In spite of the cancellation of the 2020 Newport Chartist Convention, local research into Chartism continues.

Local historian Ray Stroud has recently completed a talk on a little known but significant Newport Chartist, Jenkin Morgan.

His talk can be viewed online on the Newport Rising website at www.newportrising.co.uk/news.

There will also be a live question and answer session with Mr Stroud through Zoom on April 22 at 7pm. Registration to join this session can also be done through the Newport rising website.

Here, Mr Stroud gives a brief outline of Jenkin Morgan’s story.

ALTHOUGH much has been written about John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones, little has been recorded of the lives of others involved in the Newport Rising. This includes Jenkin Morgan, a leading Pillgwenlly Chartist.

Morgan was a radical Chartist. He was a devoted disciple of Henry Vincent and was hell-bent on political revolution. Yet he spent his working day delivering milk on the streets of Pill.

He lived in Quay Street, what today is named Church Street, and was a relatively prosperous milkman, tallow chandler and soap boiler.

His role in the Newport Rising of 1839 is a fascinating one.

His power base was located in the closed, working-class community of Pillgwenlly with its beer shops, Chartist lodges and pike-making factories.

At Morgan’s trial, William Stephens, a pike-making blacksmith, testified that Morgan had also been involved in the manufacture of weapons.

Morgan had told his neighbour Frances Gibbon to expect bloodshed on the streets of Pill ‘before Sunday night’, and had spoken of a simultaneous rising across the kingdom.

As a captain of a ‘Section of Ten’, Morgan’s role was to signal the arrival of the ‘men of the hills’ into Newport on the morning of November 4 by discharging rockets from a field near Christchurch.

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He was also tasked with blowing up the bridge over the River Usk, using large amounts of gunpowder requisitioned from Aaron Crossfield’s warehouse at Cinderhill Wharf.

Of course, the Newport Rising failed and the bridge stayed intact.

In its immediate aftermath, Jenkin Morgan fled into Glamorgan, with a price of £100 on his head, and soon attempted to find sanctuary in London.

The manhunt that ensued witnessed his capture in the Bunch of Grapes public house in Bristol on November 14, just hours before his coach was to head out of the city on the Great West Road for London. He was brought back to Newport, where he appeared before magistrates, and was then sent to Monmouth gaol to await trial on charges of sedition and treason.

On January 15, 1840, Morgan changed his plea to guilty in the hope of a reduced sentence, but the following day a crowded courtroom witnessed the judges donning their black caps. And that Thursday evening, Morgan’s hayrick, located near the Sirhowy tramroad, and confiscated by his landlord Thomas Prothero, was set on fire in an act of political revenge.

But the execution never took place.

Morgan’s sentence was initially commuted to transportation for life, before being further reduced to five years in the Millbank Penitentiary in London.

At five o’clock on the morning of Friday February 28, 1840, Jenkin Morgan, together with Richard Benfield, John Lovell, John Rees and Charles Waters were removed from their cells in the county gaol at Monmouth and taken by the prison governor to Millbank.

Millbank was then the largest prison in Europe.

Arriving by boat, this edifice came to cast an enormous shadow over their lives. As he was led to his cell, Morgan would have encountered a very different system of penal control.

The prison was run using the ‘separate system’, where prisoners were kept in isolation. Even when taking daily exercise speaking was forbidden.

Much of Morgan’s day would have involved activities such as Oakum-picking – painstakingly recycling old tarred ropes and cordage.

Morgan’s health rapidly deteriorated. He lost the use of his leg, allegedly from the mistreatment of the prison doctor. The radical MP, Thomas Duncombe, said that the ‘miserable diet’ had reduced him to a physical shell, and that he was ‘dying by inches’.

This is a story of betrayal, retribution and suffering.

Eventually pardoned by Queen Victoria on May 10, 1844, he was soon to be described by Feargus O’Connor as a ‘Chartist scarecrow’. Everything he had once owned had been taken from him. He returned to Newport, but without a home to go to, he went to live with his brother, Evan in a village near Pyle in the Vale of Glamorgan.

And yet he remained a radical, committed to the cause of liberty.

The last record of his life is found in the Northern Star on January 29, 1848.

It advertised a dinner he was organising in Merthyr in memory of the English radical Thomas Paine. This would suggest that he remained a Chartist to the end.