General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, wrote in his book In Darkest England and the Way Out that the ‘submerged tenth’ of the urban population could be rescued by progression from urban hostels to farm colonies, and from there to a new life in the colonies overseas.
In 1891 he purchased 3,000 acres of farmland at Hadleigh in Essex.As well as farming, a brickworks produced bricks for the colony’s own housing, and bricks were also sold, ferried on the Thames to London.
There was to be no alcohol.Newcomers started off as a lower class of resident, and were rewarded if they improved themselves by rising into a higher class, with better dormitory accommodation and better food.
During the 1890s there were 250 colonists at work.In 1906 Booth launched a second project, also in Essex, where a separate house was built for each plot, and if a tenant passed a two year probationary period, they would be offered a 999 year lease.By the 1920s as many as 1,000 people a year from the slums of the East End were being trained in the farm colonies and made ready to emigrate to a life overseas.
General Booth rejected the co-operative model absolutely.He was in favour of ‘the directing brain’ rather than any notion of democratic government, which he derided as ‘the principle of counting noses’.Moreover, he required ‘universal and unquestioning obedience from those at the bottom.’
Sources
W H G Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560-1960, 1961, pp 317-326.
Dennis Hardy,Utopian England Community Experiments 1900-1945, 2000.
