WILLIAM CUFFAY, the black leader of London Chartism in 1848, is a well-known figure in British history thanks in part to the pioneering work done by the later Peter Fryer with his book Staying Power.

There is now a good deal more research and published history about black people in Britain going back at least to Tudor times. Yet it remains the case that little is known about a black presence in the Chartist movement.

The presence of black workers who had come to Britain on navy or merchant ships, servants and others, meant there was a considerable black population in Victorian Britain.

The wider context of that is colonialism. Corinne Fowler’s new book, Our Island Stories, tells the story of the impact of the slave trade in the British countryside through a series of walks. One of these takes in Tolpuddle.

From the early 17th century, Dorset people were despatched to Barbados to work on plantations. However, by the 1830s they had long been replaced by African slave labour. The profits from the plantations made land-owning families wealthy, but not of course the people who worked their land in the county.

The key plantation owner in Dorset was the Drax family whose land in Barbados produced sugar using slave labour. The Drax plantation still exists, although, no thanks to the family, the slaves have gone. The current owner, Richard Drax, has refused all attempts by anti-racism campaigners to address his family’s past and present.

James Frampton was the Tolpuddle magistrate and landowner who was responsible for the prosecution of the Tolpuddle labourers. He was concerned that a union would hit profits. He had married into a family who owned plantations in Antigua.

The martyrs were framed, found guilty and transported to Australia. Frampton had sought the advice of the home secretary Lord Melbourne on how to successfully prosecute the Tolpuddle men. The foreman of the jury was the home secretary’s brother-in-law.

Once in Australia, one of the martyrs, James Hammett, was set to work for the colonial administrator of New South Wales Edward John Eyre.

A campaign saw the martyrs returned to Britain. Meanwhile, by the early 1840s Eyre had been appointed as Protector of Aborigines in south-east Australia. Suffice to say protection of colonial interests was his priority not those of the indigenous population who he described as “savage hordes.”

Eyre was promoted, acting as governor of New Zealand from 1846-53 and then of the Caribbean island of St Vincent to 1860. By 1865 Eyre was in charge of Jamaica. While slavery had officially ended, conditions for labourers on the plantations remained appalling. Protests were organised, and in 1865, Eyre imposed martial law. At least 1,000 Jamaicans were tortured and some were executed in what is known as the Morant Bay rebellion.

Eyre was recalled to Britain but was never prosecuted. Rather he was able to live out the remainder of his life on a modestly reduced colonial governor’s pension on his Devonshire estate. He died in 1901.

The links between the attempts to resist trade union activity in Britain and the colonial slavery regimes, often owned by the same people, have been too little explored. While the Tolpuddle men were certainly not slaves, exploitation for profit at home and abroad was the name of the game for people like James Frampton.

It is far from just history either. At the July 4 election Richard Drax, who was the long-standing Tory MP for a Dorset constituency lost his seat to Labour. A small victory for the six men of Tolpuddle even if it did take 190 years!

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on X @kmflett.