Robert Lowery, 1809-1863 Newcstle radical and delegate to the First Chartist Convention
Robert Lowery was Newcastle's delegate to the General Convention of the Industrious Classes and one of 12 delegates whose portrait (left) was drawn for The Charter newspaper.
By the time of the 1839 Chartist convention, Robert Lowery had already established a reputation for himself in the radical politics of Tyneside.
He had been secretary of the local political union at the time of the Great Reform Act agitation of 1831 to 1832, and had gone on to serve as secretary to the tailors' branch of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union. When Chartism came along, Lowery clearly saw no problems in transferring his energies to this new cause.
Having given up his work as a tailor to open a political bookshop, he was already in effect a full-time radical politician, and was well known in Newcastle. At the end of 1837, he was to be found addressing a large meeting in the Assembly Rooms in support of the Glasgow spinners imprisoned for their trade union activities (Northern Liberator, 30 December, 1837).
He was also a driving force behind the reformation of the Northern Political Union, which would later form the nucleus of organised Chartism (Northern Liberator, 15 September 1838). His election as Newcastle's delegate was, therefore, little surprise.
Lowery was at first a relative hard-liner in the Convention. He supported – and spoke in favour of – the plan for a general strike to press home the demand for the Charter when Parliament rejected the petition, arguing that such a move would bring confrontation to a head. During the spring of 1839, Lowery was sent to the West Country as a “missionary” to agitate for the Charter.
Over the course of the rest of that year, Lowery played an active part within the Convention and as a missionary, visiting Dublin and the Scottish lowlands, as well as making return trips to the North East, to argue the case for Chartism. He also appears to have known about the planned rising that ended so disastrously in Newport, even if he himself was sceptical about its prospects.
Lowery remained faithful to the Chartist cause, and in the general election of 1841 (unsuccessfully) contested Edinburgh as a Chartist candidate. As time went on, however, Lowery's adherence to a brand of Teetotal Chartism gradually lost its radical edge and he opened a temperance hotel. At one stage he also moved to the United States, where his daughter Sarah and her husband had emigrated.
Lowery would however, continue to involve himself in Newcastle politics, aligning himself at first with the emerging Tyneside radical leader Joseph Cowen before joining the mainstream of the new Liberal Party. He had travelled a long way politically in a relatively short life, and died aged just 54.