Shedding light on life of unsung hero Thomas Spence

Jul 13 2010 by Ian Robson, The Journal

IAN ROBSON takes a look at one of the North East's unsung heroes.

WE’RE sitting in Alastair Bonnett’s office at Newcastle University and he’s telling me about political radical Thomas Spence.

You know, Thomas Spence. THE Thomas Spence. The man who ...

Got me there. He’s the man who, um, er, did something important once upon a time but you don’t know what it was.

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem.

Not for nothing, Professor Bonnett said, is Thomas Spence one of the North’s unknown heroes.

Famous in his lifetime, or infamous, depending on your point of view, the man has all but disappeared from the history books.

Only one image – a drawing – is known to have survived while the few books that have been written about him have been small press intended for academics.

His name is largely forgotten except by a loyal band of supporters anxious to preserve the knowledge of what he did.

Spence was a political radical, highly influential in his day, who rocked the establishment with his ideas.

Ideas like the rights of man, the rights of children, equality for women and common ownership of land.

Recently, following 10 years of campaigning by the Thomas Spence Trust, a plaque was put up to commemorate his birth at Newcastle quayside 260 years ago.

It is, said Londoner Prof Bonnett, a professor of geography but with a keen enthusiasm for history, the only memorial of which he is aware.

He said: “He’s a genuine unknown hero and there are not many of them left.

“When I came to the North East from London I came across the name of Thomas Spence.

“I thought I knew all the important figures in political history but I had never heard of him. As soon as I found out about him, I was fascinated.

“He was probably the first person to write about the rights of man and he was certainly the first person to write about the rights of children.

“This is someone who was a genuine original.

“A lot of political reformers were middle-class but Thomas Spence was a working-class hero.

“He was the poorest person you could imagine. He was born at Newcastle quayside, one of 19 children, and had to educate himself.

“He stayed poor as well. It was not a rags-to-riches story – it was a rags-to-rags story.

“The reason he stayed poor was because he stayed true to his principles.”

And what were those principles?

Spence believed no individual should own land but it should be held in common by small communities.

He believed in the abolition of the aristocracy, universal suffrage and a guarantee to provide income for those unable to work. And all of this was before words like socialism were coined.

Karl Marx was aware of his ideas, and may have been influenced by them, at the same time as his own contribution to political thought.

It was not long before Spence – who passed on his ideas in pamphlets and slogans on coins -– drew the attention of the authorities.

He was banned from the Newcastle Philosophical Society, the forerunner of the Lit and Phil, for selling one of his pamphlets.

And he had a very public fight with the famous engraver Thomas Bewick when they fell out over his views.

Prof Bonnett, founder of the Thomas Spence Society, a website dedicated to his memory, said: “One of Thomas Spence’s ideas was that land was a common treasury which was not to be divided up and given to individuals.

“They had an argument about that and fought each other in the street with cudgels.