...the blog of the Sandwell Abbey Ward Labour councillors.
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Well said!
And a Birmingham man, the Lunar Society member Joseph Priestley was the first scientist to isolate the chemical element Oxygen.
Priestley was known, as ‘Gunpowder Joe’ harking back to the Roman Catholic revolutionary times of the ‘Gunpowder Plot’ of 1605 where Catholic plotters led by Sir Thomas Catesby of Coughton Court near Alcester in Warwickshire tried to blow up Parliament and King James I.
The ‘Gunpowder Plot’ was largely West Midlands-based which has been forgotten over time.
The conspirators were hunted down and slaughtered at Holbeche House in Dudley after the Catholic plot was uncovered.
Priestley advocated ‘Revolution’ but not a Catholic revolution as those before him had done
He wanted ‘freedom of religious expression’ and advocated this religious freedom from his Unitarian preacher’s pulpit which he could do as Birmingham was a ‘Free City’ ……free for religion to be practised and free from the restrictive Guilds and arcane practices of the City of London, where Freemasonry, secrecy and corruption were rife at that time
These ‘Revolutions’ that Priestley promoted were just like those that had taken place in America and France at that time in the later eighteenth century, the time of ‘The Enlightenment’ of which Birmingham was a leader with those Lunar Men, Boulton and Watt, Wedgwood and Priestley, Withering and Benjamin Franklin , the American revolutionary thinker.
Priestley and his ‘incendiary ideas’ were driven from Birmingham in ‘The Priestley Riots’ of 1791…….
‘Gunpowder Joe’ fled to America and made his home in Maine where he continued to foment revolution in his home country from afar by writing pamphlets and encouraging revolutionary ideas and thought……He was no ‘Royalist’ as Birmingham was no ‘Royalist City’ being on the side of a Puritan Parliament during the English Civil War of the 1640’s which led to King Charles I being executed in 1649, over 100 years before the American and French Revolutions
A ‘Revolution’ did happen in Birmingham……. produced by his fellow ‘Lunartick James Watt….’Watt’s Revolution’……the Industrial Revolution based on the harnessing of steam power to drive machinery from those Watt engines made at Smethwick’s Soho Foundry, where Avery Weightronix is now….
Birmingham and Handsworth where the Lunar Society’s members met at Matthew Boulton’s home Soho House is the ‘Home of the Industrial Revolution’
Brilliant Birmingham and The Black Country…..where the Modern World was created by those Lunar Men!