield had been ‘rather intemperate’ and ‘indiscreet’, but nonetheless affirmed ‘the most unbounded confidence in the honesty and integrity of Mr Black, and believe a more consistent democrat does not exist’.

In a rare if only partial climbdown, Hill wrote in its notes ‘to readers and correspondents’ that week: ‘We trust that he will in future be more guarded in his expressions, and that the cause will yet derive much benefit from his patriotic zeal.’

George returned to his peripatetic life in South Wales, hawking stockings and spreading Chartism, but suffered a personal financial disaster that forced him to write to the Northern Star appealing ‘with great reluctance’ for aid (NS, 22 January 1842, p5). He had, he said, stayed overnight in Pontypool on his travels, but on getting up the following morning discovered that his purse, containing £13 was missing. This was a huge sum, and its loss or, he suggested, theft had left him destitute and ‘in deep distress’. Although he would never get back the money he lost, he was later able to acknowledge donations amounting to £3 11s 2d (NS, 9 April 1842, p4).

London and Melbourne

George Black’s life for the best part of the next decade is something of a mystery. But at some point he moved to London, where in 1851 he was living with his wife Ann at 5 Burlington Terrace, Peckham Hill Street. Although George gave no occupation in that year’s census, Ann, who was born in Ireland and at the age of 55 was twenty years older than her husband, was listed as an annuitant, suggesting that she had sufficient savings to generate an income. The couple were able to afford a live-in general servant, while their neighbours were for the most part clerks.

George soon set sail for a new life in Australia. On 25 September 1852, he arrived at Port Philip, the large bay and harbour serving Melbourne, on board the Statesman along with his brother Alfred. From here he moved to Ballarat, where prospectors had struck gold the previous summer, and opened a general store. Within a matter of months he had become a leading figure in the Ballarat Reform League, which represented the interests of the more radical miners and took much of its political programme from the People’s Charter.

Working with other former Chartists, including Henry Holyoake (brother of the Owenite co-operator George Jacob Holyoake) and Henry Nicholls, Black also took a state in the Diggers’ Advocate, of which, sadly, only a few copies now survive.

Eureka and the Reform League

Amid mounting tensions between the gold diggers and the authorities throughout 1854, George became secretary of the Reform League, in which his brothers Alfred and Henry were also now active. But he suffered a personal blow when news arrived from home of the death of his wife. This and a serious attack of inflammation of the lungs laid him low for some time so that he was unable to attend to the business of the Diggers’ Advocate.

That October, a huge crowd of miners burnt the Ballarat Hotel to the ground in protest at the arrest of three of their number for manslaughter. Amid huge protests over police corruption and, following their conviction, Black and Thomas Kennedy, a former Chartist from Ayrshire in Scotland, were sent to Melbourne to seek their release. The governor, Sir Charles Hotham, refused their demand and sent more troops to deal with the disturbances.

Led now by an Irish digger named Peter Lalor, whose family had been involved in the Young Ireland movement, the miners decided on confrontation with the authorities – taking up arms, and on 2 December 1854 building and occupying a stockade over which they flew an ‘insurgent flag’ consisting of the Southern Cross constellation on a dark blue background.

However, moves by Lalor to link the cause of the miners to Irish independence proved to be a huge mistake, and many of those in the stockade left overnight. On the following morning, troops overran the defenders and amid heavy fighting 27 men died – almost all of them on the miners’ side.

A wanted man

Black had been absent from Ballarat during the fighting, but was forced into hiding when the authorities offered a reward for his capture, accusing him of inciting men ‘to take up Arms, with a view to make war against Our Sovereign Lady the Queen’. It is from the poster offering this reward that a description of Black survives:

‘Height over 6 feet, straight figure, slight build, bright red hair worn in general rather long and brushed backwards, red and large whiskers, meeting under the chin, blue eyes, large thin nose, ruddy complexion and rather small mouth.’

Black remained in hiding for some time and was never captured, and was able to return to public life after the trial of thirteen of the stockade diggers for high treason collapsed in February 1855. He relaunched the Diggers’ Advocate as the Gold Diggers’ Advocate, but the paper was not a commercial success.

Gold Diggers’ Advocate

Some idea of the paper’s financial difficulties can be found in a letter sent by Ebenezer Syme to John Pascoe Fawkner, publisher of the more successful Melbourne Argus. Seeking capital to buy a printing press, he wrote that the Advocate took £120 in sales and advertising revenue each week. But of this, £100 was used to print the paper – a sum Syme thought could be reduced to £40 if only they had their own press. 

This was not the only problem facing the paper. As Henry Richard Nicholls, one of its principal writers, would later explain: ‘Instead of a printing plant having been taken to the diggings, the paper was printed in Melbourne, and sent up by coach, the consequence being that the parcels were frequently left upon the road, and sometimes disappeared altogether.’ As the coach took two days to reach the goldfields, departing on a Thursday morning and not arriving until Saturday, the Advocate was unable to compete with locally printed papers ‘which gathered their news in the place of publication, and, as it were, gave it to their readers hot and hot’.

After the collapse of the paper, Black withdrew from public affairs, probably in part due to his declining health. Nicholls, who had worked closely with him, later noted: ‘As far back as 1853, he was seriously ill with disease of the lungs, and never had the bold energy to become a popular favourite; and that he lived so long after his first attack was a matter of wonder to many.’

Black died at Kew in the Melbourne suburbs on 1 April 1879, and was buried the following day at Boroondara General Cemetery. Black’s former colleague Henry Nicholls recorded his old friend’s life and death in a letter to The Argus.

Notes and sources

1. Baptism and census records for George Black can be found on the Ancestry UK website, and details of his arrival in Australia among passenger lists for Victoria on Ancestry Australia.

2. George Black’s Chartist activities can be traced through newspaper accounts (cited in the text above) in the British Newspaper Archive.

3. Letter from Ebenezer Syme to John Pascoe Fawkner, publisher of The Argus. Papers of John Pascoe Fawkner, 1803-1867. Accessed here (23 January 2025).

4. Henry Richard Nicholls, letter concerning George Black, The Argus, 19 April 1879. Available on Trove and accessed here (15 February 2025).

5. There are numerous references to George Black, the Eureka rebellion, and events at Ballarat on the Institute of Australian Culture website.

6. See also Chartism in Australia on this website.