Isaac Ironside

Born near Masbrough, Rotherham, Ironside grew up in Sheffield, the son of Samuel Ironside, a Wesleyan lay preacher, and Mary Bradbury. On both sides of the family there were roots in the Independent Church in Masbrough – Mary's grandfather Isaac Bradbury was well known as an "Old Jacobin". Isaac's younger brother Samuel Ironside travelled as a Methodist missionary to New Zealand, where he became a supporter and signatory of the Treaty of Waitangi.^[1] Isaac, meanwhile, moved into politics. He began work in the foundries and undertook studies in his spare time.^[2]

Soon after marrying in the 1820s, Ironside moved to New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Owen's utopian colony. However, the colony was not a success, and the couple returned to Sheffield.^[3] In 1833, he joined his father's new accountancy business, and by the 1840s came to run it.^[2]

A supporter of Chartism, Ironside joined the Sheffield Political Union in 1831 and worked as the campaign secretary for the Radical candidate Thomas Asline Ward, who stood for Sheffield in the 1832 general election, but was narrowly defeated. In 1833, he became a founder member of Sheffield's Mechanics Institute.^[2] He increasingly became a leading figure in Sheffield Chartism, and spoke alongside Ebenezer Elliott at a mass meeting in Paradise Square in 1838.^[4] However, with the defeat of the first Chartist petition, the local movement was split between supporters of and opponents of violence, and he increasingly stayed away from meetings.^[2]

During the late 1830s, Ironside took up phrenology, but soon abandoned it, as it was "not capable of rigid demonstration", and because many of its practitioners made implausible claims about it.^[5]

In 1839, poet James Montgomery had Ironside removed from his post as honorary secretary of the Institute after Ironside placed eight books dealing with socialism on the shelves. Montgomery also claimed that Ironside had encouraged subversion by opening a coffee room.^[6] Instead, Ironside worked with Owen, proposing agrarian communities, and opening a Hall of Science in Sheffield. He wrote a polemic attacking John Brindley and despite moving away from Owen, founded a Workers' Educational Institute at the Hall of Science in 1848.^[2]