Talk: Revolting Royston

It is Wednesday 22nd June 1836. Opposite Royston Heath, the Earl of Hardwicke and local magistrates are holed up on a building site. With them are twenty policemen who had been rapidly coached in from London on the Home Secretary’s orders. Terrified, they can easily make out the 1,500 angry workers streaming onto the hill on the other side of Baldock Road, hell-bent on destroying the half-finished building they are sheltering in. Half of Bassingbourn has already gone up in flames.

How can they possibly hope to face down the mob?

Find out more in this fascinating talk from local writer Graham Palmer.

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Graham Palmer has developed podcasts for the Society of Genealogists and British Association of Local History and contributed blogsposts to Doing History in Public and Herts Memories. One element of ‘Cracked Voices’ (a local project he co-produced with composer Jenni Pinnock) was workshopped by the BBC Singers and featured in Chelmsford City Museum’s Forcast22 festival. His previous talks for Royston museum have explored 'Royston's Astronaut' and the town’s links to the Black Watch Mutiny, as well as the life of Royston’s first recorded black resident. Find out more at www.grahampalmer.co.uk

Photograph: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.