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John Cleave | |
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| Born | 1790 |
| Died | 1847 |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Printer, newspaper publisher |
John Cleave (born circa 1790) was a British, London based Chartist leader, a printer and newspaper publisher.
Born of Irish stock, as a young boy John Cleave went to sea and is first documented for his political activities as late as 1828, in London, working to assist Henry Hetherington at the Civil & Religious Association.
A few years later in 1831 Cleave was a printer at Snow Hill in London then at Shoe Lane where he also operated a bookshop and coffee house alongside his printing business. Cleave was now working on The Poor Man's Guardian along with Henry Hetherington and James Watson.
In 1834 he felt ready to start his own newspaper Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette which as well as reporting on recent crimes also contained a political campaigning and reform element within its pages, a combination that was very successful, being sold to over 40,000 avid readers per week by 1836.
Cleave was refusing to pay stamp duty on his newspaper, in line with other radical publishers and pamphleteers, which of course brought him into conflict with the authorities who levied fines and wanted such seditious radicals imprisoned. It was the view of radical publishers that a free press was vital to social, political and moral improvement and that the government were oppressing the people's firmly held beliefs and rights to communicate. The law was gradually reformed and the fourpenny tax on newspapers was reduced to one-penny and pamphlets had their tax removed altogether.
Also in 1836 Cleave joined forces with William Lovett and Henry Hetherington to form the new London Working Men's Association. He was soon to be closely involved in the National Charter Association too, and was its first Treasurer. In 1837 Cleave accompanied Henry Vincent, a gifted younger orator and emerging Chartist leader, on a speaking tour of northern England where the two men initiated the establishment of Working Men's Associations in northern cities such as Leeds, Kingston upon Hull, and towns such as Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield. The two men formed strong bonds during this time and Henry Vincent was later to marry Cleave's daughter Lucy in 1841.
In the 1840s as the National Charter Association divided over policy differences and the careers of the early leaders ran their differing courses Cleave sided with the moderate moral force Chartists alongside William Lovett and continued to work for universal suffrage and the complete removal of stamp duty from all newspapers until his death in 1847.
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Chartism was a large working-class movement for political reform in Britain that erupted from 1838 to 1857 and was strongest in 1839, 1842 and 1848. It was fiercely opposed by government authorities who finally suppressed the movement. It took its name from the People's Charter of 1838 and was a national protest movement, with particular strongholds of support in Northern England, the East Midlands, the Staffordshire Potteries, the Black Country, and the South Wales Valleys. Support for the movement was at its highest when petitions signed by millions of working people were presented to the House of Commons. The strategy employed was to use the scale of support which these petitions and the accompanying mass meetings demonstrated to put pressure on politicians to concede manhood suffrage. Chartism thus relied on constitutional methods to secure its aims, though some became involved in insurrectionary activities, notably in South Wales and in Yorkshire.
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The Poor Man's Guardian was a penny weekly newspaper published in London, England by Henry Hetherington from July 1831 to December 1835.
Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette was a British weekly newspaper published by John Cleave between 1834 and 1836. It was "one of the first and most popular unstamped newspapers to mix political news with coverage of non-political events like sensational crimes, strange occurrences, and excerpts from popular fiction".
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Richard Moore (1810–1878) was an English radical politician. He was a moderate Chartist, and heavily involved in the campaign against "taxes on knowledge".
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