Westgate Bridge / Westgate Hotel

At 11:50am on October 15, 1970 33 workers were killed when a section of the Westgate Bridge, under construction in Melbourne, collapsed. The bridge connects Port Melbourne with the suburb of Newport, and more generally, western Melbourne with the remainder of the city. Western Melbourne has long been the home of much of Melbourne’s industry, and many of the residents of the region worked in the local factories.

That the bridge connects the west of Melbourne with the remainder has always satisfied me as a reason for the name ‘Westgate’. I was surprised, then, to find an altogether more meaningful reason for the name, that I can only presume was the real reason.

On the 4th of November 1839 John Frost and an estimated 3,000 or so men and women marched to Newport, in Wales, where they attempted to free Chartists who had been arrested and held in the Westgate Hotel. This, it is thought, was to be the beginning of an uprising, to take control of government and implement the terms of the Charter – 6 points that broadly paint the picture of democracy as we know it today. Some twenty of the protesters were killed that day, and another fifty or so were injured.

Peculiarly, considering that eventually all the reforms in the Charter have been implemented, Chartism is seen to have failed. It certainly did not achieve its aims overnight. But, on the other hand, if the subsequent political developments amount to failure, then that’s a pretty good kind of failure to have.

It is true that socialist Chartism did not get its socialism, proletarian Chartism did not get its communism. (These are Engels’ categories.) But the Charter itself was implemented, and as Engels has it (1892), that looks pretty much like success:

 Of the legal enactments, placing the workman at a lower level or at a disadvantage with regard to the master, at least the most revolting were repealed. And, practically, that horrid [this is Engels using irony, in the context of the rest of the article] ‘People’s Charter’ actually became the political programme of the very manufacturers who had opposed it to the last. ‘The Abolition of the Property Qualification’ and ‘Vote by Ballot’ are now the law of the land. The Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 make a near approach to ‘universal suffrage,’ at least such as it now exists in Germany; the Redistribution Bill now before Parliament creates ‘equal electoral districts’ — on the whole not more unequal than those of Germany; ‘payment of members,’ and shorter, if not actually ‘annual Parliaments,’ are visibly looming in the distance — and yet there are people who say that Chartism is dead.¹

1. Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1892, Preface to the English Edition [↩]