40 Facts About Richard Oastler

Richard Oastler's complexion is ghastly pale: his eyes, grey and staring, have little expression in them; and, with very common features, he has the appearance of a mechanic in his Sunday clothes.

When Richard Oastler was six, his twelve-year-old brother Robert died as a result of a fire in a flax mill.

Richard Oastler attended a Moravian boarding school from 1798 to 1806, and then started training to become an architect.

Richard Oastler became involved in charity work in Leeds; sick visiting with Michael Thomas Sadler and organising charitable relief of the destitute.

Richard Oastler later claimed that it was this struggle that had broken his health, leaving him liable to periodic breakdowns in health.

Richard Oastler was a 'Church and King' Tory but, as the Duke of Wellington noted, a strange one.

Richard Oastler denied any element of Radicalism in his political philosophy, and regarded himself as an 'ultra-Tory' rather than a Peelite 'Conservative'; he thought Peel too readily accepted the Whig application of the modern doctrines of 'political economy' to the country's problems.

Richard Oastler held that God knew better than Malthus: nothing could supersede Biblical injunctions that the poor should not be oppressed and the distressed should be succoured.

In 1830 Richard Oastler, a committed abolitionist, was visiting John Wood of Horton Hall near Bradford, one of the largest worsted spinners in the country.

Wood, unhappy at the hours and conditions of work for children in Yorkshire worsted mills and his inability to persuade his competitors to ameliorate them, explained his concerns to Richard Oastler and got him to promise to "remove from our factory system the cruelties which are practised in our mills".

Richard Oastler wrote a long letter to the Mercury criticising the resolutions and reiterating the need for factory regulation.

Richard Oastler took great exception to this; the Leeds Intelligencer, the great rival of the Mercury was happy to print the letter in full, including such passages as:.

From this time forward, Richard Oastler used the Intelligencer as the chief outlet for his letters.

Michael Thomas Sadler, advised by Richard Oastler, then introduced a 'Ten-Hour Bill' for which the Short Time Committees organised mass demonstrations of support.

Richard Oastler spoke at these meetings, soon showing himself to be "one of the most accomplished popular orators that ever addressed a large assembly of the working classes".

Sadler's bill failed to complete its passage through the Commons before Parliament was dissolved Thornhill had had no objection to Richard Oastler campaigning for factory reform, but intervened when told that at Huddersfield Richard Oastler was working for the return of a Radical.

Richard Oastler was the 'centre of communication' for the organisation, and prominent in the agitation against the Commission.

Richard Oastler played a prominent part in agitation against the government Bill and for the introduction of a revived Ten-Hour Bill.

The government Bill was withdrawn after it secured a majority of only two at Second Reading; the campaign for a Ten-Hour Act continued, but was seriously set back by a speech Richard Oastler made at Blackburn in September 1836.

The Blackburn Standard published only an expurgated account of the meeting at which Richard Oastler spoke, preceding it with an editorial in which they deplored the speeches of him and his fellow orators:.

The Standard therefore did not report that Richard Oastler had talked of teaching children to sabotage mill machinery,; this was however seized upon by his opponents such as the Manchester Guardian which urged that either 'his friends should put him under some restraint' or 'the law should interpose to end the career of wickedness which he seems disposed to run'.

Richard Oastler's health broke down at the end of 1836; a meeting at Manchester in January 1837 was told he was unable to address it as 'his exertions on behalf of the factory slave had brought him to the edge of the grave'.

The Act was passed by large majorities, despite Richard Oastler personally lobbying Tory leaders to oppose it.

Richard Oastler's objections were that the Act pursued aims dictated by political economy by un-Christian treatment of the poor, and to ensure this was done with consistent heartlessness was setting up an unconstitutional body.

Richard Oastler told the Duke "if that Bill passes, the man who can produce the greatest confusion in the country will be the greatest patriot, and I will try to be that man".

Richard Oastler was a leading light in a series of intimidatory pickets of meetings of the Huddersfield Guardians.

When Richard Oastler fell behind in the poll, a mob attacked the hustings and polling had to be suspended: the Riot Act was read and the cavalry called out to restore order.

At the start of May 1838, Richard Oastler suffered another collapse.

Thornhill's letter noted that Richard Oastler had become steward on the basis that this was a full-time job and complained that Richard Oastler had not attended to estate affairs as Thornhill would have wished, but did not go into further details.

Many of Richard Oastler's associates were involved in Chartism, and Richard Oastler did not disown them: he played a prominent part in raising funds for the defence of J R Stephens; his last public campaigning for 5 years.

Richard Oastler administered Fixby less in accordance with Thornhill's wishes than with the former practice of Thornhill's father: he would not employ labourers at less than a living wage, nor let farms at rents too high to allow the tenant's prosperity; callers at Fixby on estate business were offered a drink, and their horses were stabled.

Richard Oastler thought this unjustified ; he therefore prepared to offer his resignation.

Richard Oastler had previously told other anti-Poor Law campaigners that Frankland Lewis was urging Thornhill to sack him, and his dismissal was described in various sympathetic papers as "the rewards of independent resistance of Whig tyranny".

Richard Oastler's imprisonment brought reconciliation with former allies who had broken with him, and visits and gifts not only from his supporters from every class but from political opponents who thought Thornhill's conduct oppressive.

Richard Oastler, initially recuperating at a nephew's country house, was drawn into a series of public meetings agitating for a Ten-Hour Bill, in the aftermath of the Government asserting that millworkers no longer wished for a Ten-Hour Act and making the retention of a twelve-hour limit in the 1844 Factory Act a question of confidence.

Richard Oastler was now only a support speaker, and his speeches kept to the less violent tone promised at his Huddersfield homecoming.

Richard Oastler was a Leeds sharebroker in 1845, by 1846 he was working in a London stockbroking office; in 1849 he was made bankrupt.

Thereafter, Richard Oastler was discreetly supported by his friends; from 1851 he edited a periodical The Home but this was never a paying proposition and closed in 1855.

Richard Oastler continued to argue for Protection, and against Free Trade and the "Manchester School", but his appearances at Short Time meetings were now to receive congratulatory addresses, to reminisce, and to pay tribute to former colleagues in the struggle.

Richard Oastler was buried in the family vault at Kirkstall, Leeds: he had asked for a simple and private funeral, but many of his old Short Time comrades attended and at their insistence the coffin was carried by twelve factory workers.