It's worth celebrating the birth in Newcastle upon Tyne on 21st June 1750 of radical fighter for human rights Thomas Spence.
Happy birthday Tom from everyone at The Thomas Spence Trust, responsible for the commemorative Spence plaque on the Quayside and an extensive series of events and publications dedicated to him over the years.
THE THOMAS SPENCE TRUST
It’s good to welcome the establishment of The Thomas Spence Trust, founded by a group of Tyneside activists intent on celebrating and promoting the life and work of that noted pioneer of people’s rights, pamphleteer and poet Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who has born on Newcastle’s Quayside in those turbulent times.
Spence served in his father’s netmaking trade from the age of ten but went on later to be a teacher at Haydon Bridge Free Grammar School and at St. Ann’s Church in Byker under the City Corporation. In 1775, he read his famous lecture on the right to property in land to the Newcastle Philosophical Society, who voted his expulsion at their next meeting.
He claimed to have invented the phrase ‘The Rights of Man’ and chalked it in the caves at Marsden Rocks in South Shields in honour of the working-class hero ‘Blaster Jack’ Bates, who lived there.
He even came to blows with famed Tyneside wood-engraver Thomas Bewick (to whom a memorial has been recently established on the streets of Newcastle) over a political issue, and was thrashed with cudgels for his trouble.
From 1792, having moved to London, he took part in radical agitations, particularly against the war with France. He was arrested several times for selling his own and other seditious books and was imprisoned for six months without trial in 1794, and sentenced to three years for his Restorer of Society to its Natural State in 1801.
Whilst politicians such as Edmund Burke saw the mass of people as the ‘Swinish Multitude’, Spence saw creative potential in everybody and broadcast his ideas in the periodical Pigs’ Meat.
He had a stall in London’s Chancery Lane, where he sold books and saloup, and later set up a small shop called The Hive of Liberty in Holborn.
He died in poverty ‘leaving nothing to his friends but an injunction to promote his Plan and the remembrance of his inflexible integrity’.
The Thomas Spence Trust organised a mini-festival to celebrate Spence in 2000 when it published a booklet on his life and work, together with related events, with the aid of Awards for All.
Trust founder-member, poet Keith Armstrong has written a play for Bruvvers Theatre Company on the socialist pioneer which has been performed at St. Ann’s Church and other venues in the city.
Now the Trust has successfully campaigned for a plaque on the Quayside in Newcastle, where Spence was born. The plaque was unveiled on Monday June 21st 2010, Spence's 260th birthday, with a number of talks, displays and events coinciding with it.
A book 'Thomas Spence: The Poor Man's Revolutionary', edited by Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong, was published by Breviary Stuff Publications, with launch events, in 2014, the 200th anniversary of Spence's death.
Further information from: Dr Keith Armstrong, The Thomas Spence Trust, 35 Hillsden Road, Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear NE25 9XF. Tel. 0191 2529531.
CELEBRATORY BIRTHDAY POEMS AND LYRICS BY LOCAL WRITERS:
POEMS/SONGS BY DR KEITH ARMSTRONG
SONG BY GARY MILLER
POEM BY TREVOR TEASDEL
POEM BY ROBERT LONSDALE
POEM BY TREVOR LEONARD
POEM BY DOMINIC WINDRAM
POEM BY PAUL SUMMERS
POEM BY DAVE ALTON
POEM BY GORDON PHILLIPS
SONG BY THE SAWDUST JACKS
FOLK SONG FOR THOMAS SPENCE
(1750-1814)
Down by the old Quayside,
I heard a young man cry,
among the nets and ships he made his way.
As the keelboats buzzed along,
he sang a seagull’s song;
he cried out for the Rights of you and me.
Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.
Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.
His folks they both were Scots,
sold socks and fishing nets,
through the Fog on the Tyne they plied their trade.
In this theatre of life,
the crying and the strife,
they tried to be decent and be strong.
Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.
Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.
KEITH ARMSTRONG
THE HIVE OF LIBERTY
(AFTER THE NAME OF THOMAS SPENCE’S BOOKSHOP AT 8 LITTLE TURNSTILE, HOLBORN)
I am a small and humble man,
my body frail and broken.
I strive to do the best I can.
I spend my life on tokens.
I traipse through Holborn all alone,
hawking crazy notions.
I am the lonely people’s friend.
I live on schemes and potions.
For, in my heart and in my mind,
ideas swarm right through me.
Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,
my words just flow ike wine,
my words just flow like wine.
I am a teeming worker bee.
My dignity is working.
My restless thoughts swell like the sea.
My fantasies I’m stoking.
There is a rebel inside me,
a sting about to strike.
I hawk my works around the street.
I put the world to rights.
For, in my heart and in my mind,
ideas swarm right through me.
Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,
my words just flow like wine,
my words just flow like wine.
KEITH ARMSTRONG
(from the music-theatre piece ‘Pig’s Meat’ written for Bruvvers Theatre Company)
A, B, C
You landless horses have you heard
The power of the written word
By making clear what once was blurred
I’ll raise you up above the herd
Like you I come from poverty
But grammar brought me liberty
Now with my grand repository
I’ll break your chains of slavery
Pronounce with me
These words you see
It’s as easy as A, B, C
My alphabet will set you free
It’s as easy as A, B, C
Rhyme and rhythm and repetition
Real reading made easy by definition
It’s my passion, it’s my mission
All it needs is your permission
Believe in me
And you will see
It’s as easy as A, B, C
Our language offers mastery
It’s as easy as A, B, C
So when you escape your desert isle
Spread the word through rank and file
The Spensonian Method is worthwhile
In teaching through phonetic style
Who needs elocutionists
Wordsmiths or philologists
For your mother tongue she now insists
You can all be cunning linguists
Come read with me
To your own degree
It’s as easy as A, B, C
Words and sounds in recipe
It’s as easy as A, B, C
Say after me
“I will be free”
It’s as easy as A, B, C
Knowledge is power, just turn the key
It’s as easy as A, B, C
Gary Miller
"Dare to be Free"
Where is Thomas Spence?, his song needs to be sung. Born in poverty, died in poverty, imprisoned for his ideas. He wrote the real Rights of Man. He was the bane of tyrants, the scourge of pirates, the man behind the pen.
Where is Thomas Spence? The end of aristocracy, public ownership of the land, a social gurantee for those not able to work, the rights of all and infants to be free from abuse and poverty. Where is this man who gave his life so the people could be free?
What thinks Thomas Spence about the progress that's been made? Tax havens for the rich, Council tax, income tax and VAT for all the rest. He'd see that nothing much had changed beneath the fancy rhetoric. Just desparation for the poor, the lame and all the sick.
Where is Thomas Spence now we need his utopian thought? A country run for crooks will never cut the cake. A people tired of lies and schemes, distracted by a press half baked is not the kind of world you saw. Where are you Thomas Spence? We need to hear your voice once more!
Trevor Teasdel
THOMAS SPENCE
A humble son of Newcastle,
Born in 1750 into discriminating grim poverty,
He looked destined for the Great North scrapheap,
Instead, he grew to be someone of immense utopian vision,
Integrity, courage and righteousness:
A pioneering true socialist, a minter of coins, a printer of pamphlets,
A champion of the working classes, a martyr to the common man.
He wrote and spoke passionately about human rights, the abolition of slavery,
Cruelty, justice and land for all long before it became fashionable or cool.
He constantly challenged undemocratic government practice,
He tirelessly railed against aristocracy’s unpardonable moral corruption
and tyranny.
Truly inspirational beliefs that, regrettably, were completely rejected by the powers that be.
Dynamic campaigning took him only along the prejudiced, tumbrel track
Towards imprisonment and ostracism.
Parliament’s persecution outrageously robbed him of a rightful place.
I often wonder, and hope you all do too,
What the Workers' World would be like today
If Thomas had not been shunted unceremoniously into bleak anonymity.
A memorial black plaque on a Quayside wall does not tell it well
Or adequately describe the life of a unique man born ahead of his time.
Robert Lonsdale
FOR THOMAS SPENCE
Language
Universal benefit
Freedom and passion
A common wellbeing
We are indebted
A visionary of Tyne
Thomas Spence
Shelter for all
Glorify the council house
TREVOR LEONARD
In Memory Of Thomas Spence
I believe you will not disappear.
You will not die; in children’s hopeful eyes;
In every living human heart
That dares to dream beyond its scope
Beyond the grateful peasantry
Of this compliant Kingdom.
The old, rampant tribes are beating their chests
Raising their flags & their fists against the tide;
But I still cling to the singular rose of your vision
Amidst the ruins of tainted modernity
If you were alive now you would weep great rivers.
If you were here now you would advice us to:
Awaken from the deep sleep of self servitude;
Awaken from gleaming crass consumer dreaming;
Awaken from the mass media’s circus of distraction,
Awaken from the spellbinding delusions
Of sordid symbol manipulators
& awaken with the sun of new born awareness.
Dominic Windram
the hive of liberty
God gav thi Irth to u
And not unto a Fu
But aul Mankind
& still we build
drone & dreamer
beyond each epoch’s
bleak indenture
making & amending
each pristine cell
to house the progeny
of our rights
a scaffold thatch
of vehement words
the lathe & daub
of hope & want
each glossed with the blood
of a ranter’s raw throat
Paul Summers
The Ballad of Thomas Spence
Thomas Spence strolling through a wood
When a bounty there he found,
Of ripe nuts fallen from the trees
And scattered across the ground.
He was gathering this harvest
When through the bushes there came
A Forester who demanded
To be told the poacher’s name.
“I’m no poacher!” said Thomas Spence,
“I take no rabbit or deer.
I have but one intention, which
Is gathering these nuts here.
“Would you inquire of a monkey
Or a squirrel making free
With natural sufficiency?
If not, why then question me?
“Do you think me inferior
To wild creatures such as these?
Do I have rather less right to
Garner what’s fallen from trees?”
The Forester was much aggrieved
And declared, “As you well know,
You’re no more than a trespasser
Who must answer to the law.
“The Duke of Portland owns this land
And all that grows and falls here,
He holds all the deeds and titles,
So his right is very clear.”
But Thomas Spence was not subdued,
“This wild wood grew here unplanned.
It has not been cultivated,
Nor planted by human hand.
“Therefore, this is nature’s storehouse
Where in nothing is reserved,
And the only law that applies
Is first come is then first served.
“So the Duke of Portland must be
Much faster and more aware
If he is to get here in time
To claim and gather his share.
But if he invokes privilege
Then what’s this country to me,
If by gathering hazelnuts
I commit a felony?
“I may serve in the army’s ranks
To defend this country, this wood,
Yet, just what of mine would I be
Then defending with my blood?
The enemy would laugh and jeer,
They must take me for a clown
Who’s not allowed to pick a nut:
I should throw my musket down.
“I’d say to the Duke of Portland,
And he could not ignore it,
If this wood is yours alone, then
You alone must fight for it.
“These nuts the hazel trees produce
Fall freely upon the earth,
It’s only when I pick them up
That my labour gives them worth.”
The Forester stood there struck dumb,
The argument made such sense
He couldn’t in all conscience deny
The right claimed by Thomas Spence.
Dave Alton
FROM A THOMAS SPENCE FRAME STORY UNITING HIS UTOPIAN WRITINGS
1. Captain Swallow’s Return to England
I bring you news from Spensonia
glistening in the sun
of its own making,
a single speck of land
breeding and trading between republics
on Poseidon’s map.
Imagine it.
At first, the classic text,
the greatest storm
and a besieged ship -
all hands on deck –
heave, ho! But soon floundering
at god knows where.
So pray for deliverance
or take the punishment.
But this time go one better
with a double saving,
two mariners: brothers,
fatigued,
beached like two big wet fish
without a home.
2. The Marine Constitution.
All around them is sturdy wood,
such greenery for a canopy
under a burning sun and monsoon torrent.
At their feet there’s much stone,
axe heads to make
and shape walls, an entrance.
One stone rubbed against the other
emits its rewarding flames,
a busy warmth for the fur-clad
corralling wild beasts, propagate.
They reseed lush fruit, in fact,
anything edible for the craggy table
while a perpetual spring
gives them such blessings,
seasonal observance.
But this is no Protestant Work Ethic,
no individual creed for Albion’s shores;
but an island of many hairy and soft hands.
Two brothers, two bearded wonders
heeded father’s advice.
In the carved words of their manifesto
it tells of a land made whole made real
just as between tall sails and wind helped guide them
so for each person’s need.
G.F.Phillips
Ode to Thomas Spence
A radical from the Quayside, rebellion in his bones
Speaking up for people, and decent homes
Universal suffrage - access to the land
Famous penny pamphlets and ‘The Rights of Man’
So Landlord, shove your rent book where the sun will never shine
I’ve got ‘Pigs Meat’, I’ve got Tokens, I’ve got Freedom in my mind
Education, Liberation, his Phonetics will reveal
An end to class distinction, and this one sided deal
To Hell with Aristocracy, we’ll be what we will be
A fanfare for the common man, if you dare to be free
So Landlord, shove your rent book where the sun will never shine
I’ve got ‘Pigs Meat’, I’ve got Tokens, I’ve got Freedom in my mind
Imprisoned for high treason, without a legal trial
Harassment and surveillance, in a military style
This poor man’s revolutionary, couldn’t be kept down
Spensonian Utopia, will never run aground
So Landlord, shove your rent book where the sun will never shine
I’ve got ‘Pigs Meat’, I’ve got Tokens, I’ve got Freedom in my mind
John Leslie (The Sawdust Jacks)
SPENCE IN LONDON:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IMy-h2re3g
