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| Election ad, the Mercury, 16 July 1858 |
A Photograph - Panoramic view of Hobart from Holy Trinity reveals what house originally stood at 42 Patrick St. before being demolished.
Thanks to Simon Cocker and the State Library of Tasmania for this discovery.
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| Close-up from Panorama - see original at http://catalogue.statelibrary.tas.gov.au/item/?id=NS2960-2-3 |
Dorothy Thompson obituary
Innovative historian who focused on the Chartist movement
Sheila Rowbotham
In 1945 Dorothy met the historian EP Thompson and they married after they both helped to build a railroad in Yugoslavia after the end of the second world war.
The historian Dorothy Thompson, who has died aged 87, was best known for her writing on the social and cultural aspects of the 19th-century Chartist movement. Her interest in the struggle of workers and women for rights had been awakened during her school days in suburban Bromley, Kent, when she was active in a communist youth group, and was deepened by her long engagement in radical politics. As a result she brought a complex understanding of the process of organising to her historical work.
Ever alert, Dorothy probed beneath the outer surface of evidence. The results were innovatory. The documents she edited in The Early Chartists (1971) brought to life the intense and dangerous interior world of working-class meetings, conventions and newspapers, while The Chartists (1984) revealed greatly neglected areas such as middle-class involvement, women's role and schemes for land settlements. Her collection Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation (1993) demonstrated a mix of exacting scholarship and conceptual clarity which led to her being admired by specialists and grateful A-level history students alike.
She was born Dorothy Towers in Greenwich, south-east London. From 1942 she studied history at Girton College, Cambridge, where she was active in the Communist party and attended meetings of the Communist party historians' group. In 1945 she began a lifelong love affair with a fellow historian, Edward Palmer (EP) Thompson. After helping to build the railroad in Tito's Yugoslavia, they married and settled in Halifax, West Yorkshire, where they taught in extramural adult education. Dorothy's first organisational endeavour was a campaign to keep wartime nurseries open in the late 1940s.
In 1956 she was part of the dissenting group in the Communist party which set up the socialist humanist journal the New Reasoner. Characteristically, her competence meant she was designated "business manager", though she also read through submitted manuscripts. The break with the Communist party was painful, but it also brought hope in the creation of a new left. Dorothy worked with the writers, artists, historians and trade unionists who were forming the new left clubs in many towns. Among those she admired were the Scottish miners' champion Lawrence Daly and the clothing worker Gertie Roche.
I met Dorothy in the early 1960s. Discussing history and ideas with her influenced me profoundly and I was intrigued to meet a woman who was a mother as well as an activist and intellectual. She had put aside her historical writing because she had three children, but she continued to teach in adult education and was active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Refusing to give up on the possibility of a new left network, she helped to draft the May Day Manifesto, which was published by Penguin in 1968. Later, in 1980, she helped to organise yet another attempt to bring the left together, the Leeds conference of grassroots movements which gathered after the publication of Beyond the Fragments, to which I contributed.
In 1982 she edited the collection Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against the Bomb, which grew out of her activism in the movement for European nuclear disarmament. Her essay in the book Defend Us Against Our Defenders echoed Juvenal. It was an urgent plea for democracy and toleration, and she insisted: "Every one of us is involved."
From 1968 Dorothy worked in the history department at Birmingham University; a popular, conscientious and demanding teacher, she inspired an impressive cohort of graduates. Some would contribute to a collection of essays in her honour, The Duty of Discontent, in 1995. The title was taken from a lecture by the Chartist poet Thomas Cooper. He, too, was writing after seeing his earlier hopes for radical change thwarted and it epitomised not only Dorothy's approach to history but her critical political engagement.
Accustomed to resistance against the odds, as she grew older she continued doggedly to look for ways of encouraging democracy, equality and free inquiry in every aspect of political and cultural life. Indomitable, intellectually tough, sharp in opposition, if Dorothy could be fierce, she was in equal measure inordinately kind. She was ever open to new people and unstinting in giving her time to others. Many guests from around the world were welcomed by her, first at the Thompsons' home in Halifax, and then in Leamington and Worcester. Her wit and mischief made conversing with her fascinating and fun.
For Dorothy, the duty of discontent was always sustained by her zest for life and communion with others. In her 80s she was still writing and giving lectures, keeping in touch with a vast network of friends, conferring about politics and being an active grandmother.
Edward died in 1993. She is survived by her three children, Ben, Mark and Kate, and by five grandchildren.
• Dorothy Katharine Gane Thompson, historian, born 30 October 1923; died 29 January 2011
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| This protected house stands close to where Cuffay lived in1858 at 42 Patrick St Hobart |
