Macquerie and Bigge

Between 1809 and the Colonial Office’s change of policy in 1817, Macquarie based his land policy largely on free settler immigration and launched a comprehensive policy of settlement in the ‘interior’ rather than on the more dangerous flood plains. Military officers were no longer to receive grants and he vigorously opposed monopolists especially rich settlers such as the Blaxlands who, he argued, having turned their attention to cattle production, had violated their implicit contracts with the government in taking grants to advance arable farming. Macquarie never grasped the potential for pastoral farming but his conclusions were probably right; the rich settlers became increasingly difficult to manage and ‘it seemed as if a military oligarchy were being reincarnated in the form of a civil monopoly’.[1] He concluded that if gentlemen settlers were ‘difficult’ and free settlers still arriving in only small numbers then emancipists should be encouraged to farm land. In 1816, for example, of the 352 people who settled land, only 15 were free immigrants. It was important to keep out poor settlers, who would become a burden on the colony’s resources and land speculators. In 1812, Macquarie included clauses in every grant forbidding their sale for five years and that the land would be cultivated.[2] Supported by Bathurst at the Colonial Office, Macquarie had developed an effective system of land settlement based on nothing more than ‘a Grant of Land and Some assistance of Convict Labour’.[3]

The new system introduced in 1817 had two key features. First, the amount of land granted was to be determined the actual amount of capital possessed by a settler. Secondly, it sought to resolve the question of freeing the market. In 1816, Treasury officials recommended public competition and Bathurst even threatened to import Indian maize if it was cheaper. Macquarie, however, postponed the new system and continued with the old method of government purchase. There were to be no foreign markets leading to a petition in late 1819 by settlers who rightly claimed that ‘the surplus becomes useless for want of a Market’.[4] While Macquarie had embraced the need to expand the settlement of land and had evolved effective strategies to do so, he was far less willing to welcome a free market solution. Increasingly, his land policy was under critical scrutiny. Large farmers opposed the governor because of his failure to open up the market and the graziers joined them because he had neglected their protest against English duties. The Colonial Office was concerned by ever-increasing spending without real returns, a situation increasingly unacceptable in Britain where retrenchment after the French Wars was the dominant economic priority. In addition, Macquarie had been circumspect in his despatches with regard to land policy and for over nine years had not forwarded returns of land grants to London.

The result was the appointment of Bigge as a Commissioner of Inquiry to fill in the details that Macquarie had omitted from his despatches. Bigge arrived in NSW with certain prejudices: he was less than sympathetic to those who had been transported to the colony but leaned towards the interests and values of the large landowners. His analysis of the weaknesses of Macquarie’s land policy was forensic in nature though his constructive proposals were far from original. Bigge found that many of the criticisms of Macquarie’s land policy were justified. Of the 324,251 acres of land granted, convicts held more than a quarter and thousands of blocks of land were held without title. While Macquarie may have granted large tracts of land, settlers preceded surveyors who had little incentive to keep up with the rate of occupation since their profit was barely 2/6 per farm. Even where farms had been surveyed, there was a long delay in completing the deeds because registration barely covered the cost of the parchment. At every level of land policy, there were clear abuses.[5]

Bigge proposed reviving the antiquated system of public farming in the new convict settlements of the north and the establishment of a distillery to use the surplus grain, something that had originally been proposed over a decade earlier. Instead of opening up an export trade, he relied on the building of more granaries and the conversion of the wheat into the arrack of the time. In granting land, he repeated Bathurst’s 1817 programme by recommending that land should be allocated in proportion to capital alone. There was little new in Bigge’s recommendations but they clarified the issues and justified Bathurst’s policy while condemning Macquarie’s administration of that policy.

Macquarie’s belief that emancipists could form the backbone of colonial society was bankrupt by 1820. This was reflected in his arbitrary treatment of settlers in his final years as governor, his refusal to allow any ex-soldiers to settle in 1820 and his notice, in March 1821, banning applications for land. The future that Macquarie did not recognise lay with the small free immigrant and with pastoral farming. Yet, during his governorship, he raised to NSW from a penal colony to a civil society in which there was a large free community thriving on the produce of flocks and the labour of convicts. Between 1810 and 1821, the population of NSW rose from 12,000 to nearly 40,000 cultivating 32,000 acres of land. The problem was that Macquarie’s strengths in 1810 had become his weakness by 1820: ‘a war-trained governor, who subjected lawyers and capitalists to his will, was admittedly suited to a convict settlement, but not for an expanding free colony’.[6]

The first official notion of land settlement was contained in Governor Phillip’s official instructions, in which it was assumed that a self-sustaining rural economy would make its own demand for land. Initially, settlement was linked to the feeding of the population. Grants would be made available for those who applied and small portions would be offered to emancipated convicts as it was believed that rural labour could help redeem fallen characters. The land grant system, under the direct authority of governors, was maintained until the 1820s and formed the only official means of broadening the base of settlement. Initially natural geographical features, such as the Blue Mountains, prevented the westward expansion of NSW and new settlements were made for strategic reasons by Lieutenant Collins at Port Phillip and VDL. Although Collins discounted the country at Port Phillip, VDL was settled and land grants were made at the governor’s discretion.[7]

Under Macquarie the system of grants reached its height. He held the view that rural areas should have towns constructed as service centres and places of government. Moreover, he believed that yeomen farmers should become the backbone of society and policy should be framed for their benefit. Few admitted that the Australian environment was more suited to grazing than intensive English agriculture. Large landowners and wool growers such as John Macarthur, Samuel Marsden and Gregory Blaxland sought to expand the territory available and it was the manoeuvring of private individuals that opened a path to new land in the west beyond the Blue Mountains. The investigations and report of Commissioner J.T. Bigge laid the foundations for altering the way in which land settlement progressed. Bigge, like Macquarie, supported the role of small farmers, but saw that wool could provide valuable export earnings encouraging a new type of settlers prepared to buy land from the Crown that gave them a permanent stake in the country.

Land policy between 1788 and 1821 was based on the granting of land by NSW governors to individuals. It was part of a controlled economy in which the colonial government was the purchaser of produce in which the market forces of supply and demand generally did not operate. While this may have been justifiable in the immediate aftermath of the establishment of a penal colony where survival and basic subsistence were key priorities and where government was by military rule, it was not conducive to territorial or economic expansion. Macquarie may have laid the foundations for both between 1809 and 1821 but there were important limitations to his policies. It is no coincidence that the emergence of a new approach to land policies emerged in the 1820s at the same time that NSW moved from military to civilian rule and gubernatorial autocracy was replaced by limited representative institutions

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[1] Ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, p. 21.

[2] This had the effect of reducing speculation in land in contrast to the speculative drive behind farming in Upper Canada.

[3] Bathurst to Macquarie, 24 July 1816, HRA, Vol. 9, p. 151 and Macquarie to Bathurst, 31 March 1817 outline Macquarie’s change in policy.

[4] HRA, Vol. 10, p. 59.

[5] Bigge’s Reports were printed in three volumes. Vol. 2: The State of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales, The House of Lords, (Paper 119), printed, 4 July, 1823, facs ed., Adelaide, 1971 contains his recommendations on farming.

[6] Ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, p. 25.

[7] Wheat, barley and oats have been produced in VDL since the early days of European settlement. After starvation conditions in 1805-1807, some was exported by 1812 and in substantial quantities by the 1820s when VDL was regarded as the granary of NSW.

Land policy under King and Bligh, 1800-1810

When Philip Gidley King, Hunter’s replacement arrived, he found depressed settlers, flourishing middleman, labourers demanding high wages and farming devastated by a combination of flood and bush fires.[1] His immediate aim was to reverse Hunter’s policies by treating all settlers equally, by reducing the number of assigned servants to two per settler and introducing a more competitive market for grain by allocating government orders among the settlers in proportion to their crops.[2] Convict labour was also made profitable by making them work for the state rather than clearing land for settlers. Instead of dispersing labour, King concentrated it on a large government farm at Castle Hill. This resulted in a revival of individual enterprise and by 1802 cultivated land had increased by a quarter and the colony was self-sufficient. Although this resolved the immediate threat of famine, it was not a solution to the inadequacies of many settlers who were ‘without either property to employ others or abilities to work themselves’. He urged that instead of sending labourers to NSW, farmers with capital should be encouraged to come to the colony believing that they could revive effective and efficient private farming. However, this faced sustained opposition from Macarthur and the officers of the NSW Corps.

Philip Gidley King

The system of public farming, originally introduced by Hunter, proved remarkably successful under King to such an extent that by 1802 it was producing a surplus of grain.[3] A simple solution would have been to export any surplus but King had prohibited this. If public agriculture was efficient but settlers could not sell their surplus outside the colony, free colonisation was doomed. In 1804, Hobart ordered that government farming should be curtailed and government herds dispersed.[4] The focus was now on settlers and it was the central element of the new economic policy to aid them as much as possible. More bond labour was to be allowed, stock was to be given to successful settlers and the government was to advance loans to stimulate enterprise. This was combined with an ending of the closed market with the ending of guaranteed prices, the operation of supply and demand and the introduction of a system of tenders with safeguards against the monopolists. This represented a shift away from government activity towards free enterprise. While control of the minutiae of life especially leading agrarian change in NSW by the governor may have been justifiable during its struggle for survival but there were limits to what government alone could achieve. By giving special terms to men with capital who could develop the colony, such as the Blaxland brothers[5] who obtained grants of 8,000 acres in 1805 on condition that they spent £6,000 and by the development of an export trade for surplus products, Hobart and King moved NSW towards a market economy in which individual enterprise would be rewarded. This resulted in a change in land policy that was for the first time linked to expansion rather than static subsistence. The NSW government wanted to group settlers round ‘townships’ or shires of up to 30,000 acres with farms radiating from centrally placed ‘towns’. This would have the effect of gradually colonising the interior and as these lands were not retained by government but vested in certain ‘Resident Trustees’, chosen by settlers and other farmers in the district stimulate further growth. [6]

Under King, there was a radical transformation in land settlement. When he arrived in 1800 there were 401 proprietors with grants for 43,786 acres of land; when he left there were 646 with 84,466 acres. The settled districts had increased to below Windsor and the intervening land had in general been occupied. The area under cultivation had almost doubled and the population of the colony had increased by 4,936 to 7,052. King had played a central role in furthering these changes despite the opposition of the NSW Corps. It was, however, not until after the Rum Rebellion against King’s successor William Bligh that these soldiers were demobilised and the greatest obstacle to sustained expansion was eliminated. [7]

While Bligh’s land policy had been moderate and progressive, following his deposition there were two years of retarded development as first Johnston, then Foveaux and Paterson endorsed different policies.[8] Johnston was moderate in his approach; Foveaux made few grants[9] while Paterson, revived the unstructured grants associated with Grose issuing 413 grants of 64,475 acres in a year. There are grounds to support Bligh’s later assertion that the administrators gave land to individuals who they believed would support their interests. Their grants were rendered void when Macquarie took over although the Colonial Office gave him discretionary powers to confirm these grants as he deemed fit.[10] By 1809, there were 737 settlers out of a total population of 10,482 holding 95,637 acres (an average of 128 acres each) with 7,615 acres under cultivation and 74,569 acres of pasture.

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[1] See King to Portland, 25 September 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 177-186.

[2] Government and General Orders, 1 and 2 October 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 220, 222.

[3] King to Hobart, 9 November 1802, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 899-900.

[4] King to Hobart, 1 March 1804, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 329-330.

[5] See, Gregory Blaxland to Under-Secretary Cooke, 24 October 1804, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 479-480 and Gregory Blaxland to Under-Secretary Chapman, 1 March 1805, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 568-569.

[6] The Colonial Office approved of this and included it as part of Bligh’s instructions, 25 May 1805, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 640-641.

[7] King to Camden, 15 March 1806, HRNSW, Vol. 6, pp. 34-40, 43-45 provides a summary of King’s achievements.

[8] The decline in agriculture is evident in Civil Officers to Bligh, 18 February 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 36 and in Foveaux to Castlereagh, 20 February 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 39-40.

[9] See, for example, Foveaux to Castlereagh, 20 February 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 41.

[10] Proclamation, 4 January 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 256-257.

The Eastleigh by-election 28 February 2013

By-elections are an important feature of British politics and a few have had a significant impact on national politics.  Whether Eastleigh falls into that category only time will tell.  But it was a significant election called in the wake of Chris Huhne’s admission (finally) that he had perverted the course of justice and during the changing ramifications of the ‘sex scandal’ in the Liberal Democratic Party and six days after Britain lost its AAA credit rating.  That the Liberal Democrats retained the seat, albeit with a significantly reduced majority was a victory ‘against the odds’ but hardly ‘stunning’ as Nick Clegg maintains when there was a 19.3 per cent swing to UKIP and its share of the vote fell by 14 per cent since the 2010 general election. For the Conservatives this was fair more than the ‘disappointing’ result, David Cameron’s verdict, it was a humiliating defeat in a constituency that it must win in a general election to secure a majority government.  As for Labour, yes Eastleigh is its 258th target seat and it has never come close to winning it, but it failed to extend its appeal beyond its core voters despite the current unpopularity of the government.  Yes, it will say that the anti-government vote went to UKIP but that neglects the point that Ed Milliband’s One Nation Labour made no inroads in a southern English seat.

The real winner at Eastleigh was UKIP.  Although it came second, it was, according to some commentators,  a victory in all but name.  Let’s be clear, Eastleigh may have been their best by-election result but they did not win.  However, what the result demonstrates is that UKIP’s stance on issues such as EU migration resonates with the public and that David Cameron’s offer of a referendum on Europe did not benefit the Conservatives at all.  The problem for the Conservatives (and incidentally Labour) is that they have promised referendums in the past and then reneged on the deal and that the public, when faced by a political establishment that is pro-Europe in its attitudes, vote UKIP not as a protest vote against that establishment but out of frustration at the failure of that establishment to give the people the referendum they want because they think they might/will lose.  All the major political parties are divided over Europe though there is an unbridgeable chasm at the heart of Conservatism that has poisoned its electoral prospects for the past two decades.  They have not won a general election since 1992, whatever the party rhetoric about 2010, an election that Labour lost rather than the Conservative won.  What the public recognise and the Conservative leadership does not is that re-negotiating our position in the EU is effectively a non-starter—why should a Europe of 26 countries negotiate with the twenty-seventh?  David Cameron’s dilemma is that he supports the EU if it acts in Britain’s interests while those in Brussels look at issues from a Europe-wide perspective.  The public pragmatically takes the view that we will never get what we want through negotiation and that, as a country, we need to decide whether we want to be in the EU or not.  UKIP recognise this and this helps to explain why their candidate did so well in Eastleigh.

The difficulty for the political establishment, a point well made on Question Time last night, is that it sits in the ‘Westminster bubble’ and is not only completely out of touch with the concerns and fears of the general public but appears indifferent to them.  That’s the message from the by-election and explains why UKIP did so well and the other parties so badly. 

History in schools

The purpose of the proposed changes in the National Curriculum is made very clear in its prologue:

A high-quality history education equips pupils to think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. A knowledge of Britain's past, and our place in the world, helps us understand the challenges of our own time.

A distinction is established between History as a methodology (how do we ‘do’ history and what problems does this throw up) and as a form of Whiggish nationalism (we have to know about the past if we are to understand the challenges that face us at present).  Although students will be expected to ‘know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history’, it is clear that the focus will be on British history and that the development of understanding this should be taught chronologically.  Leaving aside the problematic questions of how history should be taught under these proposals and the  nature of historical methodology, I want to explore whether this is the right approach or not.

Should students have both knowledge and understanding of British history and why?  Few would, I suspect, disagree that students should know about the history of their own country.  While British education has long debated this question, other countries in the EU and globally have little difficulty with the proposition that their students should study the history of their own countries.  This has to do with developing a sense of individual identity within the nation state, it is part of the socialisation role of schooling.  Whether this does, in practice, result in understanding of the history of those states is questionable: research in the United States, Canada, Australia and France suggests that students do not have either knowledge about or understanding of the histories of those countries.  That may be a consequence of poor teaching rather than the general principle that students have a right to study their own histories.  If teaching and learning is, as a student commented to me on one occasion, ‘one damn event after another’, then perhaps that is hardly surprising. 

Although there is a strong argument for placing British history at the heart of the history curriculum, there are two problems with the existing proposal.  Is it about ‘British’ history or ‘English’ history with bits of Welsh, Scottish and Irish history tagged on when those histories impact of what occurred in England?  Given that there are few mentions to history beyond England – the Edwardian conquest of Wales and the failure of a similar project in Scotland, Irish plantation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Union of the Parliaments and Irish Home Rule – then using the term ‘British history’ throughout the proposal is pushing the definition somewhat.  This raises the question of what ‘British history’ actually means and what is suggested makes no attempt to do this, merely resurrecting the somewhat worn notion of ‘for British history read English history’.   I would have hoped that we would have got beyond this somewhat archaic definition of British history if only because of the work of Pocock has sought establish a methodology for understand ‘British history’ as a justifiable concept in its own right.  There is also a practical problem that will require teacher development.  The ‘modernisation’ of the history curriculum in both schools and in higher education, evident from the mid-1980s, means that many teachers have little or no experience of history before the nineteenth century and in some cases the twentieth.  Good on Hitler but who was Athelstan or Becket and what was the Heptarchy?  This is a problem especially since the broad span of pre-modern history is to be taught in KS 2 and 3 where non-specialists are more likely.  If learning is to be effective, then teachers need to be confident in their knowledge and understanding and many, I suspect, are not.  You need to be able to tell the story with verve to engage students and if teachers are not confident in their knowledge then the story will lack the bite it needs to enthral the pupils ranged before them. 

Which brings us to the issue of British history being taught chronologically.  It’s how I was taught and means that I, and my peers, are able to place events and people into their context and to see the ways in which British history developed.  Yesterday’s letter in The Times from several eminent historians in which they argued in favour of a chronological approach registered their support for the approach advocated in the National Curriculum proposals.  They complain, with justification, of the paucity of breadth and knowledge among the students they receive from schools.  I remember receiving favourable comments from university admissions tutors because my students took a course at Advanced Level that included medieval, early-modern and modern history but that this was a rare occurrence.  So the eminent historians are right in their conclusions but…These are the same historians who have seen the breadth of the university history curriculum contract so that students can simply study modern history and, though there is an element of self-interest in their pronouncements, don’t forget that the overwhelming majority of school pupils do not go on to university to study history.  So the question ought to be whether a chronological approach is appropriate for all those students who do not enter the hallowed halls of academe as well as those who do?  On balance, I think it should.  Good history is about establishing links and drawing comparisons and without a sound sense of chronology this simply does not occur and students are left with a fragmented, unconnected view of the past.  They may know about Hitler, the Holocaust and the slave trade (and they should) but history is far more than these almost classic studies of good versus evil…without context students cannot made coherent judgements about these events. 

The move away from a fragmented history curriculum in schools is a positive move and calls for a greater emphasis on British history and its place in the European and global past is a defensible one.  If the past is not to be a foreign country, then being able to place individuals in their pasts is fundamental.

Granting land under Grose and Hunter, 1793-1800

Grose’s land policy was widely and justifiable criticised by contemporaries and has subsequently been called ‘anarchical’.[1] His administration was lax and the widespread lack of deeds and non-transfer of title left many poor farmers officially landless. The provision of additional large land grants, giving numbers of convict workers in excess of official entitlements and food privileges for officers ensured that a fair share of the limited resources of the colony did not flow to the poor and ex-convicts in ways that Phillip had intended.[2] Through his blatant misuse of his discretionary powers in downsizing ex-convict grants while expanding land made available to officers, Grose and then Paterson began translating elitist attitudes of the officers into a colonial reality that marginalised and disadvantaged equally ex-convicts and free poor immigrant settlers.

By 1795 when Hunter arrived, there was again a food crisis in the colony. The value of much land had declined to such an extent that expenditure on seed was no longer justified and the government was no longer using convicts to clear new land for cultivation.[3] Initially Hunter introduced state aid for settlers by fixing prices and promising to buy all their wheat but this had little effect and it was clear that a radical change in land policy was needed. [4] The result was reversion to the policy of public farming that addressed the issue of food shortages but was vigorously opposed by Portland in London.[5] In addition, by trying to evolve a flexible policy for development that satisfied both settlers and government in London, Hunter managed to alienate both. For example, in 1799, he followed Portland’s instructions to lower the price of grain but then withdrew it to conciliate the settlers.

Hunter’s indecision and lack of support from London spawned settler protest that first emerged in mid-1797 when John Macarthur, a captain in the NSW Corps protested against the nationalisation of production. This resulted in the appointment of two commissioners to hear the grievances of settlers in public meetings, the first attempt to mould land policies by the collection of information instead on through generalised assumptions. The settlers’ grievances were real. The government fixed the price of wheat yearly and received the settlers’ produce into public granaries at that artificial price. This situation was made worse by the officers’ crops going directly to the stores while settlers had to sell to ‘dealers, peddlers and extortioners’ at lower prices.[6] As a result, the 1798 Commission found that agriculture was being constricted. Parramatta showed signs of prosperity but many settlers had not remained on the land reducing overall output to such a degree that of the population of 4,955, 3,545 were fed by the government. Of the 388 settlers, seven out of ten supported themselves. This had not prevented Hunter from making 364 land grants, 181 to convicts covering 28,279 acres or nearly twice the area granted by his predecessors. [7]

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[1] Ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, p. 7.

[2] This is evident in the land grants between 13 December 1794 and 15 October 1795 see, HRNSW, Vol. 2, pp. 350-356.

[3] See, Hunter to Portland, 28 April, 20 August 1796, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 38-42, 76-79 on obstacles to progress.

[4] As, for example, in the general order, 10 March 1797, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 196-198 listing wages to be paid for particular tasks.

[5] See his letter to Hunter, 31 August 1797, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 293-298.

[6] Settlers’ petition to Hunter, 19 February 1798, HRNSW, Vol. 3, p. 369 and settlers’ appeal to Portland, 1 February 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 25-28.

[7] For the list of grants from August 1796 to 1 January 1800, see HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 38-48.

Hymns and the Chartists revisited

It has been two years since the discovery of a possibly unique copy of the National Chartist Hymn Book printed in Rochdale for the National Chartist Association in Todmodern Library raised the neglected question of the significance of hymns and hymn singing and more broadly religion to the Chartist movement. [1] In the interim, Dr Mike Sanders has done further research on the volume and has published his findings in Victorian Studies. [2]
 

The discovery of the Todmorden booklet raises important questions about the importance of hymn singing to Chartists. Sold for one penny, it was obviously aimed at the mass market. So why were hymns important to the Chartists? There had been two earlier attempts at producing a hymn book for the whole movement: Thomas Cooper edited the Shakesperian Chartist Hymn Book published in 1842 and Joshua Hobson’s Hymns for Worship: Without sectarianism and adapted to the present state of the church, with a text of scripture for each hymn published the following year. Cooper’s Shakesperian Chartist Hymn Book gave both the hymn and Shakespeare a new oral agitational and political resonance by attempting to give both Bardic and religious authority to Chartist lyrics. [3] It collects together songs and ballads of the indigenous rank and file ‘Chartist poets’ and demonstrates the importance of orality to the movement. The hymns were meant to be memorised and so even the illiterate could participate in the process of collective worship and agitation. The dominant poetic tradition is, as a result, startled into new meanings or new purpose by using traditional literary forms in differing socio-political contexts and stressing the latent energy and orality of popular lyric forms. The development of Chartist hymns represented an extension of the radical ballad narrative into the religious domain combining perceptions of the intense feeling and vision about the alienation they felt from the dominant middle-class industrial culture with a morality tale that allowed them to articulate in accessible ways both their religious and political solidarity and the identification of their grievances through a populist oral tradition against those who failed to recognise or were unwilling to accommodate those demands. Sanders concludes that the hymn books were designed in an attempt to produce a standard hymn book for the movement, as a Chartist forerunner of Hymns Ancient and Modern.

The origins of the National Chartist Hymn Book can be tentatively identified in the pages of the Northern Star. On 28 December 1844, On 1 February 1845, A month later, on 1 March, the Northern Star included the following, By 23 August 1845, the book was nearing publication or had already been published

Finally, on 1 November 1845, it is clear that the Chartist Hymn-Book was in use, though given the reference to the ‘36th hymn’, whether this was the book found in Todmorden is debatable and is more likely to be a reference to Hobson’s 64 page book:

Heavily influenced by dissenting Christians, the hymns are about social justice, ‘striking down evil doers’ and blessing Chartist enterprises, rather than the conventional themes of crucifixion, heaven and family. Rather than the crucifixion or Christ’s glory, the focus of the hymns is a cry for liberty. Some of the hymns protested against the exploitation of child labour and slavery. Another of the hymns proclaimed: ‘Men of wealth and men of power/ Like locusts all thy gifts devour.’ Two of the hymns celebrate the martyrs of the movement. Great God! Is this the Patriot’s Doom? Was composed for the funeral of Samuel Holberry, the Sheffield Chartist leader, who died in prison in 1843, while another honours John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones, the Chartist leaders transported to Tasmania in the aftermath of the Newport rising of 1839.

For the remainder of the pamphlet see: http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=102253&PageNo=1

Although the hymns are printed without authors, John Henry Bramwich, a Leicester Chartist and stockinger who also wrote poetry for the Northern Star, is known to have written hymns 1-14 in his friend Thomas Cooper’s Shakesperian Chartist Hymn Book and may have contributed to this collection. [4] There is no music. This came later to hymn books and singers would have fitted the words to tunes they were already familiar with. Each hymn is marked with the metre of the hymn, for instance L.M. for Long Metre and this would have helped them know how the words went with the rhythm. Mike Sanders, commented,

‘This fragile pamphlet is an amazing find and opens up a whole new understanding of Chartism – which as a movement in many ways shaped the Britain we know today.’

Elizabeth Gaskell, especially in Mary Barton seems to suggest that suffering is something that Christians have to accept and she repeatedly insists that the only way people can be happy is to resign themselves to God’s will. During the nineteenth century, the Church of England and those Nonconformist churches that sought ‘respectability’ used to insist on this point as well and it seemed to many Chartists that the Church was an accomplice of the middle-classes by keeping the poor quiet and resigned to their suffering fate. When Mrs. Gaskell insisted on this resignation to God’s will she puts everything under this resignation of suffering, death and poverty. In fact throughout the novel, the protagonist John Barton questions whether poverty is in fact God’s will or whether it was brought about by the incessant greed of the rising middle-class. Distress and unemployment were caused by man’s selfishness not the Lord’s judgement and this was a very different message to that extolled by mainstream Christianity. The ways the working-class is presented in the novel suggests that the only way that the laws that had enriched the middle-class were to be changed it would be by Chartism.

Given that Chartism was a cultural as well as a political movement, it is not surprising that religion and religious belief, whether orthodox or not, played a significant role in determining the character of the movement and that in that process hymns played a major role. A quick search of the Northern Star identified 447 references to hymns ranging from advertisements for non-sectarian hymn books to the singing of hymns at the beginning and often the end of Chartist meetings. The state had politicised the Church and Chartist recognised the practical and symbolic importance of attacking this religious hegemony in their extended campaigns for the vote. For example, during August and September 1839, Chartists in South Wales began attending their local parish churches in large numbers, something many regular worshippers could not understand as the attitude of churches to the Chartists had changed little. The Baptists in their association meetings at Risca deplored the level of disaffection and insubordination shown by Chartists. In June, a Wesleyan minister, expressing broader views in his denomination had accused them of being levellers, thieves and robbers. [5] Nonetheless, on 11 August they marched to the parish church of St Woolos in Newport for both morning and evening services. A week later, at Merthyr, the Chartists peaceably crowded into the parish church where the curate, Thomas Williams, who had been informed of their intentions preached an aggressive sermon from the text: ‘Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake; whether it be to the King as supreme or unto Governors...’ [6] The following week, Chartists listened to a sermon at Pontypool while in Abedare and Hirwaun, Chartists specifically asked John Davis an Independent minister to preach to them. Although he produced a scriptural justification for the doctrine of the rights of man, he begged them to abstain from physical violence and not raise the sword against their fellow man. Was attendance at church, as David Williams suggests ‘a cloak to cover nefarious designs’? [7] This misreads their significance and widespread occurrence. [8]

Religion helped to give Chartists strength, sanctify their crusade and face the possibility of dying in the struggle. For many, millenarian Christianity emphasised historical change brought about by an awakened people. In occupying church pews, Chartists were asserting their moral authority but were also showing their contempt for the Anglican usurpation of Christianity and the Constitution and this was even more the case in South Wales where the church represented an alien culture and government. Christianity was just as capable of being democratised as political institutions. [9] Sanders argues that there was a distinctive Chartist theology that prioritised communal feeling and action over individual subjectivity and conversional relationship with God. This, he suggests, is evident in the politically conscious nature of the hymns in the Todmorden booklet in which there are clear tensions between Chartism’s own religious sensibilities and Chartist attitudes towards religious institutions. What was important was not the visions of heaven and unified nature evident in conventional Victorian hymns but the expression of contemporary political and economic antagonisms. The issue for Chartists was justice in this life not the next.

 

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[1] Its discovery was reported widely in the press; see, for example, Lancashire Telegraph, 21 December 2010.

[2] Sanders, Mike, ‘‘God is our guide! Our cause is just!’: The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 54, (4), (2012), pp. 679-705.

[3] See, Janowitz, Anne, F., Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, (Cambridge University Press), 1998, pp. 136-137, Roberts, Stephen, The Chartist Prisoners: The Radical Lives of Thomas Cooper (1805-1892) and Arthur O’Neill (1819-1896), (Peter Lang), 2008, p. 78, and Roberts, Stephen, ‘Thomas Cooper in Leicester, 1840-1843’, Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions, Vol. 61, (1987), pp. 62-76, at pp. 70-71. See also, Murphy, Andrew, ‘Shakespeare among the Workers’, Holland, Peter, (ed.), Shakespeare Survey: Writing about Shakespeare, (Cambridge University Press), 2005, pp. 111-112

[4] Cooper, Thomas, ‘Memoir of John Henry Bramwich, The Chartist Poet of Leicester’, Northern Star, 4 September 1846.
See also http://myfamilyhistoryjj.com/TNG/showmedia.php?mediaID=29909&medialinkID=8571

[5] Western Vindicator, 20 July 1839.

[6] I Peter ii, verses 13-17.

[7] Williams, David, John Frost: A Study in Chartism, (University of Wales Press), 1939, p. 187.

[8] Yeo, Eileen, ‘Christianity in Chartist Struggle 1838-1842’, Past & Present, Vol. 91 (1981), pp. 109-139, identified demonstrations in Sheffield over five consecutive weeks as the most protracted but there were others, for example in Stockport, Norwich and Bradford.

[9] Jones, Keith B., ‘The religious climate of the Chartist insurrection at Newport, Monmouthshire, 4^th November 1839: expressions of evangelicalism’, Journal of Welsh Religious History, Vol. 5, (1997), pp. 57-71.

Settler Australia, 1780-1880, Volume 2: Eureka and Democracy

JUST PUBLISHED

The second volume, Eureka and Democracy, is also divided into two parts. The constitutional separation of New South Wales and the Port Phillip District in 1851 and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony coincided with the discovery of large deposits of gold. Although the established colonial administration in New South Wales coped relatively well with the ensuing influx of immigrants in search of success on the gold diggings, developments in Victoria were less auspicious. Coping with setting up the new colony and the rapid growth in population proved difficult for Charles La Trobe, the colony’s Lieutenant-Governor leading to growing protest from diggers who, not without justification, felt oppressed by colonial taxation and the colonial police. With widespread protest in 1851 and 1853, matters came to a head in Ballarat in the final months of 1854 when a combination of colonial mismanagement, locally and in Melbourne, and a burgeoning sense of in justice and tyranny led to the formation of a rebel stockade on the Eureka gold field and its brutal repression by British troops and colonial police. It proved a pyrrhic victory for the authorities that was damned for the heavy-handed nature of its actions during and after the attack on the Stockade and was unable to convict any of those brought to trial for high treason the following year. How far Eureka was responsible for political change in Victoria in the mid-1850s is debatable. The process of establishing responsible government in the colony took place parallel to the increasing intensity of protest on the goldfields and would have occurred whether there were protests or not. Nonetheless, the ‘spirit’ of Eureka played an important role in establishing a new system of colonial government that was aware of and responsive to populist demands and Eureka was and still is regarded as the midwife of democracy in Australia. It became, though initially its memory was ‘whispered’, one of the defining events in the formation of Australian nationalism.

The second section of the book contains five papers linked broadly to the theme of democracy. They explore the different ways in which working people struggled to define their rights within the framework of changing notions of the colonial state and maintain those rights against assault from those who favoured an anti-democratic state and from immigrant labour. Paradoxically, the Australian state that emerged from the 1870s was both inclusively democratic in character and also exclusively racist and ‘white’ in its cultural attitudes leading to the espousal of a ‘White Australia’ policy after Federation in 1901. For most of the nineteenth century, according to Richard White, there was no strong evidence of a distinctively Australian identity: ‘Australians saw themselves, and were seen by others, as part of a group of new, transplanted, predominantly Anglo-Saxon emigrant societies’. It is significant that a sense of national distinctiveness only grew stronger towards the end of the century and that this was accompanied by ‘a more explicitly racial element’, based on being Anglo-Saxon or, as confidence in the new society grew, ‘on being the most vigorous branch of Anglo-Saxondom’. White settlers may have been deeply attached to freedom for themselves but they opposed freedom for others. The result was that to be free, individuals needed to be of British or at least European origins. However, these colonial freedoms were not freely given to settlers who had to extract recognition of their rights by persuasion, resistance and even rebellion from metropolitan and colonial authorities that wished to maintain centralised control over colonial activities. The book ends with an examination of the nature of the colonial settler state.