The right to dig, by Vanora Bennett

After 13 years in increasing despair at never getting to the top of my London borough’s apparently endless allotment waiting list, I applied to another London borough a few weeks ago and immediately – starting last Saturday – got a half-size allotment of five poles.

Half-size! That’s deceptive. My new smallholding is huge, at least the size of my house, surrounded by other plots of either twice or four times the size, and charming brambles and wildflowers and fruit trees in blossom in between (it is not quite in the perfect condition of the plot in the picture, by the way; I just borrowed that picture). Call me over-enthusiastic, but at the end of my first weekend, even if I ache a lot, my plot still seems an absolute paradise of fruit and veg and flowers and bees and fascinating sheds and delightfully Chekhovian characters and tea and bric-a-brac and happiness.

Which has all, naturally enough, made me wonder how it came about historically that a bunch of middle-class London characters such as my fellow allotment-farmers and me have been so blessed. Who gave the citizens of England the right to five or ten poles of land somewhere near where they live, for not much in the way of rent, and when, and why? Is it all just to give us a chance to out-Fearnley-Whittingstall Hugh and live poshly off the finest of fresh food without paying the supermarkets for it? Is it part of living in a democracy? Or is it something to do with being afraid of hunger - digging for victory in the Second World War - or an older right still, corresponding to older hungers? Was it once a way for the poor to feed themselves and ward off starvation, like the Russian dacha-and-allotment system that (sometimes) kept the Slavic version of the grim reaper away at tight times in the 20th century?

The answer, it seems, is that there are at least two allotment histories merged into one outcome, and all these sets of suppositions are true.

On the one hand, there was a long-running and serious story about alleviating poverty. The enclosures movement that saw peasants squeezed off common land as it was hedged and allocated to a single owner, making it unavailable for traditional shared farming, caused unrest through history and in particular sent crowds of the hungry poor into towns to kick-start the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. But the fightback on behalf of the dispossessed also eventually made it mandatory to make growing land available to the poor and displaced.

Secondly, in a fairly separate strand of history, the middle classes prospering in towns as a result of the Industrial Revolution then clamoured for “city allotments” to do a bit of digging, but also to have a garden to relax and escape the confines of the city – partly because of a 19th-century obsession with gardening and partly as a show of wealth. These “posh” plots became known as “pleasure gardens” and often had brick summerhouses or follies. Families might even stay the night in their city allotments, which were surrounded by hedges or fences – but the plots didn’t survive the spread of Victorian villas with their own gardens later in the 19th century. Most were turned into “normal” allotments, or built on.

So it’s the other, more brutal story – the one of brutal eviction of peasants from the land – that really brought us the Paradise Regained of modern allotments, I’d say.

A 19th-century question: how little land does a peasant need to stop revolting?

The enclosure movement in the late 18th century helped shape modern Britain. Enormous swathes of the English countryside were enclosed and the new fences planted altered the look of the landscape for good. By the mid-19th century, most common land in Britain had been enclosed and a whole class of rural people dispossessed. Throughout this period, according to The Allotment Gardener, movements came into being to try and fight for some ground for the common labourer who was quietly losing his all. As early as 1649 protesters calling themselves the “Diggers” demanded the “right to dig”. A group of hungry men led by Gerrard Winstanley, they organised a mass trespass on waste land in St George’s Hill, Surrey, sowing it with vegetables and wheat. 

Winstanley was a cloth merchant whose business had been ruined in the Civil War; he had, in January of 1649, published The New Law of Righteousness in which he envisioned a just and harmonious society guided by spiritual regeneration through Christ. He explained his belief that the miseries of the world result from men turning from God, whom he equates with Reason, to satisfy greed and the pursuit of power. Poverty and inequality stem from the selfish buying and selling of land and property, and could be eradicated by communal living and an acceptance of the risen Christ, he wrote: "Was the Earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?"

The New Law of Righteousness was published as the trial of King Charles I was drawing to a close. Four days later, the King was beheaded at Whitehall. England was declared a "Commonwealth and free state". In this revolutionary atmosphere, it seemed possible that all tyranny and oppression could finally be brought down and Winstanley's utopian vision become reality.

 

In April, to prove their point, Winstanley's Diggers started planting St George's Hill. 

Their idealism, it turned out, was misplaced. The new authorities didn't like it. A Kingston court indicted and fined them in July. 

By August, harassed off the land, they moved on. 

But the idea of a “right to dig” had taken hold.

The social unrest caused by the process of enclosure led to a number of private initiatives to provide the common man with land to grow and provide for himself. This was mainly driven by private land owners who commonly believed that not only would a small patch of land be worth more to their workers than an increase in salary, but that it also kept them away from the ale house, making them better workers. These sponsors didn’t want workers turning up too tired to work at their paid employment, however, so they wanted the size of the allotments provided to be restricted.

The age of legislating for social improvement was at hand. The General Enclosure Act in 1845 offered “field gardens” of up to a quarter-acre for the poor, but the Act was poorly framed and made little real difference. After an election in 1884 in which allotments were a political hot potato, in 1887 an Allotments Act was introduced, which made it possible for local authorities to acquire land for allotments and also made it compulsory for local authorities to provide allotments where there was demand for them. Local authorities resisted however, and this led to further Acts in 1894, and then finally the Smallholding and Allotments Act of 1907. This was the defining measure, still in place today, which forced councils to provide allotments where there was demand. Under it a local authority is obliged to provide allotments if there is demand from more than six people (unless, as with central London, there is insufficient space).

New century, new stimuli: veg gardening as a response to war and fear

Until now handing over land had seemed, to many in the governing classes, a where-will-it-all-end pandering to the demands of the greedy poor.

World War One changed that. With the German blockade biting and people worried about where their food would come from, the authorities stopped going slow and hastily tripled the number of plots available, which rose from half a million to one-and-a-half million by 1917 (this fell back below a million by 1929).

Enthusiasm hit another peak during the Second World War. All sorts of land was given out to allotment plots – even parkland and city gardens.

My father remembers the central garden of the square where he and I both grew up – St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith, west London - being turned over to vegetables during the War when he was a small boy. The picture on the left is of Hampstead Heath.

It was the age of the Dig for Victory campaign, with the government exhorting gardeners to grow, grow, grow and get the family along to help too.

The numbers of allotment holders shrank dramatically after the war ended. An era of ready-made food and Wonderbras, and the uncoolness of the flat-capped-old-man-gardener image, looked set to kill off forever the idea of it being fun growing your own veg. Yet every decade or so another TV programme would come along that would briefly send people rushing for an allotment again – “The Good Life,” in the Seventies, and then in our time almost anything by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

21st-century hip

Think organic. Think the rise of green parties everywhere. It’s all reflected down at the allotments too. There are about 300,000 potholders in the UK today, and, according to the National Society for Allotment and Leisure Gardeners, there are another 100,000 on waiting lists. (No, make that 99,999 – this week I’m crossing myself off the waiting list I’ve been on for so long). The average age has shifted down several generations. I’m at the old end of my field, it seems. Many of the people I met were in their 30s and 40s: mums with children, young men with girlfriends ... like fresh-faced Katie and many others on YouTube.

My allotment field is a place of kindly advice and shared cups of tea, and cheerful internationalism too. Savvy immigrants from the gardening nations are all strongly represented here. There’s an Afghan guy growing an astonishing number of crops on his plot, just down from me; and a pair of Cypriot brothers who’ve had side-by-side plots for longer than anyone can remember on the other side of him. Below that, a double plot – 20 poles! Pretty much a farm, with three sheds and a greenhouse and more fruit trees than you can imagine – belongs to Svitlana, from Ukraine, who farms it with her sister and her sister’s small children. She kindly offered me tea and the use of one of her sheds to store my stuff. She keeps a nip of vodka and a couple of tins of sardines in hers, too, in case a party is needed.

I used to worry about what I’d do if a world-changing catastrophe hit - Brexit or Grexit or Donald Trump or a terrorist strike. Now I know, and it is strangely reassuring.

If all else failed, I’d still have the freedom to go to the place that Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers campaigned to be called into existence, all those centuries ago, and subsist by the sweat of my own brow; to exercise my “right to dig.”

Vanora Bennett's website

History by Osmosis

Barbara Mitchelhill

In my November blog I wrote how I disliked history until I was sixteen. I didn’t ‘get it’. What was history to me? Dates. Kings and Queen. Laws and treaties. But when I was sixteen, I studied the Industrial Revolution and I suddenly realised that history was all around me in my home town of Rochdale. I understood why industry had built up in the town; how people had flocked there to find work; how the new inventions had made manufacturing on a grand scale possible.

At last I knew that history wasn’t just about kings and queens, it was about people and how they lived and how their lives changed, for better and for worse.

Because my own introduction to history was dire, I feel passionately that children should enjoy the subject from an early age. Have fun with it. Feel a part of it. With this in mind, I must enthuse about the pleasures of living museums and I’m lucky enough to live near one of the very best – the Ironbridge Gorge Museum in Shropshire.

This part of the country is often called ‘The Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’ because it was in Coalbrookdale (now known as the Ironbridge Gorge) that Abraham Darby I perfected the technique of smelting iron with coke in 1709. It made the production of iron much cheaper and so the great quantities needed for steam trains and bridges and other inventions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries were now possible.

When his grandson, Abraham Darby III eventually took over the running of the Coalbrookdale Company, he built the first major cast-iron bridge over the Severn in 1779 – an amazingly complex structure with joints modelled on those used by the carpenters of the day. The bridge was unique and rapidly became a tourist attraction. Indeed The Tontine Hotel was built opposite the bridge by the shareholders of the Bridge specifically to accommodate visitors who came from all over Europe as well as the UK. A prosperous town grew up around the bridge which became known as Ironbridge.

The area was an interesting one indeed with its ironworks, potteries, tile works, canals and bitumen pools. In fact in 1837 it was described by Charles Dibdin as “the most extraordinary district in the world”. With all this wealth of industry, it may surprise most of us that, until the 1940s, no one was very interested in industrial archaeology. In fact, the expression ‘industrial archaeology’ was first used by the Birmingham University historian Michael Rix in 1955 and we have LC Rolt to thank for stimulating public interest by his enthusiasm for the restoration of canals.

By the 1950s, the Coalbrookdale Company had been taken over by Allied Iron Founders and in 1959 undertook an early excavation of Abraham Darby’s Old Furnace and opened a small museum to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the original perfecting of coke smelting in 1709.

In the 1960s, a huge new town was planned in East Shropshire

by which time the Ironbridge Gorge was in sad decline and many derelict buildings, both industrial and residential, were ear-marked for demolition to make way for new housing and offices in the New Town which was to be called Telford after the successful civil engineer, Thomas Telford, who was Shropshire’s first Surveyor of Public Works and who built forty bridges in the county.

The Lilleshall Company and Allied Iron Founders were keen to ensure the heritage of the area was not forgotten and encouraged the Telford Development Corporation to halt much of their demolition work in order to protect the early origins of the Industrial Revolution. The young Michael Darby, a descendant of Abraham Darby I and then a student at Birmingham University, became involved at this early stage and is still today a board member of the Museum Trust that was eventually formed . Through their combined efforts, conservation began and the architect of the new town, John Madin, was commissioned to write a report on the practicality of retaining the old buildings. In 1966 he reported that, with care and effort, the area could become of major significance and, thanks to the Telford Development Council and many significant industry supporters and volunteers, the Ironbridge Gorge Museum was set up in the following year.

Telford grew and flourished as did the museum as buildings were renovated or moved, brick by brick, from other locations. The museum sites are located in the Ironbridge Gorge, which in 1986 was designated a World Heritage Site, and spread over a vast area of six square miles.

There are now ten family-friendly museums, from the Museum of Iron to the Blists Hill Victorian Town, where you can step back in time and visit a fairground, or sit in a Victorian school and have a lesson from a very strict Victorian teacher. You can exchange twenty first century money for shillings and sixpences and spend them in the sweet shop or the baker’s and eat a pie walking down cobbled streets, passing folk dressed in Victorian costume who will chat to you about the town. If you take a short walk from the Coalport China Museum (European Museum of the Year 1978) you’ll come to the amazing Tar Tunnel where, over two hundred years ago, natural bitumen dripped like treacle into pools and was turned into pitch. You can walk along that tunnel and still see the bitumen oozing through the walls.

You’ll need several days to visit everything but this is a place of delight whether you are six or a hundred and six. A place where you can see and touch and experience how life was lived in another age. This is a living museum. This is history by osmosis

Industrial Revolution - how I came to love history

Barbara Mitchelhill

Today is my birthday. Hurray. Yes, three cheers! But that said, my birthday was the first thing that turned me off history. It was marred by the fact that it fell on Armistice Day and made me feel unbelievably miserable. From the time I was five, the school assemblies on my birthday were filled with prayers and images of the dead of two World Wars. I was very cross about it. Everybody made such a song and dance about the past while I wanted to concentrate on the present. By the age of eleven, I had come to the conclusion that history was very dull and very boring indeed.

When I went to grammar school, I had a second reason for disliking the subject. Our history teacher was Miss G – a read-page-ten-in- your-books-and-answer-the-questions type of teacher. These dinosaurs of the teaching profession must be extinct by now. I hope so.

Of course, Miss G couldn’t take all the blame for my dislike of history. The curriculum must shoulder some responsibility. That first term at Grammar School covered Ancient Egypt but I don’t remember stories of Egyptian gods or the wonderful artefacts discovered by archaeologists. We studied agriculture on the shores of the Nile. Why I should care about methods of irrigation thousands of years ago? As I had never travelled more than fifty miles from home, Egypt might as well have been on Mars. After the Nile delta, we plodded through the Romans, returned to England with William the Conqueror and worked our way through kings and queens and wars with lots and lots of dates and nothing which sparked my imagination.

Was Miss G really so bad or was it me?

But when I was sixteen all that changed. Suddenly I got it. Suddenly I understood what my history lessons were all about because the subject on the curriculum was the Industrial Revolution. Let me explain. I was born and brought up in Rochdale in Lancashire where evidence of the Industrial Revolution was all around me. There was no doubt about it, I became excited. History was real. Now I understood why how the weavers’ cottages I knew so well, with their loom windows on the top floor, had been made redundant by the huge woollen mill that blocked out the light in our front room. I also learned that even our two up and two down had its own history. It was a part of four streets of terraced houses with back alleys and shared privies which had been built for mill workers, giving them only a short walk to and from the their place of employment.

This was doubtless done for economic rather than humanitarian reasons, most probably to ensure that both adults and children were never late for work. After incredibly long days of labour, it must have been so hard to get up in the morning. These houses were tied to the mill, meaning that employees couldn’t change jobs easily. Their wages were paid partly in tokens which could only be spent at the corner shop. Shrewd move on the part of the mill owners. No wonder they could afford to build grand houses on the outskirts of town.

But I found signs in Rochdale of movements to improve the lot of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution. For years, I had walked up Toad Lane to the Grammar School, passing a small shop without a glance. With my heightened interest in the period, I found that this very shop was the model for the modern co-ops we all know. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers was set up in 1844 by a group of weavers and artisans who opened the store to sell food at more affordable prices. Various groups had tried this in other parts of the country, but the shop in Toad Lane is believed to be the first successful co-operative.

If I walked home from school to save the bus fare, I passed a statue of John Bright without registering his name. Yet he was born in Rochdale, the son of a textile manufacturer, served in Gladstone’s cabinet and co-founded the Anti- Corn Law League.

I was so interested that I went to the library and found out that the Corn Law was had a devastating effect on the price of the staple part of poor people’s diet – bread. And when I discovered that my own grandparents had travelled north to Rochdale when agricultural work was in short supply, I realised that living in the country wasn’t all roses round the door but meant no work and empty bellies. My grandmother believed that the grime and dirt of the town was better than going hungry in in the country.

So the past was becoming clearer. It was fitting together. At the grand old age of sixteen I had learned to love history through looking around my own town and at my own family. I had found a realistic way to the past.

Luckily, the teaching of history has change hugely. Young children start by investigating their family roots, by walking around their town, asking questions, drawing plans. They talk to their grandparents about life when they were small. Older people come into schools and talk about their early life. And so history begins where is should begin, with our surroundings and things we can understand. Things that are real. Then the children step back in time, further and further, knowing where they have come from.

Today is Armistice Day – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – when the First World War came to an end. I know more about it now than I did when I was ten. I shall think about those who died in that terrible conflict and say a prayer for them -but I shall also have a happy birthday.