Unlike the movement's more celebrated national leaders, these were artisans, for Chartism in the capital was “a sustained movement which produced its own leaders, stuck to its traditional radicalism yet worked out its own class attitudes”. tall, had emerged as one of the dozen or so most prominent leaders of the Chartist movement in London. It was a year when “magistrates trembled and peaceful citizens felt that they were living on a social volcano” - a year when one noble general wrote to his brother “It looks as if the falling of an empire was beginning.” Before long Cuffay, the neat, mild-mannered black tailor, 4ft 11in. In 1839 he joined the great movement in support of the People's Charter drawn up by the cabinet-maker William Lovett with the help of Francis Place, demanding universal male suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by secret ballot, payment of MPs, abolition of property qualifications for MPs, and equal electoral districts. As a result he was sacked from a job he had held for many years, and found it very hard to get work afterwards. Though he initially disapproved of the Owenite Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, formed in 1834 on the initiative of the London tailors, and was nearly the last to join the appropriate affiliated lodge, Cuffay came out on strike with his fellow-members in the Tailors' Strike of 1834 (1).

He married three times but left no children. He became a journeyman tailor in his late teens and stayed in that trade all his life. As a boy, though 'of a very delicate constitution' - his spine and shin bones were deformed - he 'took a great delight in all manly exercises'. William was brought up in Chatham with his mother and his sister Juliana. Soon after coming to Britain his father, who had evidently been freed, found work as a cook on a warship. William Cuffay was born in Chatham in 1788.

Staying Power by Peter Fryer