Monday 27 January 2020

Stephen Roberts on Ian Foster, Heronsgate (2000)

Ian Foster, Heronsgate: Freedom, Happiness & Contentment (Manticore Europe, 1999)
Written By: Stephen Roberts
Date: April 2000
Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 9: Summer 2000  

Between 1846 and 1948 Feargus O’Connor bought five estates in Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Oxfordshire. The aim was to settle industrial workers, chosen by ballot, on these estates, each family farming their own two, three or four acre smallholding. Alice Mary Hadfield, in 1970, told the story of the Chartist Land Plan. It is a readable account, though marred by its wholesale acceptance of the anti-O’Connor historiography of earlier writers. Today interest in the Chartists in the estates themselves is particularly evident in Heronsgate, Dodford and Lowbands. In both Dodford and Lowbands memorial stones have been put in place. Dodford resident, Diana Poole, drawing on local legal records, has also produced The Last Chartist Land Settlement (1999).

Ian Foster’s study of Heronsgate is beautifully illustrated. It includes maps, photographs, some of them in colour, and a reproduction of Ann Dawson’s 1947 sample, bearing the moving inscription “The Charter And No Sorender” (This can be also be found on the front cover of S. Roberts & D. Thompson eds. Images of Chartism, 1998).

O’Connor bought Heronsgate in March 1846. At just over £18 per acre, it was the cheapest Chartist estate. (O’Connor paid £50 per acre for Lowbands.) One year late, at a crowded meeting in Manchester, the ballot for the allotments took place; some subscribers to the Land Company had walked all night to attend. The first residents, John Walwark, a weaver from Ashton-under-Lyne, and his wife, arrived in August 1846; the other setllers (including Rebecca, a cow named after the Rebecca riots) moved into their cottages the following year. The cottages were built by local labourers, who, working in gangs of six, earned between them £3 over five days. Declaring a half holiday for the labourers in July 1846, O’Connor organised a cricket match. Captained by Feargus himself, the bricklayers beat a team of carpenters and sawyers by twenty-eight runs.

The working people who settled at Heronsgate in 1846-7 shared fully O’Connor’s vision. George Ramsbottom, Davis Watson and George Richardson with their 32-stone pigs and the finest onions “you ever saw” believed that they had discovered “freedom, happiness and contentment”. These high hopes were dashed. By 1851 six plots at Heronsgate were unoccupied and twenty-two had changed hands. Walwark, Ramsbottom, Watson and Richardson had all gone, probably back to their home towns.

Foster tells the story of Heronsgate Chartist years and later history well - though the big slabs of text from the Northern Star needed editing. This interesting new account should be read alongside Diana Poole’s carefully-researched book on Dodford and Malcolm Chase’s wider discussion in the volume of essays he co-edited for J.F.C. Harrison, Learning and Living (1996).

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