Robert George Gammage

[4][5] In June 1839, he walked the six miles from Northampton to the village of Brixworth in order to address a public meeting.

Despite this, Gammage recalled that attendance at the roadside assembly later that day amounted to several hundreds and the minister’s efforts to persuade the constable to arrest those addressing it were unsuccessful.

He then travelled through Bedford, Ampthill, Huntingdon and Cambridge to Hertford, where he stayed with friends, and made a visit to a cousin in Hatfield he had not seen since childhood.

He moved on to Sevenoaks and Maidstone, where he had another friend from Northampton, to Tonbridge, Lewes, Brighton, Chichester, Fareham, and Southampton.

[10] In Sheffield, he met the Chartist leader George Julian Harney, and in Leeds worked for seven weeks and addressed meetings there and in the surrounding townships.

He stopped briefly in Harrogate, where he had an introduction from his employer in Sherborne to a coach trimmer who had moved there from Dorset, and he finally arrived in Newcastle in September 1842.

It is clear that on his travels since Chelmsford, he had become increasingly active as a speaker, and in Newcastle he was advised to take up lecturing as a Chartist orator regularly.

Gammage travelled very extensively in the autumn of 1842 and in 1843, passing through the north west, the midlands, and the south to arrive in London by Christmas.

He remained in the north east for several months in early 1844, having developed links with radicals there, but returned to Northampton by the end of the year.

[1][11][12] Gareth Stedman Jones, writing in the 1980s, includes Gammage among the "first generation of Chartist historians", who "concentrated disproportionately upon rifts in organisation and the angry and divisive battles between leading personalities".