Heronsgate
Just off junction 17 on the M25 on the outskirts of London, a quiet country lane leads to the village of Heronsgate.Behind tall hedges, spacious gardens are well stocked with trees, fruit trees in particular.This is stockbroker territory, as the imposing houses, immaculate lawns, expensive cars, and tasteful security all testify.But here and there within the grounds lie small cottages, and the narrow lanes, designed for carts rather than cars, are named not after poets or war heroes or local councillors, but commemorate rather a series of industrial towns: Halifax, Nottingham, Bradford, and Stockport.
For this was once O’Connorville, a community designed and built by working people for themselves, and an almost forgotten memorial to the aspirations of mid nineteenth-century Chartism.
How the voice of the people fell on deaf ears
In 1838, and again in 1842, the Chartists had drawn up petitions calling for universal suffrage and annual elections, as a means of securing political power for all people rather than merely the privileged minority.They had travelled to town and village, collecting signatures, fired by great hopes.In Yorkshire when town meetings were banned they met by torchlight at night on the moors, and at last the petitions, bearing millions of signatures, were carried with ceremony to Parliament.Twice the petitions were presented, and twice they were dismissed.
The Land Plan of Feargus O’Connor
Feargus O’Connor, leader of the radical wing of the Chartist movement, was not to be beaten.He came up with a plan to settle large numbers of working people on the land, each man holding property with an annual rental value of at least forty shillings, sufficient to qualify for a county vote.The idea was simple: when enough working people had obtained property qualifications, the people would be able to vote themselves the reforms which those in power had denied them.
O’Connor was editor of the Northern Star and in April and May 1843 his newspaper ran a series of letters (written by himself) addressed to the ‘producers of wealth’, and suggesting that 20,000 acres could support 5,000 families, with four acres per family, in forty estates, each with its community centre, school, library and hospital.Subsequently he published a booklet, ‘A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms.’
Investment, he believed, would have to come from working people themselves.In 1845 O’Connor proposed that a company be formed and capital of £5,000 be raised from two thousand shares bought by working people for £2.10s each.This would allow 120 acres of good land to be brought at the current price of £18.15s an acre, providing sixty cultivators, selected by lot, with two acres each and £2,250 to buy cottages and stock.The allotments would be let by the company to the members in perpetuity at £5 a year (providing total rental income to the company of £300 a year).By selling twenty years of the rental income the company could raise a further £6,000, which would buy land for 72 families.Their rent would be capitalised in the same way and would buy land for 86 families, and so on.
O’Connor travelled to France and Belgium and met socialist and communist leaders, including Marx and Engels.They were vehemently opposed, regarding private land ownership as a stronghold of opposition to change in society.O’Connor refused to be discouraged.He remained firm in his belief that by owning a cottage and a piece of land, people would achieve fulfilment, independence and liberty.
The Land Company would give everyone a chance to work for himself, would solve the problems of criminal law, dispense with many of the burdens of government and a standing army, and provide sanitary improvements and educational aid.In the Northern Star on 12th August 1848 he also claimed that the plan would reduce the suppression of wages of the industrial poor:‘With my operations I will thin the artificial labour market by employing thousands who are now destitute, and constituting an idle reserve to enable capitalists to live and make fortunes upon reductions of wages.’
O’Connor insisted that he intended no socialism (on the Owenite model) or partnership with the state.Ownership and control were always to reside with the individual, and O’Connor described himself as an ‘elevator’ not a ‘leveller’.
Company registration
The Land Plan office was set up at 83 Dean Street in Soho.The legal form of the new company was the first obstacle.Charitable registration was out of the question because of the Plan’s commercial aspects.The Registrar of Friendly Societies ruled that the company was not a type of savings scheme and was therefore ineligible.The remaining options were to establish a Joint Stock Company (which required prescribed forms of governance and account keeping), or by Act of Parliament apply for a royal charter, available for non-profit-making benevolent activities or for single purposes such as building a railway.All were expensive (the cost of a private Act of Parliament if uncontested was about £2,500) and none were entirely suitable.
Initially O’Connor opted for the joint stock route, and approached the Registrar of Joint Stock Companies, achieving provisional registration as a joint stock company.The company was originally called the Chartist Land Company, then the Chartist Co-operative Land Company, and finally the National Land Company.
The Land and Labour Bank
Working people asked why they could not save to buy the freehold on their allotment.So in August 1846 O’Connor proposed to found a land bank where members could deposit money at 4% interest, and save towards the £250 purchase cost of their allotment.Deposits would progressively reduce an allottee’s rent. A levy of 3d per share per annum was made to cover expenses of the bank, arrangements of the company, directors wages etc, and in January 1847 the Land and Labour Bank went into operation.
The first settlement
The Land Plan was widely promoted and Chartist branches across the country collected 3d or 6d a head towards shares.By April 1846, 1,487 people had paid in full, enough to establish the first settlement, so O’Connor and his colleagues started to travel in search of land.In September 1846 he visited Devon but was not impressed, calling it the ‘land of Parsons, sour cider, and low wages.’He settled on a piece of farmland outside Rickmansworth, and named it O’Connorville.
The model cottages at O’Connorville had three rooms: a sitting room, kitchen, bedroom, and next to them outhouses for a cow, pony, cart, wash-house, diary, wood, fowls, and pigsties.The company provided equipment, farm stock, manure, and fruit trees.O’Connor was determined that quality should be high and the cottages were roomy, well lit, with oak plank floors and good cast iron grates.As the town was being built, working people holding shares would turn up from all over England, finger the seasoned oak, and exclaim ‘Eh! But that’s rare stuff!’
A ballot was held to select the first thirty five settlers, and they arrived on 1st May 1847.It was, according to O’Connor, ‘England’s “May Day”’, and a band struck up the tune ‘See the conquering heroes come’.At the official opening on 17th August 1847 O’Connor stood on a platform jubilantly waving a giant cabbage.
Victory in Nottingham
In 1847 O’Connor stood for election to Parliament in a Nottingham by-election.In a campaign speech O’Connor described the case of Charlie Tawes, an allottee who had come from Radford to O’Connorville.Charlie had been shut up in a ‘Whig bastille’ (a workhouse), separated from his wife and children.
Now he had been reunited with them and raised to independence.Now he had four pigs in his sty (tremendous cheering).Would he have ever got them by sticking in Radford workhouse?If the government would put half the money spent on building workhouses into buying land for poor men, it would destroy the new Poor Law system.
O’Connor won a surprise victory.Across the country working people rejoiced.In Barnsley candles were lit in every working class window and the Chartist flag of green and pink hung over the streets.
The model replicated
Over the next two years, working people continued to buy shares and money poured in.By the end of 1847 O’Connor was able to claim that over 60,000 members were holding 180,000 shares, and £90,000 of capital had been accumulated.Further settlements were built at Lowbands, Minster Lovell, Snigs End, and Great Dodford.
Education was always a core objective: ‘The mind has not been forgotten, as each house is fitted up with a neat and elegant library.’Schools were built and schoolmasters appointed, employed by the Land Company.
The allottees represented a cross-section of the mid nineteenth century working classes.Former occupations included:
Coalminer, weaver, labourer, calico printer, shoemaker, limeburner, block printer, stockinger, baker, woolcomber, innkeeper, smith, tailor, stonecutter, cabinetmaker, joiner, potter, cordwainer, mason, grocer, piecer, moulder, nailer, victualler, postman, skinner, butcher, embroiderer, farmer, hatter, spinner, milkman, servant, gardener, lacemaker, overlooker, warehousemen, tinman, clerk, thatcher, plumber, painter, plasterer, mechanic, clothier, fustian cutter, grinder, bricklayer, trunkmaker, seamstress, warper, turner, carpenter, slater, schoolmistress, cotton band maker.
Life in the new settlements was difficult: the urban settlers were unskilled in rural trades, and often arrived malnourished and in poor health.Nevertheless, initial enthusiasm was high and by 1848 some of the allotments were, literally, bearing fruit.One claimed to have 700 fruit-bearing trees: apples, pears, gooseberries and currants.
Attempts were made to find customers for produce.At Great Dodford the settlers cultivated strawberries and made jam for sale in markets in Bromsgrove and Birmingham.At Lowbands and Snigs End market gardens were developed to supply Gloucester.At O’Connorville some residents became cobblers and carpenters, providing services to the agricultural community.Outbuildings were sometimes converted into small workshops, and at Great Dodford wives and daughters started making bonnets.Some allottees demonstrated a sound business sense, co-operating to buy coal and groceries at wholesale prices.
Under pressure
But O’Connor was falling under personal strain.Like many a modern community activist he found himself doing too much of everything, describing himself as ‘bailiff, contractor, architect, engineer, surveyor, farmer, dungmaker, cow and pig jobber, milkman, horse jobber and Member of Parliament.’He started drinking heavily.
The uncertainty of the company’s legal status was a great burden.In an attempt to meet the regulations for the deed of registration, the company directors were advised (wrongly it seems) that they needed to collect 40,000 signatures. The company’s representatives travelled from town to town in a weary and expensive attempt to achieve this.
National and regional newspapers began to attack the company’s business methods, pointing out with sanctimonious glee that while incorporation remained unresolved, the legal rights of working people in the settlements were uncertain.This created a crisis of confidence.Receipts dropped quickly towards the end of 1847 and some of the lucky winners in the ballots promptly sold their allotments, for amounts between £70 and £120.O’Connor found it hard to hold his tongue and addressed the editor of one national paper as .You unmitigated ass!You sainted fowl! You canonised ape!’
The Parliamentary enquiry
In February 1848 O’Connor, desperate to achieve legal status, presented a petition to Parliament to legalise the company through Act of Parliament, and the Bill received a first reading. It was not immediately rejected, probably because the government did not want to be held responsible for dashing the hopes of so many working people.A date for a second reading was appointed and a Parliamentary investigation began.
Complaints started to surface from within the company.Meetings of Directors and dissident representatives were called, to which O’Connor was not invited, and he used the columns of the Northern Star to vent his frustration and anger.
The enquiry took evidence from a Poor Law specialist, who pointed out that tenants would be eligible for poor relief by virtue of length of residence and level of rent they paid, and this meant that if the allotments failed and the tenants threw themselves on the parish for relief, rural parishes be forced to levy a massive increase in poor rates and this would suddenly reduce to nothing the value of every property in the parish.
His conclusion was that the settlements were not sustainable, and therefore that they were likely to lead to ‘serious and sudden burthens upon the poor’s rates of those parishes in which they acquire land.’He noted that the allottees were not yet paying rent, that manure provided in the first year had been used up and not replaced, that some of the settlers had already fled the land.
O’Connor replied that the settlements were viable, and that he had provided ‘a market, better than the gin-palace or the beer-shop, for those who had small savings to carry to the labour field.’One of the committee members travelled to Snigs End and Lowbands to see for himself. He was surprised at the high standard of building and cultivation on Lowbands.Wheat and potatoes, he reported, were as good as those of any farmers.
There were accusations of financial mismanagement, even suggestions that O’Connor had been lining his own pockets by tricking the poor.Clutching bundles of paper, O’Connor pulled out records and accounts.A government accountant claimed they were unintelligible, so O’Conner took him to Great Dodford and showed him more piles of papers.Patiently the accountant examined them all.His conclusion was a vindication of O’Connor: ‘I am thoroughly satisfied, not only that the whole of the money has been honourably appropriated and is fully accounted for, but also that several thousand pounds more of Mr O’Connor’s own funds have been applied in furtherance of the views of the National Land Company.’
An illegal lottery
So far, O’Connor was standing his ground, but there was worse to come.A government barrister, Edward Lawes, asserted that the company was established for the purpose of an illegal lottery, where many paid but only a few would gain.Subscriptions from 70,000 (of whom about half had fully paid up) had been necessary to locate 250 people in the new villages. A single subscription could never suffice because the cost per location was between £200 and £300.
Total subscriptions amounted to £91,000.£35,000 had been spent on buying land, £50,000 on forming and building estates, £4,000 on expenses of management.Cash assets were £7,000 but there were debts to the Land bank of £6,800 and at least £3,000 was owing to O’Connor.
So there was no money to build more estates, unless the reproductive principle, whereby rental income would be capitalised to raise the investment for the next estate, and so on, could be proved viable.Lawes claimed it could not.
As the number of subscribers was 70,000, and the cost per allotment £300, the sum needed was £21m.Fully paid up shares from the 70,000 subscribers would bring in capital of £273,000.The government accountants showed that by mortgaging and re-mortgaging, the original capital could grow to a total of £819,000.This would locate 2,730 people, but leave 67,270 members unprovided for.
Moreover, the scheme would take longer to realise its benefits than the lives of its members: even if all the capital were mortgaged and each new estate were bought and built within a year, the company would take 75 years to house its members.
On 30th July the Committee delivered its verdict to the House of Commons.The company in its present form was illegal, and accounts were imperfectly kept.The large number of people involved, all of whom had acted in good faith, should be allowed to wind up the undertaking and relieve themselves of the penalties to which they had subjected themselves.
Finally, careful to give the appearance that the Government was critical only of the methods, and not of the social objectives of the company, the Committee stated that ‘it should be left entirely open to the parties concerned to propose to Parliament any new measure for carrying out the expectations and objects of the promoters of the company.’
This was a crushing defeat.In the Northern Star O’Connor attempted to present the verdict in the best possible light.He implied that contributions from the poor alone were inadequate to capitalise such projects, pointing out (with justice) that subsidy on a large scale was provided by the government of the day for other projects in the national interest, such as railway and mining schemes.
The Plan disintegrates
The spirit of common enterprise eroded rapidly, and now everyone looked only to their own interests.The tenants were determined to acquire a title deed and not to pay rent, the unallotted members wanted no-one to get a penny before the final dividend and demanded that back rent be paid, the directors and staff wanted to extricate themselves and leave O’Connor to carry the full responsibility for failure, and O’Connor wanted payment of his own expenses.
Relations between O’Connor and the allottees became tense. Some who refused to pay rent were letting their houses and land to others and drawing good rent for them, so O’Connor threatened to sell the estates, and dissident groups emerged among the tenants.
Despite everything, during 1849 the Company pursued attempts to register the company under the Joint Stock Companies Act.Building continued at Great Dodford, and sowing and planting at the other estates.
But O’Connor was under attack from all sides and even within the Chartist movement he was isolated.In April 1848 the last great Chartist petition had been presented to Parliament, in a wagon drawn by four horses from O’Connor’s estate at Snigs End, trimmed with red, green and white streamers.But when the petition had been examined it was found to contain far fewer signatures than claimed.O’Connor had become frantic and abusive and fled the chamber.Many of the national Chartist leaders attacked O’Connor, claiming he was ruining their cause by his extreme views and erratic behaviour.Others in the co-operative movement complained that the Land Plan had diverted the energies and resources of working people away from their efforts.[1]
O’Connor was now suffering badly.His red hair began to turn white and he was said to be drinking heavily.He was losing control and in August 1849 he wrote a bizarre letter to Queen Victoria beginning ‘Well Beloved Cousin’, and signing himself as ‘Your Majesty’s Cousin, Feargus, Rex, by the Grace of the People.’
For a while O’Connor rallied; he went on a speaking tour of the Scottish branches and was received with acclaim.Support also came from the pioneer sociologist Harriet Martineau, who wrote two open letters on the capabilities of two and a quarter acres of land to support her household of five, with the labour of one man from the workhouse. But nothing now could save the scheme.In June 1850 the courts rejected the attempts to register the company.In July a petition was made to wind up the company, and in 1851 it was finally closed down.
The grave of a patriot
In 1852 O’Connor assaulted a policeman after a row at the Lyceum Theatre and spent seven days in prison.News began to circulate that he was neglected and in need, and working people responded quickly and generously: a fund was started in March, and allottees and members from across the country subscribed what they could.
But in June O’Connor was taken to a clinic for the insane at Chiswick.He considered himself a state prisoner, and regarded his confinement with ‘grave pride.’In 1854 the first signs of epilepsy appeared, and in 1855 his sister removed him from the clinic to her home.On 30th August he died and on 10th September large crowds followed the coffin to Kensal Green cemetery.The epitaph reads:
Reader, pause,
thou treadest on
the grave of a patriot.
While philanthropy
is a virtue, and
patriotism not a crime,
will the name of
O’CONNOR
be admired and this
monument respected.
Forgotten communities
By 1858 at O’Connorville, soon to be renamed Heronsgate, only three of the original settlers were left.Because the estate was close to London, the houses were bought up by well-off people who enjoyed the privacy given by the large grounds about the house.Not much is left in Heronsgate of its radical past, although the local pub bears the splendid name ‘The Land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty.’
After a while some of the original Chartist cottages in the other settlements were also replaced with larger houses, although quite a few have survived and one at Great Dodford is maintained by the National Trust in its original condition.Soon the memories of the original settlers had passed into local folklore, and for years afterwards the story was told of the man, arriving at Charterville (Minster Lovell) from the northern slums, who, it was said, had never seen a pig before and chastised it for noisiness.
O’Connor has not been treated kindly by historians.For some the fact that he was an outspoken Irishman was sufficient to condemn him as a demagogue.Early accounts of Chartism were written by more moderate Chartists, who feared that O’Connor’s radicalism jeopardised public acceptance of their cause.They criticised his community experiments, believing that they were a distraction from the primary goal of universal suffrage, which they considered to be the only path to justice and prosperity.Today, in the knowledge that the right to vote has not, on its own, produced these universal benefits, O’Connor’s vision has more resonance than ever.
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961, pp 224-237.
Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica, 2001, pp100-105.
Alice Mary Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company, 1970, reprinted 2000.
Feargus O’Connor, A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms, 1843.
[1] For example George Jacob Holyoake, Self-help by the People: the history of the Rochdale pioneers, tenth ed 1892: ‘We are bound to relate that the capital of the Store would have increased somewhat more rapidly, had not many of its members at that time been absorbed by the land company of Feargus O'Connor.’
