24/05/2025
Kate has had a passion for family history since her late teens, and has spent endless hours tracing her own ancestors at the Lancashire Archives in Preston.
In 2015 and 2016, she was commissioned by Wall-To-Wall Television to provide some information relating to the episode of Who Do You Think You Are? about Sir Ian McKellen. The following year, she appeared on Clitheroe-based Ribble FM to talk about her work, and contributed a short article for Family Tree Magazine's feature on regional family history societies in December 2017.
During 2018 she provided long-term research for a Yale University project centred on bills of exchange issued in Britain between c.1750 and 1850.
Her talk will be an overview of a time in East Lancashire’s history when the wages of domestic handloom weavers were being cut as factory-based textile production became more dominant. Struggling to survive, the weavers organised a protest in April 1826, and the mill owners responded by calling in soldiers to deal with what they considered to be a “riot”.
Rather than concentrate on everything that happened during that week, her talk will concentrate on events in the Accrington/Oswaldtwistle area, Blackburn, Chorley, Clitheroe, Haslingden and Chatterton (near Ramsbottom), where six people were killed by the soldiers.
Date: 4th June 2025
Wednesday 7.30pm
The Weavers' Uprising of 1826
Speaker: Kate Hurst
Meeting at Great Lever & Farnworth Golf Club & Online via Zoom
Attendance in person at Great Lever & Farnworth Golf Club - no booking required
Zoom - Booking required - ticketets now available via Eventbrite
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-weavers-uprising-of-1826-tickets-1128881066659
Members of MLFHS – free, Non-Members of MLFHS - £5
Please note: All events are subject to last minute changes due to circumstances beyond our control. Please check our monthly Newsletter and page for any last minute changes, as that is the only way we can contact people.
