Friday 22 August 2014

TYNESIDE SONS


HERITAGE OPEN DAYS 2014

TYNESIDE SONS: A CELEBRATION OF THOMAS SPENCE & THOMAS BEWICK

Join the Thomas Spence Trust and Northern Voices Community Projects in marking and celebrating the bicentenary of Thomas Spence (1750-1814). On September 11th 2014, poems, stories and songs will be performed at the site of the Spence plaque on Broad Garth at 14.00 and then readings from his work and that of his friend and sparring partner Thomas Bewick with poems and songs inspired by both of them will be performed at the Red House, Newcastle at 19.30 (over 18s only).

HERITAGE OPEN DAYS THURSDAY 11TH TO SUNDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 2014

TYNESIDE SON: THOMAS SPENCE 1750-1814

A display of books and documents to mark the bicentenary of Newcastle born Thomas Spence who died in London in 1814. 

Level 6, Newcastle City Library, Charles Avison Building, 33 New Bridge Street West, Newcastle upon Tyne.



http://www.made-in-britain.org.uk/directory/north-east-odes-and-pit-poems-by-northern-voices-community-projects



Breviary Stuff is pleased to announce...
Thomas Spence: The Poor Man's Revolutionary
Edited by Alastair Bonnett & Keith Armstrong
paperback • 156x234mm • ISBN 978-0-9570005-9-9
*To be published in September 2014.
2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of an important and original voice in the history of radicalism: Thomas Spence. Spence described himself as ‘the poor man’s advocate’ but he may equally be described as ‘the poor man’s revolutionary’, for what he advocated was a dramatic over-turning of the existing social order.
Perhaps Spence can be best summed up one of the inscriptions he placed on one of his self-minted coins, the coin his friends chose to place in his coffin. It depicts a cat. It stares straight out at us, around it the words, ‘IN SOCIETY LIVE FREE LIKE ME’. Spence wasn’t interested in compromise, with reforms and half-freedoms. He was stubborn. Contemporaries described him as ‘querulous’ and ‘single-minded’. One obituary also observed he was ‘despised’, yet ‘not despicable’.
But who was Thomas Spence? And why did he excite such passions? This collection of essays seeks to go some way to find answers to these questions. It offers a series of insights from contemporary experts on different aspects of Spence’s life and times. We are also delighted to be publishing some pamphlets by Spence himself, including Property in Land Every One’s Right, which has not been in print since it first appeared over 230 years ago.
Spence’s story is a rags to rags tale of defiance and ingenuity. Today Spence’s name is little known but this in no way reflects his significance. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century it was synonymous with ultra-radical opinion. Thomas Spence was the subject of four contemporary biographical memoirs. Moreover, three years after his death an Act of Parliament was passed prohibiting ‘All societies or clubs calling themselves Spencean or Spencean Philanthropists’. Spenceanism appears to be unique: it has a good claim to be the only political ideology to have ever been outlawed by the British Parliament.
Spence’s scheme for local and democratic ownership of the land found a receptive audience within sections of the labouring poor. In 1817 Thomas Malthus observed that, ‘an idea has lately prevailed among the lower classes of society that the land is the people’s farm, the rent of which ought to be divided equally among them’. This, in a nutshell, is ‘Spence’s Plan’. It sounds simple but it carried profound economic claims. It was a message spread more by way of tavern meetings, chalked graffiti and ballads than by published treatise.
In 1787 Spence moved to London, setting up a bookshop on Chancery Lane. He plunged himself into the capital’s turbulent radical sub-culture. He sold Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and went to prison for doing so. But he disagreed with Paine on a number of fundamental issues. Paine had no qualms about private property in land. Spence began issuing a penny weekly, Pigs’ Meat or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, which could hardly have been more inflammatory. Spence was taking considerable risks in a dangerous city: spies, threats and conspiracy swirled around him.
Spence’s wish for ‘perfect freedom’ often took him one step further than his peers. He accorded women equal democratic rights. For the time it was a daring idea but Spence went even further. For what about the rights of children? Spence’s The Rights of Infants no doubt provoked more than a few incredulous smiles when it was published in 1796. Yet cruelty towards children was a topic Spence returned to time and again and it is fitting that today he is cited as one of the world’s first champions of children’s rights.
He was an angry man, a revolutionary and an insurrectionist but he was anchored by humanitarian concerns and a wide-ranging, omnivorous, interest in the betterment of his fellows. In this book we hope to go some way in retrieving Spence, of bringing him before a new generation.




Breviary Stuff Publications 
BCM Breviary Stuff 
London WC1N 3XX

Tuesday 19 August 2014

THE CENTURION

















































THE LIGHT IN THE CENTURION


I drink the sun,
I booze the moon,
I throw planets down my neck.
In the Centurion bar,
a thirst rages
for the sunshine in my jar,
the songs in my roaring throat.
This beautiful day,
cascade of ale,
chorus of clouds
flooding through the roof,
I think
I am very much alive.
My blood is full
as the Tyne in heat,
as the veins of Neville Street
coursing
with my misspent hours.
This temple
of Bacchus,
this church of drunkenness,
fills my head
with poems,
my eyes
alive with comely lasses,
the gleam of full and emptied glasses.
An old man sits
remembering
when he could run after them,
when he could
drink a vat of beer in anger.
Near him,
there’s Susan
who is going places,
who is bonny as the sky today.
Friends, don’t be too sad,
this life is fleeting,
this love is deep
like the light,
the light in the Centurion.



KEITH ARMSTRONG


WITH JACK DANIEL IN THE CENTURION

(for Jason)


It had been a long wait,
through difficult seasons,
months of dull days
lit only by cackling Geordie girls
and the odd artistic lady
with eyes like paintings.
No sign of Jack
off the train
though I knew
he was well worth waiting for.
Then all of a sudden,
with a flourish
and melting of ice,
he came
and soaked the room
with his impeccable taste,
a bitter wit that warmed your soul
in a state of Tennessee.
The Centurian
can be a lonely place
to pass the time
with only your own
aches and pains
for primitive company.
Jack could change all that,
burst open the door
to an altered
consciousness,
make the barmaids dance
for you
and the rest
of the human race.
Jack, you are a good friend,
fickle though you are.
I shake your open hand
and give you my true respect.
You are comradeship
in a sunny glass.
I wish you well,
a big well,
a fount
of joyful
kindness.



KEITH ARMSTRONG

Wednesday 6 August 2014

ST. MARY'S ISLAND, WHITLEY BAY



FRIENDS OF ST. MARY’S ISLAND


Around the low water mark,
kelp beds grow.
Network of rockpools,
boulder shore.

Long-legged bar-tailed godwit,
expert
at finding
mud and sand-living worms.

Seabed of rocky reefs,
shipwrecks dived within and around.
Wrasse and lumpsucker.
Seashore Code.

Remembered rambles,
geology jaunts.
Soft coral communities.
Relic dunes.































THE BEACON



A St. Mary’s Light
incandescent
with rage.
A three ton lens,
balanced
on a trough of mercury,
kept revolving,
round the gas mantle,
by a simple pendulum 
wound up
on the hour.
A climb
up 137 steps,
inside the 120 foot tower,
a hiss of flame,
clamping 
of a prism
constantly
turning.
Since medieval times,
across the ocean fields,
this beacon 
has burned,
blinking
on the drink.
Years sailed by,
memories
of shipwrecks,
of Russian soldiers
cholera-wracked
in 1799,
of the ‘Gothenburg City’
and rats with chewed tails.
These heartbreaking waves,
the illumination
of shafts of history:
the rays
and days
of a shining Empire
sunk.




KEITH ARMSTRONG