Mechanics Institute. Source: Picture Sheffield.
Soon after his birth in 1808 in Masborough, Isaac Ironside and his family moved to Sheffield where his father became a Congregationalist lay preacher and a successful estate agent. Ironside became an apprentice stove-grave fitter, but poor health forced him to give up his apprenticeship and join his father’s estate agency.
In 1830 when the Sheffield Political Union was calling for reform of the House of Commons to ensure ‘a real and effectual representation of the lower and middle classes’, Ironside became one of its council members. His passion for education led to his involvement in the Mechanics’ Library and in 1833 the foundation of the Mechanics’ Institute. He continued to collaborate politically with the moderate liberals until December 1837 when he and other radicals despaired of how things were progressing. Ironside spoke eloquently at Sheffield’s first full-scale Chartist demonstration in Paradise Square in September 1838, accusing the parliamentary reformers of betraying the people and calling for the six points of Chartism to be accepted. As the Sheffield Chartists became more violent, Ironside withdrew and focused on educational reforms.
In 1846 Ironside was elected to the town council as a ‘Democrat’ in the Ecclesall ward and continued to press for working-class rights, civic improvement, educational reform and meaningful local democracy. He embraced the communalism of Robert Owen and the extreme local democracy of Joshua Toulmin-Smith, and got Karl Marx to write for his newspaper, the Sheffield Free Press. He visited Paris after 1848 to express support for the revolutionary cause and returned to Sheffield vowing not to shave off his beard until democratic rights had been established.
In the early 1850s Ironside was entangled in a succession of controversies and his erratic behaviour seriously damaged the Democrats who fought their last election in 1854. In Ironside’s later years, working-class activism declined and he died in 1870. He was buried in grave B 120 in the Nonconformist area of the Cemetery.