On this day, 196 years ago, two dozen men gathered at a farm in the Elham Valley hamlet of Wingmore and systematically set about destroying a threshing machine.
The following evening, the gang moved on to the nearby farm at Grimsacre and broke the machine there. Three days later, on the evening of the 28 August 1830, the emboldened saboteurs struck again, destroying three more threshing machines on isolated farms on the hills above the valley. Continue reading