William Benbow

William Benbow (1787 – 1864) was a nonconformist preacher, pamphleteer, pornographer and publisher, and a prominent figure of the Reform Movement in Manchester and London. He worked with William Cobbett on the radical newspaper Political Register, and spent time in prison as a consequence of his writing, publishing and campaigning activities. He has been credited with formulating and popularising the idea of a General Strike for the purpose of political reform.

Benbow was born on 5 February 1787 in Middlewich, Cheshire, son of William Benbow, shoemaker, and his wife Hannah (née Chear). His early employment history is unknown, but McCalman describes him as an ex-soldier. By 1808 he was preaching Nonconformist sermons in the Newton area of Manchester, and evidence suggests he may have been a Quaker. He appears as "William Benbow, of Manchester, shoemaker" in a list of the leading reformers of Lancashire in 1816. When interviewed in Chester gaol in 1841, where he was serving a sentence for sedition, he described himself as a married shoemaker with three sons, and gave his religion as Baptist.

Benbow attended political meetings in London during 1816 as a delegate of one of the Lancashire Hampden Clubs, and became interested in Spenceanism. He was closely involved with planning the attempted Blanketeers protest march by Lancashire weavers in March 1817 and was one of a number of radicals arrested in the wake of this event and the subsequent severe crackdown by the authorities, amidst rumours that mass uprisings were being plotted in industrial centres like Manchester. His protest petition to Parliament in 1818, presented along with a number of others, describes how he was apprehended in Dublin on 16 May 1817, spent eight months on remand in London, then was released without trial, lacking the resources to travel home to Manchester. He established himself as a political radical in London, where he was an associate of William Cobbett and passed his time "agitating the labouring classes at their trades meetings and club-houses" according to the memoirs of the Manchester radical Samuel Bamford, who also spent several months in the Coldbath Fields Prison in London and petitioned Parliament unsuccessfully for redress.

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