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Every school student in Wales learns about the doomed Chartist march on Newport in 1839, met by a hail of bullets fired at the command of the vicious reactionary mayor Thomas Phillips.
But historians still argue about the aims of the marchers. Were they merely workers from the most oppressed part of industrial Wales calling for a fair deal from their masters? Were they demanding political reform and the right to vote under the banner of the Charter's 6 points? Or were they marching to overthrow the monarchy to set up their own working class fortress under the principles of co-operation and co-ownership? The many-headed nature of the march is summed up in the characters of the best-known Chartist leaders: John Frost was a small businessman who had been Mayor of Newport himself but had fallen out with the cabal of businessmen who ran the town; Zephaniah Williams a much more dodgy character who had been the organiser of a gang of 'claim jumpers' taking over small mines belonging to other people and after some dubious adventures ended up running a public house in Blaina where one of the Chartist groups used to meet; William Jones the leader of the Pontypool Chartists, a former actor.

'Jack the Fifer'

Humphries adds to those leaders a much more shadowy figure John Rees or Jack the Fifer. Little is known about him, but it appears likely that he was the same John Rees who had emigrated to America and like many other soldiers of fortune had joined the 'Army of Texas' fighting for freedom from Mexican rule. The Army itself was very different from the picture painted in the John Wayne film. Ragged, and undisciplined it practised a type of revolutionary democracy like that of 'peoples' militias' in the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. However the Texans concept of democracy was very ambiguous. They were fighting for freedom from Mexico - but also the freedom to keep slaves, which was illegal in Mexico. Rees certainly fought at the first battle of the Alamo and escaped from a massacre at Goliad where the Mexicans killed 400 Texan troops. It is possible, but not 100% certain that Rees was the 'old fighter' who took part in the heated debates among Chartists in Monmouthshire over how to demand their rights. Also it is possible but not certain that he was the leader of the charge on the Westgate Hotel. What is certain is that while Frost, Williams and Jones were arrested, charged with high treason and transported, Rees slipped away and was never heard of again.

First steps on the road

Humphries tells an interesting and exciting tale. But he fails to answer his own question on the nature of the Chartist March. He makes the very valid point that it was in the Government's interest to portray the march as an attempt to overthrow the state in order to whitewash Phillips' shooting down of marchers and to justify harsher laws. In exactly the same way, New Labour and the Secret Police (or Security Services as they prefer to be known) are using Al Qaeda as a bogey to allow them to erode our liberties. But the truth is more complex. Just as all sorts of people marched on the anti-Iraq War demonstrations, all sorts of people marched to Newport - boyos from the pub out for a bit of a punch-up, workers with no ideas of politics but up for anything that might give them and their families a chance, people looking towards political reform and the right to vote as a way forward, but also workers prepared to fight against the old system to build a new one, workers who believed that their movement would form part of a mass movement across Britain. That movement never came and the Chartists were crushed. Nevertheless socialists in Wales rightly see the march on Newport as one faltering step on the road to overthrowing capitalism. Humphries' book is an interesting read and a useful contribution to the historical debate.