Defeat and Regrouping

The moving spirit of this group was Henry J. Wilson of Sheffield, who had been opposed to the Acts since 1870 and had organised the first Sheffield meetings against them in April 1871 – largely to avoid the shame of letting working-class activists take the lead. Wilson was always firm on the need for a middle-class leadership. ¹ He was a tireless administrator and a born radical activist – although Mundella disliked him as an ‘ultra-rabid Birmingham type’ he had to admit that ‘he is a capital fellow in harness and is only dangerous when he has nothing to do’. ² Wilson was to be fully occupied for the next 14 years as a leading repealer, but like so many nonconformist radicals he spread his effort generously: in the early 1870s he was a pillar of the Sheffield Nonconformist Committee in opposition to the Education Act, he was a temperance advocate, a liberationist, active on the Eastern Question in 1876 and 1877, on moral questions in the 1880s (he was treasurer of the National Vigilance Association formed to enforce the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act), against the opium trade in the 1890s (the sole dissentient on the 1893 Royal Commission). His attitude to religion gloriously typifies his aggressive, independent cast of mind: brought up as a Congregationalist, he later took to attending Quaker meetings though without ever becoming a member; he explained that he did not care for chapel services because he so often wanted to move an amendment to the sermon. ³