Comedian Jack’s shock at ancestor who tried to hang rebel
JACK WHITEHALL loves to tease his Tory-voting father Michael about politics in their TV double act.
But the comedian was less amused to discover an earlier ancestor was a ‘scumbag’ who caused the downfall of a Labour hero.
In an upcoming episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, Jack was stunned to find out that his great-great-great-greatgrandfather, Thomas Jones Phillips, played a key role in quashing a major Chartist rebellion in 1839.
Phillips arrested pro-democracy campaigner John Frost for leading the Newport Rising in South Wales. In one of the most controversial trials in legal history, Frost and his fellow ‘conspirators’ were then sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason. But after a public outcry, they were transported to Australia instead.
In the BBC1 series, which launches later this month, Whitehall and his father, an actors’ agent, barely hide their contempt for their ancestor.
Jack said he had hoped Phillips, a solicitor in Newport, might turn out to be a ‘low-level wrong ’un or a pen-pusher’. But by the end of the show, the star jokes that Phillips was instead the sort who might ‘burn down an orphanage’. The comic also learns that Phillips, a member of the Tory-supporting Newport True Blue Benefits Society, actively tried to stifle democratic change, including attempts to strip political opponents of their right to vote.
Whitehall describes his ancestor’s actions as ‘pioneering scumbaggery’ and sarcastically adds that he ‘sounds like a great guy trying to get people who would vote the opposite way to him unable to vote... That is not how you should run an election. That sounds like a dictatorship’.
But it is Phillips’s efforts in building a case against Frost that most horrified Whitehall. He said: ‘Our great ancestor is gathering evidence to bang up the guys who were fighting for the rights of workers in Wales. He has gone from being an officious windbag to being a full-blown snitch who is trying to stop a mob of people who are fighting for freedom.’
Phillips received a £100 reward for the arrest of John Frost, a tailor who became a leader of The Chartists, a group that sought universal suffrage. He was eventually pardoned and allowed to return to the UK, where he died in 1877 aged 93. To this day he is regarded as a hero of the Labour movement.