John Windeler, 1814 – 1868, and Elizabeth Windeler, 1817 – 1891
John and Elizabeth Windeler were never prominent in Chartism and probably played only a small part even within the City of London Chartist body. But they were active in the movement for at least a decade, and their involvement would have been typical of thousands like them.
John, a bootmaker by trade, was born on 27 September 1814 at St Luke’s, just outside the northern boundary of the City. His father Daniel, a silver polisher, had come to England from Hanover, and in 1808 had married Norfolk-born Hellen Watts at Saint Mary’s, Islington.
Elizabeth Palmer was born in Oxford and baptised at the parish church of St Ebbe’s on 1 October 1817. She was the daughter of William Palmer, a shoemaker, and Mary (Price).
John and Elizabeth married at St John the Baptist, Hoxton on 31 March 1839 and made their home in Plumber Street, close to where John had grown up. Their first child, John, died in 1841 at less than a year old, but two years later the Northern Star was able to record the birth of John Frost Windeler under the heading “More young patriots” (NS, 26 March 1842, p5).
That summer, Elizabeth’s name appears in reports of meetings of the City of London Female Charter Association, and when the Association adopted new rules (ES, 16 September 1842, p4), she was one of two delegates elected to visit members who had not attended meetings to find out why. She would later be credited with raising 7s 9d for the families of the Haswell Colliery disaster in which 95 men and boys lost their lives (NS, 11 January 1845, p4).
For some years, the Windelers lived in Gloster (or Gloucester) Row, Shoreditch (later renamed Crondall Place), around forty minutes’ walk from the Chartist meeting rooms at 51 Old Bailey and Turnagain Lane. And by the time of the 1851 census, their family had grown to include three more children, including Rachel, just four months old. There would eventually be at least eight children, six of whom lived to adulthood.
The family must have been subscribers to the Chartist Land Company. When the company was being wound up in 1851, John became part of an initiative led by Thomas Martin Wheeler to buy out dissatisfied shareholders and use the dividends buy back some of the company’s assets (NS, 19 April 1851, p5).
John was elected treasurer of this National Land and Labour Loan Society with Wheeler as secretary. But the initiative failed when it became clear that the £20,000 worth of scrips paid for by Chartists but not converted into shares would be treated as assets of the bankrupt company, leaving the society without any money. The society was duly wound up.
The couple remained in Shoreditch. Elizabeth died there in September 1868 aged 61; John outlived her, dying in September 1891. Both were buried in Islington.
Notes and sources
Reports from the Northern Star referenced in the text (and abbreviated to NS after the first mention) above are taken from the British Newspaper Library.
Details of births, marriages and deaths and census entries are from Ancestry.
Haswell Collier Explosion – Haswell – 1844. On the Northern Mines Research Society website (accessed 25 October 2025).
The fate of the National Land and Labour Loan Society, registered as the National Loan Society, is recorded in Alice Mary Hadfield’s The Chartist Land Company (David & Charles, 1970).