The 1820s: writing off a decade of radical activity

The 1820s is often written off as a decade of little radical activity yet it was during these years that Britain became a manufacturing society. Whether factories and firms were small or larger-scale, whether increases in productivity were achieved by increasing the labour force or using machine technology, whether growth was achieved using skilled or unskilled labour or in urban or rural settings, British society was increasingly and irrevocably manufacturing in its emphasis. The relative stability and long perceived certainties of pre-industrial Britain were replaced by the vibrancy, uncertainties and class tensions of a free market economy and modernising society.

The economy revived in the early 1820s and there was a decline in radical political activity, something that reinforces the link between poor economic conditions and concerted radical action. But popular radicalism always meant more than demanding inclusion in the political system and embraced a range of causes of beliefs. Some radicals focused on building cooperative institutions such as trade unions, friendly societies, mutual aid societies and Mechanics Institutes. Others sought greater religious equality for nonconformists and to establish a system of secular education. Many nonconformists also were radical in their politics because they objected that being a member of the established Church of England gave individuals important legal privileges denied to nonconformists. Religious issues could stir deeper passions than politics and the religious question, as contemporaries called it, was a key political issue for most of the century.

Some workingmen turning to religion--there were revivals in particularly in the north and south-west. There was, for instance, a Primitive Methodist revival among lead miners in Weardale and more generally across the North-East in 1822 and 1823. [1] Revivalism in the 1820s occurred largely in areas with a significant rural population. Primitive Methodism was largely rural in character and, with the exception of the North-East and the Potteries; its main strength was in the largely agricultural counties of England. It was not until after 1850 that its appeal to the urban worker became obvious. Primitive Methodism was the medium through which agricultural labourers could fight for social and economic recognition and its chapels provided rural workers with a symbol of independence and defiance of the established social order.

While Primitive Methodism represented a radical theology, Wesleyan Methodism was increasingly strident in its support for the existing social order and, under the influence of Jabez Bunting, large numbers of people were expelled for radical activities. Growth in the northern manufacturing districts came to a halt and even went into temporary decline in 1819 and 1820 and in Rochdale there was a fifteen per cent decrease in membership between 1818 and 1820.[2] Although Bunting and his supporters recognised the value of revivalism and encouraged it so long as it did not disrupt regular circuit life and could ideally be managed, they disapproved of some of its methods, especially ranting and disassociated themselves from the emotionalism of Primitive Methodism.[3] This, and John Wesley’s policy before his death in 1791 which was continued by his successors of concentrating on evangelising urban areas where the Church of England was failing in its functions, meant that the links between Methodism and urban radicalism were loosening, although the extent to which this occurred varied from locality to locality. This view of Methodism, akin to E. P. Thompson’s excoriating critique of the movement as an instrument of social control, neglects the internal battles of the 1790s and early years of the nineteenth century in industrial towns over lay participation in church governance, control over Sunday schools and the extent of denominational control over the political activities of its members. In the 1820s, its nature as a popular movement meant that it could still undermine the established order of Church and State even if, by 1850, its role as an alternative national faith had evaporated. [4]

The 1820s also represented a critical decade for workers in textile industries as it saw an intensification of the demise of handloom weaving. The introduction of powered spinning largely in spinning factories from the 1780s resulted in surging production of yarn that had to be woven on handlooms by weavers whose numbers in Britain reached a peak of about 240,000 workers in 1820. For several generations, handloom weavers had enjoyed high prices, a relatively good standard of living and benefitted from increasing demand for the products of their looms. They were also vocal in defence of their livelihood with, for instance, 130,000 signing a petition in 1807 calling for a minimum wage and the following year, some 15,000 attended a demonstration in Manchester. The development of a reliable power loom by Richard Roberts, a Manchester engineer, in 1822—he also perfected a fully mechanised self-acting mule for spinning between 1825 and 1830—led to the rapid adoption of powered weaving. Edward Baines estimated that there were 2,400 power looms in British factories in 1813, 14,150 in 1820 but over 115,000 by 1835. This shift placed handloom weaving under growing pressure, its profitability tumbled and the numbers of handloom weavers in Lancashire fell from between 150,000 to 190,000 in 1821 to about 30,000 by 1861.

The decline in handloom weaving was uneven with some millowners using both machinery and hand-working while some weavers used finer grades of cotton, which early power looms could not weave, or turned to silk that remained largely unmechanised. Even so, handloom weaving was in terminal decline and, as many children of handloom weavers did not follow their fathers in the trade, it was increasingly characterised by an ageing workforce. [5] By the late 1820s, progressive cuts in wage-rates left many handloom weaving families with serious economic problems. Handloom weavers who move into urban areas might mitigate this by deploying women or children in the factory labour market while those weavers who remained in rural areas could take advantage of supplementary earning opportunities afforded by farming and mining. Nonetheless, by 1830 both sets of weavers found themselves in endemic structural poverty unable to generate sufficient income to cover basic costs and heavily dependent on poor relief.

The idea of a government-applied minimum wage to give give handloom weavers a degree of security was still being suggested and not just by the weavers. Some of the more respectable ‘putting-out’ firms, facing competition from machine-weaving businesses who undercut them by paying their unskilled workers low wages, saw the benefits of such a scheme. In September, 1819, a month after the Peterloo Massacre, 35 calico producers supported the call for a minimum weavers' wage and as late as 1822, several manufacturers met in Rossendale to demand restrictions on the use of power looms. The Committee of Manchester Weavers joined the outcry, claiming:

The evils of multiplying power looms, by first ruining half a million who depend on manual weaving (he was presumably referring to families rather than individuals), and especially those unhappy young people they now employ, are such as no human being can think are counterbalanced by any good expected from them.

Having repealed the legislation that might have protected weavers in 1809, the government was unwilling to introduce obstacles to the free market accelerating the trend towards mechanisation and it was not until 1834-1835 that a Select Committee examined the problems faced by weavers. James Hutchinson, one of the calico producers who had protested in 1819, like many of his fellow businessmen, finally opened his own power-loom mill at Woodhill, Elton.

Handloom weavers publicised their plight whenever the opportunity arose. Actress Fanny Kemble, one of the guests at the opening on the Liverpool-Manchester Railway in 1830, described the arrival of the first train into Manchester, packed with dignitaries including Wellington:

High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling faces, a loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-looking weaver, evidently set there as a representative man, to protest against the triumph of machinery and the gain and glory which the wealthy Liverpool and Manchester men were likely to derive from it. [6]

For radicals such as Peter Murray McDouall writing in his Chartist and Republican Journal in 1841, the gradual disappearance of handloom weavers, represented the destruction of independence, family economy and control over the pace and nature of work and the creation of wage slavery by ‘factory slaves’ within the developing factory system of industrial capitalism.

Other radicals campaigned successfully against the Combination Acts leading to their repeal in 1824. A downturn in the economy led to a rapid increase in trade union activity with extensive strikes, including some violence in the winter of 1824-1825. Employers lobbied for the reintroduction of the Combination Acts and in 1825 new legislation was passed allowing unions to negotiate over wages and conditions but without the legal right to strike. This effectively limited trade unions to peaceful collective bargaining with employers and if they went beyond this narrow definition of legal activity for trade unions, they could be prosecuted for criminal conspiracy. Faced with technological change and the considerable powers left to employers after 1825, workers were increasingly convinced that small unions could never succeed. What was needed, some argued, were national or general unions representing all the workers in a particular trade from different parts of the country. In 1829, John Doherty, leader of the Lancashire cotton spinners formed a Grand General Union of Spinners. For greater negotiating power, the next step was to try to unite all unions in all trades into a single union. He formed the National Association for the Protection of Labour in late 1829 in Manchester and it spread into the neighbouring cotton towns the following year and subsequently into other manufacturing areas especially the East Midlands. [7]

The 1820s also saw a refinement of working-class analysis of the exploitative nature of the economy. [8] William Cobbett’s solution was to get rid of the system of corruption, the national debt and paper money and he implied that life would revert to the patterns of the past; little analysis, simply populist nostalgia. By contrast, Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson, Robert Owen, John Gray and later John Francis Bray, Ernest Jones, James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien and George Harney argued that the rights of man must be grounded in the possession of economic power. Their anti-capitalist and socialist political economies stood in stark contrast to the classical political economies of James and John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Robert Torrens, John Ramsey McCulloch and Nassau Senior. [9]

Robert Owen had outlined his cooperative views in A New View of Society in 1813. Although Owen was influential in the working-class movement in the early 1830s, he sought social reform from above, a reflection of his elitist and paternalist attitudes. His reform programme was not confrontational: he saw his reforms as a means of avoiding class conflict, violent protest and revolution. His most important contribution was seeing capitalism not as a collection of discrete events but as a system. Throughout the 1820s, a growing group of labour radicals embraced Owen’s critique of capitalism and his views on cooperation. Thompson, Hodgskin and Gray articulated not simply the theoretical basis for a distincly anti-capitalist political economy but also considered its scope, methods, content and aims. All were, to a degree, Ricardian socialists who adopted the labour theory of value while rejecting the elements of Ricardo’s model that claimed capital, too, was productive. Hodgskin, for instance, argued that capitalists were parasites who diverted the fruits of labour’s productivity into unproductive consumption.

Thompson rejected the notion, expressed particularly by Thomas Malthus that any increase in the wages of labourers could only lead to their further immiseration. [10] Hodgskin, though he rejected Thompson’s cooperative views, suggested:

…the real business of men, what promotes their prosperity, is always better done by themselves than by any few separate and distinct individuals, acting as a government in the name of the whole.[11]

In 1825, in his Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, he argued that free-trade economists had invested ‘capital’ with productive powers that it did not possess and that capitalists could only grow rich where there was an oppressed group of workers kept in poverty. Writing in the aftermath of the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824 and the repressive legislation the following year, Hodgskin believed that laws against trade unions and collective bargaining had created an unfair advantage against workers in favour of capitalists and that the large profits made by capitalists were not the result of natural economic forces but were generated by the coercive power of government. Only with the freedom of the free market, he maintained, could labourers of every kind receive just compensation for their work. Economic intervention by governments could do nothing to increase wealth or to accelerate its progress and that the laws of economics would only have the power to transform society when unrestricted by arbitrary legal systems. [12]

John Gray argued that the producers receive only about a fifth of the value of their products, whereas their labour creates all of that value. [13] However, he did not believe that this issue could be resolved by the unrestricted operation of the free market arguing that free market competition hampered the economy’s productivity because incomes remain low, limiting demand and therefore production. The market was seen as a source of exploitation and economic depression and the competitive pressures unleashed by the market resulted in socially destructive and morally corrosive behaviour. To overcome the limits competition places on social production and the hardships it imposes, Gray proposed a communitarian solution. What was necessary, Gray maintained, was central direction and control over the industrial economy by a National Chamber of Commerce, which would own the means of production, as a way of achieving certain socialist objectives. He also called for the formation of a National Bank that would ensure that money would increase as product increased and decrease as produce was consumed or redemanded as well as a system of cooperative associations to organise supply and demand. In this way, Gray believed that economic activity could be managed to ensure distributive and commutative justice, price stability, efficient allocation of resources and an end to economic depression resulting from supply outstripping effective supply.

The major problem with populist anti-capitalist thinking in the 1820s was that it lacked a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the causes of the exploitation and alienation of capitalism. Largely because of their failure to address this issue, Thompson sought to establish cooperative solutions irrespective of what was going on in the wider capitalist society. His solution was not to replace the existing capitalist system but to circumvent it by creating separate cooperative communities. The communities established by Robert Owen failed to translate the theory of cooperative living into communities that worked largely because of his paternalistic and undemocratic approach to running them and their need to operate within a capitalist environment. Gray, however, went further in suggesting socialist solutions to replace market capitalism. Although anti-capitalist economists had developed an effective critique of capitalism in the 1820s and this continued into the 1830s, what they had not done was to link their critique to the question of parliamentary reform. It was the publication of the Poor Man’s Guardian, edited by Bronterre O’Brien that proved crucial. Although strongly influenced by the popular economists and by Owen, he rejected Owen’s opposition to political action. He transformed the traditional rhetoric of radicalism by treating parliamentary reform as meaningless on its own. Without social and economic transformation, he argued, parliamentary reform could not address the ills of the working-classes.

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[1] Patterson, W. M., Northern Primitive Methodism, (E. Dalton), 1909, pp. 154-170.

[2] Engemann, T. S., ‘Religion and political reform: Wesleyan Methodism in nineteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Church & State, Vol. 24, (1982), pp. 321-336, provides a good summary. Hempton, David, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c1750-1900, (Routledge), 1996, pp. 162-178, is excellent on the historiography.

[3] Hempton, D., Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850, (Hutchinson), 1984, Edwards, M., After Wesley: a study of the social and political influence of Methodism in the middle period, 1791-1849, (Epworth Press), 1948, Taylor, E. R., Methodism and Politics 1791-1851, (Cambridge University Press), 1935, and Wearmouth, R. F., Methodism and the Working-class Movements of England 1800-1850, (Epworth Press), 1937.

[4] Ibid, Hempton, David, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c1750-1900, pp. 170-171.

[5] Bythell, Duncan, The Handloom Weavers: A Study in the English Cotton Industry During the Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge University Press), 1969, Nardinelli, Clark, ‘Technology and Unemployment: The Case of the Handloom Weavers’, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 53, (1), (1986), pp. 87-94, and Timmins, Geoffrey, The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire, (Manchester University Press), 1993.

[6] Kemble, Frances Ann, Records of a Girlhood, (R. Bentley & Son), 1878, p. 304.

[7] The development of trade union is explored in greater detail.

[8] Thompson, Noel W., The People’s Science: The popular political economy of exploitation and crisis 1816-34, (Cambridge University Press), 1984, and The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775-1850, (Pluto Press), 1998.

[9] McNally, David, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique, (Verso), 1993, pp. 104-138.

[10] Thompson, William, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, (Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme, Brown & Green), 1824, and Labor Rewarded. The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated: or, How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products of Its Exertions, (Hunt and Clarke), 1827.

[11] Hodgskin, Thomas, Travels in the North of Germany: Describing the Present State of the Social and Political Institutions, the Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Education, Arts and Manners in that Country Particularly in the Kingdom of Hannover, 2 Vols. (Constable), 1820, Vol. 1 p. 292.

[12] Slack, David, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), (Boydell), 1998, pp. 89-136, considers his thinking in the 1820s.

[13] Gray, John, Lecture on Human Happiness: Being the First of a Series of Lectures on that Subject in which Will be Comprehended a General Review of the Causes of the Existing Evils of Society, and a Development of Means by which They May be Permanently and Effectually Removed, (Sherwood, Jones & Company), 1825, and The Social System: A Treatise on the Principle of Exchange, (Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green), 1831. See also, DLB, Vol. 6, pp. 121-125, and Kimball, J., The Economic Doctrines of John Gray, 1799-1883, (Catholic University of America Press), 1946.

Policing in Australia: exporting British traditions

There was a fundamental tension at the heart of the colony in NSW in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It was to be a penal colony, governed through executive military rule but in which the principles of the rule of law applied. Although the British intended to transport English law and legal proceedings along with the convicts, in practice there were significant departures from English law in the new and distant colony. Notably, the first civil case heard in Australia, in July 1788, was brought by a convict couple. They successfully sued the captain of the ship in which they had been transported, for the loss of a parcel during the voyage. In Britain, as convicts, they would have had no rights to bring such a case. The question of how to police a society that was both penal and free posed major problems after the creation of civilian colonial government in 1824. This was exacerbated by the sub-division of NSW after 1824 with the separation of VDL and Victoria and the establishment of South Australia, by the growing numbers of free settlers arriving in the colonies especially after the discovery of gold in 1851 and the gradual ending of transportation from the 1840s.

Colonists, initially in NSW but later in the newer colonies, were influenced by established English traditions in determining their policing arrangements. The English were suspicious of any notion of a powerful police, which they equated with the Catholic absolutism of France. This led to the development of decentralised model of policing in the eighteenth century where the administration of justice and the policing of towns and villages were placed under local control. The gentry acted as unpaid magistrates dispensing justice through the local Bench and property owners devoted some time to the duties of the unpaid parish constabulary. In the late eighteenth century, however, this informal, amateur system began to break down before the increasing incidence of urban unrest and property crime, especially in London.[1] Police reformers, such as John Fielding and Patrick Colquhoun and the commercial and propertied middle-classes increasingly advocated rigorous control and surveillance of the lower classes by a more systematically organised and coordinated police force. Such proposals were vehemently opposed by the gentry and the emerging industrial working class, who feared that the government would form a powerful, centralised police force to ride roughshod over their liberties. With the crucial support of Tory backbenchers, they resisted efforts to establish French-style police methods in England. The most important development was the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 that appointed stipendiary or paid magistrates in charge of small police forces. But the predominantly local system of policing was still in place in the 1820s.

There was less resistance to stern measures against agrarian protest and violence in Ireland. The Peace Preservation Act of 1814 and the Irish Constabulary Act of 1822 established police forces in county areas and created a more militarised and centralised form of policing.[2] The author of these statutes, Robert Peel, when home secretary, used arguments based on the efficiency of the Irish police and the threat to liberty from disorder and crime to achieve police reform in England. Peel pushed the Metropolitan Police Act through Parliament in 1829 creating a paid, uniformed, preventive police for London headed by commissioners without magisterial duties and under central direction. The example of uniformed, professional police subsequently spread throughout England over the following decades, but they remained under local control and the extent to which the new police differed from the existing watchmen and constables should not be exaggerated.[3]

These developments provided two different models for colonial policing. First, a centralised, military styled and armed force of Ireland kept away from the local community in barracks. Secondly, a consciously non-military, unarmed, preventive English police supposedly working in partnership with and with the consent of the local community.[4] More often than not elements from both models were employed by colonial police forces and adapted to suit local circumstances. Where the security of the state was threatened, the Irish approach was deployed, while English methods were more pervasive and influenced day-to-day policing of all aspects of social life.[5]

During the 1950s and 1960s, historians of English policing argued that the introduction of the ‘new police’ received widespread community support. The few individuals, who opposed its introduction, it was argued, were soon won over by the force’s ability to prevent crime and maintain social order, so securing it ‘the confidence and the lasting admiration of the British people’.[6] The smooth transition from a locally based ‘inefficient’ parish constable system to an efficient and professional body of law enforcers formed the basis of this ‘consensus’ view.[7] During the 1970s, historians using conflict and social control theories challenged the consensus view of widespread public acceptance. Concentrating on working-class responses, they argued that the ‘new police’ were resisted as an instrument of repression developed by the propertied classes. The ‘new police’, it was argued, were developed to destroy existing working-class culture for the purposes of imposing ‘alien values and an increasingly alien law” on the urban poor’.[8] Conflict historians argued that a preventive police system was developed in response to changes in the social and economic structure of English society. Robert Storch, the foremost proponent of this interpretation contended that, the formation ‘of the new police was a symptom of both a profound social change and deep rupture in class relations’.[9] The working-class, it was argued, questioned the legitimacy of the ‘new police’ and responded to their interference in a variety of ways ranging from subtle defiance to open and, on occasions, violent resistance.

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[1] Philips, David, ‘‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’: The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcement in England, 1780-1830’, in Gatrell, V.A.C., Lenman, Bruce and Parker, Geoffrey, (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe Since 1500, (Europa), 1980, pp. 155-189; Hay, Douglas and Snyder, Francis, (eds.), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750-1850, (Clarendon Press), 1989; Emsley, Clive, The English Police: A Political and Social History, 2^nd ed., (Longman), 1996, pp. 15-23; McMullan, J.L., ‘The Arresting Eye: Discourse, Surveillance, and Disciplinary Administration in Early English Police Thinking’, Social and Legal Studies, Vol. 7, (1998), pp. 97-128. Gattrell, V.A.C., ‘Crime, authority and the policeman-state‘, in Thompson, F.M.L., (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: Vol. 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, (Cambridge University Press), 1900, pp. 243-310 provides a good overview.

[2] Palmer, S.H., Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850, (Cambridge University Press), 1988, chapters 6 and 7.

[3] Styles, John, ‘The Emergence of the Police: Explaining Police Reform in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’, British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 27 (1987), pp. 15-22.

[4] Brogden, Michael, ‘An Act to Colonise the Internal Lands of the Island: Empire and the Origins of the Professional Police’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, Vol. 15, (1987), pp. 179-208; Anderson, D.M. and Killingray, David, (eds.), Policing and the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830-1940, (Manchester University Press), 1991 and Emsley, Clive, The Great British Bobby: A history of British policing from the 18^th century to the present, (Quercus), 2009, pp. 104-111.

[5] See, ibid, Emsley, Clive, The Great British Bobby, pp. 91-92 for s succinct discussion of the two models and Hawkins, Richard, ‘The ‘Irish Model’ and the Empire: A Case for Reassessment’, in ibid, Anderson, D.M. and Killingray, David, (eds.), Policing and the Empire, pp. 18-32 makes a powerful case that there was no real ‘Irish model’.

[6] Jones, David, ‘The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829-1888,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 33, (1983), p. 153. For discussions of this debate see, Emsley, Clive, Policing and its Context, 1750-1870, (Macmillan), 1987, pp. 4-7; Bailey, V., ‘Introduction’, in Bailey, V., (ed.), Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, (Croom Helm), 1981, pp. 12-14; Fyfe, N.R., ‘The Police, Space and Society: The Geography of Policing’, Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 15, (3), (1991), pp. 250-252; Taylor, David, The new police: crime, conflict, and control in 19^th-century England, (Manchester University Press), 1997, ibid, Brogden, M., ‘An Act to Colonise the Internal Lands of the Island: Empire and the Origins of the Professional Police’, pp. 181-183.

[7] King, H., ‘Some Aspects of Police Administration in New South Wales, 1825-1851’, Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 42, (4), (1956), p. 207.

[8] Ibid, Jones, David, ‘The New Police, Crime and People in England and Wales, 1829-1888’, p. 153.

[9] Storch, R., ‘The Plague of the Blue Lotus: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 20, (1975), p. 62.

Emily Wilding Davison and the 1913 Derby

The protest at the Derby on 4 June 1913 and subsequent events were discussed in my Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain 1830-1918 and I have taken the opportunity in its centennial year to extend that discussion. 

On 4 June 1913, Emily Davison rushed on to the Epsom racecourse while the Derby was in progress, received fatal injuries to her head and died in hospital four days later. [1] She was one of a group of ‘freelancers’ or irregulars within the WSPU who inaugurated some of the best-known militant tactics such as hunger-strikes and window-breaking. Fiercely loyal to the WSPU leadership, they also retained their right to independent action even if supported by district WSPU and national organisers. One of the arsonists was Lilian Lenton, the daughter of a joiner from Leicester who  celebrated her twenty-first birthday by volunteering at her local WSPU office for window-breaking raids. After her first spell in prison, she graduated to arson, vowing to burn two empty buildings a week. She was arrested for setting fire to the orchid house and pavilion at Kew, went on hunger strike in prison, and was force-fed. Leonora Cohen, by contrast, was nearly forty when she hurled an iron bar at a display case in the jewel Room at the Tower of London. Unlike Lenton, Mrs Cohen was a respectable married woman, the wife of a staunchly Liberal watchmaker in Leeds. Until she became a branch secretary in 1911, she had contented herself with bringing up her son, and selling newspapers and making marmalade for the WSPU. When Asquith suddenly announced a man-only suffrage bill in November of that year, reneging again on a commitment to women, she turned to direct action. Her subsequent hunger strikes, and refusal to accept fluids, in Armley Gaol in Leeds nearly killed her. [2]

These ‘freelancers’ posed a problem of control over the movement for Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. The autocratic nature of their organisation meant that it was relatively easy to dismiss any staff who deviated from the agreed strategies even at local level. This was not the case with suffragettes who, from 1909 onwards, on their own initiative took militant action. The use of hunger-strikes was begun by Marion Wallace-Dunlop in July 1909 on her own initiative and subsequently accepted by the leadership. The Pankhursts initially disapproved of boycotting the 1911 Census but, when faced with large numbers of members who wanted to take part, somewhat reluctantly approved their actions. By 1913, militant suffragettes and the government, especially Reginald McKenna at the Home Office, were embraced in a struggle for public opinion. The authorities wanted to suppress the campaign but without risking the death of a suffragette explaining the introduction of the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act. Militants sought to discredit McKenna’s policy by taking action that included the serious risk of injury to highlight their cause. For the Pankhursts, their inability to restrain independent, uncoordinated militant initiatives threatened their control over the organisation.

Since 1909, Emily Davison had been involved in militant activities resulting in imprisonment, hunger-strikes and forced-feeding; stone-throwing in 1909, setting fire to pillar boxes in late 1911 and two bombings in 1912. Virtually everything about her death is contentious. Whether or not Emily intended to die is a much debated question. [3] Eyewitnesses were unclear about what happened: some believed she was crossing the course to get to the other side thinking the horses had passed, others thought she was trying to grab the reins of Anmer, the King’s horse as a deliberate act, something Stanley and Morley suggest is shown in film footage of the incident. [4] Gertrude Colmore’s biography was produced at high speed to make political capital from Emily’s death and constructed it as the martyrdom for ‘the Cause’ that many people had been waiting for.[5] She suggested that Davison had considered suicidal action on several previous occasions. Rebecca West also said that she had committed suicide, though the inquest recorded a verdict of death by misadventure, and that her decision was both rational and premeditated.[6] While in Holloway serving a six month sentence in 1912, Davison was again force-fed and in protest threw herself twice over the railings but wire netting broke her fall. She then jumped from the netting onto an iron staircase injuring her hand and cracking two vertebrae. Whether, as Davison told the Pall Mall Gazette on her release he had deliberately tried ‘to commit suicide’ to highlight the ‘horrible torture our women face’, it later used by suffragettes and their critics to explain her action at the Derby as ‘suicide’ and that she was an unbalanced, suicidal fanatic.

In reality, Davison deliberately undertook her final militant act alone, knowing it might prove fatal. But little attention has been given to her religious convictions. As a devout Anglican, suicide would have been unthinkable as it have meant that she could not be buried in consecrated ground. That Emily had purchased a return rail ticket is generally taken as indicating that she did not intend suicide but normal services to Epsom were suspended on Derby Day and replaced by excursion services for which people bought a return ticket, so this is not conclusive. However, she also an invitation to a suffragette dance later that day and had planned a holiday with her sister which suggest that martyrdom was not her intention. She was carrying a suffragette scarf and may have wished to attach it to the King’s horse or simply unfurl it after the horses had passed. If this was the case, then it was a protest that went tragically wrong. Analysis of the three newsreels of the incident show that Emily was closer to the start of Tattenham Corner than previously thought and that this would have given her a clear view of the oncoming race. They show that in the four seconds that passed after she got on to the course, she was able to identify the King’s horse and sought to attach the scarf to it as it passed her but it collided with her and it had always been assumed that this was her intention. Although the jockeys were wearing their owners’ colours, it is unlikely that she would have been able to identify Anmer as he galloped towards her and that she was simply lucky to pick the royal horse. This was an act of political protest not one of political suicide though she was probably aware of the risk this entailed. Stanley and Morley concluded that no proof of her motives is possible since she left no written statement about her intentions.[7] In some respects, it does not matter what her purpose was because the political implications were the same. [8]

The leadership of the WSPU in London found itself having to improvise in the aftermath of Davison’s actions. Christabel was in exile in Paris and Emmeline was in and out of prison and was rearrested en route to the funeral. Her funeral in London, organised by Grace Roe on 14 June, proved to be the last great suffragette showpiece attended by a vast crowd and five thousand women dressed in white as a suffragette guard of honour and much of the press coverage was respectful, awed by her devotion to ‘the Cause’. Although the funeral procession was not subjected to hackling from people who normally turned up the suffragette events, popular reaction to the procession was ambiguous. Anmer had been put down following the incident and, though it was unlikely that he would have won the race, many people had placed bets on him and may have blamed the suffragettes for losing their money. Others saw the attack on Anmer as an insult to the king. Emily’s body was taken north by train and was buried in St. Mary’s churchyard, Morpeth, Northumberland. The movement now had its martyr.

The mixed reactions to her funeral were a reflection of growing popular hostility to the suffragettes after 1912. Labour Party leaders and non-militant suffragettes denounced suffragette martrydom as a contrived and dishonest policy that did little to further the suffrage cause. The press insisted that society could not submit to what the Daily Sketch labelled as a form of terrorism. Emily’s death had no impact of government policy to suppress the WSPU: in continued to raid its headquarters, tap its telephones and intercept its mail. If anything, the campaign by the authorities was intensified strengthened by the increased alienation of public opinion by its militant actions. This was reflected in private correspondence along suffragettes and, although the Pankhursts tried to capitalise on Emilys’ death, it helped to strengthen their determination to change course after the outbreak of war in 1914.

---

[1] Tanner, Michael, The Suffragette Derby (Robson Press), 2013, is good on the tensions of the Derby though less convincing on Davison’s actions.

[2] Ibid, Liddington, Jill, Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote, pp. 231-245.

[3] Morley, Ann with Stanley, Liz, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, (Women’s Press), 1988, is an important revisionist study of this rather enigmatic figure. See also, Purvis, June, ‘Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872-1913), Women’s History Review, Vol. 22, (3), (2013), pp. 353-362, and Fisher, Lucy, Emily Wilding Divison: The Suffragette Who Died For Women’s Rights, (Blacktoad Publications), 2013. Collette, Carolyn P., (ed.), In the Thick of the Fight: The Writing of Emily Wilding Davison, Militant Suffragette, (University of Michigan Press), 2013, prints her published and unpublished writings, some of which are at http://emilydavison.org/browse-letters/

[4] Morning Post, 9 June 1913. Ibid, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, pp. 164-165.

[5] Colmore, Gertrude, The Life of Emily Davison: An Outline, (The Woman’s Press), 1913. Her biography, hagiography as it undoubtedly is, remains an important reference point as it contains the basic source material for all later writers in Emily Davison. However, it excludes much that is important in understanding Emily’s life and thus her death.

[6] West, Rebecca, ‘The Life of Emily Davison’, The Clarion, 20 June 1913.

[7] Ibid, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison, pp. 165-166.

[8] There was a copycat incident at Ascot a fortnight later, when James Hewitt, great-grandson of the second Viscount Lifford and generally regarded as an ‘eccentric’, ran out in front of the Gold Cup field with a suffragette flag in one hand and a loaded revolver in the other. He brought down Tracery, the leader and was seriously injured.

Immigrants and diggers

There was also significant movement of population within Australia itself. Of particular concern was the movement of people from VDL. Transportation to NSW and Victoria had ceased by the time gold was discovered in 1851. Nonetheless, VDL remained a penal colony with a very high proportion of transportees to free settlers.[1] On the mainland they were disparagingly known as ‘Vandiemonians’ or ‘Vandemonians’ referring to the place where they had often served time blended with ‘demon’. They flooded into Victoria in the early days of the gold rushes and in the second half of 1851 there were more recorded immigrants from VDL than NSW and South Australia combined. A significant proportion of these were ex-convicts, but it is probable that many more crossed the Bass Strait. The majority of contemporary observers considered them as a severe threat to law and order on the goldfields and Geoffrey Serle suggested Vandemonians were largely responsible for the increase in recorded crime. [2] Efforts to stem their flow led to the Convicts Prevention Act of 1852. Criticised by some at the time as ‘illiberal’ and ‘arbitrary’, this legislation stopped convicts with conditional pardons from landing in Victoria. The fear and hatred these new immigrants inspired also helped generate support for the anti-transportation movement, headed by the Australasian League that successfully lobbied for the end of transportation to VDL by the end of 1852.

The population of Australia doubled in less than ten years because of gold. Over half a million people sailed from the United Kingdom during the 1850s, more than went to the United States. Over half paid their own fares and in Victoria seventy per cent were unassisted. A high proportion of men who came to Australia were educated, had professional experience and good connections at home. Peter Lalor, a civil engineer, came from Ireland to Melbourne in 1852 and Joseph Reed, a Cornish architect left England to look for gold in Victoria. Thousand crossed the Pacific from California and China. Some came from continental Europe such as Raffaello Carboni, a colonel under Garibaldi and since 1849 an exile in Rome, attracted to Melbourne by articles in the Illustrated London News.

Gold worth £3 million was mined in NSW and more than £9 million in Victoria by the end of 1852 long before most emigrants from England landed. Although gold continued to be found in significant quantities in Victoria during the 1850s, it gradually declined after 1860 and the number of individual diggers plummeted. Many of those who rushed to the goldfields turned to other occupations either to support the diggers or in areas that benefited from the growing wealth of the colony. Joseph Reed, for instance, began to design the grand civic buildings in Melbourne that gold made possible. Peter Lalor and Raffaello Carboni became involved in goldfields politics in the period leading up to Eureka Stockade. Francis Hare, cousin of the governor of Singapore who arrived in Melbourne in mid-1852 found that more reliable money was to be made in guarding the gold as it travelled to Melbourne than digging for it. Some emigrants were successful; most were not.

What image do we have of diggers? Though they only made up a significant proportion of Australia’s workforce only in the 1850s, nostalgia for the freedom of the digger developed rapidly once the early rushes was over. This was, in part, fostered by the emerging labour movement as a time when working men were, at least temporarily, free from the master-servant relationship.[3] By the late nineteenth century, the 1850s increasingly looked like a lost heroic or ‘golden’ age during which, according to W. E. Adcock ‘our pioneers were founding a nation.’[4] The Australian writer Henry Lawson played a major part in communicating this nostalgia and his pessimism about the Australian present was developed in relation to a weakening collective memory of the gold decade. [5] His writing on the gold rush was largely a memory of greatness as well as a radical critique of the loss of independence since suffered by working men and a contrast between the confining anonymity of the city and the freedom of the diggings and the ‘mateship’ of the diggers. Gold-seeking was a liberating experience leading to independence and freedom that anti-democratic imperial officials sought to smother. This optimistic view of experience is problematic for two reasons. First, it seems to read back some of the nationalist concerns of the 1890s into the 1850s. Secondly, it gives a false impression of the way gold was actually understood in the 1850s when reactions across the political spectrum were either pessimistic or deeply ambivalent in the aftermath of the chaos of self-interest that gold seemed to have released. Conservative memory was not of freedom but disorder and the gold rushes were remembered as a vast fantasy that lured and trapped thousands of immigrants in an alien and hostile land.

This pessimistic view of gold-rush society was gradually erased from radical memory and the dominant nationalist historiography[6]. Disruption was temporary and soon forgotten. What was remembered was the beneficial increase in population, urban growth and civic pride, self-government and effective nation building. Gold became the keystone on which Australia’s new society was based and mainstream history has in general celebrated the achievements of the gold years. The self-seeking acquisitiveness of the diggers was refashioned as initiative and enterprise and their creative energy was favourably compared to the attitudes of convicts and assisted immigrants. It was on them that the nation was built. This view was strongly expressed in the 1930s with almost eugenic pride when Australians were concerned about the quality of their racial stock

...the diggers as their Pilgrim Fathers, the first authentic Australians, the founders of their self-respecting, independent, strenuous national life, the fathers of their soldiers....[the legend] does not distort the facts. [7]

White Australia was the central defence of national identity and this, in Hancock’s view, justified the restriction of non-Europeans.

What [Australians] fear is not physical conquest by another race, but rather the internal decomposition and degradation of their own civilisation. They have gloried in their inheritance of free institutions, in their right to govern themselves and freely make their own destiny.[8]

This view was reiterated in the Australian volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire, originally published in 1933[9] and W.P. Morrell concluded

...tens of thousands of men took part, and though many faltered or fell by the wayside, the best of them evolved a new type of self-reliant character, a new free, careless social life. [10]

The only qualification to this general approval of the nation-building capacity of gold was that the large number of immigrants swamped the Australian-born population and this delayed the rise of nationalism to the end of the century.[11] Goodman argued that

The realisation that Australian nationalism played little part in the consciousness of the 1850s had not prevented a popular reading of the gold rushes into the story of national development. [12]

Despite this nationalist historiography using the past to justify the present, there is a modicum of truth in its view of the independent diggers. What it neglects is that their independence was interspersed with intervals of wage-labour as they exhausted their resources before striking gold. It also romanticises the nature of the egalitarianism present on the goldfields. There was certainly a sense of social equality that led to the jettisoning of social pretensions but it was a consequence of the particular conditions that existed as all scrambled for their own gold. Many contemporary observers commented that the goldfields were not place for people unwilling to put their physical energy into manual labour. Egalitarianism was a consequence of the nature of the labour market during the 1850 when workers could demand their own rates of pay. Gold refashioned Australia but the legacy of the diggers is greater in legend than in reality.

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[1] Ibid, Robson, Lloyd, A History of Tasmania, Vol. 1, pp. 465-467.

[2] Serle, pp. 126-127.

[3] This is examined in ibid, Goodman, D., Gold seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, pp. 5-10, 20-24.

[4] Adcock, W. E., The Gold Rushes of the Fifties, (Cole), 1912, p. 11.

[5] Matthews, Brian, ‘Lawson, Henry (1867-1922)’, ADB, Vol. 10, pages 18-22 and Clark, M., In Search of Henry Lawson, (Melbourne University Press), 1978 provide valuable, if idiosyncratic, biographical material.

[6] Ibid, Goodman, D., Gold seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, pp. 10-11 and ibid, Lyons, Martyn, and Russell, Penny, (eds.), Australia’s History: themes & debates, pp. 24, 36, 54-55, 103-105 and 121.

[7] This can be seen especially in ibid, Handcock W. K., Australia, pp. 35-36.

[8] Ibid, Hancock, W. K., Australia, p. 80.

[9] Portus, G.V., ‘The Gold Discoveries’, in Scott, Ernest, (ed.), Cambridge History of the British Empire: volume VII (part I) Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 1933, reprinted with a new introduction, 1988, pp. 245-271.

[10] Morrell, W. P., The Gold Rushes, (A & C Black), 1941, p. 415.

[11] Ward, Russel, Australia since the coming of man, (Melbourne University Press), 1987, p. 117.

[12] Ibid, Goodman, D., Gold seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s, p. 11.

4000,000 and counting

PASSING 400,000

I started my Looking at History blog on Blogger on 30 July 2007 and it’s taken until 7 June 2013 to reach 400,000 ‘hits’: an average of around 66,000 per year.  I’ve published 823 blogs in that time, around 137 blogs a year.  Inevitably, take-up of the blogs was initially slow but once they began to appear in Google Search the number of hits began to rise significantly and in the past two years the blog has consistently been getting 20,000 hits a month.

Analysis of which blogs have been particularly popular shows that ‘Disease in the Victorian city: extended version’ has over 9,000 hits followed closely by ‘Suffrage since 1903: Arguments against  women’s suffrage’ with 8,300.  Generally the blogs on nineteenth century British society, women’s history and Canada have performed the best.  Given the nature of the blogs, their audiences is not surprising with the United Kingdom (150,000) and United States (121,000) being the most important.  There has also been a good take-up from Canada (23,000), Australia (13,000), France (11,000) and Germany (10,000) with a gap before Russia (2,000) and India (2,000). 

The bulk of the hits are accessed through Internet Explorer (41%), Firefox (21%) and Chrome(20%) using Windows (77%), Macintosh(10%) and Linux (5%).  Access using tablets or phones is currently more limited with iPad (2%), iPhone(2%) and Android (1%) but this represents a significant increase since the end of 2011 when these did not register at all. 

Comments on the site have been overwhelmingly positive and in several cases helpful in enabling me to correct errors and I have been both gratified by this as well as pleased that readers take the time to make comments (whether critical or not). 

‘A Peaceable Kingdom’: Essays on Nineteenth Century Canada

JUST PUBLISHED

The essays in this book seek to unpick the notion of the 'peaceable kingdom' in the light of the violence that permeated Canada between 1837 and 1885 and argue that, far from having little impact on the development of Canada from a colonial state to a continental dominion, violence played a seminal influence in stimulating constitutional development. The British government's response to the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 and 1838 was to establish a union of the two provinces in 1841 and rule by a 'responsible' government from 1848 that proved sufficiently resilient in facing down the Tory reactions to the Rebellion Losses legislation. The Fenian invasions in 1866 impacted on the Confederation debates, though to what extent is unclear, but the fear of further Fenian incursions reinforced the argument that domestic security could only be achieved through a closer constitutional federalism. The resistance in Manitoba in 1869 and 1870 reflected the hesitant nature of the new Confederation especially its failure to take account of minority interests while the North-West rebellion in 1885 demonstrated its unwillingness to negotiate for a second time and the growing confidence of its political and military position.

 

Contents

Preface

Prologue: A Peaceable Kingdom

1. Populism and Protest

2. Niagara, 1837

3. The Militia and French Canada 1760-1867

4. Defending the Crown

5. Provoking violence: Montreal and Longueuil

6. Patriotes and independence

7. Was Papineau to blame?

8. The Diary of the Rev. Henry Scadding, 1837-1838

9. Murder, Vengeance and Rebellion

10. Russia and rebellion in North America

11. Interpreting the rebellions

12. Canada’s ‘Wars of Religion’

13. The Offending Arch

14. Rebellion, remembering and trauma

Index

Cutting pensions!!!

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls has just announced that he would cut the winter fuel payments for the UK’s richer old people if Labour wins the next general election.  It would affect about 600,000 people over 61 who pay higher and top income tax rates—saving about £100m. He also suggested curbs on new free schools and police commissioners to save money.  The response on the BBC website has been predictable with nearly three hundred comments within two hours of his speech and most of them negative: we paid in for our pensions and now are getting pay-back, some higher tax payers are not wealthy pensioners, typical labour, the politics of envy…and so on.  Now it’s not like me to jump to Ed Balls’ defence…he generally brings out the worst in me largely because he comes across as arrogant and self-obsessed (yes and I’m positive he’s a very nice man really, kind to animals!!), but he has made what is a good point but has not taken it further enough.  Why should pensioners be exempt from the austerity programme that is being foisted on the rest of society? 

Now I’m a pensioner.  I took early retirement from teaching to care for my wife disabled by a stroke (for which we have a disability living and carer’s allowance) and will receive my state pension later this year.  We had already paid off the mortgage on our house and had the sense to save for our retirement so we’re not badly off…not wealthy by any means but with enough to get by with some ease (even without the benefits).  We had planned for our retirement, though circumstances meant that there had to be some rapid changes in those plans, and had the incomes to do so.  Many pensioners could not do this even if they wanted to.  You might think that I would find Ed Balls’ proposal completely unacceptable but I don’t and think he’s missed a trick in not carrying out a thorough review of pensions and allowances, something that you can afford to do when in opposition rather that come up with a headline-grabbing and inevitably unpopular idea.  The problem is that pensioners have a firm grasp over the political system…they are the ones who are most likely to vote in elections and the power of the ‘grey vote’ is growing.  Politicians who challenge pensioners are in for a good mauling: it’s unfair to target the old, it’s an attack on the elderly poor and suggests that society is becoming increasingly uncaring.  Well, yes but that doesn’t mean that pensioners should be treated as politically untouchable and until politicians are prepared to address the issue, despite its political risks, that perception will remain.

I have examined how I think matters could be reformed in a previous blog http://richardjohnbr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/pensioners-benefits-and-morality.html  and I want to reiterate the points I made there.  The problem for any government is balancing the needs of pensioners with the needs of society as a whole.  If rises in benefits for those below 60 are fixed at 1%, then why should this not apply to those of pensionable age?  This would be a perfectly acceptable proposition if the UK defined the ‘minimum wage’ as a ‘living wage’ but it doesn’t.  So, unless as a society we are prepared to accept more pensioners living in abject poverty, it’s a non-starter unless politicians are prepared to accept the political fall-out of doing it and most are not.  What about reintroducing national insurance contributions for pensioners to cover health costs, a more reasonable proposition as they are most likely to need medical services but again is it politically acceptable and anyway pensioners will continue to cover the costs of their social care needs, arguably a fiscal contribution to the state?  Which brings us to the other allowances pensioners get: free prescriptions over 60, free bus passes, free television licences to those over 75 and the winter fuel allowance.  Of these arguably the more important and costly are free prescriptions and the winter fuel allowance.  So link free prescriptions to the common pensionable age, 65 not 60 and increasing in line with the increasing pension age…there is no longer any logic with leaving it at 60.  As far as winter fuel allowance is concerned, it should be taxed something that now has increased logic given the increase in personal allowances and limited to those whose joint or single incomes is below say £40,000 (though there may be a case for a figure as low as £30,000).  Those on the lowest income would receive the full amount with those above that level paying tax on it and those who clearly don’t need it would no longer be eligible.  In addition, when people receive the allowance should operate in the same way as free prescriptions.  The importance of free bus passes (for which you have to apply—you do not receive them automatically) depends, to some extent, on where people live: there is greater logic in rural areas where facilities may be at some distance than urban areas where they are generally closer. So, again link the allowance to the common pensionable age and introduce a fee of say £50 for urban dwellers and £20 (or none at all) for rural dwellers or abolish it altogether and accept the political flak.    Finally, free television licences should be restricted to those over 80.

The current situation for pensioners is becoming increasingly unaffordable and as the number of those on pensions increases, this will become even more the case.  There would be a case for reforming the state pensions system further even if we were not in the depths of recession.  Pensioners should not be immune from tough and unpopular political decisions.

Gold in Victoria: Chinese immigration

During the 1840s and 1850s, the discovery of major gold reserves in northern California, Victoria and later British Columbia and New Zealand transformed the European settler societies of the Pacific Rim. [1] Many of the international gold seekers of the 1850s and 1860s followed the gold rushes to Victoria and Chinese gold seekers, mostly from southern China, were key members of all these rushes. The southern provinces were overpopulated and subject to invasions, rebellions, severe floods and famines between 1830 and 1887. The greatest numbers of Chinese came to the colony of Victoria from 1852 onwards. The first Chinese seeking gold arrived in 1853 and in 1854 there were 2,000 Chinese in Victoria. By June 1855 this had grown to 15,000. In 1858 the Chinese population of Australia reached a peak of 40,000, representing roughly 20 per cent of the adult male population and 3.3 per cent of the total population. The Chinese largely settled in the key goldfields centres of Bendigo, Ballarat and Castlemaine and brought with them their distinctive way of life and specialised mining techniques.

In 1855, Victoria levied a £10 poll-tax on all Chinese entering by sea leading to many of them landed at Guischen Bay near Robe in South Australia. [2] The routes to the mining areas of Ballarat, Bendigo and Mount Alexander were most arduous part of this journey and Chinese gold seekers were the largest group of non-English speaking diggers on the Australian goldfields. [3] The full extent of the Chinese role in the emergent central Victorian goldfields society has only recently been recognised. Although best known for their role in the gold mining industry, they were involved in other activities on the goldfields working as herbalists, merchants, and restaurateurs. As a cultural group they stood out because most retained their identity and customs and the ‘Chinese question’ began to vie with the other major issue of the day, the ‘unlocking’ of Crown Lands. European miners were angered by their increasing presence in the fields and in 1854, an irritated group of European and American miners met in Bendigo and declared that a ‘general and unanimous rising should take place for the purpose of driving the Chinese off the goldfield’. Local constables acted quickly to prevent the uprising and warned the miners against any further vigilante action. The event was only the beginning of greater anti-Chinese tensions. In some instances, full-scale rioting resulted as angry Europeans attacked Chinese diggers for example at Buckland River in Victoria in 1857 and Lambing Flat in NSW in 1860-1861. [4]

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[1] ‘The Chinese’, in ibid, Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people, pp. 197-204; Curthoys, Ann, ‘Men of All Nations, except Chinamen’: Europeans and Chinese on the Goldfields of New South Wales’, in McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander, and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold: forgotten histories and lost objects of Australia, (Cambridge University Press), 2001, pp. 100-123, and Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, (Cambridge University Press), 2008, pp. 15-47.

[2] The South Australia Parliament soon passed similar legislation to Victoria and over 10,000 Chinese were landed in southern NSW, who mostly made their way to Victoria.

[3] The experience of Chinese gold-seekers in Victoria during the 1850s can be explored in Daley, C., ‘The Chinese in Victoria’, Victorian Historical Magazine, Vol. 14, (1931-1932), pp. 23-35; Serle, pp. 320-335; Price. C., The Great White Walls are Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia 1836-1888, Canberra, 1974; Markus, A., Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California 1850-1901, Sydney, 1979; Gittins, J., The Diggers from China: The Story of the Chinese on the Goldfields, (Melbourne University Press), 1981; Curthoys, Ann, ‘’Men of All Nations, except Chinamen’: Europeans and Chinese on the Goldfields of New South Wales’, in McCalman, Iain, Cook, Alexander and Reeves, Andrew, (eds.), Gold, pp. 100-123, passim, and Cronin, K., Colonial Casualties: Chinese in Early Australia, (Melbourne University Press), 1982. McLaren, Ian F., The Chinese in Victoria: Official Reports and Documents, (Red Rooster Press), 1985, is an invaluable study including critical sources from the 1850s.

[4] Reeves, Keir and Wong Hoy, Kevin, ‘Beyond a European protest: reappraising Chinese agency on the Victorian goldfields’, in Mayne, Alan, (ed.), Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend, (Network), 2006, pp. 153-174, is a crucial revisionist contribution to discussions of the Chinese in Victoria in the 1850s. There is a growing literature on Lambing Flat: Carrington, D. L., ‘Riots at Lambing Flat 1860-1861’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 46, (1960), pp. 223-243; Walker, R. B., ‘Another Look at the Lambing Flat Riots 1860-1861’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 56, (1970), pp. 193-205; Selth, P., ‘The Burrangong (Lambing Flat) Riots 1860-61: A Closer Look’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 60, (1974), pp. 48-69; Connolly, C. N., ‘Miners’ Rights: Explaining the ‘Lambing Flat’ Riots of 1860-61’, in Curthoys, A., and Markus, A., (eds.), Who are Our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working class, (Neutral Bay), 1978, pp. 35-47, and Messner, Andrew, ‘Popular Constitutionalism and Chinese Protest on the Victoria Goldfields’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 2, (2), (2000), pp. 63-78.

Terrorism in London

Under no circumstances can anyone justify the appalling act of wanton brutality that unfolded in Woolwich this week.  The murder of an off-duty soldier and the actions of his killers after his murder and before they unsuccessfully sought death from the guns of the Metropolitan Police should bring home to the public the sacrifice of the British army in its long campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.  That a soldier who had served bravely in different theatres was then chosen, presumably at random, by his killers and died on the streets of London makes his death even more horrific.  Soldiers face the risk of death or injury on the battlefield; they do not expect it at home as his wife eloquently expressed it in yesterday’s family news conference.

What has concerned me in the last two days has been the wall-to-wall news coverage of what happened and why.  In a world of 24/7 news this is hardly surprising but has it all been necessary and who has it been for?  The difficulty for the media is that much of what is know or not know is inevitably speculative.  For instance, according to a friend, one of the killers was been approached by MI5 for information or even, according to today’s Times to act as a covert agent.  Or what happened was or was not part of a broader conspiracy.  What did MI5 know and why did it not act?  These are legitimate issues for investigation, and the inquiry set up by the Prime Minister will undoubtedly do so, but are they are questions that have almost endlessly and fairly fruitlessly been speculated about in the media?  The problem with speculation on terrorism is that it gives succour to all shades of extremists and, perhaps more importantly given their actions the oxygen of publicity.   We do not know why the killers decided to act as they did, other than their distorted view of Islam, and we will probably never know.  While the public wants to know about events such as this, it is important to distinguish between the facts of the case, people’s opinions and speculation and this distinction is not always clear in the media coverage.  I sometimes wonder whether it would be better if there was less speculation in the media on terrorist questions, a vain hope perhaps in an age of social networking and extensive media coverage, since it can lead to neglect of what is a human tragedy.

Gold in Victoria: British immigrants

Migration was common among many Cornish people and, in the nineteenth century, an estimated third of Cornwall’s population emigrated. [1] They were often pulled to countries such as Australia by news of mining work or pushed from their homes by a variety of factors including poverty, famine (the potato crop failed in Cornwall in 1845 and 1846), depression and economic change. [2] Between 1846 and 1850, 6,700 assisted Cornish immigrants went to Australia.[3] The Cornish were a significant ethnic group on the Victorian goldfields because of their number and, like Welsh immigrants, the mining knowledge they brought with them. Some of the distinctively Cornish mining practices established in the Victorian goldfields developed from the equipment and techniques favoured by Cornish miners: single-pointed picks; bucket pumps; the ‘hammer and tap’ method of drilling holes in the rock face; the ‘Cousin Jack’ wheelbarrow; and Cornish-designed whims are examples.

The first Cornish arrivals on the Victorian goldfields travelled overland from South Australia and its copper mines where they had originally emigrated in the late 1830s and 1840s. Letters home played a powerful role in spreading news of opportunities for Cornish miners in Australia. In 1849, a mining man wrote home to Cornwall from Australia

If...you may know of any Government [assisted] Cornish miner about to seek his fortune in Australia, be pleased to tell him to apply his knowledge of the mode of extracting his ore from his own gravel to the drift and debris on the flanks of the great north and south chain of Australia...for great would be my pleasure to learn that through the application of Cornish skill such a region should be converted into a British El Dorado.

The South Australian town of Burra Burra was a significant Cornish settlement and most of its 5,000 residents in 1850 were Cornish. [4] From 1851, the Burra’s copper mines lost many of their workers to Victoria’s gold rushes.  A deputation of Cornish miners from Burra Burra visited the goldfields to ascertain their worth, and when they returned to the Burra to collect their families and belongings, their enthusiastic descriptions of Victoria precipitated a mass exodus from the South Australian mines.[5]

The next wave of Cornish miners did not begin to arrive from Cornwall until the end of 1852. [6] The Ballarat area received many ‘Cousin Jacks’ who congregated in particular areas: Mt Pleasant was an important Cornish settlement and Sebastopol had its own ‘Cornish Town’. [7] Cornish miners and their families travelled together, lived in close proximity and worked co-operatively in groups, a distinctively Cornish mining practice. Jan Croggon showed that the mining skills and knowledge that the Cornish immigrants in Ballarat brought with them prepared some of them to become managers of mines in Victoria as the alluvial rushes ended in the mid-1850s. [8]

Irish immigration increased with the discovery of gold. [9] Initially their lack of mining skills was not a problem since alluvial mining required little expertise. [10] However, as surface deposits of gold were exhausted and alluvial mining gave way to deep, shaft mining, mining skills became essential. Lacking these, the numerous Irish on the goldfields became a ready source of unskilled labour for large-scale mining. For the vast majority a short, fruitless stint as a miner soon gave way to more profitable occupations as grocers, publicans, cartage operators, brewers, domestic workers, policemen and general labourers and the wealth of available work meant that many of the Irish enjoyed a standard of living far exceeding their experience in Ireland. They had a large impact on the goldfields communities that sprang up if only because of their numbers and quickly earned a reputation for their colour and flamboyance on the diggings. Nonetheless, political discontent was never far from the surface and of the diggers that took part in the 1854 Eureka rebellion, one witness at the Gold Fields Commission claimed that, ‘quite half of them were Irishmen’.

Many Scots and Welsh emigrated to Australia and played an important part in the development of Victoria. [11] For example, William Campbell arrived in Australia in 1838 and discovered the ‘first’ gold at Clunes in early 1850; Scottish diggers played leading roles in the Red Ribbon Movement; James Scobie’s murder was a catalyst for the events at the Eureka Stockade in December 1854, and a Scot, John Robertson, was killed at Eureka. Australia became a particularly popular destination after the discovery of gold with approximately 100,000 Scots arriving between 1851 and 1860. [12] Many headed for the Victorian diggings and contributed to the new towns and communities emerging in the interior of the colony. As gold fever took hold in Victoria, many of the squatters who were faced with threats to their livelihoods with the exodus of workers to the diggings, were immigrant Scottish landholders and farmers who had been ‘pushed’ to migrate earlier in the century by rising rents and the high cost of new agricultural techniques. The Scottish immigrants in Victoria helped to build its infrastructure while ensuring that elements of Scottish culture endured in the new colony. Presbyterian churches and schools, funded by Scottish squatters and highland games and pipe bands sprang up in towns such as Ballarat.[13] Detailed reports of gold arriving in Britain, fresh from the Victorian goldfields and excited letters home from expatriate diggers were published in the local press playing a major role in encouraging migration to Australia although a high proportion of Scottish arrivals during the 1850s were assisted migrants: 51% received assistance compared with 25% from England.

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[1] Schwartz, Sharron, ‘Cornish migration studies: an epistemological and paradigmatic critique’, Cornish Studies, Vol. 10, (2002), pp. 136-165, provides an excellent framework.

[2] Payton, Philip, ‘Cornish’, in ibid, Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people, pp. 237-245, and his broader The Cornish Overseas, (Alexander Associates), 1999, pp. 161-200, 228-255, provide a good introduction to the Cornish diaspora while his The Cornish Miner in Australia, (Dyllansow Truran), 1984, is the most detailed study. Croggan, Jan, ‘Methodists and Miners: the Cornish in Ballarat 1851-1901’, in Cardell, Kerry, and Cummings, Cliff, (eds.), A world turned upside down: cultural change on Australia’s goldfields 1851-2001, (Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University), 2001, pp. 61-77.

[3] Lay, Patricia, ‘Not what they seemed? Cornish assisted immigrants in New South Wales 1837-1877’, Cornish Studies, Vol. 3, (1995), pp. 33-59.

[4] Auhl, Ian, and Marfleet, Denis, Australia’s Earliest Mining Era: South Australia 1841-1851, (Rigby), 1975 and Auhl, Ian, The Story of the ‘Monster Mine’: The Burra Burra Mine and Its Townships 1845-1877, (Investigator Press), 1986.

[5] South Australian Register, 19 July 1851

[6] Payton, Philip, ‘Cousin Jacks and Ancient Britons’: Cornish Immigrants and Ethnic Identity’, Journal of Australian Studies: Scatterlings of Empire, Vol. 68, (2001), pp. 54-68.

[7] Rich gold-bearing quartz lodes were found in the bedrock under the buried streams of the Ballarat plateau in 1856 and a new settlement, mainly of Cornish and Welsh miners, developed on the Yarrowee Creek. Sebastopol grew rapidly in the late 1850s and its population rose from 2,149 in 1857 to 6,496 in 1871.

[8] Jan Croggan ‘Methodists and Miners: The Cornish in Ballarat 1851-1901’, in Cardell, Kerry, and Cummings, Cliff, (eds.), A world turned upside down, pp. 61-77, passim.

[9] Ibid, O’Farrell, Patrick, The Irish in Australia, ibid, McConville, Chris, Croppies, Celts & Catholic: The Irish in Australia and ibid, Fitzpatrick, David, Oceans of consolation: personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia. See above, pp. 222-264.

[10] Coughlan, Neil, ‘The Coming of the Irish to Victoria’, Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 12, (1965), pp. 64-86, and ‘The Irish, in Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people, pp. 443-478, passim.

[11] Jones, Bill, ‘Welsh Identities in Colonial Ballarat’, Journal of Australian Studies: Scatterlings of Empire, Vol. 68, (2001), pp. 34-53, and ‘Welsh identity on the Victorian goldfields in the nineteenth century’, in Cardell, Kerry, and Cummings, Cliff, (eds.), A world turned upside down, pp. 25-50.

[12] Macmillan, D. S., Scotland and Australia, 1788-1850: emigration, commerce and investment, (Oxford University Press), 1967, ‘The Scots’, in ibid, Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people, pp. 644-665, and Prentice, Malcolm D., The Scots in Australia: A Study of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland 1788-1900, (University of Sydney Press), 1983, provide the context.

[13] Cardell, Kerry and Cummings, Cliff, ‘Squatters, Diggers and National Culture: Scots and the Central Victorian Goldfields 1851-61’, in Cardell, Kerry, and Cummings, Cliff, (eds.), A world turned upside down, pp. 78-94, passim, and Cummings, Cliff, ‘Scottish National Identity in an Australian Colony’, Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 72, (1993), pp. 22-38.

‘Swivel-eyed loons’ and Europe

Lord Howe, Chancellor and  Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, said today in an article in the Daily Telegraph Mr Cameron had ‘opened a Pandora's box politically and seems to be losing control of his party in the process’, over his plan to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the European Union.  Whether a leading Conservative actually referred to grassroots Conservative activists as ‘swivel-eyed loons’, it reminiscent of John Major’s apocryphal statement about ‘bastards’ in his cabinet.   David Cameron, who in 2011 said there was no case for a referendum, has shifted his position this year first with the promise of a referendum in 2017 after a renegotiation of Britain’s position and then, this week, issuing a draft referendum bill as well as having 116 members of his party voting against the Queen’s Speech in the ‘regret’ debate.  The problem the Prime Minister faces is that if you make concessions to the disparate group of euro-sceptics, they will just come back, like Oliver, and ask for more. 

There is, and arguably has been since the 1990s , a three-way split in Conservative ranks over Europe.  There are those who want to remain within the EU but who now support the Prime Minister’s stance on renegotiation.  There are euro-sceptics who want to leave Europe but are also supportive of the Prime Minister’s position hoping that a referendum in 2017 will go in their favour.  Finally, there are those Conservatives who want to leave Europe and want to leave it now after winning an immediate referendum that recent polls suggest they might do.  This division is also evident among the Tory old guard such as Lords Howe, Lawson and Tebbit who were already active in politics in the 1970s when the last referendum took place.    This raises what I think is an important issue, that of the referendum being a generational issue.  The youngest of us who campaigned in the referendum campaign in 1975 (ironically given the present situation it was supported by the majority of the Conservative Party with the Labour Party riven by division on the issue) and who voted are in our mid-50s.  The result was unequivocal with two-thirds of those who voted in favour, some 17.38 million people (67.2 per cent)  with only 8.47 million voting against (32.8 per cent) .  Support for EEC membership was positively correlated with support for the Conservative Party and with average income. In contrast, poorer areas that supported Labour gave less support to the question.  Campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote, I remember the enthusiasm of the many young activists from all three major political parties extolling the virtues of a ‘Common Market’ while opponents such as Tony Benn were claiming that ‘half a million jobs would be lost in Britain as a direct result of our entry into the Common Market’.  I am reminded of Nick Clegg’s outrageous statement that three million jobs depend on the EU though he provided no justification for his claims…political assertion to engender fear much as Benn did in 1975.   What was not recognised in 1975 was that the Common Market represented one element of a much broader European project for great political union as well as creating a massive free trading market.  And therein lies the problem.  In 1975 people did not vote for political union, a federal state of Europe.  It never came up on the doorstep. 

If there is a referendum in 2017, it could be those who voted in 1975 who determine its outcome.  Not only are those over sixty more likely to vote but there is evidence to suggest that they could vote against continued membership.  In part this reflects the conservatism that comes to many with age but it also reflects what many see as a distortion of the mandate that they gave in 1975.  Talking to my contemporaries who campaigned for entry in 1975, I’m struck by how many of them would now vote for exit unless David Cameron can return the UK to the Common market position of the 1970s, reduce immigration from the EU as many believe that uncontrolled immigration is not longer acceptable (for them not a racist argument but a pragmatic way of maintaining Britain’s long reputation as a safe haven for those fleeing persecution in their own countries) and give Britain back control over key areas of people’s lives though they disagree about which areas.  Most don’t want to leave the EU as such but want Britain’s relationship with it restored to one of economic not political union.  It is therefore essential that the debate about Europe enthuses those below 50 and especially those between 20 and 40 as they will be the people who have to live with the consequences of a referendum whatever the result and this will prove difficult.  If you’re say 25, you are concerned with your job (if you have one), your wages, your ability to purchase a flat or house and, if you’re a graduate with paying off your student debt, you are not concerned with a possible referendum in four years.  Yet without their support, it is highly probable that a referendum will be lost as the UK will leave the EU.  

There has long been pressure for a referendum that has been denied by politicians but this is an increasingly unsustainable political option for them.  Politicians can’t say that they are taking what the public says into account and then ignore their calls for a vote.  There is a generational opportunity to re-commit Britain to at least the economic principles of the EU but this will only occur if younger voters are engaged with the issue.  At present many, I would suggest most, are not and unless they are we are on the road leading to exit.

Regrets…I’ve had a few!

Last night an unholy alliance of Conservative MPs with very different views about the EU were defeated in a free vote by 277 to 131 on a proposed amendment to the Queen’s Speech that ‘expressed regret’ that a bill paving the way for a referendum in 2017 was not being brought forward this year.  It was backed by 116 Tory MPs representing half of the party’s backbenchers.  It is no coincidence that many who supported the amendment have ‘safe’ seats while those in marginals were less enthusiastic.  Attention now turns to the 20 MPs who will be drawn in the ballot for private member’s bills; the hope is that one of the 4 MPs selected who voted for the amendment will adopt the draft referendum bill.  Even if it became law, and private member’s bills occasionally do, you cannot pass legislation binding a future parliament.  So if the Conservatives won in 2015, given the Prime Minister’s commitment to a referendum in 2017, it is unnecessary and if Labour won they currently have no commitment to a referendum anyway so it would be set aside.  Either way, it looks like a fruitless exercise.

Is David Cameron going down the same road that John Major trod in the 1990s?  Despite the rhetoric from supporters of yesterday’s amendment saying that it shows the strength rather than weakness of the Prime Minister, that is not how it looks outside the Westminster village.  Whatever your view about the EU and the need for a referendum, the Conservatives do appear to be banging on about it when they should be focussing on the economic recovery…and it that respect the Labour Party are right, a view I’m certain the Prime Minister would agree with.  The vote yesterday does give the impression of a party divided over Europe…so nothing new there for those of us who remember the debates after Maastricht…but what many Conservatives appear to have forgotten is that they lost disastrously in 1997 and the impression of division played a significant role in that defeat.  When governing in a coalition, political parties are not able to do everything they would like and, given Lib-Dem opposition to a referendum in this parliament, David Cameron’s commitment to renegotiation and a referendum if (and it’s a big ‘if’) he wins the next election is probably about as far as he can go. 

There is no doubt that having a referendum on Europe would be popular with the public and there is a question of ‘trust’ in politicians over the issue.  In the last twenty years, the three main political parties have all given a commitment to hold one and then reneged on the deal most noticeably on the Lisbon treaty.  The critical question is whether public attitudes on this issue will be sufficient to determine the outcome of the 2015 election.  The key issues for voters in past elections have been the economy, the NHS and law and order with membership of the EU not a key determinant of voting intentions.  None of the elections since 1975 have been what may be called ‘euro elections’ so will 2015 be any different?  Well possibly.  The strong showing of UKIP in the local government elections and the euro elections in 2014 in which it is likely they will also do well has pushed the referendum up the political agenda.  The Conservatives will include it in their election manifesto and this may persuade many UKIP voters to vote Conservative since UKIP will not win the election while the Conservatives might.  This is a problem for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats as a failure to include a commitment to hold a referendum could well lose them votes.  Both could argue that there is already legislation that triggers a referendum if there is a ‘significant’ transfer of powers to Brussels (who decides when this has taken place?) and that such a commitment is therefore unnecessary but this is unlikely to assuage those for whom a referendum has become a matter of faith. 

With a more promising report on the state of the British economy yesterday from the Bank of England and the continued recession in the euro-zone, it appears that the question of the referendum is not going away.  At no time since the 1970s is it more likely to take place.