Agriculture and politics in England, 1815-1939

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 Edited by

J.R. Wordie

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939

Also by J. R. Wordie ESTATE MANAGEMENT IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND TOWN AND COUNTRYSIDE: The English Landowner in the National Economy, 1660–1860 (co-editor with C. W. Chalklin)

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 Edited by

J. R. Wordie Lecturer in Early Modern Social and Economic History Reading University Reading

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–74483–7 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, LLC, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–23435–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Agriculture and politics in England, 1815–1939 / [edited by] J. R. Wordie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN 0–312–23435–X 1. Agriculture—Economic aspects—England—History. 2. Agriculture and politics—England—History 3. Agriculture and state—England—History. 4. Corn laws (Great Britain) 5. England—Economic policy. I. Wordie, J. R. (J. Ross) HD1930.E5 A34 2000 338.1'842—dc21 00–027832 Editorial matter and selection © J. R. Wordie 2000 Chapter 1 © J. R. Wordie 2000 Chapters 2–8 © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents Preface

vi

Notes on the Contributors

vii

1

Introduction J.R. Wordie

2

Perceptions and Reality: the Effects of the Corn Laws and their Repeal in England, 1815–1906 J.R.Wordie

33

‘Preventing Ourselves from being Plundered by our Betters’: Thomas Perronet Thompson and the Corn Laws Michael J. Turner

70

Land, Labour, and Politics: Parliament and Allotment Provision, 1830–1870 Jeremy Burchardt

98

3

4

1

5

The Agricultural Interest and its Critics, 1840–1914 David Martin

6

No Longer the Farmers’ Friend? The Conservative Party and Agricultural Protection, 1880–1914 Ewen Green

149

Agricultural Policy and the National Farmers’ Union, 1908–1939 Jonathan Brown

178

‘Red Tape Farm’? Visions of a Socialist Agriculture in 1920s and 1930s Britain Clare Griffiths

199

7

8

128

Bibliography

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Index

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v

Preface This present collection of essays constitutes Reading Historical Studies No. 2, a modern companion volume to Reading Historical Studies No. 1, which dealt with a medieval theme. Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England: Fifty Years On was edited by Professor Donald Matthew, with the assistance of Anne Curry and Ewen Green, and was published by Reading University in 1994. The only University of Reading staff member to contribute to this volume was, however, Donald Matthew himself, with his paper, ‘The Making of Anglo-Saxon England’. By contrast, the intention was to make this present volume entirely a University of Reading production. At the time of its conception, Ewen Green and Clare Griffiths were members of the History Department’s staff, and Professor E.J.T. Collins was to have contributed a paper on the 1850–1914 period. However, shortly after the project was launched, Ewen and Clare secured posts at Oxford University, Ewen becoming a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, and Clare becoming a junior research fellow at Wadham. In the event, Professor Collins proved to be too deeply committed to other ventures to provide a paper for us, but Dr David Martin, who has been working in related fields for many years, was able to step into the breach with his own chapter, ‘The Agricultural Interest and its Critics, 1840–1914’. The resulting collection has been planned to provide a full chronological coverage of the period 1815 to 1939, and to focus upon specific topics of interest within it concerning the changing relationship between agriculture and politics during this time. Some of its themes, inevitably, will be familiar ones, but each paper is based on original research, and has new findings to present on each of the topics dealt with. J.R.W.

vi

Notes on the Contributors Jonathan Brown is a research fellow and archivist at the Rural History Centre of Reading University. His publications include, with S.B. Ward, Village Life in England, 1860–1940 (1985), and The English Market Town: a Social and Economic History, 1750–1914 (1986). Jeremy Burchardt is a lecturer in Rural History at the Rural History Centre of Reading University. He is now the country’s leading authority on the English allotment movement of the nineteenth century, and has contributed to Agricultural History, Rural History, and The Agricultural History Review. Ewen Green is a fellow and tutor of Magdalen College, and lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Oxford. His publications include The Crisis of Conservatism, 1880–1914 (1995), and the editing of Parliamentary History, Vol. 16, pt I, 1880–1914 (1997). Clare Griffiths is a junior research fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. She is an authority on the Labour movement and rural Britain between the wars, and has contributed to Rural History and The History Workshop Journal. David Martin is a lecturer in Social and Economic History at the University of Sheffield. His publications include, with D. Rubinstein (eds), Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays presented to John Saville (1979) and John Stuart Mill and the Land Question (1981). Michael J. Turner is a lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Reading. His special field is the Social and Economic History of nineteenth-century England, and his publications include, Reform and Respectability: the Making of a Middle-Class Liberalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Manchester (1995). J.R. Wordie is a lecturer in Social and Economic History at the University of Reading. His publications include Estate Management in Eighteenth-Century England (1982) and with C.W. Chalklin (eds), Town and Countryside: the English Landowner in the National Economy, 1660–1860 (1989). vii

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1 Introduction J. R. Wordie

The chapters in this collection are designed to throw some new light upon the changing fortunes of England’s agricultural community, in both political and economic terms, over the period of a very eventful 124 years. They trace its sad decline from political grace during that time. In 1815 this sector had ruled supreme on the political scene, with complete control of both national and local government, and even in 1900 it still enjoyed a political potential that was out of all proportion to the numbers and relative wealth of the agricultural community. By the 1920s, however, its political influence had dwindled to negligible proportions, and agriculturists had become the mere supplicants of government, pathetically begging for relief and favours from the hand of a generally unsympathetic administration. By the 1930s the latter-day representative body of the once all-powerful landed classes, the Central Landowners’ Association, was, as Jonathan Brown is able to show in his chapter, paid less attention to by the government than the National Farmers’ Union, although even this latter body carried little enough weight with the administration. Indeed, as Clare Griffiths shows us in her own chapter, many members of both bodies came to fear that they faced the prospect of an unacceptable level of interference in their affairs from that very state that the landed classes had once controlled. As far as the agricultural interest was concerned, the wheel of political fortune had veered through 180 degrees. In 1815, however, at the opening of our period, the political importance of the agricultural sector of the British economy was very great. This importance derived not so much from the economic contribution of the sector which, according to the census of 1811, employed only one-third of the labour force at that time, and generated only 1

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Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939

about one-third of the gross national product,1 but rather from the stranglehold on political power which was still being exercised by the landowning classes in 1815.2 At the highest levels of government, cabinet posts were held entirely by major landowners, and of course the same class of persons sat in the House of Lords, arguably the more powerful of the two legislative chambers at that time. But the House of Commons too was totally dominated by the landed classes: indeed the ownership of a substantial amount of land was a legal requirement for membership of the lower House. In 1711 a triumphant but vindictive Tory party had passed the Property Qualification Act, which laid down that the ownership of land worth £300 p.a. in rent was an essential requirement for all those wishing to represent a borough, while those wishing to represent a county had to possess land worth £600 p.a.3 In 1815, even after all the inflation of the Napoleonic Wars, a rent roll of £300 p.a. still translated into an estate of at least 300 acres, depending on the quality of the land. The abolition of this property qualification requirement became one of the Chartists’ famous ‘Six Points’, but this legislation, although amended in 1838, was not in fact repealed until 1858. The law was never enforced to the letter, and it did not in practice preclude wealthy merchants and manufacturers, who were also substantial landowners, from membership of the Commons, but it did help to ensure that they remained a small minority within the lower chamber, heavily outnumbered by their landed colleagues. This landed elite, however, represented only a very small proportion of the English population as a whole. Referring to the situation in 1803, Patrick Colquhon estimated that the ‘nobility, gentry, and rentiers’ constituted between them 1.2 per cent of the whole population, but he followed the tradition of his statistical predecessors, Gregory King and Joseph Massie, in counting in the extended families of this ruling group, and all their servants, as part of their ‘families’. Had his census taken in only the heads of these families, where the only real power lay, or even if it had included only them and all their male children, the proportion of such people in the population would have amounted to less than one half of one per cent of the whole. The properly ‘landed’ group constituted something much closer to one in a thousand than one in a hundred of the whole population. This was the extent of the ruling class that controlled the national government.4 Most of the government of England in 1815 was, however, local government, and here the landed classes were equally well entrenched. At the top of the administrative pyramid in the counties

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stood the lord lieutenant, the crown’s representative in the shire. He was assisted by a vice-lieutenant and a small number of deputy lieutenants who together comprised ‘the lieutenancy’, the essential executive of the shire. All were substantial landowners, and so too was their immediate subordinate, the sheriff, a man of lower social status and mainly historical duties. Under their command was a small army of Justices of the Peace, the key administrators of the countryside, and also landed gentry. Like the JPs of today, these Justices fulfilled a judicial role: two sitting together in petty sessions could administer summary justice to minor offenders, and with a ‘full bench’ of four or more could try more serious cases at the Quarter Sessions, held four times a year. But the JPs of 1815 were far more than simply judicial officers: they were more akin to the mandarins of ancient China, who were administrators as well as judges. They were responsible for the maintenance of roads and bridges, the licensing of alehouses and theatres, and the administration of the poor law. They appointed overseers and constables, settled disputes between employers and employees, and above all were responsible for the maintenance of law and order in their districts. They carried out government policies, and were therefore executive as well as judicial officers. The JPs were, in effect, little kings in their own areas, where they were often the principal landowners as well. Indeed, a landed qualification applied also the office of JP: they were either to own land worth £100 p.a. in rent, or be heirs apparent to land worth £300 p.a. D.C. Moore tells us that in 1851 21 000 adult males in England and Wales qualified for the office under these criteria (0.12 per cent of the total population of 17.98 million) and had their names placed on the Commissions of the Peace, but that fewer than 40 per cent of these had at that time bothered to register, or to take office.5 Although highly prestigious, the office of JP was unpaid, and could be onerous and time-consuming. Many gentry felt that they already enjoyed enough local power and prestige in their own right without taking on this additional burden, and there was much justification in this assumption. Landowners appointed to local offices were not powerful because they held the office: they held the office because they were powerful. The higher local government offices were also unpaid, and were filled on the principle of noblesse oblige. This meant that the range of candidates suitable for their occupancy was very small, and the same problem also applied, on a lesser scale, to the magistracy. It was unthinkable to appoint just any Tom, Dick or Harry as a magistrate, as Oliver Cromwell and James II had found to their cost: only a man of the

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Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939

highest local standing would do. If no member of the landed gentry would come forward, the next best thing was to appoint a clergyman of the Church of England to the bench. As the population of England grew, and with it the need for more magistrates to control the growing numbers, the proportion of clerics on the magisterial bench rose, from 11 per cent in 1761 to 22 per cent in 1831.6 But many clergymen easily passed the landed qualification test, particularly after enclosure and tithe commutation had left some clerics as substantial landholders. In any case, the Anglican clergy were for the most part simply the younger sons of gentry families. Finally, as the owners of most of the land in the country, members of this class exercised a direct influence over all those who tenanted it, in both town and countryside. In one way or another, the landed classes exercised total control over local as well as national government in 1815. A consideration of the social background of most Anglican clergy brings us to another aspect of landed power in 1815. Under the system of primogeniture which had prevailed in England since the seventeenth century, the eldest son inherited the entire landed estate, leaving his younger brothers to make their own way in the world, and his sisters, even if older than he, to be packed off into suitable marriages. These younger sons were provided with a good education by their parents, and they then went into the army, the Church, the law, or the embryonic civil service which existed at that time. In the fullness of time, they rose to the top of these institutions, and proceeded to run them in the interests of the class from which they had been drawn. Many indeed became so wealthy that they were able to buy their way back into the landed classes. While the judiciary was by no means closed to the sons of the better-off urban middle classes, promotion and the securing of the more important posts came more easily to those with a landed pedigree. The key courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and Chancery saw their benches dominated by justices drawn from this background, while the touring Assize judges, who tried the most serious cases in the shires, came from the same social class.7 At the same time, the Church of England had come to be regarded as little more than the clerical arm of the state by 1815. Membership of the established Church was essential for all those who wished to enjoy full civil rights at that time, and in the parishes the squire and the parson worked hand in hand in support of the status quo. Not infrequently the two were blood relatives, and in some places, where the rector was also a substantial local landowner, he sat on the bench and ruled as the local squire as well, producing that

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curious hybrid known as a ‘squarson’. Under this arrangement, the landed church preached humility, obedience and acceptance of the status quo to the landless masses, and in return it was supported and accorded a privileged status by the landed state. Both the Church and the judiciary were thus held firmly in landed hands. Meanwhile, the military power of the state fell clearly into two categories. There was first of all the regular army, officered and controlled, of course, by the younger scions of landed families, supplemented by the militia, a kind of poorly trained home guard. This had proved itself to be useless during the 1745 Rebellion, and was a body in decline. The regular army, however, was a large force, and although after 1815 it was posted mainly to imperial duties abroad, a strong contingent remained at home. In 1820 the home garrison numbered just over 64 000 men and, according to Correlli Barnett, ‘It was only with the establishment of borough police forces in 1839 and county police in 1855 that the army ceased to be the main prop of public order.’8 In practice, however, the first line of defence called upon to aid the civil power in the event of domestic upheavals after 1815 was not the army, but the yeomanry. This was a comparatively new body of amateur troops that had come into existence only in 1794, as part of a wider volunteer force which had been raised to meet the twin threats of invasion from France, and domestic insurrection at home. The original force had included a large infantry element drawn mainly from urban artisans and manufacturers, but the elite units were, of course, the cavalry. It was this element that survived the disbanding of the infantry volunteers in 1815, mainly because they enjoyed the support of more than 50 yeomanry officers in the Commons and several more in the Lords. Like the old militia, the yeomanry were, in a sense, a citizens’ army, but they differed from the old militia in two significant ways. First they were an entirely volunteer force, membership exempting individuals from the militia ballot, and secondly they were a mounted force. They were part-time soldiers who kept their uniforms and weapons in the cupboard, bringing them out to drill and train at weekends, much like our modern Territorial Army. Twenty days of training was considered sufficient to turn a horseman into a yeoman, and from 1816 a minimum of only eight days a year of continuous service was required from each troop. But the most important way in which the new yeomanry differed from the old militia was in its social composition. Many were, as their name implied, tenant farmers, followers of their landlords who raised and officered the troops. No radicals were to be found in the

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Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939

yeomanry: the rank and file were of one mind with their landed officers, representing the conservative elements of English society, believers in the preservation of the status quo, at least until 1830, when some troops began to show sympathy with those fellow members of the middle classes who favoured moderate reform. Although the exact nature of the role of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry in the notorious Peterloo massacre of 1819 remains a matter of controversy (regular troops were certainly also involved), there can be no doubt that the vast majority of this body of men had little patience with radicals. Those who were not farmers were at least fellow members of the comfortable middle classes – tradesmen, shopkeepers, professional men, employers of labour – persons of property, although not landed property, who would have something to lose in the event of a popular uprising. They needed to be men of some wealth, because each yeoman was expected to supply his own horse! From 1817 onwards, the annual capitation grant provided by the government of £1.10s. for every efficient man fell far short of what was required even for uniforms and equipment, far less the maintenance of horses and training. Each yeoman therefore had to make a personal contribution to the maintenance of his status, unless he could find a generous local landed commander who would lead and support the troop. Such men were not in short supply among the aristocracy and gentry, many of whom spent thousands of pounds upon handsomely uniformed brigades which were their pride and joy, frequently turned out on ceremonial occasions. Although they were only seldom used in action against rioters, the yeomanry constituted a highly mobile and quite formidable body of troops. At the peak of their strength in 1827 they consisted of 62 separate corps, and in 1820 they numbered 28 000 officers and men, a very useful supplement to the 64 000 regular troops stationed in home garrisons in that year. Should armed revolution be attempted, the landed classes were ready.9

I In the above ways, the landed classes of the early nineteenth century were in firm control of both national and local government, of the legislative process, the established Church, the judiciary, and the military power of the state. But the basis of their power rested on even firmer foundations than these. The members of this class had been born to rule, educated to a level far above the normal, and trained to

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rule. They were the ‘natural’ ruling class, and they occupied their station with complete confidence, utterly assured of their place in the social hierarchy. Nor was this confidence misplaced, for their opinion as to the nature of their role was not exclusive to themselves: the social ranks beneath them looked to the landed classes for leadership. If they were not to rule, then who else would? A butcher? A baker? A candlestick maker? The idea was preposterous. Of course, the ruling classes should rule: what else were they there for? These were the people who had been specifically trained for the job, and who were best suited to it. Although members of the urban middle classes began to agitate vigorously for reforms after 1815, it was the policies, rather than the personnel of government, that the English people first sought to change. The notion that ‘common’ people might be fit to govern came very slowly to them. This was a view held not only by the labouring classes, but by the middle classes as well. A keen radical like Richard Cobden was appalled to see the ‘progressive’ city of Manchester, by that time entirely self-governing, voluntarily choosing a young squire as its representative in Parliament in 1840, writing, As for the conduct of our men here in selecting Gibson, a young untried man and a Suffolk squire, to become member for Manchester, I am quite disgusted at it. What wonder that we are scorned by the landed aristocracy, when we take such pains to show our contempt for ourselves? We save our enemies the trouble of trampling on us, by very industriously kicking our own backsides!10 Even in the twentieth century, a man like Sir Oswald Mosley, Bart, hardly a political genius, could secure an automatic entrée to the highest ranks of government purely because of his landed background and social connections, and had no difficulty in getting himself elected as a Labour MP.11 This abiding respect for members of the landowning classes was a quirk of the specifically English psyche: it applied much less strongly in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Even in England, many urban radicals like Cobden, Lovett, and Place strongly rejected this attitude, and were disgusted to see a majority of both the middle and working classes continuing to doff their caps to landed power far into the nineteenth century. This attitude of almost unconscious deference did eventually wane in England, but was very slow to do so. It is interesting to notice that even the Chartist movement, considered to be ultra-radical in its day, made no proposals whatso-

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Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939

ever to preclude landed gentry from sitting in the Commons, and made no suggestions at all for the reform of the very powerful House of Lords, then as now a totally unelected body. In 1815 the landed classes ruled not only in Parliament, but also in the hearts and minds of the common people, who generally accepted their divine right to leadership. To that extent, although so few Englishmen were allowed to participate directly in the political process, the system was more ‘representative’ than it superficially appeared. Had universal adult male suffrage been introduced in 1815, the personnel elected to Parliament would not have been very different from those who sat there already. Mindless and pathetic as this canine devotion might appear to modern eyes, it was not without some measure of rational justification. The landed elite, although such a small proportion of the population, were still numerous enough to include within their ranks some men of real political ability, and it was these men who rose to the highest offices. One such was Henry Addington, the first Viscount Sidmouth, who held the office of Home Secretary between 1812 and 1822. Hardly a liberal, Sidmouth was rather a deeply convinced Tory, who was responsible for many measures of harsh government repression during his years in office, and yet his advice to local magistrates on the eve of the Peterloo massacre is cited by D.G. Wright: Twelve days before Peterloo, Henry Hobhouse, Permanent UnderSecretary at the Home Office, informed the Manchester stipendiary magistrate that it would be advisable simply to gather evidence of what took place at the meeting, to ignore illegal proceedings for the time being and avoid the use of force: ‘But even if they really should utter sedition, or proceed to the election of a representative, Lord Sidmouth is of opinion that it will be the wisest course to abstain from any endeavour to disperse the mob, unless they should proceed to acts of felony or riot.’12 As a piece of intelligent and moderate counsel on how the proposed meeting on St Peter’s Fields should be handled, this could scarcely be bettered. In the event, the local magistrates panicked, and forgot the wise words of the Home Secretary, but we should not forget that most magistrates did accept advice of this kind from central government, which is precisely why events like Peterloo were so rare, and Peterloo itself an entirely unique disaster. After the event, Sidmouth felt that he had little choice other than to back the magistrates rather than ‘the

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mob’, but his intention had clearly been the avoidance of just such a catastrophe. The wise advice of Lord Sidmouth should be compared with the speech to the House of Lords delivered by Lord Liverpool in February 1822, and quoted in my chapter below, which was again a model of political astuteness and good sense. There was a moderation, a flexibility, and a limited concept of fair play about landed rule in England that was lacking in more autocratic continental regimes,13 and which was sensed and appreciated by the English people, despite the irritation that many members of the middle classes came to feel with the regime after 1815. They retained a fundamental trust in the efficacy of landed rule that was not entirely misplaced. The battle which radicals and reformers were forced to fight was, therefore, not only against the firmly entrenched landed battalions themselves, but also one for the hearts and minds of the common people in first the middle, and then the working classes. So firm was the grip of the landed classes upon political power in 1815 that it must have seemed to many that it could never be broken. The process of prising power out of their hands was indeed a long and painful one, but that it was done at all, and without major violence, was a remarkable achievement, a tribute to both the reformers and the reformed. Indeed, in the countryside it could be argued that landed power never was broken, but lingered on in rural parishes to 1914 and beyond, with the squire continuing to rule socially, if not politically, despite the Local Government Act of 1894, which was intended to ‘democratize’ the villages. Boys were still taught to doff their caps, and girls to curtsey, when the squire or his lady passed by. Even in the early twentieth century, a child could still be caned at school for failing to observe these courtesies, even if the offence had taken place out of school hours.14 In a sense, the common people of England did not so much overcome landed power during the nineteenth century as escape from it, in a mass exodus to the towns, where the squire’s writ did not run, particularly after the passing of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. It is interesting to notice that while the property qualification for MPs was finally abolished in 1858, that for JPs was retained until 1906.15 Those who remained in the countryside still had to acknowledge the local power of the squire, at least until 1914. With some 80 per cent of the population living in towns of more than 5000 people by 1911, however, the national picture was a different one.16 It is this overall picture that needs to be considered.

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II In view of the highly developed level of Britain’s economy in 1815, and the nature of the nation’s social structure, the political system of the day had become anachronistic: it remained in many ways feudal, with its continuing insistence on the indissoluble link between the ownership of land and the exercise of any real degree of political power. This seemed increasingly out of step with a country that was by then no longer primarily agricultural, but instead generated most of its wealth by manufacturing and commercial activities, and employed most of its people in those sectors. In the countryside, where most of the population lived until 1850, even the right to vote was dependent on the occupancy of freehold land worth at least 40 shillings a year in rent, until 1832. In truth, political reform might well have begun a good deal earlier, but for the advent of the French Revolution and the subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in which Britain became deeply involved between 1793 and 1815. The total concentration of the nation upon victory in this long and exhausting struggle, fought in part against the principles for which the French Revolution stood, served not only to delay and suppress any current movements for reform, but also to strengthen the hand of conservative elements within the British political establishment, who could now point to the French Revolution and its consequences as the likely outcome of any pandering to reformist tendencies in England.17 At the same time, however, a large, prosperous and articulate commercial middle class had grown up in England which, by 1815, had come to bitterly resent its virtual exclusion from any significant say in the political process. While they had largely refrained from attacking their landed government during its desperate struggle against Napoleon, their passions were fully unleashed with the coming of peace in 1815. From 1816 onwards, Hampden Clubs and other reform societies sprang up in many of the larger towns in the industrial midlands and in the north of the country, protest meetings and petitioning increased in frequency, and some of the parliamentary ‘pocket’ boroughs began to struggle in the grip of their landed masters.18 Between 1815 and 1830, however, the country was ruled by a succession of Tory governments, who turned an unsympathetic ear to these cries for political reform. Their fear was that concessions would lead to a general jacquerie along French lines, and their answer was repression. From 1822 onwards a more liberal form of Toryism came to the fore, but the leaders of this movement, Peel, Huskisson and Canning,

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were much more concerned with social and economic reforms than with political ones.19 In this way, the stage was set for political agitation and conflict in England during the postwar years, and it is against this background that the first three decades of our period should be viewed. Although increasingly there were members of the landed classes who were prepared to accept moderate reforms, in general the agricultural interest of the country at that time represented the conservative side of the political debate, with landowners and tenant farmers standing for the most part shoulder to shoulder against political reforms, and the mass of the uneducated agricultural labourers following blindly where their betters led them. Post-1815 English radicalism, and the slow but steady course of social and political reforms up to 1850, are topics that have already been well covered in other publications.20 This particular collection of essays, however, offers initially to throw more light upon a specifically agricultural aspect of the reform agitation of those years – namely the long struggle to secure the repeal of the Corn Laws which were operational during this time. My own contribution deals with the attitudes of various economic and social interest groups towards the post-1815 Corn Laws and concludes, rather surprisingly, that the landless labouring classes, whose interests were most damaged by the operation of these laws, were the very group who complained least about them, until they were stirred into action at last by the vigorous campaigning of the Anti-Corn Law League in the early 1840s. Even then, the League found that mass working-class support was hard to come by, and it remained an overwhelmingly middle-class movement, both in its leadership and in its membership: much more so than its contemporary and rival movement, Chartism. There was indeed some hostility between the two organizations, particularly on the Chartist side. The Chartists were wary of the clearly middle-class nature of the League’s leadership, suspicious that its objective was to secure a reduction in the price of bread only so that the employing classes would then be able to lower wages.21 By another strange irony, the loudest and most bitter complaints against the Corn Laws between 1815 and 1846 can be seen to have been voiced by tenant farmers and landowners, the very people in whose interests they had been passed in the first place, but who remained eternally dissatisfied with their operation. I have been able to show in my chapter that both sides were mistaken in their attitudes, because the Corn Laws were in fact both more damaging to the labourers, and more beneficial to the

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farming community, than has previously been supposed. The urban and commercial middle classes adopted an attitude towards the Corn Laws that was intermediate between the two cited above. Basically they were hostile to them, but not excessively so. They accepted the laws as an inevitable part and parcel of landed domination of the political scene, believing that they would disappear automatically if only other reforms, notably the reform of Parliament, could be achieved first. While they were highly critical of government policies in general, the urban middle classes of Regency England did not single out the Corn Laws in particular for attack, but on the contrary placed them well down on their list of reform priorities, below such items as the extension of the franchise, taxation, government retrenchment and currency reform. Even so voluble a middle-class critic of the government as William Cobbett did not mention the Corn Laws in his list of ten vital measures that could be secured if only the reform of Parliament could be achieved first.22 Another celebrated middle-class reformer and friend of the poor, Robert Owen, put forward detailed plans for their relief in The Times during the ‘very dear’ year of 1817. There was to be new legislation, government loans, the setting up of co-operative communities with the assistance of local poor law authorities, but again his plans contained not a single mention of the Corn Laws.23 In 1839 J.H. Shearman, a paid lecturer for the Anti-Corn Law League, reported from Birmingham that ‘in the main streets ninety out of a hundred shopkeepers stated that they neither knew nor cared about the corn laws’.24 The somewhat ambiguous attitude of the urban middle classes towards the Corn Laws is more fully explained in my chapter below. While the middle classes as a group were equivocal and intermittent in their opposition to the Corn Laws, however, there were individual members of this class who vigorously and persistently campaigned against them, at least from the mid-1820s. One of the most effective of these campaigners was Colonel Thomas Perronet Thompson, whose contribution to the Anti-Corn Law movement is fully explained by Michael Turner in Chapter 3 below. An unjustly neglected figure today, during the 1840s Thompson was hailed as one of the heroes of the Anti-Corn Law League, and ranked with Cobden and Bright as one of its leading champions. He was certainly the League’s most persuasive and intellectual writer, doing more than anyone else to effectively destroy the arguments of the protectionists. Precisely because of the highly informed and intellectual nature of his writings, however, Thompson failed to secure a mass audience during the 1820s and

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1830s, although his arguments were appreciated by the educated minority, including many members of the government, and, of course, Peel himself. It was only when his ideas were taken up and popularized by the Anti-Corn Law League, which incorporated them into a host of inexpensive pamphlets and tracts, that he at last reached a wider audience, and achieved the recognition that he deserved. His work meant that leaders of the League did not have to sit down and begin to write their own propaganda after the official foundation of the organization in 1839 – a set of virtually irrefutable arguments lay ready to hand. Perronet Thompson also has a wider importance as a member of that ‘small but determined band’ of middle-class radicals and reformers who consistently attacked the Corn Laws during the 1820s and 1830s as a part of their campaign to secure free trade. This collective description was originally coined by one of their number, Richard Potter, and applied at first only to a fairly closely-knit group in Manchester.25 However, the term has a wider application, and should be extended to other middle-class writers and campaigners who were also untypical of their class as a whole in consistently and vigorously opposing the Corn Laws in the 1820s and 1830s. They included London-based writers and campaigners like Charles Pelham Villiers and Perronet Thompson, but also a few exceptional urban merchants and manufacturers in the midlands and north, such as the celebrated ‘Corn Law Rhymer’, Ebenezer Elliott, and the less well known Joseph Livesey. Elliott was a Sheffield steel producer who is dealt with more fully in my own contribution, and Livesey was a prosperous Preston cheese merchant. Both men had the money and the leisure to produce and publish, at their own expense, various writings against the Corn Laws of the 1830s. Elliott’s attacks were couched in verse, while Livesey produced The Moral Reformer, a small periodical with a limited local circulation. Both men were intellectual pygmies by comparison with Perronet Thompson, but the sincerity of their convictions cannot be doubted. The motivation of Livesey in particular was deeply Christian, and the Corn Laws were only one of the targets of his campaigning in The Moral Reformer. In his autobiography, however, which he began to write in 1868, he proudly recalled his early stand against the Corn Laws, and quoted from his Moral Reformer of 1831. The passage is worth citing in some detail here, for Livesey’s autobiography is a particularly interesting one, with relevance for later political developments. He wrote,

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Though not a professed political agitator, I took a share in every movement which had for its object the freedom of trade and the untaxing of the people’s food. It was impossible for me to remain a mere spectator, when I saw my fellow creatures suffering so severely from a removable cause, and on every occasion I endeavoured to expose the cruel tendency of the Corn Laws; the wickedness of excluding foreign food when the people were starving, for the selfish purpose of keeping up the value of land. Ten years before the Anti-Corn League was fairly at work, in my Moral Reformer, I wrote strong articles upon this subject.26 Livesey then went on to quote extensively from the March 1831 number of his Moral Reformer, which drew particular attention to the plight of the hand loom weavers. In the Preston area at that time, this group of workers was, of course, suffering very badly. Instead of blaming the invention of the powerloom for their plight, however, Livesey blamed the Corn Laws, making such statements as, ‘Oh! how hard that honest and industrious men should hunger, while God gives bread enough and to spare!’ He then concluded by stating, Though I never assumed the character of a political agitator, yet, I feel it no slight honour to have stood with ‘Cobden and Bright’, on a platform in the open-air, denouncing monopoly, and pleading for the people’s rights. And, comparing the last twenty with the previous thirty years, I don’t hesitate to say that the free trade policy advocated so long by Colonel Thompson, Villiers, Cobden and Bright, and at last taken up by Sir Robert Peel, has saved this country from revolution; and, in fact, has been the forerunner of that contentment, tranquillity, and progress which have marked this latter period.27

III There was much truth in Livesey’s concluding remarks. Although halfhearted in their opposition to the Corn Laws, the urban middle-class campaigners had been much more adamant in their demands for political reform, in particular the breaking of the landed monopoly, a general extension of the franchise to members of their own class, and a redistribution of Commons seats in favour of the towns. By 1830, after 15 years of vigorous but fruitless campaigning, their patience was wearing thin, and violence seemed to threaten in the years 1830 to

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1832, for the labouring classes were also restive.28 One group of workers in particular, among the most poorly paid in the country, reached the end of their tether in 1830. These were the agricultural labourers of southern and eastern England who spontaneously broke out into riot and protest against their conditions in 1830 and 1831. These were, of course, the notorious Swing riots, which were harshly put down, and appeared to have achieved nothing in terms of the immediate relief of the conditions which had caused them. However, as Jeremy Burchardt is able to show in Chapter 4, they did provide a crucial impetus to a philanthropic movement which, prior to 1830, had made very little progress indeed. This was the concept of providing small allotments at low rents to poorly paid labourers, on which they might grow vegetables and cereals to supplement the food supplies of their families. Jeremy Burchardt is able to show that official legislative encouragement of the allotment movement after 1830, although well meaning, was largely ineffective, but that private initiatives from landowners and clergymen saw a rapid acceleration of allotment provision between 1830 and 1870. There was an element of poetic justice about this development, since it had been the agricultural policies of the great landlords themselves which had been largely responsible for the high levels of unemployment, and the low wages, which had been suffered by agricultural labourers in the south of England. By 1800, the great landowners of England held about 75 per cent of all the agricultural land in their large estates.29 They chose to let this land out, however, not to a large number of small tenants, but to a small number of large tenants. This was partly for reasons of prestige, since the possession of a ‘substantial tenantry’ was a point of pride for the great estate owners, and partly for ease of administration. A smaller number of tenants required less management and, it was believed, were more likely to pay their rents in full and on time. They would be better able to weather the storms of hard times and poor harvests.30 They would be well-equipped, capital-intensive farmers, market-oriented and aware of the latest new agricultural techniques: in short, more ‘efficient’. As a result of these beliefs, the average size of English tenant farms grew steadily during the eighteenth century, and by 1815 large farms predominated on the great estates.31 But ‘efficiency’ is an elusive concept. In terms of rent per acre, the larger farms were actually lower yielding than smaller holdings, partly because they required fewer farm buildings, but mainly because the extensively cultivated large farms were less productive in terms of yield per acre than smaller holdings.32 The great attraction of the large

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farms was not their high output, but their very much lower costs. They could make optimum use of capital equipment, could buy inputs in bulk, required fewer farm buildings, and above all were highly economical in their use of labour. As a result, although less productive, they were undoubtedly more profitable from the tenant farmer’s point of view, allowing him to pay his rents fully and on time. Landlords therefore made a conscious decision to exchange higher rents for rents that were lower, but more certain, and much easier to collect. The alternative, as landlords saw it, was the horrendous scenario of a rabble of small, ‘inefficient’ tenants, eternally short of funds, who would be a disgrace to the estate, and who would make rent collection a nightmare. The large farm system was, therefore, designed primarily for the benefit of the great estate owners and their tenant farmers. But the wider community, and especially its poorest members, paid a price for their convenience. First, the total cereal output of the country was reduced by the extensive cultivation of the large farms, and this served to raise food prices. The small, intensively cultivated peasant farms of France in fact produced higher yields per acre than the large English farms, and the Corn Laws of 1815 were designed to protect English farmers from imports from France as well as from eastern Europe.33 Secondly, because the large farms were not labour-intensive, but rather labour-efficient, the land was not able to absorb additional numbers (as did the land in Ireland and France under different systems) in proportion to the nineteenth-century rate of population increase. This created a large, underutilized labour pool in the southern counties prior to 1850. The problem was a far less serious one in the midlands and the north, because here the rapid rise of industry between 1750 and 1850 easily absorbed the additional labour force, but the success of the north actually worsened the situation in the south, because the better advantaged and more efficient industries of the north competed with and destroyed the few manufacturing industries which the south had managed to retain in 1750.34 The luckless southern labourer was as a result caught in a vicious crossfire of high prices, low wages and high unemployment levels. The great landlords were therefore under something of a moral obligation to the southern labourers to deliver some kind of recompense to them for the considerable hardships to which they had been subjected. The allotment movement was, in large measure and from a minority at least, that moral response. The motivation for establishing allotments was in part to secure the ‘moral reform’ of the labourers, but the movement was twice blessed, representing a degree of moral

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improvement on the part of the providers as well. At first the heaviest concentration of allotment provision was in the south, where they were most needed, but by 1886 allotments had also become numerous in the midlands and the north.35 As history so often teaches us, the morally correct answer proved also to be the economically correct answer. In terms of yield per acre, the small but intensively cultivated allotments showed themselves to be no less than twice as productive as the extensively cultivated arable fields from which they had been carved.36 They provided not only more food for the nation, but more food specifically for the most needy sections of society. They were proved to reduce poor rates dramatically in those parishes where they were established, so that middle-class ratepayers also benefited from their introduction. The labourers of town and countryside, who might otherwise have spent their evenings in the alehouse, possibly plotting sedition, instead turned eagerly to their allotments, demand for which was always oversubscribed. By the 1880s the merits of allotments were clear to all, and successive governments gave further and increasingly effective legislative encouragement to the allotment movement with measures such as the Allotment Extension Acts of 1882 and 1892, going on to pass the Smallholdings Act of 1908, an extension of the allotments principle.37 Allotments became a source of great pride for their holders, and gave them a real sense of achievement: the poor labourer was empowered to help himself. The allotment movement was, in short, an unmixed blessing upon the land, and contributed in no small measure to that greater sense of general well-being that Livesey had noticed as prevailing in 1868.

IV The country was less settled, however, in the 1830s. The urban middle classes in general, and radical reformers in particular, soon came to see that the so-called ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832 had in reality done very little to loosen the iron grip of the landed classes upon the levers of power. The executive branch of government remained almost entirely in landed hands, and when the ‘reformed’ House of Commons sat in 1833, some 500 of its 658 members still directly represented the landed interest, while in 1837 only 97 MPs could be clearly identified as manufacturers, bankers or merchants, much the same proportion as had sat there in the late eighteenth century. The Reform Act of 1832 had allocated 65 additional seats to the English counties, and within

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these rural areas had enfranchised the very numerous leaseholding tenant farmers, to that extent actually increasing the electoral influence of landowners in the shires, since voting was still by open and public declaration. Local gentry continued to nominate the candidates for many Commons seats, including town seats, and often chose to occupy those seats themselves. In the five general elections held between 1832 and 1847, the average proportion of contested seats was only just over half of the total, and where seats were contested, the conflict often represented a clash of local gentry interests rather than a genuinely democratic process.38 In reality, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 proved to be a more significant piece of legislation, as far as the towns were concerned, than the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832. Indeed, some legislation of the 1830s, such as the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, could even be seen as reactionary. The radical party, including Commons MPs such as Joseph Hume, John Fielden and Thomas Attwood, and their supporters outside Parliament like Francis Place, William Lovett and Richard Cobden, began to feel that they had been outmanoeuvred, and were very much on the back foot. The legislation of the 1830s had proved to be little more than a brilliant rearguard action fought by the landed classes, who had lost a battle, but had won the war. Frustrated and angry, the radicals began to probe for a weak point in the Conservative front, and it did not take some of the group long to focus their attention upon the Corn Laws.39 Tory governments had clearly been wavering on this issue, with the revised Corn Laws of 1828 already a paler shadow of the 1815 legislation, as the logic of free-trade principles began to penetrate the Tory cabinets. Here, in the view of many radicals, was the weak point on which to concentrate an attack. The Corn Laws stood as the great symbol of landed domination on the political scene. If they could be toppled, the morale of the radical party would be splendidly restored: a real sense of progress would be achieved, inspiring the group to press on to further victories. But this was not a unanimous view. The radical party was far from being a cohesive group, and others in their number saw the Corn Laws as a side issue, a piece of legislation that would fall as naturally as ripe fruit once other, more important reforms had been achieved. This latter group turned instead to Chartism in the late 1830s. As noted above, relations between the two groups of reformers were often strained, and there were some among the Chartists who did not see the Leaguers as true radicals at all.40 Moreover, from the perspective of 1850, it appeared that the two bodies had even less in common. By that date, the Anti-

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Corn Law League had been completely successful in its aims, while the Chartists were diminished and in disarray, with their support rapidly fading. In 1850 not one of the six points of the People’s Charter had yet been achieved, and Chartism seemed to be a lost cause. In the longer term, however, the validity of the Chartists’ demands did come to be recognized, one by one, until by 1911 only one of their six demands, that for annual parliaments, remained ungranted. At the same time, the great ‘victory’ of the Anti-Corn Law League was less of a triumph for that body than it appeared to be. Deeper political and economic currents had prescribed the ending of the Corn Laws, and they would certainly have been repealed at some date close to 1850 even if the Anti-Corn Law League had never existed. The anecdote first related by John Morley is well known. After listening to a Commons speech by Cobden on the inequities of the Corn Laws, Robert Peel was so utterly convinced by it that he threw down his papers and turned to Sidney Herbert, who was sitting beside him on the front bench, muttering, ‘You must answer this, for I cannot’ before striding from the chamber. There is no documentary proof of the story, but Norman Gash believes it to be very probably true, in the light of Peel’s earlier beliefs and later actions. Certainly Herbert was surprised to be asked to speak, had no notes, and made a very poor reply to Cobden.41 More recent research suggests that the Corn Laws had been marked down in Peel’s mind for total abolition at some future date even as early as the 1820s.42 Eventually, it was a Parliament of landlords that bowed to the inevitable, and voted out their own Corn Laws in 1846. But their change of heart had deep roots, which I am able to say more about in Chapter 2 below. From the perspective of 1850, therefore, it could be argued that the Anti-Corn Law League had won only a hollow and unmerited victory in 1846, while the Chartists had failed completely. But this would be to dismiss both organizations too lightly. The Chartists had sown the seeds of future reforms, which came to fruition gradually over the following 60 years while the Anti-Corn Law League, during its seven years of vigorous campaigning, had been highly successful in ‘demonizing’ the Corn Laws, representing them as the chief grievance of the people, from which all of the country’s other ills had flowed. W.H. Chaloner noted that, ‘As time went on the fight against the Corn Laws took on the aspect of a semi-religious crusade’,43 while Michael Turner, in Chapter 3 below, quotes from the speech of a typical repealer who claimed that, ‘It is impossible to estimate the quantity of human misery created by the Corn Laws, or the quantity of human

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felicity that is overthrown by them.’ This piece of polemic was, of course, a grotesque oversimplification of the situation, but precisely because it was simple, it was easy to remember. It was entirely due to the propaganda of the League that Robert Peel, hardly a believer in democracy, ‘fell from official power into the arms of the people’. Following the repeal of the Corn Laws, cheap prints of Sir Robert Peel, their ‘saviour’, appeared in many working-class households. The city of Birmingham, whose opposition to the Corn Laws had been intermittent at best, and which had been slow to respond to the League’s campaign, was highly appreciative of Peel’s achievement after 1846, raising a statue to him by public subscription, much of which was contributed by working men. But perhaps the most touching tribute to him was paid by the politically tough and cynical city of London. In 1850, as Peel lay dying, the notorious London mob once more gathered, but this time to stand in silence by his gates, paying their last respects to a great leader, who had sacrificed his position and his party for the common good.44 All this retrospective gratitude for the repeal of the Corn Laws made little political impact at the time in terms of the fortunes of the Tory Party, but it entered deeply into the minds of the people, and was to assume a far greater significance in the early years of the twentieth century, as I try to show in Chapter 2. In another important respect also, the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League should be credited with a major achievement. This was the drawing of the working classes into large-scale, serious political commitment for the first time. The ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832 had indeed extended the franchise, but in 1833 only 656 000 adult males were allowed to vote in England and Wales out of a total population of nearly 14 million, a trifling extension of the 439 000 who had been allowed to vote in 1831.45 The new voters were, moreover, like the old, members of the substantial middle classes, men of property, although not necessarily landed property, and employers of labour. During the 1830s, the proletarian classes on the whole remained as firmly excluded from the political process as ever, according to the law and the constitution. It was the middle-class leaders of the Chartist Movement and the Anti-Corn Law League who reached down a hand to the social classes below them, and drew them up into organized and large-scale involvement in a serious political arena for the first time. This is not to say, of course, that there had been no kind of workingclass involvement in political activity before 1839, but only to stress that it had previously been very limited in scale. Both the nature and extent of working-class involvement in Chartism and the League were

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of an entirely new order. In some of the pre–1832 parliamentary boroughs the franchise had been widely extended to include members of the labouring classes, but such boroughs were few, and the proportion of working-class voters to be found even in these was small. It is also true that many non-voters of the lower classes participated in elections prior to 1832 as organizers, helpers and supporters of one side or another.46 These participators, however, like many of the voters themselves, were experiencing the elections as carnival, rather than as a serious political process, with most electors placing their vote at the disposal of patronage or bribery. Even those who voted honestly on the issues of the day, such as the Wilkes affair or the American War of Independence, were not given the opportunity to alter in any fundamental way the political process itself. Following the Septennial Act of 1716 elections were few and far between, and contested elections were even rarer. When there was a contest, electors were in almost every case presented with a choice between two gentry candidates, both of whom were firmly in support of the existing political system, at least in its fundamentals. By participating in these ‘elections’ at all, it could be argued that all voters, including those few from the working classes, were merely registering their support for the status quo. Recent research has shown that workingclass participation in genuinely radical politics was very small. There was less working-class involvement in the London Corresponding Society and in the provincial societies than was once thought.47 Hampden Clubs and Union Societies did have a working-class membership, although their leadership was invariably middle-class, but again the number of such bodies was comparatively few, with most Hampden Clubs concentrated in south Lancashire and the East Midlands. Working-class membership of these bodies, as a proportion of the working population as a whole, was always very small, and fell away from its peak in 1817 in the face of government repression which, together with its well organized spy system, proved to be very effective in the dispersal of radical groupings.48 Mass meetings and the presentation of petitions to Regent or Parliament were forms of political protest that were invariably organized by the middle classes, although some artisans and operatives did attend the meetings, and the signatures of those who could write did appear on some petitions – although usually at the behest of their employers. This left only rioting as a form of truly working-class direct action, aimed at influencing the local authorities. Riots there certainly were, against high food prices, low wages, gig mills, enclosure, threshing machines, the

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New Poor Law, toll gates, and a host of other grievances which are looked at more fully in my contribution below. But again these riots were comparatively few, the number of rioters always small, and the protest always against a specific grievance rather than against the social and political structure of the country as a whole. They had nothing to do with ‘high’ politics in the way that Chartism most certainly did, and to that extent it is debatable whether they should really be seen as forms of ‘political’ action at all, particularly at anything higher than local government level. A similar argument could be applied to the early trade union movements. But ‘high’ politics was the sphere in which both the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League aspired to move. The latter body aimed to mobilize large-scale electoral support for their cause, but also worked hard to recruit working-class support. In this regard they were admittedly less successful than the Chartists, as hostility between the two movements grew in the early 1840s, but their intention of both educating and recruiting the working classes was very clear. Moreover, despite the views of the veteran Chartist G.J. Holyoake, the Anti-Corn Law League was a truly radical movement. Its aim was not only repeal, but also the overthrow of that landed political hegemony which was such anathema to Cobden, thereby opening the way to an entirely different political system. Cobden himself described the League as ‘a phalanx for upsetting the proud aristocracy of England’, and it is clear from his speeches that John Bright too was a deeply committed radical, who saw repeal not as an end in itself, but rather as the beginning of a profound process of political reform.49 Although both organizations appeared to be ‘finished’ by 1850, both left behind them long-term legacies, including the new notion that large-scale involvement in ‘high’ politics was now a respectable working-class aspiration.

V In the shorter term, however, when all the smoke and dust of the 1840s conflicts had cleared away, the landed classes were left ostensibly still in possession of the field. Cabinet posts remained almost entirely in landed hands during the 1850s and 1860s, and in 1865 some 400 of the 658 Commons seats were still occupied by landed gentry, 180 of whom were the sons of peers or baronets, while the House of Lords remained as powerful and exclusive as ever.50 With their extreme demands, threats of violence, and divided leadership, the Chartists had shot themselves in the foot, and the wound had

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proved fatal, not only to Chartism, but also to all such similar radical movements in the future. After 1850, it was recognized by both sides of the debate that swift and radical change was not on the agenda. In 1851 Lord Shaftesbury wrote to Lord John Russell from Manchester, ‘Chartism is dead in these parts; the Ten Hours Act and cheap provisions have slain it outright.’51 There was much truth in both of Shaftesbury’s points, but he might have added that other measures – such as the introduction of income tax at 7d. in the £ on incomes over £150 p.a. in 1842, the passing of the Public Health Act in 1848, and the spread of the allotment movement – had also done much to persuade a majority of Englishmen that continuing landed rule would not prove to be an intolerable burden. The Continental revolutions of 1830 and 1848–9 had not spread to England, and indeed the latter upheavals had served as more of a warning than an inspiration to British radicals, impelling them to rethink their whole attitude towards the securing of their goals. So profound was the change in the nature of the reform movement in Britain after the collapse of Chartism that Miles Taylor has been able to write of ‘the decline of British radicalism’, arguing that there were no more than 60 Commons MPs who could be described as ‘radical’ in the 1850s, and that even they did not form a coherent party. In similar vein, Margot Finn entitled her study of radical politics in England After Chartism in order to stress the post–1850 discontinuity, although she argues for the survival of a working-class radical culture in the 1850s.52 Chartiststyle radicalism, however, red-blooded, extreme, desperate, and with one hand eternally twitching towards a musket, had indeed been slain forever. On the face of things, it appeared that the landed classes had once again fought a brilliant rearguard action, making a few timely concessions, and thereby losing a few minor battles, but in the process winning the war. This time, however, they had retreated a step too far. They had indeed ‘slain’ Chartism with their repeal of the Corn Laws and other measures, but they had won only a pyrrhic victory. By accepting the fact that they had no tactic open to them but the repeal of their own Corn Laws, the landed classes were in fact admitting that they had been holed below the waterline: their ultimate decline was now only a matter of time, just as Cobden had hoped. If the Corn Laws were a pass that the landed classes could not hold, then there was no pass that they could hold. Their fundamental weakness had been exposed, and their enemies began to close in, slowly at first, but more relentlessly than ever. With the threat of violent revolution

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finally dead in the 1850s, the ruling elite no longer had any excuse for the harsh repressive measures that they had been able to deploy after 1815. The landlords had slain physical-force Chartism only to clear the way for a much more deadly enemy, the movement for moderate and gradual reform. Its weapons were not muskets, but the free press, and its tactics not violent riot, but the steady conversion of public opinion. The strength of its legions grew as the urbanization of England proceeded apace, the franchise was extended, and the relative economic importance of the agricultural sector steadily declined. In Chapter 5, David Martin has been able to show how criticism of the landed hegemony and its consequences increased after 1850, and how this criticism was now hitting home with more telling effect. It was not only the political position of the landed classes that came under question, but also their right to a disproportionate share of the very land itself. In a rapidly changing climate of opinion, a blizzard of legislation was passed that blew away much landed power, piece by piece. Like Hitler on his long retreat from Moscow, the landlords were forced continually to give ground in order to prevent their position from becoming completely untenable. Their strength in the Commons steadily waned as the Second and Third Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884–5 enfranchised new legions of urban voters, but their declining position in the Commons was not the main reason for a change in landed attitudes. Although only 34 per cent of new MPs came from landed backgrounds after the 1885 election, this proportion actually rose to 37 per cent after elections in the following year, and to 42 per cent after the elections of 1892.53 In addition to holding the still significant House of Lords, therefore, the landed interest remained heavily overrepresented in the Commons, and continued to dominate in the Cabinet, with the noble lords Salisbury and Rosebery filling the office of Prime Minister for almost all of the years between 1885 and 1902. It was not, therefore, so much that the landed classes lacked the power to block reforming legislation as that they lacked the will, and the sense of moral authority, to do so, against a background of the rapidly changing social and economic structure of the country that they ruled. Their attitude was a tribute to their political good sense, but it could only delay, and not prevent, their inevitable decline. Many of the post–1850 reforming measures which Parliament passed were carried out in the name of efficiency, such as the County and Borough Police Act of 1856 which compelled all local authorities in town and countryside to set up professional uniformed forces,

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supported in part by central Treasury funds, and subject to inspection by three national Inspectors of Constabulary. While the main aim of the Act had undoubtedly been the securing of more efficient national policing, it had the incidental effect of relieving country JPs of much of the direct responsibility for the maintenance of law and order. Other reforms, however, were more specifically targeted against landed power, such as the Corrupt Practices Acts of 1854 and 1883, which introduced increasingly serious penalties for those found guilty of unduly influencing parliamentary elections.54 Final abolition of the property qualification for MPs came in 1858, and the Militia Act of 1882 removed control of the militia and the yeomanry from the lord lieutenants and JPs and placed it instead under the control of the regular army, which in turn answered to the national government. Other important pieces of legislation included the County Councils Act of 1888, which provided for democratically elected governing bodies in the counties, relieving JPs of the last of their administrative duties, and leaving them with purely judicial functions. The Rural District and Parish Councils Act of 1894 was intended to democratize local government even at parish level, although, as noted above, this latter Act had little immediate effect. The powers of the House of Lords were at last curbed by the Parliament Act of 1911. For many years previously the Lords had not in practice been blocking money Bills sent up to them from the Commons, but this Act now formally abolished their power to do so, and limited their veto on other legislation to a delay of two years only, if their consent was withheld.55 The Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885 had established equal electoral districts, while the Franchise Act of 1884 had extended the vote to all adult male householders, tenants, or lodgers who could establish a one-year residential qualification, although this still left many men without the vote.56 Only in 1918 did the Representation of the People Act unequivocally extend the vote to all men over 21 who wished to join the electoral register. Since the secret ballot had been established in 1872, and payment of MPs provided for by the Parliament Act of 1911, five of the six Chartist demands of the 1840s had therefore been granted by 1918. Annual parliaments remained a dream, but the Parliament Act had at least reduced the maximum term of any one parliament from seven to five years. All of this legislation, of course, left the landed classes, and the agricultural interest in general, in a seriously weakened position in political terms. But their economic position too had deteriorated badly by 1900. Even in 1851, the census of that year had revealed that

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the agricultural sector was employing only 20 per cent or so of the workforce of England and Wales, and generating about the same proportion of the gross national product. In 1851 agriculture could at least claim to be still one of the largest single employers of labour, closely rivalling manufacturing industry in this regard, but by 1901 agriculture was employing a mere 8 per cent of the labour force in England and Wales, and was generating only 6 per cent of the gross national product.57 Free-trade policies, which had been fully introduced in the 1850s and 1860s, had left British agriculture highly vulnerable to foreign competition, which proved to be the main factor in producing a long period of agricultural depression during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as cheap cereals began to flow in from Canada, the USA, Australia and Argentina, while the invention of refrigerated shipping in the 1880s brought livestock farmers too within the range of foreign competition. Agricultural prices, rents, and land values all fell sharply, undermining the economic basis of landed power, and placing great financial strains on most tenant farmers.58 By 1900 the agricultural sector was desperate for some form of government relief to ease its plight, but found that its friends in high places had become very few. Instead of being represented by Parliament as a whole, it was now only the Conservative Party that harboured a residual commitment to the agricultural sector, the Liberals having thrown in their lot with the urban middle classes, the Dissenters and ‘progressive’ thought.59 Between 1868 and 1910 the proportion of landowners among Liberal MPs had fallen from 26 to only 7 per cent, but even in the Conservative Party the proportion of landed MPs had fallen from 46 to only 26 per cent over the same period.60 The House of Lords remained strongly Conservative, but by 1900 it had become the weaker of the two Houses, hesitant to overrule the Commons, and soon to have its powers curbed officially in 1911. Moreover, even the Conservative Party, led by politically astute men, was very wary of appearing to favour the agricultural sector, in view of the new electoral landscape of Britain. It is unlikely that even a gesture in the direction of agricultural protectionism would have been made around the turn of the century had it not been for a measure of confusion in party policies that arose at that time, as the Liberal Party split over the question of Irish Home Rule, and the Conservatives over the questions of protectionism and imperial preference.61 But even to give the appearance of undue favouritism to food producers at the expense of food consumers in the early years of the twentieth century was a very dangerous policy in electoral terms, as I try to show in Chapter 2.

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Ewen Green asks whether even the Conservative Party could still be regarded as the ‘farmers’ friend’ at this time, and concludes in Chapter 6 below that the question remained an open one in 1914.

VI The First World War, of course, brought a revival in the fortunes of agriculture, and a new recognition of the strategic importance of the agricultural sector by the government.62 This new attitude was reflected in the Agriculture or Corn Production Act of 1920, which offered farmers guaranteed prices for their cereals, and appeared to secure the future of arable farming in England. However, the guaranteed prices clauses in the Act were repealed barely a year later, in June 1921. F.M.L. Thompson believes that this repeal was ‘as dramatic in its way as the repeal of the Corn Laws, and its effects were a good deal more instantaneous’.63 Many owner-occupying farmers were forced to sell up, and there was considerable bitterness in their ranks.64 The political influence of the landowning classes continued to decline after the First World War, partly as a result of the large-scale selling off of land from the great estates that took place mainly between 1919 and 1921, although it continued throughout the interwar period. Much of this land was purchased by tenant farmers, who took out mortgages to buy the farms that they had previously occupied as tenants. F.M.L. Thompson has calculated that while in 1914 only 11 per cent of the agricultural land in England and Wales was farmed by its owners, including the home farms of the great estates, by 1927 owner-occupiers were farming 36 per cent of the total acreage. Thompson goes on to remark, Insofar as a proportion of the estates that were sold continued to pass into the hands of the large landowners, established or new, and did not swell the ranks of the owner-farmers, it is possible that in the four years of intense activity between 1918 and 1921 something between six and eight million acres changed hands in England. Such an enormous and rapid transfer of land had not been seen since the confiscations and sequestrations of the Civil War, such a permanent transfer not since the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. Indeed, a transfer on this scale and in such a short space of time had probably not been equalled since the Norman Conquest.65

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Spectacular as they may have seemed, however, these extensive sales certainly did not destroy the great estate system in England. In her study of landed families, Heather Clemenson found that 52 per cent of those families who had owned land in 1880 had descendants in 1980 who still owned some land, while 44 per cent of them still held estates of more than 1000 acres.66 Between the wars some twothirds of agricultural land continued to be worked by tenant farmers, in part because many of the new owner-occupying farmers of 1920 had been forced to sell their farms again following the repeal of the Agriculture Act in 1921. Although the large landowners had certainly ‘lost ground’ in the most literal sense since the nineteenth century, the great estates had by no means been wiped out. The ‘New Domesday Survey’ of the ownership of land in Britain carried out in 1873 had revealed that fewer than 7000 persons owned 80 per cent of the land of the United Kingdom. However, a Royal Commission Report of 1979 concluded that six million acres of agricultural land in England and Wales were still held in privately owned estates of 5000 acres or more, and that fewer than 1200 individuals still owned one quarter of all English farmland.67 In 1939, therefore, the landed classes of England were still alive and well, but they had voluntarily withdrawn from the political arena.68 It could well be argued that they had made their last stand against the Budget of 1909 and the Parliament Act of 1911, and had learned from the experience. As Jonathan Brown is able to show in Chapter 7, the National Farmers’ Union did far more to represent the agricultural interest to the government between the wars than did the Central Landowners’ Association (renamed the Country Landowners’ Association in 1949) which had been founded in 1907, just a year before the NFU. Even the latter, however, was in a weak bargaining position, and found itself acting often as the apologist for government policies to its membership. As Clare Griffiths shows so clearly in Chapter 8, both landlords and tenants came to believe that they had more to fear than to expect from government policies, as the Labour Party, with its socializing and bureaucratic tendencies, grew in strength between the wars. The fortunes of the agricultural community were near their nadir in the early 1930s, and the future must have looked bleak. Agriculturists could not have foreseen that the coming of the Second World War and entirely new postwar government attitudes would so greatly improve the outlook for their sector. This change of fortune would provide a happier ending to the long story of English tenant farmers and of their landlords, who had ruled the land

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with a very creditable degree of political wisdom for so long. The contributions which now follow have been written to provide detailed illustrations of some of the developments that have been sketched in above.

Notes (Place of publication London unless otherwise stated.) 1. P. Deane and W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1969) pp. 142, 166. 2. N. Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–1865 (1979) pp. 41–62, E.L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1963) pp. 15–30, 75–92. 3. G.S. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (1967) pp. 178–82. 4. P. Mathias, ‘The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century: a Calculation by Joseph Massie’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. vol. X (1957) pp. 44–5. 5. D.C. Moore, ‘The Gentry’ in G.E. Mingay (ed.), The Victorian Countryside (1981) p. 393. 6. E.J. Evans, ‘Some Reasons for the Growth of English Rural AntiClericalism’, Past and Present, no. 66 (1975), p. 104. 7. D. Dunman, The Judicial Bench in England, 1727–1875 (1982) pp. 18–24. 8. C. Barnett, Britain and Her Army, 1509–1970 (1970) pp. 170–4, 278–9. 9. I.F.W. Beckett, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester, 1991) pp. 73–7, 120–8, 130–7; A. Verey and S. Sampson, The Berkshire Yeomanry (Stroud, 1994) pp. 1–12. 10. Quoted in N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (1967) p. 30. 11. O. Mosley, My Life (1968) pp. 111–77. 12. D.G. Wright, Popular Radicalism: the Working-Class Experience, 1780–1880 (1988) p. 72. 13. See R. Gibson and M. Blinkhorn (eds), Landownership and Power in Modern Europe (1991), esp. p. 176. 14. F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963) p. 325; J. Burnett (ed.), Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education, and Family (1982) pp. 291–2. 15. J.V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986) p. 457. 16. R.J. Morris and R. Rodger (eds), The Victorian City, 1820–1914 (1993) pp. 2–3. 17. H.T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 1985) pp. 25–42; J.R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850 (1992) pp. 207–12. 18. R.C. Baily and S.M. Hardy, ‘The Downfall of the Gower Interest in the Staffordshire Boroughs, 1800–1830’, Collections for a History of Staffordshire, (1950–1) pp. 267–301; D. Read, The English Provinces, 1760–1960 (1964) pp. 65–94; A. Briggs, ‘The Background of the Parliamentary Reform Movement

30

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 in Three English Cities 1830–1832’, Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. X (1952) pp. 293–317. E.J. Evans, Britain before the Reform Act: Politics and Society, 1815–1832 (1989) pp. 13–20, 39–61. For example, P. Adelman, Victorian Radicalism: the Middle-Class Experience, 1830–1914 (1984); Wright, Popular Radicalism; J. Vernon, Politics and the People: a Study in English Political Culture, 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993); J. Belchem, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1996). E. Royle, Chartism (1996) pp. 38, 113. J.M. and J.P. Cobbett (eds), Selections from Cobbett’s Political Works vol. IV (1835) pp. 499–527. The Times, 1817: 30 July, p. 3, 9 August, p. 4, 22 August, p. 3, 10 September, p. 2. L. Brown, ‘The Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’ in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (1959) p. 353. M.J. Turner, ‘Before the Manchester School: Economic Theory in Early Nineteenth-Century Manchester’, History, vol. 79 no. 256 (1994) p. 218. J. Pearce (ed.), The Life and Teachings of Joseph Livesey, Comprising his Autobiography (1885) p. 20. Ibid., p. 21. M.I. Thomis and P. Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (1977) pp. 85–99. F.M.L. Thompson, ‘The Social Distribution of Landed Property in England since the Sixteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. vol. XIX (1966) pp. 510–15. M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England, 1500–1850 (Cambridge, 1996) pp. 20–1. G.E. Mingay, ‘The Size of Farms in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. vol. XIV (1962) pp. 469–88; and J.R. Wordie, ‘Social Change on the Leveson-Gower Estates, 1714–1832’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. vol. XXVII (1974) pp. 605–7. On this West Midland estate farms of over 200 acres occupied 51.7 per cent of the tenanted area, and farms of over 100 acres 76.8 per cent in 1813. M.E. Turner, J.V. Beckett and B. Afton, Agricultural Rent in England, 1690–1914 (Cambridge, 1997) pp. 54–6. W.H. Newell, ‘The Agricultural Revolution in Nineteenth-Century France’, Journal of Economic History, vol. 33 (1973) pp. 708–20. A satirical cartoon by George Cruikshank, drawn in 1815, depicted French merchants approaching English shores to offer wheat at 50 shillings a quarter, only to be turned away by English landlords. Reproduced in D. Richards and D.W. Hunt, Modern Britain (1950) p. 96. J.R. Wordie, ‘The Southern Counties’ in J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. V, pt I, 1640–1750 (Cambridge, 1984) pp. 346–57. J. Burchardt, ‘The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873’ Unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Reading, 1997) pp. 199–248. Ibid., pp. 472–86. W.A. Armstrong, ‘The Flight from the Land’ in Mingay (ed.), Victorian Countryside , pp. 131–2.

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38. E.L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1962) pp. 90–2, 661–3; W.L. Guttsman (ed.), The English Ruling Class (1969) pp. 149–61; E.J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State, 1783–1870 (1983) p. 216. 39. McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, pp. 15–29. 40. Royle, Chartism, p. 128. 41. J. Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (1905) p. 318; N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel: the Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (1972) pp. 470–1. 42. B. Hilton, ‘Peel: a Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, vol. 22 no. 3 (1979) pp. 600–6. 43. W.H. Chaloner, Introduction to second edition of A. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League (1968) p. xviii. 44. Gash, Life of Peel, p. 700; D. Fraser, ‘Birmingham and the Corn Laws’, Birmingham Archaeological Society Transactions, vol. 82 (1967) p. 20; N. Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–1865 (1979) p. 249. 45. F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons, and Parties: the Unreformed Electoral System in Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989) p. 179. 46. Ibid., pp. 138–41, 254–9, J.A. Phillips, Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England (Princeton, 1982) pp. 176–211, 243–52. 47. M. Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society (Cambridge, 1983) p. xix; H.T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution (Oxford, 1985) p. 11. 48. Wright, Popular Radicalism, pp. 64–78; Read, English Provinces, pp. 65–77; Belchem, Popular Radicalism, pp. 32–50. 49. Brown, ‘Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, pp. 344–58; G.J. Holyoake, Bygones Worth Remembering (1905) vol. I, pp. 90–2; McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, p. 136; J. Bright, Speeches on Parliamentary Reform, Etc., by John Bright, Esq., M.P. (Manchester, 1866) pp. 10–17, 20–26, 68–73. 50. Woodward, Age of Reform, pp. 92, 186–8, 664–7. 51. Gash, Aristocracy and People, p. 249. 52. M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995) pp. 19–25; M.C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993) pp. 60–141. 53. Beckett, Aristocracy in England, pp. 463–4. 54. C. Cook and J. Stevenson, Modern British History, 1714–1987 (1988) p. 69. 55. R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936) pp. 294–6, 424–5. 56. H.J. Hanham, The Reformed Electoral System in Great Britain, 1832–1914 (1968) pp. 24–5. 57. Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, pp. 142–3, 147, 166. 58. R. Perren, Agriculture in Depression, 1870–1940 (Cambridge, 1995) pp. 7–30. 59. H.V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals, and Social Politics, 1892–1914 (Cambridge, 1973) pp. 1–141. 60. Beckett, Aristocracy in England, p. 463. 61. I. Jennings, Party Politics, vol. II (Cambridge, 1961) pp. 165–249. 62. P. Dewey, British Agriculture in the First World War (1989) pp. 47–79, 107–34. 63. F.M.L. Thompson, ‘English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property: Collapse and Survival’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th. ser. vol. 40 (1990) p. 11. 64. A. Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: a Social History, 1850–1925 (1991) pp.

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281–3. 65. Thompson, English Landed Society, pp. 332–3 66. H.A. Clemenson, English Country Houses and Landed Estates (1982) pp. 118–22. 67. Thompson, English Landed Society, p. 27; Thompson, ‘Property: Collapse and Survival’, p. 14. 68. Ibid., pp. 3–12.

2 Perceptions and Reality: the Effects of the Corn Laws and their Repeal in England, 1815–1906* J.R. Wordie

The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 has been seen by many historians as one of the defining moments of nineteenth-century British history: a pivotal development of the first magnitude. It was the moment at which, in the long arm-wrestling match between agriculturist and industrialist, the back of the agriculturist’s hand hit the table top with a resounding crash. The beginning of the end of landed domination of national government could much more justifiably be dated from 1846 than from 1832.1 Equally, by many in the agricultural community of the time, the Corn Laws were seen as the pass at Thermopylae: if that pass could be held, all would be well: but if the pass were sold, the Persian hordes would burst through, wreaking havoc upon a noble civilization.2 Sir Robert Peel’s ‘selling’ of that pass was regarded as a monstrous act of betrayal by the very party that he led, and which he himself had done so much to rename and reshape in a more progressive image. It could well be argued that Robert Peel both created and destroyed the first Conservative Party, leaving its ruins to be reconstructed again at last along Disraelian lines, since the Party’s disastrous split over the Corn Law issue allowed them only 26 months in office over the following 20 years.3 But the full significance of the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws remains a debatable issue. Other historians have argued that, since the Corn Laws were ineffective and irrelevant, therefore their repeal was an event of no great significance, in either economic or political terms.4 The highly controversial nature of the Corn Laws and their repeal arose in part because they were seen as the tool of a sectional interest group – namely, of course, the agricultural interest. Perceptions of the *I would like to thank Michael Turner and Ewen Green for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 33

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effects of the Corn Laws would therefore vary according to the standpoint of the observer: different interest groups would inevitably take different views on the desirability of the Corn Laws and of their effects: or so one might have expected. But how, in fact, did the different interest groups in England perceive the post-Napoleonic Corn Laws during their years of operation between 1815 and 1846? It would seem that shortly after its official foundation in 1839 the Anti-Corn Law League succeeded in uniting a substantial majority of all the classes of English society, including, remarkably, the landed class itself, which still dominated the executive branch of national government, against the idea of tariff protection for British agriculture. In view of the total, and surprisingly rapid, success of this movement once its campaigns had got under way in the early 1840s in persuading a majority that the Corn Laws were utterly iniquitous and completely unacceptable, it is rather surprising to notice how patiently the Corn Laws had been endured by the bulk of the population prior to that time, during the quarter of a century or so that followed 1815. It has been argued by some historians that the Corn Laws were not, in fact, ‘patiently endured’ by those classes who were disadvantaged by them, and that voices of protest were raised by the wage-earning labourers, the industrial manufacturers, and the urban middle classes. There is some truth in this view, but the nature of this protest needs to be examined, and its scale and effectiveness placed into perspective. It will be argued here that prior to 1840 protest against the Corn Laws from the labouring classes was virtually nonexistent, while protests from the urban middle classes were few, intermittent, muddled in purpose, muted in tone, and completely ineffectual. Criticism of the Corn Laws from radical MPs and their pamphleteering supporters outside Parliament was far more consistent and better reasoned, at least from 1822, but these campaigners were few in number, and preached to a small, though highly appreciative audience of literate intellectuals like themselves. They could, with little exaggeration, be described as nothing more than voices crying in the wilderness. It was only after their ideas had been taken up and systematically given much wider publicity by the Anti-Corn Law League that they won widespread support. At the same time, before the election of Peel’s administration in 1841, this group cut little ice with the government. In the words of Norman McCord, they were ‘condemned by the circumstances of the time to work outside the charmed circle that held the reality of power’.5 Ironically, the interest group that voiced the loudest and most effec-

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tive complaints against the Corn Laws of 1815 to 1846 was none other than the same group that had initiated the laws in the first place, that is the agricultural interest, as represented by the tenant farmers, who occupied roughly 90 per cent of all the agricultural land in England at that time, the larger landowners, and many members of the government itself, which remained firmly dominated by the landowning classes up to 1840. It was dissatisfaction from these quarters that secured a revision of the 1815 Corn Laws in 1822, a lengthy debate in Parliament on the issue from 1825 to 1828 which culminated in a further revision of the Corn Laws in that year, another modification in 1842, and finally the effective abolition of all tariff protection for agriculture in 1846. It is clear that perceptions of the Corn Laws and their supposed effects varied widely between the different interest groups of the country, and indeed varied even within the same groups. But how closely did these various perceptions accord with the realities of those years? With the advantage of hindsight, we can look back on this period and draw conclusions that were not evident to many of those who were alive at the time. For these purposes, four main interest groups may be distinguished: the landless wage-labourers in town and countryside, the urban middle classes and industrial manufacturers, and the agricultural interest, which at that time included both the tenant farmers and the substantial landowners, the aristocracy and gentry, who still dominated Parliament and the government in 1841.

I Let us look first of all at that class which might have been expected to have protested most strongly against the Corn Laws as being totally antipathetic to their interests, namely the landless wage-labourers in town and countryside, faced now with the prospect not only of very low wages, but of high bread prices as well. Strangely, before their passions were aroused by the carefully planned and orchestrated campaigns of the Anti-Corn Law League, there was surprisingly little protest from this very large social group, which indeed comprised a majority of the population. In his classic history of the Corn Laws, D.G. Barnes quoted the following passage from The Annual Register of 1828: The working classes universally looked on the Corn Laws as the first and greatest source of their distress, for they could comprehend

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this position, that the cheaper the corn the cheaper the loaf; they knew that they could live more comfortably if they obtained a certain quantity of bread for threepence than if it cost them sixpence, and further they went not.6 Barnes then allowed this opinion to stand as his own, and it does indeed appear to be an entirely sensible view. However, Barnes did not then go on to adduce any evidence in its support. The same tendency may be seen in later works: the temptation to assume that the working classes must have been actively and violently opposed to the Corn Laws is very strong, because the assumption seems to be such a logical one. Norman Gash said of the 1815 legislation, ‘There was a mass of petitioning against the bill from manufacturers, towns, and industrial labourers, and outbreaks of riot in towns as far apart as Edinburgh, Norwich, and Canterbury.’7 There were indeed petitions from the articulate urban middle classes, but self-contained groups of industrial labourers were not in the habit of petitioning Parliament at that time. Those who did petition in 1815 are listed and described in the House of Commons Journal for that year. The petitioners were ‘the manufacturers, traders, mechanics, farmers and inhabitants of Mitcham and its vicinity’, or ‘several merchants, cotton manufacturers, spinners, and other inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood of Burnley’. While there may have been some working-class signatures on these petitions, the initiative for them had clearly not come directly from the working classes themselves, but from their employers and betters who, in 1815 and afterwards, often requested their employees to sign petitions which they had sponsored.8 The nearest approach to independent working-class petitioning was not to be found in England at all, but came from the Scottish ‘Incorporations’, such as ‘The Incorporation of Wrights, Shoemakers, Tailors, Bakers, and Masons of the burg of Dumfermline’, or ‘The United Corporations of Wrights, Masons, and others in the city of Edinburgh’. But the members of these Incorporations were respectable tradespeople, and should more properly be seen as lower-middle-class.9 Similarly, Eric Evans says of the Corn Laws of the 1830s, ‘Hostility was not restricted to the middle classes. The artisan radicals remained primarily antiaristocratic into the 1840s and Sheffield had seen the development of a Mechanics’ Anti-Corn Law Association in the early 1830s.’10 It is a fairly safe assumption that those very few ‘artisan radicals’ who did exist at the time would have been anti-aristocratic, but Evans cites the Sheffield Association as though it were a typical example of working-

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class response to the Corn Laws, whereas in fact it was a uniquely untypical instance. Sheffield was the home of Ebenezer Elliott, the celebrated ‘Corn Law Rhymer’, a prosperous steel manufacturer, but also a great eccentric and a fanatical opponent of the Corn Laws. He should be numbered among that ‘small but determined band’ of radical politicians and middle-class writers who consistently opposed the Corn Laws from the 1820s.11 Elliott contributed to the struggle by attacking the Corn Laws in verse, most of it published at his own expense. The less said about the quality of his poetry the better, but he did found in 1833 the Sheffield Mechanics’ Anti-Corn Law Association, around a nucleus of his own employees.12 Without the presence of Elliott, however, it is very doubtful that this Association would have generated itself spontaneously. But to what forms of evidence should we turn to discover the real views of the working classes on the Corn Laws? The semi-literate labouring masses, at that time unrepresented and inarticulate, had only one effective form of protest open to them – physical direct action, which usually took the form of riot. It is therefore through the shouts of the rioters that we may hear of the most keenly felt grievances of a mainly inarticulate community. But what did they have to say? D.G. Wright declared, ‘The 1815 Corn Bill was passed amid widespread rioting in both London and the provinces.’13 However, the sources that he cites in support of this claim, Stevenson and Darvall, mention riots in London only. Darvall adds, At Norwich on the occasion of the Agricultural Show there was a demonstration against the bill, though it did not lead to anything. At Nottingham, as we have seen, there was muttering. Otherwise there was only an undercurrent of discontent.14 This hardly suggests ‘widespread rioting‘ in the provinces. The claim of Gash, cited above, that there were riots in Edinburgh, Norwich and Canterbury in 1815, may be tested by an inspection of provincial newspapers of the time. These reveal that there were no riots in Edinburgh or Canterbury: local papers reported the London riots, but none in their own areas.15 There was indeed a riot at Norwich, occasioned by the local unpopularity of Thomas Coke, later the Earl of Leicester, who presented himself at a Norwich cattle show on 17 March, just as the Corn Law debate in Parliament was at its height. Coke was booed and chased by a mob: he made good his escape, but a general riot then ensued. The Riot Act was read, and the mob was

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dispersed by the yeomanry with no serious casualties. 16 This must be counted as an anti-Corn Law riot, because the main reason for Coke’s unpopularity at the time was his notoriously high-profile support for the Corn Bill. However, had Coke kept a lower profile on the issue, or failed to attend the show on that day, the riot would probably not have occurred. Local papers do not report any other anti-Corn Law riots in the year 1815 in any other part of the country.17 There was no ‘widespread rioting in the provinces’ in 1815. It seems reasonable to assume that, insofar as they thought about it at all, the working classes were, like the urban middle classes, hostile to the Corn Laws, but the articulation of this hostility was left almost entirely to middle-class expression. There were serious riots in London during the week from Monday 6 March to Friday 10 March, but when it came to wider working-class protest, it seemed almost as though it was only the sophisticated artisans of the capital who were capable of fully grasping the implications of wheat being on sale for never less than 80 shillings a quarter nationwide, which was the clear intention of the 1815 legislation.18 But perhaps this is not so surprising: from the time of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, through to the Civil Wars and the Gordon Riots, the London mob had been known as the most radical and dangerous in the country. Subsequent to 1815, historians of rural and urban protest have nothing to tell us about anti-Corn Law riots during the years 1816 to 1846, and even the League itself had, initially, some difficulty in whipping up support, facing, indeed, the open hostility of the Chartists.19 Riots and protests there certainly were after 1815 and prior to 1846, but surprisingly none of these were directed against the Corn Laws, not even those of the early 1840s, when the League’s campaign was well under way, such as the Plug riots and the Rebecca riots. In an extensive study of local newspapers, I have been able to find only one example of a post-1815 riot at which the Corn Laws were even mentioned, and on that occasion not by the rioters themselves, who were bent on the destruction of powerlooms, but by a well-meaning member of the public who tried to deter the mob from its intent. As an ugly crowd began to gather in a field off St George’s Road in Manchester on 27 April 1826, they were addressed by a Mr Jonathan Hodgins, who urged the men to return to their homes, and instead of rioting, to petition against the Corn Laws. This suggestion was, however, met with hoots of derision. The crowd surged forward, Hodgins was swept aside, and several mills believed to house fustian powerlooms were attacked.20

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The most famous of the earlier riots, however, were surely the bread riots of 1816 and 1817. Towards the end of 1816 wheat prices rose rapidly, to peak in 1817 at an annual national average of almost 97 shillings a quarter. Indeed, the only two years in the century following 1815 when wheat actually did exceed 80 shillings a quarter in price for considerable periods of time were 1817 and 1818, with wheat prices in the latter year averaging 86s.3d. per quarter.21 Later came the Swing riots of 1830–1. These and numerous other lesser outbreaks of the times are now well documented, and their historians relate a long list of the rioters’ grievances: low wages, high food prices, unemployment, the administration of the old poor laws, the Reform Bill of 1832, the New Poor Law of 1834, trade union rights, enclosures, the Game Laws, gleaning rights, Chartist demands, threshing machines, mole ploughs, gig mills, steam looms, toll gates, greedy shopkeepers, mean-minded farmers, oppressive clergy, speculative grain dealers, almost every conceivable form of grievance but, remarkably, not the Corn Laws, which are never listed as being among the rioters’ complaints.22 This is most surprising, particularly in relation to the years 1816–18 when food prices were high, riots frequent, and the Corn Laws, apparently, a most obvious cause of complaint. Once again, however, newspaper evidence supports the findings of modern scholarship. Newspapers of the time gave ample coverage to the rioters and their grievances, but no mention appears of the Corn Laws in their reports.23 If ‘trial by riot’ is to be trusted, the English working classes appear to have acquitted the Corn Laws. But this conclusion raises the question of whether ‘trial by riot’ is a fair means of assessing the real opinions of the working classes at that time. The evidence could also be read as suggesting that the labouring classes would respond with riot only against an immediate and present grievance – such as the physical presence of Coke or the known supporters of the Corn Bill in London, an intrusive fence that had enclosed their common, or a powerloom that had taken their work – but not against an abstract, long-term, and hypothetical threat to their interests, as the Corn Laws must have appeared in the rest of the country. However, perhaps working-class opinion in the provinces was none the less strong on the issue for that? Further indicators of workingclass feeling on the subject must be sought. On the question of working-class perceptions of the 1815 Corn Laws, another source of evidence presents itself. In the nineteenth century, for the first time, working-class autobiographies become available to us in appreciable numbers. Could it be that the more liter-

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ate and thoughtful members of the working classes, who were not prone to rioting, were nevertheless the ones who did appreciate the iniquities of the Corn Laws, and committed their thoughts on the subject to writing? These autobiographies should surely afford us a valuable insight into the minds of working-class people of the time, revealing their innermost thoughts and feelings, expressed in their own words. But what do these autobiographies have to tell us about their opinions on the Corn Laws? The answer is, very little. Several studies of working-class autobiographies of the nineteenth century have now been carried out, but the texts they examine reveal an almost total indifference to the Corn Law question.24 After many years of research, in 1955 the American scholar William Matthews produced An Annotated Bibliography of British Autobiographies which, although far from complete, is still our best single guide to the subject. Matthews listed 6654 autobiographies in all, most of them relating to the nineteenth century, and provided a very brief commentary on each one. He then equipped his book with an invaluable subject index, which cross-referenced his entries. This index lists 47 autobiographies which are described as ‘Working Class, C19th.’ but lists only ten autobiographies from all classes as making any mention of the Corn Laws at all.25 The two lists overlap at only two points – that is to say only two autobiographies out of 6654 are categorized as being both ‘working-class’ and mentioning the Corn Laws. One of these, however, turns out to be the autobiography of none other than Archibald Prentice (1792–1857), the celebrated journalist, anti-Corn Law campaigner, and historian of the movement, whose ‘working class’ credentials are highly questionable. It is true that he was for many years a radical campaigner on many issues, including that of free trade, but after recording Manchester’s lack of resistance to the passing of the Corn Laws in 1815 noted above, there are only a few passing references to them in the remainder of his autobiography.26 Norman McCord observed, ‘Prentice’s later prominence as historian of the League has tended to exaggerate the part he played.’27 The other autobiography referred to by Matthews is that of John Buckley, published under the title of A Village Politician in 1897. Buckley certainly was a member of the working class, at least in his early years, but in 1839 he was only 19 years of age, had never campaigned against the Corn Laws before that date, and clearly knew almost nothing about them. Buckley was, however, soon to become an ardent proponent of repeal, declaring that by 1841, ‘I had for some time read everything I could lay my hands on about the Corn Laws.’ Two pages

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later, however, he boasted, ‘I could repeat from memory all the imports and exports of grain since the passing of the first Corn Law in 1820’, suggesting that his engrossing of knowledge on the issue had been recent, hasty, and ill-digested.28 As with other members of the working class, it had taken the League itself to stir Buckley into action on the issue. But the most thorough study of working-class autobiographies completed in recent times is surely David Vincent’s Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom. This book is based on a study of no fewer than 153 nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies, many of them not listed in Matthews, but only one of these is cited as containing any reference to the Corn Laws.29 The passage referred to comes from the autobiography of Charles Shaw, and is worth quoting. ‘When the Queen came to the throne, work was scarce and food was dear. The Corn Laws were bringing into play their most cruel and evil results. One of these results was that little children had to compete for the decreasing sum of available work.’30 Shaw then goes on to describe the evils of child labour, and has nothing more to say about the Corn Laws. The passage is interesting, not only for the extreme brevity of the reference to the Corn Laws, but also because of the year in which it was written, 1903, the very year in which Joseph Chamberlain made his celebrated Birmingham speech, in which he advocated a return to some form of agricultural protectionism. The passage above provides no evidence at all that Shaw had given any kind of consideration whatsoever to the Corn Laws in the year 1837, although he thought fit to mention them in 1903. This is a point worth bearing in mind when we later come to consider the general election of 1906. Diaries are a less satisfactory source of insight into the working-class mind of this period, because poor labourers had neither the time nor the inclination to keep diaries. Indeed, even ‘working-class’ autobiographies were written mainly by those who subsequently made good, and raised themselves up from the class into which they had been born. The furthest down the social scale that diary writing reached before 1840 was to members of the lower middle classes, and their records tell a mixed tale. Some, like Robert Sharp of South Cave, who was a village schoolmaster, took a lively interest in current events of all kinds, and frequently expressed opinions on the Corn Laws and other matters. Others, like William Lucas of Hitchin, a small yeoman and brewer, made no mention of the Corn Laws until his attention was drawn to them by the campaigning of the League, while some, like James Maggs of Southwold, never mentioned the Corn Laws at

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all.31 In short, there appears to be very little evidence that the working classes of England gave any great consideration to the Corn Laws at this time: they made no move to protest against them after 1815 until they were recruited into the repeal campaign by the Anti-Corn Law League in the early 1840s. But this conclusion raises another question: why were the working classes so passive on a measure that struck at one of their most vital interests – the price of bread itself – when they were so ready to riot against a host of other grievances? Any attempt to answer this question must take us into the realms of speculation, for the working classes themselves have left us with no record of their own thoughts on the matter, if indeed they spared much time to think about it at all. One might first of all point to the fact that the price of wheat very rarely did exceed the magic figure of 80 shillings a quarter, which was the one provision of the Corn Laws which everybody seemed to remember. This could have led to the impression that the Corn Laws were ‘not working’ and were therefore an irrelevance, and nothing to worry about. However, this explanation cannot be applied to the crisis years of 1817–18, when the original 1815 legislation, red in tooth and claw, was still in unmitigated effect, and when the average price of wheat was above 80 shillings a quarter, and indeed, in some areas, in some months, well above that price. Still there was no protest against the Corn Laws from the working classes, and little enough from the urban middle classes either, who were nevertheless so moved by the plight of the poor that they subscribed large sums for their assistance.32 Any explanation of the silence of the workers on this issue must therefore go deeper than a suggestion that the Corn Laws were ignored on the assumption that they were ‘not working’. One might also point to the sheer complexity of the Corn Laws: to the fact that they had always been there in one form or another from 1660, and that they had always been incomprehensible to the mass of the population. The fact that the laws of 1815 were somewhat less favourable to the consumer than had been the equally incomprehensible laws of 1804 or 1791 was probably very dimly perceived, if it was perceived at all, by the semi-literate masses. Indeed, the laws of 1815 were so complex in detail that very few would have been able to recite their terms. For example, rye, peas and beans might be freely imported when their prices reached 55 shillings a quarter, barley at 40 shillings a quarter, and oats at 26 shillings. But wheat from the North American colonies could be admitted when the home price had reached only 67 shillings, with proportionate reductions for the other commodities.

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Further complex rules on the timing of price levels in England and on which parts of Europe importation was then to be allowed from were also written into the legislation.33 The final consequences of all these provisions were almost unfathomable, even before the situation was complicated even further by legislative revision in 1822, 1828 and 1842. Perhaps the only men in England outside the government itself who fully understood the Corn Laws were that ‘small but determined band’ of radical MPs and their intellectual supporters who campaigned so bravely and consistently against them from the 1820s. A further reason why the labouring classes paid little attention to the Corn Laws might have been that they had so many other, and much more immediate problems to contend with. Their autobiographies and diaries bring out this point very clearly. They tell of the harshness of life for the poor in the first half of the nineteenth century, speaking of the struggle for existence, childhood, education, the working day, making one’s way in the world, family life, selfimprovement, temperance and religion. These were the immediate issues that occupied the minds of the workers, and left them with little time or inclination to think about anything else. As a class they had no ‘politics’ in the modern understanding of the word: indeed, they were not expected to have any, for they were deliberately excluded from the ‘political nation’. Rather, they reacted to immediate circumstances by direct action: they might hijack the grain wagon of a ‘greedy’ corn factor, smash a threshing machine that had taken away their winter work, or pull down a fence that had enclosed ‘their’ common. They might riot against low wages and unemployment, as in 1830. But in general, with the exception of a tiny minority only, they accepted society as it was, and accepted too the political views of their betters, including the view that ‘high’ politics were a mystery far above their heads, and a matter best left to their superiors. Included under the heading of ‘high’ politics were such questions as the extension of the franchise, the redistribution of parliamentary seats, and the revision of the Corn Laws. Their betters among the middle classes seemed to be very concerned about such things, no doubt for their own benefit, but their immediate relevance to the poor must have seemed obscure. The notion that he might soon be called upon to express opinions on such ‘high’ matters would have seemed incredible to the labourer of 1830, at a time when even the middle classes were still being denied an effective say in the political process, despite their increasingly vigorous protests against this situation. But called upon the labourers were soon to be. The middle-class organizers of the

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Chartist movement and the Anti-Corn Law League reached down a hand to those classes below them, and drew them up into the political arena.34 Both movements could trace their origins to 1838. Prior to that date, however, it could be argued that the labouring masses thought little about the Corn Laws partly because they had too much else of immediate concern to think about in their daily lives, partly because of the complexity and unfathomable implications of the Corn Laws, but partly too because they were not expected to think about them. Their betters had decreed that the Corn Laws were a matter far above their consideration, and in this as in other things, they accepted the views of their betters. It was one of the greatest achievements of the Chartists and the League that they changed forever the English working man’s perception of himself, and of his political potential.

II Before those two organizations began their work, however, there can be little doubt that the working classes did not devote much thought to the issue of the Corn Laws, nor see them as a serious threat to their interests. Were they correct in their perceptions? It would seem not. The assumption that the Corn Laws were ‘not working’ simply because the price of wheat in England usually remained well below 80 shillings a quarter was only partially correct. They did indeed fail in their primary aim of keeping wheat and other foodstuffs at prices of the prescribed level, but Susan Fairlie has argued very cogently that the Corn Laws in fact kept English wheat prices at levels significantly higher than would have been the case under free trade, and that they were repealed just in time to prevent cereal prices from rising to very high levels in the 1850s and 1860s. The situation between 1815 and 1841 is particularly interesting, for Dr Fairlie shows that cereal prices in Prussia, France and Russia were substantially lower than those of England and Wales during those years. For example, between 1815 and 1827, while the price of English wheat averaged 66s.11d. per imperial quarter, Prussian wheat averaged only 34s.3d. a quarter, little more than half the price. However, in order to calculate its sale price in England had free importation been allowed, Dr Fairlie added 7s.6d. per quarter in freighting and distribution costs to the Prussian figure, and reduced the remaining price difference by 50 per cent, to allow for the effects of English demand on Prussian price levels. The resultant sale price in England, at 54s.4d. a quarter, was then 19 per cent lower than the actual average price of wheat from 1815 to 1827. On the

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same basis of calculation, Prussian wheat could have sold in England at 17 per cent below the actual average price level in England between 1828 and 1841. However, as Dr Fairlie herself admits, these price reductions represent a conservative estimate of the potential impact of free importation over those years.35 Indeed, one might go further, and suggest that they represent a very conservative estimate. Dr Fairlie was certainly on the right track here, but did not go far enough down the road, for had a totally free importation of all cereals been allowed from 1815, the situation in England would have been radically different from the one that in fact obtained. One might first of all point to the fact that the main cereal crop of Prussia, and of northern Russia too for that matter, was not wheat but rye, and that Prussian rye was even cheaper than Prussian wheat, at an average price of 23s.2d. a quarter from 1816 to 1827, and only 22s.10d. a quarter between 1828 and 1846. This compared with average English rye prices of 41s.4d. and 34s.8d. for the same periods.36 Now rye bread is well known to be both wholesome and nutritious: the Prussians did very well on it, and it is a favourite product of modern health food shops today. Had English rye supplies been freely supplemented by those of Prussia and other countries, making rye both cheap and abundant, a rye loaf might have sold in England for something like half the actual price of a wheaten loaf between 1815 and 1846. Against this it could be argued that English labourers had ‘lost their rye teeth’ in the early eighteenth century when wheat had been cheap, and that their fondness for wheaten bread was not a habit that could be easily broken. It is certainly true that wheat was the main cereal consumed by all classes in the south and midlands of England in the early nineteenth century, but Professor Collins has argued that, ‘In 1800, only an equivalent 65–70 per cent of households in England and Wales, and 55–60 in Great Britain overall, lived on wheat.’ In the north of England and in Scotland, other cereals, including rye, were still used as bread corns.37 The wheat-eating proportion of the population did increase steadily as the century progressed,38 but had cheap and abundant rye been available, this trend might have been slowed, or reversed. A swing to rye would also have served to bring down the price of wheat, by reducing demand for that cereal. As it was, a serious problem facing the southern labourer was that expensive wheaten bread was usually the only form of bread available for him to buy. The reason for this was that southern farmers preferred to grow wheat, because it gave a higher return per acre than any other cereal. Indeed, as prices fell, they

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tended to respond by growing more wheat rather than less, producing the remarkable phenomenon of a backward-sloping supply curve for wheat.39 Under the pressures of the times, however, southern labourers might well have been glad to turn back to rye bread, had it been cheaply and readily available. Let us assume, however, that wheat would have remained the key bread cereal under free trade. Dr Fairlie has argued that wheat could have been 19 per cent cheaper in England under free trade between 1815 and 1827, and 17 per cent cheaper between 1828 and 1841. But she assumed that British demand would have raised Prussian prices. This would have been true for the existing levels of Prussian wheat output, on which she based her calculations, but an increase of demand from England could well have been met by an increased wheat supply from the cereal lands of eastern Europe, so that the rise in Prussian prices might have been less than Dr Fairlie envisaged.40 A more important point, however, is that under free trade, Prussia and the Baltic would not have supplied the bulk of our cereal imports in any case. Black Sea wheat was even cheaper than Prussian wheat, and potentially more abundant. British importers were forced to look to the Baltic only, rather than elsewhere, in ‘dear years’ precisely because of the Corn Laws. As Dr Fairlie explains, Under the Corn Laws, merchants who could be reasonably sure of making a profit on imports from ports and depots in north-western Europe when conditions warranted it hesitated to engage in the Black Sea and America even when near famine conditions at home might make this a social duty. In the first place, the journeys home were so long that the chances of the corn arriving after prices had fallen and the duties had been reimposed were too large for comfort. In the second place, British ships, which virtually had to carry the cargoes under the Navigation Acts from countries like Russia with no navy, were scarce at the best of times in the Black Sea and other grain ports, and their freights soared wildly on the slightest expectations of grain price rises. Repeal of the Sliding Scale made distant grain trades ‘respectable’, and repeal of the Navigation Acts enabled merchants to use whatever shipping was currently available in grain-trade ports.41 Dr Fairlie has a point in her conclusions about the Black Sea, but British merchants had other reasons for shunning the American trade. Prior to 1846, the American wheat market was neither very cheap nor

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very reliable. During the ‘dear years’ of 1816 to 1818 when wheat was very expensive in England, it was also expensive in New York, at over 80 shillings a quarter, although from 1820 to 1835 the average price of wheat in New York was lower, at $1.30 a bushel, or 45s.7d. a quarter at the gold standard conversion rates to which both countries adhered after May 1821, when the Bank of England resumed gold payments. This was well below the British price, but high enough to make America an unattractive market for English merchants by comparison with the Black Sea or the Baltic. Moreover, there was a disastrous harvest failure in the north-eastern states in 1836, and the price of wheat on the eastern seaboard shot up to $2.90 a bushel. There were bread riots on the streets of New York, and some grain was actually imported from England, which fortuitously experienced a wheat surplus in 1835 and 1836, with average wheat prices at 39s.4d. and 48s.6d. during those years. By 1840, New York prices had returned to their normal levels where they remained until 1854–5, when the Crimean War disrupted the Black Sea trade, and so increased the demand for wheat from Europe that New York prices rose again to $2.25 and $2.46 a bushel in those years, almost twice their normal level.42 But Dr Fairlie is correct in her statement that European cereal prices were on an upward trend after 1828 as a result of steady population growth, so that American wheat did indeed become fully competitive with Baltic and Black Sea wheat in the 1850s. Prior to 1841, however, without the Corn Laws, Britain’s key wheat supplier would have been neither the American nor the Baltic markets, but the Black Sea. Between 1815 and 1827 Russian wheat was on sale at Odessa at an average price of only 26s.6d. a quarter, and from 1831 to 1846 at 24s.9d., in both periods some 20 per cent below the Prussian price.43 Against this it could be argued that Odessa was further away than Danzig, thereby adding to freight costs and deterring British merchants from trading there. However, J.R. McCulloch, a well-informed contemporary, believed that the shipping costs for a quarter of wheat from Odessa to London were no more than 14 to 15 shillings, raising its cost in London to just 41 shillings a quarter or so.44 Had trade with Odessa been free, however, freighting costs might well have been lower. The argument about there being insufficient shipping to carry a free trade before the repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1849 seems weak. Britain was a great shipbuilding nation at that time with the largest merchant marine in the world, and had an opening for profitable trade existed, the ships to carry it would soon have been forthcoming, of the right type and in the right numbers. In

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addition, many ships would have been diverted from the Baltic to the Black Sea trade, as indeed happened after 1846. Dr Fairlie further argues that transport problems in the Ukraine would have limited the supplies of wheat that could have reached Odessa in the event of increased demand, stressing the absence of railways in the Ukraine prior to 1860. It is certainly true that Russia was slow to see the importance of railways: in 1855 there were only 660 miles of track in the whole country.45 However, the absence of railways does not seem to have prevented Odessa’s wheat supplies from rising sharply in response to increased foreign demand. For example, in the five years from 1835–9 the average quantity of wheat reaching Odessa for sale abroad was 920 000 chetwerts a year, but from 1845–9 an average of 2 131 000 chetwerts a year were available for sale there, long before any railways had appeared (one Chetwert = 0.727 quarters.)46 Much of this wheat had come to Odessa along the coast of the Black Sea, which was well served by river systems which drained into it from the north and west. The rivers Pruth and Danube served Bessarabia, Moldavia and Wallachia, while the Dniester, Bug, Dnieper, Donets and Don were all navigable along most of their lengths, and could have provided at least partial water transport for grain.47 However, the key point about Black Sea wheat was not so much its quantity as its price. Clearly its quantity could have been increased in response to greater demands, thereby keeping price levels fairly stable. But no great quantities of Black Sea wheat need have reached England in order to have substantially affected price levels there, because of the extremely inelastic nature of England’s demand curve for wheat. We need not go as far as Claude Scott, who informed a House of Lords Committee in 1826, ‘The arrival of 100,000 quarters of wheat in the London market might occasion a fall of one-sixth in the price, though the 100,000 quarters might be only one hundred and fiftieth part of the consumption of the kingdom.’48 Scott may have been correct, but this would have implied a very inelastic demand schedule for wheat indeed. A more realistic estimate was put forward in 1816 by Charles Western, when he announced to the Commons that, If there is a small deficiency of supply, the price will rise in a ratio far beyond any proportion of such deficiency; the effect indeed is almost incalculable; so likewise on a surplus of supply beyond demand, the price will fall in a ratio exceeding almost tenfold the amount of such surplus.49

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It could be argued that Western, as a great champion of the agricultural interest, was something of a biased witness, but his ‘tenfold’ estimate implied an elasticity of demand coefficient of about –0.1 for wheat at that time, which seems about right for the years prior to 1850. After that date the diets of the working classes became more varied and the demand schedule for wheat more elastic, but prior to 1850 the implications of Western’s observation were that an oversupply of normal demand levels of only one per cent would have caused a price fall of 10 per cent. No great quantities of Baltic and Black Sea wheat need have been imported in the 1820s and 1830s therefore to have brought prices down rapidly to the level of those in the cheapest market, that is to say the Black Sea price, plus transport costs, plus the merchant’s profit. Depending on how far transport costs could have been reduced by the establishment of a regular trade in custom-built shipping, Black Sea wheat, supplemented still by Baltic supplies, could have sold in England at between 40 shillings and 45 shillings a quarter. This was only two-thirds of the actual average annual price of wheat prevailing in England between 1815 and 1827, which was 66s.11d. In the 1859 edition of his Dictionary of Commerce, McCulloch provided a table of the average annual figures for wheat imports into the United Kingdom between 1853 and 1858, categorized into quantities from each exporting country. They enable us to compare the quantities of wheat and flour arriving in the UK from the Baltic states, including Holland, with the quantities arriving from Black Sea and Mediterranean states, including France. McCulloch’s tables show these quantities to be approximately equal, but the figures for those years were distorted by the advent of the Crimean War, which reduced wheat exports from the Black Sea to virtually nil in 1855 and 1856.50 More typical was the prewar situation of 1852, when 706 622 quarters of wheat and flour were imported into England from Russian Black Sea ports as compared to only 27 112 quarters from Russian Baltic ports, and only 452 292 quarters from Prussia.51 The potential effects of Russian wheat supplies on English price levels under a system of free trade between 1815 and 1846 should not be underestimated. All calculations of English wheat price levels under a system of free trade between 1815 and 1846 must, of course, remain speculative, an exercise in hypothetical history. But there is no other way of assessing the probable impact of the Corn Laws, and we do have enough evidence now to be able to suggest with some justification that English wheat prices might have been some 33 per cent lower than in

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fact they were between 1815 and 1828 under a system of free trade, given that Prussian wheat prices were just over half, and Black Sea prices well under half, of those obtaining in England during these years. Such a situation would, of course, have been regarded as disastrous by the agricultural community, but English tenant farmers could have survived if their landlords had reduced rents earlier, and by more substantial amounts, and if the farmers themselves had adopted the best farming practices of the time. They did in fact manage to survive in prosperity and contentment during the 1850s and 1860s on average wheat price levels of 52 shillings a quarter, even although rent levels rose substantially during this time.52 Most even managed to survive the 1890s, when English wheat prices averaged only 28s.9d. per quarter for the decade, by diversifying their production away from wheat and into livestock, dairy products, vegetables and fruit, which provided higher returns.53 On the other side of the coin, the labouring classes would have benefited greatly from a free trade in wheat, especially before 1828. It is well known that the largest single item in the expenditure of the poor at that time was bread: indeed, the poorer the family, the higher was the proportion of its total outlay on this item. John Burnett has provided us with the budgets of several working-class families between the years 1815 and 1841, and two examples may serve as illustration. The first is the family of Robert Crick, a Suffolk agricultural labourer, who supported a wife and five children on a total family income of 13s.9d. per week. Nine shillings, or 65 per cent of his weekly income, was spent on bread. A reduction of 33 per cent on this item of expenditure would have left him with an extra 3s. a week in disposable income, which could have substantially improved the family’s diet. The second example is that of a Northumberland coalminer’s family in 1825, who were slightly better off with only three children and an income of 15 shillings a week. Some 41 per cent, or 6s.3d., went on bread, so that a reduction of 33% in this cost would have left him with an additional 2s.1d. a week to spend on a smaller family.54 These figures are, of course, speculative, but a marginal increment to working-class incomes of even a shilling or two a week would have made a great difference to the families involved. There seems to be little doubt that the working classes were mistaken in their perception of the Corn Laws as an irrelevance to their situation. Had they not been repealed in 1846, cereal prices in the 1850s and 1860s would have been very much higher than they actually were, and might even have reached famine levels.55

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III All of the above arguments could also be adduced to show that the working man’s loss was the agriculturist’s gain: the landowners and tenant farmers of England benefited substantially from the Corn Laws, especially in the years prior to 1828. Ironically, however, theirs were the loudest voices raised in complaint against the legislation. Partly, this was because a substantial section of the farming community shared a common perception with the working classes, namely that the Corn Laws were ‘not working’ and therefore were irrelevant to their situation. Even more protection was needed! George Webb Hall and his ‘Agricultural Association’, founded in 1819 with a membership of tenant farmers, called for a fixed duty of 40 shillings a quarter on imported wheat, with corresponding duties on all other agricultural products, including raw wool, which at that time was imported duty free.56 When the Corn Law Amendment Act of 1822 not only failed to raise tariffs, but actually mitigated the effects of the 1815 Act by introducing a sliding scale of duties, the views of the aggrieved section of the farming community were well expressed by Lord Erskine, who addressed the House of Lords in July 1822. When I contemplate this sudden invasion of the 55th. of the late king, at the very moment when its protecting provisions ought manifestly to have been extended, it seems to me as if a course of experiments is on foot by philosophical theorists to ascertain under what accumulated pressure of unequal taxation, and unequal competition with untaxed countries, the impoverished cultivators of our soil can possibly continue to exist.57 This perception that the Corn Laws were ‘not working’ was, of course, as mistaken in the case of those agriculturists who held it as it had been in the case of the labourers. In fact, not all members of the farming community did hold this view. D.C. Moore noted that, While many agriculturists were still complaining of depressed prices, others were not only exulting in their high yields but proclaiming to the world that because of their heavy investments, especially in drainage and fertilizers, because of their emphasis upon pastoral and dairy farming, and because of their new rotations, they could sell wheat at a profit at almost half the going price.58

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Indeed, at a celebrated meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League held in Covent Garden Theatre on 29 May 1844, the Earl of Ducie, a high farmer and free-trader, had boasted that he could grow wheat at a cost of only 28 shillings a quarter on his Cotswold lands, so that he could make a profit with wheat selling at anything above that price. His boast was indignantly reported in The Farmer’s Magazine and provoked a storm of controversy in which, however, the Earl was allowed a right of reply, and defended his position well.59 It seems clear that not all farmers considered themselves to be ‘depressed’: the efficient, ‘high’ farmers were doing well, and so too, for the most part, were the livestock farmers of the north and west. But enough petitions came in from the arable farmers of southern and eastern England to persuade the government to set up parliamentary commissions of enquiry into agricultural distress in 1821, 1833 and 1836. As E.L. Jones observed, ‘Thus it was that a primarily arable depression, and an intermittent one at that, was passed off as all-pervasive.’60 But there can be no doubt that a sizable proportion of the agricultural community remained entirely dissatisfied with the Corn Laws, their amendments, and their effects up to 1846. Indeed, their dissatisfaction increased with each succeeding amendment. 61 As early as 1816, while the labouring classes remained strangely silent on the issue, the Annual Register reported that much of that year’s session of Parliament had been devoted to discussion of the distressed state of agriculture.62 The farmers found themselves a champion in C.C. Western, MP for Essex, a landowner, but, as noted above, one of the sternest critics of the Corn Laws of 1815, arguing that they should be at least partially repealed barely a year after they had reached the statute books.63 Western’s campaign faded away as prices rose shortly afterwards, but the dissatisfaction of the farming community with the Corn Laws reappeared after 1819. While the House of Commons had received only 64 petitions complaining of agricultural distress in 1816, in 1820 they received 169, in 1821 201, and in 1822, when the average annual price of wheat was only 44s.7d. a quarter, 222.64 Partly in response to this rising crescendo of complaint, the government did agree to modify the Corn Laws in 1822, but their aim was to neither raise nor lower the price of wheat by legislative means, but rather to promote steadier price levels by introducing a sliding scale of duties. It was hoped that this scale would prevent the violent price fluctuations of the previous years, which the government recognized had been harmful to both producers and consumers. On the principle of giving still more legislative support to

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agricultural prices, however, the government stood firm, adopting a balanced and responsible attitude. Lord Liverpool, a Tory and a major landowner himself, but also the Prime Minister of the day, addressed the House of Lords bluntly in 1822. It is the duty of Government and of Parliament to hold the balance between all the great interests of the country as even as possible. But, my Lords, I have so much respect for agriculture, however, that I will even say that if we were justified in throwing the weight of a hair or a feather into one scale rather than into another, it should be thrown into the scale of the agricultural interest. But the agricultural is not the only interest in Great Britain. It is not even the most numerous.65 The more prescient of their lordships might have scented the first whiff of a coming betrayal as early as that February day in 1822. Even at this time, it was becoming clear that a government of landowners was not prepared to govern exclusively in the agricultural interest. They were neither entirely unintelligent, nor entirely irresponsible: on the contrary, they understood well both the structure of the country they were governing, and the temper of its people. Indeed, the deadliest opponents of the Corn Laws between 1822 and 1846 were none other than those Tory governments of Britain who ruled the land during that time. The views of Lord Liverpool have already been quoted above, and Boyd Hilton has recently argued convincingly that Sir Robert Peel was neither a pragmatist nor a populist, but rather decidedly doctrinaire when it came to economic policy. He was certainly an adamant ‘sound money’ man, persuaded on this point by the arguments of David Ricardo, as demonstrated by his Currency Act, which he steered through Parliament in 1819. On the question of the Corn Laws, however, he had been more influenced by the views of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. In Peel’s mind, the Corn Laws had probably been marked down for total abolition at some time in the future as early as the 1820s.66 Periodically, between 1816 and 1836, some members of the agricultural community raised the cry of agricultural distress, and appealed to the government for assistance. The government of the day invariably responded politely, receiving petitions and setting up parliamentary committees of enquiry, but on the question of agricultural price levels, they were adamant that nothing more could be done. No further advantages to agriculture were to be acquired at the

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expense of the consuming masses. The government did show itself willing to make gestures in the direction of reducing farmers’ costs, but these amounted to little more than the ‘hairs and feathers’ referred to by Liverpool in his speech of 1822. For example, the Sturges Bourne Acts of 1818–19 and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 did ease the burden of the poor rates, but the poor rates remained. Similarly, the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 reduced, but did not abolish, tithe payments. The bitterly resented malt tax was not repealed until 1881, and even Peel’s relief package that accompanied Corn Law repeal in 1846 provided little compensation for the advantage lost: for example, the government drainage loans that were made available were helpful, but the loans had to be repaid, with interest.67 The clear aim was to drive agriculturists towards more efficient, capital-intensive farming as a substitute for protection. So it was that while the Chartists beat their heads against the brick walls of universal suffrage and annual parliaments, the Leaguers pushed against a door that was already half open: a door indeed that would soon have swung open of its own accord in any case, without any efforts from them whatsoever. The landed governments of Britain, Whigs as well as Tories, had accepted the logic of free-trade policies, and the inevitability of continuing population increase, which would at last outstrip the ability of the home market to supply it with food. The Corn Laws would have to go. When it came to the final vote in 1846, the Whig leadership was seen to have more of its parliamentary party behind it than had the Tories, but the views of government and opposition leaders on the question were the same, and overall majorities in both Houses had, by 1846, come to agree with them.

IV The urban middle classes were certainly more vociferous in their protests against the Corn Laws between 1815 and 1846 than were the working classes, but their protests were intermittent, incidental and ambiguous. This was partly because many urban manufacturers and merchants of the 1820s and 1830s were apprehensive about pressing too hard for a free trade in corn, in case the extension of free-trade principles should lead to the abolition of some of the protections that they themselves enjoyed. Michael Turner has noted that in the 1820s the Manchester Chamber of Commerce favoured a ban on the export of textile machinery, and the placing of an export duty on yarns and twists. He declared, ‘The Chamber, always more concerned about the

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protection of its members’ interests than about free trade ideology, favoured continued regulation.’68 It is also now thought that the famous London Merchants’ Petition of 1820 was not in fact the ringing endorsement of free trade that it seemed, and that Manchester was not the only city to be slow to come around to free-trade views.69 D.G. Barnes declared, ‘The manufacturers were absolutely opposed to the corn bill on the grounds that it would raise the price of corn and with it labour, and thus handicap British manufactures in competing in foreign markets.’70 But once again he then adduced very little evidence to support that contention, either for the year 1815 or subsequently, prior to the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League. A study of contemporary newspapers suggests that the urban middle classes did indeed petition and protest about the Corn Laws between 1815 and 1820, and again from 1826 to 1828 while the issue was being debated in Parliament, but in other years there were long periods of silence on the subject from this particular interest group until 1839, when the Anti-Corn Law League began its campaigns. Until then, the urban middle classes had seen the Corn Laws not so much as an outstanding grievance in themselves, but more as a symptom of a deeper malaise. Why had the Corn Laws been passed in the first place? On Tuesday 11 March 1817 a large meeting of concerned ‘respectable’ citizens was held in Reading Town Hall under the chairmanship of the mayor. The meeting resolved to petition Parliament for numerous economic and political reforms, and the report of their proceedings ran over seven columns of the Reading Mercury. The Corn Laws, however, were not mentioned once.71 The Leeds Mercury reported that early in 1817, protest meetings had been held which were attended by the more prosperous and articulate burgesses of Barnsley, Sheffield, Rochdale, Huddersfield and Leeds. At these meetings, numerous resolutions were passed, critical of the government and calling for reforms. On 30 December 1816, a meeting of Leeds and Barnsley citizens decided that the Leeds Union for Parliamentary Reform should be founded, and passed resolutions on 21 grievances which were to form the basis of a petition to the Crown, but not one of them related to the Corn Laws.72 On 15 January the following year, a similar meeting at Huddersfield passed 20 resolutions, which again were to form the basis of a petition, but again the Corn Laws were not mentioned. The grievances related to unfair representation, high taxation, greedy officials, a crushing national debt, government incompetence and corruption, but not the Corn Laws.73 At only two meetings were the Corn Laws even mentioned. A meeting held at Rochdale on 2 January

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passed 13 resolutions, one of which did relate to the Corn Laws. Resolution No. 9 is worth quoting here for its rarity value. That we view with horror, mingled with indignation, the many restrictive laws (we might even say prohibitary) but the Corn Law as the most prominent. For what purpose was this law passed? Was it for the welfare of any class in the community? No, it was execrated by all intelligent men in the land, and was made merely to satisfy an overwhelming oligarchy, whose rapacious hands would never rest till they had totally ruined our once happy country.74 At a meeting held in Leeds on 16 January the Corn Laws were denounced in part of a speech by Edward Baines, which the Leeds Mercury reported in full. Look at the agriculturist: what is his situation? Is it so deplorable that the legislature has deemed it necessary to pass an Act, under the form of a Corn Bill, to prevent him from being undersold in the produce of his own country? A Bill under which commerce has long groaned, and the influence of which is now universally felt in the high price of the first article of human necessity.75 The above extracts are interesting, not only for their rarity value, but also for their tone and context. They appear a propos and by the way in a list of other grievances, almost as an afterthought. The tone in which the subject is addressed is animated and polemical, as though the complainants were threshing about desperately for any stick that might come to hand, to employ as another instrument with which to beat the government. They suggest that no serious thought had been given to the question. With the fall in agricultural prices after 1819, the Leeds Mercury had nothing more to say about the Corn Laws until 1826, when renewed debate in Parliament revived some interest in the question.76 Even the progressive city of Manchester, later to adopt such a bold and high-profile leadership role in the antiCorn Law movement, remained virtually indifferent to the cause during the 1830s. Archibald Prentice, a contemporary observer of the scene and the first historian of the League, wrote in 1853, Manchester did a little, listlessly. On January 29th., 1834, a meeting of merchants and manufacturers, called by circular, was

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held in the Exchange Committee Room, to consider how the cause of Corn-Law repeal was to be forwarded; and good speeches were made by Mr. R.H. Greg . . . and Mr. J.C. Dyer, chairman of Mr. Thomson’s committee, but nothing came of it. The intention of forming any association was carefully disclaimed. A committee was appointed, from which the editors of newspapers were excluded in order to avoid the appearance of a political agitation, and the committee did nothing, perhaps could do nothing.77 The same pattern of limited response and muted protest may be traced in Birmingham and Nottingham. In the former city, there was a large protest meeting, and a petition was sent to Parliament in 1815, but thereafter Birmingham turned its attention to the reform of Parliament and the currency question. Peel’s Currency Act of 1819 had resulted in the pound sterling’s return to a gold standard by 1821, which many manufacturers believed had led to a deflation that was bad for trade, so that ‘the Corn Laws did not reappear in Birmingham affairs until 1826’.78 After 1828 the struggle for the Reform Bill took central place, and apart from two further petitions in 1833 and 1839, it was 1841 before Birmingham again gave the Corn Laws its wholehearted attention.79 Nottingham petitioned against the Corn Laws in 1815 and 1820, but here too there was a hiatus of interest in the question thereafter, until the debates of 1826 began. Another petition was sent to Parliament in 1828, but the Corn Law Amendment Act of that year appeared to settle the issue for the time being, and ‘there was a general decline of interest in the Corn Law question in the decade after 1828’.80 The urban middle classes were therefore far from indifferent on the Corn Law question, but they appear to have resented them not so much as a specific grievance, but more as part of a general resentment with the way in which the landed classes retained their firm grip on political power during this period, and too often appeared to be using it to govern in their own interests. For much of the time the towns seem to have taken the Corn Laws for granted, despairing of ever securing their repeal before the stranglehold of landed power could be finally broken.81 In this perception they were, of course, mistaken: it was a Parliament of landlords that repealed the Corn Laws in 1846.82 Some major manufacturers may indeed have believed that the Corn Laws forced them to pay higher wages than would otherwise have been the case, but it seems unlikely that the urban middle classes as a whole viewed the Corn Laws as a direct and serious threat to their

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interests. It was fairly well understood that the level of wages was a function not of the price of bread, but of the availability of labour. If this had not been so, then the Speenhamland System, a relief system designed to supplement the wages of adult labourers in full-time employment, would never have been necessary. Indeed this very point about the relationship between wages and prices was well made by a contemporary agriculturist, James Caird, in 1851.83 If higher wages had been paid after 1815, or if the price of bread had been lower, the working classes would probably have disposed of the additional income by improving their diets rather than by purchasing the goods of urban manufacturers, so that the existence of the Corn Laws probably did not seriously depress the home market for manufactured goods. The middle classes themselves, who may be defined as the employers of labour, if only as domestics or apprentices, were, of course, perfectly able to afford bread at its existing prices, and it was they who provided the bulk of the home market for manufactured goods at that time. Overseas countries might have been able to buy a few more British manufactures if a free importation of their cereals had been allowed after 1815, but a good deal of foreign grain was in fact imported despite the existence of the Corn Laws, and between 1815 and 1846 Britain was almost self-sufficient in cereals in most years in any case.84 No great foreign markets were therefore being lost to British manufactures because of the existence of the Corn Laws: without them the increase in overseas demand would have been marginal to negligible. While certainly damaging to the labouring classes, the Corn Laws probably did not significantly slow the country’s overall rate of economic growth. Those members of the urban middle classes, therefore, who believed that the abolition of the Corn Laws would lead to lower wages or to expanded overseas markets for British manufactures prior to 1846 were mistaken in these perceptions, just as they were wrong to believe that the Corn Laws would never be repealed by a Parliament of landowners. But the majority were correct in their assumption that the Corn Laws were not seriously and directly prejudicial to their interests. Indeed, there was something to be said for them as a part of a general policy of protectionism from which they themselves benefited: hence their intermittent and ambiguous protests against the system. Such resentment as urban radicals did show against the Corn Laws was more a part and parcel of their general resentment against the domination of the landed classes as a whole.

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V Following the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the living conditions of the labouring classes in England, roughly 70 per cent of the whole population at that time, at last began to improve, slowly at first, but later at a quickening pace. This improvement was, of course, by no means entirely due to the repeal of the Corn Laws: as the British economy steadily grew and its productivity increased, money wages rose against a background of stable or falling prices. According to Mitchell and Deane, a real wage index for the United Kingdom set at 100 for the year 1850 had risen to 177 by 1902, or 176 after allowing for the effects of unemployment. But sweeping, overall averages such as these can conceal as much as they reveal. In fact it was the very poorest in society who gained the most over these years, provided that they could manage to stay in employment. The lowest paid of all the working classes throughout this period were the agricultural labourers but, taking 1891 as the base year of 100, an index of their money wage levels in England and Wales moved from 72 in 1850 to 110 in 1901, a rise of 53 per cent. In real terms, moreover, their wage rise had been even larger, because this increase in money wages had taken place against a background of generally falling prices. Mitchell and Deane’s overall price index, taking an average of the years 1865–85 as representing 100, moved from an average of 111.9 in the 1850s to only 88.6 in the 1900s. But food prices declined even more sharply. Taking an average of the years 1867–77 to represent 100, the Mitchell and Deane index moves from 89.5 in the 1850s to 62.9 in the 1900s. The price of wheat, which had averaged 56 shillings a quarter in the 1840s and 53s.4d. in the 1850s, averaged only 29s.5d. per quarter in the 1900s. The price of a 4 lb loaf in London, which had been 8.65d. on average in the 1840s, was only 5.49d. in the 1900s.85 The largest price falls had taken place in those very commodities that accounted for the bulk of the expenditure of the poorest families. In addition they, together with the rest of the population, also enjoyed other benefits from free trade. With all of the cheapest markets in the world thrown open to them, even the humblest consumers in England now enjoyed access to a much wider variety of foodstuffs, at much lower prices, than ever before. Bread was no longer the vital staple that it had once been, although it remained an important element in working-class diets. Manufactured items too were cheaper and more abundant, many within the reach of wage-earning families. Housing and general living conditions also improved, at least for that 78 per cent of the popula-

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tion of England and Wales who lived in towns by 1901.86 The middle classes had also shared fully in this remarkable increase of prosperity. In short, almost everyone in England was very much better off by the 1900s than they had been in the notorious ‘hungry forties’. Only one section of the community was less than pleased with these developments – the substantial landowners of England, and their tenant farmers, who had been forced to accept falling food prices, falling land values, and falling rents. However, the census of 1901 had revealed that agriculture, forestry and fishing together employed only 8.7 per cent of the occupied labour force, and generated only 6.4 per cent of the gross national product.87 Moreover, a majority of those who worked even in this sector were agricultural labourers, who had benefited greatly from the changes of the last half-century. The great landowners and their tenant farmers therefore represented only a small minority of the total population, and it is well known that one of the problems of democratic systems is the question of how to treat minority groups within them, whose interests are often neglected, or deliberately sacrificed. But Edwardian England was not yet fully democratic. Despite a near-universal adult male suffrage, there was still a generally accepted assumption that the landed classes retained a divine right to a disproportionately large share in the business of government. For example, the hereditary House of Lords still governed as a theoretical coequal with the elected House of Commons, wielding, at least in law, full veto powers over all Bills, including money Bills, until the Parliament Act of 1911. At the same time, members of the landed classes remained heavily represented in Edwardian Cabinets. Therein lay the seeds of conflict. At the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 the landed classes were down, but not out, still able to punch well above their economic weight in political terms, and the free-trade system which had been so beneficial for the bulk of the population had done them, on balance, no good at all. They had been obliged to accept free trade as a political necessity, but in their hearts would dearly have loved to have been able to restore agricultural protection, particularly after 1880. However, as in the 1840s they remained, as a ruling elite, neither unintelligent nor irresponsible, justifying to some extent the confidence of the common people in their powers of leadership.88 If their hold on the levers of power was slipping, their grasp of political realities, of the art of the possible, remained as strong as ever. The Conservative leadership knew well that any gesture in the direction of agricultural protectionism would immediately expose them to the charge of ‘dear food’ policies, and

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prove to be electorally disastrous in those more urban and democratic times: it was therefore to be avoided. This was the wise policy to which they adhered until 1903, when a section of the party allowed themselves to be tempted away from it, although only to a very limited extent, by the rhetoric of Joseph Chamberlain. A naked attempt to reimpose agricultural protection would be politically fatal, but perhaps it could be slipped through, initially in a very small way, as part of a more complicated economic package, which purported to promote the general overall welfare of the whole British community, both at home and in the empire. Imperial preference abroad, and the regeneration of flagging British industry at home would surely prove to be generally attractive policies. Moreover, who better to act as their ‘frontman’ and to sell these policies to the urban masses than a Birmingham industrialist and former Liberal? The temptation to move on tariff policy was too strong for some of the Conservative Party to resist. When Joseph Chamberlain initiated the great tariff debate with his famous Birmingham Town Hall speech of 15 May 1903, the only ‘food tax’ on the agenda was a one shilling registration duty on imported cereals, but by 1904 Chamberlain’s agricultural policy had evolved to propose a two shillings per quarter import duty on wheat, barley, and rye, but only a one shilling duty on imperial cereals, plus a 5 per cent ad valorem duty on imported meat and dairy produce, and an unspecified duty on flour.89 All this, however, came only as part of a much more complicated package of tariff reforms, imperial preferences, and even a social welfare scheme.90 These policies became part of the Unionist platform in 1906, although Balfour himself remained unconvinced of their electoral merits, and tried desperately to fudge the issue.91 His efforts were in vain. The entire Tory Party had become tarred with the protectionist brush by 1905, and tariff reform, in particular the agricultural question, became the central issue of the fateful election of January 1906. Tariff reform proved to be an electoral poisoned chalice for the Conservatives, but whom were they trying to deceive? Was this tariff reform in a sugar-coated pill, a Trojan horse, agricultural protectionism by the back door, a design to support the interests of agriculture at the expense of those of the rest of the community? It was none of these things. As intelligent politicians, the Conservative leadership realized that the Corn Laws had gone for ever. In truth, the concessions on offer to the farming community were highly reminiscent of the ‘hairs and feathers’ mentioned by Liverpool in 1822. The measures of protection proposed in 1906, and again more firmly by a more

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united party in 1910, were insufficient to revive the fortunes of agriculture, or indeed to significantly affect food price levels in Britain, but they were as far as the Tories dared to go. Chamberlain himself acknowledged that fact when he wrote in September 1903, ‘It is ridiculous to suppose that 2/- a quarter on corn would restore prosperity to agriculture, although the farmers might possibly support it as drowning men will catch at a straw.’92 The truth was that the proposals were something of a sop to Cerberus, a mere palliative gesture by the Tories in the direction of their oldest and most loyal supporters, the farming community. While it was certainly true that they wished to keep their agricultural voters actively ‘on side’, especially in marginal rural constituencies, the gesture derived as much from sentimental as from psephological motives. Traditionally the landed party, the Conservatives had long felt a moral obligation to help their farming supporters, but as political realists, they had in effect held back from doing so. The Agricultural Relief Act of 1896 had reduced local rates for landlords, but had done little to assuage the consciences of the Tory leaders, or satisfy the farmers. The agricultural dimension in Chamberlain’s policies went further in doing so. But in their predilection to help the farmers, the Conservatives were batting on a very sticky electoral wicket indeed. Their efforts to retain a few votes in their rural constituencies did not even save them the counties, and cost them many thousands of votes in the towns. It proved impossible to convince the mass of the British electorate that any form of protection for agriculture could be imposed without raising food prices, despite the insistence of Chamberlain that the foreigner, and not the British consumer, would be forced to pay the small duty.93 Anthony Howe has argued that Chamberlain’s momentous speech of 15 May 1903 ‘opened the floodgates to a huge propaganda war unseen in Britain since 1886, and, arguably, since the 1840s’.94 By 1903 there were enough depressed and disgruntled industrialists who were ready to ally themselves with the agricultural interest to form the basis of a protectionist party, and initiate a vigorous debate.95 Passions ran high, with the defenders of free trade alleging that protectionism would favour only narrow sectional interests, at the expense of the general good.96 The Cobden Club, a legacy of the 1840s, took on a new lease of life, and Cobden’s writings and speeches were immediately republished, together with other tracts from the 1840s, including even Ebenezer Elliott’s Corn Law Rhymes. The famous ‘two loaves’, the big loaf of free trade contrasted with the small loaf of protectionism, made a reappearance in cartoons and logos everywhere for the first

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time since the repeal of the Corn Laws.97 To many it must have seemed that 1846, or possibly even 1815, had come again, and this, of course, was exactly the illusion that the free-trade lobby wished to create. A master-stroke in this regard was delivered by none other than Cobden’s own daughter, Jane Cobden-Unwin, who was fortuitously married at that time to Thomas Fisher-Unwin, the influential and avant-garde publisher, keen Liberal, and sympathizer with the working classes. She it was who first coined the phrase ‘the hungry forties’, and vividly illustrated its meaning in a series of interviews, carried out with the few aged survivors who could remember those days, and published by her husband’s press in 1904.98 The clear implication was that the implementation of Chamberlain’s policies would restore the conditions of the 1840s for the working classes of England, a preposterous and yet obviously persuasive argument. There was a fine irony here. The Corn Laws had come to be much more bitterly resented in their absence than they ever had been during most of their existence between 1815 and 1840. Ignored by the masses during the years of their most vicious operation, the full significance of the legislation had at last been brought home to them by the AntiCorn Law League, and this belated awareness was now revived in the popular imagination as a kind of horrendous folk memory. It could even be argued that Cobden’s daughter Jane was a more influential political figure than Cobden himself, since Cobden merely campaigned against laws which the ruling class had already marked down for destruction in any case, and which would have disappeared without any intervention from himself. Jane, on the other hand, played a leading role in a most hard-fought campaign, which resulted in the Liberals winning one of the most significant electoral victories of the century. So closely were the interests of the mass of the people associated with free trade, and so effectively was protectionism associated with the advantage of only narrow, sectional interest groups, that Anthony Howe has claimed of the 1906 election, ‘The defence of free trade as an economic creed was therefore now indistinguishable from the defence of democracy as a political principle.’99

VI The common thread that links all of these developments is a string of misperceptions. First, in the years between 1815 and 1841 the labouring classes failed to realize just how damaging to their interests were the post-1815 Corn Laws, and consequently they failed to protest

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against them, until alerted and stimulated by the Anti-Corn Law League. The urban middle classes too were mistaken, both in so far as they saw the Corn Laws as harmful to their interests, and in their belief that these laws would never be repealed by a Parliament of landlords: hence their halfhearted and sporadic opposition to the measures, as they allowed themselves to be distracted by other issues, such as parliamentary reform. Meanwhile, many in the farming community of the time believed that the Corn Laws had ‘failed’, and were doing nothing to help the farming interest, a view of the Corn Laws as mistaken, although in a different way, as that of the labouring classes. Only a few people at that time, the members of the ‘small but determined band’, and some of the more enlightened members of successive governments, such as Huskisson, Liverpool and Peel, came close to perceiving the true impact of the Corn Laws, and their inevitable fate. Later, when the orthodoxies of free-trade ideology came to be questioned in the 1880s, and particularly after 1903, the proponents of ‘fair trade’, ‘imperial preference’, and ‘tariff reform’ were successfully represented by their adversaries as ‘bread taxers’, whose ultimate aim was nothing less than the restoration of the Corn Laws, and a return to ‘dear food’ policies. This caricature was, of course, very far removed indeed from their true intentions, which in reality were entirely moderate and reasonable ones, not at all inappropriate to the conditions of the times. But it was these perceptions in the minds of the common people, rather than reality, which swung the 1906 election, and opened the gates to a flood of subsequent social, economic and political reforms at that particular point in time.

Notes (Place of publication London unless otherwise stated.) 1. D.G. Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws from 1660 to 1846 (1930) p. 289; B. Kemp, ‘Reflections on the Repeal of the Corn Laws’, Victorian Studies, vol. V no. 3 (1962) p. 204; R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (1985) pp. 58–9; A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997) p. 1. 2. C.B. Gurwood (ed.), The Speeches of the Duke of Wellington in Parliament (1854) vol. I pp. 346–7, vol. II pp. 263–6; B. Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: a Political Biography (1852) pp. 102–9. 3. P. Adelman, Peel and the Conservative Party, 1830–50 (1989) pp. 1–30, 91–3;

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E.J. Evans, Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, Power, and Party (1994) pp. 72–8. 4. J.S. Nicholson, The History of the English Corn Laws (1904) pp. 183–8; C.R. Fay, The Corn Laws and Social England (Cambridge, 1932) pp. 109–20; D.C. Moore, ‘The Corn Laws and High Farming’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. XVIII (1965) pp. 544–6, 559–61; N. Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–1865 (1979) p. 249. 5. N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (1968) p. 31. 6. Barnes, English Corn Laws, p. 191. 7. Gash, Aristocracy and People, p. 74. 8. L. Brown, ‘The Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’ in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (1959) pp. 356–60. 9. The Journals of the House of Commons, vol. LXX, November 1814-January 1816, Index under ‘Corn’. 10. E.J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (1983) p. 263. 11. M.J. Turner, ‘Before the Manchester School: Economic Theory in Early Nineteenth-Century Manchester’, History, vol. 79 no. 256 (1994) pp. 218–19. 12. J. Watkins (ed.), The Life, Poetry, and Letters of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer (1850) pp. 81–4; Brown, ‘The Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, pp. 343–4; A. Briggs, ‘Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer’, Cambridge Journal, vol. 3 (1949–50) pp. 686–95. 13. D.G. Wright, Popular Radicalism: the Working Class Experience, 1780–1880 (1988) p. 65. 14. J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870 (1979) pp. 190–3; F.O. Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (Oxford, 1934) p. 151. 15. The Caledonian Mercury, 13 March 1815, p. 2, The Kentish Gazette, 10 March 1815, p. 3. 16. The Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette, 25 March 1815, p. 2. 17. See for 1815, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, The Bristol Mirror, The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette, The Kentish Gazette, The Hereford Journal, The Salopian Journal and Courier of Wales, The Leicester Journal and Midland Counties General Advertiser, The Cambridge Chronicle and Advertiser, The Hull Advertiser, The Leeds Mercury and Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette. 18. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, pp. 235–8; Barnes, English Corn Laws, pp. 117–56; J. Hall, A History of the Town and Parish of Nantwich (London, 1883) pp. 237–8; A. Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (1851) pp. 68–71. 19. Brown, ‘Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, pp. 342–71; McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, pp. 48–70; A. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League, vol. I (1853) pp. 124–40; Gash, Aristocracy and People, pp. 208, 222. 20. The Manchester Guardian, 29 April 1826, p. 3. 21. R.B. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971) p. 488. 22. Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order, pp. 133–65; Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, pp. 205–66; A. Charlesworth (ed.), An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain, 1548–1900 (London, 1983) pp. 104–8, 142–63; J.P.D. Dunbabin, Rural Discontent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1974)

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23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 pp. 18–61; J. Stevenson, ‘Food Riots in England, 1792–1818’ in J. Stevenson and R. Quinault (eds), Popular Protest and Public Order, 1790–1920 (London, 1974) pp. 56–74; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1990) pp. 239–58, 529–69, 660–90; A.J. Peacock, Bread or Blood (1965); E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (1969). See, for example, The Cambridge Chronicle, 31 May 1816, p. 2; The London Chronicle, 12 March 1817, p. 3. For example, the following studies include no references to the Corn Laws at all: J. Burnett (ed.), Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People, 1820–1920 (1974); D. Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-Class Politicians (1977); J. Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education, and Family (1982). W. Matthews, British Autobiographies: an Annotated Bibliography of British Autobiographies Published or Written before 1951 (Los Angeles, 1955) pp. 372, 346. Prentice, Historical Sketches, pp. 251–2, 274–5, 296–8, 352–3, 357–8. McCord, Anti-Corn Law League, p. 35. J. Buckley, A Village Politician: the Life Story of John Buckley (1897) pp. 133–5. D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom: a Study of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography (1981) p. 74. C. Shaw, When I Was a Child, by an Old Potter (1903) p. 12. J.E. and P.A. Crowther (eds), The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave, 1812–1837 (Oxford, 1997); G.E. Bryant and G.P. Baker (eds), A Quaker Journal, being the Diary and Reminiscences of William Lucas of Hitchin, 1804–1861 (1934); A.F. Bottomley (ed.), The Southwold Diary of James Maggs, 1818–1876 (1983), Publications of the Suffolk Records Society, vol. 25. For example, The Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette, 4 January 1817 p. 3; The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette, 20 January 1817, p. 3; Leeds Mercury, 22 February 1817, p. 1. All of the local newspapers reported similar subscriptions. Barnes, English Corn Laws, pp. 133–5. Prentice, History of the League, vol. I, pp. 267–85, vol. II, pp. 238–67; The Anti-Corn Law Circular, 6 February, 19 March, 26 March 1840; Buckley, A Village Politician, pp. 43, 133–56; Brown, ‘Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, pp. 354–60; J.J. Bezer, ‘The Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848’, and B. Wilson, The Struggles of an Old Chartist (Halifax, 1887), reprinted in Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism, pp. 153–87 and 193–242. S. Fairlie, ‘The Corn Laws and British Wheat Production, 1829–76’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. XXII (1969) p. 106. A.S. Milward and S.B. Saul, The Development of the Economies of Continental Europe, 1850–1914 (1977) pp. 54, 359; S. Fairlie, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Corn Law Reconsidered’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. vol. XVII (1965) p. 574; G.E. Mingay (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. VI, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1989) p. 975. E.J.T. Collins, ‘Dietary Change and Cereal Consumption in Britain in the Nineteenth Century’, Agricultural History Review, vol. 23 pt I (1975) p. 105. T.C. Barker, D.J. Oddy and J. Yudkin, The Dietary Surveys of Dr. Edward Smith: a New Assessment (1970) p. 43.

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39. A.R. Wilkes, ‘Adjustments in Arable Farming after the Napoleonic Wars’ Agricultural History Review, vol. 28 pt II (1980) pp. 95–6. 40. There was plenty of room for expansion on the cereal lands of eastern Europe. See D. Blackbourn, The Fontana History of Germany (1997) p. 109; Milward and Saul, Economies of Continental Europe, pp. 477–9. 41. Fairlie, ‘Corn Law Reconsidered’, pp. 570–1. 42. D.C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York, 1966) pp. 137, 263; R.M. Robertson, A History of the American Economy (New York, 1973) pp. 164, 194; A. Feaveryear, The Pound Sterling: a History of English Money (Oxford, 1963) p. 223, S.E. Morison, H.S. Commager and W.E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic, vol. I (Oxford, 1969) pp. 513, 583. 43. Fairlie, ‘Corn Laws Reconsidered’, p. 574. 44. J.R. McCulloch, A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical of Commerce and Commercial Navigation (1859) p. 447. 45. H. Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (Oxford, 1967) p. 247. 46. McCulloch, Dictionary, pp. 447–8. 47. N.V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (Oxford, 1984) p. 344. 48. Quoted in Fairlie, ‘Corn Laws and Wheat Production’, p. 91. 49. Hansard, vol. XXXIII (1816), col. 36. 50. Mc Culloch, Dictionary, pp. 438–9. 51. D.P. O’Brien (ed.), The Collected Works of J.R. McCulloch, vol. 7, (1995), ‘The Corn Laws and Corn Trade’ from the 8th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1853) p. 400. 52. M.E. Turner, J.V. Beckett and B. Afton, Agricultural Rent in England, 1690–1914 (Cambridge, 1997) pp. 149–50. 53. R. Perren, Agriculture in Depression, 1870–1940 (Cambridge, 1995) pp. 11–16; J. Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: a History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Oxford, 1997) pp. 165–198. 54. J. Burnett, Plenty and Want: a Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (1966) pp. 45, 65. 55. W.H. Chaloner, Introduction to A. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League (1967 edn) p. xix; Fairlie, ‘Corn Laws and British Wheat Production’, pp. 101–8. 56. T.L. Crosby, English Farmers and the Politics of Protection, 1815–1852 (Trowbridge, 1977) pp. 35–43. Hall was himself a tenant farmer, specializing in wool production. 57. Hansard, New Series vol. VII (1823) col. 1560. 58. Moore, ‘Corn Laws and High Farming’, p. 553. 59. The Farmer’s Magazine, 2nd ser. vol. X no. 1 (July 1844) pp. 32–3, no. 2 (August 1844) pp. 113–16. 60. E.L. Jones, The Development of English Agriculture, 1815–1873 (1968) p. 12. 61. For example, the amendment of 1842 allowed for the first time the import of livestock from countries other than Scotland and Ireland, subject only to the low duties of £1 per horse, oxen, or bull, 15 shillings per cow, and 3 shillings per sheep. Crosby, English Farmers and Protection, p. 125. 62. Annual Register, vol. LVIII (1816) p. 29. 63. Hansard, vol. XXXIII (1816) cols. 31–60.

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64. General Index to the House of Commons Journal, 1801–20, p. 726, 1820–37, pp. 715–16. 65. Hansard, New Series vol. VI (1822) col. 709. 66. B. Hilton, ‘Peel: a Reappraisal’, The Historical Journal, vol. 22 no. 3 (1979) pp. 600–6. 67. K. Fitzgerald, Ahead of their Time: a Short History of the Farmers’ Club (1968) p. 91; Moore, ‘Corn Laws and High Farming’, p. 554. 68. Turner, ‘Before the Manchester School’, p. 227. 69. B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, and Commerce: the Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977) pp. 173–84; A.C. Howe, ‘Free Trade and the City of London, c.1820–1870’, History, vol. 77 no. 251 (1992) pp. 393–400, 404–10. 70. Barnes, History of the English Corn Laws, p. 146. 71. The Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette, 17 February 1817, pp. 2–4. 72. The Leeds Mercury, 4 January 1817, p. 2. 73. Ibid., 18 January 1817, p. 2. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., pp. 2–3. 76. The Leeds Mercury, 1826: 28 January, p. 2, 11 February, p. 2, 11 March, p.4, 22 April, p. 2. 77. Prentice, History of the League, pp. 36–7. 78. D. Fraser, ‘Birmingham and the Corn Laws’, Birmingham Archaeological Society Transactions and Proceedings for the Year 1965, vol. 82 (1967) p. 3. 79. Ibid., pp. 7–13. 80. D. Fraser, ‘Nottingham and the Corn Laws’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, vol. LXX (1966) pp. 81–4, 86. 81. Fraser, ‘Birmingham and the Corn Laws’, p. 7. 82. W.O. Aydelotte, ‘The Country Gentlemen and the Repeal of the Corn Laws’, English Historical Review, vol. 82 (1967) p. 51. 83. J. Caird, English Agriculture in 1850–51 (1852) p. 519. 84. Mingay (ed.), Agrarian History of England and Wales, VI, 1750–1850, pp. 1011–17; G.E. Mingay and J.D. Chambers, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (1966) pp. 126–7, 148. But, of course, the arrival of quite small quantities of much cheaper foreign wheat onto the English market could have had a profound effect on price levels, as noted above. 85. Mitchell and Deane, Abstract, pp. 343–4, 349–51, 472–5, 488–9, 498. 86. R.J. Morris and R. Rodger (eds), The Victorian City, 1820–1914 (1993) pp. 1–26. 87. P. Deane and W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1969) pp. 142, 146. 88. English landowners compared very favourably with their Continental counterparts in this regard, even in Ireland. See R. Gibson and M. Blinkhorn (eds), Landownership and Power in Modern Europe (1991). 89. J.L. Green, Agriculture and Tariff Reform (1904) p. 76. 90. Full details of these policies are provided in E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism, 1880–1914 (1995) pp. 184–263. 91. Ibid., p. 146. 92. Ibid., p. 187. 93. C. W. Boyd (ed.), Mr. Chamberlain’s Speeches, vol. II (1914) p. 329.

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94. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, p. 230. 95. A. Marrison, British Businessmen and Protection, 1903–1932 (Oxford, 1996) pp. 1–29. 96. G.R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford, 1987) pp. 52–99. 97. R.E. Welby (ed.), The Political Writings of Richard Cobden (1903); Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, pp. 263–71; G. Wallas, Human Nature and Politics (1910) pp. 84–6. 98. J. Cobden-Unwin, The Hungry Forties: Life under the Bread Tax (1904). 99. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, p. 233. Just how significant the whole free-trade issue was to the outcome of the 1906 election is fully explained in this volume (pp. 230–73).

3 ‘Preventing Ourselves from Being Plundered by our Betters’: Thomas Perronet Thompson and the Corn Laws Michael J. Turner

The Corn Laws were a significant and abiding focus of economic debate between 1815 and 1839, and the subject of political agitation during the 1840s. Agricultural protection seemed to many to be essential for the maintenance of the social order and system of governance, but opinions differed as to the effects and propriety of the corn regulations (controversially amended in 1815, 1822, 1828 and 1842). As parliamentary unease about the Corn Laws increased, extraparliamentary agitation developed at pace, and the establishment of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1839 marked the beginning of a new phase in organization and propaganda. Once the League became active, the corn issue served as a rallying point for various creeds of reformer, and repeal in 1846 was hailed as a victory for reason, justice, and popular mobilization. Most of the ideological and practical grounds for repeal had already been established long before Cobden and Bright rose to prominence as leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League. Indeed, the arguments of the 1840s were not new.1 They represented a continuation and elaboration of earlier claims. The effects of the Corn Laws on wages, employment, prices, rents and Britain’s overseas trade, and the agricultural sector’s demand for preferential treatment from Parliament, had all been discussed at length since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The purpose of this essay is to examine the development of antiCorn Law opinion and agitation during the 1820s and 1830s. Special attention will be paid to the contribution of Thomas Perronet Thompson (1783–1867). Thompson, a self-styled ‘independent radical’,2 became an ally of the Benthamites during the 1820s. The corn question and theories of rent were closely bound together in his political economy, and he published two influential pamphlets on 70

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these topics in 1826 and 1827. Thompson’s ideas were also disseminated through the Westminster Review, of which he was part-owner and co-editor between 1829 and 1836. As his intellectual reputation spread, so his involvement in radical politics increased and he served as MP for Hull from 1835 to 1837. A successful propagandist for reform and free trade, he was also active as lecturer and platform speaker. By the time the Anti-Corn Law League was founded, Thompson was renowned for his free-trade agitation and in the 1840s he devoted himself to the anti-corn law campaign. Whether in print or on the platform, in the lecture hall or on a fund-raising tour, Thompson was among the most active and committed of corn law repealers. By using Thompson’s activity as a point of entry, this essay seeks to promote a deeper understanding of the anti-corn law creed, its theoretical and tactical components, and its place in the early nineteenth-century radical consciousness. The need for an assessment of Thompson’s role is indisputable. Though well-known in his lifetime, commentators have since allowed him to fade into unmerited obscurity.3 Much has been written about other men who had a hand in corn law repeal, especially Cobden, Bright, and the Prime Minister of the day, Sir Robert Peel, but Thompson’s contribution has often been neglected. Even the leading modern historian of the League mentions Thompson only in passing,4 and various accounts of Thompson’s public career have not illustrated his importance to the anti-corn law movement in any depth.5 The contrast with verdicts given during the nineteenth century is astounding. Thompson was repeatedly mentioned in the first history of the League (1853), written by one of its founders Archibald Prentice, who, writing of the period before the League when ‘it was high time to be up and stirring’, noted that ‘Colonel Thompson had never, indeed, ceased to work through one channel or another . . . slaying, in his trenchant way, every fallacy that was uttered in favour of monopoly’.6 In 1874 the Liberal MP for Leicester, P.A. Taylor, wrote that Thompson deserved much of the credit for repeal which had habitually been accorded to others, for his role had been ‘second to none’.7 It was also admitted by Henry Ashworth, a member of the League’s council, that repeal owed much to the previous elucidation of sound political economy, and that Thompson was ‘the most persistent and most effective writer on these subjects’.8 Those who remembered Thompson and had participated with him in the battle for repeal knew well enough that his contribution had been vital. Yet Thompson has been virtually ignored by modern historians. It is hoped that what

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follows will partly make up for this neglect. A great deal will also be revealed about the nature of the anti-corn law agitation in which Thompson was an important participant.

I Born in 1783, the son of a successful Wesleyan banker and merchant, Thompson was educated at Hull Grammar School and Queens’ College, Cambridge, of which he later became a fellow. After an eventful military career, involving a brief spell as governor of Sierra Leone and active service in South America, Europe, India and the Persian Gulf, he retired from the army in 1829 as lieutenant colonel (he would later be popularly known as ‘Colonel Thompson’). Stationed in Britain from 1823, Thompson began to take a keen interest in radical politics. During the mid-1820s his postings were in and around London, which gave him easy access to circles frequented by influential politicians and writers. His commitment to the cause of liberty abroad brought him into contact with John Bowring,9 secretary of the Greek Committee. Thompson became a prominent member of the Committee, offering money, military writings and equipment to further the cause of Greek independence. He and Bowring were to be close friends and political allies for the next 30 years. Thompson’s command of Arabic (perfected while he was serving in the East) also interested utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the acknowledged leader of the radical group to which Bowring belonged. Thompson was welcomed into the Benthamite circle and agreed to translate part of Bentham’s Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code into Arabic. He also familiarized himself with Bentham’s other works. His own views coincided with those of his new associates, and he was particularly pleased to find that Bentham, ‘the Prophet’, and Bowring, ‘secretary to all the Liberals in the world’, were staunch advocates of free trade.10 Thompson maintained an independent stance on public issues. He was not an unquestioning follower of Bentham,11 while for another of the philosophic radicals, James Mill, he felt little affinity. He disagreed with many of Mill’s political and economic nostrums, and later publicized some of these points of dispute. Soon Mill began to distance himself from Bentham, focusing more on the practical application of ideas rather than what he regarded as mere theoretical discussion for its own sake. Mill also resented the fact that Bowring was superseding him in Bentham’s favour. For a time, however, such divisions were contained. Benthamites concentrated on inculcating the ‘truths’ of

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philosophic radicalism, and drew particular encouragement from discussions about the establishment of a new radical periodical, the Westminster Review. In November 1823 Thompson expressed to Bowring his high hopes concerning this project.12 Bentham provided nearly £4000 for the establishment of the Westminster Review, and the first editors were Bowring and Henry Southern.13 Some of the ablest radical writers of the time contributed to the new publication. They and their acolytes welcomed it as a rival to the Tory Quarterly Review, established in 1809, and Whig Edinburgh Review, established in 1802. In its early years the Westminster Review was the principal means by which its conductors’ brand of rational radicalism began to achieve wider renown. But it was not a financial success, and by the end of the 1820s the venture required new funds.14 Thompson made his first foray into political journalism with his article ‘On the Instrument of Exchange’, which appeared in the Westminster Review in January 1824 (and was later republished in pamphlet form). Thompson had been interested in currency questions for many years. In his article he condemned ‘uniform taxation’ and advocated payment of tax in proportion to size of income. If a man on £2000 a year gave one-twentieth of his income to the state, Thompson reasoned, a man on £200 should contribute less than one-twentieth. Much of the article dealt with banking and the value of the circulating medium. Thompson objected to private bankers’ unlimited ability to issue notes, and warned against the tendency to attribute increases in the nominal price of any commodity to growth in consumer demand. The real cause was likely to be currency depreciation.15 Events soon justified Thompson’s misgivings about Britain’s financial arrangements. In the mid-1820s there was financial panic, which disturbed business and prompted the Tory government to withdraw small notes from circulation.16 The Corn Laws also featured prominently in Thompson’s article, for his ideas on currency and taxation were shaped by his interest in the corn question. Exchange, he explained, was frequently conducted in commodities rather than cash, and this directly influenced the formation of markets and balance of prices. Corn was a principal bartering commodity, and Thompson illustrated the workings of commercial exchange and profit by referring to corn traders. His message was clear: corn was essential to international trade, both because it facilitated that trade and because, in itself, corn was a valuable trading item. It was commercially irrational to buy overpriced corn, moreover, and overpricing of corn was also a social crime. This analysis was

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extended in the pamphlet version of ‘On the Instrument of Exchange’. In the 1830 edition, Thompson discussed the problem of obstacles to commerce. He reminded readers that corn laws were one such obstacle. Foreigners would purchase British goods if they could pay for them in corn, but corn laws shut out foreign corn and thereby restricted trade and profit. Such a restriction had all manner of illeffects, on living standards, currency values, business, and employment. Thompson expressed the hope that some ‘enlightened’ minister, perhaps Peel (who had recently changed his mind about Catholic emancipation), would attend to this matter in the near future.17 These prophetic words would come to have a special significance during the 1840s. Although it made no money for its backers, the Westminster Review quickly established itself as the most authoritative radical publication of the age. Thompson was to be largely responsible for making the Review influential and respected, though he did not become closely associated with it until 1829. In 1824 he declined invitations to contribute further articles after ‘On the Instruments of Exchange’, because he was worried about his regimental superiors’ likely response. The review was too ‘political’ for their liking.18 Thompson also argued with Southern over ideas for an article on mathematical questions,19 which further helps to explain his absence from its pages between 1825 and 1829. Yet Thompson still had literary ambitions, and decided that he should seek other means of publicizing his political and economic ideas. The most appropriate method seemed to be the writing of pamphlets, and he was to make his name in the mid1820s with two such works. The first of these was An Exposition of Fallacies on Rent, later reissued as The True Theory of Rent. The rent pamphlet first appeared in December 1826, and it quickly extended Thompson’s fame and influence.20 By the 1840s he was regarded by many informed commentators as one of the ablest political economists of the age, along with Adam Smith, J.R. McCulloch and James Mill. One reviewer of The Alphabet of Political Economy, written by John Watts and published in 1847, censured this work for failing to appreciate the findings of Thompson’s pamphlet on rent. Watts had fallen into the same error as David Ricardo, James Mill and Harriet Martineau by claiming that rent ‘is the difference of produce in return for the same amount of labour, upon the worst and the best lands under cultivation’. As Thompson had explained, this was to confuse consequences with causes. ‘The simple cause of rent is in reality nothing but what Adam Smith pointed out long ago . . . It is the

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limited quantity of land, in comparison with the competitors for its produce.’21 Thompson had reached this conclusion by empirical analysis. He tested various theories of rent, and concluded that the arguments presented in the first volume of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) bore most resemblance to the way rent operated in the real world. According to Smith, rent was the price paid for use of the land. This price varied with the tenant’s profit, for the rent charged by a landlord depended on what the tenant could afford. Therefore rent levels were determined by the demand for and profitability of agricultural products. T.R. Malthus modified Smith’s theory and asserted that rent should be regarded as a cost of production, determined by the factors which controlled the total price of a product. The most significant factor was demand. But Smith’s theory was rejected in the 1820s by Ricardo and Mill. Ricardo denied that rent was determined by demand, and insisted that rent could not be viewed as a component part of commodity prices: rent was a consequence of high prices, not a cause. Productive lands requiring less capital and labour to yield the same output as poorer lands would therefore command a higher rent. James Mill supported this thesis. Rent, he claimed, depended on the level of capital used in production. Mill defined rent as the difference between the return gained by productive portions and that gained by less productive portions of capital employed on the land. But after exhaustively testing this definition, Thompson decided that it was worthless. In reality, rent did not depend on the costs of agricultural production. Rent was like any commodity, Thompson argued, and the amount which people were prepared to pay depended on supply and demand. In the case of rent, this meant the effective demand for agricultural products.22 Thompson’s definition of rent shaped and was shaped by his opinion of the Corn Laws. Indeed, one of the reasons why he published his rent pamphlet was to contribute to the struggle against corn regulations. He thought that Ricardo’s rent theory was a point of weakness in the case against the Corn Laws, and he wanted to destroy it because it tended to create the impression that burdens on the land led to higher food prices. This could only help landowners in their demand for preferential treatment from Parliament. If Ricardo was right, landowners could claim that corn laws for their benefit would also bring advantages to the rest of the population. Thompson did not accept this. In the preface to his pamphlet, he explained that opponents of the Corn Laws habitually claimed that tithes burdened the

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community in much the same way as corn regulations. They believed that this argument strengthened the case for corn law repeal. In practice, though, tithes fell on the landowners, a conclusion Thompson arrived at when examining the flaws in Ricardo’s rent theory. It was upon Ricardo’s theory that many opponents of the Corn Laws based their economic ideas. As Thompson’s pamphlet demonstrated, this was not a reliable foundation. The Corn Laws were repeatedly mentioned in the rent pamphlet. Responding to Ricardo’s claim that high corn prices facilitated payment of rent, Thompson pointed to a wider problem, the belief that high corn prices were beneficial because they pushed up the price of other goods and raised wages. Thompson denied that prices or wages were affected in this way: ‘the fact avowedly is that the increase of competition among the labourers is such as to oblige them to accept a diminished recompense’. Those who worked for wages, Thompson insisted, could not benefit from artificially high corn prices. He also took issue with one of Mill’s favourite notions. Mill had written that a tax on corn would raise the price of corn, as would happen with any other commodity, and that this tax would fall on consumers. The farmer was similar to any capitalist or producer, and taxes on commodities always tended to be transferred from producer to consumer. Landlords also escaped the effects of the tax, Mill added, because they could withdraw that portion of capital which yielded no profit (as a result of the tax). Thompson saw several errors in Mill’s proposition. Not all commodities were alike, for instance, and there was a clear difference between those items produced under a monopoly and those that were not. Nor could the farmer be regarded as the same as any other producer, since he had a monopoly to help him recover from changes in taxation and prices. And though it was true that landlords could withdraw part of their capital, this did not happen for the reasons Mill supposed. Mill’s premise was unalterable demand, a fallacy, for levels of demand could and did fluctuate. Lower demand was the reason why small portions of capital were withdrawn from the land, not the effects of tax on corn prices.23 On 22 February 1827 Thompson published what was to become his most acclaimed work, the Catechism on the Corn Laws, which made the case for corn law repeal and carried forward the analyses set out in the rent pamphlet. Thompson took no proceeds as author and production costs were kept to a minimum. The sale price of sixpence helped the pamphlet to become a best-seller, and it was enthusiastically reviewed in London and provincial liberal newspapers.24 Thompson was

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pleased to find his work (‘my second escapade’) disseminated so widely. It was to go into many editions, 15 by 1831, 20 by 1842, and in 1839 a penny abridgement was published by the Manchester AntiCorn Law Association (forerunner of the League).25 Thompson’s teachings were also famously put into verse by the Sheffield radical Ebenezer Elliott.26 Bowring called the Catechism ‘one of the most masterly and pungent exposures of fallacies which ever passed the press’,27 and Cobden was publicly to acknowledge Thompson as the first man to ‘vulgarize’ (Bright preferred the word ‘popularize’) the doctrines of sound political economy, paying warm tribute to Thompson when the League’s activity was officially suspended in Manchester on 4 July 1846.28 After corn law repeal, the reformer and journalist Samuel Smiles also eulogized Thompson and his writings.29 Clearly, from 1827 the Catechism played a vital role in instilling ideas and familiarizing arguments that would later provide fertile ground for the Anti-Corn Law League. Thompson was one of those who did the preparatory work and laid the foundations for a successful repeal campaign. Indeed, the Catechism had immediate impact in the circumstances of early 1827. Canning introduced a corn Bill on 1 March 1827. This was designed to replace the 1815 enactment, which had prohibited the entry of foreign wheat until the home price reached 80s. a quarter.30 Canning’s proposal prompted lively discussion, and the expectation of it had already generated a wave of extraparliamentary agitation. Joseph Hume, radical MP for Aberdeen, made clear his own debt to the Catechism when presenting a petition for repeal in the Commons on 9 February 1827, and Lord King also employed the ideas and vocabulary of Thompson’s pamphlet when speaking on the corn question at this time.31 Thompson’s Catechism explained the nature and effects of corn laws in penetrating detail. Factual analysis and favoured theses were mixed together in virtually unanswerable arguments which were soon adopted in the nation as a creed. What were corn laws? ‘Laws which enact that the labourer shall not exchange his produce for food, except at certain shops, namely the shops of the landlords’. What were the consequences? ‘The same in kind as would arise from limiting the food consumed in the United Empire, to what could be produced in the Isle of Wight.’ Thompson asserted that corn laws restricted British wealth, manufacturing, welfare and power. Workers faced general distress, ‘arising from employment and wages being reduced to what afforded the smallest pittance of food upon which life could be supported’. Trade was disrupted by glut and stagnation. More

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goods were being produced ‘than could possibly be sold at a living profit’. In fact, it was impossible for anyone to profit from some new manufacture or trade, and population was also limited in proportion to the limitation of food. Labourers went hungry. Businessmen went bankrupt. Yet landlords claimed that they merited the increased rents which resulted from corn laws. Were such rents to be regarded as the landlords’ right? No more than the increased prices which a shopkeeper might get, if he could forcibly prevent men from buying at any shop but his own. So far from allowing rents to be increased by forcible means, a nation where the laws are determined only by justice and the good of the community would allow no taxation to fall upon industry, as long as it was possible for it to fall upon rent. But did high rents help British industry, by enabling landlords to purchase more manufactures? ‘Not if they are to consume them for less than could be had from other people, and oblige the manufacturers to diminish their sales besides.’ From such premises Thompson proceeded in the Catechism to discuss a wide range of facts and propositions. He concluded that agricultural protection could not be a basis for national wealth, that it was folly for Britain to grow corn at a greater cost than it could be had for elsewhere, and that it was impossible to fix a price at which corn could be sold with advantage to the producer in all years. Moreover, wages would not fall as quickly or as much as food prices should corn regulations be relaxed (hence repeal would improve workers’ standard of living). Thompson also demonstrated that manufacturers’ access to foreign markets was hindered by corn laws, and that a selfishly-sought prosperity for one section of the community was paid for by the suffering of another. It was clear that distress could not be explained without reference to the Corn Laws. Other prominent themes in the Catechism included the immorality and injustice of forcing consumers to pay artificially high prices for food, and the confident expectation that free trade in corn would not harm Britain by helping her economic rivals. Finally, Thompson expressed his belief that public opinion could and would quickly be convinced of the need for repeal. The suffering masses would join with the liberal middle classes to press for a wise and just reform, he predicted, though a change in the system of parliamentary representation might be the prerequisite for this.

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If any man desires experimental proof of the senselessness of what is termed virtual representation, let him take it in one word – Corn Laws. The manufacturing and commercial interest is robbed, because its opponents have contrived to arrange matters so that they shall have many voices in making the laws and the others shall have few; and the fraud of virtual representation consists in maintaining that the few are as good as the many. Corn law repeal was therefore part of the parliamentary reform question.32 Canning’s corn Bill of March 1827 provided for a sliding scale of duties to operate around the pivot point of 60s. a quarter, ceasing entirely at 70s. After the Duke of Wellington carried an amendment in the Lords to prevent bonded corn from coming to market until the price reached 66s. a quarter, which contravened the principle of the Bill, Canning (now Prime Minister) abandoned his measure in June.33 Another corn Bill was introduced in 1828. During the spring of 1828 Thompson prepared a new edition of the Catechism, and formulated a response to the Quarterly Review’s latest item on the Corn Laws. He also looked forward to the parliamentary debates on the new corn Bill. These developments were noticed in the amended version of the Catechism published in May 1828. Thompson, now stationed with his regiment in Ireland, had also been canvassing in Cambridge and elsewhere for election as a fellow of the Royal Society. His nomination as FRS was confirmed towards the end of 1828, largely in recognition for his writing on the Corn Laws.34 The new corn Bill was passed in June 1828. It was a compromise. By this time Wellington was Prime Minister, and Huskisson (Canning’s successor as leader of the ‘liberal’ Tories) had to respect his desire to appease the landed interests. So the duties in the new scale were higher than those previously proposed by Canning, and foreign wheat was not to be admitted ‘free’ (subject only to a nominal duty of 1s. a quarter) until the home price reached 73s. a quarter. The scale was unacceptable to most radicals of Thompson’s ilk, and they continued to press for full repeal. They were unimpressed by arguments that fair protection had now replaced burdensome prohibition with respect to corn, and that the new scale of duties should be welcomed as a useful improvement. Revision of the Catechism continued from time to time, when Thompson found that some new point needed to be made or an old one strengthened. In March 1830, for example, he informed his old schoolfriend George Pryme, Professor

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of Political Economy at Cambridge, that the next edition of the Catechism would pay more attention to corn prices. Thompson wanted to emphasize more strongly than before that corn laws never lowered the price of corn.35

II Widely respected for his pamphlets and able to extend political friendships beyond the metropolitan circle of philosophic radicals, Thompson nevertheless remained a leading member of that circle. He became essential to it when he took a controlling influence in the running of the Westminster Review at the end of the 1820s. He was to be co-owner (with Bentham and then Bentham’s executor Bowring) from 1829 to 1836, as well as joint editor with Bowring. From the autumn of 1831 Bowring left by far the greater share of editorial tasks to Thompson, who was also one of the most prolific contributors to the review in this period.36 In his article ‘Corn Laws’ (1829), Thompson maintained that opponents of repeal had lost the argument, and knew it, because all their fallacies had already been exposed. As the public realized this, and as knowledge of the true effects of the corn laws spread, more pressure would be exerted on Parliament for repeal. In this context it was important that, at election time, voters should support no candidate who still adhered to discredited regulations. Enlightenment was increasing, Thompson added, and repeal was just a matter of time. Workers, employers, intellectuals and writers were now convinced of the truths explained in the Catechism and elsewhere. No compromise with injustice was possible, moreover, which meant that even a small fixed duty on corn could not be accepted. Thompson stressed that the landed interests were simply deluding themselves if they thought they benefited from corn laws. Corn prices were not amenable to selfserving manipulation, and in fact had fallen by about 21 per cent between 1814 and 1826. Over the same period weavers’ wages had fallen by 79 per cent, clear proof that distress was no chimera. Workers in industry, and their employers, knew how damaging corn laws could be, and Thompson was certain that farmers and rural labourers would soon get the message too.37 Thompson completed another article, ‘Free Trade’, in response to the protectionist arguments of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Tory M.T. Sadler, MP for the Duke of Newcastle’s pocket borough of Newark. ‘Free Trade’ was subsequently republished in pamphlet

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form, with a cover illustration by Thomas Landseer, the engraver, showing monkeys feeding out of each other’s vessels. Thompson liked this image because it symbolized the effect of protection. A man might take from his neighbour, but could enjoy no advantage because he himself was robbed in turn. Therefore nobody gained and everybody lost.38 In ‘Free Trade’ Thompson pointed to the absurdity of the protectionist premise that ‘we can mend ourselves by pillaging each other’. He again complained that corn laws forced consumers to pay extra for food. If the laws were removed, this extra would be disposable income and could be used to purchase other products. Useless money would thereby become useful money. Repeal would also stimulate international trade, and alleviate distress at home, for Britain would be better able to sell her manufactures abroad.39 In another article, published in 1830, Thompson attributed rising distress to monopolies and protection. Monopolists gained at a double loss to others, by taking custom from some other trader and by taking from the consumer the difference between the dear and the cheap commodity. The Corn Laws were a keystone in the protective system. This monopoly affected bread, a necessity of life, and symbolized the criminality of those who dominated the representative system in Britain. Landlords legislated only in their own interest.40 During 1831–2 the struggle to secure parliamentary reform prompted Thompson, Bowring and their allies to focus on two main themes in their public activity. The first was a straightforward tactical consideration. As Thompson put it, ‘it is impolitic at this moment to do anything which must have a direct tendency to rally particular interests against the Reform Bill’. This meant that radicals had to put aside any disagreements they might have with ministers on other matters, and concentrate on assisting the new Whig government to overcome anti-reform opposition. The second theme which dominated philosophic radical thinking at this time concerned the further improvements which parliamentary reform would make possible. Corn law repeal ranked highly among these.41 The Reform Bill was eventually passed in June 1832, and Thompson looked to the future: reform had opened the door for a challenge against landed control of the legislature, and it would give more influence to commercial and manufacturing interests. The very idea of progress had been given a huge fillip, indeed, and this could also be turned to advantage. In July 1832 Thompson prepared notes for speeches and articles on commercial questions, addressing among other issues the probable effect of commercial freedom on Britain’s

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aggregate trade balance. He also corresponded with Bowring about the harm done by obstacles to trade and consumption.42 Thompson continued to write highly influential articles for the Westminster Review. The Corn Laws featured in many of these, as he expanded on and gave added force to earlier arguments. Reviewing the lectures on political economy delivered in the University of Oxford during 1831 by Richard Whately, subsequently Archbishop of Dublin, Thompson insisted that protection meant higher prices for customers, helped inefficient producers to take the business which should go to efficient ones, and retarded trade and employment. Whately’s published lectures also tended to reinforce Thompson’s view of the manner in which the discipline of political economy was developing. ‘Political economy might not unreasonably be defined as the art of preventing ourselves from being plundered by our betters. It is the grand expositor of the peccadilloes of those who volunteer to benefit mankind by governing; its professors form the great Antifelony Association of modern times.’43 Information was spreading, but there was still work to do. The French Chamber of Deputies, for example, had not yet been sufficiently enlightened on the matter of free trade. In March 1832 the chamber received a report which made deluded claims about the corn trade and how it related to manufacturing development. In ‘French Commerce’, Thompson focused on the notion that French industry would suffer if France purchased corn from abroad. He explained that corn imports would be paid for in French manufactures or items imported in exchange for French manufactures. Therefore French industry would in fact increase, not decline.44 Error was also being propagated by Thomas Chalmers, Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh University. Chalmers admitted that if Britain’s consumption of any particular foreign commodity was disturbed, there would be suffering. But the suffering would touch only the foreign producer; British consumers and Britain’s wealth would not be affected. Thompson found this untenable. Chalmers seemed blind to the fact that Britain exported items not needed at home in exchange for items that were needed.45 After Chalmers, Thompson criticized J.R. McCulloch, Professor of Political Economy at the University of London. McCulloch had published a new edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, with a discourse, notes, and ‘supplemental dissertations’. McCulloch claimed that intellectual developments since 1776 necessitated a re-examination of Smith’s observations. Thompson was aghast: ‘It is an awful

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thing to have undertaken to mend Adam Smith.’ Smith had established unquestionable truths, Thompson explained, particularly that nations should always buy in the cheapest market. Many of McCulloch’s objections to Smith’s original text were mistaken, moreover, and Thompson objected to the manner in which Smith’s work was being misrepresented. How could McCulloch comment on Adam Smith when he did not even understand the latter’s principles? Nor was McCulloch altogether sound on the Corn Laws. He argued that a small ad valorem duty would be a just claim from agriculturalists ‘to indemnify them for peculiar charges’. Thompson disputed the right to such an indemnity, emphasizing that the duty would still represent a loss to the community at large. McCulloch’s idea of a bounty on corn exports was also unacceptable. Once again, nobody could gain but the landlords, and the community would find it even more difficult to procure food.46 Thompson was impressed and gratified at this time by Viscount Milton’s Address to the Landowners of England on the Corn Laws (1832). It was significant that ‘the noble heir to one of the first rentals in the country’ had come forward to argue that high food prices harmed the whole nation. Even the agricultural classes suffered when bread was dear, for they were consumers just like any other section of the community. Thompson argued that by continuing to resist repeal, agriculturalists would simply make matters worse for themselves. The wise course would be to give way. They would thereby win respect and could reasonably expect security for their honest interests. Failure to do this would provoke a desire for revenge and, once stirred, the people would not be satisfied by corn law repeal alone.47 In 1833 Thompson reviewed various publications on economic questions. He stigmatized monopoly as fraud and robbery, and identified the ‘corn fraud’ as ‘the master pustule’. The ‘corn fraud’ was greater than the sugar, coffee, silk, wool, leather, cotton and iron frauds, and represented a loss of millions of pounds to the nation (especially in high food prices and lost trade). Landowners only got a portion of this sum; the rest was forfeited for ever. Thompson estimated the total annual loss to be £17 million, with about £5 million going to the landlords. Therefore £12 million was the value of the trade denied to the British people. In view of this, Thompson asserted that corn law repeal should be accompanied by a tax on rents and a legacy duty, to reimburse the nation for its losses.48 In 1833 Thompson also engaged in controversy with Colonel Robert Torrens, MP for Bolton. Torrens was peculiar among liberal economists because

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he opposed unilateral free trade and insisted that there should be reciprocity between nations. Thompson rejected his claims, arguing that free trade would bring greater prosperity in the long run: merchants themselves should be left to decide where they wanted to trade, for they would find the best markets and most profitable methods, and there was no need for government to interfere. Torrens reacted angrily to Thompson’s criticism, and tried to discredit the works which had made Thompson’s name, notably the rent and corn pamphlets. Torrens dismissed Thompson as a ‘distributor’ rather than ‘discoverer’ of truth, pointed to errors in the pamphlets, and claimed that their best sections had actually been based on work which Torrens himself had written. In fact Thompson had never read anything published by Torrens before the appearance of the pamphlets in question. Thompson repeated his earlier argument that merchants should be given a free choice of markets, and he ridiculed Torrens for failing to understand that any interference with trade was an obstacle to prosperity.49 Two articles in 1834 saw Thompson review books, articles and pamphlets which defended the corn monopoly and protection. One area of focus was the claim that repeal of the Corn Laws would harm labourers by forcing down wages. Under free trade, it was suggested, the value of labour fell and the value of money rose. Thompson responded: This is the fallacy by which the working classes have been condemned to half-a-dozen years more starving under the corn laws. The effect of free trade is only to sink the value of the labour of the dishonest labourer – of him who wants to raise his wages by robbing some other working man of what ought to be his; and it raises the wages of the honest labourer, by preventing the dishonest from making a law to hinder him from employment.50 Thompson paid renewed attention to the problem of persuading farmers that they could not benefit from the Corn Laws. Farmers had to realize that their interests differed from those of their landlords. High corn prices did not help farmers, because landlords could simply increase rents. This also had ramifications for agricultural labourers. Farmers who had to pay higher rents would reduce wages. Other classes in the community already saw that repeal would bring great advantages to the nation, for the Corn Laws were ‘an embargo on the whole progress of the country’s industry’. Repeal would not ruin

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landowners, nor diminish cultivation at home. The fear that foreign supplies would not be enough to feed the people was also groundless, Thompson argued, as was the claim that foreigners would not buy British manufactures in exchange for their corn. Most of them would. Even if some did not, ‘does that form any reason why the English people should be so bestial as to tax themselves to support the tyrants of the soil, and refuse to buy food where it may be had?’51

III From the mid-1820s to the mid-1830s, Thompson offered a cumulative exposition of economic theory and attempted to drive home the arguments generated by these favoured premises. He thereby made a significant intellectual contribution to the anti-Corn Law movement. Thereafter, he began more actively to publicize the case for repeal and to present it in person to audiences all over Britain. This new commitment would come to full fruition after the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League, but it is important to recognize that even before this, Thompson had participated in forms of agitation, propaganda and mobilization which would later become League trademarks. In 1835 Thompson became MP for Hull. He wrote regular reports on parliamentary affairs, addressed to the secretary of the Hull Reform Association and published in Hull and other provincial newspapers. Extracts also appeared in the London press. Collections were later published as Letters of a Representative (and in Thompson’s Exercises of 1842). Early in 1836 Thompson sold his interest in the Westminster Review in order to devote more time to his parliamentary career. He continued to issue new versions of the Catechism on the Corn Laws, and his fame as a free-trader was now widely established.52 As before, Thompson took no profits as author of the best-selling pamphlet nor the many abridged versions and printed extracts. From the mid-1830s onwards, in fact, he was to devote even more of his fortune (as well as his time and energy) to the anti-Corn Law campaign. Not for nothing would he later be hailed as ‘the Bonaparte of free trade’.53 The purpose of Thompson’s ‘letters of a representative’ was threefold: to inform the public about parliamentary developments, to shape and direct opinion, and to explain his own conduct as MP. To a prominent campaigner against the Corn Laws, the letters provided a useful tool for the exercise of influence. Thompson believed that the corn question was inseparable from other controversial issues of the period, notably factory reform, and the letters enabled him to develop

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these points week by week. On 9 May 1836 the Whig President of the Board of Trade, Charles Poulett Thomson, moved the second reading of the Factory Act Amendment Bill. This was designed to relax the 1833 restriction on working children aged 12 and 13, and to leave those aged under 12 on an eight-hour day. Thompson participated in the debate, and subsequently explained his position in the letters. He stated that he would do as factory reformers wanted and vote against the measure. But this was not to be taken as a sign that he believed factory regulation to be more important than corn law repeal. The Corn Laws were the real cause of suffering, and they should be the priority for popular agitation. Corn laws and factory acts were bound together, indeed, for both were used by agriculturalists against the manufacturing interests, employer and worker alike. Thompson decided that the best course would be to leave the 1833 Factory Act alone. He could see no reason for voting against the wishes of the labouring poor. If employers were worried about foreign competition they should look to the Corn Laws, not seek to work factory children for longer hours. By opposing the Bill Thompson sided against radical MPs with whom he normally cooperated, including Bowring, Joseph Hume and C.P. Villiers. But they were already accustomed to his demonstrations of independence. On this occasion, moreover, Thompson felt vindicated because Poulett Thomson’s Bill only survived by 178 to 176 votes, and the division was so close that the government chose not to proceed with the measure. The debate had also given Thompson a good opportunity to draw attention to the harmful effects of the Corn Laws.54 Thompson assisted in the establishment of the London Anti-Corn Law Association towards the end of 1836. He was a member of its committee, along with other reformers such as Ebenezer Elliott and Samuel Bailey of Sheffield, the Quaker journalist and future Chartist William Howitt, Archibald Prentice of Manchester, the veteran radical organizer Francis Place, and Colonel Leicester Stanhope, a friend and admirer of Bentham who had previously participated with Thompson in the philhellene movement. Also involved in the early affairs of the association were the radical publisher William Tait of Edinburgh, London-based radical J.R. Black, Elias Moss of Liverpool, and virtually all of the most prominent radical MPs of the day: T.S. Duncombe (Finsbury); George Grote (City of London); Joseph Hume (Middlesex); William Molesworth (East Cornwall); J.A. Roebuck (Bath); Joseph Brotherton (Salford); J.S. Buckingham (Sheffield); William Ewart (Liverpool); D.W. Harvey (Southwark); J.T. Leader (Bridgwater);

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Richard Potter (Wigan); Joshua Scholefield (Birmingham); Thomas Wakley (Finsbury); William Clay (Tower Hamlets).55 Soon after the formation of the London body, William Clay’s motion for a moderate fixed duty on corn, to replace the sliding scale, was debated in the Commons on 16 March 1837. Thompson was among those MPs who presented repeal petitions before the debate commenced. He repeatedly tried to gain a hearing during the debate, without success, but was glad that his ally Joseph Hume spoke, even though the latter was shouted down. Thompson wrote to inform his Hull constituents that MPs who favoured Corn Laws could only rely on ‘a thousand-times answered fallacies’. Hume’s reception also showed that the people must actively take up the corn question and force parliament to attend to popular grievances. ‘Why will you drive your friends and representatives on the bitter and degrading office of presenting themselves before howling savages . . . what can you expect from it but to be trampled upon in the persons of your ambassadors?’ Thompson asserted that the corn question held the key to the whole future of British governance: repeal was essential if the dominance of landowners and subjection of the people were to be ended, and it would make possible other necessary reforms. As for Clay’s motion itself, Thompson could not vote for it because he had pledged himself against any measure falling short of repeal. He was glad to see events and opinion moving in that direction, but concerned that a fixed duty would be an obstacle rather than a necessary stage on the road to repeal, ‘a half-way house for the enemy to stick at’. The motion was defeated by 223 to 89 votes, having gained little Whig support.56 There was another opportunity to discuss the corn laws only days later. On 21 March George Robinson, MP for Worcester, moved to relax the prohibition on manufacturing flour for export from foreign corn held in bond. The debate was adjourned after Lord John Russell declared that there was no point in further discussion until definite proposals were brought before the Commons.57 Thompson told his constituents that no government had ever imposed and no nation ever submitted to such ‘monstrous absurdities’ as the Corn Laws. He believed that progress was discernible, however, and that this could easily be speeded up. Corn laws were defended, for example, on the grounds that manufacturing interests enjoyed protection and that agriculture deserved similar treatment. But if manufacturers gave up their claim to monopolies and protective barriers, this whole argument would fall to pieces and defenders of the Corn Laws would be weakened. At the same time, British manufacturing could only benefit

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from the relaxation of restrictions. Thompson was convinced that more and more people, of all social ranks, were gradually coming to a better realization of what could be gained from the freeing of trade. This is in reality the track upon which the Liberals in the government have for many years been moving. The other side have of course done their utmost to stir up the working classes to opposition, by those arguments which are almost as old as the serpent’s ‘Thou shalt not surely die’, and to which the working classes have always been Mother Eve – advising them never to consent to the removal of a mischief a little at a time, and never to assist in removing a mischief so long as another mischief can be pointed out whose removal they would prefer. It is all an encounter of wits; when men have learned the way they will succeed, and not before. The latter comment indicates Thompson’s frustration that the process of enlightenment was not as fast as he had been hoping. Nevertheless, he was certain that repeal would be brought closer if protection for certain branches of industry (which did not help workers or masters anyway) was given up. Landowners would be deprived of an argument upon which they had previously relied. They would have to resort to other devices. They might declare that, as legislators, they taxed themselves heavily and had a fair claim to corn laws as compensation. Thompson referred to this as the ‘tax compensation fallacy’, and the answer was simple: ‘Lay the taxes in such a way as shall leave no shadow of pretence for a claim in any party. There is no policy in allowing an order of men to tax themselves five pounds, to be a pretence for recovering (as they think) ten pounds, or at a final loss of a hundred pounds to the community.’58 Three months later a bonded corn Bill introduced by Robinson was defeated in the Commons by 82 to 57 votes (28 June 1837).59 On reflection Thompson decided that the measure would have done little good: ‘I doubt whether the loss of it is not overbalanced by the evidence given to the country of the incorrigible nature of the landed oppression under which we suffer.’ The debate established other important points as well, notably that the President of the Board of Trade was weak and unreliable. In his speech Poulett Thomson had stressed that the bonded corn Bill should not be regarded as a government measure, and that it was not designed to ‘get rid of the corn laws by a side wind’. Poulett Thomson said he could never approve of such a manoeuvre. Though he opposed the Corn Laws, he believed that

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they should only be removed after a direct vote. He also favoured going into a committee on Robinson’s Bill, because he wanted amendments to afford security for corn growers.60 Another lesson to be learned from the debate, suggested Thompson, was that the repeal campaign needed more widespread support in the nation. Greater effort was required of committed reformers if workers and employers were to be educated about their true interests. Material hardship would provide opportunities for this. As Thompson told his constituents: The truth is that we must wait till hunger brings our people to their colours, and some time or other we shall have a fair stand-up fight to know whether we are to continue to be the born-thralls of the owners of the soil or not. Our Saxon ancestors wore it written on a ring about their necks; we wear it in an Act of Parliament. But we are a long way from the time yet; there must be thousands more of bankruptcies, and myriads of the wives and children of the working classes must die of hunger or overwork in factories, that a greater quantity of the produce of their industry may be given to the landlords for a bushel of corn. Thompson was annoyed that many workers preferred to press for factory reform rather than join in the campaign for corn law repeal. Workers could thereby be tricked into defending the Corn Laws in return for a limitation of factory hours, which would be a travesty, for the survival of corn regulations would ‘keep up the oppression that creates the inducement to over-work’. As misery spread and information was made more widely available, however, this wrongheadedness would pass away. Until then, most reliance would have to be placed on manufacturing and commercial elites. ‘The working classes, at least in the southern parts, have proved themselves unequal to the question. It will be when the capitalists and employers find out where they are hurt, that the real resistance will begin.’61 Considering the status and identity of those who would later come together to form the Anti-Corn Law League, Thompson’s prediction was a shrewd one indeed.

IV Thompson did not seek to retain his Hull seat at the general election of August 1837, and was an unsuccessful candidate in Maidstone.

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Hence his public usefulness in the later 1830s rested on extraparliamentary activities (which he found more agreeable): correspondence, speaking tours, newspaper articles, committee memberships, financial contributions. He stepped up his efforts to enlighten and rouse potential supporters of repeal. One of the themes in his speeches and lectures during 1838 was that corn law repeal and the extension of the suffrage should be viewed as united goals, not separate issues. These two necessary reforms would solve the central problem which vexed the British people: how to ensure for all responsible citizens a share of legislative power. Thompson also informed audiences about the principles and advantages of freer trade, and exploited platform and press to urge all reformers to unite in the cause of social and political progress. September 1838 saw him lecturing on these matters in London,62 and he then made an arrangement with Murdo Young of The Sun whereby he would write a twice-weekly column for the paper on ‘Corn Law Fallacies, and the Answers’. In these essays Thompson responded to statements made in London newspapers and other publications about the Corn Laws. By the end of October he had submitted 28 columns for The Sun. They normally appeared on Mondays and Wednesdays.63 At this time he was also writing articles for R.S. Rintoul, founder-editor of the radical Spectator, with whom he had a previous connection. From February to June 1834 Rintoul had published articles he submitted on ‘anti-commercial fallacies’.64 The later months of 1838 provided important opportunities for anti-Corn Law agitation. The autumn was unusually wet and wheat prices were rising. The Whig Prime Minister, Melbourne, had stated that he would not consider amending the Corn Laws until it was clear that the majority of the people wanted this, a remark which disappointed many government supporters.65 Such a situation gave added incentive to campaigners who wanted to shape opinion and promote opposition to the Corn Laws, and the foundations of the Anti-Corn Law League were laid after Bowring was invited to address a free-trade meeting at the York Hotel, Manchester, in September 1838. Bowring had lost his seat in the Commons (for Clyde burghs) in 1837, and was subsequently engaged by the government to undertake a commercial mission to Turkey, Syria and Egypt. On his return, he gave several speeches around the country, but the most important was in Manchester, where the meeting was chaired by Archibald Prentice, editor of the Manchester Times. Bowring told the Mancunians that corn law repeal would bring prosperity and peace, extend commerce and spread enlightened ideas. As he concluded: ‘It is impossible to

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estimate the quantity of human misery created by the corn laws, or the quantity of human felicity which is overthrown by them.’ This occasion was quickly followed by the inaugural meeting of the Manchester Anti-Corn Law Association on 24 September (two weeks after Bowring’s appearance). Then, in March 1839, various anti-corn law associations were organized into a centralized Anti-Corn Law League, with headquarters in Manchester.66 Thompson actively assisted in bringing about this consummation. In January 1839 he was one of the guests at a grand dinner in Manchester, and was toasted as ‘The Author of the Catechism’.67 In subsequent meetings he assured his Manchester friends that they could rely on the cooperation of the London association. Thompson then went to Sheffield, to secure support from radical groups there, and in February he represented London at a delegate meeting held in Brown’s Hotel, Westminster. This was arranged to coincide with an important parliamentary manoeuvre. Villiers, the leading spokesman for repeal in the Commons at this time, proposed that the authors of anti-corn law petitions should be summoned to Parliament to give evidence about the operation of the Corn Laws. The motion was defeated on 19 February 1839, by 361 votes to 172. This again served to underline the need for more energetic agitation. Thompson was already leading the way. On 7 February he was in Hull to speak on the Corn Laws, and he then embarked on a lecture tour which took him to rural counties, including Suffolk, where he attempted to spread the repeal message to agricultural audiences. Being a landowner himself by virtue of his patrimony, he thought he could use his insights into the operation of the Corn Laws to good effect. He told one audience of Suffolk farmers on 14 February: ‘As a landlord, I for one throw up all interest in the Corn Laws’. Five days later he addressed a meeting in the Shire Hall, Ipswich. These speeches represented the first effort made by the burgeoning anti-corn law movement to carry repeal agitation into an agricultural region.68

V In succeeding months Thompson tried to put together broad radical alliances, drawing in repealers, Chartists, and various other shades of reformer. This seemed increasingly impossible to achieve, however, and he was far less hopeful after 1842. But the attempt to enlighten workers, manufacturers, farmers and others continued, as did his correspondence and publication, speaking tours, electoral campaign-

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ing, and related efforts to form opinion. Thompson was also to become one of the League’s most active fund-raisers, as well as a regular adviser to Cobden on tactics, propaganda and personnel. But in 1839 all this, and an ever-closer association with leaders of the League, lay in the future.69 Thompson, present at the birth of the League, was also its most renowned precursor. He had achieved a great deal by the end of the 1830s. He had written two influential pamphlets, one on the theory of rent (for an educated audience), the other on the Corn Laws (which had a mass readership). The ideological basis of these works was tested and explained further in a series of articles in the Westminster Review, so that by the mid-1830s Thompson enjoyed a virtually unrivalled reputation as the leading anti-Corn Law writer of the age. He then concentrated on disseminating the case for repeal more widely, from the platform and in London and provincial newspapers. For a short period he was MP for Hull, and he made full use of this position to benefit the cause in various ways. By the time the League was established, Thompson had already perfected arguments and elaborated principles without which a more organized repeal movement could hardly have been viable. He had elucidated the detrimental effects of the Corn Laws in many spheres – foreign trade, prices and exchange, profits, currency values, employment and wages, rent, taxation, food supply – and had examined the wider significance of corn regulations in terms of social justice, political and legislative power, popular radical mobilization, and the vitality of Britain’s farming, manufacturing and service sectors. Thompson had evolved a set of initiatives and ideas for general adoption, a comprehensive remedy for national ills. Nobody else could claim to have done more than Thompson to foster and guide anti-Corn Law agitation before the 1840s.

Notes (Place of publication London unless otherwise stated.) 1. W.H. Chaloner, ‘The Agitation against the Corn Laws’, in J.T. Ward (ed.), Popular Movements 1830–50 (1970) p. 136; M.J. Turner, Reform and Respectability: the Making of a Middle-Class Liberalism in early NineteenthCentury Manchester (1995) ch. 5; T.S. Ashton, ‘The Origins of the Manchester School’, The Manchester School of Economics, Commerce and

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5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

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Administration, vol. 1 (1931), pp. 22–7; D.G. Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws from 1660 to 1846 (1930), p. 216. To Thompson, independence meant complete freedom in thought and action, and no fixed ties to any particular leaders, parties, interests or dogmas. Radicalism meant ‘the application of sound reason to tracing consequences to their roots’. T.P. Thompson, Exercises, Political and Others (6 vols, 1842), I, pp. 306–7. Most of Thompson’s remaining papers are in the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull. They form a huge and fascinating collection, but one which has been strangely neglected by historians. I am grateful to Mr Brian Dyson, Archivist at the University of Hull, for permission to cite these manuscripts. References will be given in the form TPDTH – file. N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–46 (2nd edn, 1968) refers to Thompson only three times. Nor is there any detailed discussion of Thompson’s role in a more recent work, N. Longmate, The Breadstealers: the Fight against the Corn Laws (1984). B. Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working Class Problems in the Age of Industrialisation (1984), pp. 93–110; L.G. Johnson, General T. Perronet Thompson: his Military, Literary and Political Campaigns (1957); J.R. Morrison, ‘Thomas Perronet Thompson: a Middle-Class Radical’ (Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of York, 1993). Some impression of Thompson’s career may also be gained from the notices in S. Lee (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography, LVI (1898), pp. 224–6, and J.O. Baylen and N.J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals (2 vols, 1979 and 1982), I, pp. 475–9. There is also cursory discussion of some of Thompson’s ideas and activities throughout F.W. Fetter, The Economist in Parliament 1780–1868 (1980). A. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League (2 vols, 1853), I, p. 63. ‘Who did Most to Abolish the Corn Laws?’, Daily News, 7 November 1874. Taylor’s father had been active in the Anti-Corn Law League and a close friend of Thompson. H. Ashworth, Recollections of Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League (1877), p. 19. Bowring was a London merchant who would later achieve renown for a variety of activities and commitments, as a political economist, linguist, Unitarian, traveller, radical politician and colonial official. Thompson to Thomas Thompson (his father), 14, 19 October 1823, TPDTH 5/17, and also biographical narrative of events in 1823, TPDTH 5/17,18. See recollections by Thompson’s son, Charles William, in TPDTH 4/22. Thompson to Bowring, 12 November 1823, and narrative, TPDTH 5/17. Southern was a literary critic, editor of several periodicals, and later a diplomat. G.L. Nesbitt, Benthamite Reviewing: the First Twelve Years of the Westminster Review 1824–36 (1934); J. Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections, ed. L.B. Bowring (1877), pp. 65–77; J. Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (1965), pp. 17–22; J.S. Mill, Autobiography (1873), pp. 91–108; A. Bain, James Mill (1882), pp. 260–1. ‘On the Instrument of Exchange’, Westminster Review, I no. 1 (January 1824), pp. 171–205; also amended version in Thompson’s Exercises, III, pp.

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16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 295–343. Thompson’s arguments are outlined in the narrative, TPDTH 5/17. B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: the Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–30 (1977), chs 7, 8; Turner, Reform and Respectability, pp. 224–31; A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959), pp. 200–7. ‘On the Instrument of Exchange’: remarks are taken from the version in Thompson, Exercises, III, pp. 297–8, 340. For example, Thompson to Bowring, 5 May 1824, 20 February 1825, TPDTH 5/18. See narrative, TPDTH 5/18. The article was later published as ‘Geometry without Axioms’, Westminster Review, vol. XIII no. 26 (October 1830), pp. 503–9; also in Thompson, Exercises, I, pp. 306–13. Thompson’s contemporary, the renowned French political economist Jean-Baptiste Say, endorsed his views on rent (as in the early twentieth century did J.M. Keynes and J.A. Schumpeter). Thompson was happy to read of Say’s opinions, published after the appearance of the first edition of the rent pamphlet, and in later editions he included a translation of the relevant part of Say’s Cours Complet D’Economie Politique Pratique (1829). See Thompson, Exercises, IV, pp. 455–8. J. Watts, The Alphabet of Political Economy (1847), p. 12; T.P. Thompson, An Exposition of Fallacies on Rent (1826), p. 6. For the review, see The Reasoner, vol. LXXVIII, 17 November 1847, pp. 634–7. The tenth edition of Fallacies on Rent (1841) was republished in Thompson’s Exercises, IV, pp. 399–458. See Thompson’s Fallacies on Rent, which explains the shortcomings of the Ricardo-Mill theory, in greater depth. For the evolution of rent theory see Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (2 vols, 1776), I, ch. 11; Malthus, Principles of Political Economy considered with a View to their Practical Application (1820); Ricardo, Notes on Malthus’s Principles of Political Economy (1826); Mill, Elements of Political Economy (3rd edn, 1826). The wider intellectual framework is dealt with in D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: an Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (1996), ch. 13; S. Collini, D. Winch and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: a Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (1983), pp. 63–89. Thompson, Fallacies on Rent: quotations and examples are taken from the version in Exercises, IV, pp. 400, 406, 433. For example, on 29 August 1829 and again on 26 November 1831, copies of the Catechism were given away free with each issue of the radical Manchester Times. Its editor, Archibald Prentice, had previously made an arrangement with Thompson’s publishers whereby copies of the Catechism would be delivered without charge around the Manchester region by the newsmen who delivered the Manchester Times. Later Prentice gained permission to print copies of Thompson’s pamphlet on his own presses. Turner, Reform and Respectability, pp. 96, 246. Thompson to George Pryme, 25 February 1827, and narrative, TPDTH 5/18. Elliott’s Corn Law Rhymes were first published in 1831. L. Stephen (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography, XVII (1889), pp. 266–8; Baylen and Gossman, Modern British Radicals, II, pp. 199–200; A. Briggs, ‘Ebenezer

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

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Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer’, in Collected Essays of Asa Briggs (3 vols, 1985), II, pp. 36–48; January Searle (George S. Phillips), The Life, Character and Genius of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer (2nd edn, 1852), p. 142. Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections, p. 72. Speeches of Richard Cobden, eds J. Bright and J.E. Thorold Rogers (2nd edn, 1878), p. 201. For example, Howitt’s Journal, 31 July 1847, p. 66. On Canning’s Bill, see Parliamentary Debates, n.s. vol. XVI (1827), 758–87. Thompson to Pryme, 8 March 1827, TPDTH 5/18; Times and Morning Chronicle, 8 March 1827. For Hume and King, see Parliamentary Debates, n.s. vol. XVI (1827), 412–13, 626–8, vol. XVII (1828), 387–9. Later editions of the Catechism included, on the title page, Lord King’s remark of 2 March 1827: ‘He would recommend him to buy a little Catechism which had been published on the corn laws, which would enable him to answer all the fallacies of the noble Peers opposite to him’. See Thompson’s Exercises, IV, p. 459. Thompson, A Catechism of the Corn Laws (1827); quotations are taken from pp. 1, 2, 4, 71. The 20th edition is included in Exercises, IV, pp. 459–579. Parliamentary Debates, n.s. vol. XVII (1828), 1302–39 (18 June 1827); C.R. Fay, The Corn Laws and Social England (1932), ch. 5; Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce, ch. 9; Barnes, History of the Corn Laws, ch. 9; B. Gordon, Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism 1824–30 (1979), ch. 5. Thompson to Nancy Thompson (his wife), 9 March 1828, and narrative, TPDTH 5/18; ‘The Corn Laws’, Quarterly Review, vol. XXXVII no.74 (March 1828), pp. 426–47; Parliamentary Debates, n.s. vol. XIX (1829), 16–39, 141–56, 191–6, 208–29, 843–6, 900–03. Thompson to Pryme, 1 March 1830, TPDTH 4/4. On managerial changes at the Westminster Review, see Thompson to Bowring, 15 November 1828, and narratives, TPDTH 5/18,19; Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 70–2; J.S. Mill, Autobiography, pp. 129–31 (highly critical of Bowring). ‘Corn Laws’, Westminster Review, vol. XI no. 21 (July 1829), pp. 1–9; reprinted in Exercises, I, pp. 87–95. Narrative, TPDTH 5/20; Examiner, 4 October 1829; A. Fonblanque, England under Seven Administrations (3 vols, 1837), I, pp. 225–6. ‘Free Trade’, Westminster Review, XII no. 23 (January 1830), pp. 138–66; Exercises, I, pp. 191–219. ‘Distress of the Country’, Westminster Review, vol. XIII no. 25 (July 1830), pp. 218–26; Exercises, I, pp. 278–87. Thompson to Bowring, 22 August, 5, 13, 16, 20, 29 December 1831, 3 January 1832, TPDTH 4/4. See drafts dated 17 July 1832, and Thompson to Bowring, 17 July 1832, TPDTH 3/6,15. Bowring was now an adviser to government on trade and financial questions. He was to be appointed to several commissions, and travelled all over Europe observing commercial operations and negotiating trade agreements for Britain. His own financial embarrassments, indeed, made official employment a necessity. At the time of these communications, summer 1832, Bowring was investigating the silk trade. ‘Archbishop of Dublin on Political Economy’, Westminster Review, vol. XVI

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no. 31 (January 1832), pp. 1–22; Exercises, II, pp. 2–23. 44. ‘French Commerce’, Westminster Review, vol. XVI no. 32 (April 1832), pp. 534–41; Exercises, II, pp. 159–66. 45. ‘Dr Chalmers on Political Economy’, Westminster Review, vol. XVII no. 33 (July 1832), pp. 1–33; Exercises, II, pp. 167–200. 46. ‘McCulloch’s Edition of the Wealth of Nations’, Westminster Review, vol. XVII no. 34 (October 1832), pp. 267–311; Exercises, II, pp. 238–81. 47. ‘Viscount Milton’s Address on the Corn Laws’, Westminster Review, vol. XVII no. 34 (October 1832), pp. 510–13; Exercises, II, pp. 316–20. 48. ‘Henry Booth’s Free Trade As It Affects The People’, Westminster Review, vol. XVIII no. 36 (April 1833), pp. 366–74; Exercises, II, pp. 392–401. 49. ‘Colonel Torrens’s Letters on Commercial Policy’ and ‘Colonel Torrens’s Additional Letters on Commercial Policy’, Westminster Review, vol. XVIII no. 35 (January 1833), pp. 168–76, no. 36 (April 1833), pp. 421–7; Exercises, II, pp. 351–8, 409–14. 50. ‘Economy of Paying Twice Over’, Westminster Review, vol. XX no. 39 (January 1834), pp. 238–59; Exercises, III, pp. 43–68. 51. ‘Quarterly Review, Globe, etc, in support of the Corn Monopoly’, Westminster Review, vol. XX no. 40 (April 1834), pp. 514–20; Exercises, III, pp. 100–7. 52. For example, see references in Prentice, History of the League, I, pp. 48, 63, 70, 100. 53. Evening Sun, 31 July 1847. 54. Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. XXXIII (1836), cols 737–90; memorandum, TPDTH 5/22; Exercises, IV, pp. 115–16. 55. Memorandum, TPDTH 5/22; Prentice, History of the League, I, pp. 49–50. On developments in London, see also D. J. Rowe (ed.), London Radicalism 1830–43: a Selection from the Papers of Francis Place (1970), pp. 210–18; A.C. Howe, ‘Free Trade and the City of London c.1820–70’, History, vol. 77 (1992), pp. 393–410 (esp. 397–401). 56. Thompson to Nancy Thompson, 17 March 1837, and Letter to Constituents, 18 March 1837, TPDTH 4/7, 5/23; Exercises, IV, pp. 227–30; Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. XXVII (1837), cols 562–617; Prentice, History of the League, I, pp. 54–5; Barnes, History of the Corn Laws, p. 234. 57. Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. XXVII (1837), cols 683–91. 58. Letter to Constituents, 24 March 1837, TPDTH 5/23; Exercises, IV, pp. 232–3. 59. Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. XXXVIII (1837), cols 1676–8. 60. Ibid., col. 1678. 61. Letter to Constituents, 1 July 1837, TPDTH 5/37; Exercises, IV, pp. 288–90. 62. For example, Corn Law lecture, Holborn Mechanics’ Institute, reported in The Era, 30 September 1838. See also TPDTH 4/24. 63. These were not included in the Exercises of 1842, but appeared as a separate collection, Corn Law Fallacies, With the Answers (reprinted from The Sun) (1839). The Sun was a liberal anti-corn law paper, more Whig than radical, and unfriendly to the People’s Charter. 64. These were later republished in Letters of a Representative to his Constituents, to which is added a Running Commentary on Anti-Commercial Fallacies (1836). The ‘running commentary’ is on pp. 135–208.

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65. Melbourne made this statement on 2 July 1838, after repeal petitions had been presented in the House of Lords. Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. XLIII (1838), cols 1174–5. 66. Narrative, TPDTH 5/24; Prentice, History of the League, I, pp. 64–77; Manchester Guardian, 22 September 1838. 67. Prentice, History of the League, I, pp. 96–100; Hull Advertiser, 26 January 1839; Manchester Guardian, 12, 26 January 1839. There was a fund-raising meeting on 10 January at the York Hotel, then the grand dinner in the New Corn Exchange on 23 January, followed by a delegates’ meeting the next day. 68. Narrative extracts, and Thompson to Lily Thompson (his daughter), 23 January, 14 February 1839, TPDTH 4/8, 5/24,25; Hansard, 3rd ser., vol. XLV (1839), cols 129–30, 155–6, 217–19, 228–46, 355–9, 609–95; Prentice, History of the League, I, pp. 108–15. 69. For details, see M.J. Turner, ‘The “Bonaparte of Free Trade” and the AntiCorn Law League’, Historical Journal, vol. 41 (1998), pp. 1011–34.

4 Land, Labour, and Politics: Parliament and Allotment Provision, 1830–1870 Jeremy Burchardt

Allotments were the subject of extensive and at times intense political interest in the mid-nineteenth century. Many landowners saw them as the best hope for improving the social and moral condition of the rural poor, and it was widely believed that they encouraged selfreliance, industriousness, sobriety and political docility. Numerous local associations to promote allotments were established across the country (especially south of the Trent), and the national allotments society, the Labourers’ Friend Society, was patronized by an array of bishops, noblemen and MPs. In both Houses of Parliament, Bills to facilitate allotment provision were brought forward repeatedly, and governments were put under sustained pressure to legislate on the subject. For much of the period between 1830 and 1870, any discussion of rural labourers, agricultural employment, emigration or enclosure in either House was likely to precipitate a speech advocating allotment provision, even if, at least in the 1840s, such a speech might well elicit a scathing response from one of the radical MPs. All the major parliamentary inquiries into social conditions in the countryside, from the 1831 House of Lords Select Committee on the State of the Poor Laws to the 1867–9 Royal Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, paid respectful and extended attention to allotments, including not only the 1834 Poor Law Report, the three select committees on agriculture of the 1830s, and the 1843 inquiry into women and children’s employment in agriculture, but also the inquiries of 1840 into handloom-weaving and 1845 into framework-knitting. In short, the allotment movement was a staple element of the parliamentary politics of rural society in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the political history of the allotment movement in the 98

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period between 1830 and 1870 is almost entirely unknown. There are a few paragraphs on the legislation of the first half of the 1830s in Barnett’s pioneering 1967 article, but the treatment is cursory and does not set the legislation adequately into its parliamentary context. Furthermore, the article stops short in 1840 and so does not discuss subsequent attempts to pass legislation on allotments, although these were at least as important as those of the 1830s.1 David Crouch and Colin Ward’s ‘The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture’, which has a primarily sociological focus, is superficial in its coverage of the political history of allotments before 1870, devoting fewer than four pages to the subject.2 More recent work has concentrated on the social and economic rather than the political aspects of allotment provision. Boaz Moselle’s article on ‘Allotments, Enclosure, and Proletarianization in Early Nineteenth-century Southern England’ depends entirely on Barnett’s earlier work in its very brief discussion of legislation on allotments, and J.E. Archer’s response to Moselle’s article similarly eschews political analysis at the national level.3 The present author’s article on opposition to allotments explores intellectual, cultural and social aspects of the subject, but again does not attempt to provide an account of the political history of the allotment movement in this period.4 The first purpose of this chapter is to fill the gap in our knowledge of the pre-1870 politics of allotments by providing an outline of the main legislative developments between 1830 and 1870 (Section I). The second section will review the effectiveness of the legislation. It will be argued that in general the Acts relating to allotments in this period were of strikingly limited effectiveness. The third section will attempt to explain why the legislation was in the main so unsuccessful, and the fourth and final section will ask why it was that Parliament failed to pass measures which would have had more chance of achieving the goal of increasing the availability of allotments in rural areas.

I The first legislation relevant to allotment provision was in fact passed before the beginning of the period discussed here, in 1819. The Act concerned was, however, not primarily concerned with allotments at all. It was Sturges Bourne’s ‘Select Vestries Act’ (59 George III cap. 12). This was a major piece of legislation, whose primary aim was to increase the efficiency (and exclusivity) of parochial government. But some subsidiary clauses of the Act gave parishes powers to take in

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hand parish land, or purchase or hire other land, in order to provide employment for the poor. This could be done either directly by the parish, or by dividing the land into allotments and letting them to the poor. The genesis of the allotments clause seems to have been from the Report of the 1817 Select Committee on the Poor Laws. Witnesses to this committee mentioned a number of successful instances of allotment provision, and in the Committee’s report it was suggested that legislation should be passed permitting parishes to let allotments.5 The allotments clauses of the 1819 Act seem to have been little noticed at the time, and were evidently rarely acted on by parishes subsequently. For the next 11 years the paucity of references to allotments in parliamentary sources makes it plain that there was little political interest in allotments: the inclusion of allotments clauses in the 1819 Act remained an isolated episode, little attended to in the country at large in the years which followed, and still less so in Parliament. All this was to change dramatically in the year 1830. This year, indeed, marks the most decisive break in the history of allotments from their inception to the present day. For whilst prior to 1830 the number of allotments had been increasing only very slowly indeed (there were probably no more than about a hundred sites in the country as a whole at the beginning of 1830 – representing an average rate of growth of no more than about three sites per year since the first allotments appeared in 1795), from 1830 onwards the rate of growth in the number of sites and the general level of public interest in allotments both grew rapidly.6 By the mid-1840s there were about 2000 allotment sites in England, and articles about allotments appeared frequently in the local and national press, especially, although by no means exclusively, the agricultural press.7 There is little room for doubt that the immediate cause of this sudden growth of interest in allotments was the Swing riots of 1830–1. It was widely reported that parishes where allotments were available had not been affected by the riots, and the value of allotments as a means of restoring social peace in the countryside was much discussed.8 In this early period, it was the potential offered by allotments to act as a substitute for paid employment that was regarded as being their main virtue, since it was rural unemployment which was thought to have been the prime cause of the riots. Allotments were seen to a large extent as a form of ‘self-employment’ which, alongside other measures to promote employment by farmers or by the parish,

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might help diminish the hardship and corresponding discontent of the winter months in rural parishes. This is why measures to promote allotments were so often coupled together with more general measures to promote agricultural employment by contemporaries in the early 1830s. The first political manifestation of the new interest in allotments came in the debate on the first reading of the Earl of Winchilsea’s agricultural employment Bill on 11 November 1830. Winchilsea’s Bill was mainly concerned with promoting the adoption of the ‘labour rate’ method of poor relief, and did not itself contain any allotments clauses. But Lord Suffield’s speech on the Bill emphasized the effectiveness of allotment provision in holding down the poor rates.9 Winchilsea’s Bill was postponed sine die on 30 November, but by that time a very similar Bill had been introduced by Lord Nugent in the Commons. In the debate over the first reading of Nugent’s Bill, allotments were again advocated, on this occasion by J.I. Briscoe, MP for Surrey, and a leading figure within the Labourers’ Friend Society, the main organization campaigning for more extensive allotment provision. Briscoe’s intervention was well received by Nugent (who was himself active in the Labourers’ Friend Society), although the latter indicated that in his view allotment provision required separate legislation and could not be brought within the compass of his Bill. A particularly significant feature of Nugent’s remarks was that he suggested that parishes should be allowed to let allotments to the poor (he was evidently unaware that under 59 George III cap. 12 they already were permitted to do so), since this was to be the legislative avenue eventually adopted by Parliament in 1831 and 1832.10 Ten days later on 29 November 1830 the Marquis of Salisbury moved in the House of Lords for a select committee on the state of the poor laws. In proposing the motion, Salisbury claimed that one of the main reasons for the deterioration in the condition of the ‘peasantry’ had been that ‘of late years’ landowners had systematically been clearing their estates of outlying cottages, forcing the poor together in the villages, and so depriving them of garden ground.11 Salisbury’s motion was successful. The ensuing Select Committee on the State of the Poor Laws, under Salisbury’s chairmanship, included amongst its members three prominent advocates of allotments – G.H. Law (the Bishop of Bath and Wells), the Duke of Richmond, and Earl Stanhope.12 Law had first let allotments as early as 1807 when he was rector of Willingham in Cambridgeshire, and since becoming Bishop of Bath and Wells had established a celebrated site of about a hundred

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acres in size at Wells.13 Richmond was the landlord of about 1500 plots in Sussex.14 Stanhope let land to cottagers to keep cows, advocated large allotments of several acres in size, and was a prominent figure in the pro-allotments Agricultural Employment Institution (as indeed were Salisbury and Law).15 Unsurprisingly, the witnesses called to give evidence to the Committee were also often well-known advocates of allotment provision. Amongst these witnesses was the Reverend Stephen Demainbray, whose experience of letting allotments dated back to 1806 when he had fought to have them provided for the poor on the enclosure of his Wiltshire parish of Great Somerford.16 Other witnesses convinced of the importance of allotment provision included R.M. Bacon, editor of the Norwich Mercury and associate of Suffield, T.G.B. Estcourt, whose father Thomas Estcourt had established what were probably the first allotments in England in 1795, and the Wiltshire landowner Richard Pollen, as well as Law and Stanhope, who despite being members of the Committee also gave evidence to it.17 The appointment of the Select Committee did not, however, prevent advocates of allotments from raising the subject in Parliament in the meantime. On 17 December 1830 there was a discussion in the House of Commons on several petitions which had been presented on the state of the labouring classes. Briscoe took advantage of this to make a speech on the benefits of allotment provision, informing the House that if he had support he intended to bring in a Bill on the subject in the next session. Briscoe was supported by Long Wellesley and Lord Nugent, although Sir John Sebright and Alderman Waithman expressed reservations, in the former case on the grounds that only small plots were desirable and in the latter that the letting of land should be left entirely to landlords.18 Undeterred, Briscoe did indeed move for leave to bring in a Bill which would facilitate allotment provision by increasing the quantity of land overseers might take under the Select Vestries Act of 1819. Briscoe had strong support, including qualified approval from the government in the shape of Lord Althorp, and although at one point the debate threatened to degenerate into an embittered squabble over the necessity or otherwise of emigration, Briscoe gained his point and leave was given to bring in the Bill.19 However, for reasons which remain unclear it seems that no further progress was made with Briscoe’s Bill subsequently to this debate. A few days after the debate on Briscoe’s Bill on 4 March 1831 the Marquis of Salisbury attempted to give added momentum to the cause

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of allotment provision by calling the attention of the House of Lords to the evidence which had been given up to that point to his committee on the poor laws. This appears to have been a carefully calculated political manoeuvre, in that almost all the witnesses who regarded allotments as particularly important had already given their evidence by this date. Salisbury particularly called the attention of the House of Lords to the evidence on allotments, and was supported in this by Stanhope. But the Duke of Richmond, despite his record of allotment provision, argued that it was a mistake to submit the evidence to the Lords before it had all been heard. However, once again, the real argument seems to have been between those who were attracted to allotment provision and greater agricultural employment at home on the one hand, and those like Richmond who believed that the only remedy which stood any chance of success was emigration. The Earl of Carnarvon’s tactful suggestion that both allotment provision and emigration had their merits brought the inconclusive discussion to an end, but did nothing to resolve the underlying division of opinion.20 In the next few months attention shifted away from allotments towards agricultural employment in general. Winchilsea brought forward a Bill in the House of Lords which was in many respects similar to his previous Bill. This time the Bill passed its first reading, but after sustained criticism from government spokesmen it was withdrawn on its second reading.21 In the course of the debates on Winchilsea’s second Bill, the government had come under sustained pressure not to allow winter to approach without having taken at least some form of action to mitigate the hardships to which it was generally anticipated agricultural labourers would be subjected. The government’s response came initially in the House of Lords, where most concern over the issue had been demonstrated, when Richmond introduced a poor relief Bill on 9 August. The Bill took up an idea which had been widely canvassed in the preceding months – that of increasing the amount of land which parishes were allowed to take for the employment of the poor and the provision of allotments under 59 George III cap. 12.22 The Bill passed in the Lords on 25 August, but the government chose not to proceed with it as such and introduced a replacement Bill in the Commons. In the meantime, allotment provision had received highprofile consideration in the Commons when Michael Sadler, the leading ‘Tory radical’, argued that this should from a central plank in efforts to improve the living standards of the rural poor. Sadler’s lengthy and impassioned speech met with widespread approval, and

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although none of his proposals were directly incorporated in subsequent legislation, it seems likely that the favourable reception of his advocacy of allotment provision gave additional impetus to the government’s intention of legislating in that direction.23 The government’s new Bill to replace Richmond’s Bill extended the quantity of land which parishes might take or hire (but not purchase) for the purposes of providing employment or letting to the poor from 20 acres to 50 acres. Furthermore, parishes were also permitted, with the consent of the lord of the manor and the majority in value of the commoners, to enclose up to 50 acres of common or waste to apply to the same purposes. The Bill was hurried through Parliament so as to clear all its stages before the winter recess, and received the Royal Assent on 15 October. The official title of the new Act was ‘An Act to amend an Act of the 59th year of His Majesty King George the Third, for the Relief and Employment of the Poor’, but contemporaries referred to it less cumbersomely as the Inclosure of Wastes Act.24 Following hard on the heels of this Act the government brought a companion Bill into the Commons. This Bill enabled parishes, with the consent of the Lord High Treasurer or the Treasury Commissioners, to enclose up to 50 acres of forest or waste belonging to the Crown, to be used for the purposes permitted under the Select Vestries Act. The Bill was again hastened through all its stages, and became law on 20 October as ‘An Act to enable Churchwardens and Overseers to inclose Land belonging to the Crown for the benefit of poor Persons residing in the Parish in which such Crown Land is situated’, or more familiarly the Crown Lands Inclosure Act.25 The passing of these two Acts represented a significant success for the allotment movement. Not only had the quantity of land which parishes might let in allotments been more than doubled, but the clauses permitting parishes to enclose common or Crown land created an entirely new way in which this could be done. In many parishes it was very difficult to find land to rent or buy, and if the parish had no land of its own enclosure of new land might be the only practicable option. Furthermore, the fact that the government had passed legislation specifically with the aim of increasing allotment provision was a mark of the effectiveness with which advocates of allotments such as Salisbury and Briscoe had raised the profile of the issue by repeatedly drawing it to Parliament’s attention in the preceding year. But for many of those who looked to allotment provision as a solution to rural social problems the two Acts were no more than a first step, since their implementation depended entirely on the willingness of

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parish officers to make use of the powers conferred by the Acts. Furthermore, many of those who wished to see allotments become widespread looked on allotments very much as a form of compensation to labourers for the loss they suffered on the enclosure of common land. From this point of view, it was desirable that a direct link should be established between enclosure and allotment provision, so that in future those labourers who lost from enclosure would automatically gain from allotment provision. These concerns underlay a Bill ‘for encouraging and facilitating the employment of labourers in agriculture’ introduced into the House of Commons on 10 April 1832. The Bill provided for a simplified process for enclosing waste land, but made it compulsory for those wishing to take advantage of this to set out in allotments for the poor a tenth by value (up to a maximum of 200 acres) of the area to be enclosed. The Bill seems to have originated in a similar Bill which had been introduced in the House of Lords earlier in the year by Lord Kenyon, but had been criticized on the grounds of the threat it allegedly posed to the rights of property.26 The House of Commons Bill fared little better. Although it was given a second reading, it attracted hostile criticism from large towns such as Bristol and several of the London boroughs, which feared that the clauses simplifying waste land enclosure might jeopardize their own open spaces. Such objections, and the unwillingness of the government to assist the Bill, led to it running out of time in mid-July. However, a less ambitious Bill which had been brought in by John Weyland in the meantime had more success. This Bill was concerned primarily with ‘fuel allotments’ – portions of land provided under the terms of enclosure Acts to compensate the poor for the loss of fuel-gathering rights. Such fuel allotments were not let severally to poor parishioners – instead, they were either let to a farmer and the rent then applied by the parish to the purchase of fuel for the poor, or left uncultivated for the poor to forage for fuel on. Under Weyland’s Bill, parishes were required to let such unproductive fuel allotments in small plots to the poor (that is, in allotments in the modern sense of the word). The Bill also contained clauses facilitating the recovery of rent and ejection of refractory tenants from allotments let by parishes, and these clauses were to be extended to the Inclosure of Wastes Act and the Crown Lands Inclosure Act as well. Weyland’s Bill seems to have been regarded by the government as a useful complement to the two Acts passed the previous autumn, and received the Royal Assent on 1 June 1832 as ‘An Act to authorize (in Parishes inclosed under any Act of Parliament) the letting of the Poor

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Allotments in small Portions to industrious Cottagers’ (2 William IV cap. 42).27 For the sake of clarity this Act will henceforward be referred to as the Fuel Allotments Act. There seem to have been no further attempts to promote legislation on allotments in Parliament for the remainder of 1832, and indeed the issue seems not to have been raised again until 8 May 1833. On this occasion it was George Pryme MP, himself an allotment landlord and also a contributor to Facts and Illustrations, the monthly periodical of the Labourers’ Friend Society, who brought the matter forward. Pryme emphasized the remarkable results which had been obtained with respect to poor rates and disorder through the introduction of allotments, and referred to the Labourers’ Friend Society in support of this. He suggested that every future waste land enclosure Bill committee should have to state in its report whether land in the proportion of one acre to every 25 inhabitants of the parish had been set aside for allotments; if land had not been so set aside, the Committee would have to justify this decision.28 On this occasion, debate on Pryme’s suggestion was deferred. A year later, Pryme tried again, but was attacked on the grounds that his plan was ‘a mere peddling attempt at getting rid of a great and extensive evil’. The House divided on Pryme’s motion, and rejected it by 136 votes to 31.29 Whilst the great Poor Law Report of 1834 discussed allotments in favourable terms, and the minutes of evidence both of that report, of the three parliamentary select committees on agriculture in the 1830s, and of the 1840 Report on the Handloom Weavers, were also quite strongly favourable, after Pryme’s motion of 1834 there was no further attempt in either House to use legislative means to encourage allotment provision for several years. This was partly no doubt because the recovery of agricultural prices in the second half of the 1830s led to a distinctly improved situation with respect to the availability of employment, but more perhaps because of the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act.30 Amongst its supporters, there was, of course, a tendency to see the Act as a panacea for all the great ills of rural society. More importantly, perhaps, the larger body of the unconvinced were prepared to allow the Act time to prove its worth. Even those who were bitterly opposed to the new regime seem to have accepted the political reality that the passing of the Act drew a line under the great debate over the condition of rural society and the measures needed to restore it to health which had been argued so vigorously over the preceding five years. In these circumstances, there was perhaps a certain inevitability about the lull in efforts to promote

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allotment legislation through Parliament that occurred in the years immediately after 1834. It was as a by-product of the ongoing debate over the merits of enclosure, and the conditions on which enclosure should in future be carried out, that the question of allotment provision eventually arose again. On 9 March 1837 the House of Commons had voted to make it a standing order (number 89) that land should be set apart for exercise and recreation on all future enclosures of commons and wastes.31 Those who wished to see allotments more extensively provided regretted that similar provisions did not exist with respect to allotments, and on 14 March 1843 Stanton, who would be a member of the Select Committee on allotments when it sat later in the year, moved a resolution that Standing Order number 89 should be amended to this effect. Despite considerable support, particularly from reforming movements like Young England, doubts were expressed about the particular method Stanton proposed for administrating allotments – it was to be the parish officers who were responsible, and rents received would go in aid of the poor rates. As a result of these reservations, Stanton agreed to withdraw his motion.32 A few days later, on 23 March, he reintroduced it in modified form: he now proposed that the allotments should be vested in the lord of the manor, minister, and churchwardens and overseers, rather than just the churchwardens and overseers. But despite his efforts to make his motion more acceptable, Stanton found there were still many objections to a standing order along the lines he proposed. Lord Granville Somerset, who spoke first, argued that such a standing order would interfere with the rights of occupiers of common lands. Even committed supporters of the allotment movement voiced reservations. T.G.B. Estcourt, whose family prided itself on having been the first to introduce allotments, thought that through making allotment provision a right rather than a privilege, Stanton would turn it into a means of encouraging idleness rather than industry. Lord John Manners urged Stanton to withdraw his motion and suggested that an allotments Bill should be introduced to replace Stanton’s flawed suggestion. W.F. Cowper also thought that the end of promoting allotments, which he considered of great importance, would be better advanced by bringing in a Bill on the subject. Under such pressure from those to whom he might naturally have looked for support, it is not surprising that Stanton withdrew his motion and did not attempt to bring it forward again.33 Only a week later on 30 March 1843, however, the suggestion made by Manners and Cowper that a Bill on allotments should be brought

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in was taken up, when W.B. Ferrand moved for leave to bring in a Bill for the allotment of waste lands. Ferrand claimed that there were 30 million acres of uncultivated waste land in the British Isles, and proposed that in parishes with uncultivated waste one-twentieth of the waste should be set aside for the use of the poor. The land would be held in a perpetual trust for the poor, vested in the rector, the lord of the manor, and parish officers. A small part of the land would be reserved for a recreation ground, and another small area for a dryingout ground for wet clothes – the difficulty of drying clothes being, according to Ferrand, a serious one for the working people in his part of the country. But the remainder, which it is clear Ferrand assumed would be much the largest part, was to be divided up into allotments. The costs of setting up and maintaining the allotments would be met from the poor rates, and the rent received from the holders of the allotments would correspondingly go to repay the parish. A radical feature of Ferrand’s plan was that the parish was to build cottages on the allotments for their future occupiers. This incurred the disapproval of the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham. Graham also argued that it was not conceivable that any land that could profitably be cultivated remained out of cultivation, at least in populated areas, and that what Ferrand was proposing would therefore ultimately turn out to be a form of state-supported charity (an objection which was echoed by Lord Worsley and by Joseph Hume). But despite the fact that it was clear that the government was at heart utterly opposed to interventionist schemes like Ferrand’s, Graham went out of his way to pay tribute to Ferrand’s generous intentions and hard work, and made it clear that he would not oppose the bringing in of the Bill.34 Ferrand introduced his Bill on 12 May 1843, but it must have been clear even to him that it stood no chance of success (the Bill was eventually ordered to be withdrawn on 12 July). In any case, it had been overtaken by a much more important development. On 11 April, Cowper moved for a select committee on the question of whether allotments should be provided under all future waste land enclosure Acts. Cowper argued that the time was ripe for legislation on allotments. Large areas of waste land were, he alleged, about to be enclosed, but the general enclosure Bill about to be introduced made no provision for allotments. At the same time the popularity of the Chartist Land Plan demonstrated how widespread and deeply felt the desire to have land was amongst the labouring classes, whilst the effectiveness of allotments had been established through a now lengthy experience of them. Cowper’s motion was backed by the

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government, and a select committee was accordingly appointed.35 The general enclosure Bill anticipated by Cowper was indeed introduced into the House of Commons later that spring by Lord Worsley. On its second reading, Worsley came under pressure from supporters of allotment provision, in particular Ferrand, Manners and Sharman Crawford, to insert clauses relating to allotments in his Bill. He was urged to wait until the Select Committee on allotments had reported before proceeding further. Sandon suggested that the Committee’s recommendations could be incorporated into the Bill when the Committee made its report. Although in the event the second reading of the Bill passed easily, it was evident that there was a gathering body of opinion, even amongst those who voted for the Bill, that if it were to become law it should at some stage be amended to take account of the allotment Committee’s report.36 The Select Committee on allotments which had been appointed on Cowper’s motion was as partisan in its membership as mid-nineteenth century select committees usually were.37 Almost all its members had a long track-record of support for allotments: amongst them were Cowper, Stanton, Ferrand, Manners and Estcourt, as well as three influential MPs with close connections with the Labourers’ Friend Society – Lord Ashley, Lord Robert Grosvenor and Thomas Wyse. In the circumstances, it was probably a foregone conclusion that the final report (dated 4 July 1843) would be a favourable one. Nevertheless, the evidence gathered by the Committee was impressive in its quantity, detail and variety. A particularly important point which emerged, and one on which the Committee was careful to lay emphasis in its report, was that spade husbandry could enable tracts of waste land too barren to be worth ploughing to yield valuable returns to labourers cultivating them in their spare time. The most important recommendation made by the Committee was that any future enclosure Act, whether general or merely local, should include powers enabling the majority of the interested parties to set aside allotments, of which the lord of the manor, beneficed clergyman, and two elected allotment wardens could be constituted the trustees. Three further important but unfortunately rather vague recommendations were made. The first was that the powers given to churchwardens and overseers under the Acts of 1819 and 1831–2, which had been transferred to the guardians of the poor under the 1835 Union and Parish Property Act (5 and 6 William IV cap. 69), should be taken out of the hands of the poor law officials altogether and transferred to some other body. The second was that some form

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of central society should be established which would co-ordinate the efforts of existing voluntary local allotments societies, and act as an intermediary responsible for supervision and rent collection in instances where landowners were disposed to provide allotments but unwilling to incur the potential trouble of administering them. The Committee’s final major recommendation was that ‘facilities should be afforded’ to enable parish vestries to rent charity lands situated in the parish in order to let the land in allotments.38 The immediate upshot of the report was that another allotments Bill was brought into the House of Commons. The author of this new Bill was Lord Ashley. Like Michael Sadler before him, Ashley is much better known for his efforts to promote factory legislation than to extend allotment provision, but to both men allotments represented a healthy rural alternative to the sickness they perceived in urban industrialism. Ashley proposed to establish a ‘National Allotment and Loan Fund Superintendence Society’, which would let allotments to labourers and act as a regulatory body supervising loan funds. In attempting to encourage borrowing facilities as well as allotments for the labouring classes, Ashley’s Bill echoed the original intention of the Labourers’ Friend Society, the efforts of which had become wholly focused on allotments only because its initial attempts to promote loan societies had encountered insuperable difficulties. Of the allotments clauses of Ashley’s Bill, the two most important were one which allowed the Society to take or purchase land and let it out in allotments, and another which permitted the Society to agree with any lord of a manor a lease of waste land for the purposes of letting it in allotments. The radical feature of the second clause was that the agreement between the Society and the lord of the manor was not to be subject to the consent of the commoners. The rent of the allotments was to be paid to the churchwarden and applied to general parish purposes.39 Ashley’s Bill received its first reading on 25 July. It was vigorously attacked in The Times on the grounds of its alleged centralizing tendencies, but it was probably Ashley’s anxiety to depart for the Continent for the sake of his wife’s health rather than the strength of the opposition to his measure which led Ashley to withdraw it on 26 July.40 Ashley stated in explanation that he intended to reintroduce a similar Bill in the next session, but for reasons which remain unclear he did not do so. Possibly he had simply forgotten all about it when he returned to England after his three-month foreign tour; certainly, it is clear that allotments were never more than a peripheral interest of Ashley’s, absorbed as he was at this time in

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bitterly controversial struggles over factory legislation and the opium trade.41 Worsley’s enclosure Bill had not had time to pass through all its stages in the session in which he introduced it, but he brought the measure forward again early in 1844. In the debate on the first reading of the Bill on 29 February 1844, the supporters of allotments again urged that clauses permitting the provision of allotments should be inserted into the Bill, Sharman Crawford quoting extensively and effectively from the Select Committee’s report to this end.42 Sharman Crawford also urged allotment provision on the second reading of the Bill, whilst Cowper, although voting for the measure, indicated that he was contemplating moving an amendment with respect to allotments, and warned that if the Bill were not altered to take more account of the rights of the poor, it would meet considerable opposition in committee.43 In the event, Worsley’s Bill was referred to a select committee on 27 June 1844, whilst Cowper decided to bring in a new allotments Bill rather than limiting himself to sniping at Worsley’s or any other future general enclosure Bill. Cowper argued that the evidence heard by the Select Committee on allotments had clearly demonstrated the advantages of allotment provision, but that because it was very difficult to obtain land for allotments these advantages were not as widely diffused as it was desirable they should be. Giving substance to one of the Committee’s hazier suggestions, Cowper proposed the establishment of a field gardens board in each parish, consisting of four elected ratepayers and the officiating clergyman. These boards would in effect take over the powers of the churchwardens and overseers to let allotments under earlier allotments Acts, which were henceforth to cease, but under slightly different conditions. In addition, they would be able to take parish land to let in allotments, and would have the right to demand up to one-twentieth of any newly enclosed land for allotments. Sir James Graham, perhaps stung by Cowper’s sharp thrust that the government did not seem very interested in Bills aimed at benefiting the labouring classes, did not oppose the second reading, and when Cowper moved for the House to go into committee on the Bill, expressed his approval of its principle. Cowper, gratified by this support, accepted Graham’s suggestion that as it was too late in the session for the Bill to pass, the House should go into committee pro forma so that the Bill could be circulated during the recess with Cowper’s alterations, and the subject brought before the House in the next session.44 Cowper did indeed introduce a very similar measure early in the

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next session on 4 March 1845. Whilst there was opposition to the Bill on the grounds that it was based on the principle of the subdivision of land and was allegedly a compulsory measure, the forceful support of Graham was enough to get the Bill past its first reading without a division.45 On the second reading the House divided 92 to 18 in favour of the Bill.46 While Cowper’s Bill was under the consideration of the House, the government had decided to take action on the report of the Select Committee on enclosure, which had strongly recommended the passing of a general enclosure Act to facilitate enclosure. Accordingly, Lord Lincoln moved for leave to bring in a general enclosure Bill on 1 May 1845. In his speech introducing the measure, Lincoln drew attention to clauses in his Bill which adopted some of the provisions of Cowper’s Bill with respect to allotments.47 When Cowper moved that the House go into committee pro forma on his Bill six days later, he accordingly indicated his willingness to strike out the clauses of his Bill relating to enclosure if Lincoln’s Bill was passed with its allotments clauses intact. Despite a fierce attack by Roebuck, who alleged that Cowper’s Bill would be ‘the first step towards introducing the ruinous and depraved method of dealing with the land which had produced such evil results in Ireland’, and accused it of being ‘a sort of supplementary poor law’, there was no division on the motion.48 Cowper took the opportunity to amend those clauses of his Bill which had provided for the costs of establishing and maintaining the allotments to be paid out of the poor rates. Following the revision, the costs of the scheme would be met from the highway rates instead, thus accommodating Graham’s major objection to the Bill. The House went into committee on the Bill on 2 July. It was attacked by Roebuck and Bright on the grounds that labourers should depend on their wages, not on land, but Sir Robert Peel pronounced that whilst the principle of the Bill, if carried to its logical extreme, might be pernicious, its practical effect would be good, and he would wish to see it carried into law. Partly perhaps as a result of this intervention, the Bill passed through committee without any damaging amendments being made, and was given its third reading on 8 July.49 It now seemed that Cowper had all but achieved the objective which he and other advocates of allotments had so long striven for. But it was not to be. Although the Bill was given a second reading, and had government support, it encountered bitter opposition, and Radnor insisted on entering a protest against the second reading in the Lords’ Journals. Radnor objected to the Bill on the grounds that it

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would lead to favouritism, excessive local variation, early marriages, lower wages, and the subdivision of land, because it contraverted the principle of the (new) poor law, and because it was founded on a false view that the people ‘must be cared for, overlooked, and directed by others, their superiors perhaps in fortune, but I believe by no means superior to them in virtue, natural intelligence, or public spirit’. With such grave accusations levelled against it, the Bill was referred to a committee, which eventually reported that it had decided it was not expedient to proceed. This was, of course, the end of the matter.50 All, however, was not lost. Although Cowper’s Bill fell at the last hurdle, the allotment movement did nevertheless achieve its most longstanding legislative objective in 1845. When Lincoln’s general inclosure Bill became the General Enclosure Act (8 and 9 Vict. cap. 118), it incorporated, as Lincoln had promised, a clause empowering the newly created inclosure commissioners to require as a condition of the enclosure of any waste or common that allotments be provided; if the commissioners chose in a particular instance not to exercise this power, they were to state why they had not done so in their annual report to Parliament.51 This did not, of course, create a field gardens board in every parish, as Cowper had wished. But it did at last enshrine in legislation the direct link between enclosure and allotment provision which advocates of allotments had been trying to establish at least since Lord Kenyon’s ‘Bill for encouraging and facilitating the employment of labourers in agriculture’ of 1832. Whilst in retrospect the 1845 Act was to seem disappointing, at least in regard of its allotments clauses, at the time it was welcomed by advocates of allotments as the culmination of long years of effort.52 The 1845 Act was the last piece of legislation on allotments for a very long time – indeed there seems to have been no further attempt to promote allotment provision through legislation until the end of our period. This is in some respects surprising, bearing in mind that that although the wages of agricultural labourers rose during the 1850s and 1860s, food prices did so too, and any improvement in real wages seems likely to have been slight.53 But two main reasons can be adduced to explain the lack of parliamentary interest in allotment promotion after 1845. In the first place, the General Inclosure Act seems to have been regarded both inside and outside the allotment movement as a definitive general measure with respect to allotments. It might be less than some had hoped for; but there seemed little prospect of generating sufficient political pressure to pass a better Act now that there was actually a general measure on the statute book.

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Secondly, after the mid-1840s the level of political concern about rural social problems in general seems sharply to have diminished. It is remarkable that there was no major public inquiry into rural social conditions between 1843 and 1867. The main reasons for this reduction of concern seem to have been that whilst real wages did not necessarily rise very much in the countryside, employment did become more regular, and it had always been the irregularity of employment rather than the low level of wages that was the most serious cause of rural poverty. Real incomes in the countryside therefore probably did rise after 1850, and there was correspondingly less discontent. The combination of better social conditions and a reduction in discontent seems likely to be the main reason for the fall in the level of political concern with rural social problems. It was only with the publication of the reports and minutes of evidence of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture of 1867–9, which, in their massively bulky coverage of rural living standards, inevitably gave a prominent place to the adequacy of allotment provision, that Parliament’s attention was again drawn to allotments. But the legislative fruits of these reports were slow in ripening, and it was not until long after the close of the period covered in this chapter that they were harvested.

II By 1870, there were therefore five Acts on the statute book containing clauses designed to increase the availability of allotments in rural areas: the 1819 Select Vestries Act, the 1831 Inclosure of Wastes and Crown Lands Inclosure Acts, the 1832 Fuel Allotments Act, and the 1845 General Inclosure Act. This represented a substantial political achievement by advocates of allotments, and reflected an immense amount of hard work and perseverance. But for all the effort which had gone into passing them, in terms of increasing the number of allotments provided these Acts were of remarkably limited effectiveness. Very few allotment sites of any kind are recorded as existing prior to 1830; probably there were no more than a hundred sites in existence all told in 1829.54 Even of these, an overwhelming majority were let privately: there are only two or three sites which can be positively attributed to the 1819 Act. Before they were used to build the 1831 legislation on, the allotments clauses of the 1819 Act were very rarely referred to, and it seems likely that they had been effectively forgotten. The Acts of 1831–2 were not quite so nugatory, but can

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scarcely be said to have had a significant direct impact on allotment provision in England in themselves. There are a handful of records of sites let under these Acts, but the overwhelming majority of sites remained those let by private landowners.55 With the passing of the Union and Parish Property Act of 1835, which transferred the powers of the churchwardens and overseers under the 1819 and 1831–2 Acts to the guardians, the provision of allotments by public authorities seems to have ceased altogether until the 1845 Act.56 The latter was much the most successful of the five Acts in terms of the number of allotments provided under it, but whilst impressive in relation to the other four Acts, in relation to the extent of unsatisfied demand for allotments, and the expectations which had been had of the Act, it cannot be judged as otherwise than an almost complete failure. Indeed, so wide was the gulf between what it had been hoped the 1845 Act would achieve in terms of allotment provision and what it actually did achieve, that when interest in allotment provision began to revive as a result of the reports of the 1867–9 Royal Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, the way in which the inclosure commissioners had operated the allotments clauses of the 1845 Act was referred to a special select committee on the subject. The report of this select committee, which appeared in 1869, found that of 368 000 acres of common or waste enclosed since 1845 under the General Inclosure Act, only 2223 acres had been set aside for allotments.57 Probably only about 5 per cent of new plots established between 1845 and 1873 can be attributed to the Act.58 It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that if the contribution of legislation prior to 1870 to allotment provision was not actually negligible, it was virtually so.

III This leaves us with two interesting problems. In the first place, why was it that the legislation on allotments was so very unsuccessful? Secondly, why did Parliament not pass legislation which was more effective? The remainder of this chapter will be taken up with attempting to answer these two questions. The most obvious reason for the failure of the legislation passed on allotments in this period is that the four Acts passed prior to 1845 all entrusted responsibility for establishing and managing allotments created under their powers to entirely unsuitable authorities – the parish officers. It was not only that the churchwardens and overseers

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were unpaid officials who already had onerous responsibilities in other directions, although this was a serious enough difficulty. What really made the churchwardens and overseers unsuitable was that in general they were not only without any strong positive motive to establish or adequately supervise allotments, but actually had what was often a very strong motive not to provide allotments. This was because the great majority of churchwardens and overseers were in fact farmers. The hostility of farmers to allotment provision was a commonplace of the time, and whilst a few farmers were prepared to take a broader view, this was swamped by the decided antagonism of the mass of farmers. Not only was this antagonism general, but it was also often bitter, and it found expression in a whole range of hostile actions, ranging from refusal to lend equipment to labourers to cultivate their plots right up to sacking labourers who had allotments or accusing those who did of theft.59 The causes of this hostility were many and complex, and beyond the scope of the current discussion; but seen in the light of so vehement a dislike of allotments, we can scarcely find it surprising that farmers – when acting as churchwardens and overseers – were no more willing to provide allotments for labourers than they were as private individuals. In some respects the transfer of the allotment-providing powers of parish officers to the guardians in 1835 might have been expected to bring about a broader view of the merits of allotment provision, since the position of guardian was to a greater extent that of a public official with responsibility for carrying out public policy than was the case with a churchwarden or overseer. But in fact far from giving the Acts of 1819 and 1831–2 a new lease of life, the effect of the Union and Parish Property Act was, as we have seen, to put a stop to even the small extent to which these Acts had previously been operative with respect to allotments. Part of the reason for this was doubtless that the guardians were also very often farmers, and had even more excessive demands on their time. But probably a more important reason was that the whole context in which the guardians were operating was antipathetic to allotments. The guardians naturally saw themselves, as they indeed were, as poor law officials, and their overriding concern was to implement the New Poor Law and make it work. From this perspective, allotments were at best an irrelevance, and at worst a survival of the pernicious relief-in-aid-of-labour practices of the pre1834 era, which it was the whole thrust of the New Poor Law to eliminate. Even before 1834, there were grave disadvantages to mixing up allotment provision with the poor law; but after that year, any

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attempt to combine the two under one administration could only lead to the neglect of allotment provision. The 1845 Act did not, of course, mix allotments up with the poor law. But the notion of attempting to generalize the allotment system by hitching it on to future enclosures was, certainly by 1845 and for that matter even by 1830, one which made little sense. Not only were there relatively few parishes which remained unenclosed at this time, but the wastes and commons which were still unenclosed by the second quarter of the nineteenth century were in the wrong place, both within their parishes and in the country as a whole.60 They were in the wrong place within their parishes because they were generally located at a considerable distance away from where most of the local labourers lived (naturally land close to villages was usually of high value, and tended to be enclosed early), and they were in the wrong place in the country as a whole because it was mostly the great moors of the north and west which remained unenclosed.61 Not only was population density very low on the northern and western moors, but even those labourers who did live in these regions were generally very much better off in terms of wages and living standards than their southern counterparts.62 In fact it was in the more densely populated counties of the midlands, East Anglia, and the south that allotments were really badly needed; but in these parts of the country, unenclosed commons and wastes were few and far between, and where, as in parts of Norfolk and Berkshire, they did exist to any considerable extent, they were usually some distance from the nearest village.63 One final, and most important, explanation for the ineffectiveness of the legislation of the period before 1870 is that it was essentially permissive rather than compulsory. Under the Acts of 1819, 1831–2 and 1845, the churchwardens, overseers, guardians and inclosure commissioners were given powers to provide allotments, but they could choose not to do so; and in general they did choose not to do so. The contrast with the 1887 Allotment Act, which began the series of Acts on which allotment provision in the twentieth century was based and which was the first allotment Act under which plots were provided on a really large scale, could not be clearer. The 1887 Act made it obligatory for local authorities to provide allotments if on investigation it was determined that an unsatisfied demand for allotments existed, and gave powers of compulsory purchase to facilitate this if necessary.64

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IV Why, then, did Parliament not pass more effective legislation on allotments in this period? Bearing in mind the conclusions of the previous section about the reasons for the failure of the legislation that was passed, the question resolves itself into three subsidiary questions. Firstly, why was legislation on allotments entrusted to such unsuitable agents? Secondly, why was it thought that attaching allotments clauses to enclosure legislation was a plausible way of substantially increasing the availability of allotments? Thirdly, why did legislation remain permissive rather than compulsory? These three questions will now be taken in turn. There were several reasons why Parliament entrusted legislation on allotments to the unsuitable agency of the churchwardens, guardians and overseers. It was partly because members of Parliament, like most of their contemporaries, were generally inclined to see rural social problems through the medium of the poor law: after all, the most direct way in which they usually became aware of a worsening of such problems was when as landowners they found they were having to pay out more in poor rates. The poor law was seen both as the means by which government and society attempted to contain and check rural social problems and, through its deficiencies, as a major cause of such problems in itself.65 Since the idea of allotment provision was to reduce rural underemployment, poverty and discontent, it was natural for legislators interested in promoting allotments to make the local poor law the means of implementation in 1819. Subsequent legislation in 1831–2 largely built on the foundations laid in 1819. Important as the precedent of 1819 was, however, it was not the only reason that the Acts of the 1830s also turned to the parish officers as agents of allotment promotion. The pages of the Labourer’s Friend Magazine show that advocates of allotments were well aware of the disadvantages of associating allotments with the poor law; but when it came to drafting legislation, they too, albeit reluctantly, found themselves turning to the churchwardens and overseers to administrate publicly provided allotments, and to the poor law to give financial stability (as for example in Ferrand’s Bill of 1843, and even the early versions of Cowper’s Bills of 1844–5). The reason was that there was in fact no other alternative local authority in existence at all. The difficulties besetting the allotment movement in terms of finding an effective and acceptable local agency reflect the wider problem of nineteenth-century local government as a whole, a

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problem which was not to be solved until the establishment of county councils in 1888 and parish councils in 1894. It is revealing that, just as in the case of schools and public health, those who wished to see enhanced effectiveness at a local level were forced to improvise nonpoor law forms of specialized local authority such as school boards and local boards of health/sanitary authorities, so in the case of allotments the notion of field garden wardens emerged in the Bills of the early 1840s (and was eventually incorporated into the 1845 Act). Turning to the second of our three questions, how was it that a general enclosure Act could be thought a suitable vehicle for the generalizing of the allotment systems? One reason was that many of the landowners who supported the allotment movement had a deep sense of the damage that enclosure had done to rural living standards and the morale and independence of rural labourers. There was a tangible sense of guilt amongst these landowners: seeing themselves as part of their class, they felt that they as landowners had grown richer on the back of the suffering of the labourers. From this point of view, attaching allotments clauses to future enclosure legislation was morally logical and had something of an act of reparation about it. A more pragmatic reason for attaching hopes of generalizing allotment provision to enclosure legislation was that this seemed to be the only way in which allotments could be provided on a more universal and systematic basis without actually taking away the property of any single individual. Insofar as an unenclosed common was in effect collective property, subtracting land for allotments from it at the moment it was enclosed was seizing a strategic opportunity. It should be remembered that not only did the supporters of allotment provision have to attempt to pass legislation through a Parliament of landowners, but that they were in general landowners themselves. Finally, then, why did legislation on allotments remain permissive rather than compulsory? One possibility is because of the perceived connection between compulsory legislation and interference with the rights of property. The Bills brought forward in 1843 by Ferrand and by Ashley, whilst not actually incorporating powers of compulsory purchase, were both vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that they threatened the property of those who held common rights (which landowners and farmers often did). Ferrand’s Bill provided for the compulsory enclosure of one-twentieth of the uncultivated waste in each unenclosed parish, whilst Ashley’s allowed the proposed National Allotment and Loan Supervision Society to agree with the lord of the manor to enclose waste without securing the consent of

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those with common rights. Ferrand’s Bill was to a large extent pushed into the background by the appointment of the Select Committee on allotments, whilst Ashley’s was withdrawn after its first reading, but had either made further progress it seems likely that they would have run into stiff opposition on the grounds of their interference with property rights. But Cowper’s Bills of 1844 and 1845 were a different matter. Whereas both Ferrand’s and Ashley’s Bills would have created situations in which land could have been enclosed under conditions which interested owners of property regarded as unacceptable, Cowper’s Bills did not contain any clauses permitting compulsory enclosure. Furthermore, where enclosure was agreed upon and allotments correspondingly provided, the rent of the land set aside for allotments would be paid to an assigned party in lieu of the land itself. The other mechanism for establishing allotments provided for under Cowper’s Bills showed an equal degree of tenderness for property rights: the new field garden boards to be created would only be able to hire land by agreement, not take it by compulsory purchase. So it is difficult to attribute the opposition to Cowper’s Bills to sensitivity to interference with property rights. A more plausible explanation for the opposition to Cowper’s Bills is that by the mid-1840s the question of allotment provision had become tangled up in the bitter antagonism over the Corn Laws. There was not in fact any direct connection between the two issues, and it was perfectly possible to be both a convinced free-trader and an ardent advocate of allotments (as, for example, was the Marquis of Lansdowne, who let several hundred acres of allotments near Calne).66 But in the heated atmosphere of the times the radicals, many of whom had earlier looked on allotments with mild favour or, at worst, indifference, began to see the entire allotment system as yet another dishonest invention of the aristocracy to distract the attention of rural labourers away from the iniquity of the Corn Laws, and to perpetuate a ‘feudal’ relationship with their labourers. Roebuck, for example, had voted for Pryme’s 1834 motion proposing a standing order to ensure that future enclosure Bills included allotments clauses.67 But eleven years later he launched a bitter attack on Cowper’s Field Gardens Bill, accusing those who favoured allotments of ‘mock humanity’ and insisting that labourers ought to be supported by their wages alone.68 Roebuck’s shift in attitude exemplified that of parliamentary radicalism as a whole. Whilst Hunt and Attwood spoke in favour of Sadler’s allotments Bill of 1832, Hume and Bright were fierce opponents of allotments legislation in the 1840s (in spite – or

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perhaps partly because – of the fact that the trend of opinion within the country at large had been in the opposite direction).69 Both Hume and Roebuck explicitly identified land provision for the poor as an unviable alternative to repeal of the Corn Laws, which they saw as the real solution to rural poverty.70 Other than the radicals, however, there were few who evinced outright hostility to allotments in the parliamentary context. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the allotment movement in the post-1830 period was the breadth of political support it enjoyed. Whilst rural allotments have sometimes been associated with a reactionary, paternalistic High Toryism, this was in fact far from being the case. Of the 26 MPs subscribing to the Labourers’ Friend Society in 1833, all but two were Whigs or at least reformers, and the two MPs who were most active in promoting legislation on allotments, J.I. Briscoe and W. Cowper, were both Whigs.71 In the late 1830s and 1840s the balance within the Society shifted towards conservatism, but only to an extent mirroring the shift in political forces in society at large. In 1850 there were 40 MPs on the subscription list of the Society (now relaunched as the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes). Of these, 15 were Whigs or Liberals, 13 were protectionists, and eight were Peelites: a fairly close approximation to the strength of the respective groups within Parliament as a whole.72 Nor was support for allotment provision confined to the insignificant and eccentric within each political grouping. On the contrary: Peel intervened decisively in one of the debates on Cowper’s 1845 Bill in support of Cowper, as did Graham on several occasions; Russell agreed to chair the 1848 annual general meeting of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes; whilst Disraeli not only made a speech in praise of allotments when visiting Ferrand at Bingley in 1843, but damned the cold-hearted Lord Marney in his Sybil by noting that he was ‘tremendously fierce against allotments’.73 It is true that the depth of the support for allotment provision did not match its breadth. Although Peel, Russell and Disraeli were all prepared to indicate their approval of allotments, it was scarcely the case that allotments occupied a very large share of their thoughts. Similarly, whilst governments in this period were sometimes prepared to facilitate the passage of allotments legislation, as was the case with Weyland’s Bill of 1832 and Cowper’s Bills of 1844 and 1845, it was only in the exceptional circumstances of 1830–2 that they were prepared to give such Bills sufficient priority to ensure that they would actually become law. It was because Peel and Graham did not trouble

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to use their influence that Cowper’s 1845 Bill was eventually thrown out by the House of Lords. But if Peel’s government did not find it necessary to give its full support to measures to promote allotments, this was in large part because it was under little pressure to do so. This was not primarily a reflection of any lack of strength in the allotment movement per se. In fact the movement was probably at the peak of its nineteenthcentury strength amongst the landed elite in the mid-1840s. There were local allotments societies up and down the country, hundreds of thousands of allotments had been established through the commitment of rural landowners and clergymen, thousands of the wealthy subscribed to the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, and the allotment movement had influential spokesmen both within and without Parliament.74 The real problem was in fact neither the opposition to allotments, which was far from strong, nor the relatively low political profile of the movement as a whole, which could have been remedied had those who supported allotments united in pursuit of a common political objective: it lay rather in a fundamental ambivalence in the allotment movement towards the very idea of state-sponsored provision of allotments. Most of those who wanted to see increased allotment provision saw it in strongly moral and local terms: as an arrangement which a dutiful landowner would carry out for those of ‘his’ labourers who were deserving, and as such as a valuable and, to be effective, necessarily voluntary contribution to the well-being of essentially local social relations. For such landowners, allotment provision through the state was to a large extent an irrelevance, and might even prove destructive of those delicate local moral and social relationships the power of which to enhance was for them the source of the attraction of allotments. T.G.B. Estcourt, who took pride in the fact that his father Thomas Estcourt had been one of the originators of the allotment system, typified this attitude. Although he let allotments himself, and was one of the most diligent members of the 1843 Select Committee on allotments, he nevertheless spoke out strongly against Stanton’s 1843 proposal to make allotment provision on enclosure a standing order of the House, claiming that taking away the voluntary aspect of allotment provision would very much reduce its effectiveness, and make it a means of encouraging idleness rather than industry.75 Two other members of the 1843 Select Committee on allotments were also in favour of privately let allotments but quite hostile to any provided by the state. Escott was one of the leading

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opponents of Cowper’s 1845 allotments Bill, declaring that the Bill’s ‘obnoxious provisions’ were calculated to do away with ‘almost all the good’ that had resulted from the allotment system as conducted on a voluntary basis.76 Stansfield attacked the same Bill in its committee stage in very similar terms, as reported in Hansard: ‘. . . the whole success of the scheme [i.e. allotment provision] depended upon its being voluntary. He approved of the principle of allotting garden fields; but it was most objectionable to adopt a system of enforced charity’.77 With such friends, one might suggest, the allotment movement was scarcely in need of political enemies for its legislative achievements to amount to less than they might have done.

V To conclude: the allotment movement attained considerable political prominence between 1830 and 1870, particularly in the 1830s and 1840s. From Suffield’s intervention in the debate on Winchilsea’s labour rate Bill on 11 November 1830 to the rejection of Cowper’s second Field Gardens Bill by the House of Lords on 1 August 1845 allotments were a perennial subject of discussion in both houses of Parliament, and leading political figures such as Althorp, Peel, Graham and Disraeli found themselves drawn into the argument. MPs of all political shades lent their support to allotments, and a long series of reports from parliamentary inquiries, including one which had been set up with the sole purpose of investigating allotment provision, emphasized the benefits which allotments could bring to rural living standards and social relations. The fruits of all this political interest were four Acts aimed in whole, or in one case in part, at facilitating the establishment of allotment sites. But in terms of actually increasing the number of allotments available to rural labourers, the upshot was disappointing. Only the last Act of the four, the 1845 General Inclosure Act, led to the creation of more than a handful of new sites, and even this Act fell far short of achieving what advocates of allotments had hoped for from it. No more than 2223 acres had been set aside for allotments under the 1845 Act by 1869, whilst something like 20 times this acreage was provided privately over the same period. There were three main reasons for the failure of the allotments legislation of this period to achieve better results. Firstly, the Acts of 1831–2 entrusted allotment provision to a quite unsuitable authority – the parish officers. Churchwardens and overseers had generally

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neither the time nor the inclination to make use of the powers given to them under these Acts. Secondly, the 1845 Act relied upon future enclosures to function as a vehicle for making allotments more widely available. But in the main the areas remaining to be enclosed by 1845 were not those where allotments were most needed, so even had the inclosure commissioners made full use of the powers given to them under the Act, it could never have contributed more than marginally to making up the shortfall in the number of allotments. Thirdly, all the allotments legislation passed in the first half of the nineteenth century was permissive rather than compulsory. The contrast between the very limited effectiveness of this legislation and the much greater effectiveness of the 1887 Allotments Act – the first which made allotment provision a duty (in defined circumstances) rather than an option for local authorities – indicates how much was lost by this. Parliament’s failure to legislate more effectively on allotments reflected partly existing administrative and ideological barriers to allotment provision. The choice of churchwardens and overseers as responsible authorities under the 1831–2 Acts was to some extent dictated by the absence of an adequate structure of local government in the mid-nineteenth century, whilst in linking enclosure with allotments the 1845 Act adopted an obvious (if ultimately unsatisfactory) method of delivering allotment provision without interference with existing property rights. But it would be wrong to suggest that the strength of contemporary commitment to the preservation of property rights was an insuperable obstacle to successful legislation on allotments. It would have been quite possible to make it a duty of some constituted local body (such as the field gardens boards proposed by Cowper’s Bills, or the allotments wardens electable under the 1845 Act) to let out allotments without giving powers of compulsory purchase, so long as the local body was exempted from this duty if it proved impossible to rent the land on financially viable terms. This was in practice the way in which the 1887 Act worked, since although the Act incorporated compulsory purchase clauses, these were in the event scarcely ever used. The fact that some such legislation was not passed in the mid-nineteenth century can hardly be attributed to the political strength of the opposition to allotments, since this was largely confined to a vociferous but exiguous group of radical MPs. More significant was the low political priority usually given to allotments by leading politicians, except in the immediate aftermath of the Swing riots of 1830–1. But bearing in mind the impressive number and standing of the support-

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ers of allotments, it seems likely that had the allotment movement joined together to bring its united political weight to bear in pressure on the governments of the day, the political leaders would have given a higher priority to allotment provision. In accounting for the relative ineffectiveness of attempts to promote allotment provision through legislative means in the mid-nineteenth century, most emphasis should therefore probably be placed on the ambivalence towards legislation within the allotment movement itself. This is apparent not only in the lukewarm attitude towards legislation displayed by the movement as a whole, but even more strikingly in the fact that some of the leading figures within the movement actually voted against allotments measures in Parliament. For whilst many contemporary landowners regarded allotment provision as being of very great importance, it was often precisely the voluntary, personal aspect of allotment provision that made allotments valuable for them. When made available undiscriminatingly by the state, allotments could operate to undermine and disrupt those very same local power relationships and allegiances for strengthening and confirming which when let privately many of the supporters of allotments most valued them.

Notes (Place of publication London unless otherwise stated.) 1. D.C. Barnett, ‘Allotments and the Problem of Rural Poverty, 1780–1840’ in E.L. Jones and G.E. Mingay (eds), Land, Labour, and Population in the Industrial Revolution – Essays Presented to J.D. Chambers (1967) pp. 162–83, esp. pp. 178–82. 2. D. Crouch and C. Ward, The Allotment: its Landscape and Culture (1988) pp. 47–50. 3. B. Moselle, ‘Allotments, Enclosure, and Proletarianization in Early Nineteenth-century Southern England’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. XLVIII (1995), pp. 482–500; J.E. Archer, ‘The Nineteenth-century Allotment: Half an Acre and a Row’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. L (1997), pp. 21–36. 4. J. Burchardt, ‘Rural Social Relations 1830–50: Opposition to Allotments for Labourers’, Agricultural History Review, vol. 45 pt II (1997), pp. 165–75. 5. PP 1817, vol. VI, S.C. on the Poor Laws, p. 19. 6. J. Burchardt, ‘The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873’ (unpublished University of Reading Ph.D. thesis, 1997) pp. 175–237.

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7. Ibid., pp. 73–8, 236–7. 8. Ibid., pp. 78–81; Archer, ‘The Nineteenth-century Allotment’, pp. 23–5. 9. Parliamentary Debates (hereafter Parl. Deb.), 3 ser. 1, House of Lords, 11 November 1830, p. 375. 10. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 1, House of Commons, 19 November 1830, p. 600. 11. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 1, House of Lords, 29 November 1830, pp. 687–91. 12. Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP) 1831, vol. VIII, S.C. on the State of the Poor Laws. 13. Burchardt, vol. ‘The Allotment Movement’, pp. 130–4. 14. D. Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (1979) p. 108. 15. Burchardt, ‘The Allotment Movement’, pp. 75–6. 16. Ibid., pp. 128–30. 17. Ibid., p. 76. 18. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 1, House of Commons, 17 December 1830, pp. 1315–32. 19. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 2, House of Commons, 16 February 1831, pp. 606–7. 20. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 3, House of Lords, 4 March 1831, pp. 10–12. 21. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 4, House of Lords, 7 July 1831, pp. 930–42. 22. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 6, House of Lords, 22 August 1831, pp. 379–80. 23. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 8, House of Commons, 11 October 1831, pp. 524–54. 24. 1 and 2 William IV cap. 42. 25. 1 and 2 William IV cap. 59. 26. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 11, House of Lords, 13 March 1832, pp. 126–8. 27. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 11, House of Commons, 15 March 1832, pp. 286–90. 28. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 17, House of Commons, 8 May 1833, pp. 1065–7. 29. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 21, House of Commons, 25 February 1834, pp. 789–91. 30. E.J.T. Collins, ‘Harvest Technology and Labour Supply in Britain, 1790–1870’ (unpublished University of Nottingham Ph.D. thesis, 1970) pp. 179–99. 31. The Labourer’s Friend Magazine, vol. CXII (May 1841), p. 80. 32. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 67, House of Commons, 14 March 1843, pp. 870–4. 33. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 67, House of Commons, 23 March 1843, pp. 1314–17. 34. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 68, House of Commons, 30 March 1843, pp. 183–206. 35. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 68, House of Commons, 11 April 1843, pp. 856–8. 36. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 70, House of Commons, 21 June 1843, pp. 182–92. 37. Compare, for example, Brown’s account of the 1840 Select Committee on Import Duties: L. Brown, The Board of Trade and the Free-Trade Movement, 1830–42 (1958) pp. 71–3. 38. PP 1843, vol. VII, Select Committee on the Labouring Poor (Allotments of Land). 39. The Labourer’s Friend Magazine, vol. CL (September 1843), pp. 125–8. 40. The Labourer’s Friend Magazine, vol. CL (September 1843), pp. 131–2; E. Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. (1886) vol. I, p. 496; Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 70, House of Commons, 26 July 1843, p. 1350. 41. Hodder, Life and Work of Shaftesbury, I, pp. 451–76. 42. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 73, House of Commons, 29 February 1844, pp. 423–32. 43. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 73, House of Commons, 13 March 1844, pp. 965–79. 44. The Labourer’s Friend, vol. III (August 1844), p. 57; Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 76, House of Commons, 10 July 1844, pp. 563–70; ibid., House of Commons, 17 July 1844, pp. 992–3. 45. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 78, House of Commons, 4 March 1845, pp. 308–20.

Jeremy Burchardt 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

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The Labourer’s Friend, vol XII (May 1845), p. 213. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 80, House of Commons, 1 May 1845, pp. 28–9. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 80, House of Commons, 7 May 1845, pp. 244–9. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 81, House of Commons, 2 July 1845, pp. 1418–28. Journals of the House of Lords, 1845, pp. 817, 868, 884. T.H. Hall, The Law of Allotments (1886) pp. 29–31. The Labourer’s Friend, vol. XVI (September 1845), p. 305. A.L. Bowley, ‘The Statistics of Wages in the United Kingdom during the last Hundred Years. Part I. Agricultural Wages’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. LXI (1898), pp. 703–22; W. Hamish Fraser, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (1981) pp. 15–16. Burchardt, ‘The Allotment Movement’, pp. 175–99. Ibid., pp. 88–9. Ibid., p. 88. PP 1868–9, vol. X, Select Committee on the Inclosure Act, p. 329. Burchardt, ‘The Allotment Movement’, p. 168. Burchardt, ‘Rural Social Relations, 1830–50’, pp. 165–75. J.R. Wordie, ‘The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. vol. XXXVI (1983), p. 502. M. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750–1830 (1984) p. 23. A. Armstrong, Farmworkers: a Social and Economic History, 1770–1980 (1988) pp. 66–8. M. Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: its Historical Geography and Economic History (Folkestone, 1980) p. 62. 50 and 51 Victoria cap. 48 ss. 2(1) and 3(2–6). J.R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism (1969) remains the most comprehensive work on attitudes to the poor law and rural society for the pre-1834 period. Earl Fortescue, ‘Poor Men’s Gardens’, The Nineteenth-century Magazine, vol. CXXXIII (1888), pp. 395–7. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 21, House of Commons, 25 February 1834, p. 91. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 80, House of Commons, 7 May 1845, pp. 245–7. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 8, 11 October 1831, pp. 545–50; Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 68, House of Commons, 30 March 1843, p. 203; Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 81, House of Commons, 2 July 1845, p. 1424. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 68, House of Commons, 30 March 1843, p. 203; Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 70, House of Commons, 21 June 1843, pp. 186–8. Labourers’ Friend Society subscription list for 1833, bound into Proceedings of the Labourers’ Friend Society for 1833. Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes subscription list for 1850, bound into 1850 volume of The Labourer’s Friend. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 81, House of Commons, 2 July 1845, p. 1426; B. Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations (Harmondsworth, 1985) p. 73. Burchardt, ‘The Allotment Movement’, pp. 73–6. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 67, House of Commons, 23 March 1843, p. 1316. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 79, House of Commons, 9 April 1845, p. 382. Parl. Deb., 3 ser. 81, House of Commons, 2 July 1845, p. 1425.

5 The Agricultural Interest and its Critics, 1840–1914 David Martin

In a book about rural England written early in the Second World War, H. J. Massingham harked back 60 years to when the writings of the American land reformer Henry George were first published. ‘For Henry George’, he wrote, ‘the foundations of justice and liberty were built on the land, and these through the bounty of nature were part of the universal law.’ He added: ‘George was right: the land is the measure of all human rights and without the distribution of lands there are none.’1 Similar premises have formed the basis of most arguments directed against large landowners. The possession of a form of property self-evidently not of the occupiers’ creation, but the unique character of which conferred power over others, has always tended to arouse antagonism. In the nineteenth century, when all-pervasive economic change altered profoundly the relationship between social classes, those in possession of substantial amounts of land were raked by the fire of critics. However, the political power that was such a key feature of landownership itself afforded considerable protection against attackers. If not always strong enough to resist change, the landed classes could make concessions in a way that preserved some privileges. Moreover, those who directed criticisms at the possessors of land did so for various, often contradictory, reasons. Their divisions too sometimes made the case against the agricultural interest appear impracticable, irrelevant or insidious. Even the apparently straightforward term ‘landlordism’ divided critics. Some reserved the word as a semi-abusive one for the absentee landowners of Ireland (an aspect, like the Scottish dimension, that warrants closer attention than can be afforded here). In England, the more commonly employed term ‘landed interest’ usually implied a class of substantial proprietors, often referred to as aristocrats and 128

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gentry, who rented out most of their land to tenant farmers. Sometimes added in too were those connections, frequently the younger sons of landed proprietors, who benefited from the existing structure of landownership – the clergy of the Church of England, officers in the army and navy, placemen and other holders of public office, and the bar, including judges, magistrates and solicitors (the last often dependent on the complexities of the laws relating to the registration and inheritance of real property). Politically, these men were, as Mill concluded after a discussion of them, ‘unqualified Tories’.2 Additionally, there was the question of whether tenant farmers should be considered as part of the landed interest. Some critics, such as Mill, included them (except for small proprietors, the remnants of the yeomanry).3 Others, for example some of the leaders of the AntiCorn Law League, claimed to identify differences between the large proprietor and his tenant farmers; the latter enjoyed no privileges, hereditary or otherwise, and were more akin to the urban middle class.4 However, the broader term the ‘agricultural interest’ did group together both the great proprietors and the class of more substantial tenant farmers. The similarities between them were emphasized particularly by those who identified with or adopted a sympathetic attitude towards that other element of rural society, the landless agricultural labourer. Critics of the agricultural interest were inclined to blame tenant farmers for the neglect of the labourers, rather than landlords. Some of the latter, at least, were paternalistic, for example, in supporting the provision of cottage gardens and allotments.5 In particularly hard times, soup kitchens could be set up. Properly organized, it was held that these neither demoralized the poor nor distorted food and labour markets. For instance, Richard Whatley, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University from 1829 to 1831 (when he was appointed Archbishop of Dublin), warned against indiscriminate charity, but added: ‘as for food, I like particularly to have all the bones and scraps that would otherwise be wasted, collected for soup; that does increase the quantity of food’.6 In contrast to the landlords’ modest paternalism, farmers, as a whole, were consistently criticized for their parsimoniousness towards their hired labour. The low wages paid, and a growing tendency to hire workers only by the task and often on a seasonal basis, were deplored. So too were reduced opportunities for access to common land and perquisites such as gleaning. Snaring of rabbits was illegal under the provisions of the game laws.

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The under-fed and ill-clad appearance of labourers’ children was frequently commented on. Cottages were often cramped and damp. The threat of the workhouse was seldom far distant, particularly in broken-down old age.7 These abuses were made worse by the farmers’ growing appetite, or so observers believed, for conspicuous consumption. In the early 1790s, Arthur Young too often saw ‘a pianoforte in a farmer’s parlour, which I always wish burnt; a livery servant is sometimes found, and a post-chaise . . .’. Thirty years later William Cobbett, a commentator less sympathetic to the farmer than Young, made a similar point more forcefully; ‘Yes, and I shall see the scarlet hunting cloaks stripped from the backs of the farmers. I shall see the polished boots pulled from their legs: and I shall see the forte-pianos kicked out of their houses’.8 But Cobbett’s wishes were not realized, for in the 1890s Joseph Arch could write in a similar vein: Farmers’ wives nowadays are ashamed to go to market to sell their eggs and butter as they used commonly to do. They want to play the piano, dress fine, make calls and ape the county gentry . . . the farmers too want to hunt, and shoot, and play the fine gentleman at ease. Then, when these would-be swells find their cash run short, they cry out that it is the labourers who are extravagant and thriftless, who want too high a wage, who do too little work, and are bringing the land to ruin!9

I Neglect of the labourer was but one facet of the indictment directed against the landed interest. By the early nineteenth century, that somewhat artificial construct the ‘typical landlord’ was arraigned on a host of connected charges. His fondness for hunting and shooting necessitated the widely resented game laws. Poachers were frequently imprisoned by magistrates who were themselves gentry and protectors of game; critics often spoke indignantly about the injustices that occurred. Mill, for example, railed against such a case, arising from ‘that accursed subject – game’, in a speech of June 1867 organized by the National Reform Union.10 For their part, landlords regarded their rights over game as a justifiable feature of the superiority of landownership over other forms of wealth.11 A more far-reaching and financially charged criticism made against landlords was that they had secured their already considerable pros-

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perity by the new Corn Law of 1815. As David Ricardo, both in and out of the House of Commons (he was an MP from 1819 to 1823), had reasoned with the dispassion of the political economist, the protection gained by landlords had been at the expense of all other classes. Poorer land had been artificially kept in production and had thus yielded a rent; better land received rents proportionately higher; the overheads of food producers were consequently pushed up and passed on to consumers. As the demand for food was relatively inelastic, consumers were unable to spend as much as would have been the case on other goods, which therefore constricted the growth of the rest of the economy. Ricardo and those who accepted his analysis acknowledged that the removal of duties would lead to a fall in rents, but the self-regulating mechanism of the Smithian market economy could be relied on to ensure that all, including landowners, would benefit in the longer term. Even before the full vigour of the Anti-Corn Law League’s campaign, some Conservatives recognized the case for removing the duties on imported food. It became a question of timing and tactics, not so much to prepare agriculturalists for repeal, but to avoid dividing the Tory Party. In the outcome, it was not the prosperity of the farming interest but its standing in the House of Commons that was eclipsed for a generation after the ending of the Corn Laws. As well as distorting the free play of the corn market, at least until 1846, political economists and others held the landed interest culpable of a more serious offence against other sections of society – their monopolization of land. The ramifications of the nineteenth-century ‘Land Question’ are too extensive to be considered here, though certain aspects occur throughout the period under discussion.12 By the use particularly of strict settlement, entails and primogeniture, it was held, substantial owners of land were able to preserve intact estates that, under the natural forces of competition, would have been dispersed more widely. The resulting overconcentration of landownership was regarded as damaging to the majority of the population. The harmful effects alleged were various. In a century when the gospel of work was widely preached, the large proprietor was susceptible to the charges of idleness and selfish pleasure. In discussing those who lived by rent, Adam Smith had noted the ‘indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation’, a mild observation compared to the comments of other critics.13 For instance, at a meeting in Barnsley in May 1839 George Greig, an Anti-Corn Law League lecturer, denounced the ‘gluttons and debauchees . . . who impoverish the poor tenants to fill their capacious maws, and whose

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whole life is a routine of oppression, extravagance and luxury’.14 Such virulence was more common among working-class radicals; critics from the middle class tended to make similar points in more polite language. Some even recognized the philanthropic and other forms of public service undertaken by leisured members of the landed class, while maintaining that such functions did not justify either the associated privileges or the harm done to the political and economic interests of the country. Moreover, critics were loath to concede that the upper classes could act with disinteredness; their activities were ultimately designed to advance their position. The middle-class radical W.J. Fox offered his version of how this process operated in the military sphere: War is the aristocratical trade . . . the aristocratical convenience for bringing together the junior members of titled families, instead of providing for them out of the family property. They cannot all be put in offices of state . . . You cannot put them all into the Church . . . And so, the army, with its promotions – war, with its chances of cutting the way up to a barony, an earldom or a dukedom, that is what they specially delight in.15 Yet the established pattern of landownership, which favoured the preservation of an aristocratic class, had its defenders. Although reformers ridiculed Lord John Manners, who was part of Disraeli’s Young England movement, for his lines in England’s Trust and other Poems (1841) – ‘Let wealth and commerce, laws and learning die, / But leave us still our old nobility!’ – these were sentiments shared, if less naïvely, by others. Britain’s avoidance of revolution in the 1840s, together with the growth of economic and naval strength that made it possible for politicians to boast of the ‘Pax Britannica’, meant the British Constitution was praised for its superiority over the political systems of other countries. The English system of landownership, and its constitutional functions, could thus be equated with the interests of the whole country. On such a basis, the political economist J.R. McCulloch defended the principle of primogeniture and the use of entails to preserve intact large estates, for: A powerful and widely ramified aristocracy . . . is necessary to give stability and security to the government, and freedom to the people. And our laws in regard to succession being well fitted to maintain such an aristocracy, and, at the same time, to inspire

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every other class with the full spirit of industry and enterprise, to change them would not be foolish merely but criminal.16 At about the same time, Palmerston was opposing any changes that would interfere with the rights of landed property. Even in Ireland, he insisted that ‘tenant right was landlord’s wrong’, while as Prime Minister he maintained the view that ‘hereditary Succession to unbroken Masses of landed property’ was ‘absolutely Necessary for the maintenance of the British Constitution’.17 Faced by such views, Richard Cobden wrote to his closest colleague John Bright bemoaning the ‘servile, aristocracy-loving, lord-ridden people, who regard the land with as much reverence as . . . do the peerage and baronetage’. Politicians who argued for the division of large estates would be, he added with some exaggeration, ‘looked upon as revolutionary democrats aiming at nothing less than the establishment of a Republic upon the ruin of Queen and Lords’. He went on to mention approvingly a study of small proprietors on the Continent, but concluded that the ‘only way of approaching this question at the moment is through an economical argument’.18 In the way of politicians, critics of the landed interest tended to deploy their arguments according to what they regarded as their opponents’ weaker points. Economically, Cobden and his disciples maintained, the existing system of landownership was most unfair in the ways it hindered others from acquiring land. In its place should be the unfettered forces of the free market – what Cobden and those who adopted his views termed ‘free trade in land’. In the 1860s and 1870s this was the position of most who wrote and spoke on the subject from within the progressive wing of the Liberal Party. However, some other, equally middle-class, reformers were inclined towards remedies of the Land Tenure Reform Association, formed in 1871 with a programme that involved an element of state regulation.19 Among the wider issues raised by this body were the loss of open spaces through enclosure and the need to preserve sites of historic and scientific interest. Landlords and farmers had long been accused of appropriating waste land, blocking up footpaths and making trespassers of those who had once enjoyed access to the commons. With the growth of towns, the sense that remaining open spaces were in danger increased. In 1865 a group of mostly middle-class reformers founded the Commons Preservation Society to lobby for the retention of open spaces, both in the countryside and in London. Nor was it only reformers who deplored the disappearance of commons. Even the historian J.A. Froude, whose

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essay defending the existing system of farming and landownership provoked a number of responses from reformers, approved of the action of Augustus Smith who in 1866 had organized a team of 120 London navvies to throw down the fences that had been erected to enclose part of Berkhamsted Common.20 According to the Cobdenite school, competition and free-market forces were governing principles, except, apparently, in the case of those protected by the land laws. Large landowners could, therefore, avoid what would have been the consequence of mismanagement and indebtedness, the sale of their land. In vain was it pointed out by those on the other side of the question that estates were frequently offered for sale (and that the purchasers were often middle-class manufacturers or others of the socially mobile nouveau riche). Critics continued to maintain that landownership was concentrated in a relatively small number of hands. The census of 1861, which counted a total of only 30 766 landowners in England and Wales, added weight to this view. It was to disprove such charges that in 1872 a leading Conservative, the fifteenth Earl of Derby, instigated the so-called ‘New Domesday Book’, an official survey of landownership. In the outcome, Derby had made a striking misjudgement, for the published report showed that there was indeed a concentration – one estimate concluded that fewer than 7000 individuals owned some 80 per cent of the land – and demands for reform were reinvigorated.21

II The jealous retention of land by the few acted, it was held, against the interests of the many who also depended on agriculture for their livelihoods. The English labourer, in Richard Cobden’s widely adopted phrase, was ‘entirely divorced from the land’ in comparison to the peasantry of Continental Europe.22 That the labourer yearned for some possession of the land he worked was widely assumed. Contemporaries found evidence for this land hunger not only in the debates surrounding the allotments question, but also in the fervent support for Feargus O’Connor’s Land Plan, the popularity of emigration schemes that promised ‘free land’ in Australasia and North America and, before they evolved into the mundaneness of the building society movement, the enthusiasm for freehold land societies.23 The upsurge of trade unionism among farm workers in the early 1870s again focused attention on rural conditions. Proposed remedies for the wretched condition of the labourer once more included

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allotments and smallholdings.24 An outcome of this belief that the farm worker yearned for a direct interest in the land was legislation seeking to make more easily available allotments and smallholdings. But legislation providing for these did not come about until late in the century and was not intended to change drastically the concentration of landownership or the long-established character of farming. Some reformers therefore continued to favour the more far-reaching remedy of peasant proprietorship. British classical economics had tended to assume that economies of scale applied to agriculture as much as to industry. The larger farm was thus the more efficient and productive farm. Moreover, there was within the United Kingdom an apparent, and awful, example of the corresponding inadequacies of the small, peasant holding – the Irish potato farmer. The Great Famine of the 1840s seemed to prove the dire consequences of subsistence farming. A large population struggling to gain access to tiny holdings of land was at the centre of the catastrophe that Ireland suffered. Yet the Famine brought forward the case for peasant proprietorships. J.S. Mill in particular argued against the orthodoxies of political economy, denied that the Irish peasant was other than a rent-racked ‘cottier’ and developed a detailed apologia for small, owner-occupied farms. Mill had hinted at some of these themes in his earlier writings, but it was during the course of 43 articles published in the Morning Chronicle between October 1846 and January 1847 that he made a full-blooded case for the establishment of peasant proprietorships in Ireland.25 Though the immediate source of this debate was the crisis in Ireland, for several years evidence had been accumulating of the benefits that small farms had brought to parts of the Continent. There the ownership of land had inculcated habits – of thrift, industry and sexual prudence (in the form of delayed marriage) – that were much admired by some in Britain. Details of the European peasantry had often been transmitted in the writings of travellers, both British writers – such as Samuel Laing and H.D. Inglis – and Europeans whose books were translated into English.26 Mill’s reworking of his Morning Chronicle articles for his celebrated Principles of Political Economy, the period’s leading text on the subject from its first edition in 1848 until beyond the seventh (1871) edition (the last to appear during the author’s lifetime), ensured the case for the small farmer was widely known. As well as Mill, others took seriously the idea that peasant proprietorships might find a substantial place within the United Kingdom. It was a notion that surfaced regularly from the 1840s until beyond the turn of the century. In later years, its advo-

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cates linked the ills of cities to the restrictions affecting land. ‘The pauperism of England is to a great extent the consequence of our feudalised land system’, wrote Arthur Arnold, who added: ‘Our race is deteriorating by forced and unnatural confinement in the atmosphere of streets.’27 As well as worthy of support on economic and social grounds, peasant proprietorship also seemed to promise political dividends. While no completely unqualified generalization about land and agriculture in nineteenth-century Britain can be made, it was broadly the case that those who held great tracts of land were Conservatives and those who sought reform were Liberals, and usually on the radical wing of the party. It was in the context of the widening of the electorate in the 1860s and 1880s that a strategy developed of appealing to the great majority who held no land. In 1885, as part of this process, Joseph Chamberlain organized ‘a definite and practical Programme for the Radical Party’ in a form that became known as the Radical – or Unauthorized – Programme.28 One section, written by the Liberal MP Jesse Collings, offered a critical view of the condition of the farm worker: The life of the labourer may be said to be one long grind of human toil, unrelieved by holidays or recreation, happy if he escapes sickness and loss of work. With no pleasure in the present, and the horizon of his future bounded only by the workhouse and the grave, he works on to the end, to escape ‘the parish’, which he dreads. Strength, however, fails at last, and he then has to rely on a scanty ‘out-door relief’, or he goes into the ‘House’. In due time he is reported dead, and so ends a long life of toil, in which he has added who shall say how much to that stock of national wealth, so small a portion of which has fallen to his share.29 The solutions offered, however, were not very drastic. Although reformers conceded that the proposals associated with ‘free trade in land’ would bring no immediate benefits to the labourer, their main remedy, apart from legislation to improve housing standards, was to allow the cultivator a more direct interest in the soil. State policies to promote peasant proprietorships were suggested along with giving local authorities ‘compulsory powers to purchase land where necessary . . . to be let at fair rents to all labourers who might desire them, in plots up to one acre of arable and three or four acres of pasture’.30 The section ended by referring to the view, in order to discount it,

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that the newly enfranchised farm labourer would vote Conservative. And, indeed, not only did the Liberal Party make advances in rural constituencies in the general election that followed soon after, but there was also a belief that what became the cry of ‘three acres and a cow’ played a large part in gaining the labourers’ votes. Before the election campaign was over, Henry Labouchere, in what has become a much quoted phrase, wrote to Chamberlain: ‘Is not the cow working wonders for us? Next time we must have an urban cow.’31 Radical Liberals were to maintain their support for schemes that gave labourers greater access to the land, but already their thunder was being stolen by the advent of the Henry George school of reformers.

III The influence of Henry George on British politics is still debated. He has been portrayed both as a force that galvanized progressive elements and as a figure who merely reflected some of the attitudes already emerging before his appearance in Britain as a propagandist. Those inclined towards the latter view point to the long tradition of land radicalism, sharpened in the late 1870s by the renewed intensity of the Irish agitation. By 1881 Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist, had proposed land nationalization as a solution to the situation in Ireland and had set up, with a programme intended for the whole of Britain, the Land Nationalisation Society. Nevertheless, the advent of Henry George made an enormous impact. He captured the attention of both working- and middle-class politicians as well as provoking an aristocratic response, most notably by the Duke of Argyll, whose dismissive soubriquet ‘the prophet of San Francisco’ was taken by reformers as a compliment. In his attempted demolition of classical economics, Progress and Poverty (1879), George had little to say about rural conditions, an omission remedied after his visit to the United Kingdom. After that, in Social Problems, he wrote of the ‘free-born Englishman’ in terms that far outbid in vehemence the remarks of Jesse Collings: He lives in a miserable hovel. . . . He works from morning to night, and his wife must do the same; and their children, as soon almost as they can walk, must also go to work . . . He becomes bent and stiff before his time. His wife is old and worn, when she ought to be in her prime of strength and beauty. His girls – such as live – marry such as he, to lead such lives as their mother’s, or perhaps are

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seduced by their ‘betters’, and sent, with a few pounds, to a great town, to die in a few years in brothel, or hospital, or prison. His boys grow up ignorant and brutish; they cannot support him when he grows old, even if they would, for they do not get back enough of the proceeds of their labour. The only refuge for the pair in their old age is the almshouse . . . where the man is separated from the wife, and the old couple . . . lead, apart from each other, a prisonlike existence until death comes to their relief.32 And while Collings had limited himself to a few remarks about the partiality of rural magistrates and unjust enclosures of common land, George sharply contrasted the ‘dire, soul-destroying poverty’ of the labourer with the landlord’s ‘wantonness of luxury’. The landowners, he wrote, live in the utmost luxury. They have town houses and country houses, horses, carriages, liveried servants, yachts, packs of hounds . . . But not one iota of this wealth do they produce. They get it because, it being conceded that they own the land, the people who do produce the wealth, must hand their earnings over to them.33 The criticisms directed at landlordism by George and his disciples made advanced Liberal reforms seem merely palliatives, all the more so when Conservatives came to accept similar policies. The loss of rural seats in the general election of 1885 led to a debate in the Conservative Party about what might be done to win over the farm labourer. It was an issue dramatized by concerns about the depressed state of agriculture and a growing awareness of the ‘rural exodus’ as labour left the countryside to seek better conditions in towns. In 1889 the Prime Minister, Salisbury, brought into his Cabinet Henry Chaplin as President of the newly formed Ministry of Agriculture. Chaplin, virtually a caricature of the Tory squire, had, after opposing the ‘socialistic schemes’ of Collings and Chamberlain, become an advocate of smallholdings and in 1892 saw through Parliament an Act (which had, however, few practical consequences) facilitating their creation.34 It is a characteristic of the land reform movement that the far-reaching demands of one generation became the modest or mistaken tinkerings of the next. Though revolutionary in comparison to the proposals of the established political parties, Henry George’s assault on landownership and his panacea of a tax on land were soon to be

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regarded as insufficiently far-reaching. In London, George had stayed for a time with Helen Taylor, the stepdaughter of Mill and herself a land reformer, and with the socialist H.M. Hyndman. The latter, who was to write of the ‘glittering superficiality of George’s attacks upon private ownership of land’, recorded Karl Marx’s view of Progress and Poverty: ‘Marx looked it through and spoke of it with a sort of friendly contempt: “The Capitalists’ last ditch,” he said.’35 Marx classed George with other ‘panacea-mongers’ and regarded his economic ideas as akin to those who in the 1830s built their critique of society on Ricardo’s theories.36 The advanced socialist of the late nineteenth century had the capitalist rather than the landlord in his sights; wage labour, not rent, was the defining characteristic of economic exploitation. However, Marxian socialism was always a minor part of left-wing and progressive thought in Britain. Among the members of the nascent Labour Party, there was support for the Land Nationalisation Society; about half the Party’s MPs were vice-presidents of the Society in 1913 (together with over 60 Liberal MPs). The land question had also stimulated considerable academic activity, mostly by historians of a reforming disposition.37 Before 1914, however, the Liberal Party remained the main vehicle by which any practicable changes could be carried forward. Although support for free trade dominated the election addresses of Liberal candidates in the general election of 1906, 68 per cent mentioned land reform38 and the issue was subsequently kept alive in various ways. Less controversially, the Liberal government passed the Small Holdings and Allotments Act of 1908. This proved more successful than Chaplin’s legislation of 1892. By 1914 it had enabled over 12 000 tenants to lease a holding of up to 50 acres or of an annual value not exceeding £50. County councils were required to administer the act and, by compulsory purchase if necessary, to obtain land. The legislation included an option that allowed tenants to buy their land, but it was seldom exercised.39 Much more controversial were the campaigns of David Lloyd George. These began with the land tax in what he termed his ‘war budget’ of 1909. Radicals had long held that the incidence of taxation on the landed interest was disproportionately light. Now it was possible to link the need for state expenditure on social reform, in Lloyd George’s ‘war against poverty’, with the case for obtaining increased revenue from large landowners. The taxes proposed involved a 20 per cent levy on higher land values that resulted from unearned increments as well as various other imposts.40 Lloyd George relished the

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struggle that his budget created, not least when it led to a constitutional crisis involving the House of Lords. He helped to provoke the crisis in a notorious speech at Limehouse on 30 July 1909, when he gave examples of the gains made by landlords at the expense of the rest of the people, and answered his question ‘Who is the landlord?’ in mocking terms: . . . the landlord is a gentleman who does not earn his wealth. He does not even take the trouble to receive his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks to receive it for him. He does not even take the trouble to spend his wealth. He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending for him. He never sees it until he comes to enjoy it. His sole function, his chief pride, is stately consumption of wealth produced by others.41 By the time of the speech he made at Newcastle on 9 October, the Conservative Party had decided to defeat the Budget in the House of Lords which allowed him to link the constitutional issue with that of the monopoly of landownership. He raised the question whether ‘five hundred men . . . chosen accidentally from the ranks of the unemployed’ should override the judgement of millions, and followed it with a second question: ‘Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?’42 In June 1912 Lloyd George set up the Land Enquiry Committee. Its detailed report, based on a total of some 3600 replies to two lengthy questionnaires, was published in October 1913.43 The campaign instigated by Lloyd George, of which the Land Inquiry Committee was a part, allowed a refocusing of the pressure on the landed interest that had begun with his budget. He both refreshed the age-old cries against the large proprietor – ‘Idle land in the hands of idle men’ was Lloyd George’s repeated slogan after 191244 – and attempted, unsuccessfully in the outcome, to integrate land reform into a wider programme of statist radicalism. However, his budget speech of May 1914, intended to embody the proposals growing out of the Land Enquiry Committee, was generally regarded as inept. Asquith, the Prime Minister, wrote to Venetia Stanley that Lloyd George had put the House of Commons into a ‘morass of obscurity in which for the moment everyone was bogged’.45 This embarrassment of the early summer was soon to be shrouded by the great crisis of August 1914. The issue of land reform did not, however, altogether disappear with the outbreak of war. In 1916 the

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Land Agents’ Society offered a considered response to critics in Facts about Land: A Reply to ‘The Land’, the Report of the Unofficial Land Enquiry Committee. This was edited by the agricultural historian and Conservative politician R.E. Prothero (later Lord Ernle), who regarded the ‘grotesquely exaggerated’ Liberal report as ‘a dangerous weapon for urban propaganda’.46 In December 1916 Lloyd George became Prime Minister and invited Prothero to join his Cabinet as President of the Board of Agriculture. ‘From the first’, Prothero recalled, ‘my relations with him were of the friendliest character’, enlivened by Lloyd George’s facetious references to mangolds and pheasants.47 Undoubtedly the war, as this trivial instance testifies, put former issues and interests into a different perspective. Writing on the eve of the war, Joseph Hyder, the Land Nationalisation Society’s secretary, in his compilation of evidence against the landlord, mused on the issue of the game laws: ‘The squire looks out in the morning across his park, and says, “It is a fine day; let us sally forth and kill something.’”48 Within a few years, gamekeepers had been conscripted, packs of hounds disbanded and horses shipped to the battlefield. The demands of war also swept the sons of squires, and of other sections of the landed interest, into military service. Defenders of the privileges enjoyed by the propertied classes had emphasized the duties they undertook, not least service in the armed forces. Now, as the historian of English landed society has written, the war ‘perhaps brought greater losses to the landed families, with their long military traditions, than to any other class’.49 Certainly, the land question and the associated criticisms of the agricultural interest failed to re-emerge with anything like the old intensity on the return of peacetime politics. In the 1920s the impression is one of shadow-boxing as those on the Left debated the respective merits of land value taxation and land nationalization, at a time when the Liberal Party was in decline and Labour at best able to form a brief minority government.50

IV Yet, although the war did create change, it was probably not the decisive force behind the dwindling of the land reform movement. For many years before 1914, remarks were made about the difficulties involved in getting an increasingly urban population interested in rural questions. Moreover, non-socialist reformers were aware that their criticisms of landowners offered general arguments about the divisions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ that could be

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extended to other possessors of substantial wealth. George Riddell, proprietor of the News of the World and crony of Lloyd George, touched on this aspect when noting in his diary on 19 June 1912: ‘This land scheme is a shrewd political move. While it deals with present-day economic troubles, it is framed to appeal to the Liberal politician who is not prepared to attack the commercial classes, but will rejoice in attacking the pockets and privileges of his traditional bugbears and enemies, the squires and ground landlords.’51 Lloyd George, on reading Progress and Poverty at the age of 20, had realized that every argument applicable to the single tax ‘is also an argument for State appropriation of personal property’.52 Yet it was his early life in Wales that did much to drive his speeches against peers and rich landowners, and the ‘feudalism’ they embodied. As his private secretary was to recall, Lloyd George claimed to have been, as a boy, the best poacher in the village of Llanystumdwy, someone who ‘could never understand that any land was private property’.53 Thus, mixed in with political opportunism, were strongly held feelings about landlords’ abuse of their power over small tenants and labourers. His speeches often invoked Welsh experiences. For example, on 23 March 1910, in a speech reprinted under the title ‘Rural Intimidation’, he recounted that the pressures put on Liberal tenants awoke the spirit of the people, with the result that ‘the political power of landlordism in Wales was shattered, as effectively as the power of the Druids’. To end feudalism in rural England, his message was ‘Go thou and do likewise’.54 But the lessons drawn from rural north Wales in the 1870s were far removed from day-to-day life in England and Wales 40 years later. The powers of landowners had less impact on that 78.1 per cent of the population classed as urban dwellers in the census of 1911. The growth of towns had not only distanced most of the people from a close familiarity with life in the countryside, it had also resulted in a corresponding reduction in the status of the agricultural interest. Large proprietors could still exercise power and influence, but on nothing like the former scale, not even those with estates that had improved their rental value as a result of urbanization. The majority who possessed agricultural land had experienced sharp falls in rents and land values; one calculation suggests that between 1870 and 1914 the price at which land could be purchased fell from 30–35 years’ rental to 20–25.55 Thus there was both a decline in the standing of many landed families and, encouraged by the relatively low price of rural estates, a continuing tendency for those enriched by industry and trade to acquire land. Moreover, in an age of increasing

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democracy, the Conservative Party, had to balance its traditional role as the representative of the agricultural interest with the need to appeal to a wider electorate. Nor were matters easily resolved on the progressive side of politics. ‘Land reform covers a menagerie of aims and programmes’, observed the radical MP Josiah Wedgwood.56 In consequence, there was never a single, integrated scheme that had the backing of all who opposed the existing system of farming and landownership. Reformers, moreover, tended to be strongly committed to their particular nostrums – the biographer of Wedgwood, for example, noted that the taxation of land values was the ‘one political doctrine’ he consistently held; at the end of his life, he would bewilder visitors ‘by announcing himself to be a Single-taxer’.57 But others wanted to see the state acquire the land directly. ‘The land is yours; it has been robbed from you; it must be recovered’, wrote the Revd William Tuckwell, who conceded that the state should pay rents to the existing owners of land for forty years, after which ‘all such payments should cease; and the State should be absolute owner, using all rents paid to it for public purposes’, these to include the multiplication of small tenancies.58 Yet at the same time, the Cobdenite solution had its supporters. Winston Churchill concluded his chapter on ‘The People’s Land’ with the sentence: “‘You who shall liberate the land,” said Mr Cobden, “will do more for your country than we have done in the liberation of its commerce.’”59 Thus, critics of the agricultural interest were unable to find a common position. Indeed, they often disagreed fundamentally. Most, moreover, were politicians, or at least closely identified with a political party. Their opponents could counter with two broad arguments. The first was that proposals for change were often misinformed or mischievous, were driven by narrow political calculations, and would lead to consequences that would be harmful both to the consumer and the constitution. Secondly, it was possible to show that concessions had been made – the land laws had been modified, smallholdings were available, the ranks of the territorial classes could be entered by those enriched by trade and industry, and so on. Even in the last great campaign against the landed interest, that orchestrated by Lloyd George, the Conservative Party was prepared to make concessions. In particular, there was a willingness to reduce the powers of the House of Lords (even though the so-called ‘Diehard’ element among the peerage did consist mainly of substantial landowners).60 Moreover, many Conservatives also wished to see the needs of agriculture given a higher priority and to find ways of reviv-

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ing rural prosperity; such was the level of agreement between the political parties that Lloyd George’s biographer has described the land campaign as ‘essentially a sham fight’.61 As on previous occasions, the greater part of the Conservative Party adhered to the principles of Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto that proven abuses should be corrected or heeded the advice of Bagehot that the ‘higher classes’ must ‘willingly concede every claim they can safely concede, in order that they may not have to concede unwillingly some claim which would impair the safety of the country’.62 It was an approach, especially after 1850, in which the landed class was practised. With a show of reluctance, its members conceded a range of powers. The Police Act of 1856 ended the control of magistrates – often landowners – over the police; in 1870–1 the abolition of the purchase of commissions in the army, the introduction of competitive examinations for entry into the civil service (though not into the Foreign Office) and the University Tests Act, which removed Anglican privileges in Oxford and Cambridge colleges, weakened the grip of landed connections; the Militia Act of 1882 took the militia out of the gentry’s hands; and the County Councils Act of 1888 and the Parish Councils Act of 1894 further reduced the power of the gentry in the countryside. By a strategy of gradual concession, at least some elements of the early nineteenthcentury agricultural interest were preserved into the period after the Great War, by which time the views of its former critics seemed no longer to apply.

Notes (Place of publication London unless otherwise stated.) 1. H.J. Massingham, The Fall of the Year (1941) p. 204. I am grateful to Donald M. MacRaild and J.R. Wordie for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2. J.S. Mill, ‘Reorganization of the Reform Party’ (1839) in J.M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill VI: Essays on England, Ireland and the Empire (1982) p. 471. On lawyers resisting reform of the land laws, see E. Spring, ‘Landowners, Lawyers and Land Law Reform in NineteenthCentury England’, American Journal of Legal History, vol. XXI (1977) pp. 58–9. See too A.V. Dicey, ‘The Paradox of the Land Law’, Law Quarterly Review, vol. LXXXIII (1905) pp. 221–32. 3. Mill, ‘Reorganization of the Reform Party’, p. 472. Though they had virtually disappeared, the yeomen of England, and their doughty qualities,

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6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

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tended to be eulogized by all sides of the debate over the nature of landownership. D. Martin, ‘Land Reform’ in P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (1974) p. 144. This point has recently been discussed by J. Burckhardt, ‘Rural Social Relations, 1830–50: Opposition to Allotments for Labourers’, Agricultural History Review, vol. XLV (1997) pp. 166–7. From a letter of 1830, quoted by E.J. Whatley, Life and Correspondence of Richard Whatley (1866) p. 77. Whatley was undoubtedly an authority on the subject of food: at about the same time a contemporary noted he was ‘as great a glutton as ever graced a college Hall. I trust his digestive powers are as unbounded as his appetite; less restraint of that sort I never saw.’ J.L. Mallet, diary, 13 January 1831, in Political Economy Club: Minutes of Proceedings . . ., vol. VI (1921) p. 220. There is an extensive literature on these themes. Two modern treatments, from different perspectives, are K.M.D. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985) and A. Armstrong, Farmworkers: a Social and Economic History 1770–1980 (1988). Annals of Agriculture, vol. XVII (1792) pp. 156–7; Political Register, 17 March 1821, col. 757. J. Arch, Joseph Arch: the Story of his Life. Told by Himself (1898) p. 30. J.M. Robson and B.L. Kinzer (eds), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill XXVIII: Public and Parliamentary Speeches (1986) p. 199. P.B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: the English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981) p. 164. See too C. Kirby, ‘The Attack on the English Game Laws in the Forties’, Journal of Modern History, vol. IV (1932) pp. 18–37. The term the ‘Land Question’ entered general usage in the late 1840s, though for 20 years or so it tended to refer to the Irish situation. There are surveys of aspects of the question by F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. vol. XV (1965) pp. 23–44; H. Perkin, ‘Land Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain’, in idem (ed.), The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History (1981) pp. 100–35; and U. Vogel, ‘The Land Question: A Liberal Theory of Communal Property’, History Workshop, XXVII (1989) pp. 105–35. A. Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776) bk I, ch. XI. Quoted by N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League 1838–1846 (1968) p. 59. Quoted from a lecture of the 1840s by R. Garnett, The Life of W. J. Fox: Public Teacher & Social Reformer 1786–1864 (1910) p. 271. For an account of the range of activities in which large landlords had an interest, see G.E. Mingay, The Gentry: the Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (1976) passim. J.R. McCulloch, A Treatise on the Succession to Property Vacant by Death (1848) p. 172. Quoted by J. Ridley, Lord Palmerston (1970) p. 512. Letter of 4 November 1849, quoted by J. Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden II (1896 edn) p. 54. The Cobdenite position was sympathetically presented by J.E. Thorold Rogers, Cobden and Modern Political Opinion (1873). For the programme of

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21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 the Land Tenure Reform Association, see J.M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill V: Essays on Economics and Society (1967) pp. 689–95. J.A Froude, ‘On the Uses of a Landed Aristocracy’ (1876) in idem, Short Studies on Great Subjects III (1893) pp. 392–3. One of Smith’s collaborators, G.J. Shaw-Lefevre (later Lord Eversley), gave an account of the dispute surrounding Berkhamsted Common in his Commons, Forests and Footpaths (1910 edn) ch. 5. Return of Owners of Land 1872–3 (Parliamentary Papers 1874). For examples of the renewed campaign, see the books by two middle-class Liberals which, before going on to develop the detailed critique of the existing system, began by discussing the return of owners of land: J. Kay, Free Trade in Land (1879) and A. Arnold, Free Land (1880). For an example of Cobden’s use of the phrase, in a speech at Rochdale in 1863, see Morley, Life of Richard Cobden, p. 431. The latter are discussed by Martin, ‘Land Reform’, pp. 150–2, and M. Chase, ‘Out of Radicalism: The Mid-Victorian Freehold Land Movement’, English Historical Review, vol. CVI (1991) pp. 319–45. See too M. Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988) for a discussion of early-nineteenth-century land radicalism. F.G. Heath, The English Peasantry (1874) pp. 268–70; see also Burchardt above, pp. 115–25. R.N. Lebow discusses these articles in his introduction to a reprint of a selection of them, John Stuart Mill on Ireland (Philadelphia, 1979) and they are also considered in D. Martin, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question (Hull, 1981) pp. 22–4. For a complete edition, see A.P. and J.M. Robson (eds), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill XXIV: Newspaper Writings (1986). Elements of this debate are examined by C.J. Dewey, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought’, History of Political Economy, vol. VI (1974) pp. 17–47; and D.E. Martin, ‘A Comment’, ibid., vol. VIII (1976), pp. 297–302. A. Arnold, ‘The Abuses of a Landed Gentry’, The Nineteenth-Century Magazine, vol. CXXXII (1887) p. 477. This article was a reply to that by Froude, cited in note 20 above, which, among other positions, held ‘a peasant proprietary is a dream’ (p. 404). The Radical Programme, with a Preface by J. Chamberlain (1885) p. vi. An earlier version had appeared in the form of unsigned articles in the Fortnightly Review. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., pp. 117–18. A.L. Thorold, The Life of Henry Labouchere (1913) p. 245. H. George, Social Problems (1884) pp. 134–5. Ibid., p. 137. Unlike some critics, George directed all his fire on the landlord: so high were the rents of large farmers that ‘they must grind the faces of their labourers’ (p. 132). Thompson, ‘Land and Politics’, p. 43; Marchioness of Londonderry, Henry Chaplin: a Memoir (1926), p. 170; E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: the Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (1995) p. 128.

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35. H.M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911) p. 281. 36. Marx detailed his criticisms to Friedrich Sorge in a letter of 20 June 1881, printed in A. Trachtenberg (ed.), Letters to Americans 1848–1895 (New York, 1963) pp. 127–9. 37. Of the literature of the period, the following books are still often cited: G. Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common Fields (1907); J.L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832 (1911); R.H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912). 38. A.K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: the General Election of 1906 (1973) p. 65. 39. The Act and its operation are briefly summarized in Lord Ernle, English Farming Past and Present (1961 edn) pp. 424–5. 40. B.K. Murray, The People’s Budget 1909/10: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics (Oxford, 1980) pp. 131 ff. 41. D. Lloyd George, Better Times (1910) pp. 150–1. 42. Ibid., p. 190. 43. The Land: The Report of the Land Inquiry Committee. Vol. 1: Rural (1913) pp. xv–xvi. 44. B.B. Gilbert, David Lloyd George: a Political Life. The Organizer of Victory 1912–16 (1992) p. 55. 45. Quoted, ibid., p. 84. For two, somewhat differing, surveys of the budget proposals and the responses to them, see H.V. Emy, ‘The Land Campaign: Lloyd George as a Social Reformer, 1909–14’ in A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: Twelve Essays (1971) pp. 62–5; and B.B. Gilbert, ‘David Lloyd George: The Reform of British Land-holding and the Budget of 1914’, Historical Journal, vol. XXI (1978) pp. 117–41. 46. Lord Ernle, Whippingham to Westminster (1938) p. 206. 47. Ibid., p. 285. In a Land Campaign speech at Bedford on 11 October 1913, Lloyd George had denounced landlords for rearing game which fed on the crops of farmers, a point turned against him by Conservative supporters who in subsequent rural by-election campaigns ridiculed his knowledge of farming and displayed mangolds stuffed with pheasant feathers. See J. Grigg, Lloyd George: From Peace to War 1912–1916 (1985) p. 94. 48. J. Hyder, The Case for Land Nationalisation (1913) p. 278. 49. F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963) p. 327. 50. See, for example, C.A. Cline, Recruits to Labour: the British Labour Party 1914–1931 (New York, 1963) pp. 43–51; R. Douglas, Land, People & Politics: a History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878–1952 (1976) pp. 184–97. 51. Lord Riddell, More Pages from my Diary, 1908–1914 (1934) p. 71. 52. Quoted in Gilbert, David Lloyd George, p. 55. 53. A.J. Sylvester, The Real Lloyd George (1947) p. 6. 54. Lloyd George, Better Times, pp. 296–7. 55. F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Free Trade and the Land’ in G.E. Mingay (ed.), The Victorian Countryside, I (1981) p. 115. 56. Quoted in T.P. Whittaker, The Ownership, Tenure and Taxation of Land (1914) p. xvii. 57. C.V. Wedgwood, The Last of the Radicals (1951) p. 10. 58. W. Tuckwell, Reminiscences of a Radical Parson (1905) p. 117.

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59. W.S. Churchill, The People’s Rights (1910) p. 130. Like Cobden, Churchill also deplored ‘the divorce of the people from the land’ (p. 139). 60. N. Blewett, The Peers, the Parties and the People: the General Elections of 1910 (1972) pp. 171–2; G.D. Phillips, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (1979) pp. 55–6. 61. J. Grigg, Lloyd George: From Peace to War 1912–1916, p. 98. But for the view that Lloyd George’s Land Campaign found the Conservatives’ weak spot, see I. Packer, ‘Conservatives and the Ideology of Land Ownership’ in M. Francis and I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (eds), The Conservatives and British Society, 1880–1990 (Cardiff, 1996) p. 54. 62. W. Bagehot, The English Constitution (2nd edn, 1872; 1963 edn) p. 278.

6 No Longer the Farmers’ Friend? The Conservative Party and Agricultural Protection, 1880–1914 Ewen Green

Throughout the nineteenth century the Conservative Party was frequently and justifiably referred to as the ‘farmer’s friend’. Eighteenth-century Tories had been proud of their ‘country’ politics, and their early nineteenth-century successors introduced and for 30 years defended those most obvious symbols of government support for the farming community, the Corn Laws. Sir Robert Peel’s conversion to free trade in 1846 was seen by the bulk of his party as a betrayal of the Conservative Party’s traditions, interests and ethos. In many respects Peel’s apostasy in 1846 only served to strengthen the Conservative Party’s identification with the farming community and vice versa. As a consequence the Victorian Conservative Party remained above all else the political arm of the landed interest – drawing its leadership from the aristocracy, its parliamentary cohorts from the county squirearchy, and finding its most rock solid electoral support in the English counties. But in the last quarter of the century doubts arose as to whether the relationship between the Conservatives and the farming community either would or could continue to be mutually satisfactory. The problems posed by the agricultural depression of the last quarter of the century, and a resurgence of protectionist opinion in farming circles, placed severe strains upon what had once seemed a natural and unbreakable alliance. Writing to the Earl of Carnarvon in October 1881, Lord Salisbury noted that ‘We shall have some bother with our agricultural friends’,1 and in the decades that followed his words were to prove prophetic. The first indications that the Conservatives might have trouble in rural areas surfaced in the 1870s, when it became evident that the ‘great depression’ was placing a severe strain on rural communities. To begin with there was the impoverished condition, and increasing mili149

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tancy, of the agricultural labourers. The labourers’ position had always been difficult,2 and their relations with their social superiors had always been strained, but Joseph Arch’s Agricultural Labourers’ Union brought a new dimension to popular rural protest,3 and household enfranchisement in the counties in 1884 gave the labourers’ grievances a new significance. I have dealt with the concerns that the labourers’ outlook provoked in Conservative circles elsewhere.4 In this chapter, therefore, the initial focus will be the deteriorating relationship between landlords and tenants and the problems this created for Conservative politics.

I Differences and indeed open conflict between landlord and tenant had been a feature of rural life in Ireland in particular, but also to a degree in Scotland and Wales, before the 1870s. That the ‘Celtic Fringe’ saw increased tenant agitation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was thus not that surprising to contemporaries. More novel, and more directly worrying for the Conservative Party, was the appearance of landlord–tenant conflict in rural England. The ‘Celtic Fringe’ after all had provided the Conservatives with little or no support over the years, but the English counties were the Conservative heartland and English tenant farmers had long been the bedrock of Conservative support in those constituencies. Anything that threatened to alter this situation was of major concern to the Conservative Party. The main cause of tension between landlord and tenant in England was the agricultural depression. From the 1870s a combination of foreign competition, a long-term fall in agricultural prices and, in 1877 to 1879 and again in 1892 to 1894, poor harvests, caused severe difficulties for English farmers. The most severe problems were in the arable districts of the south and east, but dairy, livestock and mixed farming regions were by no means immune from the effects of the depression. The ‘custom of the country’ in many rural areas was for landlords to cushion their tenants against hard times through rent reductions and other informal methods of financial and social support.5 However, landlords were also affected by the depression, and it was difficult for them, especially those dependent on farm rents alone, to provide adequate relief for their tenants. The custom of the country, it seems, could not cope with the scale and duration of the problems emerging in the late nineteenth century.6 The apparent

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failure of informal mechanisms of community support led on the one hand to strained relations between landlords and tenants, and on the other to demands from the rural community, but especially farmers, for government assistance. An early example of tenant agitation was their demand, voiced in the mid-1870s, for landlords to provide compensation for improvements. Much pressure was brought to bear on the government to legislate on this matter, and Disraeli’s government was faced with the dilemma of satisfying the farmers’ demands, and thereby implicitly endorsing ‘anti-landlord’ sentiments, or disappointing the farmers and appearing to be merely a tool of the landlords. The 1875 Agricultural Holdings Act, a compromise measure which created the legal framework for a compensation process but stopped short of compelling landlords to compensate tenants for improvements, epitomized the Conservative dilemma. But it signally failed to square the circle. Only a few months after this legislation was enacted, the Chamber of Agriculture Journal, mouthpiece of the Central Chamber of Agriculture, remarked that the ‘slipshod and pernicious style’ with which such ‘great questions’ had been dealt with by the Conservative government was ‘simply contemptible’. In 1879, with farmers countrywide growing increasingly restive, the Farmers’ Alliance came into being, and began to agitate for tenant rights that looked like an English version of the Irish tenantry’s ‘3 F’s’. It seemed that Britain’s farmers were no longer predisposed to identify their interests with those of their landlords, that they no longer instinctively deferred to them on political matters, and that there was the potential for conflict within the upper echelons of rural society. The Conservative Party’s concern was that the Liberals would exploit these growing differences between landlords and farmers. In the 1880 general election the Liberals secured significant gains in county seats, largely on the strength of support from disgruntled farmers, and the Liberal government’s almost immediate repeal of the Malt Tax and introduction of the Ground Game Act seemed to indicate that they intended to extend their farming appeal. The Conservatives were clearly worried by these developments, with Sir Stafford Northcote, at that point the party’s joint leader, noting that, What chiefly disconcerts our men is the audacity with which the Government are putting themselves forward as the true farmers’ friends – and the momentary applause they are obtaining from the Chambers of Agriculture and other representatives of the farmers’

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interests on account of the Hares and Rabbits Bill and the repeal of the Malt Tax.7 Moreover, the Conservatives had great difficulty in deciding just how to meet this threat. Northcote again summed up the problem, recording that, The difficulty we are placed in by the Hares and Rabbits Bill is a serious one. Four leading Whigs have given notice that they will oppose it . . . on the grounds that it interferes with freedom of contract. If we do not act with them on this occasion, we shall disgust them . . . On the other hand many of our county members are aware that by voting against this Bill they will risk the loss of their seats.8 A special meeting was convened at the Carlton Club to discuss the dilemma, but this only resulted in ‘an agreement to differ’.9 This problem recurred in 1883 as a result of the Liberals’ Agricultural Holdings Act, which made it compulsory for landlords to compensate tenants for improvements.10 For much of Gladstone’s second administration, the Conservatives were on the defensive in their county strongholds, alarmed by apparent Liberal inroads into Conservative farming support and yet finding it difficult to respond without compromising their defence of landlords. Much of the farming vote, having been alarmed by the Liberals’ ‘Three Acres and a Cow’ campaign in the countryside, returned to the Conservative fold in and after 1886, but this did not mean the relationship between the Conservative Party and farmers was restored to the relatively comfortable status quo ante the 1870s. Far from it. The relationship continued to be intensely problematic. If anything, farming complaints about economic distress deepened in the late 1880s and 1890s, and calls for assistance grew louder. At first glance it seems the farming community was in a good position to make its grievances and policy desires known in the right places. In the late 1880s the Conservative parliamentary party contained ‘an “Agricultural Committee” to which nearly all the county members belong[ed]’ which met on the first Wednesday in every month to discuss issues and legislation affecting agriculture.11 However, this Committee appears to have enjoyed little success.12 The only occasion on which it appears to have gained a receptive audience was in 1887, in the wake of a Liberal victory at the Spalding by-election. Concerned

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by the Liberals’ apparent ability to mobilize the labouring vote the ‘Agricultural Committee’ pressed for allotments legislation as a popular counter to Liberal appeals.13 Whether it was the Committee’s views or a more general concern over Conservative vulnerability in the counties that proved decisive is difficult to assess, but in 1888 the Conservatives introduced legislation to provide allotments in rural areas. But even this ‘victory’ was double-edged. Allotments were seen as of interest largely to labourers and were an additional cost for rural communities. Likewise, the Conservatives’ introduction of free, compulsory education in rural districts in 1892, and their Small Holdings Act of the same year, were aimed largely at the labouring vote and represented new burdens for rural local government. Conservative measures to appease labouring opinion may have been designed to help defend the political future of farming MPs, but they were not without their drawbacks. To begin with there was the cost of such legislation. If rural rates had to rise to fund the new measures, there was the certainty of renewed farming agitation over ‘the burdens on agriculture’. In addition the fact that government action only seemed to be forthcoming on ‘labourers’ issues’ meant that farming opinion could easily conclude that ‘the farmer is nowhere today in considerations of party politicians, and the labourer is the king to whom the leaders of both parties do homage’.14 Farming frustration continued to give Conservatives cause for concern through the 1890s. In December 1892 Henry Chaplin attended a special agricultural meeting in London at which 250 representatives of chambers of agriculture and farming associations were present. In his report on the meeting Chaplin noted that it had taken a great deal of effort to prevent the farmers passing a ‘3 F’s’ motion by a substantial majority, and he argued that, unless something was done to ease the farmers’ plight, ostensibly moderate farmers might join with their labourers to support radical measures based on anti-landlord sentiment.15 In the same month Chaplin told the Conservative Chief Whip that ‘the agricultural situation . . . is grave and . . . full of difficulty’ and that there was the possibility of farmers forming their own independent party.16 Such a notion may appear fanciful, but the examples of the German Agrarian League, the Farmers’ Alliance in the USA, and the political leverage exercised by the Danish co-operatives, provided contemporaries with evidence of often effective independent farming action. Moreover, the founding of the National Federation of Tenant Farmers’ Clubs in January 1893, and a more general increase in independent farming action in the 1890s, seemed

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to herald the possibility of just such a development in Britain.17 It is also worth noting that when a landowner, Lord Winchilsea, launched a joint landowners’ and tenants’ organization he received very little farming support.18 It seems that English farmers were suspicious of associations linked with or led by a landlord, no matter how sympathetic that landlord might be to farming grievances. The Conservatives were probably fortunate to be out of office between 1892 and 1895, the period when the agricultural price trough reached its lowest point. The Liberal government established a Royal Commission to investigate the agricultural depression, but otherwise offered no concessions to farming interests. However, in and after the 1895 general election the Conservatives still had to work to convince farmers that their party held farming interests in greater esteem than the 1892–5 Liberal government. A particularly important test was the position of the ‘Ministry of Agriculture’. Shortly after the 1895 election Balfour felt obliged to remind Salisbury, ‘that in any final arrangements [for the new Government], some one will have to be provided in the House of Commons to answer for Agriculture . . . [and that] More questions are asked of the Minister of Agriculture than of any other except the Irish Secretary’.19 At first glance this seems a trivial point to raise, but at the heart of the matter was the status accorded the Board of Agriculture. Henry Chaplin had already told Salisbury that ‘there is considerable difficulty brewing about Agriculture and the Cabinet’. The problem, Chaplin noted, was that ‘many of our County members have made it a handle in their constituencies, that the Minister of A[griculture] was not in the [Liberal] Cabinet’ and that their position would ‘not be very easy to defend’ if the Conservatives did not make the Presidency of the Board of Agriculture a Cabinet post.20 Whether the exclusion of the Minister of Agriculture from the Cabinet would have sparked a ‘farmers’ revolt’ cannot be stated as certain, but the Conservative leadership took the threat seriously, forestalling any immediate difficulties by making the Board of Agriculture a Cabinet post.21 The ‘Ministry of Agriculture’ question epitomized the relationship between the farming community and the Conservative Party in the late nineteenth century, in that the farmers became increasingly militant and independent whilst the Conservatives searched for ways to appease them. Nor did this problem disappear after the turn of the century. In 1907 the appearance of the fledgling National Farmers’ Union provided evidence of a desire on the part of many farmers to organize themselves as an independent pressure group, and in 1908

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the Central Chamber of Agriculture (CCA) saw motions in favour of establishing a separate Agricultural party.22 Likewise in 1910 Austen Chamberlain was informed by a leading Conservative agricultural spokesman, George Courthope,23 that it was important he attend a dinner organized by the CCA, the Farmers’ Club and the Central Land Association, because, there is a great deal of political activity among agriculturalists all over the country, and there is no doubt that agricultural matters will be forced to the fore in the House . . . the various agricultural bodies are looking to this dinner as an important move in the game, and I am sure it worth an effort to show that our leading men sympathize with the farmers’ activity.24 Edwardian Conservatives, like their predecessors, were forced to confront the questions of how to cope with disgruntled and disillusioned farmers and hold on to farming support. In the ‘golden age’ of British, and especially English, farming between 1850 and the mid-1870s the social and political structures of rural life seemed settled and secure. But the pattern of ‘the rich man in his castle, the large tenant farmers with his hunters and the parson in his Church’ 25 and, one may add, the Conservative MP returned to Westminster, seemed far less immutable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ‘fixity’ of mid-Victorian rural society and politics appears to have been largely dependent upon the prosperity of English agriculture in a period when home as well as foreign producers supplied the needs of Britain’s booming industrial towns. In contrast, the agricultural depression made questions such as security of tenure, cost of improvements, and the level of rents openly contentious in a way not known before. The result was that established patterns of authority in Britain’s rural communities were disrupted and traditional political allegiances destabilized.26 The disruption in England was clearly not as deep or as widespread as in Ireland or even Scotland, but it was marked none the less. Obviously English farmers were not transformed overnight into ‘Boycotters’ or even radical agitators. Established patterns of authority, like all old habits, die hard, especially when they are supported by a network of social and political relations as deep and complex as those that characterized English rural society. But, in spite of the structured hierarchies of the hunt, the county yeomanry and the local magistrates’ bench, and the pull of local loyalties they both expressed and

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reinforced, it seems that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries farmers were generally less willing to accept the economic and political authority of their landlords, and more sceptical about the Conservative Party’s position as ‘the farmers’ friend’. Likewise landlords felt threatened by the militancy of tenant demands whilst the Conservative Party fretted for the first time over the reliability of the farming vote.

II The question arises as to why the Conservatives did not do more to assuage the concerns of their traditional core constituency. Above all, there is the question of why the British Conservatives, alone of all the major right-wing parties in Europe, did not resurrect agricultural protection to defend their oldest allies. There was certainly no shortage of demands for tariffs within the farming community, for the most vocal requests for tariff assistance in the last quarter of the century came from Britain’s farmers. In his report to Lord Salisbury on the agricultural conference of 1892, Henry Chaplin noted that when he addressed the meeting and ‘mentioned the word Protection’ the audience were ‘like people gone mad – many of them springing up in their places and cheering frantically’.27 Chaplin, a landowner and MP in the depressed, arable-farming county of Lincolnshire, was a convinced protectionist himself and had strong personal reasons for ‘talking up’ the degree of protectionist sentiment in the farming community. But Chaplin’s view that there was ‘no mistaking how deep the [protectionist] feeling is among the large majority of farmers’28 appears to have been justified. As early as September 1881 William Lowther won a by-election in the hard-pressed arable-farming constituency of North Lincolnshire on a protectionist platform, and Lowther’s success was repeated in January 1882 when two protectionists were returned in regions as distinct as Cambridgeshire and North Yorkshire. There were few dramatic electoral successes for protectionists after 1884, but activity in many of the chambers of agriculture and farming clubs of Britain through the 1880s and 1890s meant that the Essex MP J.H. Round did not exaggerate when in 1895 he charted the progress of what he called ‘the protectionist revival’.29 By 1896 the Digest of Agricultural Opinion was able to report that 60 per cent of farmers favoured protection as a solution to their difficulties.30 At times it did seem as if the Conservative Party might try to exploit these protectionist sentiments. In 1881 Edward Hamilton noted that

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Gladstone was ‘incensed at the account to which the Tories are turning this wretched hollow Fair Trade cry’,31 and through the 1880s and 1890s the Conservatives often hinted, not always very subtly, that they had some sympathy for a revision of Britain’s free-trade position. It was the Conservatives who supported, and in 1885 conceded, the demand for a Royal Commission on the Depression of Trade and Industry, which singled out agriculture as particularly hard pressed.32 After the 1885 general election there were 60 Conservative MPs listed as committed to a revision of Britain’s free-trade position, 12 of whom represented county seats. However, the Salisburyian Conservative Party refused to commit themselves to a pro-tariff stance. One possible explanation for this is that they did not wish to trespass on the free-trade sentiments of their Liberal Unionist allies after 1886. But it is not wholly clear that the Liberal Unionists saw free trade as essential to their identity. In 1887 Hartington announced at Dover that if he had to choose between a Home Rule government and a protectionist government he would choose the latter.33 Given Hartington’s reaction to the tariff reform campaign 16 years later, the Conservatives may have been wise not to take him at his word, but the fact remains that the Liberal Unionists’ commitment to free trade is often assumed rather than demonstrated. A more important problem with this explanation is that Conservatives showed a reluctance to come out against free trade before 1886. It may be that they were already concerned about alienating potential Liberal deserters, but this seems unlikely. A more plausible explanation for the Conservatives’ drawing back from an assault on free trade is their fear of a ‘dear food’ cry. Henry Chaplin, hardly the most self-restrained politician, noted that when he addressed the agricultural meeting of December 1892 he had ‘the fear of Middleton before my eyes’ and had ‘dared not respond altogether as . . . [the meeting] would have wished’.34 Likewise the Conservatives’ new ally, Joseph Chamberlain, remarked after the 1892 general election that ‘Lord Salisbury’s unfortunate allusion to fair trade’ during the campaign had allowed the Liberals to raise a ‘dear food’ cry, and cost the Unionist alliance a number of county seats owing to the labourers’ concerns over the cost of living.35 However, ‘dear food’ was not the only problem protectionism posed for the Conservatives. The last quarter of the nineteenth century had seen the Conservative Party attract extensive support in urban and suburban areas. As a consequence the interests of industrial and commercial property were becoming equally, perhaps more, impor-

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tant to the Conservative Party as those of the land. In the context of debates over protection this was a vital factor. Much of the fair trade movement of the 1880s and 1890s had been led by industrialists seeking to impose retaliatory tariffs on imported manufactures. Likewise industrialists were the leading voice behind the campaign for preferential tariff arrangements with Britain’s major Colonies, whereby Britain would give preferential treatment to Colonial foodstuffs in exchange for imperial reciprocity on British manufactures. But, as some contemporaries were quick to realize, there was a major difference between the tariffs desired by farmers and industrialists. Remarking on a conversation with Lord Bath, Edward Hamilton, Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, noted that Bath was ‘hankering after “fair trade” and imagines that this delusive cry will find a ready response with the new electorate in the towns, forgetting that the protection of manufactured articles in any form, open or disguised, would make matters worse for agriculturists’.36 Herein lay the rub. British agriculture had nothing to gain and much to lose from industrial protection and retaliation. Likewise imperial preference, also popular with some urban interests, was predicated on the notion of importing Colonial instead of foreign foodstuffs, and thus offered no respite to Britain’s farmers from the deluge of imports. In 1887 the Conservative fair trade MP Frederick Dixon-Hartland stated that fair trade was a political non-starter ‘until manufacturers and agriculturists can agree upon some policy’.37 Given these (much-discussed) facts the Conservative Party was hardly likely to launch a policy which threatened to open a rural/urban divide between its propertied and manufacturing supporters.

III That there was potential for rural/urban conflict was confirmed by the vexed question of local taxation. The idea of compensating farmers for the loss or unavailability of tariff protection through a reduction of their tax burden was not new. The first Conservative administration after the repeal of the Corn Laws had taken this course of action, and thereafter both Liberal and Conservative governments had introduced numerous adjustments in taxation and deployed central government funds to assist local government (and thus local ratepayers) in general and rural local government in particular.38 By the late 1880s, during George Goschen’s period at the Exchequer, the practice of subsidizing local government from central revenues had reached new heights, but

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it also began to arouse concern. Above all, the issue of whether town and country were being dealt with on an equal basis became a central question.39 The predicament the Conservatives faced in balancing the demands of rural and urban ratepayers is best demonstrated by their attempt to relieve the ‘burdens on agriculture’ through the Agricultural Land Rating Act of 1896. Having castigated the 1892–5 Liberal administration for ‘ignoring’ the farmers’ plight, the Conservatives entered office virtually pledged to do something for the farming community. Salisbury had indicated the probable direction the Conservatives would take in a speech at Trowbridge in 1894.40 He likened British agriculture to a train pulling up a steep gradient towing two extra burdens, those burdens being foreign competition and high local taxation. With protection beyond the realm of ‘practical politics’, it was only logical that local taxation became the focus of Conservative efforts to assist agriculture, and in April 1896 the Conservatives introduced a measure to relieve agricultural land of half its local tax burden. On the face of it the so-called ‘Agricultural Relief Act’ was a success – at last the Conservatives had given some succour to their oldest friends. But at the same time the Act highlighted some problems. To begin with it was criticized for not giving assistance directly to farmers. Strictly speaking, relief went to the landowner, with the assumption being that, as farm rents took account of local taxation, the landowners would pass on the savings to their tenants through rent reductions. The fact this would not necessarily happen allowed Liberals to claim that the 1896 Act was simply ‘doles for the squire and the parson’, and opened up the possibility that, once again, the Liberals would be able to exploit landlord–tenant differences.41 Also the Act was not as generous as either the farmers would have liked or as the RCAD had recommended. The RCAD had argued in its interim report that agricultural land should only pay one-quarter of its rateable value whereas the Act had only conceded one-half. The Conservatives thus seemed to be in the position of delivering only half a loaf, which was better than nothing, but still disappointing. That the Conservatives had not been more generous was largely a result of the twin pressures of cost and who was to pay. As it stood the 1896 arrangement meant that central government funds had to provide £3 550 000 additional grantin-aid to rural authorities, and the main complaint was that urban taxpayers were being forced to subsidize rural ratepayers. The Liberals argued ‘that it is inexpedient and unjust that relief granted from impe-

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rial taxation to rateable property should be restricted to one class only of such property’42 and contended that the government was simply using urban ratepayers’ money to bail out not only its own supporters but its own members, with the young Liberal firebrand David Lloyd George stating that the proposer of the Bill, Henry Chaplin, stood to gain £700 p.a. in rate relief and that the Cabinet as a whole would receive £2 250 000.43 This was all good polemical stuff from the Liberal benches, but there were those on the Conservative side who agreed with George Whiteley, the cotton-spinner and MP for Stockport, who stated that ‘the Bill was in every respect contrary to the interests of the towns . . . [and] a gross and cruel act of injustice to the boards and urban districts of the country’.44 There was no urban Tory rebellion when Parliament voted on the legislation, but there were nevertheless signs that any further ‘favouritism’ towards rural areas would not be greeted warmly by urban Conservatism.45 Thus it had become clear by the end of the nineteenth century that if Britain’s farmers were to be assisted by their old political friends, then the Conservatives would have to integrate the claims of agriculture into a more general scheme for the support of British economic interests. In the Edwardian period Joseph Chamberlain and his successors in the tariff reform campaign attempted to construct just such a policy.

IV ‘1846 is not 1903’ the Conservative journalist J.L. Garvin roundly declared in his book Imperial Reciprocity,46 meaning issues raised by the tariff campaign were wholly different to those which had characterized controversy over the Corn Laws 60 years earlier. Garvin’s remarks were endorsed by the Tariff Reform League, whose Speakers’ Handbook noted that ‘Tariff Reform is not a revival of the old controversy between Free Trade and Protection. The beginning of wisdom in regard to the Fiscal question lies in a recognition of this fact.’47 These statements were accurate, for the tariff campaign as it evolved saw the development of a complex political economy which was not, like the 1846 debate, focussed on a single issue.48 Nevertheless agricultural protection and indeed the broader position of agriculture within the British economy were integral to the tariff debate and Conservative politics in the early twentieth century, and the development of the tariff campaign in this context sheds a great deal of light on evolving relations between the Conservatives and the farming community. Addressing the opening session of the Agricultural Committee of

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the Tariff Commission,49 Henry Chaplin argued that ‘If we examine Mr Chamberlain’s proposals carefully we shall find that in all probability they will do more for agriculture than is very often supposed to be the case.’50 Chaplin was reassured in his views by the Secretary of the Commission, the economist W.A.S. Hewins, who informed him that ‘I do not think there is any more promising branch of the work [of the Commission] than that relating to Agriculture . . . I am sure . . . that we shall probably know more about agriculture, and probably do more to stimulate agriculture in England than has been done in the last 50 years’.51 Such optimism was not surprising given Joseph Chamberlain’s stated policy goals in the autumn of 1903 and the spring of 1904. Although Chamberlain’s initial tariff proposal in the summer of 1903 had been simply to place a 2s. per quarter duty on imported corn and to give Colonial producers a 1s. preference, by October 1903 his scheme had been expanded. Speaking at Glasgow in early October he added a number of new proposals, including not only a 10 per cent ad valorem duty on manufactured goods but also duties on imported meat, dairy produce, vegetables and flour. At Welbeck in August 1904 Chamberlain went into further detail about his ‘food taxes’ – the 2s. duty on corn was to apply to wheat, barley and rye, there was to be a 5 per cent ad valorem duty on imported meat and dairy produce and an unspecified duty on flour.52 Nor was Chamberlain simply firing blind with these proposals. They were welcomed by the Rural League, and the Tariff Commission used them as the basis for the policy laid out in its Agricultural Report of 1906.53 By 1905, therefore, a fairly broad spectrum of agricultural tariffs was integral to the tariff programme, and the possibility of adding other items to the tariff list was never far away.54 It was always made clear, as the Conservative Party’s Chief Agent stressed in his correspondence with one rural Conservative association, that ‘the alteration in the fiscal system proposed by Tariff Reform does not include the restoration of the protective system which existed in this country prior to the repeal of the Corn Laws’,55 but, it was claimed, ‘the agricultural interest . . . will gain by some of the tariff proposals made’.56 How these tariff proposals were to benefit agriculture was a complex issue, made more complex by the way the case was presented. It was always said that moderate duties, such as those outlined above, would not raise the price of food. Chamberlain told his audience at Welbeck that although his proposals would confer great benefits upon the farmer and ‘in all cases extend the production of food and increase the employment of labour [on the land] they would not increase the price

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of food’.57 These statements seem difficult to reconcile, for the only way Chamberlain’s proposals could achieve what he claimed was through creating a situation in which British farmers could compete with the low-cost produce of foreign competitors. A rise in prices thus seemed to be the only way in which Chamberlain’s tariffs could aid British agriculture. Yet this was precisely the implication Chamberlain and his supporters wished to avoid. The reasoning which allowed these implications to be skirted had been outlined as early as 1899 by E.E. Williams. Commenting on Henry Chaplin’s proposal for a 1s. registration duty on imported corn Williams argued that the duty ‘would give a small modicum of protection to the British farmer’.58 However, this ‘modicum of protection’ was to have no impact on prices, because rather than the consumer paying the duty ‘by far the most likely result [was] that the foreigner would pay the duty’. The reason for this, Williams declared, was that, England is practically the only market for the world’s surplus supply of corn, which is sold here for what it will fetch. Now as the home produced, and I trust the Colonial, would be exempt from the shilling duty imposed on foreign corn, the British articles would be able to maintain the same price as before, and the foreigner would have to conform to it; that is to say to sell wheat he would have to take a shilling a quarter less for it, in order that it might enter the market on equal terms with home and colonial produce.59 Williams’ line of reasoning, implicitly reproduced by Chamberlain at Welbeck, and popularized in Leo Maxse’s slogan ‘England Expects that Every Foreigner Shall Pay His Duty’, was given the stamp of economic authority by W.A.S. Hewins. In 1907, discussing the effects of existing ‘food duties’ on coffee, tea and cocoa,60 Hewins stated that ‘there is no doubt that all these duties raise prices’ and that there was, something to be said for the view that, apart from the question of Tariff Reform, it might be advantageous to reduce some of our present revenue duties, all of which are paid by the British consumer, and substitute revenue duties on imported agricultural produce, some part of which would certainly be paid by foreigners.61 Thus the ‘protective’ effect of agricultural tariffs, particularly corn

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duties, was not a simple return to traditional protection. The emphasis on ‘taxing the foreigner’ shifted the argument from the issue of price towards the issue of supply. This introduced an original, subtle and politically very convenient nuance into the economics of agricultural protection. Prices would remain stable but British producers would be able to capture a larger market share; this argument reconciled direct aid to agriculture with ‘cheap’ or at least ‘un-dear’ food. If it allowed Conservatives (as Liberals claimed) to appeal to farmers on the grounds that the proposed tariffs were ‘protective’, and to everyone else on the grounds that they were not, this was all to the good, but the apparent duplicity of the Conservative argument was sustained by the sophistication of tariff economics. The Tariff Commission surveyed a broad range of farming opinion, providing Conservatives not only with a clear picture of farming attitudes to tariffs, but also with the background for a much more ambitious agricultural policy. In 1904 the Agricultural Committee of the Tariff Commission circulated a questionnaire to over 500 agricultural organizations and individual farmers, asking for their views on Chamberlain’s proposals and requesting suggestions as to any other steps which could be taken to assist agriculture. With regard to the proposed duties on corn and flour and the question of preference, the Tariff Commission reported that ‘No question was more generally answered than this, proving the great interest which the subject has aroused among agriculturalists . . . 483 answers were received on this question alone.’62 Moreover the response was overwhelmingly positive, for the Commission noted that ‘on the subject of Mr Chamberlain’s wheat and flour proposals . . . farmers of every kind, and in every part of the country, approve the principle. . . [and] objections are confined to details’.63 There was also great enthusiasm for the proposed 5 per cent duty on meat and dairy produce, which produced 453 answers, 209 expressing approval ‘almost without qualification’ and only 66 stating that it would provide no benefit.64 Interestingly, unanimity was shown about the non- protective (in the traditional sense) nature of the 2s. corn duty. It was accepted that duties on dairy produce, meat and flour would assist British producers and millers, but a low duty on cereals was expected to have minimal benefit.65 The reason farmers expressed enthusiasm for the corn duty was in part because they saw it as the thin end of the wedge, but also because they assumed the revenue gained from such a duty would be used to reduce rates on agricultural land.66 This was underlined by a member of the Tariff Commission’s Agricultural Committee, a farmer

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himself, who stated that ‘whilst these [Chamberlain’s] proposals are a step in the right direction, and should be welcomed by all farmers, the immediate advantage will be very small, unless in the allocation of the taxes for the purpose of ridding the land of its many burdens’.67 The idea that tariff revenues could be used to finance ‘secondary’ benefits for agriculture soon made the transition from backroom discussion to public pronouncement, with Joseph Chamberlain stating in July 1905 that revenues generated by tariffs would indeed be used to reduce rural rates. Demands for reduced rating levels had been a major feature of agricultural politics for 50 years following the repeal of the Corn Laws, but in the 1890s growing budgetary problems had seemed to rule out any further remission of ‘the burdens on agriculture’.68 However, as an untapped source of revenue, tariffs could fund rating reform.

V Between 1906 and 1910 the indirect benefits of tariffs became increasingly important to the Conservative effort to attract agricultural support. The Conservatives wished to maximize their appeal in rural districts whilst minimizing their vulnerability to a ‘dear food’ cry. This was a difficult circle to square. In 1904 the Tariff Commission demonstrated there was a ‘considerable section’ of farmers who objected to Colonial corn and meat products entering Britain, duty free.69 The Tariff Commission advocated a 1s. per quarter duty on Colonial corn, but many Conservatives, even some of the most committed tariff reformers, were unhappy with this proposal. The result was confusion and often contradictory statements.70 No ‘official’ pronouncement was made on this question until April 1910, when Balfour, in an open letter to George Courthope, declared that Colonial corn would enter duty free. This was welcomed by the Party,71 as helpful in limiting the scope of ‘dear food’ accusations. But even a minimal concession to these prejudices could only disappoint agriculturalists. The proposed duty on Colonial corn was largely of symbolic value, but symbols, especially for the hard-pressed arable districts, were important. In these circumstances proposals such as tariff-funded rate reductions sugared the pill, convincing farmers that the Conservative Party was still serious about giving assistance to its oldest allies.72 The Conservatives’ willingness to accept the idea of free Colonial corn was in part informed by their appreciation of the changing structure of British agriculture. Although the Conservatives argued that

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they were committed to revitalizing British agriculture, they placed an increasing emphasis on expanding the number of small farmers.73 This carried important implications. In 1904 J.L. Green of the Rural League, commenting on Chamberlain’s proposals for a 2s. duty on corn and 5 per cent ad valorem on meat and dairy produce, observed that, [These] proposals are intended, so far as corn-growing is concerned, to give a preference to the Colonies over the foreigner in our markets. It is clearly not intended, or likely, that corn-growing . . . in Great Britain, will not receive any particular impetus by their adoption. We agree with the best formed agricultural opinion that the future of British farming will be mainly in a stock-raising and dairying direction, accompanied by a large increase in small holdings for the[ir] production.74 The Conservatives’ increasing emphasis on smallholdings and their desire to play down the domestic impact of the corn duties and play up the importance of other agricultural tariffs/policies were closely related. The Conservative Party, through the framework of the tariff campaign, was, in effect, attempting to adjust to changes in the structure of the British agricultural market. Responding to pressure from foreign competition, this had shifted away from arable farming to mixed and dairy production. But although the process of change was underway and understood, it was neither complete nor accepted. The debate over free Colonial corn, and the importance attached to the 2s. corn duty, indicated how arable farmers – traditionally the most loyal sector of Conservative support – still influenced Conservative thinking. The Conservative debate over agricultural policy was thus in part at least an attempt to weigh and reconcile different interests within the agricultural sector. By the early twentieth century it had become clear as never before that British agriculture was not simply a tripartite structure consisting of landlords, farmers and labourers, but that there were regional and product differences to be taken into account as well. The political market had altered too. The enfranchisement of agricultural labourers, and their mobilization in and after 1906, coupled with the emergence of farming organizations less willing to accept the Conservative Party as ‘the farmers’ friend’ redrew the map of rural politics. The changing and complex political economy of the Edwardian Conservative Party’s debate on agricultural policy thus reflected the changing and increasingly complex structure it was supposed to address.

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VI The structure of British agriculture envisaged in the Conservative debate on agricultural tariffs and rural policy was by no means an attempt to turn the clock back to 1846. Equally the method of creating that structure was wholly in keeping with the innovative flavour of Edwardian political controversy. Of particular importance here was the role assigned to the state. In 1906 the Tariff Commission remarked that ‘many witnesses . . . have drawn attention to the great advantages which have followed to agriculture in foreign countries through the organization on a great scale of state departments with extensive powers’.75 By 1910 the Conservative Party had adopted a policy which implied bringing Britain into line with other nations in this area. Agricultural tariffs, and the range of supporting services necessary to support the Conservatives’ smallholdings schemes – rural credit banks, co-operatives, agricultural colleges76 – would have entailed extensive research, a large administrative machine, and a central authority endowed with quite wideranging powers and a large budget. Small wonder that by 1913 Lord Milner was telling Bonar Law ‘I like the idea of a big Land Department . . . [with] all the powers of interference, or imprint of Govt., which it is thought desirable to create’,77 the Conservatives’ plans would not have been feasible without such a department. This emphasis on the role of the state was in keeping with both the Conservative analysis of what was wrong with British agriculture and the underlying philosophy of the tariff campaign. According to Christopher Turnor, the decline of British agriculture was testimony to the fact that ‘generation after generation of politicians . . . in their belief in the soundness of Manchester doctrines were led to neglect agriculture’.78 As a result of this ‘lack of interest by the State’,79 a situation was seen to have arisen in which a whole section of British economic and social life had been placed under conditions of great hardship, causing dislocation and discontent in every echelon of rural society. Beginning with Chamberlain’s Glasgow proposals, and continuing through the work of the Tariff Commission and the evolution of the Conservatives’ smallholdings policy, the tariff campaign and the broader policy debates which it prompted held out the promise of reversing agricultural decline and defusing rural discontent across the board. This was to be achieved by the state abandoning its non-interventionist position and acting for ‘the improvement of agriculture as an industry . . . [and] giving assistance and encouragement to all those engaged in it’.80 The Conservative

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Party’s adoption of a range of agricultural tariffs, and their stated aim of developing a far-reaching agricultural policy, is a clear indication both of the intrinsic importance they attached to the rural economy and of their determination to reassure farmers that the Party was still their friend. But the Conservatives’ two general election defeats of 1910 induced severe doubts in the Party as to whether they could afford to continue with this approach. The basic problem was the ‘food tax’ cry. In and after 1910 even some of the most committed advocates of the tariff programme conceded that agricultural tariffs, especially the proposed corn duties, were an electoral incubus. Between December 1910 and January 1913 an intense internal party debate saw proponents and opponents of the food taxes fight to gain ascendancy. The story of this debate has been told in detail elsewhere.81 Suffice it to say here that the opponents of food taxes won a significant victory when the Party’s new leader, Andrew Bonar Law, announced in two key speeches, at Ashton-UnderLyne in December 1912 and at Edinburgh in January 1913, that the Conservatives, if elected to government, would introduce tariffs on imported foodstuffs only after a request from the Colonies and only after a second election to gain a specific mandate for such action. In terms of addressing the electorate at large, and especially the urban working classes, the logic of Bonar Law’s action in early 1913 was obvious. However, the decision to ‘postpone’ the food taxes made the Conservatives’ relationship with Britain’s farming interests difficult. Shelving food taxes did not mean abandoning tariff reform. Duties on imported manufactured goods remained central to Conservative policy, and the Party had to face the issue of whether farmers would accept a tariff regime which offered them no direct benefits and possibly some harm. The Conservatives had had ample warning of the farming community’s sensitivity over food taxes. Farming clubs and associations around the country had made it clear that agriculture had to share equally in any benefits that tariffs might bring.82 In 1910 this had caused the Conservative leadership some difficulty when they debated whether to continue advocating an import duty on Colonial corn. Dropping this duty diluted the ‘dear bread’ problem, but caused consternation in agricultural circles. Austen Chamberlain outlined a solution to the problem: he told Balfour, There may be a few parts of the country where the agriculturalists would like Colonial corn taxed, but the representatives which have

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come to see me on the subject come largely from county members who find the proposed tax on Colonial wheat unpopular with labourers and farmers. We grow so little wheat in these days that even the farmer in most parts of the country is to be reckoned a consumer rather than a producer of wheat.83 Food taxes in their broader aspect were to be retained, whilst the ‘dear loaf’ tax, insofar as it related to Colonial wheat, was to be jettisoned, thereby accommodating agricultural interests and electoral expediency in a subtle compromise. The proposed duty on Colonial wheat was discarded without major upset, but the compromise represented a significant retreat from the full tariff programme. In particular, the justification Austen Chamberlain produced for dropping the duty was that Britain no longer had a large wheat-producing sector, or, as The Outlook argued, it was ‘no use complaining of the lopsidical development of this country during the era of free imports . . . [or complaining that] Throughout the whole or greater part of that period the village has been ruthlessly sacrificed to the town’.84 Yet a central argument of both the farming community advocates of the full tariff programme had been that there was every need to complain about the rural–urban imbalance, and that the fall-off in British wheat production was bad not only for Britain’s farmers but for the country as a whole.85 That there was no major party upset was almost certainly due to the fact that the proposed 2s. duty on foreign corn and the broader range of food taxes on both foreign and Colonial meat, dairy produce, fruit and vegetables were retained. Nevertheless in October 1910 the burgeoning National Farmers’ Union underlined its commitment to obtaining a fair share of any tariff benefits,86 and Acland-Hood warned that ‘If we drop these [food] taxes we lose the counties.’87 The concerns prompted by the decision to go for ‘free Colonial corn’ were small beer compared to the alarums that greeted Bonar Law’s full-scale ‘postponement’ of the food taxes three years later. Following Bonar Law’s initial announcement at Ashton, Leo Amery warned Austen Chamberlain that, the speech unless re-explained . . . would seem to preclude all protection of any sort to British Agriculture. It . . . is essential to make clear that ‘food’ in the Ashton speech only referred to bread and meat in the ordinary sense of the food of the masses, and that we are not precluded from protective as well as preferential duties

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on barley and oats, fruit, hops, poultry and, I should like to add, dairy products. Without such a ‘re-explanation’, Amery argued, the Party would have no positive appeal to British, Irish and Dominion farmers.88 The question many Conservatives asked was whether it was politically feasible to ‘offer a policy which claims to be beneficial to national industries, and leave out of your policy the most ancient, the most extensive, the most important socially, and the least prosperous?’89

VII Summing up the developments that led to the ‘postponement’, Earl Crawford, the former Conservative Chief Whip, noted that although the immediate crisis had passed, ‘the agricultural difficulty will remain’.90 He was quite right. As soon as it became clear that the food taxes were to be shelved, Bonar Law received messages from a number of Conservative Party agricultural spokesmen indicating displeasure at the decision and warning that it would cause trouble with the farmers.91 The next few months saw evidence of significant farming discontent over the ‘postponement’. In mid-January the Lincolnshire Farmers’ Union provided Law with a copy of their resolution that they would ‘be no party to any changes in . . . fiscal policy that excludes Agriculture from its benefits’,92 and in the same month the NFU passed a similarly strongly worded resolution. In the autumn the Lincolnshire landowner and Conservative land ‘expert’ Christopher Turnor told Bonar Law’s parliamentary secretary that, ‘the farmers are beginning to feel generally . . . that, though they have suffered under free trade they have at all events been upon the same footing as all other industries: but that now their position will only be made worse by any measure of protection being granted to any of the other industries’. He also warned that ‘an important group of men, who really are Unionists, are about to start an organization for the purpose of inclining farmers throughout the country to vote against the Unionists’.93 This was the Farmers’ Tariff Union (FTU), which warned that it would ‘advise every farmer to abstain from taking part in the next Election unless the Conservative candidate has pledged himself to vote against any scheme of Tariff Reform that does not carry out the full policy of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’.94 Bonar Law received reassurance that Gilbert and the FTU were not

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representative of farming opinion, and that the NFU had distanced itself from FTU activities.95 The FTU seemed largely a Lincolnshire phenomenon, but it would be a mistake to see farming disgruntlement with the Conservatives as either confined to a specific area or short-lived.96 In January 1910 Bonar Law was warned by the Chairman of the Hop Growers’ Defence League, whose membership was drawn mainly from Kent, Sussex and Herefordshire, that, a storm is brewing, which may increase to a whirlwind, unless the position of the Unionist Party towards agriculture is shown to be quite satisfactory . . . To put the matter plainly, it will be necessary to give agriculture the benefit of some large scheme of betterment at one and the same time that manufacturers are given the benefit of a scheme of tariffs.97 Bonar Law heard similar complaints from North Devon, and Austen Chamberlain was lobbied by the Essex Farmers’ Association, whose leading spokesman also demanded that ‘agriculture should have . . . the [same] advantages as others’.98 What made the situation worse in 1913–14 were the Liberals’ ‘skilful attempts . . . to turn the farmers’99 through ground-level activism in the counties. In late October 1913 Steel-Maitland drew Bonar Law’s attention to developments in Northamptonshire, where ‘a Radical farmer’ had ‘captured’ the Chamber of Agriculture and was bringing motions to the CCA on matters of tenant compensation for disturbance and related questions. Steel-Maitland felt that on these issues, which the Land Campaign was also promoting, the CCA might fall into radical hands. Though he was ‘not by nature panicky’, he was ‘frightened at the prospects of the farmers being turned against us on yet another account’.100 The Conservatives’ desire to limit the damage caused by the ‘postponement’ and thwart Liberal attempts to sway the farming vote led to a frenetic policy debate. The most straightforward suggestion, to return to the direct tariff appeal of the full programme, was advanced in the Second Agricultural Report of the Tariff Commission, published in June 1914. According to the Tariff Commission, agricultural imports, especially of dairy produce, had risen markedly since the publication of their first report, and hence they contended that there was an even stronger case for a comprehensive agricultural tariff schedule of the kind they had laid out in 1906.101 A more subtle argument for a tariff appeal was

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that the ‘postponement’ formula – no tariffs on the ‘basic foodstuffs of the people’ – should be interpreted literally, in that cereals like barley and oats, and other items like hops, were not foodstuffs and it was thus possible to advocate tariffs on such goods without breaching the compromise.102 These arguments received strong support from many Conservatives, but the party hierarchy refused to consider them.103 Instead the Conservatives fell back on rate relief. Immediately Bonar Law’s decision to drop the food taxes became known, Conservative agricultural spokesmen began to press for a commitment on rates.104 Its necessity was urged by the Agricultural Committee of the Tariff Commission and the Party’s Land Policy Committee,105 and in November 1913, Bonar Law stated that revenues raised by industrial tariffs would indeed be used to fund rate relief on agricultural land.106 That the Conservatives were so concerned to appease farming opinion was understandable. In March 1913 one NFU representative pointed out to Austen Chamberlain that there were, ‘170 constituencies with under 500 majorities, which on a mean average of 250 votes, an average of only 125 . . . transferred is required to change these seats over to the other side, [and] slightly over half of these are Unionist & about 80 Government members’. Chamberlain’s correspondent concluded, ‘the agricultural vote is at present the main stay of Conservatism, [and] failure to retain . . . [it] must mean disaster’.107 Farmers turning Liberal seemed unlikely, but this was not the Conservatives’ main fear. In January 1913 one leading tariff campaigner told Austen Chamberlain that dropping the food taxes would be safe, because farmers would be ‘dead against’ the Land Campaign and would continue supporting Conservatives.108 In an apparently similar vein, another of Chamberlain’s correspondents stated that ‘I don’t think the farmers will readily turn against us’, but this individual also stressed that ‘in order to keep [the farmers] . . . as really helpful supporters we must have something to offer them, for there can be no doubt that they will strongly resent agriculture being sacrificed a second time in the interests of the manufacturing community’.109 The Conservatives’ concern was that disillusioned farmers would either abstain or not render the party full assistance. The ‘postponement’ seemed to many to signal that the Conservatives had opted for an ‘urban’ strategy, but the Conservatives worked hard to reassure farming opinion. Bonar Law’s speech to the NUCA in November 1913, promising rate relief to agriculture, went some way towards pacifying farmers,110 but they were not wholly

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satisfied. In January 1914 the General Secretary of the NFU was pressing Bonar Law for further concessions on local taxation, railway rates, issues relating to the break-up of estates, and on agricultural wages,111 and the Liberal Agricultural Holdings Bill in 1914 saw the Conservatives still desperate to demonstrate their sympathy with tenant farmers.112 As late as May 1914 Walter Long, who in 1912 had been sanguine about farming support, was still bemoaning the fact that the ‘postponement’ had alarmed and distressed many . . . farmers’.113 Neither the farmers’ confidence in the Conservative Party nor the Conservatives’ confidence in the farmers had been fully restored by the time the Great War broke out.

Notes (Place of publication Londonunless otherwise stated.) 1. Salisbury to Carnarvon, 8 October 1881, Carnarvon Papers, British Library, Add. MSS 60759, fos. 64–5. 2. See J.P.D. Dunbabin, Rural Discontent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1974) passim. 3. See A. Howkins, Poor Labouring Men (1986) pp. 57–61. 4. See E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism (1995) pp. 121–2 and also idem, ‘Radical Conservatism: The Electoral Genesis of Tariff Reform’, Historical Journal, vol. XXVIII, 1985, pp. 667–92. 5. See F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (1963), pp. 151–212. 6. For a contemporary statement of the problem from the point of view of a ‘straitened landlord’ see ‘Letters from Ruricola’ [Earl Carnarvon], National Review, vol. XIV, April 1884, vol. XXIII, January 1885, vol. XXVI, April 1886. For Carnarvon’s own problems, see A. Adonis, ‘The Survival of the Great Estates: Henry, 4th Earl of Carnarvon and his Dispositions in the 1880s’, Historical Research, vol. LXIV (1991) pp. 27–42. 7. Northcote, Diary, 20 June 1880, Iddesleigh Papers, 50063A, fos. 347–57. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. For a discussion of Conservative problems with this legislation, see P. Marsh, The Discipline of Popular Government (Brighton, 1978) pp. 29–30. 11. H. Chaplin to Salisbury, 7 July 1887, Salisbury Papers, Hatfield House. This Committee had probably existed for some time, but I have not found any earlier references to its activities. 12. In spite of intense lobbying the Committee was unable to force amendment to the Agricultural Holdings Act in 1890, and, in the same year, was

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13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

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further disappointed in its efforts to obtain regulation of cattle-ship loading. Chaplin to Salisbury, 7 July 1887, Salisbury Papers. The Agricultural Gazette, 30 November 1891, quoted in J.R. Fisher, ‘Public Opinion and Agriculture, 1875–1900’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 1972) p. 125. Chaplin to Salisbury, 9 December 1892, Salisbury Papers. Chaplin to Akers-Douglas, 26 December 1892, Akers-Douglas Papers, West Kent Record Office, U564 c 122/10. See A. Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: a Social History, 1850–1925 (1991) pp. 157–61. Ibid., p. 161. Balfour, Memorandum to Salisbury, n.d. June 1895, Salisbury Papers. Chaplin to Salisbury, 1 June 1895, Salisbury Papers. That this occurred as a result of the pressures described here is confirmed by Almeric Fitzroy’s memoirs. In February 1905, remarking on the question as to who was to succeed Walter Long at the Board of Agriculture, Fitzroy noted that ‘it was practically laid down in 1895 that the President of the Board of Agriculture should necessarily be in the Cabinet’, Sir Almeric Fitzroy, Memoirs of Sir Almeric Fitzroy (2 vols, 1923) I, p. 236 (my emphasis). For a contemporary account of this episode see C. Turnor, Land Problems and the National Welfare (1911). G.L. Courthope was MP for East Sussex, Chairman of the Central Chamber of Agriculture, and Chairman of various Conservative backbench committees dealing with agricultural questions. G.L. Courthope to A. Chamberlain, 6 February 1910, Austen Chamberlain Papers, Birmingham University Library, AC 8/5/9. Howkins, Rural England, p. 138. Ibid., esp. pp. 138–65. Chaplin to Salisbury, 9 December 1892, Salisbury Papers. Ibid. See J.H. Round, ‘The Protectionist Revival’, National Review, vol. CXLVIII, June 1895, pp. 497–511. Quoted in Fisher, ‘Public Opinion’, p. 249. Hamilton, Diary, 19 September 1881, in D. Bahlmann (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Hamilton (Oxford, 2 vols, 1976) I, p. 169. Edward Hamilton saw Salisbury’s sympathy for a Royal Commission as a product of his ‘coquetting’ with fair trade, Diary, 24 December 1885, ibid., II, p. 718. For the Royal Commission’s view of the condition of agriculture see the preamble to its Final Report, Cmnd. 4893. The Times, 30 December 1887, quoted in Fisher, ‘Public Opinion’, p. 765. Chaplin to Salisbury, 9 December 1892, Salisbury Papers. Middleton was the Conservative Party’s Chief Agent and played a decisive role in determining the electoral acceptability of statements by the Conservative leadership. J. Chamberlain to A. Balfour, 19 July 1892, Balfour Papers, British Library, Add. Mss 49773, fos. 53–4. Hamilton, Diary, 24 December 1884, Bahlmann (ed.), Hamilton Diary, II, pp. 755–6.

174 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 The Times, 7 November 1887. See A. Offer, Property and Politics (Cambridge, 1981) esp. pp. 162–200. Ibid., pp. 200–13. Salisbury at Trowbridge, 27 June 1894, reported in The Times, 28 June 1894. For a Liberal critique of the Act on these grounds, see for example D.F. Goddard, 20 April 1896, Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. XXXIX, cols 1300–02. For a general discussion of this problem see Offer, Property, chapter XIV. This was the main Liberal amendment as proposed by Sir Henry Fowler, 30 April 1896, Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. XL, c. 240. Ibid., cols 241–2. G. Whiteley, 20 April 1896, Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. XXXIX, cols 1327–8. For more details see Offer, Property, esp. pp. 221–40. J.L. Garvin, Imperial Reciprocity (1903), p. 84. Tariff Reform League, Speakers’ Handbook (5th edn, 1908) p. v. For a full discussion of the political economy of the tariff campaign, see Green, Crisis, pp. 159–266. A body of experts and businessmen established by Joseph Chamberlain to produce a ‘scientific tariff’. H. Chaplin, opening address to the Agricultural Committee of the Tariff Commission, n.d. July 1904, Tariff Commission Papers, LSE Library, TC6 1/2. W.A.S. Hewins to H. Chaplin, 22 January 1904, ibid., TC6 1/2. Chamberlain at Welbeck, 4 August 1904, reported in The Standard, 5 August 1904. J.L. Green, Agriculture and Tariff Reform (1904) p. 76; The Tariff Commission Report on Agriculture (1906), para. 188. In particular there was a great deal of pressure for the Party to propose duties on imported hops – for example, see F. Neame (Hop Farmer of East Kent), evidence to the Agricultural Committee of the Tariff Commission, 10 January 1905, Tariff Comission Papers, LSE Library, TC3 1/181. J.P. Hughes to T. Davies (Secretary, Cirencester Conservative Association), 21 December 1909, Tariff Comission Papers, LSE Library, TC8 2/18. W.A.S. Hewins, Memorandum of conversations with A.J. Balfour of 1, 3, 4 November 1907, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49779, fos 117–28. Chamberlain at Welbeck, 4 August 1904, reported in The Standard, 5 August 1904. E.E. Williams, ‘Mr. Chaplin’s Kite’, The National Review, vol. CC (October 1900) pp. 227–8. Ibid., p. 224. These duties did not contravene free trade precepts because they were non-protective. Hewins to Balfour, 11 February 1907, Balfour Papers, 49779, fos. 37–40. Tariff Commission, Memorandum on the Report on Answers to the Inquiry Form issued by the Agricultural Committee, n.d. October(?) 1904, Tariff Commission Papers, TC 1/81. Ibid.

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64. The only criticism made by those who responded positively was that the duty should be higher, perhaps 10–15 per cent ad valorem. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Sixty-six of the respondents to the Tariff Commission Questionnaire rested approval of Chamberlain’s proposals on this assumption. 67. J.W. Dennis, evidence to the Agricultural Committee of the Tariff Commission, 14 November 1904, Tariff Commission Papers, TC6 1/3. Dennis was a farmer, a fruit and potato broker and a merchant, chiefly in agricultural products. 68. Offer, Property and Politics, pp. 213–14. 69. Tariff Commission, inquiry, para. 88. 70. At the City Carlton Club in March 1910 the Conservative MP Major E.F. Coates noted that, during the January election campaign, ‘in one place he was told to say nothing about such taxes; in another, to declare that no duty would be put on Colonial corn; and in a third, that a 1s. duty would be placed on that corn’, quoted in W.E. Dowding, The Tariff Reform Mirage (1913), p. 108. 71. The fact that Austen Chamberlain accepted this pronouncement without demur is an indication of its largely non-controversial status, for Chamberlain was perhaps the leading senior advocate of a positive agricultural policy. For his views, see his correspondence with Balfour on the subject cited below. 72. This was the approach adopted by W.A.S. Hewins when in 1900 he addressed the Lincolnshire Farmers’ Union, one of the most militant arable farming organizations in the country. Hewins told his audience that there was no prospect of a return to high corn duties, and the focus of his speech was the revenue potential of tariffs. Hewins’ arguments are outlined in Dowding, Tariff Reform Mirage, p. 107. 73. For a discussion of this issue, see Green, Crisis, pp. 215–18. 74. J.L. Green, Agriculture and Tariff Reform (1904) p. 76. 75. Tariff Commission Report on Agriculture, para. 359. 76. See Green, Crisis, pp. 216–18 for a brief discussion of Conservative arguments for these innovations. 77. Milner to Bonar Law, 24 October 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 30/3/50. 78. Turnor, Land Problems, p. 285. 79. H. Tremayne, Protection and the Farmer (1903) p. 60. 80. Milner to Bonar Law, 24 October 1913, Bonar Law Papers, House of Lords Record Office 30/3/50. 81. See in particular Green, Crisis of Conservatism, pp. 274–80. 82. See ibid., p. 190. 83. Chamberlain to Balfour, 9 March 1910, Balfour Papers, Add MSS 49736, fos. 69–82. 84. Ibid., and ‘Mr Balfour and Colonial Wheat’, anonymous editorial, The Outlook, no. 576, 23 April 1910. 85. For a rehearsal of this argument, see Green, Crisis, pp. 208–9. 86. See The Times, 6 October 1910. 87. Acland-Hood to Sandars, 6 November 1910, J.S. Sandars Papers, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Hist. c 762, fos. 6–11. 88. Amery to Chamberlain, 27 December 1912, 5 January 1913, Austen

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Chamberlain Papers, AC1O/3/1, 9/5/9. 89. C.A. Vince to Amery, 4 January 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 28/2/32. 90. Crawford, Diary, 19 January 1913, in J. Vincent (ed.), The Crawford Papers: the Journals of David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford and 10th Earl of Balcarres (1871–1940) during the Years 1892–1940 (Manchester, 1984), pp. 304–6. 91. Bathurst to Law, 12 January 1913, and C.S. Parker to Law, 16 January 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 28/2/55, 28/2/65. 92. H.W. Palmer to Law, 16 January 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 28/2/66. 93. C. Turnor to J. Baird, 28 September 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 30/2/32. 94. B. Gilbert to G. Lloyd, 2 December 1913, George Lloyd Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge, GLLD 16/15. 95. A. Weigall to Law, 17 January 1914, Bonar Law Papers, 31/2/47. 96. For this interpretation, see M. Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886–1914 (Edinburgh, 1990) pp. 143–59. 97. A. Bannister to Law, 10 January 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 28/2/45. 98. C. Wing-Gray at a meeting of Essex Farmers and Employers, 14 April 1913, East Anglian Daily Times, 15 April 1913, enclosed with Chamberlain to J. Farrow and the Essex Farmers’ Association, n.d. April 1913, Austen Chamberlain papers, AC9/5/20. 99. Steel-Maitland, Memorandum on the Land Question, n.d. November(?) 1913, Steel-Maitland Papers, GD193/119/5/139–43. 100. Steel-Maitland to Law, 28 October 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 30/3/62 (my emphasis). 101. Tariff Commission Memorandum MM53, Second Report of the Agricultural Committee, 22 June 1914, Tariff Commission Papers, TC1/8/3. 102. For this suggestion, see, for example, H. Page-Croft to Law, 8 November 1913, R. Hunt to Law, 26 March 1914, Bonar Law Papers, 30/4/17, 32/1/68. 103. See Page-Croft to Law, 11 November 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 30/4/26. 104. Bathurst to Law, 12 January 1913, A. Colefax to Law, 15 January 1913, Bonar Law Papers, 28/2/55, 28/2/62. 105. See Tariff Commission Agricultural Committee, Minutes, 22 April 1913, Draft Memorandum on Agricultural Rates, Tariff Commission Papers 2/2/2. The Tariff Commission called for agricultural land to be taxed on only one quarter of its rateable value, with an estimated cost to the Exchequer of £1.9 million. See ‘The Budget and Agriculture’, TC Memorandum, MM52, 15 May 1914. For the Land Policy Committee’s position, see ‘Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider the Land Policy of the Unionist Party’, n.d. August 1913, Milner Papers, MS Milner Dep. 40, fos. 91–183. 106. Law at NUCA Conference, 13 November 1913, NUCA Conference Minutes, CPA, NUA 2/2/4. 107. S. Hole to Chamberlain, 24 March 1913, Austen Chamberlain Papers, AC9/5/37. 108. F. Leverton Harris to Chamberlain, 4 January 1913, Austen Chamberlain Papers, AC9/5/33. 109. A. Colefax to Chamberlain, 14 January 1913, Austen Chamberlain Papers, AC9/5/14 (my emphasis).

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110. For this view see Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, p. 144. 111. H.W. Palmer to Law, 12 January 1914, Bonar Law Papers, 31/2/32. 112. See Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, p. 144. Fforde’s reference to this episode in 1914 partially contradicts his view that the Conservative leadership were not concerned about hostile farming opinion after October 1913. 113. Long to Law, 6 May 1914, Bonar Law Papers, 32/3/13–16.

7 Agricultural Policy and the National Farmers’ Union, 1908–1939 Jonathan Brown

In 1901 E.H. Howard addressed a meeting of farmers in Lincolnshire, one of the events that was to lead to the formation of the Lincolnshire Farmers’ Union in 1904, and thence to the creation of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) four years later. Howard told his audience that, with economic conditions continuing to be adverse, especially for arable farmers, it was time for them to combine and defend their interests. ‘We have a perfect right’, he said, ‘to demand with the rest of the nation’s subjects a living wage. We must co-operate into a united body called the British Farmers’ Union . . .’.1 The new union’s role would be to influence the political world. Thus the purpose of the NFU was clearly defined. The NFU was to be a political campaigning organization from the outset, a creature of the modern world of the twentieth century, in which governments were coming to develop policies covering almost all aspects of life. The Union stated that ‘its principal object is so to influence legislation and the administration of the laws, both national and local, as to protect the farmer against exploitation and to promote the prosperity of his industry’.2 The Union’s means of fulfilling its ambitions were a mixture of the old and new. Many of its early efforts went into the lobbying of members of Parliament and parliamentary candidates with its parliamentary programme. It appointed a political lobbyist in 1913.3 The parliamentary programme was fairly modest in its ambitions, in line with the farmers’ concerns and agricultural policies inherited from the late-nineteenth century. Parliamentarians were thus asked to support increased grants under the Agricultural Rating Act of 1896, increased Exchequer grants for education and roads, amendments to the Agricultural Holdings Acts, and the ending of ‘preferential’ railway rates for foreign agricultural produce.4 178

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The NFU declared its neutrality in party politics. All political parties were to be lobbied. In 1913 the Parliamentary Committee proposed that all candidates should be asked to give a pledge that ‘on all agricultural questions they will act independently and free from party’, and that they would join an all-party committee of MPs watching over the interests of agriculture. ‘There should be a great effort on the part of the Farmers’ union to put a stop to the attempt that is being made to put us between the two parties. We want first a party in the House independent of either party.’5 The theme of political neutrality was rehearsed with regularity throughout the years. The Union’s President, E.W. Langford, told the Glamorgan branch in 1926: ‘the Union had no politics. The moment it became a political organization . . . it would begin to decay and go down.’6 This was to lead the Union down some blind alleys, notably the attempt to establish an all-party agriculture committee in the House of Commons, the direct sponsorship of MPs, and, worse, the chimera of an independent agrarian party. The Union’s constitution included the aim ‘to secure the representation of farmers by practical men in the Legislative and Administrative Councils of the Kingdom’.7 Like other groups that had come before it, the NFU wanted to see agriculture represented in Parliament by real farmers rather than the self-appointed ‘farmers’ friends’ from among the gentry members. A parliamentary fund was opened in 1909. When the Executive Committee agreed to open this fund, one of the members urged that ‘the time had come for the Union to look for direct representation in parliament’.8 The theme was repeated in the following years. Colin Campbell told the annual general meeting in 1917 that they must get ‘some direct representation in Parliament at the earliest possible moment’.9 This was essential if the enhanced standing of agriculture as a national industry was to be retained after the war. The aftermath of the repeal of the Agriculture Act of 1920 led to a resurgence of interest in parliamentary representation, which reached its peak in the general election of 1922. As the election approached, union leaders continually reminded their members in the branches that the government’s about-turn on its agricultural policy made it imperative for agriculturalists to want a greater say in ‘shaping of their destinies by Parliament’.10 The Union’s efforts met with some success, for, of seven union members directly supported as candidates, four were elected: F.N. Blundell (Ormskirk), Robert Bruford (Wells), J.Q. Lamb (Stone, Staffs.) and E.W. Shepperson (Leominster).11 However, the fact that the elected members stood as Conservatives, whereas the unsuccessful

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candidates had stood as agrarian independents illustrates the central problem faced by the Union in supporting candidates at general elections.12 Other national issues were bound to overshadow agriculture, even in the most rural of constituencies.

I After this election the NFU’s parliamentary ambitions became more modest. The attempt to form an all-party agriculture committee in the Commons fizzled out, and enthusiasm for direct independent representation declined. The Union continued to sponsor parliamentary candidates, but they were almost invariably Conservatives. The NFU edged into an unofficial alliance with the Conservative Party, while at the same time retaining its officially independent stance.13 However, many in the Union continued to cling on to the idea of an independent party. County branches would send resolutions to headquarters on these lines throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the central committees would politely decline to take action.14 At the 1931 election the Union formally passed a resolution that it would not be supporting the ‘Agricultural Party’, a loose confederation of NFUsponsored MPs and their Conservative supporters in the Commons which had existed since 1922, but which was effectively killed off by this resolution. In 1939 there were still those pressing for independent candidates, while the Union’s headquarters declared itself unable to recommend political action of that nature.15 Essentially the question of direct parliamentary representation was a side issue. The NFU’s early successes owed more to its own organization and the drive of its leadership. The influence of the Lincolnshire Farmers’ Union was strong. Many of the National Union’s early leaders came from the Lincolnshire Union, in particular Colin Campbell. Campbell had taken over from E.H. Howard as chairman of the Lincolnshire Union and subsequently became first President of the NFU, serving until 1918. He set the course that was followed by the NFU in its early years. He ensured that the membership of the Union was open only to those who carried on the business of farming and occupied at least two acres of land, whether tenants or owner-occupiers, one of the rules taken on from the Lincolnshire Union to the National Union. The landowners were not admitted as members on the grounds that they were already well-represented in Parliament. Equally, no agricultural workers were allowed as members, the Union quickly becoming a voice of the employers in all issues

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relating to wages and conditions. This precise definition of its membership gave the NFU a cohesiveness that many earlier farmers’ protection organizations had lacked.16 It created also a tendency on the part of the Union to see the farmer’s interests as synonymous with those of agriculture and rural life generally. Campbell also directed the Union’s energies into building up membership and in developing a range of policies that would both appeal to his membership and be regarded as sound by government. Numbers of members grew rapidly. From 10 000 in 1909, six months after the Union was formed, membership had reached 22 000 by 1916. It was already a national organization. By 1918, only Cornwall, Caernarvon, Cumberland, Durham, Merioneth and Westmorland were without county branches.17 Although its membership was a small proportion of the total number of farmers, it was enough for the Union to be taken seriously by government and accepted as representative of farming opinion, in preference to the longer-established chambers of agriculture. The Union’s emergence as a pressure group had been quite precocious during the years before the First World War. Within the first two years of its existence, the NFU established official contact with civil servants and ministers at the Board of Agriculture. The issues raised included rural education, tenure, the Fertilizers Act and compensation for livestock slaughtered under contagious diseases regulations.18 Although apparently modest, the importance of these for the development of the fledgling organization cannot be underestimated. These issues, rather than tariff reform or subsidy, were the stuff of agricultural politics in these years. The burden of local taxation and similar matters were of immediate concern to farmers, and the Union was thus able to attract their support as members. The NFU credentials with government as a responsible body were also being established. When the First World War came, the Union was automatically taken into the confidence of the government in the operation of the food production policies. The Union had to lead some of its members against their natural inclinations. It supported the War Agricultural Executive committees, even though farmers were basically very wary of any state interference.19

II The NFU was accepted as a representative body by the government, but it had little influence on the development of the broader trend in policy during the First World War. The question of government

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control was raised in the Union’s meetings early on in the war. The Union’s Organising Secretary reported to the Executive Committee in October 1914 that ‘we have absolutely failed to get a guarantee’ of government support in return for meeting the demand for additional acreage of grain. Many were not satisfied, and a motion was brought to the Union’s annual general meeting of 1915 disapproving of the action of the government in asking farmers to grow more wheat and at the same time refusing to guarantee a minimum price of 35s. a quarter. The executive of the Union, apparently defensive about its relationship with the government, replied that the government had not heeded the advice of a departmental committee to which the Union had been invited to contribute. The motion criticizing the government was lost. The Union’s debates and representations to government made little difference to the development of policy. The Corn Production Act of 1917, which introduced guaranteed minimum prices, resulted more from debates within government between those, such as Lords Milner and Selborne, who wanted to intervene, modernize and reconstruct agriculture, and those prepared to retain free markets.20 The Union’s reaction to the Act was entirely favourable. Even the minimum wage, later to be a bone of contention, was accepted. The Executive Meeting in March 1917 passed a motion of thanks to the government for introducing its new policy and ‘the principle of minimum prices, accompanied by a wage, which will restore that confidence, and give that guarantee and security for the future, too long withheld, and will go a long way to remove the indifference shown in recent years to the importance of agriculture . . .’.21 The Union was convinced that the war would bring agriculture greater prominence than it had enjoyed before 1914, and that it would retain that place. However, if farming had been recognized as an essential national industry during the war, then the question remained in peace time as to the extent to which it should continue to be so treated. The issues of government support for agriculture had been raised and were to remain in contention. The NFU, having established itself with some authority, was provided with the opportunity to keep agriculture’s case on the political agenda. Equally, the Union was faced with challenges, for its problem was to decide quite what line it should be pursuing. According to the critique of Self and Storing, the Union was weak and divided. Its ‘vacillating strategy during the inter-war period was uncomfortable and frustrating’, although it did achieve some modest success.22 The Union appeared not to have a concerted line on protection or subsidy. The reality was

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more complicated. In the first place, the prevailing philosophy in politics in the 1920s remained in favour of free trade. Tariff reform had shot its bolt before the First World War.23 For the farmers’ union, therefore, promotion of tariffs was not going to get anywhere. When its Parliamentary Committee was asked in 1917 to amend the parliamentary programme to include tariff reform, it was not thought advisable to take action.24 All sections of the Union recognized this political fact. Resolutions before the Union’s committees about tariffs were rare before the mid-1920s, and they were not given support when they did appear. The Prime Minister underlined this political fact in 1923, telling a deputation from the Union that public opinion prevented the use of protection as an effective means of giving support to agriculture.25 However, as the depression in agriculture deepened and dissatisfaction with the government grew in 1927, duties on foreign produce were proposed increasingly in resolutions sent up to headquarters from county branches. The Union did formally adopt the proposition that there should be a duty on malting barley. In general it remained cautious. It was left for the government to change its policy. A second feature in the development of the Union’s attitudes was the strongly held feelings against state direction among farmers. They disliked government control when it was in force during the First World War. They resented the government’s efforts to increase the arable acreage, regarding the war as but a temporary aberration in the normal course of events. They objected to the penalties for ‘bad farming’. The Union’s meetings received more motions on the fixed maximum prices, the ploughing and cultivation orders and above all the minimum wages, which irritated farmers beyond measure, than they did on minimum prices and guarantees.26 Feelings against ‘farming from Whitehall’ continued to run high throughout the 1920s and 1930s. A resolution on milk prices adopted by one of the NFU branches could thus be presented emotively: ‘We are now under Government control and we ask the Government to help us.’27 A.F. Cooper notes that many of those who became leaders in the Union, such as R.R. Robbins and T.H. Ryland, were themselves ‘union fundamentalists’, convinced that farming would serve its own business best if unfettered by government interference, and they almost had to be prised out of office when changes in attitude came in the 1930s.28 However, they were reflecting the views of a considerable body of farming opinion. Even when relations with the government were reaching a particularly low point in 1926–7, the leadership was

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holding its membership behind it. Resolutions submitted from the branches to headquarters regularly congratulated the leadership on its handling of affairs. It was not until the introduction of the Agricultural Marketing Act in 1931–2 that serious divergences of opinion between centre and branches began to appear. These anti-statist convictions were at the heart of the farmers’ dilemma. They wanted the government to do something about agriculture, to come up with a strong policy that would give farming the recognition they thought it was due. But they did not want the government to do too much, to have control, and especially not to control the rate of wages. The NFU in the 1920s tended, therefore, to present a neutral statement of the alternatives facing government: treat agriculture purely as an economic issue with no involvement from government, or support agriculture wholeheartedly on the grounds of social policy or national defence. The Union was not inclined to press a case for either very firmly. For its part, the government’s line could be just as unsatisfactory, assuring farmers of its desire to support them on the one hand, and on the other telling them to look to themselves for their own salvation. ‘We look to the agricultural community itself to find a remedy for agricultural ills’, Lord Bledisloe, Parliamentary Secretary of State to the Ministry of Agriculture, told the Gloucestershire branch of the NFU.29 However, the government had no particular incentive to do much about agriculture in the 1920s. It took an international economic crisis, a determined Minister of Agriculture and the anticipation of war to bring about a major change of approach in the 1930s.

III As the First World War was drawing to its end, and immediately afterwards, the NFU was pressing for clear statements of government policy towards agriculture.30 It organized a conference in March 1919, chaired by the Earl of Selborne, as a public demonstration of a strong body of agricultural opinion, not merely the Union’s own interest, that farming should be treated with ‘fairness’ by the government.31 One of the points stressed by the Union was that there should be a ‘permanent’ settlement for agriculture. What the settlement might be, perhaps, was less important than its permanence. Lloyd George took up the call in a speech at Caxton Hall, London, in October 1919: ‘We must go forward . . . We must have a settled policy with regard to agriculture.’32 It was a theme that was to recur throughout the interwar

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years. Union members remained unconvinced that the government was presenting agriculture with a settled policy, and continued to send resolutions to headquarters about this until the late 1930s. Politicians regularly declared that their intention was to produce a settled policy. Lord Bledisloe, when he was Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture in 1924, told the Gloucestershire branch of the Union, ‘We have suffered from an utter lack of purpose and aim in agricultural policy . . . You need fear none of that from the present administration.’33 The Minister of Agriculture, addressing the Essex Farmers’ Union, made much of the same thing, claiming that the government was looking for agreement on the ‘main lines of policy that might reasonably be expected to be durable and permanent’, for ‘the experience of four years ago tends . . . to emphasise the wisdom . . . of securing . . . permanent agreement’.34 The President of the Union was stressing the same line in published letters.35 The NFU dilemmas about state support for agriculture were revealed clearly over the Agriculture Act of 1920 and its repeal. Following the report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture of 1919, the government seemed to have made up its mind in the debate over intervention and reconstruction of agriculture. The Agriculture Act of 1920, offered permanent support to agriculture through guaranteed minimum prices for wheat and oats, in continuance of the provisions of the Corn Production Act of 1917. Prices were to be supported through deficiency payments, and four years’ notice were to be given of termination of these payments. The NFU felt encouraged that this was going to form the settled policy of which Lloyd George had spoken and accepted the government’s belief that increased arable production was in the national interest. The Union’s Council declared that the Act ‘establishes agriculture more than ever as an industry in which the Nation has a definite stake . . .’, and the union pressed the government to speed the Bill’s passage to the statute book.36 In the spring of 1920, even as the Bill was before Parliament, prices of agricultural produce started to fall.37 With the ink barely dry on the Royal Assent, the government decided to repeal part I of the Act, dealing with guaranteed prices, on grounds of the potential cost to the Exchequer. The Union’s reaction appears at first sight quite extraordinary. One has to look twice at the Union’s minute book to realize that there is more than the slightest mention of the event. There is a brief record on 7 June 1921 that the government had informed the NFU of its decision to repeal and had invited the Union’s leaders to meet the Minister. On 22 June the Council congratulated the President on his

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handling of negotiations with the Ministry.38 Thereafter, the section of the legislation concerned with the Agricultural Wages Board takes up most of the attention of the union committees. The farmer’s dislike of state control was coming to the fore, making the support for the passage of the Act seem perhaps more the divergence from usual form. Edmund Penning-Rowsell argues that the brief records in the minute book obscure the hard, secret bargaining to persuade the government to buy the farmers off with generous payments for the crop of 1921, and greater freedom in wage negotiations.39 The Union found itself in a remarkably strong position, as the government, anxious to keep to the financial limits set by the Treasury, sought an agreement to break its promises to farmers. Having extracted as much as they could from the government, the Union had to promote the agreed settlement to the public and its members. The Act, which had been welcomed in union council a few months previously, was now being dismissed. ‘Part I of the Act is not a farmer’s measure’, declared the Farmer and Stockbreeder, which tended to act as mouthpiece for the NFU.40 At the same time the Union stuck to the argument rehearsed since the closing days of the war, that the farmers had not sought price support, and that it was up to the government to decide whether it wanted to maximize agricultural production. For the farmers’ part, they were quite happy to adapt to the market, provided they were given complete economic freedom.41 A third approach used by the Union was that this episode demonstrated its own value. ‘If the placing of the Corn Production Act on the Statute book taught thousands of farmers the need for organisation to protect their interests, it is safe to say that the Government’s abandonment of the Act . . . will teach thousands more that the Farmers’ Union is a necessity to their industry.’42 In the immediate aftermath of the repeal of the Corn Production Act, the Union campaigned vigorously to keep farmers on its side and to boost its own membership. Union leaders went out to address the branches. H. German, the NFU vice-president, went to a number of branches sounding optimistic about the future for farming. Others would capitalize on the general distaste among farmers for wage controls. The Union certainly seemed to succeed in convincing farmers of its value. Membership was reported to the annual general meeting in 1920 as having reached 76 000. It had reached 99 000 by 1923.43 By then the Union’s Yearbook could declare: ‘It is safe to conclude that the farmers of England and Wales realise that today the National Farmers’ Union stands alone as their representative organization func-

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tioning nationally and on a democratic basis.’44 This growth was in contrast to the experience of other agricultural organizations. The rise of the National Farmers’ Union was recognized as one factor in the decline in membership experienced by the Royal Agricultural Society of England in the later 1920s.45 The Union’s growth continued relatively untroubled by the effects of economic depression. From 106 000 in 1927, membership had reached 112 000 in 1930, and 131 000 by 1939.46 With growth continuing in this way while numbers of farmers were declining, the efforts of the Union were clearly paying off in some way. The NFU owed a good deal of its success in recruiting members to its ability to convince farmers that it was addressing the issues that were of greatest immediate concern. It ‘had served its members and the farming community as a whole very well indeed’, the Chairman of the Cirencester branch told his annual general meeting in 1924. He ‘did not know what the price of milk would have been had it not been for the NFU or even what the Agricultural Wages Act would have been like’. Here were two of the major issues that were uppermost in the concerns of farmers, and which occupied the attention of the NFU in the 1920s.47 The Union’s strength was based upon its administrative organization, with its committees dealing with those subjects of real concern to farmers, such as milk, livestock and labour. These committees were able to receive resolutions from county branches and forward them to the central executive. The whole added up to an effective means of communication between farmers in the counties and the central administration, and from there, possibly, to the government. The Union was also able to act effectively on behalf of farmers in negotiations over such matters as milk prices. After the repeal of the Agriculture Act, James Donaldson, Union President, told farmers at Devizes that the condition of agriculture was not rosy, but ‘if they concentrated on the small things which would bring immediate help to the industry, they would get relief’. The bigger issues should be left to parliamentary activity.48 A great deal of the union’s efforts at this time were directed in this way.

IV Whatever strength the NFU had gained in bargaining with the government over the repeal of the Agriculture Act had largely gone by the mid-1920s.49 Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister from 1923, had a firm aversion to the National Farmers’ Union.50 Relations between union and government descended at times into acrimony during the next

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few years. Baldwin regarded the Union as narrowly selfish and unable to make a good case for government to pay attention to agriculture. For its part, the Union thought the government was indecisive about policy. Deputations to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Agriculture in the autumn of 1923 sought to elicit positive statements from the government.51 Baldwin’s proposal to introduce a subsidy of £1 per acre for arable cultivation, made during the campaign for the general election of December 1923, was regarded by the farming world as too vague to be of value.52 When the government came up with a proposal for an agricultural conference ‘to consider what measures, if any, are necessary either by the state or by the agricultural industry itself, or by both in concert: (1) to maintain and (2) to increase the area of arable land in England and Wales’, the Farmer and Stockbreeder described the move as ‘not so much an agricultural policy as a search for an agricultural policy’.53 The conference was not welcomed with open arms by the NFU, although some branches of the Union were more inclined to favour it.54 The Union suspected it would be a timewasting exercise talking about agricultural problems when firm action by the government, including subsidies or tariffs, was needed. A sharp, public exchange of letters ensued between the President of the Union, T.H. Ryland, and the Minister of Agriculture, Edward Wood. The Minister complained that the NFU attitude was unhelpful: ‘Your letters . . . suggest, firstly, that apart from direct Government assistance, there is nothing which the industry can do to secure an increased production and improve its own economic position, an assumption I find myself unable to accept . . .’.55 Baldwin’s view of rural England was paternalistic. He was prepared to offer support to agriculture as a means of introducing greater social stability into the countryside. In his election address in 1924 he summed up his views: ‘I regard it as vital that the great basic industry of agriculture should be not merely preserved, but restored to a more prosperous condition as an essential balancing element in the economic and social life of the country.’ Alongside his proposal for a subsidy to arable farming was the proposal that there should be a minimum wage for labourers of 30s. per week.56 At the same time, it was not for the government to act as a cradle for farming. Others in the Conservative government took a less idyllic view of country life, and were inclined towards promoting the modernization of agriculture without subsidy, more through improved business structure and marketing. The modernizers had the ascendancy by the time a White Paper on agriculture was published in 1926.57

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The White Paper was a great disappointment to many in farming. It declared that the government ‘have come to the definite conclusion that they cannot support or advocate’ any of the various types of subsidy that had been proposed for agriculture. In the months following this, government spokesmen re-emphasized the virtues of self-help on the farmers’ part.58 ‘Subsidies or other direct assistance to agriculture appear to have sunk below the political horizon’, commented the Farmer and Stockbreeder.59 The NFU’s response was rather muted. Addressing the Glamorgan branch, the President, E.W. Langford, said ‘He was not going to blame the Government for that White Paper, but he was going to charge them with wanton delay in producing it.’60 The Union’s branches were far less complaisant, and a number of resolutions came into headquarters expressing anger and dismay. Lancashire, for example, submitted a resolution that ‘We fail to understand the announcement that no subsidies can be granted by the Government when it is already granting subsidies to other industries.’ However, these resolutions were generally set aside by the union’s General Purposes Committee, as it felt unable to take action ‘in view of the declaration of Government policy’.61 The Union’s President, meanwhile, was left complaining about the government’s broken promises.62 One of the problems for the NFU in these years was that, having supported the repeal of the Agriculture Act, it was difficult to change course and start campaigning for subsidies. At the same time there remained that suspicion of ‘farming from Whitehall’. Talk of minimum wages had raised the spectre of government controls, with no commercial benefit to farmers. In February 1924 the Union’s Labour Committee resolved to place on record its conviction that as long as the industry is exposed to the competition of unrestricted imports . . . then in the absence of any guarantee to the farmer of prices covering his costs of production, any attempt to control by statute wages and hours of employment or methods of cropping and cultivation, thereby artificially increasing costs of production, must of necessity result in diminished production and reduced employment.63 Freedom from control of wages continued to be the Union’s main demand into the mid-1920s. Even so, the Union was gradually moving towards greater support for guaranteed minimum prices. The subject of subsidy had been raised in the exchange of letters between

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the Union’s President and the minister in November–December 1924. In the period that preceded the publication of the White Paper, the Union was presenting subsidy more openly as one of the options, if not quite taking a firm line in its favour. As depression in farming grew worse during 1926 and 1927, the attractions of subsidy became greater. Resolutions came to the Union’s headquarters from county branches in increasing numbers, calling for the introduction of subsidies, the application of the Safeguarding of Industries Act to agriculture, and even, from Oxford, for the Agriculture Act of 1920 to be re-enacted.64 None of this got anywhere. The Safeguarding of Industries Act was not extended to agriculture, nor were other subsidies or guarantees introduced. The Union’s leadership, meanwhile, retained the confidence of the rank and file in the counties, which continued to express support for the Union’s position against the government.

V The international economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash in 1929 brought renewed pressure on farmers as world market prices fell. The price of wheat fell by a half between 1929 and 1931, beef by about 30 per cent. The county branches of the NFU set about mobilizing opinion to bring about changes in policy. There were mass meetings, such as one held at Salisbury in April 1930, to draw the attention of the government and electorate to ‘the serious Crisis in Agriculture’.65 Changes did come, but not immediately. Relationships with Baldwin’s government continued to be becalmed. It was not until 1931–2 that the National government abandoned free trade. Proposals for tariffs appeared to be what the Union had wanted. In February 1932 the Parliamentary Press and Publicity Committee recorded that ‘the introduction of a scheme of tariffs including agricultural produce within its remit was to be welcomed’. There was more they could wish for. The Committee was concerned that meat was not included in the scheme for tariffs, whereas feeding stuffs were. The proposed form for imperial preference, based on deduction from the general 10 per cent tariff, rather than making an additional levy on non-empire produce, was not to the Committee’s liking either.66 This initial caution was justified in that the subsequent course of trade agreements and imperial preference for industrial goods and agricultural commodities limited the effect of tariffs for British farmers. Better news for farmers came with the reintroduction of guaranteed

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prices under the Wheat Act of 1932. Arable farmers were offered a ‘standard price’ of 10s. per cwt, to be underwritten by a levy imposed on all wheat flour delivered from the mills.67 Before free trade was abandoned the government had pursued marketing reform as a means of assisting agriculture, and here the union found itself wrong-footed. Baldwin’s government had started to take an interest in the restructuring of marketing as a means of enabling farmers to help themselves out of their difficulties, and of promoting an efficient agricultural industry. The Agricultural Credits Act of 1928 was regarded as an initial step. The NFU showed little interest. After all co-operative marketing had, at that time, made little impression in British agriculture. When the new Labour government, which took office in 1929, took up agricultural marketing as a means of alleviating agriculture’s problems the Union was hostile. For the leadership of the NFU the Agricultural Marketing Bill introduced by Dr Christopher Addison, the Minister of Agriculture, in 1931 represented the worst of all worlds, raising fears of state control and direction, without offering farmers real financial benefit. The second piece of legislation introduced by this government, the Land Utilization Bill, was seen as an even worse example of Whitehall interference. Some of Addison’s remarks tended to add fuel to the NFU fears.68 At first the union had a fairly united view against the marketing Bill. Even when it was revised, 34 of the county branches remained opposed to it, including three (Kent, Leicestershire and Warwickshire) which had originally supported it.69 However, after the Act was passed in 1931, while the executive resolved to maintain its opposition, it soon faced demands from county branches to change that policy and investigate the setting up of a milk marketing scheme.70 In January 1932 the Somerset branch brought a resolution to the annual general meeting of the union that the NFU should approach the Ministry with a view to setting up a reorganization commission for milk. This was passed, against the wishes of the leadership, by a vote of 97 to 94.71 The resolve of headquarters began to crack shortly afterwards. The Potatoes Committee in February resolved ‘that this Committee proceed to draft a scheme under the Agricultural Marketing Act for ultimate submission to the Ministry’. This was in response to the announcement by the Minister that the government was prepared to appoint a reorganization commission if desired by the potato growers. The Union’s Council accepted the Committee’s resolution on 18 February.72 The Union’s change of heart over agricultural marketing owed a lot

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to overtures from the Ministry. The appointment of Walter Elliot as Minister of Agriculture in 1932 ushered in a new phase in relations between government and union. Elliot wished to bring farming into partnership with the government, and thus to reform the structure of the industry.73 He set out to win the farmers, in particular their union, to his government’s side. To do this he first had to convince the NFU that the Agricultural Marketing Act did not mean ‘farming from Whitehall’, and to involve the Union in the formulation and administration of policy. He succeeded to a remarkable degree. By 1933 the Union leadership’s opposition to marketing boards had melted away. Instead of being on the defensive against resolutions from county branches demanding action on marketing schemes, headquarters now espoused the cause. In May 1933 the Parliamentary Press and Publicity Committee was to be found passing a resolution upholding the principles of the new Agricultural Marketing Bill, and discussing the need for propaganda from the NFU to counter the opponents of marketing schemes.74 Once the marketing boards were established, leaders of the Union accepted seats on them. Captain E.T. Morris became ViceChairman of the Pigs Marketing Board, and Thomas Baxter Chairman of the Milk Marketing Board, while other prominent union men were board members.

VI From these beginnings a new closeness between government and union developed. Elliot drew the NFU into regular contact with the Ministry. He acknowledged this when he was invited to address the Union’s Council in December 1933.75 The Union appreciated the attentions bestowed upon it. In 1936, after Walter Elliot announced proposals for a levy-tariff to support beef, the NFU said it had reservations about the policy, but declared, ‘the NFU is in touch with the Ministry of Agriculture on all these points with a view to ascertaining whether Mr Elliot’s statement has been correctly understood, or whether a more favourable construction is to be placed upon it’.76 It was not that contact between the officials of government and union had dried up during the 1920s, but there was now a welcome from the Minister himself. Elliot’s efforts were reciprocated by the NFU leadership, even to the extent of easing out some of those who remained most opposed to any form of state intervention.77 The suspicions that had underlain relations with ministers disappeared. Appreciation of Walter Elliot’s work

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appeared in the Union’s documents and publications. When he left the Ministry the Union was fulsome in its tributes. ‘It is with genuine regret that most farmers in the country learned of Mr Elliot’s transference from the Ministry of Agriculture to the post of Secretary of State for Scotland’, reported the NFU news-sheet.78 ‘No minister has ever been more popular with, or more trusted by farmers’, wrote the Farmer and Stockbreeder.79 Elliot was corporatist in his political philosophy and this formed the basis of his desire to build a consensus between government and agriculture. He also had pressing practical needs, for there were strong departmental forces ranged against the Ministry of Agriculture as the policy of free trade broke up.80 It was important for Elliot to have the farmers behind him rather than against him as he faced battles within government. The NFU also had a lot to offer any government that was moving towards greater intervention. Most important was its administrative machinery, and of this strength the Union was well aware. When the administrative arrangements under the Wheat Act were being set up the Union’s newsletter noted, ‘In this work the co-operation of the National Farmers’ Union with its complete chain of organisation throughout the country must prove of valuable assistance.’ As the Pigs Marketing Board was getting established, the Union reported proudly, ‘No organization other than the NFU possesses the requisite machinery for securing and focusing the opinion of the pig producers of England and Wales.’81 What was true of pig producers applied equally to most aspects of agriculture. As the likelihood of war grew, this became an added incentive for building up relationships with the NFU. It is well known that the government in the mid-1930s was anxious to avoid its mistakes of the First World War, and started preparing for the eventuality of another war, with the appointment of shadow county agricultural committees and other measures. Closer relationships with the NFU became part of that preparation. The union which Baldwin had regarded as too narrow-minded was now treated as the only body representative enough and with the administrative machinery needed to deliver the results in wartime administration should the need arise. The Country Landowners’ Association and the National Union of Agricultural Workers were both left on the sidelines in these preparations. The result was that the NFU was increasingly becoming the government’s apologist on agricultural policy. Instead of facing pressure from branches to support the marketing Acts, Union leaders were now fending off resolutions from branches that were critical of the govern-

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ment. The central leadership of the Union was faced with continual concern from branches that insufficient was being done to help agriculture. Resolutions came in from branches often at odds with the policy of headquarters.82 In 1935 there was much concern from county branches about the drift of agricultural policy, some arguing that there should be more protection introduced in preference to the development of marketing schemes.83 The Farmer and Stockbreeder for 25 May 1937 commented on the restiveness among county branches, concerned that their views were not being taken up by headquarters.84 When the government issued a statement on agricultural policy in May 1937 proposing a standard support price for barley and oats, a subsidy for lime, and grants for drainage, the NFU’s official response was supportive, on the grounds that the government was laying the foundations for a more permanent long-term policy for agriculture, emphasizing the need to restore fertility to the soil, while remaining on a peacetime basis.85 Local opinion was less keen, however, and critical resolutions were sent in from many county branches, for example Suffolk: ‘This county protests against the long-term policy of the government for agriculture.’ Northamptonshire demanded that headquarters should press for an increase in the guaranteed price of wheat to 50s., a subsidy on barley and oats to apply to every farmer, and proper remuneration for all agricultural commodities. ‘The government’s long-term policy, as pronounced, entirely fails to recognize the vital necessity to maintain labour on the land.’86 The Agriculture Bill which was introduced shortly afterwards to put some of these proposals into practice was similarly condemned by local branches, and the central Parliamentary Committee felt ‘unable to endorse some opinions that the measure was of no use and felt that it was too early to express such a sweeping views on what was clearly only a first instalment of policy’.87 It was not that the NFU was now in the lap of government. The leadership was far from happy with several aspects of policy. Agriculture might be getting more support from the government now, but prices remained generally low and farmers dissatisfied on many issues. The lack of support for livestock farming to match that granted to the arable producer was a sore point throughout the 1930s. A storm of protest greeted the government’s proposals to introduce levy-subsidy on milk in the summer of 1937. The idea was dropped, not entirely as a result of the union’s protests.88 While the Union was being formally supportive of the government’s proposals on standard prices for barley and oats, the committees were expressing great concern at the limits placed upon the farmer’s eligibility for

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subsidy, and pressed for the guaranteed price for wheat to be raised to 50s. per cwt.89 The NFU was, of course, never going to achieve all it desired. Agriculture was some way down the priorities of national government, and the Union was bound thereby to feel dissatisfied. The major difference in the 1930s compared with the mid-1920s was that the critical resolutions before union committees came in an atmosphere of general trust between union and government. The government was not inclined to dispel that, as its concerns were moving increasingly towards preparations for war. When a speech by the Prime Minister in July 1938 provoked alarm in farming circles, the Minister of Agriculture was swift to meet union leaders and reassure them that the aims and objectives of agricultural policy remained unchanged.90 The path to ‘incorporation’ of the NFU within the administrative structure of the country was becoming increasingly smooth. The appointment as Minister of Agriculture in 1938 of Major Reginald Dorman-Smith, a recent President of the Union who had been elected NationalConservative MP for Petersfield in 1934, was another mark of the NFU’s progress. By 1939 the Union had achieved what it had set out to do in 1908, in becoming a body of influence. Yet this achievement could not be ascribed so much to its own efforts as to wider political forces within governments that had resulted in the NFU being recruited as an ally by the Ministry of Agriculture. The results for the Union were somewhat different from the original aims. Colin Campbell and his fellows had set out to win influence over the legislature. The NFU’s place in the 1930s turned out more to be in Whitehall than Westminster, the foundations being laid for the union–ministry axis that was to emerge after the Second World War.

Notes (Place of publication London unless otherwise stated) 1. 2. 3. 4.

Farmer and Stockbreeder, 12 January 1931, p. 66. NFU Annual Report, 1913, p. 7. Ibid., p. 68. Parliamentary programme, 1911; University of Reading, Rural History Centre, records of the National Farmers’ Union, SR NFU AD1/1. [Citation hereafter as NFU] p. 87. 5. NFU Annual Report, 1913, pp. 96–9.

196 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 Farmer and Stockbreeder, 15 February 1926, p. 341. NFU AD1/1, pp. 72–4. NFU AD1/1, Executive Committee, 19 October 1909, p. 12. NFU AD1/2, p. 17 NFU P4/A2, News sheet, 13 November 1922. NFU AD 1/5, pp. 7–8. David Rolf, ‘The Politics of Agriculture: Farmers’ Organizations and Parliamentary Representation in Herefordshire 1909–1922’, Midland History 2 (1973) pp. 182–6; NFU Yearbook, 1922, pp. 99, 209. Rolf, ‘Politics of Agriculture’, pp. 183–7; S. Moore, ‘The Agrarian Conservative Party in Parliament, 1920–1929’, Parliamentary History, 10 (1991), pp. 347, 349. NFU AD1/19, p 63; AD1/20, p. 395. NFU AD1/13, p 91; AD1/21, p. 39. G. Cox, P. Lowe and M. Winter, ‘The Origins and Early Development of the National Farmers’ Union’, Agricultural History Review, vol. 39, pt I (1991) pp. 35–7; British Yearbook of Agriculture, 1913–14, pp. 23, 116. Cox, Lowe and Winter, ‘Origins and Early Development’, p. 36. NFU AD1/1, passim. L.M. Barnett, British Food Policy during the First World War (1985), pp. 25, 65. Cox, Lowe and Winter, ‘Origins and Early Development’, pp. 39–43; E. Whetham, The Agrarian History of England Wales, Volume VIII, 1914–1939 (Cambridge, 1978) pp. 85–97. NFU AD1/1, unpaginated. NFU AD1/2, p. 27. P. Self and H.J. Storing, The State and the Farmer (1962) pp. 45–6. See A. Sykes, Tariff Reform in British Politics 1903–1913 (1979). NFU AD1/2, p. 66. NFU AD1/5, p. 186. NFU AD1/2, pp. 12ff, 20, 27, 64ff. NFUB AD1/9, Devizes Branch minute book, 24 March 1934. A. F. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy 1912–36: a Study in Conservative Politics (1989), pp. 128–9, 169. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 8 December 1924, p. 2902. NFU AD1/2, p. 146. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 31 March 1919, p. 551, NFU AD1/2, p. 162. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 27 October 1919, p. 2198. Ibid., 8 December 1924, p. 2902. Ibid., p. 2876. Ibid., p. 2900. NFU AD1/3, p. 162. R.R. Enfield, The Agricultural Crisis 1920–23 (1924) p. 44. NFU AD1/3 pp. 275, 293–4. E.C. Penning-Rowsell, ‘Who “Betrayed” Whom? Power and Politics in the 1920/21 Agricultural Crisis’, Agricultural History Review, vol. 45 pt II (1997) pp. 185–7. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 13 June 1921, p. 1433. NFU AD1/3, Memorandum on the repeal of the Agriculture Act, August 1921, pp. 324–6.

Jonathan Brown 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

197

NFU P4/A1, News sheet, 16 June 1921. Cox, Lowe and Winter, ‘Origins and Early Development’, p. 35. NFU Yearbook, 1924, p. 16. N. Goddard, Harvests of Change (1988) p.155. NFU Yearbook, 1928, pp. 354–92, 1931, pp. 532–78, 1940, pp. 151–98. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 1 December 1924, p. 2830. Ibid., 20 February 1922, p. 423. Penning-Rowsell, ‘Who “Betrayed” Whom?’, p. 188. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy 1912–36, pp. 67–9. NFU AD1/5, Report to Council by the President, General Purposes Committee, 17 Sept 1923, AD1/5, pp. 186–7, 214–15, 240. NFU Yearbook, 1924, p. 200. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy 1912–36, pp. 65–6. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 1 December 1924, p. 2830. For example, Hampshire: Farmer and Stockbreeder, 8 December 1924, p. 2902. Ibid., p. 2876. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy 1912–36, pp. 66–7. Ibid., pp. 66–73. NFU P4/A7, News sheet, 25 July 1927. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 8 February 1926, p. 283. Ibid., 15 February 1926, p. 341. Ibid., 15 February 1926, p. 340; NFU AD1/8, pp. 81, 134. Ibid., 1 February 1926, p. 243. NFU AD1/6, p. 49. NFU AD1/8, p. 82, AD1/9, passim, AD1/10, p. 8. NFUB AD1/9, Devizes Branch minute book, 1 April 1930. NFU AD1/14, p. 54. J.A. Mollett, ‘The Wheat Act of 1932: a Forerunner of Modern Farm Price Support Programmes’, Agricultural History Review, vol. 8 pt I (1960) pp. 20–35. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy 1912–36, pp. 128–32. NFU AD1/13, p. 90. NFU AD1/13, pp. 334, 364, 412, 414, 448–9, 498. NFU AD1/51, unpaginated; Farmer and Stockbreeder, 25 January 1932, pp. 167, 173. NFU AD1/14, pp. 37–8, 60. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy 1912–36, pp. 160ff. NFU AD1/15, p. 220. NFU Record, January 1934, p. 92. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 13 July 1936, pp. 1668–9. Cooper, British Agricultural Policy 1912–36, p. 169. NFU P4/A16, News sheet, 2 November 1936. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 3 November 1936, p. 2611. T. Rooth, ‘Trade Agreements and the Evolution of British Agricultural Policy in the 1930s’, Agricultural History Review, vol. 33 pt II (1985) pp. 176–9. NFU P4/A12, News sheet, 20 June 1932; NFU Record, January 1934, p. 82. NFU AD1/14, pp. 392ff, (1932), AD1/15 (1933) passim.

198 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 NFU AD1/17, pp. 57–8. Farmer and Stockbreeder, 25 May 1937, p. 1273. Ibid., 1 June 1937, pp. 1342–3. Ibid., 8 June 1937, p. 1407, 15 June 1937, p. 1459. NFU AD1/19, p. 344. Rooth, ‘Trade Agreements’, pp. 186–9. NFU AD1/19, pp. 299–300. NFU AD1/20, p. 351.

8 ‘Red Tape Farm’? Visions of a Socialist Agriculture in 1920s and 1930s Britain Clare Griffiths

One morning in 1927, in a farmhouse somewhere in England, John Barleycorn was wading through his post over breakfast. Most of the mail came from the government’s agricultural department, and one of these letters angered him more than usual. It informed him that an inspector would soon be visiting his farm to check that he was farming it properly. Barleycorn had scarcely finished reading this letter when the inspector arrived. Mr Nosey Parker from the Agricultural Authority was not a figure to inspire immediate confidence as to his rural expertise. He appeared in top hat and pristine spats. Worse still, he was carrying an umbrella in the countryside – the sure sign of a townie. But he quickly set to work, and showed just how much he really knew about agriculture, pausing only to warn Barleycorn that he would be turned out if his farming did not come up to scratch. Parker made his way around the farm, finding many matters to engage his attention. He observed that the pigs were too fat – so he put them through exercises until they were skin and bones. He cautioned the cocks for fighting – since cock-fighting is an illegal activity. He attempted to milk a cow – by working her tail like a water pump. Taking a break from his labours, he then wandered into a field with a bull in it – and proceeded to sing ‘The Red Flag’ . . . Barleycorn Farm had been transformed into ‘Red Tape Farm’, a place where all sensible agricultural practice was cast aside before the dictates of bureaucracy and misplaced notions of efficient management. On ‘Red Tape Farm’, the bureaucrat held sway over the farmer, and agriculture suffered. This comic nightmare was a product of Conservative Central Office: a silent black-and-white animated cartoon satirizing the Conservatives’ political opponents and warning the rural electorate of the dangers to British agriculture should they 199

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forsake their proper political allegiance.1 Red Tape Farm was designed as part of the Conservatives’ propaganda for rural areas, and would have been screened from a mobile van touring the countryside, featuring in programmes alongside more serious information films and political exhortations.2 The cartoon functions on one level as an entertaining and polished piece of comedy, reaching the predictable climax as Mr Nosey Parker is tossed by the bull into a pond, from which he emerges sadly bedraggled and covered in mud. But behind the slapstick was a very clear political message: the countryside was threatened by a future under ignorant bureaucracy. Any alternative to Conservative government would, according to the film, result in farmers and landworkers being ‘bossed’ around, and ‘hampered’ in their work by committees and officials. The moral was stated bluntly in the final caption: ‘You don’t want hundreds of officials to swarm all over the country, and meddle with you in your daily life, do you? Well then, support the Conservative Party, which believes in HELP not INTERFERENCE.’ There are good reasons for beginning an examination of socialist policies on agriculture by looking at a piece of Tory propaganda. Red Tape Farm was not only a satire of radical agricultural programmes as seen from Central Office: it was also an illustration of attacks which had a significant impact on the very development of those policies. Politicians on the Left were anxious to dissociate themselves from Mr Nosey Parker and the laughable chaos of a ‘Red Tape Farm’ and, for reasons which are explored below, they were often far more peculiarly concerned to avoid charges of bureaucracy and officialdom in their programmes for agriculture than in those relating to any other sector of the economy. This had important implications for the way in which agricultural policies were framed and articulated, but it was by no means an obvious response to the challenges presented by the state of British farming in the period. In many respects the case for controls, public accountability and state direction (and for what came increasingly to be known as ‘planning’) seemed more, rather than less, compelling in agriculture than in other industries. In the years between the two world wars, British agriculture was going through one of the most difficult periods in its history. Farming had been in depression since the late 1870s and, after a boost in its fortunes during and immediately after the First World War, prices and wage levels dropped in 1921, and serious collapses in prices followed the financial crisis of 1929. These economic travails raised questions about the long-term viability of

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traditional areas of production and crops of high prestige, particularly wheat. Agriculture’s social base also seemed uncertain: as a quarter of England changed hands in the aftermath of the Great War, many farmers made the transition from tenancy to owner-occupancy, though collapses in prices, rising wage bills and contentious burdens like tithe charges were blamed for preventing numbers of these new landowners from realizing an enhancement in their economic position to accompany their changed status.3 Moreover, despite genuine improvements in wages and conditions for their employees, agriculture remained a low-wage industry, and the ‘flight from the land’ continued. Changes in land use, notably towards pasture rather than arable cultivation, were in any case reducing the need for workforces of a size which was common only a generation earlier, and the growing possibilities of mechanization and other technical developments seemed further to confirm the likelihood that, even in times of economic prosperity, agriculture could support only a fraction of the population once employed within it. A cohort of academic experts in a new discipline analysing the economics of agriculture wrung their hands over inefficiencies and operational conservatism amongst the farming community, while foreign imports, by fair means and foul, undercut British producers, as well as winning consumer loyalties on the grounds of quality and effective marketing.4 In the 1920s and 1930s, political parties were under considerable pressure to respond to these problems and demonstrate their commitment to bolstering agriculture. There is little doubt that many politicians felt sympathy and concern, and that they believed that farming made a vital and unique contribution to the national economy and society. Others were more dismissive of the claims of agriculture, yet it was impolitic to deny them completely at a time when farmers in particular were ready to voice their dissatisfaction with governments’ neglect of their interests. It would be difficult to argue that agriculture was a dominant priority for any of the political parties in the period, though it might be said with slightly more truth of the Liberals than of Labour or the Conservatives. Even so, there were people in all parties who believed that agriculture required guidance and support and who were prepared to rethink the relationship between the state and the farming community. At the same time, political allegiances in rural areas seemed more conditional than perhaps they had once been, and the pragmatism of touting for votes added a further and very important dimension to politicians’ engagement with the problems of this basic industry.

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It is important to note that ‘Red Tape Farm’ declared itself to be a criticism of the policies of both the Liberal and the Labour parties, at a time when the Liberals presented the more immediate and worrying electoral challenge to the Conservative Party in most rural areas, despite their weakness in the nation as a whole.5 In 1927, although the Labour Party was established as the official Opposition and had experienced the rite of passage of a brief period in government, it was in no position to mount serious campaigns in the majority of agricultural constituencies, and had only recently begun to face up to the challenge of introducing itself and its programme to rural electors: the Party had launched its first major rural campaign in December of the previous year. The Liberals, by contrast, had at least a history of rural support, and Lloyd George was attempting to reinvigorate his party’s rural commitment with campaigns to publicize its new land report, the so-called ‘Green Book’ (The Land and the Nation).6 Labour politicians themselves recognized that the Liberals remained the real challengers to the Conservatives in rural areas, a fact attributed variously to the ‘backward’ political culture of the villages, the weakness of Labour networks in country areas, and the superiority of Liberal briefings on agricultural policy.7 All of this suggests that the Liberals should be credited with more than merely a supporting role in Red Tape Farm. It is true that certain details in the film, like the singing of ‘The Red Flag’, imply that Mr Nosey Parker may well have been the representative of a Labour rather than a Liberal administration, though the intention may equally have been to underline what was already a common theme in Conservative propaganda: that the Liberals offered nothing more than socialism under another name.8 None the less the attack launched in Red Tape Farm was one to which the Labour Party felt particularly vulnerable. Socialists who attempted to address the issues of agriculture and rural life were subjected to criticism and ridicule by Conservative propaganda, and this had a significant effect on the ways in which rural policy developed on the political Left in Britain. As this chapter will argue, the resulting visions of what a socialist agriculture would be like often bore the signs of attempts to distance themselves from the slur of being identified with the ill-informed bureaucracy personified in the figure of the interfering townie. British socialists proved remarkably anxious to avoid accusations that their programmes aimed to create a real-life version of ‘Red Tape Farm’. When opponents attacked ‘socialist’ policies on agriculture, they were generally agreed on what particular evils were involved.

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According to Conservative Party leaflets of the time, for example, socialism would mean that all land would be owned by the state, that farmers would be subject to the orders of committees and officials, and that smallholding would be restricted so as to ensure an adequate labour force for large-scale public farms.9 Land nationalization, the planning of agricultural production, state-run farms and a preference for large-scale cultivation might be considered relatively unsurprising components in a vision of how the industry should function under socialist direction. However, those who regarded themselves as socialists in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s were actually far from agreed about what agriculture would actually be like under socialism. Some of the dilemmas of defining a policy were identified by the MP Josiah Wedgwood, who was himself an interesting illustration of the breadth of political approach which could be embraced within ‘socialism’ in the period. Wedgwood, who was characterized as ‘the last of the radicals’ in the biography written by his niece,10 had begun his career as a Liberal, but moved across to Labour in 1919, and subsequently became a prominent spokesman for the agricultural and land policies being developed by the Labour Party in the early 1920s. Throughout his life, the issue of land value taxation remained one of his main political principles, closely allied to a commitment to encouraging access to smallholding. Not surprisingly, this made him unsympathetic to the approach taken by some of his new political colleagues on the Left, who would rather see a landscape of large fields than one of small plots. But, with an interesting emphasis, Wedgwood presented this policy difference as reflecting an underlying contrast in attitudes towards issues of state control and bureaucracy. He wrote in 1922: Some Socialists imagine food production on the grand scale, the league-long furrow with State ploughs and State servants. Capitalism seems to be developing on those lines, and therefore, as they think, Socialism must follow in capital’s wake – maximum production, though for the good of all. But that is bureaucracy: real Socialism puts freedom above ease and utility. Better to be a man, with God and a crust, rather than a well-greased cog in the food factory.11 Few within the Labour Party would have accepted in any unqualified sense Wedgwood’s self-definition as a socialist, and indeed he was often singled out for criticism as leading the party towards an exces-

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sively compromised Liberal policy. Yet he was keen here to identify his priorities not only as representing a legitimate socialist approach, but as the ‘real’ socialism. So how was one to define a socialist approach to agriculture? This was a difficult problem. Left-wing groups engaged in defining agricultural policy had to wrestle not only with practicalities and detail, but also with the question of underlying principle. Often they took the easier route of assuming that this foundation was already established and understood, but with little justification for doing so. Thus when the New Fabian Research Bureau commissioned questionnaires on agricultural topics in 1934, it asked its contributors to assume the application of a ‘socialist policy in agriculture’, but did not see a need to explain what that involved. For at least one contributor, this was a major omission which only served to expose the lack of foundation to his colleagues’ thinking on the subject: he criticized the other respondents for limiting their proposals to ameliorative measures which accepted a basic continuance of the capitalist system already in operation in agriculture, with production based on the profit motive for individualistic producers, a wage labour force enjoying poor status and opportunities, and private control of marketing and distribution.12 Many of the agricultural programmes produced on the Left throughout the interwar period showed a similar reluctance to look to radical solutions and a thorough reconstruction of the industry. This residual reformism was part of a complex radical inheritance from the nineteenth century, but it also reflected the circumstances in which the political Left developed commitments to agricultural policy during the early twentieth century. Wedgwood’s views fit easily into the older tradition and illustrate the longevity of ideals which attacked forms of landholding rather than approaches to agriculture itself, and which held up as a goal the expansion of opportunities for individuals to go ‘back to the land’, rather than seeking to change the way in which agriculture functioned as a economic sector. For some, like Wedgwood, this approach remained in essence a Liberal one, even when masquerading under Labour colours: Labour’s first Minister of Agriculture, Noel Buxton, retained an old-style Liberal radicalism under his new identity, as his successor Christopher Addison also did to a considerable degree, with both men, for example, showing an enduring interest in land settlement schemes.13 In the 1920s, unreconstructed Liberal land reformers became the target of jibes from left-wingers within the Labour Party who wanted to be able to pursue what they saw as a less-compromised, independent and more truly

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‘socialist’ policy.14 But it would be wrong to assume that this landreforming approach was infallibly a sign of more moderate tendencies on the Left, of alien elements transplanted in an opportunistic manner onto a new political home in the aftermath of the First World War. Similar proposals and ideals also claimed a genealogy within the more ‘advanced’ sections of the Left. Keir Hardie’s ‘socialist’ vision of a utopian agriculture, for example, was a mixture of communitarian ethics and individualistic opportunity, predicated on the vital principle that an individual should have access to the land as a definition of his personal freedom. ‘The peasant who has even three acres of land, a well-filled pigsty, a cow’s grass on the common, and a cottage . . . is to all intents and purposes a free man’, he wrote.15 Although Hardie obviously identified himself as a socialist, this analysis might as easily have come from a classical Liberal, since it was firmly rooted within capitalist assumptions and moralities. As these examples suggest, much early progressive thinking about agriculture was more strictly concerned with questions about land than with the business of farming. It was only in the early twentieth century, and particularly following the Great War, that left-wing politicians began to choose (or felt themselves forced) to consider policies for agriculture as a national industry, and the circumstances in which they came to do so had an important influence subsequently on the way in which socialist policies were defined. The socialist mainstream in Britain before the 1920s had relatively little rural following and evinced only a very limited interest in agriculture. This is not to imply that there were no rural socialists, or that socialist authors had nothing to say about agriculture: both the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party were discussing rural policy in some detail before the First World War.16 But the Labour Party, which became the most influential representative of ‘socialism’ in Britain, was almost exclusively an urban organization in its formative years and, more importantly, socialism was usually perceived to be an urban movement which was at the very least ignorant about the countryside and, according to many critics, positively hostile towards it. The ease with which political opponents could point to Labour’s weakness in this area created an anxiety within the Party to prove itself both interested in agriculture and yet willing to acknowledge a need to take expert advice on the subject. It has been one of the curiosities of agricultural policy in the twentieth century that, possibly alone amongst policy portfolios, only those with personal experience in the industry are judged capable of properly understanding it.

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Agriculture might well have remained an insignificant interest for Labour were it not for the fact that by the early 1920s the Party was convinced that its electoral future was inherently dependent upon winning rural seats; and for that task an attractive and authoritative agricultural policy was deemed a necessity. Labour’s definitions of agricultural policy, and many approaches to agriculture within socialism more broadly construed, were thus deeply bound up with electoral issues, to such an extent that agricultural policy was often discussed specifically as part of an electoral strategy. When Christopher Addison commented on a draft policy document about agriculture in 1926 he observed, ‘Our purpose is, I take it, not only to formulate a sound policy, but to be able to present it in such a form that it will enable us to win a sufficient number of seats in rural areas.’17 Constraints inevitably resulted from such an instrumental approach. As Addison continued, ‘We should, therefore, limit as much as possible, the recital of things which, although very important, are not readily understood by the ordinary countryman.’ The implications of this comment were that the main constraint was on the presentation of policy, on what should be emphasized and how it should be expressed; what was less clear, but perhaps even more significant, was the boundary set to the political imagination, that is to say the parameters within which policy was discussed. The vision of a socialist agriculture was itself limited by these considerations about what agriculturists needed and wanted, and by concerns about the sorts of policies which would prove acceptable to the rural electorate. In this chapter I shall focus on some of the intersections between ideology and pragmatism in looking at the visions of agriculture which were put forward by socialists in Britain between the wars. The issue of ideology requires some comment here. It will be clear already from descriptions of some of the personnel under discussion, that the idea of ‘socialism’ covered a very broad spectrum of political approaches. Whilst some of these embraced political views which bear no relationship to political philosophical definitions of socialism, it seems reasonable to take individuals and organizations at their own valuation. If Josiah Wedgwood chose at times to describe himself as a socialist, then that is relevant to understanding how the term was used in the early twentieth century. My aim here is to understand what contemporaries meant when they talked about a socialist agriculture. Within this, the policies of the Labour Party (which routinely described itself as working for socialism) loom large, and much of

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what I discuss below involves the debates and exchanges which took place across a range of personnel focused around the Labour Party and associated groups like the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party. But I hope also to show some of the ways in which definitions of socialism were contested within the Labour camp, and also to comment on the role played by other socialist groupings, including the British Communist Party. I shall focus on three major questions which were debated in the period, and which illuminate some of the problems in outlining a socialist approach to agricultural policy: how agriculture was to be organized, centring on the issue of the appropriate scale of cultivation to be adopted; the role of agriculture in society, and the way that it should contribute to wider socialist priorities; and finally the issue at the centre of ‘Red Tape Farm’, namely the question of who should farm and how, and what control the state or the community could exert to ensure that farming served national needs. Conservative attacks, like that in the cartoon, assumed that there was a vision of a socialist agriculture which could be caricatured. In fact socialist opinion was far more divided than this suggests. In addition to the ideological uncertainties which have afflicted the relationship between socialism and agriculture in virtually every country where an attempt has been made to apply the one to the other, the achievement of any agreed socialist programme or set of objectives was complicated by an anxiety to be exonerated of these charges being laid against the Left by political opponents who claimed to have a deeper understanding of the nature of agriculture and the needs of the industry.

I The scale of cultivation A good many Socialists, especially of the ‘State Socialist’ variety, have fallen into the error of assuming that Socialism commits them to large-scale State farming, and that agriculture cannot be ripe for Socialism until capitalist methods have been applied to it, and small-scale cultivation either eliminated or greatly reduced . . . Socialism is as fully compatible with small-scale cultivation as with large-scale ‘industrialised’ farming. G.D.H. Cole, 192018

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In 1931, the agricultural commentator Joan Beauchamp surveyed the future of agriculture in a series of articles for the Labour Research Department, and outlined her version of what is perhaps the best known of socialist visions of the farming landscape. This was a vista of large farms, big fields and mechanization. ‘That factory farms on the largest possible scale, financed by the State, are a better economic proposition than small capitalist farms, while at the same time providing infinitely better opportunities for the workers, has been proved up to the hilt by the recent agricultural development in Soviet Russia’, she maintained.19 A few months earlier, Christopher Addison, the Labour Minister of Agriculture, introduced a bill to enable the state to experiment with different forms of cultivation and set up experimental farms on a large scale. But although this ultimately unsuccessful proposal aimed to establish at least some farms along the lines which Beauchamp regarded as representing the future under socialism, it was coupled with expressions of a very different vision for the organization of agriculture. Addison’s Land Utilisation Bill was also an expression of continued faith in land settlement, supporting that most limited of all agricultural units – the smallholding.20 These two very distinct ideas represented polar opposites in socialist approaches to the question of how agriculture should be structured. The assumption that socialists naturally tend to favour farming on a large scale is, and was, very widespread, and has concealed the diversity of the approaches which were adopted towards agriculture on the Left in Britain before the Second World War.21 In part, the arguments were about the most efficient way to conduct farming in a modern context, but they were also informed by a varied political inheritance which, as described above, drew from celebrations of the practical liberation offered to individuals by having a plot of their own, as well as from the inspiration of prospects for lending a more industrial character to agricultural work and production and encouraging a communistic spirit to replace the hierarchical and exploitative structures of rural capitalism. Remarkably, these very different ideals were often combined to complement each other within agricultural programmes on the Left. Both could claim ideological justifications, as well as citing economic arguments in their favour, but this did not prevent many socialists from effectively subscribing to a ‘middle way’, which was almost impossible to defend on any strict ideological grounds. By 1939, the Labour Party, and even some communists, were in practice committed to support for the existing class of farmers, and for the medium-sized farms which they rented or owned.

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These debates and compromises are clear in many of the statements made about agricultural policy before the Second World War. From the critics’ point of view, however, the Left’s intentions were easier to characterize and to caricature, by assuming an inclination towards Soviet-style public farming and an accompanying hostility towards the small-scale cultivator. These two positions seemed to be natural concomitants, and in 1926 the Conservative Party appealed for farm workers to recognize that socialists were committed to a deliberate limitation of opportunities for smallholding, so that the supply of labour to large-scale public farms might not be jeopardized.22 The impact of such propaganda must have been enhanced by the fact that critics within Labour’s own ranks were at the time castigating the National Executive for failing to express support for smallholding: the Conservatives took delight in annexing Josiah Wedgwood’s outbursts on the subject in support of their own political interests.23 There were in fact very real divisions over attitudes towards smallscale cultivation. Marx left his disciples an unequivocal opinion of peasant agriculture and of the peasants themselves, as unwelcome survivals in a process of social and economic evolution. In the face of much evidence to the contrary, Marxists in Continental Europe from the late nineteenth century had argued that property was becoming more concentrated in agriculture as in other industry, and that smallscale production was doomed.24 Moreover, peasants were condemned by Marx as the worst of all individualists, the ultimate conservative force in a nation, submerged in the ‘idiocy of rural life’.25 The British tradition, however, tended to point in a different direction, with the radical heritage contributing a far more positive view of the political virtues of small-scale farming. Left-wing attacks on smallholding in Britain were on the whole more likely to emphasize the poor standard of living associated with this sort of farming than to focus on its place within the economic development of agriculture. Much early discussion of smallholding situated the debate specifically within a context of welfare policies. Arguments in its favour across the political spectrum were often based on its potential either to relieve unemployment or to remedy deficiencies in the population by giving access to a healthier way of life. Within policies for agriculture, Labour groups treated smallholding as an approach to improving the lives of those who, although they were already working on the land, still needed to be brought ‘back’ to it. Few of Labour’s agricultural policies could have been based to such an extent on the popular demands of rural constituents, especially in areas of high unionization on the farms,

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such as Norfolk, the heartland of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. The agricultural unions at a local level were instrumental in agitating for local councils to fulfil existing obligations to make holdings available, but there was scope for a national government to bolster such provision and give greater assistance to those farming or wanting to farm in this way. In terms of grass-roots support, no policy can have seemed more natural for a Labour party to pursue, and the appeal of smallholding in many rural areas was not insignificant in securing a respected place for small-scale cultivation in election addresses and socialist programmes. Whilst the prospect of ‘big farming’ apparently left most rural workers unmoved, some Labour politicians addressing rural audiences recognized the utility of declaring their commitment to expanding small-scale cultivation. Yet even within the agricultural trade unions, some officials expressed clear opposition to a policy which attracted such support amongst their own membership. One of the most vehement in his criticism was the general secretary (1912–28) of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, R.B. Walker, who disagreed with Josiah Wedgwood even in the pages of party pamphlets, and was far more scathing of ‘back to the land’ sentiments in private. When asked ex officio to provide a preface for a pamphlet which Wedgwood had written specifically for farm workers, Walker clearly found it difficult to be supportive, and had to acknowledge that he did not see rural problems from ‘quite the same angle’ as Wedgwood, insisting that farm workers had need of better wages rather than access to the land.26 In an unpublished (and clearly unpublishable) draft for the preface, Walker expressed his true feelings on the subject, namely that smallholding was completely incompatible with the organization of agricultural workers, that it was not economically viable, and that the supposed hunger for land was a feature of the past, irrelevant in a period when workers were becoming ‘enlightened’ through improved education and contact with the Labour movement.27 Walker believed strongly that smallholding was contrary to political principle and economic development, and that the desire for land of one’s own was a mere ‘mirage’, a superficial sentiment which could (and would) be obliterated completely by socialist propaganda.28 But his views failed to dampen the enthusiasm of many within his own union for whom a plot of land of their own and the scope to work it remained matters of major consequence, or an ambition to be cherished. The period of Walker’s leadership in the National Union of Agricultural Workers was thus a peculiarly ambivalent one, as official condemnations of policies

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to encourage smallholding were issued from a union whose membership included both smallholders and many who aspired to that estate. The union journal, The Land Worker, included articles arguing that smallholdings were an inefficient use of land, alongside complaints that many union members were enduring long waits to be allocated holdings by local councils.29 Despite Walker’s faith that an association with Labour would wean farm workers from such mistaken ambitions, resolutions to the union conference continued to bear witness to the health of ‘back to the land’ sentiments amongst the membership. But however much they recognized the existence of this enthusiasm and felt some need to represent it, many socialists believed that smallholding allowed only for a very poor quality of life. It was common to find expressions of distaste at the life of the ‘small grubber’, condemned to ‘drudge’ and virtual enslavement to the land, where only the superhuman efforts of the farmer and his family, and the deprivations which they endured, could make such farming a going concern. These rejections of the hardships of peasant life were frequently accompanied with expressions of xenophobia: other countries had large numbers of people prepared to put up with such low standards, but it was argued the English deserved better. While employment practices within agriculture were becoming more standardized with the recognition of set working hours and a general expansion in leisure time, the relentless labours of the smallholder seemed increasingly offensive and undesirable. A discussion group around Addison at the Ministry of Agriculture in 1930 wrestled with its misgivings about the prospect of expanding smallholding and decided that conditions which would be completely unacceptable for an employee were not to be condemned where a man was working for himself.30 This individualistic work ethic in itself attracted suspicion, and was the ground for further objections about the place of smallholding in the social order. Joseph Duncan believed that, at least in the competitive environment of contemporary Britain, the smallholder ‘must always be too self-centred to become a good citizen or the stuff from which a healthy rural community can be created.’31 Smallholders were often associated with selfishness and being ‘petty minded’: it seemed that their sacrifice and dedication were thus not to be admired, but were rather illustrations of the individualism which kept agriculture more generally from becoming a ‘social industry’.32 Walker objected to the idea of favouring an individual worker with ambitions to work the land for himself, when that individual should be working for the community. By contrast, large-scale farming, with

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correspondingly large workforces, seemed much more likely to encourage a reconstitution of agriculture. ‘It will be interesting to watch the difference between the selfish spirit displayed by men labouring on small holdings, and that displayed by the Comrades of the Great Farm’, mused the rural socialist, F.E. Green.33 Such considerations formed an important part of socialist visions for agriculture, but the most powerful objections to small-scale farming were made on a different basis entirely. For those who saw large farms as the face of the future, the case seemed to rest on economic arguments. The assumption was that agriculture would behave no differently from other industries, demonstrating economies of scale and allowing for the employment of modern methods. Early discussions on agriculture within the ILP, for example, tended to assume that agriculture was undercapitalized and on too small a scale, so that a socialist policy should promote collectivization and the employment of scientific methods in cultivation.34 The importance given to technical innovation and improvement fitted in with socialist hopes and expectations that agriculture would become more like other industries in its operation and in the experience of its workforce: it was also hoped that, as this came about, a higher proportion of farm workers might be organized successfully within trade unions and indeed recognize their destiny to vote Labour. ‘It is very probable that agriculture will in future tend to become more and more an “industry” similar to the mechanical industries of the present day’, argued a Labour Party pamphlet in 1924. ‘The farms themselves may be larger than at present, and mechanical power will be applied more extensively.’35 A Labour Research Department publication in 1927 similarly assumed that agriculture would obey the same ‘laws’ of development as industries in the towns, and that the future lay with large-scale production. Henry Harben, a Fabian businessman, also argued that agriculture naturally became more efficient as the scale of production increased, and enthused about a future where farms in the order of 10 000 acres would become practical possibilities.36 Some of the most dramatic illustrations of agriculture actually being conducted on a large scale came from Soviet Russia, which Joan Beauchamp had cited as proving the case for the economic importance of large farms. In 1930, she visited Gigant, the largest farm in the world, covering an area of 703 square miles. Many others also took the Soviet experiment as proof of the direction in which agriculture should be developing. However, it is interesting to note the features of the Russian countryside which attracted the attention of ideological

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tourists including representatives of the Fabian Society, Labour politicians and socialist journalists.37 For many observers, the Soviet Union’s rural programmes were more significant for their social impact than for their economic effects, and the transformation of village life and culture seems to have made a much greater impression even on those who were particularly interested in observing a revolution in agricultural practice. Common observations related to the improvements in living standards, the spread of literacy, the provision of electricity supplies (still at that time a major issue in many parts of rural Britain) and the encouragement of a thriving rural civilization. Yet despite an enthusiasm for these changes in the villages, agriculturists were sometimes disappointed by what they saw on the farms. Whilst the actual tragedies of collectivization and the inadequacies of supply and distribution were largely hidden from them, and the experiment could thus be regarded on the whole as a success, even the model farms open to inspection did not necessarily live up to expectation. John Morgan, a farmer and agricultural journalist who travelled to Russia with a party from the New Fabian Research Bureau in 1933, was unimpressed by the crop yields on the vast farms near Stalingrad, and was surprised to see camel teams more in evidence than tractors – the legendary number of tractors in Russia being an important component in the country’s reputation for modern agricultural practice.38 Some accounts certainly waxed lyrical on the subject of Russian agriculture, and celebrations of technological innovations and agricultural achievement were quite common in the late 1930s. The communist-sponsored monthly The Country Standard, published in Suffolk from 1935 onwards and aimed at progressive opinion in rural areas, carried regular features on Soviet agricultural developments, and organized trips for readers to visit the collective and state farms. None the less, one should not overemphasize the extent to which Russia was taken as the definitive model of socialist agriculture in practice. Too much emphasis on comparisons with Russia was a dangerous gift to Conservative propagandists, who already accused the Labour Party of Bolshevik tendencies. One Conservative MP even went so far as to identify English smallholders as Labour’s ‘kulaks’.39 Capitalist as well as socialist countries, of course, also offered examples of cultivation on a large scale, most of which seemed to be lessons in what to avoid: for example, US-style ‘bonanza’ farming was a subject of concern at a time when agricultural policy on the Left was still partly influenced by a concern to expand opportunities for

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employment, not to reduce labour demands on the land. And far from always wanting to hurry on the supposedly inevitable progression towards larger farming units, some socialists wanted to stop the process in its tracks. One of the early hopes attached to the policy of land nationalization, for example, had been that it could act against the trend in capitalist development, facilitating the breaking down of large farms into smaller holdings.40 Assumptions that agriculture was naturally evolving towards largerscale operations were in fact largely based on theoretical expectations, and the evidence about economic development in agriculture was considerably more equivocal, pointing to potential advantages in economies of scale, but generally denying that there was any obvious tendency for farming to show a natural development towards larger holdings. Some agricultural economists, most notably C.S. Orwin, argued that most farming in Britain was conducted on too small a scale to allow for proper capital investment or the best use of new technology, but their concerns were precisely that agriculture was not evolving of its own accord into larger, more efficient units. Orwin came to advocate land nationalization and degrees of state control precisely on the grounds that these would enable agriculture to be restructured in a way which seemed unlikely to happen if processes were left to the market alone.41 Higher labour costs and the development of new techniques and machinery did appear likely to grant an evolutionary advantage to larger, more highly capitalized enterprises, and long-time advocates of smallholding, such as the Liberal R.F. Easterbrook, were beginning to have doubts in the 1930s about whether small farms had any economic future, even in intensive forms of cultivation, such as the growing of salad vegetables and soft fruit, for which they had seemed most suited.42 Yet there were in fact certain tendencies towards the establishment of smaller units in agriculture, particularly following the break-up of large estates after the First World War. In 1933, the non-party organization Political and Economic Planning warned about the dangers which this might bring: ‘The movement destroys the power of the landed aristocracy and is therefore welcomed by a large part of political opinion, but it puts in its place a system of land owning which can be quite as dangerous and anti-social in that it militates against any broad outlook in land development.’ 43 In the light of the diametrically opposed traditions on the British Left – towards industrialized production on large-scale farms, where reasonable working conditions could be assured and individualistic

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tendencies eliminated, and towards the emancipatory vision of independence based on access to smallholdings – the deciding factor in socialist agricultural policy came to rest increasingly on arguments about economic efficiency rather than the inherent sociopolitical virtues attributed to different kinds of farming. The problem with this position was that there was no obvious consensus about what forms of organization promoted greatest efficiency. In 1921, the Labour Party’s programme dithered on the subject: ‘Whether the future lies with small holdings, with the present middle-sized farms, or with highly capitalized production on much larger farms, no one can at present foresee.’ As a result, the Party had to declare that ‘there is room, in a National Policy for Agriculture, for farms of all sizes’.44 The picture did not become much clearer in later years, even as Labour accumulated more sources of agricultural expertise and growing levels of support within the industry. At the height of Labour’s socialist ambitions, in the wilderness after 1931, plans for state farming on a large scale began to be outlined with greater confidence, but even in a flush of enthusiasm which led to a draft ‘five year plan’, state farming was to be balanced by a massive programme of land settlement, with 20 000 smallholders to be settled on the land in group co-operatives.45 This shadow of the Soviet experiment proved to be an exception to the general scope of Labour’s agricultural planning, and confidence in large farms run along factory lines quickly waned. By 1945, Labour was cautious about citing large farms as a desirable goal for its new agriculture. It seemed quite possible after all that there were practical reasons why farming had not developed along the same lines as urban industry, namely at the expense of small-scale, independent producers.46 Through ebbs and flows in enthusiasm for large-scale cultivation, the most common theme in socialist programmes for agriculture was in fact the need for a varied approach. As early as 1918, Labour was putting forward the case for a combination of agricultural practices, with a general policy of encouraging large-scale farming, but seeing a place also for smallholdings.47 When Addison was drawing up ‘a policy for British agriculture’ two decades later, he placed an emphasis on large farms as the appropriate scale for farming in the future, but still allowed a significant role for smallholding, on the grounds that it remained very popular and could also be justified as a viable economic prospect in some parts of the country.48 By 1939, though, there had been a further development in the vision of agriculture being presented in policies on the Left: a recognition of the place of medium-sized farms within any national scheme. This was a signifi-

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cant shift: both large and small farms could be defended within leftwing traditions, but there seemed to be no obvious justification for farms which were neither one thing nor the other. John Dugdale warned that a Labour government could not, in conscience, encourage a class of medium-sized holdings, where the farmer employed two or three workers. ‘There is much to be said for peasant holdings,’ he allowed, ‘but nothing whatever from a Socialist standpoint for small capitalist farms.’ In Dugdale’s view, those whom he described as ‘genuine-peasant farmers’ (employing no labour) would remain, and indeed their numbers would grow, but he believed that other private farms should be taken over and amalgamated into state farms with large workforces.49 Yet by any measure of economic resilience, the medium-sized farm could claim to be the natural option for most established agricultural enterprise in most parts of the country. When Geoffrey Garratt, a Labour farmer who acted almost as the Party’s official spokesman to the farming community, surveyed land organization in 1930 he found the success of farms of between 50 and 150 acres to be the notable feature, despite a history of governmental promotion of smallholding on the one hand and landlords’ preference to consolidate rather than divide holdings on the other. With the benefit of no particular encouragement from any quarter, medium-sized holdings had thrived and survived, coming to occupy about one-third of the total farm acreage. ‘It is . . . a superficial view to assume that the choice lies between very large and very small farms’, Garratt observed. ‘It is at least arguable that sound units are to be found amongst farms of medium size.’50 Garratt, who had retired from service in India to his own farm of a hundred acres in Cambridgeshire, did not share Dugdale’s anxieties about distinguishing farmers from ‘genuine peasant-farmers’, but he did draw distinctions of his own within the farming class. For Garratt, the significant division lay between ‘clean boot’ and ‘dirty boot’ farmers, where the former had no active involvement in work on the farm, beyond overseeing the foreman, while the latter supervised their employees and worked alongside them. Garratt justified his support for the ‘dirty boot’ class (whom he referred to rather curiously as the counterparts of Russia’s kulaks) over the ‘clean boot’ farmers on the grounds that their enterprises had better economic prospects: in his view, few farms in England were large enough to justify a distant approach to management, whereas the dirty-boot farmers represented an effective method of supervision.51 The idea of the ‘working’ or

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‘small’ farmer became well established in Labour, and indeed communist discussions about possible sources of support in country districts, and this figure became the focus of sympathy for the economic difficulties which he suffered as the National government in the 1930s refused to address farmers’ complaints about hardship. Factors such as the size of operation and active personal involvement in the work on the farm became more relevant signifiers than, for example, renting as against owner-occupancy. Under such revised definitions, it was ‘discovered’ that many owner-occupiers were not capitalists at all, since they employed no hired labour.52 And even those who did employ men on their farms were not necessarily beyond political redemption. These shifting attitudes towards farmers will be considered further in relation to the issue of control and the direction of agriculture under socialism. The significant point to note here is that a latitude in accepting the diversity of English farming practice as a likely feature of the future as much as the past was well established in socialist discussions of agricultural programmes by the Second World War. As early as 1920, G.D.H. Cole had warned that farmers could not be treated as a coherent class: that there was a great difference between the ‘capitalist’ farmer, who deserved to be expropriated, and the ‘socially useful individual cultivator, who lives by his work and has no chance or prospect of accumulating riches or turning into a “country gentleman”’.53 Yet despite such observations, visions of a socialist agriculture generally remained polarized between arguments in favour of small and large-scale enterprises until the 1930s, at which point it became increasingly common for policy discussions to recognize instead that farming under socialism was likely to retain many points of continuity with the existing organization of the industry under capitalism. There were good reasons for this: Labour politicians came to acknowledge what was already a commonplace amongst agricultural economists, namely that agricultural organization reflected geographical characteristics and varied across different sectors of the industry. In other words, diversity of production required variety in the size and type of farm, since questions about the organization for optimum efficiency attracted different answers according to whether one was looking at the best acreage for salad vegetables or for wheat. In planning a national food supply, there was therefore no need to choose between large and small farms, but rather to ensure that the appropriate forms of cultivation were matched to each.

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II A ‘Social Industry’ Labour’s aim can be stated in a few words. It is to make agriculture a public service . . . Labour Party pamphlet, 193554 Socialist approaches to agricultural policy were not restricted to debates about the best way to mobilize the means of production, whether in farms large or small, or of medium size. Discussions about the appropriate scale of cultivation in its relation both to levels of employment on the land and to the efficiency of production have already served to highlight certain considerations about the fundamental purpose of agriculture. These basic questions about what agriculture was for had a crucial role in shaping socialist attitudes to the future of farming, and indeed socialist policies for agriculture during the 1920s and 1930s were defined far more by their outcomes than by any inherent economic characteristics. In debates about the organization of farming, the social and economic contribution which the industry might make to the community as a whole was increasingly adopted as the most significant guide to socialist policy. It seemed clear to most socialists that British agriculture in the early twentieth century was failing to fulfil its national role. Agriculture was proving unable to realize its economic potential, and appeared both unable and unwilling to discharge supposedly natural obligations to the community. In outlining the new face of agriculture which would emerge from an economic reconstruction, the idea of a ‘social industry’ was often invoked. The terminology was common, though it carried various meanings. In earlier usage, it was sometimes equivalent almost to the idea of sociability, in connection with aims to free agriculture from the isolation and individualism which seemed so characteristic of much farm work. Few portrayed the loneliness of the agricultural labourer with such pathos as the writer F.E. Green. In his books he often summoned up the image of the farm worker who spent long working hours in total isolation in the landscape, sometimes spending the whole day without seeing another human being.55 Green hoped that, with a revival of agriculture promoting larger workforces on the land, the ‘lonely figure working with a leaden heart in the middle of a wide field’ would no longer be ‘a familiar feature of our deserted countryside.’56

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For Green, this was in part a humanitarian concern, but the loneliness of individual workers was also perceived to have consequences which went beyond the matter of their own personal happiness. ‘Isolated from their fellows, rarely seeing a paper which writes of a larger outlook on life,’ he reflected, ‘ . . . these village labourers . . . lead lives entirely cut off from the stream of modern movements.’57 Such insularity was widely lamented on the Left. In contrast to the idyllic paradigms of rural community, this reading of the impoverished rural character carried with it implicit assumptions about the more advanced nature of social experience in urban environments. In turn, it tended to view the agricultural labourer as in many respects inferior in personality and character. The Countess of Warwick observed that it was ‘absurd’ to say that the solitary countryman was as good a man as the best product of the more complex life of the towns.58 The idea that agricultural workers lived narrow lives offering few opportunities for personal development lay behind many plans to reorganize the industry along more ‘social’ grounds. E.J. Pay, of the Social Democratic Federation, insisted at the 1924 Labour Party Conference that Labour must emphasize the importance of recreating agriculture as a ‘social industry’ (which he connected with state farming on a large scale) ‘so that there should be greater opportunity for intercourse amongst those who had to spend the most impressionable years of their life in that industry’.59 The social impoverishment of agricultural workers supposedly had two results in particular which agitated politicians on the Left. First, it imposed serious limitations on a class identity developing amongst the workforce: a sociological phenomenon which was much discussed at the time, and has been since.60 The problem of recognizing common interest or having the confidence to express it was reflected in the difficulties of organizing agricultural trade unions. Joseph Duncan, who spent much of his career fighting an almost hopeless battle to build a union of agricultural workers in Scotland, believed (and presumably on the basis of much personal experience) that industrial organization was only promising on large farms ‘with comparatively large numbers of workers who are working under the same conditions’.61 Thus, many trade unionists believed that unionization would only prosper when agriculture was reconstructed such that the working experience on the land approximated more nearly to that in the factory. Secondly, politicians on the Left assumed that isolation in the workplace made it unlikely that farm workers would take an interest in

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public affairs: to be, in any deep sense, political. This conclusion became relevant, and even convenient, when the Labour Party began to contest rural seats in numbers from the early 1920s. Its results in rural constituencies were disappointing and one explanation for Labour’s problems in the countryside was identified as being an inferior state of political awareness and education in the villages. If agricultural working practices could be changed to allow for the ‘greater intercourse’ which Pay wanted to see, then perhaps this might give the Left its opportunity to build support amongst this constituency. But concerns about the working conditions in agriculture were not just linked to the experience of the existing workforce on the farms. Many observers were deeply concerned that agriculture offered such unattractive prospects that it could not retain its own labour force, let alone attract those used to better conditions in other fields of employment. This was an interesting, and perhaps inevitable reversal of the old topos about the superiority of working on the land, the hollowness of which had been clearly demonstrated by decades of exodus from agricultural employment. Yet some believed it might still be proved true if only agriculture could be reconstructed according to its proper principles. Politicians of varied persuasions remained to lesser or greater degrees hopeful about the prospect of leading numbers of the population, and particularly the unemployed, ‘back’ to the land. The potential of agriculture to absorb larger numbers of workers was always an important part of Labour Party policy before the Second World War, though occasional doubts were expressed (usually by agriculturists) as to the practicalities, or even the desirability of this.62 Alongside these attitudes towards the social problems inherent in the modern organization of agricultural work, there was another use of the concept of a ‘social industry’, which related more to agriculture’s contribution to the national economy and the well-being of the community, than to the experience of those working within it. The two ideas overlapped in certain respects: the creation of a healthier and more modern rural society, producing individuals able to take initiative and responsibility, and fostering relationships and co-operation in the workplace which would have positive results for the life of the communities they lived in, was judged likely to enrich the national life. However, this second use of the phrase placed a rather different emphasis on defining the goals of agricultural policy, and illustrates a broader shift in rural programmes on the Left in the interwar period, away from welfare and employment concerns towards a

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greater focus on economic questions, and on the place which agriculture might occupy within a national plan. Agriculture, in this analysis, would justify itself by results, and was neither to be assumed as a necessary good, nor dismissed as a sector of the economy condemned always to suspicion for its innate conservatism and individualism. Farming, socialists argued, must serve the community. Only under such conditions could it claim any support from government. Ramsay MacDonald referred to the role of farmers in rendering ‘a useful public service’.63 It was hoped that cultivators would cast off their old individualism and discover a new ‘pride of calling’, a ‘public spirit’.64 The definitions of such public service shaped expectations of how farming should be conducted. The basic assumption of socialists in the period was that farming existed to produce food, but in a world where even the basics of the family diet were often imported from abroad, and where food had become more affordable for the mass of the population precisely because of cheap imports, it was difficult to argue a case for the survival of home production on these grounds alone. Where farmers agitated for state assistance in the 1920s, and with increasing stridency (and some accompanying success) in the 1930s, they were often placing their own economic well-being in opposition to the desire of the housewife to buy her foodstuffs cheaply.65 The idea that agriculture received its justification through its contribution to feeding the community was accompanied by a belief that the industry should be as productive as possible. Again, this was often contrary to what the farming community itself saw as likely to promote agricultural prosperity, the basic law of farming being that prices rose with scarcity. The farm policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States offered what many socialists regarded as an awful demonstration of the destructive selfishness of capitalism, as crops were destroyed to maintain levels of farming incomes.66 The promotion of maximum productivity acquired further impetus as concerns grew about the possibility of war; even those who had resisted policies for promoting agriculture as a method of assuring self-sufficiency against the danger of war began to worry that perhaps food supplies should indeed be safeguarded. None the less, the dominant emphasis even into the late 1930s was on the ways in which Britain could make a full contribution to a system of world trade where each country might concentrate in its domestic production on those crops for which its land and climate were most suited. Discussions about the idea of a social industry were often placed in a context of interna-

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tionalism. In 1918 Joseph Duncan defined his idea of a ‘social policy’ for agriculture in specific contrast to older principles of the need to safeguard supplies in wartime: he saw a socialist agricultural policy as one reflecting and contributing to commitments to international peace.67 Even policies such as the encouragement of sugar beet cultivation in England came to be condemned on the Left as an acknowledgement of the possibility that Britain might once more be prepared to go to war.68 The case for a prosperous, and indeed expanded, agriculture lay not in productivity alone, but in the right sort of production. Increasingly it was argued that the ‘primary purpose’ of home agriculture should be the production of ‘health foods’, specifically milk, fruit and vegetables.69 Agricultural policy thus became closely allied to food policy, and the adequate nutrition of the population at large was presented as both the obligation and the potential economic salvation of the farming community: farmers would find their best market ‘in the stomachs of the poor’.70 Through the late 1930s, this formed the major emphasis in left-wing programmes addressed to agriculturists, linking their enterprise to a great social mission, whilst also hoping to draw on rather less altruistic sentiments about how agricultural finances might recover with an enhanced consumer market. They also added the argument that it was only through making a valuable social contribution in these terms that farming could qualify for any governmental support or favour. Aside from these economic considerations, it is worth mentioning briefly one further assumption about the contribution which agriculture should make to the social good. Part of the public service which agriculturists were expected to provide was the maintenance of the condition of the land and, in consequence, the appearance of the countryside. Many socialist programmes for the industry made explicit connections between land that was farmed well and the attractiveness of the rural landscape. Here once again (and in ways quite alien to the sensibilities of progressives at the end of the twentieth century) the emphasis was on intensive and highly productive forms of farming: a countryside farmed intensively and in full cultivation was a beautiful countryside. The waste of good land was thus to be considered not only as unsatisfactory in social and economic terms, for restricting employment opportunities and reducing yields, but also as an offence against the beauty of the landscape. In this context, the vision of a socialist agriculture was also an aesthetic vision.71

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III The Issue of Control . . . they will deride the Labour Party and all its works because these things are hateful to farmers. They have a real liking for landowners, they hate all committees and boards and inspectors and control, and they delight in the gamble of the markets. Joseph Duncan, 192672 The obvious way to ensure that agriculture would indeed function as a social industry – overcoming traditions of individualism which some thought insuperable, so that farming might make a valuable contribution to the interests of the community as a whole – was to place it under state control. Controls over the use of land had been imposed during the First World War to boost food production, but in peacetime there were no sanctions to enforce good standards of cultivation, and governments had only the most indirect methods at their disposal to encourage agriculturists to concentrate on particular crops or to make their farming more responsive to social needs.73 Socialists and Liberals in the interwar years placed considerable faith in the power of regulation to transform the economic performance and the social accountability of British farming. Yet, as ‘Red Tape Farm’ demonstrates, these policies proved a gift to opposition propaganda. For socialists engaged in formulating policy, there were two major drawbacks to emphasizing commitments to control agriculture: they were deeply unpopular with farmers, and they had to contend with a widespread belief that such intervention was inherently inimical to farming. Mr Nosey Parker tried to implement the rule book on Barleycorn Farm, and the results were slimline pigs and laughable chaos. Control implied an interference in the way farmers operated, but still assumed that the state remained essentially outside the process of farming.74 Some socialists believed that this was not sufficient to guarantee that agriculture would serve the best interests of the community, and insisted that the state itself should take a direct responsibility. Visions of a future under large-scale cultivation certainly opened up a brave new world of public farming, where agriculture might at last take full benefit from scientific management and social direction. Public farming was included in the scope of Labour’s

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1926 agricultural programme, A Labour Policy for Agriculture, which outlined a scheme of planning committees to oversee all cultivation and enforce good standards of husbandry, but also allowed for some direct involvement in the actual business of farming. However, the document sounded a note of caution that ‘such public farming will not entirely supersede tenant farming, which will for long continue to be the normal method of tenure and cultivation’.75 This implied that public farming was not likely to be of major importance in the near future, though it still held out the possibility that it would become so eventually. On this, as on a number of agricultural issues, Labour spoke with a degree of schizophrenia. Only three years later, whilst the 1926 programme remained the Party’s definitive statement of policy, Garratt was reassuring farmers that Labour’s proposals did not include state farming.76 In 1932, the Party’s revised agricultural policy incorporated far more definite ambitions for direct farming than are to be found in the 1926 document, with enough references to ‘National Agricultural Commissions’ and ‘Public Farming Corporations’ to alarm even the most open-minded farmer.77 But 1932 was in reality a high-water mark for Labour’s ambitions in this area, and the later 1930s showed a definite retreat from such confident certainties of ideology. In fact, as will have become clear from the earlier discussion on large-scale cultivation, the economic grounds for accepting state farming on large acreages as an obvious goal were sufficiently unconvincing to limit support to mere endorsement of the possibility of this option as one experimental measure amongst a number of different approaches. The difficulties of presenting it as an option in practical politics were also very discouraging.78 Instead it seemed most likely, at least in the immediate term, that a socialist agriculture would be defined by control and public direction rather than by actual state or other collective organization of farming itself. Even communists in Britain were reluctant to commit themselves to state farming as a central point in their agricultural programme.79 The problem thus remained one of how to guarantee that an agriculture which remained largely under private management would yet work to meet national and social needs. It was not only socialists who believed that the time had come for creative intervention in the farming sector. British agriculturists’ reluctance to abandon what most experts considered to be inefficient methods and crops more suited to cultivation in other countries, seemed to demonstrate the dangers of leaving farmers entirely to their

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own devices: of trusting them to know what was best for their own financial well-being, let alone the development of British agriculture.80 Before the Second World War, the proverbial conservatism of farmers was widely blamed for damaging the economic viability of domestic agriculture, condemning it to the crisis which became so evident in 1930, but which bore many points of continuity with the depression of the late nineteenth century. Their obstinate attachment to unprofitable production prevented them from improving their own incomes, and could also be condemned more broadly as a rejection of responsibilities to make good use of the land under their care to provide the food which the community needed. This related closely to the ways in which the Left was defining the social role of agriculture by the 1930s. As Labour Party propaganda emphasized, it was a happy, and somewhat ironic coincidence that British soil was admirably suited to produce precisely the healthful foods in which the national diet was deficient, and in this respect, agriculture was well placed to make a valuable contribution to society.81 The fact that farmers were not by and large rushing to turn their farms over to such production could thus be regarded as demonstrating a blindness not only to their own interests, but also to the good of the nation. One way in which many socialists hoped to exert more positive influence over the development and diversification of farming was through taking on the role of landlord. In this they received considerable support from many agricultural economists, who argued that farmers under existing conditions were prevented from modernizing the industry by a variety of factors, amongst which undercapitalization and the inactivity of landlords were particularly important. Some of these academics, most notably Daniel Hall and C.S. Orwin, even lighted on the same solution as that promoted in socialist programmes: namely land nationalization. The nationalization of the land had a long pedigree on the Left, but the ways in which it was presented changed over time. During the 1920s and 1930s, the arguments for it were becoming more pragmatic. The scope of public ownership was limited from the mid-1920s to cover only agricultural land, even though many of the earlier radical agitations about landownership had been at least as much, if not more concerned with the level of urban rents and private control on building development.82 Alongside this, the claim for nationalization on point of principle became less and less acknowledged, giving way to justifications based on the idea that public ownership would promote economic benefits.83

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Central to this proposition was the argument that contemporary landlordism had failed. This implied that one of the major problems facing British agriculture was that the land was inadequately equipped and that farmers no longer received the support which landlords had provided in the past and which had enabled their tenants to follow the best farming practice known at the time. Such diagnoses tended, perhaps rather surprisingly, to idealize the old, and of course capitalist landlordism, which, according to these interpretations, had taken its responsibilities seriously, rather than simply regarding land ownership as a money-making venture. The solution, it was argued, was for the state to take on the role of landlord, providing the support and investment which farmers needed. ‘The tenant needs a good landlord. The State will be that landlord’, was the message of Labour’s campaign literature in the late 1920s.84 This prospect was presented as offering attractions even to those who owned the land they farmed; many of those who had bought their farms during the great land sales after the First World War were indeed so heavily mortgaged and short of investment capital that it was not implausible to argue that they would have been better off financially had they remained tenants. However, the prospect of the state as the great landlord did not receive a universal welcome on the Left. Landlordism of any sort had a bad name in radical circles. Josiah Wedgwood objected to such ambitions on the grounds that he wanted to get rid of landlordism altogether, not replace private landlords by the state.85 From a rather different perspective, G.R. Mitchison, one of the founding officers of the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda, also regarded it as the state’s task to abolish the role of the landlord, not to assume it as its own: a future Labour government, he argued, should have no intention ‘of merely substituting a single public landlord for a number of private ones’.86 In emphasizing this point, Mitchison envisaged a complete reconstruction of the way in which agriculture operated, within which land nationalization would be a part, but not the whole. As the rural socialist Jesse Hawkes argued in 1933, public ownership was not enough in itself to ensure that agriculture became a social industry: ‘to socialise the industry is much more important even than socialising land ownership,’ he declared. ‘The basic need is that agriculture should become a social service.’87 Moreover, most politicians on the Left acknowledged that, whatever their enthusiasm for the land being reclaimed for the people, the practicalities of administration, and above all of funding the necessary compensation to existing owners,

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meant that nationalization of the land was not a prospect for the immediate future. Ways had to be found of modernizing agriculture and directing it to serve national needs, even whilst the land remained in private hands. The resulting plans often differed little from policies put forward by the Liberal Party, centred around provisions to protect the nation against poor standards of cultivation, and retaining the right to eject farmers who were deemed incompetent.88 But as well as ensuring that farmers were kept up to reasonable standards, it was also considered important to produce some mechanism to direct agricultural development in the national interest and to make it more accountable. The Labour Party’s policy statement on agriculture in 1921, outlining a programme framed at conferences of rural representatives, defined a system of Councils of Agriculture, to be made up of one part elected farmers and one part farm workers, with the remaining third nominated by local authorities and representing the ‘public’ interest. From 1926, these proposed bodies were described as ‘agricultural committees’, to be organized at county level to plan and enforce good husbandry in their local area, and to be overseen in turn by a National Agricultural Commission. It was against such schemes that charges of ‘red tape’ were all too easily aimed. The main defence which Labour could offer against accusations that these schemes were simply bureaucratic, was that the bodies involved would be devolved and expert. Labour was keen to emphasize that its proposals represented something quite different from the spectre of a Mr Nosey Parker, descending from the ministry: one of its frequent mantras promised that there would be ‘no farming from Whitehall’. It assured the public that civil servants would not be deputed to run agriculture. ‘The very diversity of the problems involved, and the fact that most agricultural production will be for long undertaken by the individual farmer, will necessitate decentralised administration and co-operation with the producer at the source’, the Party promised in 1934.89 For some on the Left, committee structures were credited with a valuable role to play in promoting a new spirit within the industry, by giving ordinary workers on the farms a voice in directing agriculture. A commitment to ‘workers’ control’ and democratic industrial management was found at its most developed form within the Independent Labour Party (ILP). R.B. Walker, ILP member and General Secretary of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, believed that guilds at the level of individual farms were the way forward.90 The journalist H.N. Brailsford called for Agricultural County Committees

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to be based on guild organization, and for the agricultural worker to take his place on agriculture’s ‘governing board’.91 The subject was also being discussed seriously by the Fabian Research Bureau in the 1930s, by which time the heyday of guild socialism was long past. H.B. Pointing, a former ILPer and editor of the Agricultural Workers’ Union journal, The Land Worker, drew up a detailed scheme for workers’ control in which farm workers would have representation on the national and county committees which determined policy, as well as electing ‘managers’ (a.k.a. farmers) for particular farms.92 However, Pointing’s scheme was predicated on compulsory union membership, and the historical weakness of trade unionism in agriculture clearly acted as a limitation on thinking about the potential application of workers’ control. A Fabian memorandum on ‘Workers’ Control in Agriculture’ published in the mid-1930s regarded state farms as the most obvious place to give workers a say in how the industry was run. But even in this context, where the state would be in the strongest position to encourage union membership, it was acknowledged that anything more than a token representation of workers on the farm boards would have to develop gradually, as the unions matured and as recent recruits from the towns learned enough about their new line of work to elect representatives with some credible claim to experience and expertise.93 In keeping with a general scepticism about guild socialist ideas, the Labour Party itself gave much less emphasis to the goal of workers’ control, concentrating instead on the rather different issues of the scope for agricultural workers to progress within the industry, and on the need for the community (generally meaning the consumer’s) interest to be represented on the committees responsible for regulating and planning agriculture. Labour’s proposals for worker involvement in the management of farming were less an instance of enthusiasm for democratic control than a response to concerns about the paucity of opportunities for ambitious and able workers within the industry. It was argued that, for all practical purposes, farming remained in the hands of an hereditary class; farm labourers had only very limited expectations of promotion and of a developing career within the industry. Most labourers reached their maximum wage at a very early stage in their working lives, and opportunities to become a foreman or indeed start a farm of one’s own were so few that ambitious young men had little incentive to stay on the land. This situation seemed not only to be fuelling the exodus from rural communities, but also preventing agriculture from benefiting from

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the talent within its ranks. The ideal promoted by the Left was to turn farming itself from being the prerogative of a caste apart, into a higher grade within agricultural work, to which labourers could aspire. New schemes of management, Labour suggested, would give the agricultural worker a ‘partnership in a great public service in place of a life of hopeless drudgery and miserable poverty.’94 In addition to broadening the horizons of those employed in the industry, it was also argued that this was likely to improve the technical abilities of farmers as a group, and thus raise the quality of cultivation. Meanwhile, Labour continued to articulate its commitment to ensuring that agriculture functioned in the wider public interest, broadening representation on the management committees beyond those drawn from within the industry itself. The favoured approach within the party hierarchy drew on the model of a public corporation, such as the BBC, in direct contrast to the option of workers’ control. The inclusion on these management committees of members who had experience of farming, whether as farmers themselves or as agricultural employees, went some way towards disarming criticism from the farming community that such structures would obstruct agriculturists rather than assist them. Nor is there any evidence that socialists in Britain could conceive of managing agriculture without the benefit of expertise drawn from within the industry. Left-wing politicians were always particularly vulnerable to charges that they could not understand agriculture because so few of them had personal experience of farming, and the development of agricultural policy on the Left was heavily influenced by an ability to draw on experts who were often agriculturists first and socialists second. Until the Labour Party could call on its own experts, which it was able to do with increasing credibility by the mid-1920s, it was extremely cautious about expressing any view whatsoever about agriculture and rural life. Within this climate of anxiety, socialists concerned with presenting credible policies for agriculture easily fell into a somewhat surprising course: they asked what it was that farmers wanted. It is significant for the ways in which agricultural policy was being construed on the Left that this should be so. In the period before the First World War, the focus of policy had been on the fate of the labourer, with plans to address his plight through better housing, better wages, and land of his own. Policy in the later period, with at least a nominal commitment to land nationalization, might well have found the position of the landlords more interesting than that of the farmers. Yet as approaches towards agriculture became increasingly focused on the

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economic viability of this primary industry and the promise held by its potential productivity, the complaints and petitions of farmers themselves came to carry considerable weight in the formation of policy. In a period when the Conservatives seemed peculiarly unsympathetic to this interest group, it even appeared possible that farmers might be attracted to the socialist programme on the basis of favourable proposals for agriculture. One of the curious elements in this tentative negotiation with the farming community was that socialist visions for agriculture began to embrace the prospect of giving assistance to the farming class, with arguments that the state might reasonably provide support to encourage and enable farmers to fulfil their role. Although there was plenty of anti-farmer sentiment on the Left, more conciliatory voices were now to be heard, denying any necessary assumption that farmers were by nature obstructionist and conservative. The failure to plan and adapt to the new economic conditions facing agriculture was regarded by growing numbers of socialists as something for which farmers could not be ‘blamed’: indeed many Labour politicians (usually, it must be said, when addressing an agricultural audience) were careful to emphasize that under current circumstances farmers had little option but to carry on with familiar methods, and with the forms of production for which their farms were already equipped. If farmers had security, however, knowing that there would be an accessible market for what they produced, and being able to plan their cultivation with some assurance about the prices the crops would command when it came to harvest them, many of the arguments against diversification of land use would disappear. This would be even more the case if they were to be given practical help to make the necessary changes and invest in new methods. None the less, as farming was currently organized, it was unacceptable to most socialists that such help could be given without either controls over its implementation or a guarantee that social benefit would result from this national investment. They argued that farming only deserved assistance, and indeed it could only be justified to an electorate of consumers, if the industry showed itself responsive and accountable to the public. During the interwar period it was evident that farmers were not rejecting the idea of any relationship with government as, prima facie, undesirable, and indeed they positively sought out state support, in particular calling for the ‘Great Betrayal’95 of 1921 to be reversed and made good. By 1935, Tom Williams, who was later to enjoy an unusual degree of popularity as Minister of

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Agriculture under Attlee, was commenting on a ‘revolution’ in the outlook of farmers, observing that ‘from intolerance of any form of control’ many farmers had come to believe ‘in the necessity of such action as will guarantee them a profit’.96 The Labour Party became increasingly prepared to promise action to guarantee the economic prosperity of farming, and even to guarantee farmers’ incomes, considering it preferable at least that profits should go to them rather than to the ‘middlemen’ involved in food distribution. This was to be achieved in two ways: by stabilizing the prices of agricultural produce, and by reforming the way in which farming was managed. Although Joseph Duncan suggested in the article quoted at the beginning of this section that farmers positively relished the ‘gamble’ of the markets, he believed strongly that the existence of this farming ‘casino’ was a major obstacle to agricultural development, which prevented farmers from making the best use of their land and from farming boldly. If socialists were to encourage not only maximum production but also a shift in farming practice to favour the forms of production most appropriate to national needs, then they needed to persuade farmers that either of these approaches was worthwhile. There was, of course, to be a quid pro quo: as a memorandum for the New Fabian Research Bureau put it in 1933, the farmer’s prosperity would be ‘stabilised’ by ‘socialising his function’. In language which would have done little to win over any farmer who happened across this account of his planned destiny, the document promised that, in this way, ‘every willing farmer’ would be ‘utilised’.97 Beyond all the committee structures, consumer consultation and enforced standards of cultivation, someone still had to farm the land, and, as socialists postponed or discarded the prospect of either direct state farming or any major redistribution of land, it seemed increasingly unavoidable that this person would be the much-maligned farmer already occupying that post. The farmer had been vilified as almost a caricature of capitalism and selfish individualism. When Labour politicians offered a place in the new social order for the farmer who rendered a public service, the implication behind this was that farmers should not be regarded automatically as rendering such a service; it was safer to assume that they put their own interests first and took little account of the wider responsibility which they owed to the community to make good use of the land in their charge. Could a socialized agriculture be safe in these people’s hands? Socialists became increasingly hopeful that the answer could be ‘yes’. During the interwar period, ‘the socialist farmer’ ceased to be an

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oxymoron. Some farmers began to vote Labour and to join political parties on the Left, often in relatively short-lived protest against Tory neglect of agricultural interests, and sometimes with genuine curiosity about socialist policy, or even a desire to help shape its future development. Labour, and even the Communist Party, were keen to attract more. It is in this light that we need to think about socialist anxieties over the image presented in ‘Red Tape Farm’. The vision of a socialist agriculture could make no sense at all without accountability and responsiveness to the needs of the community, yet socialists were also eager, and occasionally optimistic, about attracting political support from farmers to whom the word ‘control’ was a traditional red rag. Thus the policies for creating a social industry came to be as much about assisting farmers and guaranteeing them economic security, as they were about curbing and redirecting their enterprise.

IV Conclusion We Socialists would assure the farmer that Socialism does not mean farming from Whitehall, and hosts of inspectors. Labour Party publicity material, 194598 By the end of the Second World War, some observers, whether approving or disapproving, believed that they had witnessed the introduction of socialism into agriculture, as the industry was subjected to wartime expedients of physical controls and price regulation. Although some, particularly in the Communist Party, criticized the survival of special interests even into policies supposedly focused on the fundamental task of feeding the community, many others perceived an important shift in assumptions about the social responsibilities of agriculturists and in the extent to which farmers were prepared to resign some of the liberties to which they had previously held so tenaciously. The President of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, Edwin Gooch, welcomed this ‘quiet revolution’: ‘both farmers and workers have become in effect servants of the State. In wartime no farmer can do what he likes with the land, and no farm worker can do what he likes with his labour.’99 In agriculture, as in many other fields of policy, the war seemed to have proved the case for socialist critiques of the economy during the interwar period. If the organizing power of the state, coupled with

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committed voluntary support, could work to the benefit of the community in the emergency of war, why not in peace? Yet, whilst welcoming a shift of opinion on acceptable policy towards much greater intervention and direction, the Labour Party chose to distance itself from some of the possibilties offered by the wartime precedents. There was enthusiasm for co-operative measures to enhance production, such as the much-celebrated machinery pools established in Buckinghamshire, but politicians were far more guarded in their approach to the continuance of controls into peacetime.100 ‘We do not wish to keep on any irksome controls which may have been necessary in War-time’, the Labour candidate A.E. Stubbs announced to electors in Cambridgeshire on his way to victory in the 1945 campaign.101 Despite all this, however, it seems that, through all the demands of war and shifting assumptions about the relation between farmers and the state, the ghost of ‘Red Tape Farm’ remained potent. The Left had invested a great deal during the 1920s and 1930s in trying to establish itself as the ‘farmers’ friend’, responsive to farmers’ needs and eager to gain their political support. During the war and after, the greatest priority on the land was to achieve maximum production, and the Left threw its support behind policies of giving farmers guarantees, support and privileges to encourage that production. Malcolm Chase has characterized the postwar Labour government’s agricultural policy as one of ‘private enterprise, sponsored rather than directed by the State’.102 This pragmatic ‘middle way’ was not a surprising outcome of the war years, but had its roots in approaches to policy as they had developed over the previous two decades. During the 1920s and 1930s, politicians on the Left became increasingly interested in discussing agriculture as an industry, rather than focusing almost exclusively on questions of workers’ conditions and the politics of land itself, as was common before the First World War. Within those discussions, some were prepared to apply socialist methods to envisaging a different future for the way in which farming was organized, and many more felt able to apply the label ‘socialist’ to policies which were in fact far more reformist in their approach. The political watershed of 1931 gave opportunities for far more explicit socialist planning, and in general marked a much more economic emphasis to policy discussions on the Left, but this seems to have been weaker in agriculture than in most other areas of policy. In part this was because of the historic importance of Liberal immigrants in defining agricultural priorities within the Labour Party, thus setting a

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tone for left-wing debate more generally. Liberal policy for the land and agriculture was clearly ‘advanced’ and radical, but it was not ‘socialist’, whatever slurs Conservative opponents hurled at Liberal programmes: Liberals did not want state ownership of the land, and their basic adherence to free trade made them sceptical about many aspects of planning and intervention in farming. Yet there were also important self-limitations to specific attempts to apply socialism in agriculture. Hugh Dalton’s comments on the subject reveal some of the anxieties involved. ‘The Labour Party must be ever on its guard against seeing agriculture through a townsman’s eyes’, Dalton observed in 1935. But what did this involve? For Dalton, it meant taking ‘guidance’ from the Party’s growing agricultural membership when deciding on emphasis and priorities, which argued for ‘discretion’ in discussing land nationalization, and a focus instead on the ‘primary interests’ of the countryman, namely agricultural prices, marketing, and the adoption of practical methods of assistance to the industry.103 In the film ‘Red Tape Farm’, the Conservative Party held up to ridicule the idea of running agriculture according to regulations and binding the farmer’s enterprise with controls and bureaucracy. It was an attack to which British socialists felt particularly vulnerable, and played on doubts which were increasingly well established in the 1920s about whether socialist principles could really be applied to agriculture, and whether, without sufficient experience of farming, socialists were capable of making policies sympathetic to farmers’ needs. It is one of the extraordinary features of socialist programmes for agriculture between the wars that so much attention was given to the question of what farmers themselves wanted. This led to much ambiguity over the central socialist assumption that land should be in public ownership, and placed major constraints over any commitment to reconstruct the nature of farming: to change the scale of cultivation, the personnel involved, or to place agriculture under state or community controls. Most visions of a socialist agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s were thus remarkably conservative, assuming that most cultivation would continue on medium-sized farms, run by the farmers with relatively little interference from the man from Whitehall. It seemed that, for all their sins of capitalism and individualism, agriculturists knew best.

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Notes (Place of publication London unless otherwise stated) 1. National Film Archive, London: Red Tape Farm (1927, distributed by Conservative Central Office). 2. On the Conservative Party’s use of film in the period, see T.J. Hollins, ‘The Conservative Party and Film Propaganda between the Wars’, English Historical Review, vol. XCVI no. 379 (1981), pp. 359–69. Hollins notes (p. 363) that at least seven cartoons were made for the party by William Ward in the period 1926–30. 3. See S.G. Sturmey, ‘Owner-Farming in England and Wales 1900–1950’, in W.E. Minchinton (ed.), Essays in Agrarian History, vol. II (Newton Abbot, 1968) pp. 283–306, on the expansion of owner-occupancy. Sturmey places the major increase in the periods 1919–21 and 1924–5, such that by 1927 over one-third of agricultural land was being cultivated by its owners (pp. 294–6). 4. For a general outline of the history of British agriculture in this period, see E. H. Whetham (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 8, 1914–39 (Cambridge, 1978). Joan Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture: a History (Oxford, 1997) pp. 147–219 provides an interesting account of some of the ways in which agriculturists responded to the difficulties facing the industry from the depression in the late 1870s onwards. 5. Michael Kinnear, The British Voter (1968) p. 120. On the changing relationship between the Conservative Party and rural constituencies, see Simon Moore, ‘Reactions to Agricultural Depression: the Agrarian Conservative Party in England and Wales, 1920–1929’ (Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1988). 6. The Land and the Nation. Rural Report of the Liberal Land Committee 1923–25 (1925). On the publication of the ‘Green Book’, see Roy Douglas, Land, People and Politics (1976) pp. 191–3. Unlike the pre-World War I Land Campaign, fought from a position of strength, that of the 1920s was in many ways a ‘last ditch’ effort for the Liberals, and indeed for Lloyd George himself. See Michael Dawson, ‘The Liberal Land Policy, 1924–1929: Electoral Strategy and Internal Division’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 2 no. 3 (1991) pp. 272–90. 7. See, for example, Ramsay MacDonald’s complaints about the amount of research that Lloyd George had at his disposal compared to the briefings which he himself received in preparation for the rural demonstrations in 1926–7, correspondence at PRO 30/69/1172/I/438–9 (to George Dallas, 10 January 1927) and PRO 30/69/1172/II/767–69 (to Egerton Wake, 10 January 1927). 8. Lloyd George’s programme was explicitly described as the ‘Nosey Parker Land Policy’ in The Conservative Agents’ Journal, August 1927, p. 209. 9. See, for example, Farming Under Socialism: an Examination of the Socialist Agricultural Programme, National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations pamphlet, December 1926, p. 18. 10. C.V. Wedgwood, The Last of the Radicals (1951). 11. Labour Leader, 11 May 1922.

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12. British Library of Political and Economic Science, London (BLPES), Fabian Society Papers, J23/2, item 7, comments by Jesse Hawkes; the questionnaire is at J23/2, item 6. 13. Buxton thought of the Labour Party as carrying on the work which Liberals should do, but no longer did. See McLennan Library, McGill University, Montreal, Noel-Buxton papers, draft autobiography, ch. IX: ‘Politics’. Harold Laski regarded Addison’s political philosophy at the time when he was a Labour minister as merely a collection of sympathies evolved from Liberalism (Daily Herald, 23 May 1931). 14. See comments made at the 1926 Labour Party Conference, Proceedings of the 26th Labour Party Conference, p. 219; also correspondence between Jesse Hawkes and Ramsay MacDonald, 22 February 1926, PRO30/69/ 1171/I/636–7. 15. Foreword to Anne Cobden-Sanderson, Richard Cobden and the Land of the People (ILP, 1909). 16. See Michael Tichelar, ‘Socialists, Labour and the Land: the Response of the Labour Party to the Land Campaign of Lloyd George before the First World War’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 8 no. 2 (1997), pp. 127–44. 17. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Addison Papers, box 129, file 165, ‘Notes on the Draft Report of Agricultural Policy’ [n.d., ?early 1926]. 18. G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-stated (1920) pp. 163–4. 19. Labour Research, June 1931, p. 134. See also her book, Agriculture in Soviet Russia (1931). H.G. Wells described Beauchamp as giving the impression ‘of a believer who writes without a doubt of the Five Year Plan’ (H.R. Knickerbocker et al., The New Russia (1931) p. 120). 20. It should be noted that even some Labour MPs at the time regarded the smallholding proposals as inappropriate: George Dallas, MP for Wellingborough and an important figure on the Party’s Agricultural and Rural Policy committees, described these elements of the Bill as ‘expensive and reactionary’ (BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J2/3/92, report on Society for Socialist Research weekend conference at Easton Lodge, 4–6 July 1931). 21. On attempts to counter the basic assumption that socialism naturally aims at large-scale production, see Jack Dunman, Agriculture: Capitalist and Socialist. Studies in the Development of Agriculture and its Contribution to Economic Development as a Whole (1975) pp. 16, 244–5. 22. Farming Under Socialism, p. 18. 23. For example, Farming Under Socialism incorporated substantial quotation from Wedgwood (described there as a ‘Socialist MP’) criticizing Labour’s programme (pp. 12–14, 16, 18). 24. D. Mitrany, ‘Marx v. The Peasant’, in T.E. Gregory and Hugh Dalton (eds), London Essays in Economics: In Honour of Edwin Cannan (1927) pp. 319–76. 25. Some of the classic indictments of the peasantry are in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (2nd edn, 1869), in T. Carver (ed.), Karl Marx: Later Political Writings (Cambridge, 1996) pp. 117–20. The phrase ‘the idiocy of rural life’ appears in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; cited edition, 1967) p. 84. 26. Josiah Wedgwood, Labour and the Farm Worker (Labour Party, 1925).

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27. Rural History Centre, Reading (RHC), NUAW DII/5, typed draft, 20 February 1925. 28. Clarion, 2 October 1925. 29. For example, Land Worker, October 1920. 30. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Addison Papers, box 35, notes on office conference, 19 June 1930. In a memo for the New Fabian Research Bureau in 1933 Jesse Hawkes adopted a similar position, though he observed that ‘care will be needed to prevent the automatic commitment of either woman or child to the man’s self-chosen slavery . . .’ (BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J23/1/9, ‘Some General Considerations on Socialised Agriculture in Great Britain by Jesse Hawkes’, 19 December 1933). This point had also been raised by G.D.H. Cole in Guild Socialism Re-stated (1920) p. 167. 31. Joseph Duncan, Agriculture and the Community (Stirling, 1921) pp. 54–5. 32. This notion is discussed below. 33. F.E. Green, A New Agricultural Policy (1921) p. 162. See below for Green’s observations about the isolation experienced by a scattered agricultural workforce. 34. For example, An Experiment in Agriculture (ILP, 1901) and Richard Higgs, Socialism and Agriculture (ILP, 1907). 35. The Waste of Capitalism (Labour Party, 1924). 36. H.D. Harben, Labour and the Land (1921) p. 14. 37. Published accounts of such visits include: Ethel Snowden, Through Bolshevik Russia (1920); Charles Roden Buxton, In a Russian Village (1922); Paul Winterton, A Student in Russia (Manchester, 1931); and Margaret Cole (ed.), Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia (1933). Many Labour papers and periodicals, including The Country Standard, had correspondents in Russia. On the subject more generally, see David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: a Postscript to the Enlightenment (1973); and Andrew J.Williams, Labour and Russia: the Attitude of the Labour Party to the USSR, 1924–1934 (Manchester, 1989). 38. See Morgan’s contribution to Margaret Cole (ed.), Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia (1933) pp. 107–21. 39. W.E. Guinness, Hansard, Commons, vol. 244 (1930–1) 28 October–14 November, col. 1908. Conservative Party agents were issued with lists of publications giving ‘reliable information’ on conditions in Soviet Russia (see Conservative Agents Journal, July 1927, p. 146) and a number of Conservative propaganda leaflets in the late 1920s carried quotations from commentators (including Trotsky) describing the failures of communist experiments in agriculture. 40. National Museum of Labour History, Manchester, LP/LPAC, minutes of Labour Party Advisory Committee on Land Policy, 18 and 25 June 1923, evidence from R.L. Outhwaite and Joseph Hyder. 41. C.S. Orwin and W.R. Peel, The Tenure of Agricultural Land (Cambridge, 1926) pp. 42–62; and C.S. Orwin, Problems of the Countryside (Cambridge, 1945) p. 41. 42. R.F. Easterbrook, ‘Can the Small Farmer Survive?’, New Statesman and Nation, 6 October 1934, pp. 429–30. 43. BLPES, Fabian Papers, J22/3, items 1–4, ‘Agriculture. An Industry’ (July 1933), pt 4, p. 6.

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44. The Labour Party and the Countryside (Labour Party, 1921), pp. 7–8. 45. Bodleian, Addison Papers, 129, file 165, typed note [? by John Dugdale], 6 May 1932. 46. See ‘Licinius’, Vote Labour? Why? (Labour Party, 1945) pp. 25–6. 47. Labour and the New Social Order (Labour Party, 1918). 48. C. Addison, A Policy for British Agriculture (1939) pp. 243–54. 49. BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J23/2, item 11, memo, ‘Workers’ Control in Agriculture’ by John Dugdale, n.d. [c.1934]. 50. G.T. Garratt, The Organisation of Farming, I, Production (Cambridge, 1930), p. xii. 51. Ibid., pp. 11–17. 52. Labour Research, February 1934, p. 36. 53. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-stated, p. 171. 54. Labour and the Land (Labour Party, July 1935) p. 7. 55. He also illustrated this image with photographs of rural ‘isolation’, see The Tyranny of the Countryside (1913), plate facing p. 253. 56. Green, New Agricultural Policy, p. 147. 57. Green, The Tyranny of the Countryside (1913) p.75. 58. H.G. Wells (ed.), Socialism and the Great State: Essays in Construction (New York and London, 1912) p. 59. 59. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Labour Party Conference (1924) p. 173. In the same debate, an ILP delegate referred to agriculture as ‘a great social service’, using the idea of the ‘social’ more in the second sense, as discussed below. 60. See especially Howard Newby, The Deferential Worker (1977). 61. J.F. Duncan, ‘Organising Farm Workers’ (paper from a conference at Wadham College, Oxford in July 1936), Journal of Proceedings of the Agricultural Economics Society, vol. IV no. 3 (November 1936), p. 252. 62. See comments by H.B. Pointing in report for the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda, BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J2/3/100, ‘A Socialist Policy for Agriculture’, n.d. [c.July 1931]. 63. A Prosperous Countryside (Labour Party, 1927). 64. Labour’s Policy on Agriculture (Labour Party, 1926) p. 8. For similar sentiments being expressed at the end of the period, Your Britain, 3: ‘Food and Farming’ (Labour Party, 1938). 65. Under the Wheat Act of 1932, a levy was introduced on all wheat flour, to fund a subsidy to wheat growers. Subsequently, import duties were introduced on some fruit and vegetables, and restrictions were imposed on imported bacon, which resulted in the price rising. 66. See comments in Labour Research (September 1933) p. 205. Examples of such practices operating in Britain were particularly associated with the Milk Marketing Board. On the connection of governmental policy with the promotion of scarcity, see Stafford Cripps, The Economic Planning of Agriculture (Labour Party, 1934). 67. Opening section of Joseph Duncan, Memorandum on Immediate Steps in Agricultural Reconstruction (Labour Party, 1918), written for the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Rural Problems. 68. Country Worker, January 1935. 69. Accounts of the waste of foodstuffs, or their use for other purposes such

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70. 71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81.

82.

83.

239

as in manufacture, were treated as a national scandal: see Thomas Johnston, Labour’s Policy of Food for All (Labour Party, September 1937), p. 6. A favourite case often cited in this context was the use of liquid milk stocks for the manufacture of umbrella handles. Ibid., p. 8. See, for example, Ramsay MacDonald writing in Labour’s Policy Versus Protection (Labour Party, 1923), and opening sections of How Labour Will Save Agriculture (Labour Party, 1934). ‘Has Labour an Agricultural Policy?’, Socialist Review, September 1926, p. 34. On the forms of control imposed during the First World War, see P.E. Dewey, British Agriculture in the First World War (1989), esp. ch 12. It is interesting to note that great importance was given to the decentralized administration of government policy (pp. 92, 97). The establishment of standards of cultivation during the war had allowed the County Executive Committees to take over farms in extremis, but this was an option taken relatively rarely: the committees took possession of around 27 000 acres during 1917–18 (Dewey, British Agriculture, p. 79). Labour’s Policy for Agriculture (Labour Party, November 1926), p. 6 (my italics). By 1932, official statements reduced ‘will continue’ to ‘may continue’. See The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture (Labour Party, November 1932), p. 11. Agriculture and the Labour Party (Fabian tract, 1929) The Land and the National Planning of Agriculture (Labour Party, November 1932), esp. p. 3. Joan Beauchamp cited the strength of opposition to the clauses in the 1931 Land Utilisation Bill proposing experiments in direct public farming as a sign that there could be ‘no hope at present’ of nationalization in agriculture (Labour Research, June 1931, p. 133). Communists tended to place emphasis on co-operation between small farmers, and insisted on the advantages which nationalization would bring for existing tenants and owners-occupiers alike, see British Agriculture 1943: the Communist Party’s Memorandum on Agriculture (revised version of 1942 memorandum) pp. 33–4. Even when Maurice Cornforth was discussing the virtues of economies of scale, he envisaged a future under ‘large-scale co-operative farms’ (Country Standard, June 1936, p. 4). To give credit to those who did show initiative in developing new enterprises, see Thirsk, Alternative Agriculture, chs 6 and 7. For example, Library of Congress House, JN 1129 LAB, campaign leaflet ‘Britain’s People need much more fresh food. Britain’s Land could grow much more fresh food’, June 1938. On the urban aspects of land reform, see Avner Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 1981) esp. chs 12, 16 and 23; and P.J. Waller, Town, City and Nation (Oxford, 1991) pp. 259–63. The Liberal Party’s Land Enquiry Committee presented its findings in two volumes: the rural report published in 1913, and the less well-known urban volume, which appeared in 1914. In this they came more into line with arguments in favour of nationalization from other political and non-political perspectives, cf. C.S.

240

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

Agriculture and Politics in England, 1815–1939 Orwin’s comment, in the New Statesman, 11 April 1936, that supporters of land nationalisation had in the past ‘allowed their own peculiar beliefs in some mythical rights of man to obscure what is a perfectly plain economic issue, and thereby have prejudiced the case. For there is nothing either unlawful or immoral in the private ownership of land. The argument against it is that it has outlived its usefulness and that it is an anachronism and an obstruction in the modern State.’ For example, the campaign leaflet, ‘The Labour Party and the Farmer’, April 1927. See comments at the 1926 Labour Party Conference, Proceedings of the 26th Labour Party Conference (1926) pp. 218–19. G.R. Mitchison, The First Workers’ Government, or New Times for Henry Dubb (1934) p. 369. Jesse Hawkes, ‘Some General Considerations’, J23/1/10. The main difference between the Liberal and Labour programmes was always over the nationalization of land. For Socialism and Peace (Labour Party 1934; 1938 edn) p. 25. A socialist from an earlier period had even suggested organization at the level of the parish council (Arthur Hickmott, Socialism and Agriculture (1897) pp. 14, 16). R.B. Walker, Speed the Plough (ILP, 1924). Congress House Library, London, HD595, ’Sketch of an Agricultural Policy’, duplicated notes, c.1920–2. BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J23/2, item 9, ’A Scheme for Workers’ Control in Agriculture’, 16 February 1934. The use of ‘manager’ to describe farmers was quite common in Fabian discussions at the time. Farmers were also described as ‘salaried managers’ in Walker, Speed the Plough, p. 12. BLPES, Fabian Society papers, J23/2, item 11, memo, ‘Workers’ Control in Agriculture’ by John Dugdale, n.d. [c.1934]. How Labour Will Save Agriculture (Labour Party, 1934). The ‘Great Betrayal’ referred to the repeal of the Corn Production Acts which guaranteed minimum prices for wheat and oats. Price support had been introduced during the First World War to encourage cereal production, and was continued into peacetime under legislation in 1920, but, as wholesale prices collapsed in the spring of 1921, the government’s potential liability in making up the shortfall looked too heavy to bear; to have fulfilled the commitment would in any case have been somewhat iniquitous, given the fact that the fall in prices hit all sectors of agricuture, while the government support would have affected two crops only. Although the 1920 legislation had promised four years’ notice of repeal, it was introduced with immediate effect, though some compensation was made available. For details, see Whetham (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1914–39, pp. 139–41. The 1921 repeal also marked the end of the minimum wage regulation in agriculture, though this was reinstated in a slightly weaker form by the Labour government in 1924. Tom Williams, Labour’s Way to Use the Land (1935) p. 32. Hawkes, ‘Some General Considerations’, J/23/1/10. ‘Licinius’, Vote Labour? Why?, p. 27.

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99. Journal of the Farmers’ Club, December 1941, p. 84. 100. British Agriculture, 1943 (Communist Party, 1943) pp. 20–1, 38–9. F.W. Bateson was inspired to apocalyptic verse on the subject: ‘Lines on the Buckinghamshire Machinery Pools’, published in the New Statesman, and reprinted in F.W. Bateson (ed.), Towards a Socialist Agriculture: Studies by a Group of Fabians (1946) pp. xi–xii. 101. Cambridgeshire County Record Office, Cambridge: Cambridgeshire Labour Party papers, 416/0.39, election address. Much of the work of the War Agricultural Executive Committees was deeply resented by the farmers subject to their regulations: for a wonderful portrayal of farmers’ non-cooperation see John Moore’s novel, The Blue Field (1948). 102. Malcolm Chase, ‘“Nothing Less Than a Revolution”?: Labour’s Agricultural Policy’, in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Labour’s High Noon: the Government and the Economy 1945–51 (1993) p. 80. 103. Hugh Dalton, Practical Socialism for Britain (1935) p. 158.

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Index Acland-Hood 168 Addison, Christopher 191, 204, 206, 208, 211, 215 Agricultural Association 51 Agricultural Employment Institution 102 Agricultural labourers allotments see Allotment movement economic decline 26, 60 ‘flight from the land’ 142, 201 Liberal Party 136–7, 152–3 neglect 129–30, 136 Poor Laws see Poor Laws seasonal employment 129 Speenhamland System 58 trade unions 134, 150 unemployment 16, 100–1, 114, 118 wage levels see Wages women and children 114, 115 see also Working classes Agriculture Corn Laws see Corn Laws depression 149, 150, 154, 157, 159, 200–1 free trade 26 guaranteed prices 27 interest see Landownership parliamentary enquiries 52, 53 productivity 15–16, 17, 135 Royal Commissions see Royal Commissions socialism 199–234 wheat see Wheat prices Allotment movement 1887 Act 117, 125 breadth of support 121 common land 104, 105, 107, 113, 115, 117, 119–20 Conservative Party 153 Corn Laws 120–1 Crown Lands Inclosure Act 104, 250

105, 114 field gardens 111, 113, 119, 120, 123, 124 Fuel Allotments Act 105–6, 114 General Enclosure Act 113, 114, 123, 124 hostility of farmers 116 impact of 1819–45 Acts 114–17, 123–5 Inclosure of Wastes Act 104, 105, 114 legislation 15, 17, 98–125 loan societies 110, 119 moral purpose 16–17 parish authorities see Parochial government parliamentary enquiries 98, 102, 108–9, 111, 115, 120, 122 permissive legislation 117 politics 15–17, 98–125 Poor Laws 116–17, 118 productivity 17 rural poverty 100–1, 114, 118, 134–5 Swing riots 100, 124 unsuitable authorities 115–18, 123–4 waste land 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114–15, 117 see also Enclosure Althorp, Lord (3rd Earl Spencer) 102, 123 Amery, Leo 168–9 Anti-Corn Law League campaigning 54, 55, 131 Chartism 11, 18–19, 22, 38 formation 91 ‘high’ politics 22 indifference 12 landownership 34 publications 13, 34 tenant farmers 129 working classes 42, 44, 63–4

Index see also Corn Laws Arch, Joseph 130, 150 Archer, J.E. 99 Argyll, 9th Duke 137 Arnold, Arthur 136 Ashley, Lord (7th Earl of Shaftesbury) 109, 110–11, 119, 120 Ashworth, Henry 71 Asquith, Herbert Henry (1st Earl of Oxford) 140 Attlee, Clement 231 Attwood, Thomas 18, 120 Bacon, R.M. 102 Bagehot, Walter 144 Bailey, Samuel 86 Baines, Edward 56 Baldwin, Stanley 187–8, 190, 193 Balfour, Arthur James (1st Earl) 61, 154, 164, 167 Barnes, D.G. 35–6, 55 Barnett, Correlli 5 Barnett, D.C. 99 Bath, Lord 158 Beauchamp, Joan 208, 212 Bentham, Jeremy 72, 73, 86 Black, J.R. 86 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 80 Bledisloe, Lord 184, 185 Blundell, F.N. 179 Board of Agriculture 154, 181 Bonar Law, Andrew 166–72 Bowring, John 72, 73, 77, 81, 82, 86, 90, 91 Brailsford, H.N. 227 Bright, John allotments 112, 120 anti-Corn Law arguments 12, 14, 70, 71, 77 labourers’ wages 112 radicalism 22, 133 Briscoe, J.I. 101, 102, 104, 121 Brotherton, Joseph 86 Brown, Jonathan 1, 28, 178–95 Bruford, Robert 179 Buckington, J.S. 86 Buckley, John 40–1 Burchardt, Jeremy 15, 98–125

251

Burnett, John 50 Buxton, Noel 204 Caird, James 58 Campbell, Colin 179, 180 Canning, George 10, 77, 79 Carnavon, 4th Earl 103, 149 Central Chamber of Agriculture (CCA) 151, 155, 170 Central Landowners’ Association political influence 1, 28 Chalmers, Thomas 82 Chaloner, W.H. 19 Chamber of Agriculture Journal 151 Chamberlain, Austen 155, 167, 168, 170, 171 Chamberlain, Joseph Birmingham speech 41, 61 protectionism 61, 62, 63 Radical Programme 136 small holdings 137, 138 tariff reform 160–4, 169 Chaplin, Henry protectionism 156 rate relief 160 small holdings 138, 139 tariff reform 161, 162 tenant farming 153, 154 Chartism Anti-Corn Law League 11, 18–19, 22, 38 failure 19, 22–3 ‘high’ politics 22 Land Plan 108 ruling class 7–8 six points 2, 19, 25 working classes 44 Churchill, Winston S. 143 Clay, Thomas 87 Clemenson, Heather 28 Clergy Justices of the Peace 4 landownership 4–5 Cobbett, William 12, 130 Cobden, Richard agricultural labourers 134 anti-Corn Law arguments 12, 14, 19, 62, 63, 70, 71, 92 political economy 77

252

Index

radicalism 7, 18, 22, 23, 133 Cobden Club 62 Cobden-Unwin, Jane 63 Coke, Thomas 37–8, 39 Cole, G.D.H. 207, 217 Collings, Jesse 136, 137, 138 Collins, E.J.T. 45 Colquhon, Patrick 2 Common land allotment movement 104, 105, 107, 113, 115, 117, 119–20 Commons Preservation Society 133 see also Enclosure Communist Party 207, 232 Conservative Party agricultural labourers 138 agricultural policy 26–7, 60–2, 143, 149–72, 199–200, 209 Agriculture Committee 152, 153 allotment movement 153 free trade 157 landownership 26 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 180 protectionism 61–3, 156–7 reconstruction 33 Red Tape Farm 199–200, 202, 207, 223, 232, 233, 234 small holdings 137–9, 165, 213 tariff reform 61, 131, 160–72 tenant farming 150–6 Cooper, A.F. 183 Corn Laws allotment movement 120–1 amendment 35, 52, 57, 70, 77, 79, 87 complexity 42–3 controversial nature 33–4 handloom weavers 14 ‘high’ politics 43 landownership 11–12, 35, 51 manufacturing 58 middle-class attitudes 12–14, 34, 36, 37, 54–8 ‘not working’ 42, 44, 51, 64 ‘patiently endured’ 34 perceptions and reality 33–64 petitions 36, 55

political reform 12, 14, 18 purpose 16 repeal 11, 19, 20, 23, 33, 35, 54, 57, 158 riots 36, 37–9 sliding duties 52, 79, 87 ‘small but determined band’ 13, 37, 43, 64 taxation 158 tenant farming 35, 51, 64 tithes 75–6 wages 76, 84 wheat prices 39, 42, 44–50, 52 working-class attitudes 35–44 see also Anti-Corn Law League Corn Production Act 182, 185, 186 Country Landowners’ Association 193 County Councils 25, 119, 144 Courthope, George 155, 164 Cowper, W.F. 107–9, 111–13, 118, 120–4 Crawford, Lord 169 Crawford, Sharman 109, 111 Crick, Robert 50 Cromwell, Oliver 3 Crouch, David 99 Currency depreciation 73 gold standard 53, 57 Dalton, Hugh 234 Darvall, F.O. 37 Demainbray, Stephen 102 Derby, 15th Earl 134 Disraeli, Benjamin 121, 123, 132, 151 Dixon-Hartland, Frederick 158 Donaldson, James 187 Dorman-Smith, Reginald 195 Ducie, Earl of 52 Dugdale, John 216 Duncan, Joseph 211, 219, 222, 223, 231 Duncombe, T.S. 86 Easterbrook, R.F. 214 Edinburgh Review 73 Education

Index rural areas 153 Elections corrupt practices 25 County Councils 25 patronage 21 secret ballot 25 uncontested 18 see also Franchise Elliot, Walter 192–3 Elliott, Ebenezer 13, 37, 62, 77, 86 Enclosure common land 104, 105, 107, 113, 115, 117, 119–20 Crown land 104, 105 General Enclosure Act 113, 114, 123, 124 parliamentary enquiries 111, 112 property rights 119–20 waste land 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114–15, 117 see also Allotment movement Erskine, Lord 51 Estcourt, T.G.B. 102, 107, 109, 122–3 Estcourt, Thomas 102, 122 Evans, Eric 36 Ewart, William 86 Fabian Society 205, 207, 213, 228 Fair trade 157–8 Fairlie, Susan 44–8 Farmer and Stockbreeder 186, 188, 189, 193, 194 Farmers’ Alliance 151 Farmers’ Club 155 Farmer’s Magazine 52 Farmers’ Tariff Union (FTU) 169 Farming owner occupation 27–8, 201 small holdings see Small holdings tenants see Tenant farming Ferrand, W.B. 108, 109, 118, 119, 120, 121 Fielden, John 18 Finn, Margot 23 First World War landownership 140–1 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 181–2, 183

253

Fisher-Unwin, Thomas 63 Fox, W.J. 132 France free trade 82 peasant agriculture 16 Franchise adult males 25 Great Reform Act 20 householders 25 landownership 10 tenant farming 18 urban voters 24 working classes 21 see also Elections Free trade abandonment 190, 191 agriculture 26 Conservative Party 157 France 82 landownership 60 Liberal Party 63, 139 Froude, J.A. 133 Game laws landownership 129, 130, 141 tenant farming 151, 152 Garratt, Geoffrey 216, 224 Garvin, J.L. 160 Gash, Norman 19, 36, 37 George, Henry 128, 137, 138, 139 German, H. 186 Gilbert 169 Gladstone, William Ewart 152, 157 Gooch, Edwin 232 Goschen, George J. (1st Viscount) 158 Graham, James 108, 111, 112, 121, 123 Granville Somerset, Lord 107 Great Reform Act franchise 20 middle classes 17, 20 radicalism 81 Green, Ewen 27, 149–72 Green, F.E. 212, 218–19 Green, J.L. 165 Greig, George 131 Griffiths, Clare 1, 28, 199–234 Grosvenor, Lord Robert 109

254

Index

Grote, George

86

Hall, Daniel 225 Hamilton, Edward 156, 158 Hampden Clubs 10, 21 Handloom weavers 14, 106 Harben, Henry 212 Hardie, James Keir 205 Hartington, Marquis (8th Duke of Devonshire) 157 Harvey, D.W. 86 Hawkes, Jesse 226 Herbert, Sidney 19 Hewins, W.A.S. 161, 162 Hilton, Boyd 53 Hobhouse, Henry 8 Hodgins, Jonathan 38 Holyoake, G.J. 22 Hop Growers’ Defence League 170 House of Commons elections see Elections franchise see Franchise landownership 2, 8, 9, 17–18, 22, 24, 26 paid MPs 25 petitions 36, 52, 53, 55 pocket boroughs 10 property qualification 2, 9, 25 seat redistribution 25 House of Lords landownership 2, 8, 22, 24, 140 Parliament Act (1911) 25, 26, 28, 60 Howard, E.H. 178, 180 Howe, Anthony 62, 63 Howitt, William 86 Hume, Joseph 18, 77, 86, 87, 108, 120, 121 Hunt, Henry 120 Huskisson, William 10, 64, 79 Hyder, Joseph 141 Independent Labour Party (ILP) 205, 207, 212, 227 Industrial revolution labour force 16 Inglis, H.D. 135 Ireland 3 F’s 151, 153

absentee landlords 128 famine 135 tenant farming 150, 151, 155 James II 3 Jones, E.L. 52 Judiciary, landownership 3–5 Justices of the Peace clergy 4 powers and duties 3, 25, 144 property qualification 4, 9 Kenyon, Lord 105, 113 King, Gregory 2 King, Lord 77 Labour force agricultural see Agricultural labourers industrial revolution 16 see also Working classes Labour Party agricultural policy 202, 205–6, 215–16, 220, 223–32 land nationalisation 139 Land Utilisation Bill 191, 208 minority government 141 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 191 rise 28 small holdings 209, 210–11 Labour Research Department 208, 212 Labourchere, Henry 137 Labourers’ Friend Society 98, 101, 106, 109, 110, 121 Laing, Samuel 135 Lamb, J.Q. 179 Land Agents’ Society 141 Land Enquiry Committee 140 Land Nationalisation Society 137, 139, 141 Land Tenure Reform Association 133 Landownership agricultural decline 25–6, 60, 142 agricultural policies 15 Anti-Corn Law League 34 clergy 4–5

Index Conservative Party 26 Corn Laws 11–12, 35, 51 critics 128–44 emigration 134 First World War 140–1 franchise 10 free trade 60 game laws 129, 130, 141 House of Commons 2, 8, 9, 17–18, 22, 24, 26 House of Lords 2, 8, 22, 24, 140 judiciary 3–5 Justices of the Peace 4, 9 ‘Land Question’ 131 Liberal Party 26, 133 local government 2–3 lord lieutenants 3, 25 middle classes 134, 142 monopoly 81, 83, 84, 131 New Domesday Survey (1873) 28, 134 paternalism 129 primogeniture 131, 132 Royal Commission (1979) 28 sale of estates 27–8 sheriffs 3 squires see Squires tenants see Tenant farming Landseer, Thomas 81 Langford, E.W. 179, 189 Lansdowne, 5th Marquis 120 Law, G.H. 101, 102 Leader, J.T. 86 Leeds Union for Parliamentary Reform 55 Liberal Party agricultural labourers 136–7, 152–3 agricultural policy 201–2, 227 free trade 63, 139 land reform 139 landownership 26, 133 Liberal Unionists 157 Lincoln, Lord (5th Duke of Newcastle) 112, 113 Liverpool, 2nd Earl 9, 53, 54, 61, 64 Livesey, Joseph 13–14, 17 Lloyd George, David agricultural policy 184, 185, 202

255

House of Lords 140 Land Enquiry Committee 140 land tax 139–40 landownership 139–40, 142, 143–4 Limehouse speech 140 Prime Minister 141 rates 160 Local government County Councils 25, 119, 144 landownership 2–3 Municipal Corporations Act 9, 18 parishes see Parochial government police forces 24–5, 144 rural population 9 London Anti-Corn Law Association 86 London Corresponding Society 21 London Merchants’ Petition (1820) 55 Long, Walter 172 Lord lieutenants landownership 3, 25 Lovett, William 7, 18 Lowther, William 156 Lucas, William 41 McCord, Norman 34, 40 McCulloch, J.R. 47, 49, 74, 82–3, 132 MacDonald, Ramsay 221 Maggs, James 41 Malt Tax 151, 152 Malthus, Thomas L. 53, 75 Manchester and Salford Yeomanry 6 Manchester Anti-Corn Law Association 77, 91 Manchester Chamber of Commerce 54–5 Manners, Lord John 107, 109, 132 Manufacturing, Corn Laws 58 Martin, David 24, 128–44 Martineau, Harriet 74 Marx, Karl 139, 209 Massie, Joseph 2 Massingham, H.J 128 Matthews, Wliiam 40 Maxse, Leo 162

256

Index

Melbourne, 2nd Viscount 90 Middle classes attitude to Corn Laws 12–14, 34, 36, 37, 54–8 definition 58 Great Reform Act 17, 20 landownership 134, 142 Military aristocratic trade 132 militia 5, 25, 144 public order 5 yeomanry see Yeomanry Militia 5, 25, 144 Milk Marketing Board 192 Mill, James 72, 74, 75, 76 Mill, John Stuart 129, 130, 135, 139 Milner, Alfred (1st Viscount) 166, 182 Milton, Viscount 83 Ministry of Agriculture status 154 Mitchell and Deane 59 Mitchison, G.R. 226 Molesworth, William 86 Moore, D.C. 3, 51 Moral Reformer 13–14 Morgan, John 213 Morley, John 19 Morris, E.T. 192 Moselle, Boaz 99 Mosley, Oswald 7 Moss, Elias 86

Labour Party 191 Land Utilisation Bill 191 lobbying 178 membership definition 180–1 membership numbers 181, 186–7 minimum prices 182, 183, 185 minimum wages 182, 183, 188, 189 Parliamentary Committee 179, 183, 194 parliamentary representation 179–80 political influence 1, 28, 154, 171, 172, 178–95 political neutrality 179 poor relations with government 183–4, 187–90 tariff reform 168, 182–3 White Paper (1926) 188–90 National Federation of Tenant Farmers’ Clubs 153 National Union of Agricultural Workers 193, 210, 227, 231, 232 New Fabian Research Bureau 204, 213, 231 Northcote, Stafford 151, 152 Nugent, Lord 101, 102

Napoleon Bonaparte 10 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) administrative organisation 187 Agricultural Credits Act 191 Agricultural Marketing Act 184, 191–2 Agricultural Wages Board 186 Agriculture Act 185, 187, 189, 190 civil service contacts 181 Conservative Party 180 ‘farming from Whitehall’ 183, 189 First World War 181–2, 183 government apologist 193–4 Labour Committee 189

Palmerston, 3rd Viscount 133 Parliamentary enquiries agriculture 52, 53 allotment movement 98, 102, 108–9, 111, 115, 120, 122 enclosure 111, 112 handloom weavers 106 Poor Laws 98, 100, 101, 103, 106 Parochial government allotments 99–100, 104–5, 110, 111, 115–17 churchwardens 104, 109, 111, 115–16, 117, 118, 123 enclosure 104 guardians of the poor 109, 116, 117, 118

O’Connor, Feargus 134 Orwin, C.S. 214, 225 Owen, Robert 12

Index overseers of the poor 104, 109, 111, 115–16, 117, 118, 123 parish councils 119, 144 rural employment 100, 104 Select Vestries Act 54, 99, 102, 104, 114 Union and Parish Property Act 109, 115, 116 see also Poor Laws Pay, E.J. 219, 220 Peel, Robert allotments 112, 121, 122, 123 anti-Corn Law arguments 13, 14, 19, 64, 71, 74, 149 Catholic emancipation 74 compensation package 54 currency 53, 57 economic policy 53, 57 enclosure 112 popular acclaim 20 social and economic reform 10–11 Tamworth Manifesto 144 Tory Party 20, 33 Penning-Rowsell, Edmund 186 Peterloo massacre 6, 8 Pigs Marketing Board 192, 193 Place, Francis 7, 18, 86 Plug riots 38 Pointing, H.B. 228 Police forces, legislative reform 24–5, 144 Political and Economic Planning 214 Political reform Chartists see Chartism Corn Laws 12, 14, 18 Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 10 Pollen, Richard 102 Poor Laws allotment movement 116–17, 118 amendment 54, 106, 116 parliamentary enquiries 98, 100, 101, 103, 106 see also Parochial government Poor rates, legislation 54, 101 Potter, Richard 13, 87

257

Prentice, Archibald 40, 56, 71, 86, 90 Protectionism 164 Conservative Party 61–3, 156–7 Corn Laws see Corn Laws ‘dear food’ 157, 164 fair trade 157–8 see also Tariff reform Prothero, R.E. 141 Pryme, George 79, 106, 120 Public order military 5 yeomanry 5 Quarterly Review

73, 79

Radnor 112 Rates Agricultural Land Rating Act 159–60 poor rates 54, 101 railway rates 178 rent 160 tariff reform 164, 171 Rebecca riots 38 Rent agitation 150, 155 custom of the country 150 economic theories 74–6, 78, 131 rates 159 Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars political reform 10 Ricardo, David 53, 74, 75, 76, 131, 139 Richmond, Duke of 101, 102, 103, 104 Riddell, George 142 Rintoul, R.S. 90 Riots bread riots 39 Corn Laws 36, 37–9 London mob 38 Peterloo massacre 6, 8 Plug riots 38 political protest 21–2, 37–9, 43 Rebecca riots 38 Swing riots 15, 39, 100, 124 trial by riot 39 Robbins, R.R. 183

258

Index

Robinson, George 87, 88, 89 Roebuck, J.A. 86, 112, 120, 121 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 221 Rosebury, 5th Earl 24 Round, J.H. 156 Royal Agricultural Society 187 Royal Commissions agricultural depression 154, 157, 159 agriculture 185 landownership 28 women and children 114, 115 Ruling class Chartism 7–8 public opinion 7, 8 see also Landownership Rural areas, education 153 Rural League 161, 165 Russell, Lord John 23, 87, 121 Ryland, T.H. 183, 188 Sadler, Michael T. 80, 103, 110, 120 Salisbury, 3rd Marquis allotments 102, 103, 104 Cabinet 138, 154, 156 fair trade 157 landed interest 24 Poor Laws 101 rates 159 tenant farming 149 Sandon 109 Scholefield, Joshua 87 Scotland ‘Incorporations’ 36 Scott, Claude 48 Selborne, William (2nd Earl) 182, 184 Selbright, John 102 Select Committees see Parliamentary enquiries Self, P. 182 Shaftesbury, 7th Earl 23 Sharp, Robert 41 Shaw, Charles 41 Shearman, J.H. 12 Sheffield Mechanics Anti-Corn Law Association 36, 37 Shepperson, E.W. 179 Sheriffs

landownership 3 Sidmouth, 1st Viscount 8–9 Small holdings Conservative Party 137–9, 165, 213 Labour Party 209, 210–11 legislation 138, 139, 153 ‘three acres and a cow’ 137, 152 Smiles, Samuel 77 Smith, Adam 53, 74, 75, 82–3, 131 Smith, Augustus 134 Social Democratic Federation 219 Socialism agriculture 199–234 issue of control 223–32 land nationalisation 203 scale of cultivation 207–17 social industry 218–22 Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes 121, 122 Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda 226 Southern, Henry 73 Soviet Union 208, 212–13 Spectator 90 Speenhamland System 58 Squires clergy 4–5 courtesies 9 Stanhope, 5th Earl 101, 102, 103 Stanhope, Leicester 86 Stanley, Venetia 140 Stansfield 123 Stanton 107, 122 Steel-Maitland 170 Stevenson, J. 37 Storing, H.J. 182 Stubbs, A.E. 233 Sturges Bourne Acts 54, 99 Suffield, Lord 101, 102, 123 Sun 90 Swing riots 15, 39, 100, 124 Tait, William 86 Tariff Commission Agriculture Committee 171 colonial produce 164

161, 163,

Index government 166 second report 170 Tariff reform colonial produce 164–5, 167–8 Conservative Party 61, 131, 160–72 ‘food tax’ 167 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 168, 182–3 rates 164, 171 see also Protectionism Tariff Reform League 160 Taylor, Helen 139 Taylor, Miles 23 Taylor, P.A. 71 Tenant farming agricultural decline 26, 60 agricultural interest 129 Anti-Corn Law League 129 conflict with landlords 150–1, 154 Conservative Party 150–6 conspicuous consumption 130 Corn Laws 35, 51, 64 franchise 18 game laws 151, 152 improvement compensation 151 Ireland 150, 151 NFU see National Farmers’ Union productivity 15–16 profitability 16 size 15–16 small holdings see Small holdings taxation 158–60 wheat prices 50 Thompson, Charles Poulett 86, 88 Thompson, F.M.L. 27 Thompson, Thomas Perronet Benthamites 70, 72 ‘Bonaparte of free trade’ 85 Catechism on the Corn Laws 76–7, 78, 79–80, 85, 91 child labour 86 currency 73 education 72 extraparliamentary activities 90–2 Great Reform Act 81 influence 12–13, 14, 70–92 military career 72

259

monopoly 81, 83, 84 MP for Hull 71, 85–9, 92 rent 74–6, 78 Royal Society 79 Sun 90 taxation 73, 76 trade policy 73–4, 77–8, 80–1, 84–5 Westminster Review 71, 73, 74, 80, 82, 85, 92 ‘Three acres and a cow’ 137, 152 Tithes commutation 4, 54 Corn Laws 75–6 Torrens, Robert 83–4 Trade unions agricultural labourers 134, 150 National Union of Agricultural Workers 193, 210, 227, 231, 232 Tuckwell, William 143 Turner, Michael J. 12, 19, 54, 70–92 Turnor, Christopher 166, 169 Unemployment agricultural labourers 16, 100–1, 114, 118 Urbanisation agricultural decline 142 franchise 24 Villiers, Charles Pelham 91 Vincent, David 41

13, 14, 86,

Wages Agricultural Wages Act 187 Agricultural Wages Board 186 allotment movement 112 Corn Laws 76, 84 increasing value 59, 114 indexes 59 low wages 129, 201 minimum levels 182, 183, 188, 189 Waithman, Alderman 102 Wakley, Thomas 87 Walker, R.B. 210, 227 Wallace, Alfred Russel 137

260

Index

War Agricultural Executive committees 181 Ward, Colin 99 Warwick, Countess of 219 Watts, John 74 Webb Hall, George 51 Wedgwood, Josiah 143, 203–4, 206, 209, 210 Wellesley, 1st Marquis 102 Wellington, 1st Duke 79 Western, Charles C. 48–9, 52 Westminster Review 71, 73, 74, 80, 82, 85, 92 Weyland, John 105, 121 Whately, Richard 82, 129 Wheat prices American wheat 46–7 backward-sloping supply curve 45–6 Baltic wheat 47, 49 Black Sea wheat 46, 47–8, 49, 50 bread riots 39 Corn Laws 39, 42, 44–50, 52 Crimean War 47, 49 guaranteed 190–1 ‘high’ farmers 52 price indexes 59 Prussian wheat 44–5, 46, 49, 50 rye compared 45 tenant farming 50 working classes 39, 50 Whiteley, George 160 Wilkes, John 21 Williams, E.E. 162

Williams, Tom 230 Winchilsea, Earl of 101, 103, 123, 154 Wood, Edward 188 Wordie, J.R. 1–29, 33–64 Working classes agriculture see Agricultural labourers Anti-Corn Law League 42, 44, 63–4 artisan radicals 36, 38 attitudes to Corn Laws 35–44 autobiographies 39–41, 43 Chartism 44 diaries 41–2, 43 franchise 21 living conditions 43, 59 political attitudes 20–1 protest/unrest 15, 34 riots see Riots wheat prices 39, 50 Worsley, Lord 108, 109, 111 Wright, D.G. 8, 37 Wyse, Thomas 109 Yeomanry control 25 public order 5, 6, 38 social composition 5–6 Young, Arthur 130 Young, Murdo 90 Young England Movement 132

107,