Our warmest thanks and congratulations to everyone who participated in this year’s Dorset Radical Bookfair. The stallholders, speakers, performers and musicians, everyone who lent us stuff, helped out beforehand or on the day.
If you supported us in any way, shape or form, donated, bought something, came to a meeting or the gig, even if you just walked in off the street, had a look round and ate some cake, you contributed to our success and we hope you had a good experience.
We really appreciate the staff at Dorchester Corn Exchange, who made a great effort to have everything ready for us, so our skeleton crew could run it smoothly.
As public and social spaces are being lost, venues becoming less affordable, the voluntary, non-commercial sector is contracting. It’s vital we all get involved in these events or they will vanish. We must have time and space to meet face to face, away from the manipulative corporate and social media, to learn from one another, share ideas and experiences, and come up with radical solutions.
We’ve all made new friends this weekend – in real life! People won’t fight together unless they care about each other personally, and that doesn’t happen through a computer screen.
Feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive, especially regarding the venue, we always welcome suggestions for improvements to future events, especially when they come with offers to help implement them!
Love and best wishes,
The DRB Collective.
PDF online 
Local residents signing the new SOLE petition at Broomfield Parade on Saturday lunchtime.
At the start of World War One Bridport was essentially a one industry town: rope and net making. The war brought opportunities to the town but also challenged paternalist employers with a revival of trade unionism and state pressure to improve low wages. With the Armistice, the sense of a collective national interest on the home front began to ebb away revealing long-standing as well as new tensions in the town. This talk explores the origins of these tensions in the war years and the range of ways in which they were expressed in the town in 1919, including soldiers’ protests and industrial strikes as well as a range of new political organisations in the town. Bridport was hardly a ‘red’ town and even with the new electorate of 1918 continued to return a Tory to Parliament as it…