A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  By 1843, O’Connor had appeared increasingly detached from the political objectives of the Charter. The new constitution ratified by the NCA that year removed references to the Charter and instead aimed first ‘by peaceful and legal means alone to better the condition of man, by removing the causes which have produced moral and social degradation’; and, second, ‘to provide for the unemployed, and [provide the] means of support for those who are desirous to locate upon the land’.3 The new, depoliticised constitution was a tactical move reflecting the new aim of registering the NCA as a friendly society. Once approved by the official registrar, it would be able to buy and sell land with relative ease. Subscribers would contribute to a land fund that would purchase country estates and divide them into smallholdings. Through a lottery, these would then be allocated to individual subscribers.

  O’Connor was keen to differentiate this scheme from Owenite socialist communities, such as the one established under the name of Queenwood in Hampshire, even though a number of Chartists, including Thomas Wheeler, the drafter of the 1843 constitution, were influenced by Owenism. Queenwood was remarkable in a variety of ways: the buildings were lavishly furnished and equipped with the latest technological advances, including a conveyor belt that took dishes from the kitchen to the communal dining room and back again. Future plans included central heating for all rooms, hot and cold running water and artificial lighting. The cost of creating this Utopian vision of a supremely comfortable socialist future bankrupted the Owenite Rational Society.

  More important than Queenwood’s high specifications, however, was Owen’s longstanding opposition to organised religion and the traditional nuclear family which was, in his opinion, its product. At Queenwood, all members of the Society lived communally, rather than in individual family units. The Northern Star criticised Owenism’s deist outlook, condemning the ‘infidelity [with] which Mr OWEN and all the principal leaders of Socialism interlard their system’. O’Connor was even more forceful in declaring that Chartism, unlike Owenite socialism, was a friend and supporter of traditional family values:

  There is no sight … which can be presented to my eyes so beautiful, so cheering, so natural and becoming, as that of the husbandman tilling the ground for his own and his family’s sole use, behoof and benefit. When I see a man with his foot on his spade, I think I recognise the image of his God and see him in that character which even the Malthusian deigns to assign him – A MAN STANDING ON HIS OWN RESOURCES.4

  There is some irony in the fact that this eulogy came from the bachelor O’Connor, whose later years were blighted, in all probability, by the symptoms of syphilis, while Owen, who derided the family as a poisonous social institution breeding competition and cruelty, was a happily married man and father of eight children.

  O’Connor was adamant that the Land Plan was no threat either to accepted social institutions or to private property: ‘there should be nothing in common, save and except the public institutions and the 100 acres of land. Every man should be the master of his own house, his own time and his own earnings.’5 Nonetheless, underneath O’Connor’s vision of independent smallholders still lurked an understanding of the land that figures like the Digger Gerrard Winstanley and Thomas Spence might have understood and sympathised with:

  the land of a country belongs to society; and that society, according to its wants has the same right to impose fresh conditions on the lessees, that the landlord has to impose fresh conditions upon a tenant at the expiration of his tenure. Society is the landlord: and as society never dies, the existing government are the trustees … Society looks on the performance of all requisite duties as the only condition on which its lessees can make good that title.6

  The Land Plan is often seen as Feargus O’Connor’s greatest mistake and the biggest blemish on his career as leader of the Chartist movement. But Chartism was in the doldrums by 1843. The second national petition had come to nothing, the elections had failed to increase Chartist representation in Parliament and, in the provinces, local Chartist newspapers were folding at an alarming rate. The Land Plan helped reinvigorate a movement that was in danger of fizzling out or splitting into innumerable different radical groupings. It would eventually prove more popular than the NCA itself, with seventy thousand shareholders at its peak and over six hundred local branches. During a severe economic downturn, the prospect of living self-sufficiently was deeply enticing. The coalminers’ strike of 1843–4 revealed the scale of the desperation. In County Durham, the major landowner Lord Londonderry evicted scores of striking miners’ families from the housing that he controlled, forcing them to sleep rough among the rocks and caves of the north-east coast, foraging for food along the shoreline. Chartism itself had abandoned the equivocal stance of 1842 and now more openly embraced and supported the trade union movement. In 1844, the Northern Star changed its subtitle from the Leeds Advertiser to the National Trades Journal and in 1845 it expended considerable column inches in publicising the creation of the National Association of United Trades for the Protection of Labour.

  Though the Land Plan fitted into a longer tradition of radical thinking about the land, more important than that legacy was the interest in the 1840s, across the political spectrum, in the land as a means of reversing the social and moral ills of industrialisation. The Labourers’ Friendly Society, Home Colonization Societies and benevolent societies formed by labourers themselves all looked to small garden plots of land as a means of lifting workers out of abject poverty and cultivating wastegrounds that lay idle. The idea appealed to Parliament as well. A select committee of the House of Commons endorsed the idea of allotments for workers, and major newspapers not known for being pro-Chartist endorsed the Commons’ plan. The Tory backers of the Labourers’ Friendly Society did not want to create a new class of small farmers, but rather ameliorate the worst effects of urbanisation and the factory system, which included the boost – from a Tory perspective – that these gave to political radicalism. As the Society’s poet put it:

  How delightful to see them gain competence, health

  And while they increase agricultural wealth

  improve in their morals; their sovereign obey …

  their energies roused, they are slothful no more

  They have almost deserted the publican’s door.7

  But the differences between this vision of the land and O’Connor’s should not be overstated. At a fundamental level, O’Connor may have believed that the land was a public trust, but the Chartist Land Plan was not designed to convert workers into independent small farmers any more than it was intended to make all land common. Apart from the notion that toiling in the soil would inculcate deference, loyalty and political placidity, the Tory schemes and the Chartist Land Plan were actually quite similar. If anything, the Land Plan seemed to move Chartism back towards the agenda of Lovett’s LWMA, emphasising education, moral reform and self-help. Though the absence of the Charter from the 1843 constitution might have been strategic, it also helped to imply that Chartism had moved away from advocating radical political change to a more gradualist stance.

  The attempt to get the NCA registered as a friendly society had, however, proved a failure, the registrar continuing to view Chartism, not unreasonably, as an overtly political movement. A new tack was adopted when the NCA convention meeting in London approved the repackaging of the Land Plan as a cooperative. The Chartist Cooperative Land Society, as the new organisation was called, established its first site at Heronsgate (renamed O’Connorville) near Watford in March 1846. At the end of the year, a Land and Labour Bank was launched to gather funds. However, O’Connor had been forced, secretly, to buy the Heronsgate estate under his own name (existing laws concerning building societies did not permit them to run lotteries) and the land itself was heavily mortgaged to release more capital. Legal complications arose over the status of the company and O’Connor’s ability as an MP to administer it and the bank at the same time. After a series of drawn-out cases, the Lord Chief Justice rul
ed out all possibility of this in 1850, and O’Connor petitioned for a bill to dissolve the company, which was finally done in August 1851. These difficulties were largely kept from Northern Star readers, who heard only of the successful acquisition of a second estate at Lowbands, in Worcestershire, in August 1847; and then at Charterville, in Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire, Snigs End in Gloucestershire and Great Dodford in Worcestershire.

  Only two hundred and fifty tenants ever settled on the land. Many of these, as we shall see, were unable to make their allotments provide enough food either to support their families or to provide an income. However, none of this was evident from O’Connor’s editorials in the Star, where he painted O’Connorville as a bucolic workers’ paradise: ‘My pale face is turned into a good, sound, sunburnt ruddy complexion. I can jump over the gates without opening them. I am up every morning at 6 o’clock, and when I look out of my window at the prospect, and think of the number my labours will make happy, I feel myself a giant.’8 O’Connorville was thrown open for inspection on the Chartists’ jubilee, Monday, 17 August 1846 (an event heavy with symbolism: the biblical jubilee was the day when the land would be returned to its original owners). Twelve thousand toured the estate, inspected the ongoing building work and petted Rebecca the cow, named after the Rebecca Riots against high tolls on turnpike roads in Wales. Ernest Jones was among the visitors that day. He shared O’Connor’s enthusiasm for the project:

  When I left London this morning I thought I was only going some seventeen or eighteen miles out of town: I now begin to think I must have made a very long journey indeed, for I have come to a land that at one time I scarcely ever expected to see. I have come from the land of slavery to the land of liberty – from the land of poverty to the land of plenty – from the land of the Whigs to the great land of the Charter! This is the promised land, my friends!9

  The Land Plan had briefly taken prominence over the Charter. However, it was always hoped that its success would contribute to the attainment of Chartism’s political goals. It was even suggested that it would help Chartist supporters gain representation under the existing electoral system, with successful male allottees securing enfranchisement. But the Land Plan on its own was not enough to revive Chartism as an overtly political movement. Its brief, and final, resuscitation was the culmination of several factors, none of which was the direct result of Chartist agitation.

  The first of these was the surprise election of Feargus O’Connor as MP for Nottingham in 1847. Attempts at enfranchising Chartist voters at the election had proved frustratingly difficult, despite rising property values. The movement was hindered as well by the obstructive behaviour of election officers: the revising barrister for Manchester rejected 450 claims by Chartists; similarly, most of the three thousand claims put forward in Birmingham were also dismissed. In September 1846, the Chartists set up a National Central Registration and Election Committee (NCREC) under Thomas Duncombe’s presidency to coordinate its election strategy. Although this could be seen as the first modern party election campaign, candidates did not have to stand as Chartists in order to receive the NCREC’s support. Colonel Perronet Thompson received a £5 donation towards his registration expenses at Bradford, although he was now a supporter of the NCSU, not a Chartist. Such candidates were, though, pledged to agree to support the implementation of the Charter in any parliamentary division.

  The strategy did produce some successes, with the election of nine radical-Liberal candidates endorsed by the NCREC. Again, there were propaganda triumphs at the hustings. Harney sealed his reputation as a politician of substance at Tiverton, confronting the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston with a dissection of his foreign policy that forced Palmerston to improvise a lengthy and detailed rebuttal. In Swansea, the Chartist candidate used the hustings to taunt the Liberal candidate (who had been returned unopposed at every election from 1832 to 1842), saying, ‘I see this will be a one-sided Parliament, a rich man’s Parliament.’10 However, overall the election was a disappointing show for the Chartists. They had achieved nowhere near the twenty to thirty sympathetic MPs they had hoped for, and the lack of any Chartist candidates in Scotland indicated that the movement’s reach was shrinking. The contrast with the Land Plan was an eye-opener: the NCREC’s total income of £470 was minuscule compared to the Land Plan, which raised over £1420 in the first week of publication alone.

  The one outstanding success, almost completely unexpected, was O’Connor’s election at Nottingham. He spent little personal energy campaigning, preferring to dig and manure his Lowbands estate for ‘swedes and white turnips’. Two hours before the election closed, he had polled fewer votes than all the other candidates. However, his opponents were even more blasé, neither of the Whigs bothering to speak before the hustings. The Tory candidate didn’t even turn up. O’Connor’s victory was, in large part, due to a lot of Tory voters determined to keep out the Whigs. If the other Tory candidate had bothered to stand, O’Connor would certainly have lost. Even if he himself seemed uninterested in the Nottingham contest, he at least, in contrast to his opponents, had a strong local election team behind him, led by one James Sweet, well versed in the running of local elections and up to speed with the key issues in the area. Sir John Cam Hobhouse, President of the Board of Control and one of the Whig candidates at Nottingham, noted the universal shock at O’Connor’s win and the humiliation that followed for the losers: ‘O’Connor’s people were astonished at his success & the shabby dissenters affected to be equally surprised and vexed. The bells of the Churches rang and bands of music paraded the town & stopt under my windows to shout and play “Johnny so long at the fair”, “Oh dear what can the matter be.”’11

  However, O’Connor’s election was less of a triumph than it appeared to be. First and most obviously, it was more a product of his opponents’ mistakes than anything else. More importantly, with Duncombe seriously ill, it left Chartism in the Commons in O’Connor’s hands. His failure as an MP has sometimes been exaggerated. When time and opportunity allowed, he was an effective and able parliamentarian. Unlike many MPs, he viewed himself as the delegate of his constituents, holding an annual informal ‘election’, open to the disenfranchised, into his conduct as MP, and promising to resign if the majority disapproved of his actions. Unquestionably, though, he spread himself too thinly: in addition to his work as an MP, he retained oversight of the Land Plan, continued to make regular contributions to the Northern Star, and undertook considerable public speaking duties. After 1850, as his mental illness became evident, his conduct in Parliament became a great embarrassment to the movement. His erratic behaviour included sitting in the Speaker’s chair, randomly offering his hand to some MPs, and physically assaulting others. Arguably by this point, Chartism was spent, anyway, as an effective political force.

  O’Connor’s election may have been an unanticipated bonus, but the more general revival in Chartist fortunes was a product of a pan-European economic and political crisis that brought political systems tumbling down. In England, commodity prices, especially wheat, had risen to levels not seen since the year of Peterloo. Overall, prices were at a level unequalled since 1841 and the cotton industry was in a deep depression: barely a third of Manchester’s factory labour force was in full-time work by November 1847. But the suffering in England was nothing compared to the famine that was now gripping Ireland and would eventually claim over two million lives. It was Ireland that prompted the resignation of Peel as Prime Minister on 29 June 1846 over the new Irish coercion bill, granting emergency powers to quell disturbances caused by the famine, and his replacement by Lord Russell.

  The death of the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell once again opened up the possibility of cooperation between English Chartists and Irish nationalists. By 1847, an alliance had developed between the Chartists and the Irish Confederation, a nationalist organisation headed by the Limerick MP William Smith O’Brien. While this union might have been convenient for Chartism, it revived fears of imminent insurr
ection, especially in cities with large Irish populations such as Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. The growth of confederation clubs in these conurbations seemed to confirm Thomas Carlyle’s words in his Chartism: ‘Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns … sunk from decent manhood to squalid apehood … the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder.’12

  Such fears were heightened further by events outside the British Isles. The Northern Star reported the Krakow rising of 1846 under the headline, ‘Springtime of the Peoples’. The Chartist press itself, which had endured a slump in the mid-1840s that only the Star had really survived, underwent a renaissance, with the number of titles doubling from ten in 1847 to twenty the following year. These publications fed a public hunger for news of the revolutionary events unfolding on the Continent. January 1848 saw anti-Austrian riots in Milan and an uprising against the King of Naples in Sicily. In the second week of February, there was serious rioting in Munich; in the third week, the French government’s attempts to suppress the reform movement led to massive crowd actions in the streets of Paris and large-scale desertions from the army. On 24 February came the most dramatic news, as a revolutionary mob sacked the Tuileries Palace, forcing the abdication of Louis Philippe in favour of the infant Comte de Paris. That night at Sadler’s Wells theatre, the occupants of the cheap seats forced the performance to stop, and ordered the orchestra to play the ‘Marseillaise’ instead. The following day, the Northern Star declared, ‘The Revolution has been accomplished.’ One Barnsley radical recalled the excitement with which the news was received: