John Gast – shipwrights’ leader and radical

This is the story of John Gast (1772-1837), leader of the Thames shipwrights and a prominent figure in radical politics.

John Gast was among the best known trade unionists of his time – condemned by The Times as “the destroyer of the Thames shipping trade”, and closely linked both to the would-be revolutionaries behind the Cato Street conspiracy and to the founders of Chartism.

Born in Bristol in 1772, Gast was apprenticed at the age of 16 to one of the largest shipbuilders in the city. He became a journeyman in 1793 and as a time-served apprentice was able to join the society of shipwrights at Bristol. But the following year saw a shipwrights’ strike in the city and Gast left soon after – later blaming the “overbearing and despotic masters” who controlled the industry locally.  He arrived at Portsmouth naval dockyard in January 1797, where he swiftly managed to impress his fellow shipwrights and was elected to lead negotiations on their behalf. Soon after, he was once more forced to move on, when the dockyard reduced its labour force by dismissing all those taken on in the previous twelve months.

Moving to London, Gast found work at John Dudman’s – one of the biggest shipbuilding yards in the country, where he would remain until 1814. Gast settled in Deptford: he became a dissenting preacher, by 1802 was regarded as the leader of the Thames shipwrights (publishing a defence of an 1802 Thames shipwrights’ strike from his home in Butt Lane), and in 1810 took over the King of Prussia public house in Union Street (now renamed Albury Street).

Gast was renowned as an outstanding public speaker and took on numerous roles on behalf of the shipwrights. In 1811, he would be at the forefront of a failed attempt to organize a shipwrights’ trade union, and of a rather more successful initiative to found the Hearts of Oak Society to build almshouses for aged shipwrights. Under his leadership, the Thames shipwrights were also prominent in an apprenticeship campaign which saw trade societies attempt to bring prosecutions against masters employing unqualified men.

When peace came to Europe in 1814, shipbuilding was devastated. Gast became president of the new Philanthropic Hercules. Thrown out of work once again by the failure of his employer’s business, Gast turned to ultra-radical London politics. He gravitated towards the Spenceans, a revolutionary group some of whose members favoured the assassination of government ministers as a means of advancing the cause of democracy. In the confusion that followed the Peterloo massacre in 1819, Gast appears to have gone along with plans for a violent overthrow of the government, and was suggested as a possible minister in the regime which would follow. Aware of the conspiracy, police stormed a meeting of the conspirators in Cato Street, and in the melee, one policeman was killed. Five men were found guilty of high treason and executed. It was Gast’s good luck that he was not present on the night.

With the repeal of the Combination Acts, Gast became secretary of the new Thames Shipwrights Provident Union. The union spread rapidly through London’s shipyards and soon had nearly 1,400 members. With a powerful network of local committee-men able to negotiate with autonomy inside the yards, it proved itself capable of winning disputes with such regularity that the shipyard owners were among the most prominent advocates of a return to the Combination Acts.

Gast would continue his active involvement in London radical politics for a further decade. He was a leading figure in the National Union of the Working Classes, formed in 1831, which campaigned for universal suffrage and annual elections, but was prepared to see the Reform Act of 1832 as a step in the right direction. He would also play a part in the campaigns of the 1830s against newspaper stamp duty – the ‘taxes on knowledge’, and in 1836 was a founder member of the London Working Men’s Association. Gast died in 1837, just as the LWMA was giving birth to the Chartist movement.

Notes and sources

Calumny Defeated, or a Complete Vindication of the Working Shipwrights During the Late Disputes with their Employers, by John Gast (1824). Available here on Google Books, (accessed 11 January 2026).

Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and his Times, by Iorwerth Prothero (Routledge, 1979), re-released in the Routledge Revivals series, 2014.