and obstructions, Plimsoll turned for support to the Nation. I think modelling his campaign on people like the Chartists and the Anti Corn Law league he’d grown up with. And he retired to Cumberland and wrote a book.

‘Our Seamen, An Appeal’, published in 1873, and it made Plimsoll famous. 600,000 copies were printed and sold, or distributed free through the trade unions, and it was copiously extracted in the press â€“ The Times got behind him, among others. It mustered all the indignation and all the evidence he had amassed of the abuses of the shipping industry. It was an impassioned plea for help, and for a Royal Commission of Inquiry. It began in a way that I really sympathise with, I have to say, from when Ibeen rather galling for him - he was greeted with a parade, and in Bristol, where sailors carried his carriage through the streets from Bristol Temple Meads Station to The Grand, his hotel, where he addressed the crowd from the balcony. But the most celebrated meeting of all was this one [shows image on projection screen], The Great Plimsoll Meeting as it was later known as, and it was held in Exeter Hall just off the Strand and was chaired by Lord Shaftesbury. This is the splendid building, sadly now demolished. Plimsoll talked for over an hour, to rapturous acclaim.

The meeting led to the establishment of a fighting fund: the Plimsoll and Seamen’s Defence Fund. Immediately 25 peers of the realm joined the trade unionists who founded it.