HOLBERRYS: A Play for Sheffield and Newport by Chris Searle

Holberrys is a play about two Sheffield Chartists, Samuel and Mary Holberry, who helped organise the betrayed ‘physical force’ insurrection in the city in January 1840.
Samuel, a distillery worker, former agricultural worker and ex-soldier who had served in Ireland in the suppression of the Ribbonmen rebellion in 1833, and his wife Mary, were at the centre of militant campaigning and planning the rebellion.

Their plans were divulged, with Samuel sentenced to four years imprisonment in prisons in Northallerton and York, where he suffered on the treadmill and died of consumption in 1842 at the age of 27. A hero of his time to working people, over 50,000 people attended his funeral procession in Sheffield.

The Holberrys’ story is lavishly illustrated using dramatic photographs taken by photographer Ron McCormick during a school children’s re-enactment of the Chartist rising in Newport, South Wales in November 1839.
'HOLBERRYS' dramatises the lives of Samuel and Mary and their years in Sheffield, ever a city of resistance and struggle. Its author, Chris Searle, is a lifelong teacher. It is a play for both the stage and the classroom, telling of an important episode, rarely remembered, in British history, through the eyes of an ordinary working class family in 1840s Sheffield.

Chris Searle has written or edited over fifty books on subjects as diverse as education, poetry, language, journalism, cricket and jazz. Among them The Foresaken Lover (which won the Martin Luther King Award in 1973), Classrooms of Resistance, The World in a Classroom, Words Unchained: Language and Revolution in Grenada, and Forward Groove.  He writes a weekly jazz column for the socialist daily newspaper, the Morning Star. In 1971 he collaborated with Ron McCormick to produce Stepney Words, the influential book of schoolchildren's poetry, followed by many other Art & Poetry projects in London's East End, most recently Stepney Words lll (commissioned by Rich Mix, the Shoreditch media arts centre, 2017).

Ron McCormick is widely known for his photographs of Whitechapel and other communities ranging from Oldham to Southend on Sea and most recently, Newport in South Wales. He is widely published, exhibited and is represented in several international survey directories of photography including 'Contemporary Photographers' Pub. St James’ Press, New York 1995. 'POST-WAR TO POST-MODERN: A Dictionary of Artists in Wales' Gomer Press, Wales, 2015
'NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY: Photography in Britain 1967-1987' Hayward Publishing, London, 2007, 'PHOTOGRAPHY OF PROTEST AND COMMUNITY:The Radical Collectives of the 1970s' Lund Humphries, London 2020, and, 'ANOTHER COUNTRY: British Documentary Photographysince 1945' Thames & Hudson, London 2022

Published October 2023 by CULTURE MATTERS 

Softcover
96 pages with 36  colour illustrations,
148 x 209mm,
£12 plus £4 P&P