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There is currently one researcher who has claimed John Stanfield
Biographies
Famous as one of the tolpoddle Marters - John is the son of Thomas Stanfield - also sentenced.
Tolpuddle Martyrs were six English farm labourers. They were unhappy with their wages and working conditions, so tried to improve them by asking for an increase in their weekly pay.
Their leaders, George and James Loveless (or Lovelace), had established a lodge of the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers during the great national wave of trade-union activity in 1833–34.
The Whig government, alarmed at the dimensions of working-class discontent, arrested six Tolpuddle labourers—the Loveless brothers, James Brine, Thomas Stanfield and his son John, and James Hammett—ostensibly for administering unlawful oaths but actually for combining to protect their already meagre wages. Convicted and sentenced by a hostile judge and jury, the six men became popular heroes.
These were sentenced (March 1834) to seven years' transportation to a penal colony in Australia for organizing trade-union activities in the Dorsetshire village of Tolpuddle.
There were protests at their sentencing and uprising quickly spread across the south of England and through Dorset. 600 rioters were imprisoned, 500 sentenced to transportation and 19 executed.
After three years, during which the trade union movement sustained the Martyrs' families by collecting voluntary donations, the government relented and the men returned home with free pardons and as heroes.
What happened to the Tolpuddle Martyrs after their transportation?
Five of the "Martyrs" were shipped in appalling conditions to New South Wales, where they were assigned as convict labour to landowners. George Loveless, delayed by illness after the Trial, later went in chains to Tasmania. They did not return to England until three years after their infamous Trial.
This was the beginning of Trade Unionism in England. It only took the jury five minutes to convict James Hammett, James Brine, brothers George and James Loveless, and father and son Thomas and John Standfield. Interestingly, the local magistrate was a factory owner who stood to lose if they got their way.
Public reaction throughout the country made the six into popular heroes, and in 1836, after continual agitation, the sentence against the so-called “Tolpuddle Martyrs” was finally remitted. Only one of the six returned to Tolpuddle; the rest emigrated to Canada, where this Tolpuddle Martyr–John Standfield–became mayor of his district. The popular movement surrounding the Tolpuddle controversy is generally regarded as the beginning of trade unionism in Great Britain.
https://www.tolpuddlemartyrs.org.uk/story
Submitted by Researcher (14183) on 7 October 2021
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There are currently no research notes attached to this convict. Sources
- The National Archives (TNA) : HO 11/9, p.333
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