Quaker’s plea to Czar to avert war

The death of Robert Charleton 150 years ago was much regretted by people in Bristol and Kingswood as the loss of a philanthropist and generous employer. Looked at in 2022, though, perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was his plea to an aggressive Russian ruler to prevent a war. Eugene Byrne has the story

NEVER was there a more hopeful man than Mr Charleton; with him there was ‘a silver lining to every cloud.’ Thus, when on one occasion there was a very small congregation, Mr Charleton, on taking the chair, began in a cheerful and playful way by observing, “Friends, it is better to have a small meeting for a good object, than a large meeting to promote a bad purpose.”

Thomas Hudson’s pen-portrait of Robert Charleton in his book Temperance Pioneers of the West goes on to note that his optimism reached its peak in 1854 when he and two other men travelled to Russia in an attempt to prevent a war.

Robert Charleton (1809–1872) was well-known in Bristol in his lifetime. He was a Quaker, pacifist, temperance campaigner and, by all accounts, model employer. He ran that most Victorian of enterprises, a pin factory.

He was one of three sons of James Charleton (1780-1847), a wealthy

Quaker businessman. (His interests involved sugar refining, and, in view of the times, he may have profited from slave labour.)

Robert’s two brothers, his only siblings, died in a shipwreck and his mother died when he was 17. His father remarried and Robert got along well enough with his stepmother to continue living in the family home on Ashley Hill. Indeed, he would go on to marry his stepmother’s niece, Catherine Brewster Fox, in 1849.

James Charleton was well-known in Bristol as a philanthropist and supporter of charities and his son would continue his work. Although he trained as a land surveyor, he took over a pin factory in Kingswood as a young man and continued to run it until his retirement in 1852.

The building is long since gone, but it was on the north side of Two Mile Hill, close to the junction with New Queen Street.

In its time it was one of the biggest factories in the neighbourhood. A factory inspection in 1841

Russia Czar Nicholas I, whose attempts to aggressively expand his empire resulted in a war which Charleton tried to prevent

Robert Charleton in an engraving from a biography published after his death

stated that it employed 110 women and girls along with 50 men and boys. A workforce that size did not make for a particularly large enterprise, but what mattered to hundreds of families in the area was that he also employed around 500 ‘out-workers,’ almost all of them female, who put the heads on the pins and sharpened them.

The Kingswood boot and shoe industry operated on similar lines, with many people working from home on various aspects of production. Pin-making had long been an established industry in the Kingswood area, with a number of small factories and hundreds of outworkers employed by other makers.

Charleton was one of the first manufacturers in the country to adopt modern machinery, some of it designed by James Lusty, an engineer he employed. A visitor to the factory wrote: “The sight was exceedingly pretty. In some machines the bright little pins were seen dropping very regularly into a basket, two or three per second. After being ‘headed,’ the sparkle accompanying them appeared like little drops of liquid. Others again, were carried from around the heading apparatus, to the receiver, in wheels looking like so many little stars.”

Hot water from the steam

engines at the factory was run off to a couple of nearby ponds, and an elderly man later recalled that “it was great sport among the local lads to strip off to wash and jump around in this.”

Here he put his principles into practice, and he was known for treating his employees well, and (this being Victorian times) factory staff were even allowed to sing as they worked – provided they were only singing hymns.

Being a model employer by the standards of the time also meant taking great care to ensure the moral welfare of the staff; so male and female employees were kept in strict separation, and swearing would land you with a 3d fine.

He also saw to the education of the local children, helping to pay for the running of schools at Kingswood and Oldland Common. He also gave financial support to a school on Redcross Street.

The business never greatly interested him, and it was said that he ran it at a loss for some years rather than see the workers unemployed. His real interests were in other areas. He was one of the most prominent campaigners against drink in Bristol, and one of the first temperance advocates to recommend complete abstinence from all alcohol – teetotalism.

He was equally opposed to the

Contagious Diseases Act of 1866, which allowed police to arrest any woman suspected of being a ‘common prostitute,’ carry out a compulsory medical examination and forcibly confine her in a hospital for sexually-transmitted diseases.

He lectured on these subjects and others, including theological issues, around Britain and Ireland, but his most famous adventure was in travelling to St Petersburg, along with fellow Quakers Henry Pease and Joseph Sturge, in the middle of winter, to present the Czar with an address begging him not to go to war with France and Britain.

As Quakers, the three men were opposed to war of any description, and their journey from Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) to St Petersburg in 1854 was done on sleighs, an expedition which required 300 horses posted in relays along the route.

Once in the St Petersburg, where the Czar was residing, they managed to get a meeting with his chief minister, Count Nesselrode, who secured them an audience with the Russian ruler on February 10.

They read the address from the Society of Friends, praying the Emperor, “in the name of that Christianity which was alike his religion and theirs, to avert the horrors of war by adopting some other means than those of bloodshed to heal the wounds between him and other sovereigns”.

The Czar was courteous, but spoke of how war was being forced on him by hostile powers, though the truth of the matter was that the Russian empire was aggressively expanding (remind you of a more recent Russian autocrat?) They then met the Empress and their daughter, the Grand Duchess Olga.

The Czar later sent a written reply to the Society of Friends in England.

The Quakers’ mission was not kindly received in Britain, with MPs and ministers lining up to say it was not the business of private individuals to meddle in the affairs of state, no matter how noble their intentions.

In any event, the mission was a predictable enough failure. Russia’s land-grabbing at the expense of the declining Ottoman Turkish empire prompted Britain and France to declare war weeks later.

The conflict, known to history as the Crimean War, would be the biggest that Britain had been engaged in for decades, and ended in defeat for Russia, though at a huge cost in the lives of soldiers on both sides.

Charleton, who had given up running his factory, continued his charitable work – including the opening of a Temperance Hall at Lawrence Hill – and lecturing for some years. By the mid-1860s, however, he was suffering from a cancer that made it difficult for him to leave his home. He was said to have endured the illness with great courage for several years before he finally died at his Ashley Hill home on December 5 1872. He left a wife and 12 year-old son as well as some children he had adopted.