Feargus O'Connor

Russian revolutionary democrats 1796–1855 ○ Natural causes

Irish Chartist leader, publisher of the Northern Star and organiser of the 1848 Kennington Common meeting

Born in 1796 into a prominent Irish Protestant family in County Cork, he was elected MP for County Cork as a Repeal candidate in 1832 and in 1837 founded the Northern Star at Leeds, which became the voice of Chartism. Touring mass meetings in the north of England, he became the movement's foremost leader and was sentenced to 18 months in 1840. In 1846 he founded the Chartist Cooperative Land Company to settle workers on smallholdings. Elected MP for Nottingham in 1847, he organised the Kennington Common meeting of April 1848 and presented a petition said to bear six million signatures, but when the procession was ruled illegal he asked the crowd to disperse; a Commons committee counted fewer than two million genuine signatures. After striking fellow MPs in 1852 he was confined to an asylum, and he died in London in 1855.

Also known as: Feargus Edward O'Connor