Thomas Attwood

At six o’clock on the morning of 16 May 1832 an express brought the news to Birmingham that Earl Grey had been recalled to office. The Reform Bill was saved. A party of Political Union men set off at once for Harborne, four miles out of town, to fetch the man they credited with the victory. The Birmingham Journal described what happened next. Crowds marched out to meet him, and “by eleven o’clock all the roads leading from that village to Birmingham were completely choked with the population of Birmingham and its vicinity”.

The man they came for was Thomas Attwood: a banker, a lifelong Tory by upbringing, and for a few weeks in 1832 the most powerful private citizen in England.

A banker’s son

Attwood was born on 6 October 1783 at Hawne House, near Halesowen. His father, Matthias Attwood, was a steel and nail manufacturer who in 1791 set up a bank with Isaac Spooner. Thomas was educated at the grammar schools of Halesowen and Wolverhampton and, at about seventeen, went into his father’s bank in New Street, Birmingham. In 1806 he married Elizabeth Carless at Harborne and set up home at The Larches in Sparkbrook. In 1811 they moved to The Crescent, a terrace planned on the model of the Crescent at Bath and then outside the town, and in October that year he was elected High Bailiff of Birmingham.

His first campaign was for trade. In 1812 the Orders in Council restricted British trade with the Continent and the United States, and Birmingham’s merchants saw them as a matter of life or death. Attwood went to London to put the town’s case, armed with a petition carrying 16,000 signatures. The Warwickshire MPs were unresponsive. The Orders were partly withdrawn that June, and the next year the artisans of Birmingham gave Attwood a silver cup. He learned a lesson he never forgot: Birmingham, with no MP of its own, could be ignored.

The paper-money man

The great idea of his life was money. After the French wars the government cut back paper money and prepared to return to gold. Attwood thought that was madness. In his pamphlets from 1816 onwards he argued that more money in circulation would mean more trade, more work and higher wages. In an open letter to the Chancellor, Nicholas Vansittart, he insisted that “the issue of money will create markets”.

He lost. In 1819 Parliament voted to bring back gold, and Attwood’s patience with the men who ran the country ran out. “In truth,” he told a Birmingham meeting in 1820, “there is not much reason to expect anything but error and crime from the aristocratic canaille which governs England.” When the Duke of Wellington’s government brushed aside a Birmingham currency petition signed by 40,000 people in 1829, the Tory banker decided that the only cure was reform of Parliament itself.

The Union

In December 1829 Attwood and fifteen others met at the Royal Hotel to plan “a general political union between the lower and middle classes of the people”. The Birmingham Political Union was launched in January 1830 at a meeting at Beardsworth’s Repository, a horse and carriage market near the Bull Ring, which is said to have drawn 15,000 people. Its watchword was “Peace, Law, and Order”. A Roman Catholic priest sat on its council and a Unitarian minister preached at its meetings. Unions on the Birmingham model sprang up across the country.

When the Reform Bill reached the House of Lords in October 1831, Attwood took the Union out of doors, to Newhall Hill, an old sandpit on the north side of the town that made a natural amphitheatre. On 3 October more than 100,000 people are said to have gathered there, 20,000 of them from the Black Country. Lord John Russell sent back a famous reply: “It is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of a nation.”

The Days of May

The Lords threw the Bill out. In May 1832 Grey’s government was defeated there again and resigned. Birmingham answered with a great “Gathering of the Unions” on Newhall Hill, claimed at 200,000 strong, a contemporary figure the Victoria County History calls “probably much exaggerated”. At one meeting the banners were draped in black. There was talk of refusing taxes, of marching a million men to Hampstead Heath, and of a rising led from Birmingham. In the town’s barracks the Scots Greys were kept “daily and nightly saddled, with ball cartridge ready for use”. Attwood’s gift was to hold all of that anger inside the law.

Then Grey came back. On 16 May the Union met once more on Newhall Hill in triumph, a scene the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon recorded in oils. Attwood was given the freedom of the City of London, and William Cobbett called him “King Tom”. The Reform Act received the royal assent on 7 June 1832. On 12 December Attwood and Joshua Scholefield were returned unopposed as the first two Members of Parliament for Birmingham.

Member for Birmingham

Westminster did not suit him. The Commons tired of his speeches on currency. In May 1833 he called his people back to the hill: “Hearts of lions, but with the gentleness of lambs, meet me again at Newhall Hill.” By 1838 he had moved further, to the six points of the People’s Charter. The National Petition was adopted at a huge meeting at Holloway Head on 6 August 1838, and on 14 June 1839 Attwood presented it to the House of Commons with 1,280,000 signatures. Hansard reported that he “washed his hands of any idea, of any appeal to physical force”. On 12 July the House refused to take it into consideration, by 235 votes to 46.

That July the Bull Ring erupted in riots after London police were sent in to break up Chartist meetings. The movement had passed Attwood by. In December 1839 he published a farewell address to his constituents and retired from Parliament.

Last years

He spent two years in Jersey for his health, failed to launch a new national union in 1843, and later lived at Allesley, near Coventry. He died at Ellerslie, a doctor’s house in Great Malvern, on 6 March 1856, and was buried in the churchyard at Hanley, near Upton-on-Severn. His grandson wrote that he died in “almost Spartan poverty”: his old house in The Crescent fetched only about £800.