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O’Connorville

Centre for Chartist Spade Culture

The Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor (1794-1855) was a somewhat wild and emotional man, whose failures eventually drove him mad. In the 1830’s he was deeply under the influence of Cobbett’s notion of ‘spade culture’, which proposed doing away with horses and machines, and working the land by hand. He formulated a modest allotment plan in 1830 that would be worked by the spade alone, and in 1848 he announced to the House of Commons that he had experimented successfully with 130 labourers on his Cork estate.

The basis of O’Connor’s ideas were contained in his Land Plan. Through the Northern Star, which he owed, he set about persuading Chartists to return to the land, casting aside the miseries of industrial society. He was not the most subtle pamphleteer, and attacked his would-be converts with the reminder that, ‘you are, in a word, a poor, beggarly, lousy set of devils!”, before he outlined the advantages of his Land Plan.

O’Connor’s blueprint called for 5,000 heads of families from industrial centres to receive two hectares of land each, in plots spread over some 40 estates throughout Britain. At each smallholder prospered, he would go into surplus and be able to take a small profit from his market sales. O’Connor’s scheme did not propose common ownership on a socialist pattern, but independence and co-operation.

After some delay, a Chartist Co-operative Land Society was set up in April 1845. Despite legal difficulties O’Connor went ahead. Funds were raised, and in March 1846 the first estate was bought in Heronsgate, near Watford, and re-named O’Connorville. On May day 1847 the first settlers moved in, and other estates were soon opened in Lowbands and Snig;s End, Gloucestershire, and at ‘Charterville’, near Whitney. Oxfordshire. Of these, only O’Connorville ever looked like succeeding. Industrial workers could not quickly adapt to the rural pattern, and none of target figures was reached. In August 1848, after further legal shenanigans, subscriptions to the Land Company was dissolved, by which time O’Connor had become more and more unbalanced, and only six families survived at O’Connorville. His brave new world disintegrated, and in 1852 the House of Commons agreed that he should be sent Tuke’s Asylum in Chiswick.