Elizabeth Heyrick Society

24/09/2026

Today we were at the University of Leicester Volunteering Fair in the Students' Union, meeting students who are just getting to know the city.

Our Chair, Joshua Thorpe, spent the day talking to anyone who'd stop about Elizabeth Heyrick. Elizabeth Heyrick was born in Leicester in 1769, and in 1824 she published a pamphlet arguing that enslaved people should be freed immediately rather than gradually over decades. Lots of the students who came over hadn't heard of her before. Quite a few left wanting to know more.

We're a small, entirely volunteer-run charity working towards a permanent memorial to Elizabeth Heyrick in Leicester city centre, along with free educational resources for young people.

Student volunteers could make a real difference to that, whether through helping at events, fundraising, or simply getting her name out there.

If you'd like to get involved, send us a message or email [email protected].

Thank you to the Students' Union for having us, and to everyone who stopped by.

What first got you into volunteering?

14/09/2026

A proper introduction for everyone who's found us recently.

The Elizabeth Heyrick Society was set up to do three things:

- Teach people who Elizabeth Heyrick was and why her work mattered.
- Build a permanent memorial to her in Leicester.
- Use both of those to inspire the next generation to take up the same fight for justice and equality.

On the memorial: In August 2024, a sculpture of Heyrick by local artist Corinne Lambert was presented to the city and is now at New Walk Museum. It came out of a national campaign to honour overlooked women in history, and the public voted for her. It was a brilliant step, and we're grateful for it.

But it isn't the same as a public statue that people walk past every day. That's still to come, and it's what we're raising funds for. We're currently working with senior officials at Leicester City Council to find the right location, and we want the artist selection to involve the public rather than being decided behind closed doors. Local artists and material suppliers are welcome to put proposals forward.

Alongside that, we're producing educational materials for young people, because a statue nobody can explain isn't much of a memorial.

If any of that sounds like something worth backing, follow the page and share this post. We'll come back to the practical ways you can help.

More at elizabethheyrick.org

11/09/2026

Ask most people in Leicester to name someone from the city's history, and you'll hear about Richard III, or Gary Lineker, or the 5000-1 season. You won't often hear Elizabeth Heyrick.

She was born here in 1769, the daughter of a hosiery manufacturer. She was widowed young, became a Quaker, and spent the rest of her life campaigning.

In 1824 she published "Immediate, not Gradual Abolition". It was a direct challenge to the leaders of the anti-slavery movement, who had settled on a slow, cautious approach that would have left people in chains for decades more. Heyrick argued there was no moral case for waiting. The pamphlet sold thousands of copies in Britain and America, and the argument it made eventually won.

She backed it up locally too. With her friend Susannah Watts, she went door to door and shop to shop in Leicester asking people to boycott sugar produced by enslaved labour, and to buy East Indian sugar instead. It was arguably one of the first fair trade campaigns in the country. By June 1825 around 1,500 Leicester families, nearly a quarter of the town, had pledged to give up West Indian sugar.

She wasn't selective about it either. When Leicester's weavers went on strike, she supported them, despite her own brother being an employer in the trade.

Elizabeth Heyrick is one of Leicester's genuine radicals, and she's still largely unknown in her own city.

If you've never heard of her before today, that's rather the point. Give us a follow, and share this with someone from Leicester who should know her name.

31/08/2026

In 1809, a bull-baiting was being planned in the village of Bonsall. Elizabeth Heyrick — better known today for her abolitionist campaigning — bought the bull herself and hid it away so the event couldn't go ahead.

She came back two years later and spent time going house to house, trying to build enough opposition in the village to stop bull-baiting there for good.

It wasn't a one-off. Heyrick backed Richard Martin's 1822 Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act, and in 1823 she published a pamphlet exposing conditions at Smithfield Market, years before any real animal protection laws existed.

Victoria DeHart has written a new guest post for us on this lesser-known part of Heyrick's activism. You can read it here:

https://www.elizabethheyrick.org/news/elizabeth-heyrick-a-trailblazer-for-animal-rights

Had you heard about this side of her work before?

Elizabeth Heyrick's work as a trailblazer for animal rights.

28/08/2026

193 years ago today, the Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent. If you were taught a date for the abolition of slavery in Britain, it was probably this one.

Nothing happened for a year. The Act came into force on 1 August 1834 and freed children under six. Everybody else was reclassified as an apprentice and carried on working unpaid for the people who had owned them. Full freedom across the British Caribbean came at midnight on 31 July 1838, five years after the signature.

Our article this month is about those five years, and about who shortened them: https://www.elizabethheyrick.org/news/the-word-they-used-instead-of-freedom

Were you taught 1833 at school? Most of us were.

17/08/2026

Antigua and Bermuda freed people outright on 1 August 1834, with none of the transitional arrangements Parliament had written into the Slavery Abolition Act.

Everywhere else in the British Empire, it took another four years, and the word Parliament used for those four years was not slavery.

Our new article is about what that word covered, and about the people who brought it to an end. Check our latest article to read more.

Emancipation Day, the four years that followed, and the argument a Leicester woman had already made

01/08/2026

On 1 August 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act came into force and slavery ended across most of the British Empire. Communities across the Caribbean and here in Britain mark the day as Emancipation Day.

The story often gets told as a tidy ending, so it is worth remembering how it actually went. Most people freed by the Act were immediately reclassified as apprentices and required to carry on working for the very people who had enslaved them. Genuine freedom took another four years and a great deal of resistance, arriving on 1 August 1838. Parliament also set aside £20 million in compensation, an enormous sum for the time. Every penny went to slave owners. Not one went to the people who had been enslaved.

Today belongs to those who were freed, and to those who fought to make it real.

There is one small Leicester footnote worth adding. A decade before the Act was passed, Elizabeth Heyrick had argued that gradual abolition was a contradiction in terms, and that any plan involving a transitional period was simply a way of postponing justice while calling it caution. She died in 1831 and never saw the legislation. The four years of apprenticeship that followed suggest she had read the situation exactly right.

Emancipation Day is not widely marked in Leicester. Do you think it should be? We would love to hear what you think.

30/07/2026

Today is World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, and this year the United Nations has focused on something most of us have brushed up against without realising it.

The theme is "Trapped Behind the Scam." It refers to the people behind the fraudulent texts, calls and messages that we delete without a second thought. A great many of them are not criminals. They are victims, recruited through fake job adverts promising decent work abroad, then held in compounds and made to defraud strangers under threat of violence and mounting debt.

Two hundred years ago, Elizabeth Heyrick was making an argument that fits this uncomfortably well. She insisted that slavery was not sustained only by the people who owned plantations, but by everyone who bought what those plantations produced. She walked round Leicester's grocers' shops in person, asking them to stop stocking West Indian sugar. By 1825, roughly a quarter of the city had given it up.

Her point was that distance is not innocence. A chain of exploitation does not stop being a chain simply because you are standing at the pleasant end of it.

Around 50 million people are living in modern slavery today.

Have you ever had one of those scam messages and wondered who was actually on the other end of it? We would be interested to hear your thoughts.

08/07/2026

Elizabeth Heyrick is remembered as the woman who demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. But the same moral fire drove her to take up another cause: the fight against cruelty to animals.

Our latest article, written by EHS Trustee Susan Pares, explores this remarkable and lesser-known side of her work, from a dramatic confrontation at a village fair to the brutal realities she exposed at one of London's great markets.

Her conviction ran deep: humans might have the power to abuse animals, but never the right to do so.

You can read the full article below.

Did you know about this side of Elizabeth Heyrick's work? We'd love to hear your thoughts below.

Heyrick condemns cruelty, opposes bull-baiting, and urges moral and legal reform.

05/07/2026

Picture a village fair in Derbyshire, summer of 1809. A bull has been chained to a stake for the crowd's entertainment. And one woman refuses to accept it.
She argues with the authorities. She argues with the villagers. And when neither will listen, she does something extraordinary: she buys the bull from its owner and leads it away to safety.

That woman was Elizabeth Heyrick, and while she's best remembered for her abolitionist work, her compassion reached much further.
This week, we're sharing a new article by our Trustee Susan Pares on Heyrick's campaigning against cruelty to animals. It's a side of her story that deserves to be much better known.

Keep an eye out for it here later this week. What do you think drove someone to take such a personal stand, long before it was popular to do so?