The Farthest Promised Land — English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s

Part One English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants

Joseph Arch 1826–1919

1 Brogdens' Navvies

ON THE EVENING OFSaturday, 13 July 1872, much of the population of the little New Zealand township of Picton had gathered at the waterfront, and were waiting with considerable curiosity to welcome the colony's first batch of ‘Brogdens’ navvies', brought from ‘home’ to build their province's first railway. Picton is situated at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound, the easternmost of the Marlborough Sounds, a complex maze of sheltered waterways formed by the drowning of ancient river valleys. Queen Charlotte Sound provides a deep, sheltered waterway, nearly twenty miles1 in length, for ships approaching the north-eastern extremity of the South Island from Cook Strait. With the colony's capital, Wellington, lying just across the Strait, the people of Picton had dreams of their settlement becoming the main gateway to the South Island.

In 1872 Picton township had a population of about 700, housed in wooden buildings scattered over a limited area of flat land between the shores of the sound and the steep hills which hemmed the settlement closely on all other sides. The place had a world's-end look about it, and as yet the one road that wound out through the surrounding hills carried little traffic. It led south, to Picton's rival, the provincial capital of Blenheim, some eighteen miles away. Since the founding of Marlborough Province in 1859, its Lilliputian Provincial Council had twice shifted the capital between these rival centres, while governing in a somewhat comic opera style the local affairs of a population which by 1871 had grown to a little over five thousand, inhabiting a territory of well over four thousand square miles. Like its main port, the province was also hemmed in from its neighbours, for high mountains lay to the south and west. If the district was to escape from its isolation and parochial pettiness, it was self-evident that there would have to be a build-up of population, and a development policy to provide good land communications with the larger provinces to the south. In the past, hopes had been raised, only to be dashed. For a time it had even seemed possible that Picton might be chosen as the country's capital. Hopes had also been raised when gold was discovered at Wakamarina in 1864. Picton's population had boomed to 3,000, only to decline rapidly when the goldfield was quickly exhausted. Now hopes were raised again as the colonial government set in motion the building of a railway, planned as part of a main trunk extending the whole length of the South Island. The people of Picton were not to know that the final link connecting them to the railway system of the southern provinces would not be made until nearly half-way through the following century. They were right, however, in surmising that the planned railway would one day make their town a key link in the country's communication system. Today a fleet of road and rail ferries run a shuttle service across Cook Strait, with Wellington and Picton as its terminals.

The more staid of Picton's inhabitants could be excused for feeling a little apprehensive, as they waited that evening in the deepening twilight. Navvies had a reputation for bravado and riotous living. The term navvy comes from navigator, the name given to England's eighteenth century canal-builders. The great railway-building era of the mid nineteenth century had greatly multiplied their numbers, and sent them in rowdy, hard-drinking gangs through the length and breadth of the British Isles, so that their reputation was well-known to the largely British-born New Zealand population. New recruits to the gangs came mainly from among the half-starved agricultural labourers, and it was said to take a year's solid work to make these into navvies.2 The transformation was brought about by higher wages, which provided more and better food. Excavating, tunnelling and bridge building gave continuous hard work to develop the muscles, and the gang life completed the transformation, fostering a distinctive dress and bearing, and a delight in living up to a reputation for reckless hard-living. Having granted that Picton needed ‘livening-up’, there may well have been those among the locals who feared that the process might be carried too far.

Let us turn now to the immigrant party, as they entered Queen Charlotte Sound on this winter's afternoon, aboard the coastal steamer Rangatira, to which they had been transferred from the sailing ship Schiehallion after a thirteen weeks' voyage from London to Wellington. They numbered a little over a hundred, almost all of them English, and mainly men, though there were a few wives and children. Doubtless they gazed intently at the landscape of the region which was now to become the

Queen Charlotte Sound, near Picton scene of their daily life and toil. It was a strange, wild, lonely world that met their eyes as the Rangatira steamed through narrow passages opening between a long series of headlands and broken bays. On either side rough steep mountains plunged deep into the waters of the sound, their slopes and gullies clothed with forest of a dark, un-English green. This landscape must have seemed scarcely less strange to these unlettered English labourers than it had done to the first Europeans to enter Queen Charlotte Sound, a century before. As it had scarcely changed in the interval, it is appropriate to quote from the description penned by Dr Anderson, surgeon of the Resolution, who was with Captain Cook on his second visit to the region in 1773.

The land everywhere about Queen Charlotte's Sound is uncommonly mountainous, rising immediately from the sea into large hills with blunted tops. At considerable distances are valleys, or rather impressions on the sides of the hills, which are not deep; each terminating toward the sea in a small cove, with a pebbly or sandy beach; behind which are small flats, where the natives generally build their huts, at the same time hauling their canoes upon the beaches. This situation is the more convenient, as in every cove a brook of very fine water (in which are some small trout) empties itself into the sea. The bases of these mountains, at least toward the shore, are constituted of a brittle yellowish sandstone, which acquires a bluish cast where the sea washes it. It runs, at some places, in horizontal, and at other places in oblique strata; being frequently divided, at small distances, by thin veins of coarse quartz, which commonly follow the direction of the other, though they sometimes intersect it. The mould, or soil, which covers this, is also of a yellowish cast, not unlike marl; and is commonly from a foot to two, or more in thickness.

The quality of this soil is best indicated by the luxuriant growth of its productions. For the hills (except a few towards the sea, which are covered with smaller bushes) are one continued forest of lofty trees, flourishing with a vigour almost superior to anything that imagination can conceive, and affording an august prospect to those who are delighted at the grand and beautiful works of nature. The agreeable temperatures of the climate, no doubt, contributes much to this uncommon strength in vegetation …3

Darkness had fallen before the Rangatira loomed into view at Picton. She was soon made fast, and the waiting crowd made a rush to see what little there was to be seen. The newcomers sent up ‘several ringing English cheers', ‘such sounds’, remarked the reporter for the local press, ‘as are seldom heard except from new arrivals or in the Old Land.’4 The officials of the railway contractors went on board, and soon the navvies were allowed to disembark. Once on the wharf they were efficiently allocated to billets that had been arranged for them. The worst fears of the locals were soon allayed. As far as he could make out in the dim light, the reporter concluded that they were by no means the typical navvy, but rather ‘instead of being loud of voice and rude of speech, they were just such a lot of men as could be met with on any market day in the Midland Counties.’ Trying to place them by their voices, he detected ‘every dialect spoken in

Township of Picton England, from the Northumbrian burr to the Cornish snap.’5 The newcomers were soon on their way to lodgings where fires were burning, and provisions awaiting them.

Over a nine months' period from July 1872 to April 1873 the English contracting firm of John Brogden and Sons were to bring 2,172 English immigrants into New Zealand, among them 1,298 able-bodied men, who had each been offered two years' work on the firm's railway contracts in various parts of the colony.6 Brogdens thereby played a significant part at a crucial stage in the immigration drive which helped to practically double New Zealand's population in the 1870s. The New Zealand Government had begun mounting its immigration drive in Britain some six months before Brogdens entered the field. Through a failure to understand the predicament of the English rural labourer, whose talents were those most urgently needed in the colony, this drive met with little success. When Brogdens joined the campaign they offered much more realistic terms and thereby started a flow of emigration which served to prime the Government's effort when increasingly liberal terms were introduced during 1873. In various ways Brogdens' contribution was more significant than the limited number of immigrants they introduced might suggest. Fortuitous links between their recruitment campaign and their New Zealand contracts established connections between particular areas in England and particular New Zealand districts, and thus served as one influence channelling the immigration flow of the following years. Also, it was Brogdens' initiative which made the first New Zealand links with the Revolt of the Field, a great uprising of the English rural labourers whose consequences go far towards explaining why 1874 became the annus mirabilis of New Zealand immigration.

By 1870 the British railway system was virtually complete, and English contractors were looking abroad for work. It was the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war that led John Brogden and Sons to turn their attention from Europe to promising news from the South Pacific.7 On 28 June 1870 the New Zealand Colonial Treasurer, Julius Vogel, presented a dramatic Financial Statement, in which he proposed a development programme to be financed by ten million pounds borrowed from overseas. The scheme aimed to supply the colony's great need of roads, railways and immigration. The colony was suffering a commercial depression. It had incurred heavy debts in Maori wars, which throughout the 1860s had almost halted development in the North Island, and it now faced the challenge of conducting internal defence from its own resources, as the Imperial Government firmly insisted on withdrawing all its troops. The New Zealand Government's ambitious public works and immigration scheme therefore aimed both to strengthen the whole colonial economy, so that it might bear any defence burdens imposed upon it, and to carry out an extensive colonisation programme in the largely forest-covered North Island, with the object of both outnumbering the Maori population there, and increasingly involving them in the white man's economy and way of life. The scheme was carried in the House, and over the next few months the colony, aided by Vogel's oratory, accepted with growing enthusiasm

Julius Vogel 1835–1899 the vision of ten years of active development and colonisation. It now became a question of ways and means. With a large part of the colony's affairs being handled by the Provincial governments, the central administration was primitive in form and ill-prepared for the task of enlisting money, manpower and skills from the other side of the world. It is therefore not surprising that when Vogel visited England early in 1871 to negotiate loans on the London money market, he should have contacted Brogdens who had already made their interest known.8

Julius Vogel was a London-born Jew who as a youth had abandoned the merchant tradition of his family for the allurements of the Australian goldfields. First in Victoria and later in Otago, whither he followed the gold diggers, he had engaged in various commercial and journalistic ventures, but increasingly his interest had turned to politics, into which he carried much of the optimism and hustle of the goldfields. His negotiations with Brogdens were characteristic of his style. Acting within a mandate already provided by parliament, he concluded one agreement whereby the firm would construct railways and provide plant to the value of £500,000. But he also negotiated a much more ambitious alternative contract, which, subject to parliamentary sanction, would have given the colony £4,000,000 worth of railways and 10,000 immigrants in return for transferring some 3,000,000 acres of land to the contractors.9 The New Zealand Parliament rejected this ambitious scheme in October 1871, while resolving that the ministry should endeavour to negotiate an extension of the other contract. Brogdens continued to be sanguine that great things awaited them in the colony, and yielding to pressure from the New Zealand authorities, began in April 1872 to ship immigrants, of whom the Schiehallion party were the first. It was not till two months later that a legal agreement was completed to cover the matter. The New Zealand ministry had begun negotiations with James Brogden, a member of the firm visiting the colony, and when he declined to take the responsibility for an agreement, the negotiations were remitted to London, to be continued between the firm's other directors, and the newly appointed New Zealand Agent-General, Dr Isaac Featherston.10

The office of Agent-General had been created by the 1870 Immigration and Public Works act, so that the colony would have in London a representative of a suitable rank to direct a major immigration drive. Featherston was a pioneer Wellington settler who had emigrated in 1840 as surgeon-superintendent on one of the New Zealand Company ships. He had been Superintendent of Wellington Province for nearly twenty years, and had also played his part in colonial politics, having been a member of the cabinet which shaped the new immigration and public works policy. He took up his post in London in July 1871, and after a quick examination of the more promising areas of England and Scotland, decided that there was little prospect at that time of any large emigration from Britain under the terms New Zealand was offering. He therefore turned his attention to Scandinavia and Germany, whence he obtained a small flow of emigrants, mainly for new bush settlements in the North Island. With the return of better recruiting weather in the spring of 1872, he concentrated his attention on assisting Brogdens to find English navvies for the contract which he had persuaded them to enter into with the New Zealand Government. Featherston's reasons for wishing to work in conjunction with Brogdens can be made clear by outlining the results of two visits made to Cornwall by C. R. Carter, a member of Featherston's staff.

Charles Rooking Carter (1822–1896) had returned to England from a successful career as a contractor in Wellington Province when Featherston persuaded him to join his staff. Before emigrating to New Zealand in 1850 Carter had been a strong sympathiser with the Chartist movement, and an active propagandist for improved working class conditions. In New Zealand he had interested himself in the cause of small farm settlements. Featherston could hardly have found a better man to send on tour recruiting labouring men, nor could he have sent him to a more promising county than Cornwall. Cornwall had begun sending out emigrants in considerable numbers immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, and recurrent hard times in the county had sent wave after wave of Cornish rural labourers, miners and fishermen to the new lands during the following decades. Cornish miners had been prominent in the Australian and New Zealand goldrushes, and Canterbury Province, which did a good deal of recruiting in Britain during the 1860s, found that more than a tenth of its English assisted immigrants came from Cornwall.11 In 1866 the collapse of the Cornish copper mining industry increased the county's flood of emigrants. The versatility of the Cornish labourers, who often combined farm skills with those of the mine or the sea, made them particularly attractive as New Zealand immigrants.

Carter went to Cornwall in mid-September 1871, and having enlisted the expert local knowledge of Captain A. Anthony of Hayle, a mining broker and inspector of mines, embarked on a six weeks recruiting campaign. He advertised in five local papers, distributed large posters extensively, and addressed public meetings wherever he found sufficient interest. Although there were many inquiries, he succeeded in getting only two firm applications. In accounting for this in his report to Featherston,12 he mentioned a general revival of trade throughout England, and a great rise in the price of tin, as contributing causes. There was also the competition of unceasing emigration to the United States and Canada. But the greatest difficulty was that the regulations to which Carter was working took no account of the poverty of the people. Each adult emigrant had to pay down five pounds in cash and sign a promissory note for two pounds ten shillings - and children of 12 years and upwards counted as adults. Emigrants also had to meet the expense of mess utensils, bedding, and travel to the port of embarkation. Carter estimated that if a family of four adults were to accept the New Zealand offer, they would require at least thirty pounds in cash, yet this was an amount that ‘nine out of ten agricultural labourers in Cornwall, and other parts of England and Scotland as well never expected to be possessed of.’13 Not surprisingly, after consulting his senior staff early in December 1871, Featherston adopted much more liberal regulations even though this meant exceeding his powers. Fortunately the ministry in New Zealand had already reached a similar conclusion. Featherston's new scheme made a charge of five pounds per adult, but emigrants who could not meet this in cash might be allowed to meet the difference by giving a promissory note for double the amount unpaid.14

Featherston, however, was of a frugal mind, the result, probably, of years of experience in administering Wellington Province with a deficient exchequer. The arrangement with Brogdens offered a way of meeting the poverty of the English labouring class, at little cost to the government, and might well start a flow of emigration which the revised government terms would prove liberal enough to continue. The agreement15 empowered the Agent-General to require Brogdens to despatch up to 2,000 able-bodied men, besides wives and children to make up a total number of not more than 6,000 statute adults. Brogdens were to pay the government ten pounds passage money per adult, and were to recoup themselves for this by taking promissory notes not exceeding sixteen pounds per adult. All emigrants were to be subject to inspection and approval by a New Zealand agent. Featherston appointed Carter to the task and it was in this capacity that he returned to Cornwall on 1 April 1872. At Falmouth, assisted by a competent surgeon, he examined a group of men enlisted by Brogdens from the surrounding towns and villages, and selected sixty adults to sail by the Schiehallion. Brogdens had guaranteed the men two years employment at the wages current in New Zealand, but with the stipulation that at no time would they receive less than five shillings for a day of ten hours. As this was about twice the amount the local farm labourers were receiving for uncertain employment, it is no wonder that Brogdens found plenty of takers, especially when they made it known that they were also prepared to advance the money to cover the various expenses of emigrating. The majority of the recruits informed Carter that their wages had been so low that they had been utterly unable to save any money. They gladly gave Brogdens their promissory notes to cover their ship's ‘kit’, outfit of clothing, and fare to London. Without this help, most of them would not have been able to move.16

A day or two earlier, on Good Friday, 29 March 1872, Carter had accompanied Alexander Brogden M.P., the head of the firm, on an even more significant journey. They had attended at the Town Hall in Leamington, Warwickshire, where Joseph Arch had assembled a great gathering of farm labourers. The purpose of this meeting was to weld the union movement, which Arch had launched barely two months earlier, into a county-wide organisation. Carter reported that neither he, nor a Canadian lecturer offering free grants of land, were able to make any headway that day against the excitement about the union. However, before the weekend was over, Carter had succeeded in selecting twelve adults for the Schiehallion17 — the first of a multitude which New Zealand agents recruited by courting the agricultural labourers' unions. To complete the Schiehallion party a few were selected at Plymouth, about a dozen from Staffordshire, and a small number from London.18 The majority were single men, a few took wives and children with them, and others left wives and families behind. The Schiehallion sailed from London on 13 April 1872.

Even before they reached Picton, the newcomers were made well aware that the new country offered them a social and economic status markedly higher than that which they had left in England. No sooner had the ship reached Wellington than it was boarded by people enquiring for female servants. A few of the families had girls of about 14 or 15, and these were engaged on the spot at good wages.19 In the four days before they sailed for Picton the men were enlightened by Wellington working men as to local wages and conditions. They came ashore to discuss their engagement with James Brogden, whom they found in Wellington. He wanted them to accept the minimum terms stated in their contracts, but they disputed the fairness of this, pointing out that their agreement was for not less than current colonial wages and conditions. After considerable discussion a wage of six shillings for a nine hour day was agreed upon.20 The men's pleasure at this excellent wage was soon heightened by Picton's easy social climate and plentitude of good cheap food. Before long enthusiastic letters were on their way to family and friends in the old country.

‘I am getting as fat as a pig’, one man told his wife in a letter dated 21 July 1872.21 He reported beef at two and a half pence a pound and mutton at one and a half pence, and this ‘not like old starvey pork at home.’ He told his wife not to be frightened of the sea, and hoped that she and the children would join him by Christmas. The same entreaty to ‘come out and enjoy the good living’ was repeated in letter after letter, along with other persuasive information. ‘Any man is an enemy to himself to stay at home to work,’ John Reynolds wrote to his wife Mary on 1 August 1872, urging her ‘to come out, not for my sake, but for the dear children's sake… Mary Ann and Bessie would do well here. If your two boys were here they would get 15s a week each. They could have horses to ride wherever they went, so it is not like home.’ Reynolds was going to write to his brother Thomas to help her get away, but apparently he was not too sanguine that she would be persuaded, for he told her that ‘if you won't come I shan't serve you as others are going to do, but I hope if you have any love for me you won't stay away.’ Reynolds was one of the men Carter had selected at Falmouth. The enumerators' schedules of the 1871 census show him as a 30-year-old labourer living with his wife and four children in Shute Lane, Penryn,22 a little market town on a creek of Falmouth Harbour. As a Cornishman, Reynolds would be well aware of the large number of deserted wives and children who had become a major social problem in his home county since the collapse of the copper mining industry;23 hence his reassurances to his wife. Mary Reynolds yielded to his urging, and in March 1873 arrived with the children by the Forfarshire, to join him.24

The Forfarshire also brought the wife and four children of James Randall, an experienced workman who became first a ganger, and later a subcontractor, on the line. His first persuasive letter was dated from Picton on 29 July 1872, and emphasised both the economic and social advantages of the colony. ‘I am feeling double the man I was when I left England…,’ he wrote, ‘dear wife, this is just the place for families like ours.’ He wished he had his boy Walter (aged 16) with him, as he could be earning twenty-three shillings a week. Randall described his own position thus:

… I am very comfortable here; like all colonials, we make a hut and live in it, but have got to cook our own food… We can go out and catch a pig any time we like two or three miles out in the bush. My brother was talking about coming; I wish he would, he could not do a better thing. ‘Tis better to be living here like a gentleman than to be in England starving. A working man here can spend more in comforts than he can earn in England. A working man is thought as much of here as a gentleman is in England. There is not the comfort here as regards feather beds; we have got to carry our beds with us where we go, but that is nothing after we get used to it.

If his wife would not be persuaded, he promised to endeavour to return in two or three years, with some money in his pockets.

The immediate future of these men did not, however, prove to be quite as idyllic as their letters would lead one to expect. Their employers became involved in misunderstandings and disputes with the New Zealand authorities, with repercussions for the navvies they were introducing into various parts of the colony. The details of the involved and prolonged differences between Brogdens and the New Zealand government do not concern us here. The underlying cause was inexperience on both sides — with the New Zealand General Government feeling its way for the first time into railway construction and immigration, and Brogdens miscalculating important aspects of the colonial situation. Distance and slow communications aggravated the difficulties which arose. Briefly, Brogdens got less work than they had hoped for, and it became available much more slowly than they had envisaged. The navvies arrived more rapidly than the firm could find work for them, and its immigration agreement proved something of a disaster, as once the men learnt that much more liberal terms had been introduced for government immigrants they, for the most part, refused to meet their promissory notes to Brogdens. In England impoverished villagers were attracted by Brogdens' credit terms, but having reached New Zealand and found that they were expected to pay two or three times as much for their passages as the Government's recruits, their attitude quickly changed. The extent of the firm's problems was by no means apparent by August 1872, when they began to renege on their agreement with the men, but their difficulties provide some excuse for their conduct. Behind the rift between Brogdens and their navvies may also be seen the influence of colonial working men, determined to maintain the custom of the eight hour day which dated almost from the founding of the colony. A letter from ‘Colonist’ in the Picton Marlborough Press of 14 August 1872 explained to the newcomers the importance of the eight hour day to New Zealanders. In the colony working men saved their money, so that they could get on in the world. Single men tended to forgo the comfort of board and lodgings, which in any case were at least twice as expensive as in the mother country. They did their own cooking, washing, fetching of firewood and water, and so on, and therefore needed the time which the eight hour system provided.

Brogdens' representatives at Picton at first began to go back on arrangements about the finishing time on Saturdays; and followed this by refusing to honour their agreement to pay wages for time lost when it was too wet to work. Eventually the men were provoked to down tools and march to the firm's local headquarters to air their grievances. While they were away a dray was sent round for the tools, and the men were bluntly informed that all future work would be let by contract, for which they would be required to provide their own tools. Most of the men inspected the contract work offered, but could not agree with the engineer as to specifications and prices, whereupon Brogdens withheld wages due and refused supplies from their store. Apparently aware that public opinion was on their side a deputation of the navvies waited upon the local Anglican vicar, the Revd W. Ronaldson, who agreed to take the initiative in calling a public meeting. Nine other prominent citizens were associated with Ronaldson in the handbills calling the meeting. Brogdens' agent declined an invitation to be present. The well-attended meeting was chaired by a local lawyer, E. T. Conolly, later to become Minister of Justice and to serve as a Supreme Court Judge. The navvies' spokesmen put their case clearly and forcefully, and the meeting passed resolutions supporting the men, and appointed a strong committee to act in their interests. This committee arranged supplies for all the labourers who were in need, while carrying on vigorous negotiations with the firm and authorities. Within a week the navvies were all back at work.25

There were again difficulties on the Picton contract in mid-September 1872, when many men were discharged because no further work was ready for them.26 At the end of October sixty further navvies reached Picton, part of a large party brought out for Brogdens on the ship Bebington.27 There were thus various reasons for the men to lose confidence in Brogdens, and they soon began leaving the firm's employ. In February 1873 Brogdens took a number of them to court for failure to meet their promissory notes. The men claimed in defence that Brogdens had broken their part of the agreement. The magistrate's judgement, which set the precedent for similar cases in other parts of the colony, was based on the decision that the agreement could be divided. The men were to meet their promissory notes, and could in turn, if they wished, use the courts to enforce Brogdens' compliance as regards their offer of employment.28 In view of the strong demand for labour in the colony, the men had nothing to gain by doing so. It was not long before three-quarters of the Picton men had left the railway work for farming and other employment, or to try their

NEW ZEALAND luck on the gold-diggings.29 As Marlborough was not developing rapidly in the 1870s, many of the navvies must have soon moved elsewhere. Some, however, settled in Picton and its neighbourhood. When New Zealand took stock of its freeholders in 1882, among Brogdens' Schiehallion men listed were William Annear, a Picton labourer with £225 worth of land in the borough; Charles Fitch, also a Picton labourer, owning 23 acres worth £180 in the county; and George Hare, a labourer at Tua Marina, a few miles away, with an acre of county land valued at £150. Two of the Bebington men were living at Blenheim, John Burton as a labourer with 29 acres of county land worth £550, and Arthur Lummas as a blacksmith with £200 worth of land in the borough.30

The pattern of events which developed over the spring and summer of 1872–3 at Picton, was repeated with minor variations on Brogdens' other five contracts of this period — at or near Wellington, Napier, Auckland, Oamaru and Invercargill. The firm enforced contract terms in place of the day labour promised in England. The men disputed the change, and left in large numbers for other employment, and Brogdens endeavoured to enforce the promissory notes through the courts. In some cases, where they did not have sufficient work ready, Brogdens actively encouraged the men to take other employment, with the proviso that they continued to pay off their notes. In other cases, Brogdens complained of local employers enticing their immigrants away. In Wellington local employers joined with the men in defence of the eight hour system, and served on the committee of an association formed to assist navvies striking for this principle.31 Brogdens complained that of the 1299 men they had brought out, only 287 were working for their firm by August 1873.32 Although Brogdens held nearly £40,000 in promissory notes from their immigrants, they found it impossible to recover most of these advances despite getting 133 cases tried by the courts. So strong were the men's feelings in the matter that many disappeared ‘up country’ to escape prosecution, some changed their names, others filed bankruptcy, and yet others went to gaol for debt, at the firm's expense.33 By November 1872 Brogdens had decided that the immigration agreement was a mistake and were suspending recruitment. Their last party sailed on the Lutterworth from London on 23 December 1872, reaching New Zealand on 5 April 1873.

The general impression given by contemporary reports is that Brogdens' immigrants provided a useful, well-behaved addition to the colony's labour force. The Picton community was not the only one to discover that navvies could be quite tame and ordinary mortals. When Oamaru's first batch of Brogden men arrived, the local newspaper found them young and healthy, but for the most part undersized, and remarked that they scarcely realised ‘the usual idea of the genus “navvy”’.34 A correspondent who passed through Hampden a week or two later found that the three gangs of these men at work there were ‘well spoken of as a steady well-conducted lot of men’, and concluded that they were ‘not navvies in the proper sense of the word’, being entirely new to the work.35 When a shipload of Brogdens' immigrants reached Napier at the end of 1872, the men were described as intelligent and respectable, with a good proportion of them ‘accustomed to farming work’.36 No doubt there was a minority of ‘roughs’ among these men, but probably the proportion who periodically set out to ‘liven up the town’ was no greater than the colony was accustomed to. When a surgeon-superintendent whose own character seems to have been open to question, reported harshly on a large party of Brogdens' immigrants that he had accompanied to Otago, C. R. Carter prepared a minute in their defence:

There were in the Christian McAusland about 40 real navvies and I am quite ready to admit that, as a class, they are rough in their manners, at times unruly and require tact mingled with kindness to manage them: but I never felt it my business to refuse to accept men of this stamp — which were the most suitable for the requirements of Messrs. Brogden in New Zealand. I believed them as a body to be hard working and honest and freely accepted them. It must be borne in mind that the gigantic public works of Great Britain have been reared up by this useful class of men; and that it is not the nice sort of emigrants who will be able or willing to make the heavy portions of the Railways in New Zealand.37

No one was better qualified than C. R. Carter, to comment on the quality of Brogdens' recruits. Throughout the spring, summer and autumn of 1872 he criss-crossed the length and breadth of England selecting from among the men they put forward. He claimed to have personally interviewed all but 70 to 80 of the more than 2000 emigrants sent out. Brogdens obtained applications through widespread advertising, through the work of salaried agents in various localities, and by sending representatives to visit promising districts. Carter himself addressed no less than 38 public meetings for the firm. As soon as sufficient applicants were offering in an area, arrangements were made for them to come together to be examined.

Railway navvying in new country While Carter conducted interviews, a medical practitioner subjected the men to a thorough examination in an adjoining room. Carter directed that the men were to be stripped for the medical examination, and that no men ‘afflicted with ruptures, varicose veins, or what in Cornwall is termed “a miner's heart”’, were to be accepted.38 Any men branded with the letter D, as deserters, were also to be rejected. At Uxbridge in Middlesex about ten men were rejected for this reason. Carter applied equally stiff selection criteria to his own interviews, declining any who in his judgement were unfit for the hard work of colonial life. As a result of these procedures, only a minority of applicants were approved, and Carter estimated that he saw at least 6,000 men in selecting Brogdens' parties. They came from counties as far apart as Cumberland, Cornwall and Sussex. To cover the ground, Carter had to work at high pressure, sometimes travelling night and day.39

Throughout Brogdens' recruitment drive, Featherston gave it priority over his own immigration effort, and placed the services of his whole staff at the firm's disposal.40 He considered that it would have been absurd for the government to have imagined it could compete on the immigration market against Brogdens' liberal terms. To get the men they wanted, Brogdens found that in almost every case they had ‘to pay nearly everything’,41 and in some cases they apparently even advanced pocket money.42 They also arranged with married men whose wives remained behind, that they would be paid a weekly subsistence. The men were promised that their wages would commence the day they landed in New Zealand. With the guarantee of two years' steady work at good wages, the total package amounted to a most attractive offer. Carter's only complaint was that having not paid a shilling by way of deposit, the men had nothing to lose by breaking their engagements. In many cases, once the men were selected, their employers raised their wages and they decided to stay. About a quarter of those selected finally declined to go, creating some difficulties with the shipping arrangements. There can be little doubt, though, that Brogdens' liberal terms enabled New Zealand immigration to break new ground in the English country-side. In the latter part of 1872 Arthur Clayden, a middle class supporter of the Revolt of the Field, cooperated with Brogdens in recruiting rural labourers from the countryside around Faringdon in Berkshire. He later reported that he had had infinite difficulty in disabusing their minds of anti-emigration prejudices. However, at length, ‘a tolerable number screwed up their courage to the requisite pitch.’ By the following year the glowing accounts they were sending home of their welfare were creating a different climate for emigration in west Berkshire.43 Without Brogdens' attractive offer, it is probable that the initial party of reluctant starters would never have left home.

These rural labourers were particularly sought after by the New Zealand authorities, and even while selecting navvies for Brogdens, Carter gave preference to men who had been brought up to farming work.44 His final figures show that 444 of those he selected were farm labourers and 339 ‘labourers mostly brought up to farm work,’ while only 284 were navvies.45 Even the strong contingent from Cornwall must have been drawn largely from farm workers as only 49 miners are listed. Carter considered that the most suitable class of labouring men were those he recruited from the agricultural districts of the midland counties of Berkshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Warwickshire. Although barely a quarter of Brogdens' navvies came from these counties, they were to prove a particularly significant group, once the rural unions with which many of them had been linked, turned to emigration. Despite their difficulties with the firm, most of Brogdens' navvies appear to have written home in very positive terms. Thus a private correspondent writing from London on 18 April 1873, was quoted in the Wellington Evening Post of 19 June 1873 as ascribing a greatly increased interest in New Zealand emigration to ‘the letters received from Messrs. Brogdens' emigrants, which are now scattered throughout this country month by month.’

2 The Village World and the Labourers' Revolt

ENGLAND'S FARM LABOURERS had been coveted by New Zealand right from the founding of the colony, but repeated endeavours had failed to recruit them in anything like the numbers desired. Genuine agricultural labourers formed too small a proportion of the assisted emigrants which the New Zealand Company sent out in the 1840s as the pioneer settlers of its new colonies.1 When the New Zealand provincial governments from time to time entered the immigration field in the 1850s and 1860s, they found that agricultural labourers were the ‘most difficult to get and the most difficult to move when they are got at’.2 A strong flow of immigration was an essential element in Vogel's ambitious plans of 1870, and some members of parliament were hopeful of a large importation of the bone and sinew of rural England. Others were sceptical. One maintained that past history had disproved the assumption that with enough pain and care ‘labourers well accustomed to hard and agricultural labour’ could be recruited from the country parts of England.3 He reminded the House that the Government had sent home excellent agents in 1863, when a military settlement scheme was being launched, and these agents had taken great pains and care, yet they had failed to get the class of men desired.

We must now examine the village world of rural England over these earlier decades, in order to gain some understanding of these labourers who were in such demand in this new community on the far side of the world. We need also to understand why they were so undervalued in the land of their birth. Why, too, were New Zealand's raw colonials so convinced that the English rural labourer could better himself by forsaking ‘England's green and pleasant land’ for the lonely emptiness of their treeless plains and the blackened ugliness of their bush-burn forest clearings? And why was it that after decades of ill-rewarded wooing, New Zealand suddenly found herself to be the ‘promised land’ of many an English village, with farm labourers flocking to her shores in their thousands. A large part of the answer to these questions lies in the conditions which led to, and the consequences which flowed from, the great Revolt of the Field which broke upon English rural society in 1872 and stirred a score of counties to the core. The name of Joseph Arch, the Warwickshire hedgecutter who spearheaded the movement, was soon a household word in Britain, and New Zealand's fortunes were so closely linked with rural England that in a very short time it was scarcely less well known in that distant colony. By October 1873 her premier was writing of ‘the high character both for ability and for unflinching honesty of purpose which Mr. Joseph Arch enjoys, the reputation for which is widely current throughout the Colony’.4 Joseph Arch was 45 when he emerged from obscurity to lead the Revolt, and this was the very age which Featherston had set a month or two earlier as the upper limit for the recruitment of married men for assisted passages to New Zealand. We will therefore briefly outline Arch's earlier life against the broad context of English rural society, with special attention to the general fortunes of his class, and thereby give both some account of the origins of the Revolt, and a sketch of the making of the villagers who were to become New Zealand immigrants.

Joseph Arch was born in November 1826 in the South Warwickshire village of Barford, the son of an agricultural labourer.5 His parents were living with his maternal grandmother, in her freehold cottage, which she and her late husband had been able to buy over thirty years earlier, when he was working as a skilled hedger and ditcher on the Earl of Warwick's estate. This cottage and its large garden were priceless assets in the life of Joseph Arch, giving him advantages enjoyed by very few of his class. With a freehold home, his parents (particularly his mother), were able to develop an independent attitude, and speak their minds, while so many of their class were blackmailed into servility and silence by the fear of eviction. In due course, inherited by Joseph, the cottage was one of the assets which made it possible for him to take the lead in the Revolt.

The wages of Joseph's father, John Arch, never rose above ten shillings a week, and it was a saving of perhaps three pounds a year in rent, together with the produce of their large garden, which enabled the family to escape the humility of soup kitchen charity, and the degradation of poor law relief, to which many of their neighbours were reduced every winter. Nevertheless, Joseph's parents paid a price for the independent line which they followed and taught to their children. In his autobiography6 Joseph tells of a duel between his mother and a despotic parson's wife, following the latter's issuing of a decree that all girls at the village school were to have their hair cut round like a basin. For refusing to allow her two daughters' hair to be cut, Hannah Arch was subjected to petty persecution, and never forgiven. Joseph also records that in 1835 his father refused to sign a petition in favour of the Corn Laws, and for this was thrown out of work for four months. Hannah proceeded to support the family by working as a laundress.7 The significance of this determined independence of spirit will become more apparent if we examine the social and economic world of the farm labourer of the 1820s and 1830s.

Rural England in the nineteenth century presented to the world a unique social arrangement in the three-tiered system of landlord, farmer, and landless labourer. Throughout the rest of the world the bulk of the rural population owned or occupied the land they tilled — in other words, they were peasants. If many of them were peasant serfs, this merely meant that they were obliged to meet feudal obligations of work on their lord's property, as well as farming their own holdings. But in England most of the land was owned by the gentry, rented by the farmers, and worked by landless labourers. This pattern was the product of the centuries, but it had become more marked and widespread in recent times, partly through the continued decline of the yeoman, the owner-occupier of a small holding, who formed an intermediate class, and partly through the further extension of enclosures of open fields, commons and wastes, which removed the labourers' claims of property in the land. A combination of social and economic changes had, since the middle of the eighteenth century, turned the majority of village labourers into servile, demoralised men. The measured words of Professor Hobsbawm are not too strong to describe the tragedy of this transformation:

It is difficult to find words for the degradation which the coming of industrial society brought to the English country labourer; the men who had been ‘a bold peasantry, a country's pride’, the sturdy and energetic ‘peasantry’ whom 18th century writers had so readily contrasted with the starveling Frenchmen, were to be described by a visiting American in the 1840s as ‘servile, broken-spirited and severely straitened in their means of living’ … From that day to this those who observed him, or who studied his fate, have searched for words eloquent enough to do justice to his oppression.8

The causes of this degradation were complex, and included the effects of enclosures, the destruction of cottage industries by the Industrial Revolution, the effects on the village community of the counter-revolutionary stance of England's ruling class in the age of the French Revolution, and the economic and social consequences of the appearance of a surplus of rural labour. The enclosure movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which affected something like a quarter of the cultivated acreage of England, has been the subject of much debate. On the positive side, it undoubtedly led to widespread improvement in farming efficiency, a large increase in food production, and increased employment, both through the extension of the cultivated area, and of the acreage in labour-absorbing crops. Allegations that the legal processes of enclosure were commonly a mockery of justice are not supported by careful modern research.9 Nevertheless, it is clear that enclosure represented a destruction of much of the traditional culture of English peasant society. A community of cooperative self-help, governed in a paternalistic spirit, with avenues by which the lowest villager might rise in the social and economic scale, gave way to a rural society in which the rich grew richer while acknowledging only minimal obligations to their increasingly pauperised labourers. Before enclosure, a cottager with a pig or two, a cow and some poultry, on the common, and the right to gather firewood, could maintain a certain measure of economic independence. After enclosure he was purely a dependent wage labourer. The steady decay of cottage industries in the face of the Industrial Revolution accentuated this dependence. To these economic forces, was added the political ideology of the ruling class, fearful of the spread of ideas from France, to whom increased dependence was a means of social discipline. Once the growth of population led to a labour surplus, it was the labourer's last ‘inheritance’, the poor-rates, which completed his degradation. When, in 1795, the Berkshire magistrates meeting at Speenhamland decided to subsidise low wages from the rates, they unwittingly initiated a system which for forty years was to obliterate the distinction between worker and pauper, by relieving the farmers of the necessity of paying a living wage. Among its injustices were the subsidising of the large farmers' wage bill by the smallholder, and the reduction of all labourers to the same subsistence level, no matter how much or little work they performed. Tied to the parish of his birth by the Act of Settlement, ‘farmed’ as a pauper by the Speenhamland system, dependent for his cottage on the whim of its owner, it is not to be wondered at that many a rural labourer became a spectacle of abjection.

Yet not all submitted tamely to their fate. The most notable movement of protest was the ‘Swing’ riots, which swept over southern and eastern England in the autumn and winter of 1830–31, when Joseph Arch was a toddler of 4 years.10 The riots were aimed mainly at the destruction of threshing machines, which were depriving villagers of much of their winter labour, but there was also widespread arson of ricks and barns. Many employers received threatening anonymous letters demanding higher wages, usually crudely written, as few rural labourers were literate. Some were signed ‘Captain Swing’, and from these the riots have taken their name. The movement was unplanned, its spread across England was largely by word of mouth, and its organisation scarcely went beyond the gathering of local village mobs. Yet it aroused deep fears in the ruling class. The government sent troops to quell the disorders, and meted out brutal punishments. Nineteen rural workers were executed, nearly five hundred transported to Australia, and hundreds more imprisoned.

The Swing riots have their link with the founding of New Zealand, for among those who over these months nightly watched the ricks and barns of East Anglia going up in flames, was Edward Gibbon Wakefield. His pamphlet Swing Unmasked vividly depicts the suffering villagers:

What is that defective being, with calfless legs and stooping shoulders, weak in body and mind, inert, pusillanimous, and stupid, whose premature wrinkles and furtive glance tell of misery and degradation. That is an English peasant pauper; for the words are synonymous. His sire was a pauper, and his mothers milk wanted nourishment.11

Wakefield, and his fellow colonial reformers saw planned emigration as the logical solution to the problems and discontent of rural England. The Swing riots strengthened their case, and also, their resolve.

The riots also had their consequences for rural education, and thereby had some part in preparing the way for the very different rural revolt of the 1870s. Over the years following the ‘Swing’ riots the propertied class, disturbed by the increasing restlessness of the urban proletariat, and fearful that city and country side might one day rise in unison, turned to education as a means of social control. ‘On one point at least, Anglican, dissenter and secularist alike could agree,’ writes John Hurt. ‘The building of more schools would help to prevent the social unrest of the day from escalating into widespread revolution.’12 Mainly on the local initiative of the Anglican clergy, and with the guidance and support of the Anglican National Society, schools now multiplied rapidly throughout rural England. It was their sponsors' intention that they should teach subordination, but the literacy which they spread was in due course to prove an invaluable aid to Trade Union organisers, and emigration agents.

Joseph Arch was fortunate in that Barford had long had a school endowed to provide education for the children of the poor. For about three years, from the ago of 6, he attended school, and was taught by ‘as excellent a teacher as a poor boy could wish’ who saw that he learnt the rudiments of the three R's ‘so thoroughly that I never let them drop again.’13 But before he was nine he had to leave to start work bird-scaring at the wage of four-pence for a twelve-hour day.14 As Joseph grew to manhood, despite long working hours and frugal living conditions he continued a simple education at home, aided and encouraged by his mother. He spent much of his free time in reading, which included the Bible and Shakespeare. His social education was furthered by his membership of the village friendly society (which dated from 1832) and his association with Methodism, in which he followed his mother. Methodist preachers first appeared in Barford about 1840, holding meetings in a barn. Some years later Joseph became a Primitive Methodist lay preacher, a role in which he was able to develop the skills of public speaking, and also experience the working of a form of democratic organisation among the common people. By the time he emerged to lead the Union, he had been a Methodist preacher for twenty-five years, and claimed to have walked 7,000 miles to keep preaching appointments.15

In 1845 Joseph's mother died, and eighteen months later at the age of 20, he married Mary Ann Mills, the daughter of a carpenter in a nearby village. The young couple set up home in the Arch family cottage at Barford, caring for Joseph's father, and rearing six of the seven children who were born to them between 1847 and 1864. It was after the birth of their second child that Mary Ann was responsible for a decision which proved to be a major turning point of Joseph's life. As a labourer for the farmers of the neighbourhood he was earning only about eleven shillings a week, and Mary Ann told him she could not manage on this amount, averring that in the houses where she had previously worked as a domestic servant, ‘better food was given to the cats and dogs’, than she could afford for her family. Her suggestion that she should go out to work herself spurred Joseph to become a jobbing labourer, operating on contract.16 He had already proved that he could outwork the majority of his mates at such tasks as mowing and hedge-cutting, and he was to become a show champion in the latter craft. He soon demonstrated that he was a fast and proficient workman in a wide variety of rural skills, including ditching, fencing, ploughing, hurdle making and gate hanging.

From his piece-work contracts Joseph was able to bring home earnings which were often double his previous wage. To the freehold cottage was now added the second priceless asset of independent employment, for his reputation as a first-class contract worker meant that he could choose his jobs, rather than depend for his livelihood on a small group of local farmers. Joseph began to travel widely in search of good contracts, and came to know large areas of the Midland counties and parts of South Wales. These journeys broadened his understanding of rural England, and of the injustices inflicted on his own class. He travelled with many strange companions, often slept in barns and even under hedges to save money, yet employed gangs of up to twenty-five men on some of his contracts.17 From time to time on his travels he was invited to preach in the local chapels. In this and other ways he was becoming widely known and respected — another valuable asset when his days of leadership arrived.

We must now turn to consider how this rural world was faring in the 1850s and 1860s, while Joseph Arch was trudging along its lanes and working in its fields. These years have come to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of English agriculture. The demand for food grew with the steady rise of population in the industrial cities, and England was still dependent on her own farmers for the bulk of her supplies. With heavy capital investment and increasingly skilled management, output rose almost as fast as the population, so that it is estimated that as late as 1868 no less than 80 per cent of the United Kingdom's food was home grown.18 Squires and farmers prospered as never before, but the labourers' share of the wealth they toiled to create increased very little. Socially, the country world remained a class-ridden hierarchy. ‘At the sight of the squire the people trembled’, Arch wrote. ‘He lorded it right feudally over his tenants, the farmers; the farmers in their turn tyrannised over the labourers; the labourers were no better than toads under a harrow.’19

We can deal briefly with the landed society of England, for the lives of aristocrats and gentry had little direct connection with those of the majority of the village labourers, important as they were in the general governance of the rural world. Their oligarchy was maintained by a firm grip on the leadership positions of county life, and a psychological dominance based on ritual and age-old custom.29 Thus the squire's attendance at church was part of his régime. In the ornate family pew surrounded by the memorials of his ancestors, he was a figure apart, of more than human dimensions in the eyes of more humble worshippers. To him they owed the obeisance of the curtsy and the touching of the forelock. He graced the more important of local occasions, and lent the prestige of his name to various local institutions, but in general he was too remote to be considered an important element of the villagers' common life. His influence reached them indirectly by way of his tenants, the farmers. And during the ‘Golden Age’ one aspect of this influence was an increased aping of the gentry life styles by the farmers.

Over these years the labourer was finding the farmer an increasingly remote and unsympathetic master. By the mid-century it had become the general rule that farmers took no part in the physical work of their farms,21 but their men, with long memories of the village past, resented this ‘kid glove’ approach to farming.22 Traditional perquisites of the farm labourer were withdrawn by masters who now cared more about their own money income and less about the welfare of the villagers.23 Old customs of social intercourse between masters and men were discontinued. Once the labourers had thought nothing of calling at the farmers' front doors, now they often found that they were unwelcome even at the back.24

The shift in the farmers' position and attitude is highlighted by marked differences between their role in the Swing riots of 1830–31, and in the Revolt of the Field of the 1870s. The latter was basically a conflict between farmers and labourers, with considerable bitterness of feeling on both sides. But in the Swing riots, it was Edward Gibbon Wakefield's belief that the labourers' hostility was directed at squire and parson, and that the farmers shared the labourers' feelings.25 Hobsbawm and Rudé, after their careful investigation of the evidence, have concluded that there is a measure of truth in Wakefield's belief and that there was a good deal of collusion between farmers and labourers, with farmers on occasion appearing as active accomplices, although ‘taking them as a whole, they were uncertain and hesitant allies’ of the labourers.26 The farmers' involvement arose from

English villagers harvesting wheat with scythe their hostility to the level of tithes and rents being exacted from them in hard times. They were still close enough to the labourers to make widespread common cause with them. But over the ensuing years various developments drew the farmers into the circle of squires and clergymen, leaving the labourers isolated. The transfer in 1836 of the liability for tithes from the occupier of land to the owner, removed the farmers' main cause of hostility to the established church. Their substantial share of the fruits of the years of prosperity meant that their rents no longer worried them. Their increasing affluence, and the continuance of the long-term trend towards larger farms, served to narrow the gap between farmer and gentry. The result was that, as Joseph Arch expressed it, the farmers' wives now wanted to ‘play the piano, dress fine, make calls and ape the country gentry’, while the farmers began to ‘hunt, and shoot, and play the fine gentleman at ease’.27 From the middle of the century the farm house was often rebuilt outside the village.28 In the late 1860s local chambers of agriculture began to develop, where farmers and landlords mingled and developed closer social relations.29

We must examine the new life-style of the farmers a little more closely, to further our understanding of the deep pent-up bitterness it aroused in the labourers. Some farmers themselves gibed at the new way of life of their class. In discussing the social consequences of the enclosure in 1801 of the Berkshire parish of East Hendred, Lord Ernle quotes some lines from the manuscript farm-book of John Robey, a yeoman of East Hendred:

1743 1843 Man, to the Plough Man, Tally Ho! Wife, to the Cow. Miss, Piano Girl, to the Yarn. Wife, Silk and Satin. Boy, to the Barn. Boy, Greek and Latin. And your rent will be netted. And you'll all be Gazetted.30

Joseph Arch records that his first employer, a fairly well-to-do farmer, was brought to grief through the extravagant manner of living that he was led into by the London lady that he married.31 But over the Golden Age many a farmer was able to ape the gentry without being ‘gazetted’. Meanwhile, their labourers began to wonder why such masters could not afford to pay a living wage. ‘We can look any day from our work and see them dash by with their carriage and pair and servants in livery’,32 wrote a Gravesend labourer, of the local farmers, when the question began to be openly posed, with the outbreak of the Revolt. Another Kentish labourer bluntly made the same point at a union meeting at Farningham early in the Revolt. ‘Most of the farmers and landowners,’ he remarked, ‘are now able to keep up great establishments, a pack of hounds, and a carriage and pair, while they pay their labourers barely sufficient to keep body and soul together.’33 These were grievances which Arch had heard muttered in fields and cottages through the years, and which in 1872 he and a host of others began to sound abroad in the land. What answer might be expected of these men? What were the farmers like at home and abroad?

In the summer of 1876 Richard Grant White, a perceptive American observer, decided to pay his first visit to England, ‘where my forefathers had lived for about eleven hundred years.’34 He took particular interest in the everyday life of the English countryside, and by persistent endeavours was able to see a good deal of the inside both of cottages and farmhouses. He reported that he found the farmers ‘the most taciturn class in England’.35 They were, in fact, the only people he met who as a whole were silent and reserved. On reflection White decided that this silence might be due to the farmer's position. Knowing little more than the peasant, and able to talk but little better, he yet had a consciousness of his superiority which made him, in the presence of his betters, ashamed of his great mental inequality with them. White describes a typical farmhouse parlour, its only books a Bible and some kind of an almanac, its walls decorated with three or four ugly coloured prints of the cheapest kind, and remarks that the holder of a similar farm in New England or the Middle States would have received him more on a footing of equality, taken him into another sort of room, and had more to say in reply to his enquiries.36 White sums up the position of the farmers thus:

In truth, the English farmer is an aristocrat. He is willing to take his place in a system of caste, and to look up, if he may also look down. He will touch his hat to the squire, and think it quite right that people should be respectful to their superiors; and he is confirmed in this opinion, or rather this feeling, when Hodge touches his hat to him … I believe the farmers to be the most conservative body in the kingdom, the least disposed to change, and to be the main-stay of the tory party.37

White decided that, except in matters of horseflesh, the farmer did not seek to acquire the tastes or habits of a gentleman.38 He was content with his place in the social scale, he read little, and thought less. It was his wife and daughters who were often more ambitious. Richard Jefferies, himself a farmer's son of this period, has described how ‘Mademoiselle the Governess’ could transform the social outlook of the farmhouse, and effectively alienate the farmer from his own womenfolk.39 Thomas Hardy has described the same process at work in the relationship of Grace Melbury and her father, in The Woodlanders.

It would seem, then, that for all his prosperity, the farmer was in some ways a victim of the social changes that had come to the villages. Ill at ease in all but the more superficial relations with his social superiors, being led on something of a social dance by womenfolk who no longer shared his farming interests, he yet consoled himself in the companionship of his fellows, as he met with them in the institutions through which they together ruled their little world. Richard Jefferies has described how each of the country's agricultural districts functioned as ‘a little kingdom’, with its own capital city and well defined frontier line.40 In the market town ‘capital’ the informal ‘farmers' parliament’ met in their chosen inn to arrange concerted action in matters of common concern. Often such a district would have an Agricultural Association to sponsor an annual ploughing match and dinner, thus providing a day's holiday for the district's labourers, with an opportunity to exhibit their skills and receive rewards for long and faithful service, and a pleasant social evening for farmers and gentry. Through these institutions it was common for one or two leading farmers to establish the level of wages and working conditions for the district's labourers.41 Thus was the labourers' general welfare decided. At the level of individual needs and circumstances the farmers considered that the labourers' needs were met through their paternalistic consideration for their men, and the ‘good feeling’ which they maintained existed between master and man. The discovery that this ‘good feeling’ had so widely given place to bitterness and resentment came as a shock to the farmers when the Revolt broke upon them. The harshness of their reaction is the more understandable when we consider that as a class they already felt socially insecure before they learnt that they had lost the neighbourly respect which they expected as of right from their men.

Such then were Hodge's masters. We turn now to the fortunes of Hodge himself over these years in which Joseph Arch was being prepared in humble obscurity to become his champion. We note first that the ‘bold peasantry, their country's pride’, has descended in popular esteem to become the despised Hodge, the ignorant, spiritless clodhopper. This change for the worse in the tone and language of society's references to the village poor had already been noted earlier in the century by their champion, William Cobbett, who remarked on the increasing tendency for the labourers ‘to be spoken of by everyone possessing the power to oppress them in any degree in just the same manner in which we speak of the animals which compose the stock upon a farm. This is not the manner in which the forefathers of us the common people, were treated.’42 Even the urban trade unionist, infected by the condescension that the countryman has too often suffered from the town, came to think in similar times. The 1 January 1872 issue of the Beehive, a London trade union newspaper, printed an article on ‘The Agricultural Labourer’ which stated that ‘… In intellect he is a child, in position a helot, in condition a squalid outcast, he knows nothing of the past; his knowledge of the present is limited to the fields he works in.’43 In shrewdly-argued, well-disciplined protest, the rural labourers were almost immediately to give the lie to this caricature, but there was more truth in the writer's assertion that the farm labourer's ‘empty head and stomach, his smock frock and squalid cottage — all that is his — point reproachfully to those who own the broad acres of England or who preach in her churches.’

There is ample evidence that the villagers over large areas of England had frequent experience of an empty stomach. This was particularly the case in the ‘corn’ counties of the south and east of England. In this area the farms tended to be larger and the ratio of farm workers to farmers to be higher than in the ‘grazing’ counties of the north and west. It was the grain-growing south-east that had been swept by the Swing riots, and these counties also gave the strongest support to the Revolt of the Field. In the pastoral farming of the ‘grazing’ counties, the farmer hired many of his men by yearly agreement, so as to ensure constant care for his stock. To the advantage of secure regular income was added better social relations, for these men were looked upon as servants, not labourers, and for convenience in caring for livestock many of them were ‘indoor’ farm servants, that is, servants living in the farmer's home. But in the ‘corn’ counties the men had largely become day labourers, taken on as required, and turned off in large numbers in the slack times of the agricultural year, and when wet weather held up farm work. Income was therefore irregular, rising to its highest in the harvest season, together with further remuneration in kind, and falling lowest in winter, at which season villagers found it difficult to keep out of debt. Even at the best of times meat was a luxury, generally reserved for Sundays only. In hard times all that distinguished Sunday dinner was a little melted butter or grease on the potatoes. The monotony of a bread diet was relieved by soaking it in broth or spreading it with dripping. Toast water was the common substitute for tea.

The quality of the labourer's cottage varied widely, but too often it was wretchedly small and badly built. In the 1850s nearly half of all cottages had only one bedroom, some had only one room. In many the floors were of clay, which became sodden when it rained. The Poor Law had been a contributing cause to the housing problem. It encouraged ‘closed’ parishes, that is, parishes where the proprietors acted in concert to keep down the population, and hence the poor rates. Wherever possible, cottages were pulled down, and labour drawn from outside the parish. The ‘open’ parish, on the other hand, was notorious for its wretchedly built small cottages run up cheaply by small farmers and shopkeepers looking

Labourer's cottage: but it was too often ‘wretchedly small and badly built’ for a quick profit. In 1862 the Poor Law Union rather than the individual parish became the unit for settlement purposes, but many landowners persisted in keeping closed parishes. One reason for continuing to keep down rural population was the protection of game.

Hunting and shooting were class sports which became more and more fashionable throughout the century. While the villagers craved for meat, they saw the wild creatures about them protected by the Game Laws to provide sport for their ‘betters’. Hunger and resentment drove many labourers to flout these class laws. The landowners built up an army of gamekeepers to protect their quarry, and rural J.P.s probably spent more time dealing with breaches of these laws, than with any other kind of offence. To Joseph Arch one of the greatest indignities imposed on the labourer was the Poaching Prevention Act of 1862, which gave rural police the right to search without warrant any person whom they suspected of poaching. In his autobiography Arch points out how vulnerable this Act made the labourer in the matter of customary perquisites. He himself when wood-felling and timber-cutting had always taken the customary perquisite of a basket of chips and dead wood. He now had to take the precaution of making this wood perquisite a matter of formal agreement between himself and his employer, so as to have a defence if he should be waylaid by a police officer in search of game. He records how two ‘respectable, honest, married women’ of his own village were accosted when returning from a day in the fields cleaning turnips. Following long-established custom, they were taking a few turnips home in their aprons, for their families. They were brought before the Magistrate at Warwick, and fined for stealing turnips.44 On the matter of poaching Arch gave his views to a Select Committee on the Game Laws, in 1873:

an honest labourer would think nothing of knocking over a rabbit in the day-time if he saw it and it came in his way; and neither should I. I don't see any harm in it because in my opinion ground game is wild. The plain truth is we labourers do not believe hares and rabbits belong to any individual, not any more than thrushes and blackbirds.45

But what the farm labourer thought on this or any other matter was of little concern to his rulers in the decades preceding the Revolt. Arthur Clayden, Arch's friend and supporter from Berkshire, was near enough to the truth when he described the farm labourer as ‘a social Pariah … the sport of circumstances and prey of parish-officers.’46 To complete our brief account of the life and circumstances of the village labourer, we will let Clayden give a glimpse of his declining years. To break the pernicious Speenhamland system, the 1834 amendment of the Poor Law grouped parishes into Unions which were to erect Union Workhouses, where able-bodied paupers would be sent for relief, rather than receiving it in their own homes. While this removed the worst evils arising from outdoor relief, it had bitter effects when the workhouse system was applied to the aged and others unable to work. On 18 January 1875, Arthur Clayden wrote to the Labourers' Union Chronicle giving an example of this:

During the severe frost I was taking my constitutional along the highroad, when I met a white-headed old labourer slowly wending his way towards the town. Something in his pinched and withered look arrested my attention, and I stopped to speak to him. I found that he was on his way to the workhouse, leaving his venerable partner at home to keep the place against he came out by and bye. Nothing would the “guardians” allow him out, and so rather than starve he had bid his dear old partner “good-bye”, and was going into that poor man's purgatory — the workhouse. The owner of the land on which he had worked for more than half a century is worth over thirty thousand pounds a year, and farmer after farmer has he enriched by his toil. The clergyman of the little village where he lived gets eight hundred pounds a year, and preaches to a dozen people once a Sunday for it … put these facts together and you have the materials for a speech ten times more severe than has yet been uttered from a Union platform.47

Clearly, in his journeyings year by year through the countryside, Arch would have been presented with copious materials for a scorching indictment of the ordering of rural England. It was not for want of a case that the labourers stirred so little over these decades. We must now briefly survey the influences which had been at work among them to make possible their sudden and unexpected revolt. One was the slow but continuous spread of education and literacy. The quiet work of schools, chapels, reading rooms and circulating libraries had brought the day when newspaper reports and printed propaganda could be a potent force in arousing and organising the village labourer. The railways and the penny post had also helped to widen the horizon and raise the aspirations of the rural worker, as well as making it possible for active and determined leaders to create a ‘modern’ type of large-scale organisation embracing the common people of the broad countryside. The continued growth of village non-conformity, in itself an expression of protest against the existing social order, had been quietly finding and training the leaders for the Revolt, and giving the labourers experience in mutual action. By one means and another, also, the labourers were made aware that they had influential friends and advocates in other ranks of society. One such was Canon Girdlestone, who in 1862 moved from a high-wage parish in Lancashire to the low-wage parish of Halberton in North Devon. Shocked by the living conditions of men receiving only seven shillings to eight shillings a week, he tried to persuade the farmers to pay better wages, first by personal remonstrances, and then by a hard-hitting sermon preached during a cattle plague in 1866 on the text, ‘Behold the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle.’ The farmers' only response was anger and abuse, so Girdlestone turned to other methods. By publicising the labourers' conditions, first in a letter to The Times, he obtained the means to organise a regular system of migration from Devon to the high-wage districts of the north of England. A more wide-spread indication of public sympathy and support was provided for the labourers by the Royal Commission of 1867, on the employment of women and children in agriculture. Taking a wide view of its task, the Commission built up a comprehensive picture of rural labour conditions. In the course of its investigations, and from the resulting public discussions, the labourers discovered that they had many worthwhile friends.

The Revolt would appear to have been finally triggered by a setback to rising hopes among the labourers. Although, for propaganda purposes, their leaders maintained that the prosperity of the Golden Age had passed the rural workers by, research indicates that between 1851 and 1871 real wages had been rising, though by less than one per cent per year.48 The spread of chapels and branches of friendly societies are among signs of a general improvement in conditions, brought about by continued emigration from the countryside (both to the cities and overseas) leaving a considerably reduced labour force to handle more work. It seems that, at least at the busy seasons, the balance of advantage had shifted during the 1850s to favour the employee. Then, from the mid '60s on, returns from arable land fell, and wage rates, particularly in the ‘corn’ counties, came under strain. At this very time the labourer saw the economic advantages of a large family begin to disappear. In the ‘corn’ counties it was the farmers' practice to turn off single men first when winter came, to reduce the burden of poor relief. Early marriages and large families were therefore common. The children contributed to the family income from an early age. Children as young as 6 were put into public gangs, organised by gangmasters who contracted for certain kinds of farm work. Older children earned enough to provide the family with something of a security against starvation should the father fail to earn enough. But by the early 1870s the large family, especially of young children, was becoming a handicap. The Gangs Act of 1869 forbade the employment of children under eight in a gang, and in 1873 all employment of children under eight was forbidden. The 1870 Education Act created justified forebodings that children were to become an increasing liability, rather than an asset.49 This simultaneous trend to reduced wages, and loss of children's earnings gives added point to Joseph Arch's ironic grace, which had wide currency in the 1870s:

O Heavenly Father bless us, And keep us all alive, There are ten of us to dinner And food for only five.

It was this dashing of recently raised hopes which caused the surge of anger that triggered the Revolt.

Over the hungry months of the winter of 1871–2 the discontent led to increased murmurings and talk of finding ways to assert their rights, among villagers in many parts of the country. In South Warwickshire, labourers in the village of Harbury, known locally as ‘Hungry Harbury’, made the first move, and held a public meeting to discuss asking for an advance in wages. Other villages began to stir, including Wellesbourne where, after a meeting or two, it was decided to call a larger meeting and get someone known and respected to come and speak and lead the movement. Three men were deputed to go to Barford to ask Joseph Arch to undertake the task. They went on Wednesday, 7 February 1872, a wet, miserable day, and found Arch at home making a box for his soldier son. Having heard their story, and satisfied himself that they were in earnest, Arch consented to speak at Wellesbourne that evening, and told them to book the club room at the Stag's Head Inn for the meeting.

Arch later confessed that he had many doubts and fears as he tramped the muddy road, between the dripping hedgerows, that evening. He was uncertain whether the scattered, depressed farm workers could be organised into an effective trade union, and he did not expect to find more than thirty or forty men gathered on that wet night at Wellesbourne. Instead he found the place ‘as lively as a swarm of bees in June’. By word of mouth news of the meeting had spread in a few hours to the neighbouring villages, and there were far too many people gathered for a meeting in the Stag Inn. It was held instead on the green outside, under the chestnut tree, with lanterns hung on bean poles for light. Arch spoke standing on an old pig-killing stool, and in his autobiography he describes the scene:

In the flickering light of the lanterns I saw the earnest upturned faces of these poor brothers of mine — faces gaunt with hunger and pinched with want — all looking towards me and ready to listen to the words that would fall from my lips. These white slaves of England with the darkness all about them, like the children of Israel waiting for some one to lead them out of the land of Egypt.50

The village labourers had found the prophet who could arouse and lead them, and take their case onto the national stage. Arch accepted their call as his destiny. ‘I felt,’ he wrote, ‘as if there was a living fire in me … There was a strength and a power in me which had been pent up and had been growing, and now it flowed forth.’51

Over the following weeks the union grew rapidly. Arch tramped from

A Meeting under The Wellesbourne Tree village to village addressing meetings, ‘Sometimes … under a tree, sometimes in a field; now it would be in an orchard, and the next night be by the roadside. We met by sunlight and moonlight and starlight and lantern light — the sun in the sky or the farthing dip — it was all one to the Union man at that time.’52 The new movement was soon involved in a whole series of small strikes and lockouts as the men respectfully but firmly approached the farmers for a rise in wages, and the latter for the most part contemptuously ignored their requests, and retaliated in the various ways open to them, when the men withdrew their labour. Fortunately for the men, the press gave them wide publicity and considerable support, with the result that generous aid flowed from workpeople in the towns. This aid, and the migration and emigration of some of the men, enabled the union to win its contest with the masters of South Warwickshire in the spring of 1872. Meanwhile the movement had been organised into a county union at a meeting following a massive demonstration in Leamington on Good Friday, 29 March 1872. It was here that Carter, the New Zealand immigration agent, first met Arch, and found him to be a man after his own heart. He described him thus:

He appeared to me then about forty years of age. He looked as if he had lived hard, and worked hard. He was of full middle height, with a strongly built frame, and a dark complexion: he was fluent in speech and strong in voice. When I first heard him speak — on the above Good Friday, at a public meeting at Leamington — I thought his speech the most heart-stirring and manly address I have ever heard delivered by a working-man.53

Carter had two interviews with Arch on emigration to New Zealand, on this occasion. However, Arch did not at this time favour emigration, as he felt it robbed the country of its most enterprising workers, and was sanguine that his movement could win its way by other means.

Meanwhile the Revolt had spread rapidly in the midland counties and southern England. In some places local stirrings had begun before Arch had come forward to lead the Warwickshire labourers, but many areas were first aroused by news of his vigorous initiative and brave words, spread abroad by the country's press. Appeals for a visit from Arch came from far and wide. The Warwickshire men decided that the time had come to form the rural labourers into a national trade union, and issued invitations to a conference which convened in Leamington on 29 May 1872. Representatives from twenty-six counties brought into being the National Agricultural Labourers Union. Joseph Arch was elected President at a salary of two pounds a week, Henry Taylor, a Leamington carpenter, was appointed paid secretary, and Matthew Vincent, proprietor of the Royal Leamington Chronicle, which had supported the labourers' cause from the start, became voluntary treasurer. An executive of twelve farmworkers was elected, and a consultative committee of gentlemen favourable to the principles of the union was also set up. Members were to pay an entrance fee of sixpence and a weekly contribution of twopence. The conference bore a strong resemblance to a religious revival, which is not surprising, since many of the delegates owed their presence at Leamington to their training as Methodist preachers. Speeches were punctuated with cries of ‘Amen’, ‘Praise Him’, and other devout utterances. One delegate said: ‘Sir, this be a blessed day: this 'ere Union be the Moses to lead us poor men up out o’ Egypt’ — and the imagery of the Exodus was to be drawn on again and again in the course of the Revolt.

Some district unions declined to send delegates to the conference, the most notable of these being the Kent (later Kent and Sussex) Labourers' Union and the Lincolnshire Labour League. The London Trades Council, which took a close interest in the Revolt, later endeavoured to bring the whole movement into unity, most notably at a conference at the Bell Inn, London, on 17 December 1872. These efforts failed, but in November 1873 most of the independent smaller groups combined loosely in a Federal Union. Unfortunately the Federal and the National acted more often as rivals than as partners in the cause of the rural labourers. At the height of the Revolt, the National claimed the allegiance of about two-thirds of the unionists. As an association, the Federal was never a great success, but one of its affiliates, the Kent and Sussex Labourers' Union, eventually proved to be the most successful and resilient element in the whole Revolt.

As a movement, the Revolt of the Field differed strikingly from the

Farm labourers' meeting in a village square Swing riots of 1830–31. The latter were rebellious, essentially local, mob actions. In the rural world of the 1830s it would have been impossible to create a successful national labourers' movement. In the Revolt of the 1870s some features of the earlier tradition persisted here and there, but the improvement in communcations, above all else, made it an essentially different type of movement. The spread of literacy, and the coming of the railways and the penny post, all helped to make possible a modern trades union approach. The Swing riots produce no literature, but the Revolt was characterised by public meetings, well-reported in the press, and both the National Union, and the two main branches of the Federal produced their own widely circulating newspapers. The hardening of class lines between farmers and their labourers, and the improved educational status of the men, also gave the Revolt something of the flavour of a modern ‘freedom movement’. The labourers clearly felt that they were grossly undervalued by the society in which they lived, yet their reaction was not a primitive resort to irrational rebellion, but a sustained and considered assertion of their human rights and dignity. In their skilful use of the law courts, of the boycott, of non-violent direct mass action, and of political involvement, their movement invites comparison with the best traditions of the American Negro Revolution. In its geographical spread also, the Revolt differed from the Swing riots, in that beside the corn-growing south and east, it extended also into some of the pastoral counties of the west. Both movements found their main support in the south-east of England, but by extending in strength as far west and north as Devon, Herefordshire, Warwickshire, Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire, the Revolt achieved the wider distribution.

Given the predicament of the English farm labourer and the nature of his revolt, it is not surprising that the New Zealand authorities looked to the movement with such hope. Their new land was hungry for men accustomed to hard labour, and gifted in the rural skills. The best of England's farm labourers were demanding adequate food, decent homes, the chance to better themselves and secure a stake in the land, and the right to be treated with full respect as free men. All these the distant colony could offer to men of energy and determination. Almost simultaneously the New Zealand emigration drive and the union organisations of the Revolt began to reach out into the English rural world, to recruit the village labourer. It was inevitable that their fortunes should be intertwined.

3 Agents and Emigrants, 1871–73

LIKE THE UNION movement of the Revolt, the New Zealand emigration drive was untidy, improvised and disunited. The methods of the two organisations provide interesting parallels, although, as one would expect, their fortunes in the field tended to follow an inverse pattern. A brief surge of heightened industrial activity in Britain in the early 1870s favoured the rural unions, while hampering emigration. The village labourers saw their wages rise by about twenty per cent, and there were plenty of tempting offers for those prepared to migrate to the cities. With a rising optimism as to their prospects in their homeland, most of them turned a deaf ear to the persuasions of the New Zealand agents, and the colony's recruitment drive dragged badly. However, the New Zealand authorities used these disappointing early years to steadily bring their policies more into line with the social realities of rural England, and to improve their recruitment organisation. When the tide turned against the rural unions, the farm labourers would find New Zealand ready with an emigration programme well attuned to their needs.

When he accepted the newly-created position of Agent-General for New Zealand in the United Kingdom, in March 1871, Dr Featherston had just returned from an official visit to London. He had been one of two commissioners sent there in 1869 to negotiate with the Imperial Government, for the retention of two British regiments in the colony, as a counter o the continuing Maori threat in the North Island. The commissioners failed on this their primary mission, as the British Government was determined to disentangle itself from further involvement in the colonists' wars, but they were able to induce the home government to guarantee a £1,000,000 loan for roads to open up native districts. The commissioners also made enquiries concerning immigration, and went beyond their instructions to arrange for the immediate recruitment of a small number of Scandinavian immigrants, whom they considered would make ideal pioneer settlers for the North Island bush. Featherston therefore combined the experience of a New Zealand settler and administrator with an up-to-date knowledge of homeland affairs relevant to his new task. He wrote promptly on 3 March 1871 to C. R. Carter, who was in England, with the request, ‘If you have nothing better to do – will you enquire about offices at the West End, and also about a house a short way out of London, and near a rail.’1 Featherston left New Zealand in May, reaching London late in July, and with Carter's help had soon taken a furnished villa at Croydon and established the headquarters offices of the New Zealand immigration drive in eight rooms leased at 7 Westminster Chambers.

Isaac Featherston 1813–1876

The assignment which Featherston now took in hand was no simple one. To the task of finding suitable immigrants were added staff problems in England, and difficulties in maintaining liaison with the authorities in New Zealand. The division of authority in the Colony between the general and the provincial governments was a recurrent source of friction and confusion. By the 1870 Immigration and Public Works Act the General Government could only conduct immigration requested by the provincial superintendents. Featherston left New Zealand without any specific directions on immigration, and it was many months before the despatches he received began to add up to a clear picture of the colony's requirements. Fortunately he did not delay but, as he wrote in a despatch of 16 November 1871, proceeded to act ‘more from my knowledge of the mind of the Ministry than from any positive or definite instructions.’2 As there was no emigration going on, ‘except in miserable driblets to Canterbury and Otago’,3 Featherston employed agents to ascertain what emigration might be depended on from England and Scotland, and on their reports proving discouraging, turned his immediate attention to Germany and Scandinavia, where he made encouraging arrangements which, however, did not in he event live up to their promise. In any case, colonial public opinion would not have accepted anything but a predominantly British immigration flow.

Featherson soon began to give his main attention to perfecting his recruitment organisation in Britain. Here his lot was greatly complicated by the failure of the General Government to insist that the provincial governments inform their emigration agents that they no longer had any powers to recruit for their provinces except as authorised by the Agent-General.4 Thus Carter's recruitment campaign of September-October 1871 in Cornwall owed much of its frustration to the absurd situation of being in competition with a Canterbury agent, offering better terms than Featherston had authorised Carter to give.5 This situation was eventually tidied up, particularly by the passing of the 1871 Immigration and Public Works Act, in November, empowering the General Government to take the entire control of emigration.6 Former provincial agents provided valuable members of Featherston's staff, and to them he added other men, such as Carter, with experience of New Zealand's needs. On 1 and 9 December 1871, Featherston called the principal members of his staff into conference. They agreed unanimously that an emigration drive of the scale contemplated by the New Zealand Government was impossible unless a uniform system was adopted, and that it was utterly beyond the power of the desired class of emigrants to meet the cost of their passage in cash, so that a promissory note system was a necessity. Featherston accordingly drew up uniform regulations,7 basing them on various provincial regulations already issued by the Governor,8 and including provision for promissory notes where the passage money could not be met in cash. In doing this, Featherston was aware that he was exceeding his powers, but was gratified when shortly after, he received a despatch authorising this very course of action.9 He reported that the emigration agents condemned his regulations as illiberal, while he himself regarded them as too liberal. He considered, however, that a temporary generosity was necessary to start a stream of emigration.10 Once it was flowing he thought increased contributions towards passage money should be required, to make the scheme largely self-supporting. Featherston's optimism failed to be justified by the recruitment results of 1872 and 1873, and the cabinet, which initially had received his regulations with approbation, responded to growing impatience in the colony by sending from time to time instructions to liberalise the terms.

The inadequate flow of immigration provided fuel for provincial rivalries. A major and clearly acknowledged aim of the immigration and public works policy was colonisation of previously unoccupied parts of the North Island, so that the growing strength of the European population would effectively counter the Maori threat, and relieve the colony of heavy defense expenditure.11 Although nearly two-thirds of the European population was in the South Island, the colony had in 1869 accepted a largely North Island cabinet, because these men put forward a policy which seemed to offer hope of an early solution of the ‘native difficulty’. In line with this policy, Wellington and Hawke's Bay, the two provinces which had suffered most in the wars of the late 'sixties, received far more than their ‘share’ of assisted immigration in the first years of the scheme. The other provinces became restive when the meagre immigration flow proved quite inadequate to their needs. In mid 1871 the Otago Provincial Council voted £12,000 for the despatch of immigrant ships independently of those arranged by the Agent-General,12 and later in the year Thomas Birch and James Seaton ‘two settlers with many years' residence in Otago’ were appointed by the General Government to go to Britain as perambulating home agents, on the recommendation of the Superintendent and Provincial Council of Otago.13 On 17 May 1873 the Canterbury Superintendent wrote to Vogel complaining that his province's interests were not sufficiently looked after, as ‘emigrants choose their own Provinces, and their advisers are North Island men’.14 The Canterbury request for permission to send home an agent to act for the province under direction of the Agent-General, was granted. The appointment went to Andrew Duncan, a provincial council member, who had begun his colonial career as a labourer, and worked his way up to become a successful seedsman and shopkeeper.15 Among other colonists sent home as emigration agents was William Burton, a Taranaki settler, appointed by his province's executive in June 1874. Featherston considered that some of the agents sent to him from New Zealand were of little use, but Duncan and Burton proved very effective, and as New Zealand emigration moved into closer association with the rural unions, their ability to establish an easy rapport with the village labourer proved a valuable asset.

In its developed form Featherston's immigration organisation consisted of three main elements, the London office staff, several peripatetic full-time agents, and over a hundred part-time local agents. The London office, under Featherston's immediate supervision, was responsible for the central direction of the campaign, including widespread advertising, the directing of accepted emigrants to their ships, the inspection and chartering of vessels, and their despatch from the ports. The peripatetic agents, such as Duncan and Burton, visited likely districts and gave public lectures, drawing on their personal knowledge of the colony. They were commonly empowered also to approve applications on the spot, a useful arrangement for speeding up the paper work, and especially valuable in the particular circumstances of rural England, where quick decisions facilitated the rapid despatch of large parties from a district, while delay allowed interests opposed to emigration to undermine and frustrate the work. C. R. Carter held an exceptional position, being both one of the most useful of Featherston's office staff, and also one of the most gifted of the itinerant agents. He described his duties thus:

I had to deliver oral lectures on New Zealand: making out the quarterly emigration returns fell to my lot: sometimes I acted as Despatching Officer to our emigrant ships sailing from London, and once, one from Hamburg: I had to assist in preparing the Charter Parties for emigrant ships the Agent-General contracted for, and see them properly signed: Sometimes I had to correspond with the Local Agents: often I had to select and approve of large bodies of emigrants: and finally, the control of the printing and advertising was entirely in my hands.16

Finally there were the local agents, people such as school teachers, booksellers, drapers, and estate agents, working on a commission basis. They distributed advertisements and application forms in their areas. Featherston considered them an essential intermediary between his London office and the intending emigrant; the New Zealand Government considered them an unnecessary expense.

Despite this impressive organisation, for more than two years the results achieved were, as we have seen, quite disappointing. In the circumstances of 1872–3 the most liberal of terms would probably not have greatly helped recruitment. When the Colonial Office learnt that the colony was asking Featherston to find 8,000 emigrants during 1872, Lord Kimberley, the Secretary of State, commented:

It is not easy I imagine to catch 8,000 English emigrants just now. It is curious to compare hypothesis with fact: the hypothesis being that there are a vast number of half starved Englishmen who would make good colonists; the fact that paupers are utterly unfit for colonists, and those who are fit are generally well employed at home, and don't want to go abroad.17

Though the colonists got nowhere near their 8,000 emigrants for 1872, within a year or two events were to prove that their hypothesis was nearer the truth than Lord Kimberley's version of the social facts. In the meantime the generous terms of Brogdens' recruitment offer tested the emigrant market fairly effectively, though of course not all intending emigrants wished to engage themselves as navvies. During 1872 Featherston despatched 6,292 assisted immigrants. 3,682 of them were English, but more than half of these were Brogdens' recruits. Featherston had therefore found only half of the 8,000 he had been asked for, and this the New Zealand government pointed out to him when it began to face increasingly vocal criticism in the harvest months of early 1873. Featherston's reply18 pointed out that Brogdens had proved such formidable competitors to his own recruitment that he had placed the whole of his staff at their disposal in order to get their contract disposed of and out of the way. Furthermore the government had hampered him by instructions not to land emigrants in the months of June, July and August (the southern winter), while it was difficult to get emigrants to move over the northern winter months of December, January and February. As a result, his effective emigration season was limited to the seven months from May to November. He was confident, however, that the future prospects of emigration were good. Interest in New Zealand was increasing daily in Britain, and the number of applications from intending emigrants, which had been 20 to 30 a day when he first arrived, had grown to between 120 and 150 by April 1873.19

Featherston was asked to find about 13,000 immigrants in 1873 and although the stream was certainly beginning to strengthen, New Zealand's hunger for labour was growing even faster, leading to ever-increasing impatience. A flood sufficient to satisfy the demand could hardly be expected while the British labour market remained buoyant and North America continued in active competition for emigrants. Nevertheless, something could be done about lesser obstacles, and over these years New Zealand public opinion and government policy moved steadily towards more liberal terms for immigrants, and finally to acceptance of free immigration. The facts of English rural poverty, repeatedly pointed out by Featherston's agents, were forcefully presented to the New Zealand public and government from other quarters also. Thus in May 1872 the Revd. G. C. Cholmondeley, of Heathcote near Christchurch, put his views on the subject to William Reeves, a member of the New Zealand cabinet, and at Reeves's request prepared a memorandum which Reeves forwarded to Featherston.20 Cholmondeley had served for abour fourteen years as curate of a large parish in Norfolk, had done a little recruiting for Canterbury Province in Gloucestershire in 1859, and had served as chaplain on an Australian emigrant ship. From his own knowledge of the eastern counties of England he maintained that the great majority of the working people would be quite unable to afford the fare from their parish to the port of embarkation. He also wrote of

… their ignorance, and, as a result of this, their fear of moving from their native place. The farmers, who are the chief employers of labour, are not slow to take advantage of this timidity. Lest immigration should cause a rise in the price of labour, they discourage it as much as possible, infecting doubts into their workmen's minds as to the possible motives of emigration agents.

Cholmondeley recommended that the colony carry out more effective propaganda among the working class, and that wherever necessary emigrants should be advanced the fare to the port of embarkation. On 5 June 1872 Featherston was directed to pay the cost of reaching the ship, and other expenses, in all cases where these proved a barrier to the emigration of desirable persons, and these instructions were repeated in despatches of 4 September and 23 November, 1872.21 Featherston was also directed on 6 July 1872 to relax the age limit of 45 for married men, where this would help to get desirable families; he replied that he was already doing so.

In May 1873 Dr R. H. Bakewell, recently returned from a voyage as Surgeon-Superintendent on a New Zealand immigrant ship, wrote three letters on New Zealand immigration to a London newspaper. These letters were promptly forwarded to the colony's Immigration Department.23 Bakewell first pointed out the many advantages which the United States and Canada enjoyed over New Zealand in the recruitment of immigrants, and then developed his main recommendation for the colony:

As to passage money, it is perfectly certain that you will never get any large immigration unless you pay the whole passage money. Even then New Zealand would hardly be on a level with the States, because the additional outfit for a long sea voyage, and the dread of the voyage itself would more than counterbalance the small payment required for emigrating to America.

Bakewell pointed New Zealand to the example of Trinidad, where he had served as health officer of shipping, and examined all the immigrant ships arriving from India. Trinidad was providing free passages, including free outfits, to Indian coolies. The cost per head was as much as it took to bring an Englishman from England to New Zealand, and the result of the policy had been to take Trinidad from depression to prosperity.

The same message was contained in a letter to the Lyttelton Times, written on 24 September 1873 by James Jenkins, a citizen of Gloucester, whose willingness to assist the colony's emigration campaign was made use of a month or two later. Jenkins maintained that in England:

… people of the class who have to do hard and rough work, get so badly paid that they can, by no means of their own, hope to get money to better their condition by emigrating to your colony or elsewhere. They are helplessly wedded to the soil of old England, unless means can be provided, not only to take them away free but to induce them to see that the exchange will benefit them; and your colony, nor any other, will never be benefited by the wealth which would result from their labour could you obtain it….24

Jenkins then gave a number of examples from his area of working men who had had to abandon intentions of emigrating to New Zealand. One, a gardener of good character, with a family, had accumulated ten pounds by careful saving over a period of time, but was told that he must find fourteen pounds, and so had been unable to go. Jenkins claimed that he could multiply examples such as this.

It may be asked why the government's repeated instructions to Featherston to meet any expenses that were hindering worthwhile emigrants, had not been implemented in cases such as these. The simple explanation is probably that Featherston's emigration organisation was not sophisticated enough to handle such matters. Short of a thorough examination of the means of individual applicants, there was no way of deciding which were deserving of special consideration. Unless thoroughly administered, the widespread granting of concessions would create opportunities for dishonesty on the part of local agents, and lead to various anomalies which would cause hard feelings on the emigrant ships. There was really no simple half-way house between a uniform system of assisted immigration, and free immigration. Featherston hesistated to take the plunge, and make the terms completely free, though he apparently considered that he had been empowered to do so by clear instructions from New Zealand that he should make his terms as liberal as those offered by any other government. He wavered briefly in March 1873, and, in his own opinion ‘very unadvisedly offered not only free passages as far as money payments were concerned, but to abolish the system of promissory notes altogether’. Having promulgated new regulations to this effect on 10 March, he quickly decided that he had committed a grave blunder, and cancelled them on 17 March. His principal reasons were that the step would have given justifiable grounds of complaint to Brogdens, and to the firms he had contracted with for emigrants in Germany and Scandinavia, and that it would have rendered it difficult for the New Zealand Government to collect the promissory notes already given by immigrants.25 This vacillation of Featherston's is possibly to be accounted for by a severe illness he suffered in the early months of 1873.26 It was now clear that he would require unequivocal instructions from the government before he would introduce free immigration. Before we see how the New Zealand cabinet came to take this step, we must return to the unions of the Revolt, for their changed circumstances were encouraging their voices to become among the most potent of those calling for this very policy.

As we have seen, in the early stages of the Revolt, union attitudes to emigration were coloured by hopes of a new order in the homeland. Emigration agents, however, hopefully canvassed the unions, and unfortunately for all involved, among the most successful were those of the Brazilian Government. By means of extravagant promises about 1,000 emigrants were induced to leave for Brazil between May 1872 and February 1873. Most of these came from Warwickshire where the Brazilian Government early secured two local agents, one of them a delegate of the National Union; and a good number were from Gloucestershire, where somewhat later the secretary of the Gloucester district of the National Union was enlisted as a Brazilian agent. In Brazil the emigrants were sent to poorly-administered, isolated colonies in an unhealthy humid climate, and many of them died. When the facts became known in England, the National Union formally dissociated itself from all Brazilian emigration schemes. Most of the emigrants eventually moved from Brazil to the United States, or returned home to England with financial help from well-wishers both in England and Brazil.27 The dampening effects of this episode on all emigration recruitment among the unions can be imagined. James Jenkins, the Gloucester friend of New Zealand emigration, commenting in September 1872 on the sufferings of the labouring families that had left his neighbourhood for Brazil, wrote that their misfortunes were ‘sure to have, on the uneducated minds of the English agricultural labourers, a deterrent effect as to emigration in general’.

However, better news was coming from emigrants who had gone elsewhere. Queensland was the only British colony offering free passages in 1872, and in September 1872 both the National and the Kent Unions officially endorsed this scheme.29 The National's executive resolved to pay railway fares and provide outfits for members emigrating to Queensland as part of a policy of assisting surplus agricultural labourers to emigrate and they indicated that if other British colonies offered free passages, similar help would be given to their recruits from the union. By May 1873 the Kent Union had assisted fifty-five members to emigrate to Australia, twenty-nine to the U.S.A., and two elsewhere.30 The Kent Union continued to end further small parties to Queensland over the following years, while others were sent to South Australia when it began offering free passages late in 1873.

We have already seen that the generous terms of Brogdens' emigration offer induced a number of National Union members to emigrate to New Zealand during 1872, especially from Warwickshire and Oxfordshire. Their good reports led a small stream of relatives and friends to follow them. Although he did not as yet have free passages to offer, Featherston appears to have steadily courted the unions. He probably initiated the approach made by Carter to Arch in March 1872.31 This was followed up later in the year by two visits to the offices of the National Union at Leamington by the Revd Gideon Smales, a veteran New Zealand clergyman and settler, temporarily on Featherston's staff, engaged to

Charles Rooking Carter 1822–1896 lecture on New Zealand in various parts of England.32 In April 1874 Featherston claimed that over the previous twelve months he had been ‘in almost constant communication with the Executive Committees of the several Agricultural Labourers' Unions’ and had lost no opportunity of enlisting their interest in New Zealand emigration. He also inferred that union leaders had visited him at his London office.33 He must have been aware that the unions were becoming increasingly interested in emigration as the intractable attitude of many farmers and landowners became more evident. The National Union received a foretaste of the strength of organised opposition when on 17 April 1873 the farmers of the Essex and Suffolk Association resolved on a lock-out of union members, and proceeded to carry it through successfully.

The National Union's changed attitude to emigration found expression in a memorial from its executive committee to the Legislative Assembly of New Zealand, dated 15 May 1873, and signed by Joseph Arch as chairman, and three other committee members.34 The memorial first depicted the English farm labourers' condition thus:

Their homes have, in many cases been wretched in the extreme; their wages insufficient; and their food scant and unwholesome. It has been impossible for them to educate their children; to avoid the miseries of debt; or to make provision for old age; - and the result has been that after years of hopeless toil, during which they have had largely to appeal to public charity, they have been compelled to end their days as paupers in the Union Workhouse.

The memorial proceeded to tell of the formation of the National Union, with the aim of redressing these grievances. It stated that emigration had been found to afford the speediest solution of the many difficulties, but that unfortunately many English labourers were going to settle among ‘people who are aliens in customs, language, and religion’ in Brazil and other countries giving free passages. The committee felt that this was undesirable when there was an urgent need for them ‘in a land where their own tongue is spoken and their own government and customs prevail’. The memorial concluded by making its petition:

It is, however, vain to expect that the labourer will, unaided, find his way to the English Colonies; and we therefore appeal, through you, to the country you represent urging that free passages from an English port, if not from their homes, be provided for all eligible labourers and their families who are willing to seek your shores; and further, that provision be made for their reception and for their transfer to fields in which their labour may be most in demand. Should it be possible for your Government to meet our wishes, and so to attract to its own land the tide of emigration now flowing to Brazil and other countries, our Committee will do all in their power to see that only proper parties are allowed to avail themselves of your privilege.

On 5 July 1873, probably before this memorial was received, O'Rorke, the New Zealand Minister for Immigration, had written to Featherston authorising him to provide passages to and from the colony to representatives from ‘societies and organisations the members of which are fitted for emigration’. ‘Organised bodies’ of agricultural labourers and small farmers were singled out for special mention.35 There was no chance of persuading Arch to visit New Zealand at this stage, as he had decided early in the summer to accept an invitation from the Canadian Government to visit their country. He sailed for Canada on 28 August 1873 and arrived back in England on 18 November 1873. The initial New Zealand response to the memorial was a short note, dated 29 July 1873, from the Under Secretary for Immigration, asking the union to communicate with the Agent-General in London, who would inform them as to the terms of New Zealand emigration.36 This useless, low-level reply was justly criticised in the colony. There was as yet nothing to induce any officer of the union to make the long journey to New Zealand.

But a new day was about to dawn for New Zealand immigration. On 5 September 1873 a committee of the Legislative Council appointed to make a thorough examination of ‘the practical working and results of the immigration policy of 1870’,37 reported that although in general they considered that a system of immigration should be largely self-supporting, and that part payment of passage money in cash served to guarantee, as a general rule, an emigrant's eligibility as a new settler, yet in view of the urgent demand for labour in the colony and the competition for immigrants in the Home labour market, for a time free passages should be offered to immigrants. Meanwhile the New Zealand Premier had come to the same conclusion. This was Julius Vogel, who had first held cabinet office in June 1869, and whose meteoric rise to a dominant position in New Zealand politics was a direct result of his being the main spokesman for the immigration and public works policy. He had become premier on 8 April 1873, and with a desperate labour shortage threatening the success of his development policy, he took over the Immigration portfolio on 11 October 1873. His impact on the recruitment drive in Britain was immediate.

To overcome the slowness of mail communications, Vogel decided to make maximum use of the cable facilities available from Melbourne. The day he took over the portfolio, he cabled Featherston. His message began, ‘Am Immigration Minister. Correspond direct. Address telegrams “Vogel, Melbourne”, forwarding arranged’. A series of staccato instructions followed. Free passages were to be introduced immediately. Emigrants ere to be assembled in depots in advance of sailings, so that all ships could be despatched with a full complement. If possible, two fast steamers were to be chartered to sail early in December. (This would get extra labour to the colony in time for the harvest). If possible, twenty thousand emigrants were to be despatched in the ensuing six months. The message concluded, ‘Suggest try obtain cooperation of organization Joseph Arch connected with’.38 The importance of seeking the cooperation of the unions, and especially of Arch, was further emphasised in the despatches which followed the telegram. On 22 October 1873 Vogel himself wrote a second reply to the National Union's memorial, advising that free passages to New Zealand which they sought were now available. Vogel assured the union that every industrious immigrant blest with good health could rely on success in the colony and that ‘the position of a prosperous farmer is open to the immigrant who lands on the shores of New Zealand, no matter how poor he may be, if he is only gifted with temperate habits, frugality and industry.’ Arch was invited to visit New Zealand at the colony's expense, or to send his nominee.39 Vogel's letter was published in the Labourers' Union Chronicle of 17 January 1874.

Under Vogel's energetic direction the path of emigration to New Zealand was made as smooth as possible. To spur recruitment an order in council of 15 October 1873 introduced a system of free nominated immigration, under which any New Zealand resident could nominate friends or relatives for a free passage. The application forms, which were freely circulated throughout the colony, included a form letter which nominators were to address to their friends or relatives, with space provided in which they could, if they wished, add particulars of their own success, or other arguments in favour of emigrating to New Zealand. It was hoped that the receipt of such personal invitations, accompanied by that of the Agent-General, would greatly augment the flow of desirable persons offering themselves for selection. Vogel himself undertook the writing of a propaganda pamphlet on New Zealand. Featherston was directed to arrange for depots at the ports, not only to ensure full ships, but also because ‘allowing them to find lodgings anywhere must frequently entail the loss of some of the most desirable emigrants.’40 The earlier inhibitions about immigrants landing in New Zealand over the winter months seem to have silently disappeared.

Not only had the New Zealand administration begun to take all possible measures, but it seemed in these closing months of 1873 that all the stars in their courses had also begun to favour New Zealand immigration. In the United States the worst depression of the nineteenth century was heralded by the collapse of the great investment house of Jay Cooke and Company on 18 September 1873. News of the resulting hard times and unemployment had an almost immediate effect on British emigration to America. Andrew Duncan, who began work as Canterbury's immigration agent in Britain in mid-November 1873, reported in a letter from Glasgow, dated 26 November, that he had ‘arrived in good time to have the pick of men as trade is very bad in America, and every steamer arriving in England is loaded with people returning’.41 The number of emigrants leaving Britain for the United States declined yearly from 1873 to the end of the depression in 1878, falling from 89,500 to 22,150. Inevitably New Zealand's recruitment drive benefited from the wilting of its chief rival. This development was followed quickly by others of great significance, affecting rural England. Between Christmas 1873 and April 1874 the price of wheat fell by six shillings a quarter, and beef and mutton by two shillings a stone.42 The farmers now had additional cause for wishing to crush the rural unions, but they appear to have waited for the outcome of the general election of February 1874. When the Liberals were defeated and the Conservatives returned with their first handsome victory since 1841, the farmers had no further need to hesitate for fear of the political consequences of a frontal attack on a popular movement.43 On 21 March 1874 the farmers of Newmarket locked out all union men. The lock-out spread over much of eastern and southern England, until perhaps 6,000 labourers were thrown out of work. In Lincolnshire the Labour League came to a compromise agreement with the farmers, but the National fought on till 27 July, when the state of funds forced the executive to advise the men to return to work to gather in the harvest, while at the same time it reaffirmed its policy on migration and emigration. The lock-out had greatly weakened the National Union, but by rendering a strike policy impracticable it gave added impetus to emigration. Featherston, reading the signs of the times in April 1874, wrote:

It is infinitely easier to procure 40,000 emigrants, now that the Agricultural Unions have taken up emigration, than it was to obtain 5,000 when they were opposed to it. All the Unions are working heartily with me, being convinced that they can only hope to succeed in their present struggle by shipping off the surplus labour … The stream thus set flowing will not easily be stemmed, especially if the reports sent home by emigrants to their friends continue as favourable and encouraging as hitherto.44

Under the changed conditions Featherston had no cause to complain that English villagers could not be coaxed from their homes over the winter months. While in the three months December 1872 to February 1873 he had despatched from English ports only six ships with 675 emigrants, over the corresponding months of 1873–4 he despatched fifteen ships with 4,973 emigrants.

We will now return to the beginning of this new day in emigration to New Zealand, and follow the fortunes of the first large party of rural union recruits, to see how the new union-colonial government cooperation worked out in practice, and to gain further understanding of what the experience of emigrating meant in human terms. Vogel's telegram of 11 October 1873, inaugurating free passages, reached Featherston on 22 October, and he must have acted upon it promptly, as the news was published in the Labourers' Union Chronicle of 1 November 1873. Henry Taylor, the National Union's secretary, expressed his particular pleasure in making the announcement, owing to the numerous enquiries he had been receiving about emigration to New Zealand. On 4 November C. R. Carter attended a meeting of agricultural labourers at Milton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire, at the express request of Christopher Holloway, chairman of the Oxford district of the National Union. The villagers had received flattering reports on New Zealand from emigrants who had gone there over the previous eighteen months, and the meeting was a great success, with eight heads of families making applications at its close.45 Carter found that Holloway was interested in selecting a party of several hundred emigrants, and accompanying them to New Zealand, so that he could bring back a report on the colony. Carter reported back to Featherston, and a letter dated 6 November 1873, was sent to Holloway, making a firm offer. In conjunction with Taylor, the union's general secretary, Holloway was to select a large party (at least 200) of agricultural labourers and their families. He would receive a free passage to New Zealand and back, one pound a day for travelling expenses while in New Zealand, and subsistence money would be paid to his family at the rate of twenty-five shillings a week while he was away. These were generous terms to a man who had been earning only eleven or twelve shillings a week as a farm worker before the founding of the union the previous year. Holloway promptly arranged to see Featherston in London on 9 November. At this interview he accepted the terms, and an agreement was reached for special advertisements and handbills to be issued.

The New Zealand authorities were fortunate in the man they had enlisted. Carter reported that ‘the position that Mr Holloway occupies amongst the agricultural labourers appears to me but second to that of Mr Arch, who is now on a mission in Canada’.46 Holloway's background was very similar to Arch's.47 He was born in 1828, in the Oxfordshire village of Wootton, in a farm labourer's cottage. He grew up to become a farm labourer in the same parish, and married a local gloveress in 1850. Like Arch and many another of the union's leaders, his leadership talents were developed in the Methodist chapel. He was appointed a trustee of Wootton Chapel in 1864, at the relatively youthful age of 35. He had also become a local preacher, and, from 1870 at least, began to represent his chapel at the Oxford Methodist Circuit local preachers' meetings. He was also one of the chapel's class leaders. He was obviously an intelligent man, of good physique and considerable drive. To better himself, he cultivated an allotment which he rented at sixteen shillings and eightpence per annum from the Duke of Marlborough. In 1867 his first wife died, and he was left with one 14-year-old son, several other children having died. Shortly afterwards he married again, to a 28-year-old dressmaker from the nearby village of Enstone, and a son was born to them in 1869. When in 1872 the Oxfordshire farm workers began to follow those of Warwickshire and form unions, Holloway was well placed to take the chairmanship of the Wootton branch. Apart from his natural gifts and Methodist training, he was not overburdoned with dependants, both his parents being dead, and his own family small. He rose quickly in the union, being elected chairman of the Oxford district when it was formed in October 1872, and became a full-time union delegate the following year. He thus became widely known and respected among the agricultural labourers of Oxfordshire. He also represented his district at the meetings of the Nation Union's Executive Committee at Leamington.

Featherston told Holloway that he might take his party by the steamer Mongol scheduled to sail from Plymouth on 15 December 1873, if he could recruit them in this short time. Holloway was confident that this could be done. The Mongol was a new ship, about to sail for New Zealand to inaugurate a mail service between the colony and San Francisco. Featherston had no success in chartering a second ‘fine fast steamer’ in line with Vogel's request. The New Zealand run was not yet economic for steamships, and Vogel's insistence that any steamer chartered must be absolutely forbidden to call at any Australian port, disposed of any interest the steamship owners might have had.48 The reason for Vogel's prohibition was the danger of losing immigrants to the neighbouring colonies. The rapid acceleration of New Zealand recruiting throughout Britain, and news of an eager response to Holloway's campaign, led Featherston to schedule the sailing ship Scimitar to leave Plymouth on the same date as the Mongol.

Scimitar (built 1863), renamed Rangitiki 1874 after her first voyage under the New Zealand Shipping Company flag. She made five voyages to New Zealand with government immigrants in the 1870s, bringing over 1500 immigrants

Most of Holloway's recruitment meetings went unreported, and many of them must have been primitive gatherings under the stars ‘in the highways and byways and open fields’.49 C. R. Carter found time for another visit to Oxfordshire on 25 November, to address ‘a very large number of labourers’ in a tent at Charlbury.50 The previous evening the Burford branch of the union had held a ‘capital meeting’ in the Primitive Methodist chapel, and among the speakers was Holloway, to give ‘a stirring address on emigration to New Zealand’. The Labourers' Union Chronicle gave Holloway every assistance. On 15 November it published a summary of Carter's lecture at his Milton-under-Wychwood emigration meeting of 4 November, supplied by Holloway; a long and enthusiastic letter from a Warwickshire man who emigrated under Brogdens' scheme in April 1872; and an account by the secretary of the Hampshire District of the union of a journey to the docks with a party of New Zealand emigrants. The latter made emigrating sound almost a gay experience:

… it would do a person good to see with what spirit they left the shores of Old England. Some say they must feel it, so they did, but with joy, saying they felt at last free, and should be able to hold their heads up. One of the women was so pleased that she kept singing - “The ship is ready, and the wind blows fair, And we shall soon be free.”

On 17 November Holloway put his scheme before the union's National Executive, which endorsed it, and issued directions to district secretaries throughout the country to give their support, and especially to encourage emigration from places where farmers seemed likely to take advantage of labourers during the winter. The Executive's support was reported in the Chronicle of 22 November and a week later the editor issued a clarion call, in a leader entitled ‘Labourers, Away to New Zealand’:

Not a farm labourer in England but should rush from the old doomed country to such a paradise as New Zealand…. The exiled labourers will be requited for their ages of suffering as a class in the Eden of New Zealand, and avenged for all the spoliation they have suffered from the plundering landed aristocracy, and a mean, thoughtless set of farmers by leaving them …, by taking themselves off as fast as ships and steamers will take them to the land of promise; - A GOOD LAND - … A LAND OF OIL, OLIVES AND HONEY; - A LAND WHERE IN THOU MAY'ST EAT BREAD WITHOUT SCARCENESS: THOU SHALT NOT LACK ANYTHING IN IT….

Away, then, farm labourers, away! New Zealand is the promised land for you; and the Moses that will lead you is ready.51

Holloway's campaign was thus well under way by the time Arch returned with a good report from Canada on 18 November 1873. During the northern winter Canadian emigration was in recess, but doubtless the influence of Arch's name led some intending emigrants to opt for Canada, and delay their departure till the spring. Arch did, however, give his full blessing to New Zealand emigration. The Chronicle of 6 December 1873 announced that Joseph Arch and others would deliver farewell addresses to Holloway's party. This issue gave details of the arrangements for the train journey to Plymouth, and printed a letter from another Brogden emigrant, who was rejoicing that ‘A working man can have as good a joint of meat as his masters’, and exulting in the plenitude of wild pigs, cattle, goats, rabbits, pigeons and ducks in New Zealand.

The news of large schemes of emigration to New Zealand, Canada, and other colonies, was beginning to cause a little stir in the land. From Oxfordshire came reports that the farmers were beginning to cry out that they would lose the best of their men. The Times, in a rather patronising editorial of 28 November 1873, warned that this large-scale shipping off of men, women and children needed as much forethought and careful preparation as a major military operation, and was firmly of the opinion that it was ‘an affair … to tax the intellect and experience of more practised administrators than Messrs Arch and Clayden’. The writer wondered whether the colonial authorities and farmers were indeed prepared for ‘the sort of material they will find on their hands’. He warned that the English labourer, though ‘the best servant in the world’ in his native village, was not ‘self reliant, or trustworthy, under novel conditions’. He pictured the rural labourers as ignorant of the outside world, mere minors in discretion, and in ability to handle the simplest of business arrangements, and he could not envisage them adapting to the make-shift of frontier life. Time was to prove him wrong both as regards the pioneering abilities of the majority of the emigrants of the Revolt, and the organising talents of their leaders.

The arrangements for assembling Holloway's party and their journey to Plymouth were made by Henry Taylor. Before becoming general secretary of the National Union in May 1872, Taylor had been a carpenter. As a member of the Leamington Trades Council he had given help to Arch's movement from its beginning.53 In December 1873 he was an energetic young man of about 30. By means of a circular he had arranged for the emigrants to assemble at various stations on the Great Western line between Leamington, and Didcot in Berkshire, on Saturday, 13 December 1873. From among the individuals and families caught up in the excitement of departure on that day, we will select a few to illustrate our account. Taylor arrived at Leamington railway station at 7.15 a.m. to assist and direct the emigrants, and among those who joined him there by the scheduled time of departure, 8 a.m., would have been Joseph Johnson, a 37-year-old shepherd from the village of Grandborough, his wife Louisa, and his five daughters, aged 5 months to 11 years. Possibly some of the Johnsons' warm friends in the Grandborough Primitive Methodist Chapel were among the dense crowd on the platform. After some delay, caused by the stationmaster's failure to make adequate provision for this special occasion, the train pulled out ‘amid the shouts and good wishes of the friends and the hurrahs of the emigrants’.54

At Banbury, in north Oxfordshire, a large number from the south Warwickshire village of Tysoe, and its neighbourhood, joined the party. The Tysoe contingent of forty-three souls included one family of ten — that of William Philpott, entered on the Scimitar's passenger list as a farm labourer of 43 years. The 1871 census of Tysoe, however, gives his age then as 49, and his wife Mary Ann as 39, (38 on the passenger list). The family included farm labourer sons aged 12, 16, 19 and 23, a daughter of 21, and three younger boys. This obviously qualifies as one of the ‘suitable families’ for which Featherston had been instructed to extend the 45 years age limit for married men. There is no indication of when, or by whom, the age was adjusted in the immigration papers but similar lowerings of the recorded ages of older immigrants are quite common.

At Oxford station Holloway joined the train, with the main Oxfordshire contingent, including at least fourteen souls from Holloway's own village of Wootton. These included Henry Lammas, a 28-year-old labourer, his wife and three young children. The circumstances of another family, from a hamlet in west Oxfordshire, suggest another social factor contributing to emigration. The father, a farm labourer, was a 42-year-old widower. He was accompanied by a daughter of 21, sons of 17, 15 and 11, and two youngsters of 4 and 1. Holloway's diary in recording the death at sea of the one-year-old, notes him as the illegitimate child of the 21-year-old girl, and the 1871 census records the other youngster as the widower's granddaughter. This hamlet appears to have shared in the circumstances contributing to the high level of rural illegitimacy - field work, domestic service, and cottage overcrowding. The hamlet had also become strongly Methodist. It is not difficult to imagine some of the pressures and incentives behind this family's decision to emigrate. Also from Oxfordshire was John Hudson, a 35-year-old sawyer, his wife, and three children aged 8 to 14. Hudson was a Methodist lay preacher, and therefore probably an old acquaintance of Holloway's.

As the journey continued through the winter countryside, reports circulated in the immigrants' carriages of farmers offering ‘prizes and other inducements’ when they realised that their best men were departing. At midday Didcot junction was reached. Here it was found that the railway company had failed to make the expected arrangements for the party to proceed by the fast train scheduled to reach Plymouth by 5.30 p.m. In the packed waiting room the emigrants disposed of the lunches they had brought with them, after which Taylor helped them to pass the time, playing lively music on a concertina borrowed from one of the party, and then leading a community hymn-singing session. Later Taylor had to take his leave and return to Leamington, while Holloway with one or two others proceeded to Plymouth on the fast train, to make preparations for the arrival of the rest. When the main party reached Plymouth at 11.30 p.m. Holloway had waggons waiting for their baggage. The immigrants followed the waggons through the night and at 12 o'clock reached the depot, where they were at once given refreshments.

The party had been scheduled to sail after a brief weekend in the depot, but now the hazards of winter emigration began to come into play. The Mongol (and possibly also the Scimitar) was detained in the London docks for five days by one of the heaviest London fogs for years.55 Both ships reached Plymouth a week later than Holloway's party, but there was further delay for engine repairs to the Mongol. The immigrants spent nine days in the badly overcrowded depot, their stay rendered the more irksome by persistent wet weather. Colds and catarrh were prevalent, the bedding was damp, and there was a dank smell about the place, caused largely by people continually going out into the rain and getting their clothes damp.56 With measles and scarlet fever widespread in the country, there was cause for foreboding. Even in the best of weather it would have been a challenging task to keep the nearly 700 emigrants crowded into the depot occupied and happy. As over 300 of them had been recruited by the National Union, Taylor left his other duties and went to Plymouth to assist Holloway. He found the emigrants ‘very uneasy for want of occupation’, but reported that, ‘Sergeant Holloway is looking things up a bit, and appears to have the confidence of all’.57 On arrival Taylor heard the curious story of the harassment of the Cullimores, an emigrant family recruited by the union. Feeling it should be given publicity, he had an affidavit prepared for publication in the Chronicle.

Joseph Cullimore, a 39-year-old farm labourer from near Windsor, decided to join Holloway's party and emigrate with his wife and seven of his children. Two sons, Job aged 16, and Fred, aged 14, were hired by a Mr Vidler of Clever, near Windsor. On 6 December Cullimore informed Sawyer, Vidler's steward, of his plans, and arranged that the boys be allowed to leave. In the course of the following week the steward forbade the boys leaving as they were busy with the horses, and sent a letter to the father to this effect. At 5 a.m. on Friday, 12 December, the boys left their lodgings near the steward's house, and went to Maidenhead – apparently starting a day earlier than the rest of the family in order to escape. The steward overtook the boys at Maidenhead station. Job escaped and travelled to Newbury, but Fred was caught on the railway stairs. He was taken to the police station, locked up for three hours, and then taken back to Windsor, where he promised to go back to work, and was allowed to do so. He was rescued by William, an elder brother who was not emigrating, acting on instructions from the father. They were pursued and recaptured by the farm's carter and the steward's wife, but managed to escape again. Meanwhile Job, who had gone to Newbury, was arrested at the railway station there, on the strength of a telegram from the steward, and locked up. On Saturday morning the father arrived and had Job taken before the Mayor of Newbury at his private house, but the Mayor said he could not act without another magistrate, and that the boy must go to Windsor. However, the police first took Job to his master, Vidler. Vidler refused to discharge him. In Windsor Job was collected by Vidler's son, and taken to the farm. Finally, about midday on Sunday 14 December, the master relented, and told Job to go after his father. Holloway and Taylor both witnessed the statement signed by Job, Fred and their father. Both boys signed the affidavit with their marks, and the father's literacy may not have extended far beyond signing his name.59 This incident illustrates both the vulnerable position of the illiterate or semi-literate labourer, and the persistence among rural employers of an outlook that regarded labourers as little more than serfs.

Taylor and Holloway obviously taxed their ingenuity to help the party to while away the days. Holloway was best at sermons, which he provided both on Sundays and midweek. Taylor was more versatile, and fostered singing, dancing and even leapfrog. One evening he was able to borrow a magic lantern with slides on ‘numerous witty and humorous subjects’. The depot manager subsidised a visit to a Christy Minstrel entertainment, and the depot chaplain supplied each emigrant with a small packet of tracts.60 But while time was thus being passed in one way or another, the silent spread of infection was preparing the way for tragedy for many families on the voyage. Later investigation showed that emigrants families from both Jersey and Ireland brought scarlet fever into the depot, and that measles was also present. Owing to overcrowding, the depot's hospital had been filled with emigrants, and when scarlet fever appeared there was considerable delay before accommodation was found for the sick outside the depot. The emigrants embarked on Monday, 22 December. The surgeon-superintendents of both ships were obviously apprehensive, especially on account of the unusually high proportion of children in their care. Two families were sent ashore from the Scimitar, one of them with an advanced case of scarlet fever which the parents had succeeded in concealing up to this point,61 and another two families were sent from the Mongol with scarlet fever infection.62 The Mongol sailed on 23 December with 313 emigrants, 125 of them being children under 12.63 The Scimitar sailed the following day with 430 emigrants, 165 of whom were children.64 Holloway's party of 327 was divided between the two ships.

The experience of the Mongol's emigrants on the voyage is comparatively well documented. The Labourers' Union Chronicle published a diary of the voyage kept by James Dixon Gore, a single man of 25, a painter from Leamington,65 emigrating with a family party whose other members were Henry Gore, 21, a gardener, and Alfred Gore, 31, gardener, with a wife and two young children. Holloway also kept a diary, and although he travelled saloon, he kept close touch with the emigrants. The evidence given by a number of the emigrants to the Royal Commission appointed to investigate the deaths from sickness during the voyage, is also available.66 Finally, a well-written account of the voyage was supplied to a New Zealand Anglican journal by the Revd H. M. Kennedy, who acted as ship's chaplain.67 Kennedy had been curate of the Irish parish of Toughboyne the rector of which was a brother of Sir George Bowen, Governor of New Zealand from 1868 to 1873. When he decided to emigrate to New Zealand, many of his parishioners decided to accompany him. As chaplain he took an active interest in the emigrants, assisting with the school, and helping to nurse the sick. Holloway and he cooperated well on the voyage, but between the lines of Holloway's diary one senses something of a feeling of rivalry with Kennedy.

Holloway was laid low with sea sickness for the first four days, and was unable to attend the Christmas day service conducted by Kennedy. By Sunday, 28 December, Holloway had found his sea legs. Having attended a morning service conducted by Kennedy for the emigrants and crew, he decided to make a move in the interests of nonconformity. He pointed out to the captain that there were a goodly number of dissenters on board, and gained permission to hold a Sunday evening service for them throughout the voyage. On New Year's eve Holloway did not feel at ease among the merriment and dancing of the saloon passengers, so retired to his cabin, and in good Methodist tradition passed the events of the previous twelve months in review, and closed the old year ‘by asking forgiveness of Almighty God’. Not all of his party were of Holloway's frame of mind. In his diary James Gore refers to the ‘grand ball’ which the cabin passengers kept up till two in the morning, but regrets that ‘they had a sail across, so we could not see them’. However, Gore and his companions spent a pleasant New Year's eve, being amused ‘by a little Jersey fellow spinning yarns’. Next morning they were chortling over an escapade of the engine-men. While the ship's officers were at the ball, these worthies had stolen a pig which the butcher had just killed, together with a sack of potatoes, and had a feast. On New Year's day Holloway arranged with the captain and Kennedy that there should be a week-night religious service, to be conducted alternately by himself and Kennedy. Holloway held the first such service that same evening, and James Gore loyally attended it.

By the time the Mongol had been at sea a couple of days it was apparent that the infection of both measles and scarlet fever had been brought aboard. The first cases occurred among the single women, but on 26 December Alfred Gore's 5-year-old daughter Emily went down with scarlet fever. The surgeon found that the measles infection was spread throughout the ship so no attempt was made to isolate it. However, all the early cases of scarlet fever occurred in the after compartment, occupied by the single women and a few families. On 26 December the surgeon therefore arranged for this area to be isolated from the rest of the ship, and the school which had just commenced was broken up. Emily Gore and the other scarlet fever patients made good recoveries, and as no new cases appeared, the isolation was relaxed on 10 January, and school was recommenced. The schoolteacher, Edward Wright, was a civil and mechanical engineer. He was assisted by the Revd Kennedy, who thus came to know the children very well.

James Gore's diary provides various glimpses of the day-by-day life of immigrants and crew. He had decided by 5 January that the captain was ‘such a stingy fellow’. On the 6th he saw two sailors put in irons. They had been down the hold all day getting up coal, and eventually refused to continue without extra rations, which the captain would not grant. On the evening of the 10th the emigrants gave a grand concert amidships, which Gore voted a great success. He contributed two songs. Saloon passengers paid a shilling each to attend, and the singers and musicians spent the takings on a supply of Bass's bitter beer. Next morning Gore enjoyed the parson's ‘first-class sermon’ on temperance. On 13 January the emigrants had their boxes up from the hold, to equip themselves for the long easterly run in the southern latitudes. On the 14th Gore averred that ‘the captain dare not put in at the Cape, for he would lose all his firemen and sailors if he did so’. On the 15th he recorded that he and his mates had been 'as black as tinkers' for three days, as the sailers were getting up coal from under their compartment. Sunday the 18th was sunny and dead calm, and Gore with a twinge of home-sickness, wrote:

Leaving Old England

I feel I should like to be in Old England, to have a roll among the hay, or sitting under a shady tree whispering a soft tale to a girl that was rather affectionate. It was an awful bore to be stuck for'ard, and all the single women aft, and not allowed to speak to one another…. We saw a shoal of sperm whales basking in the sun.

Meanwhile the measles epidemic continued, with over fifty cases in the first four weeks. The first death was that of the infant son of Henry and Catherine Lammas, from Holloway's own village of Wootton. In those days of high infant mortality this death and that of a 2-year-old on 9 January would be accepted as in no way out of the usual. But from 18 January the death rate accelerated, by the 21st scarlet fever was prevalent in the forward compartment, and by the time New Zealand was reached there had been fifteen child deaths and one adult. It is clear that there were various causes of the low resistance of the victims, including the original ill-nourished condition of the farm labourers' families, and the damp conditions at the depot. Unfortunately the damp bedding was repeated on board. The Mongol's upper decks had been inadequately caulked, and despite complaints this was not attended to for about three weeks. Until then a great deal of water leaked on to the bunks of the married quarters from the crew's daily washing of the upperdeck. The ship's provisions were also ill adapted to the large number of children, and many of them did not take well to the basic diet of preserved meat and hard ship's biscuit. Supplies of food suited to the sick were quite inadequate.

On 22 and 23 January the Lammases lost both their remaining children, and Holloway was doing his best to comfort the heartbroken parents. The following day the Cullimores lost their youngest, a boy of eighteen months. In telling of these child deaths, Kennedy wrote:

the most heartrending, perhaps (was) that of Mrs. S 's children, two fine boys, general favourites, both of whom died of malignant scarlet fever. The death of the second was most painful: the mother who was fairly frantic, drove off the sailors and would not allow them to remove the body, nor can I say that I had much better success, when sent for.

Kennedy also wrote of two other cases which were extremely painful to him. They were two 10-year-old girls Annie Johnson and Emily Hewitt, who regularly attended his Sunday School class, and led their companions for him at the singing class. Emily was one of the eight children of Daniel Hewitt, a 35-year-old groom and coachman from Warwickshire, who was to have a successful career as a small farmer at Woodend in Canterbury. Annie was the eldest daughter of Joseph and Louisa Johnson, the shepherd from Grandborough. Holloway's diary records her death on 29 January:

Mr Johnson (a very intimate friend of mine, & one who has helped me materially in holding our services) lost his eldest daughter, Annie, by death today, a most interesting girl of ten summers. This is the ninth death on board. Mr Johnson speaks in the highest terms of the attention the doctor has given his family.

Apart from the unusual number of deaths, the voyage was proceeding most satisfactorily for the captain, who was trying for a record run in his new ship. To conserve coal, he did his best to delay the use of the condenser by reducing the emigrants' water allowance. Once the cooler southern latitudes were reached he transferred the serving of water to the emigrants from the carpenter to the fourth mate, and reduced the daily issue even further below the regulation allowance. He told the mate to ignore complaints. After receiving many complaints on the matter from members of his party, Holloway took the issue up with the captain, and part of the cut was restored. On 22 January, after rounding the Cape, the main yard was hoisted on the main mast, so that sails could be rigged, and the engines assisted by the westerly winds. Towards the end of the voyage the fourth mate warned the captain of the need to start the condenser. The warnings were ignored until 10 February, when the tanks were pumped dry. The emigrants had to wait till early afternoon before the condenser provided enough water for them.68 The captain had his reward when the Mongol steamed into Port Chalmers on 13 February, after a record passage of 51 days. The ship was immediately placed in quarantine, and the immigrants transferred to Quarantine Island.

Mongol

From this quarantine period the Revd Kennedy had a touching incident to relate, concerning Joseph Johnson's second daughter, 8-year-old Mary Jane. The Johnsons had lost their third daughter, 6-year-old Emma, only three days after the death of Annie. When the ship reached port, Mary Jane was sickening with scarlet fever, and she died shortly after landing on Quarantine Island. One calm evening, some days later, Kennedy was standing on deck looking over the side of the vessel when the following episode occurred:

one of the quartermasters (W), a hard, weather-beaten old sailor, came up to me very quietly. I knew him well: it was he who sewed up the dead bodies and held the plank from which they were committed to the deep. A grim looking man he was, and, I thought, quite callous; and it appeared strange to me that the children liked him and called him ‘uncle.’ On this occasion he looked quite changed, his usually harsh voice was soft and low and his face kind and gentle; he asked about the little girl that had died on the island. ‘Was it’, said he, ‘her as used to wear the red cloak and call me “uncle”, with black eyes and hair’. I told him that it was. ‘Ah! poor lassie, I am sorry for her, I am sorry for her,’ said he, and then continued, ‘But I'm glad she didn't die on board.’ On asking why he said ‘Well, you see, at first the children didn't like me because 'twas I buried them, and the little lass caught hold of my hand one day after her sister had died, and asked me would I throw her into the sea too if she died, and then began to cry, and said “Uncle, sure you won't throw me over”. ‘So,’ said he. ‘I promised her I would not, neither I would, and yet you know, as with the rest, somebody should do it, and ‘twas my duty; I carried them in my arms as gently as their own mothers could, and wrapped the Union Jack about them so softly that if they were asleep they would not feel me — now, didn't I? But’, said he, abruptly, ‘this is no way for me to talk. I am glad, though, the lassie didn't die on board – that's all’, and then he went off without giving me time to say a word.

The Johnsons also lost Ada, aged 3, on Quarantine Island, and were left with only infant Ellen. However, four daughters and two sons were to be born to them in New Zealand.69 Joseph and Louisa entered vigorously into the opportunities offered by the new land. On 28 October 1874, Louisa wrote home to her friends at Grandborough, from Careys Bay on Otago Harbour:

We were pleased to hear that you were getting on so well at the chapel, and to hear good news of all our old friends…. Joe says he wishes someone would pay him to come over for some of you. He is going sixty miles in a steamboat today, up the country, shearing. I shall feel very lonely while he is away, but I do not mind if he gets along well; he has plenty of work. The land is dear here. He will see the country by going. He earned £2 15s. last week, and said he had worked harder in the old country for 15s. If you want to come out of bondage into liberty come out here. I was out waiting on a poor woman last week, and she gave me 30s…. I have done some sewing and always got twice what I charged for it. I made a plain skirt and charged 1s for it, and they sent 2s. You would get 10s for making a dress…. I wish a lot from Grandborough would come. Joe says he would get you all such a meal as you never had at home. Come and try him…. If you ever come, start about the time that we started, as it is still then. We never had a storm all the voyage. We should have come over beautifully if it had not been for the fever. You would never think you were in a foreign country if you were here…. We have not received any papers. We felt sadly disappointed, as we wanted to know how the Union was going on…. I am so pleased to hear you are so strong in Union. Joe thinks of sending £1 to the Union, but he wanted to see the Chronicle first, as you said the lock-out was to be settled. We have Reynolds paper sometimes and see a little news from home….70

Joseph's shepherd skills were an asset in a land whose staple export at this time was wool. Assisted by his industrious wife he was able to save the money to take up bush land near Ngaere in Taranaki, and carve out a successful small farm for himself. The other members of Holloway's party on the Mongol named in this chapter also made good in New Zealand. Arthur Hitchcock, an Oxfordshire man who settled in Dunedin, swagged the countryside doing harvest work in the autumn of 1875. In Oamaru he called on Henry Lammas from Wootton, and found him with a nice home of his own, and a section of land. John Hudson, the Oxfordshire lay preacher, wrote to relatives on 28 October 1874 that he was renting a hundred acres at Careys Bay, Port Chalmers, and already had a mare with a one-year-old colt, 27 head of cattle, 5 calves, 12 pigs and 50 poultry. He was working easier and living better then he had in the old country, and enclosed a circuit plan to show that he was going on with his lay preaching.71

Before we leave the Mongol's emigrants, two men in her Warwickshire party, not hitherto noticed, merit a brief mention. The Labourers' Union Chronicle of 23 August 1874 printed two letters written a month or two earlier by Richard Harwood, a 21-year-old gardener, who had taken work in Manawatu, near Foxton. Both letters were to his father and brothers, urging them to join him. He had never had such a good place before in his life, and was revelling in shooting pigs, pigeons and ducks, and fishing for eels, the latter under Maori tuition. He was saving money fast, and told how his master had become a prosperous small farmer in ten years. Eli Smith, the other Warwickshire man, emigrated as a 26-year-old farm labourer, with a wife and three children. After a number of years of labouring, mainly as an overseer in railway construction, he became a successful pioneer bush settler at Tawataia in the northern Wairarapa. He had long service as a member of the Wairarapa North County Council, and was made a Justice of the Peace.72

We now turn briefly to the voyage of the Scimitar, bringing the rest of Holloway's party. She too made a record passage, arriving at Port Chalmers on 4 March 1874, seventy-one days after leaving Plymouth, a time which was not bettered by a sailing ship for over twenty-five years. She was a roomy iron ship, clipper rigged.73 She was in every way ideal for immigration service, being 8 feet 6 inches between decks and well fitted. She was also well run, with a considerate captain and an efficient surgeon-superintendent. Yet there were twenty-six deaths on the voyage, mainly from measles and scarlet fever. Except for a girl of 17, all were children. In all other respects the Scimitar seems to have been a happy ship. A good account of the voyage was sent home to his grandmother by George Philpott, the 23-year-old son of William Philpott of Tysoe. The ‘Mark’ referred to in the following extract is probably Mark Fessey, a 29-year-old farm labourer, the ‘Alfred is William's 3-year-old brother.

… We have one of the best captains that ever crossed the ocean. I have not heard a bad word from him all the voyage. The first mate is a particularly pleasant man, and all the sailors, too; they often come down and join us in a spree at night, when they are not on watch. We have had several concerts while on board, at night…. Charles Fox is our captain's name, and a good man he is; it grieves him very much to lose so many children, all small ones; he has got no children himself, his wife is a nice woman, too. The captain has given the children tea and cakes a time or two, and brought plums and nuts out to scatter among them. Anybody who thinks of coming out here need not be afraid of having a short allowance of grub, for there is plenty of victuals, quite as much as you can eat; there is pudding three times and rice twice a week…. I had a good ducking one morning before breakfast; it swilled me nearly all across the deck, and you would have laughed to have seen me hold on by the things on deck; the sea comes over, when the wind is sideways to the vessel, in tons, so that it swilled the children from one side to the other, and back. Oh, what a laugh. And then there is the sailors' songs, which they sing while pulling the ropes, and we pull and join in the chorus. ‘Now, my boys, a pull at the New Zealand rope’, says the first mate, and to Mark he says, ‘Come along, my infant.’ Mark is like another man since he came to Plymouth, he is getting so fat. There is a library and school, too, on board…. On Wednesday we came in sight of New Zealand, and we sailed into harbour on Thursday morning, to their great surprise. We made the quickest passage ever known, three days shorter than ever before made by a sailing vessel…. We are now laying at anchor, and what beautiful sights we see, here a house, and there a house, one on a hill and another in the valley beneath; and bush and trees studded all over. Yonder we see a house and a green patch of grass, with two or three cows and sheep, and horses; perhaps the owner was once a poor man, but now a respectable landowner. We are up in the morning, and hear the birds whistle like nightingales, and see the bullocks drawing up the hill…. Alfred is jolly and as happy as a king…. We now get some of the New Zealand beef that we have long looked for – good beef too.

George's letter was published in the Labourers' Union Chronicle of 16 May 1874, along with one which his father had written home to a former workmate. William's letter was brief. He told his friend that ‘we have had more beef since we started from England than we had all our lives before’. His letter ends on an almost lyrical note, aimed no doubt at arousing the stay-at-homes:

‘P.S. — I have seen the whales and sharks having their larks across the mighty deep’.

William Philpott settled with his family at Waikiwi, near Invercargill, and took up an 18 acre bush section.74 With his boys he cleared the bush, by cutting it up for firewood for sale in Invercargill. Though most of their neighbours were Presbyterian Scots, the family were able to maintain their connection with Methodism by attending fortnightly services held on the farm of a neighbouring Englishman.

The voyages of both the Mongol and the Scimitar were the subjects of Royal Commission enquiries, because of the number of deaths. The reports of these commissions guided the New Zealand authorities in improving their immigration arrangements.

4 The Flood Tide of 1874

AFTER A WEEK in quarantine, Christopher Holloway landed in Dunedin, and began his tour of New Zealand on behalf of the union. It was to take him most of the year to complete his thorough examination of the colony's resources and institutions, and of the prospects it held out to labouring immigrants. As he moved from end to end of the country, he sent home a series of encouraging reports to be published in the Labourers' Union Chronicle. Together with the increasing flow of optimistic letters from the growing number of newly arrived English rural labourers in New Zealand, they must have helped to persuade many a family to take up the colony's offer of free passages. As he travelled from place to place, Holloway not only met old friends who had preceded him to New Zealand, but also individuals and parties who had emigrated in the months after he sailed. We will therefore return to England, and follow the continuing fortunes of the New Zealand emigration drive to the end of 1874, before once again taking up Holloway's story and recounting his New Zealand journeys and his return to England.

No sooner were Holloway's party away than another officer of the Oxford District of the National Union came forward to recruit a party and accompany them to New Zealand. This was Joseph Leggett, a carpenter from Milton-under-Wychwood, the secretary of the Oxford District. Arrangements were negotiated by C. R. Carter, under instructions from Featherston, and Carter again gave some assistance with the recruitment.1 Before he returned to Oxfordshire, however, Carter had begun his 1874 travels with a visit to an area outside the National Union's domains. This was to Maidstone, the county town of Kent, where on 8 January 1874 the vigorous Kent and Sussex Labourers' Union was celebrating its entry into the field of New Zealand emigration with a resounding delayed Christmas party to farewell over 300 Kentish villagers leaving for New Zealand: As Kent appears to have sent more rural emigrants to New Zealand in 1874 than any other county involved in the Revolt, we will trace the county union's fortunes, and the early stages of its involvement in New Zealand emigration, before returning to the National Union.2

The rural labourers of Kent were among the first of this period to turn their attention to unionism. In 1866 the Agricultural Labourers' Protection Association was founded in the county. It was, however, short-lived. In the intervening years until the Revolt, the radical Kent Messenger and Maidstone Telegraph, published in Maidstone, spoke out repeatedly on behalf of the agricultural labourer, and must have helped prepare for the resurgence of rural unionism. Unionism was strong among Maidstone's urban workers, and the town had its own Trades Council. The Maidstone labourers seem to have had close links with their fellows in the surrounding rural parishes, and a number of the town's industries had strong agricultural associations, including malting, brewing, tanning, and hopag and sacking manufacturing. When the Revolt began in Warwickshire, the Kent Messenger quickly expressed its support,3 and the founding of the Kent Union was clearly a direct result of Arch's movement. When some rural labourers at Shoreham, in West Kent, emboldened by the news from Warwickshire, called a meeting on 17 April 1872 to initiate a county union, it is not surprising to find that they turned to Maidstone for help. They invited a member of the Maidstone Trades Council, and Alfred Simmons, editor of the Kent Messenger, to come and address them.4 It was thus that Alfred Simmons, later to be dubbed ‘the Joseph Arch of the Kent and Sussex labourers’5 came to address a group of agricultural labourers for the first time. From then on he committed himself wholeheartedly in their cause, and quickly came to be regarded as the Kent Union's founder and main leader. The publicity which he was able to give the movement over the ensuing weeks in the pages of the Kent Messenger was a great aid to its growth.

Information on Simmons's background is difficult to find, but fortunately in January 1879, at a farewell meeting as he was leaving for New ealand with a party of locked-out labourers, the emotions of the occasion led him into a quite uncharacteristic moment of self-revelation.6 Having first posed the question as to why he, who was not a labourer, should have devoted years of his life to the cause, he proceeded to tell the story of a poor woman, the mother of five or six children, who twenty-five years before had been left an almost penniless widow at the age of 33. She had applied to her husband's creditors, but they had proceeded to strip her house bare, leaving her and her children to live or die as the case might be. She then applied to the guardians of the poor for out-door relief, but was refused. She declared that before she would go into the workhouse, she would fight her way through the world with her children, and after ten years of slaving on, she succeeded in getting her children out into the world, where four of them had done very well. Thus, far from becoming a workhouse inmate, she and her children had been driven to liberty. The meeting broke out into tremendous cheering when Simmons revealed that he was one of the poor woman's children.

This disclosure makes evident the origins of Simmons's radicalism, and of his deep sympathy for the poor. He must have drawn on the emotions aroused by his childhood, in developing the considerable powers of oratory which he displayed in the village labourers' cause. One infers that he was probably about 30 when he emerged as the main leader of the Revolt in Kent. He was married, as some reports of union occasions mention his wife. Whatever his education and early career had been, they had enabled him to develop organising abilities and qualities of leadership which proved invaluable assets to the Kent Union. Under his guidance the union developed policies and tactics which differed in significant ways from those of the other unions of the Revolt, and the Kent Union's emergence as markedly the most successful of the whole movement must be largely credited to his wisdom. Unlike Arch, Simmons was not suspicious of ‘outsiders’ and ‘professional Trades Union men’, but rather drew on the experience of the urban unions. Simmons probably had a major part in the forming of an interim committee of Maidstone urban trade unionists to foster the spread of rural unionism, until it had had time to find and organise its own leadership.7 It was certainly he who early in May 1872 approached George Roots to become the union's first chairman.8 Roots is recorded in the 1871 census as a 40-year-old General Agent living in Maidstone with his wife and four daughters. When he first appeared on the union platform in Maidstone on 4 May 1872, he stated that he was the son of an agricultural labourer, and knew the oppressions that had been put upon that class. He paid tribute to his parents for their industry and sacrifice in providing him with what they had not had themselves — education9. In its early years Roots gave good service to the union as a spokesman, but does not seem to have contributed much to union policy or administration.

Following the example of the urban unions, Simmons guided the Kent Union in such policies as a conservative attitude towards strikes; a preference for conciliation and arbitration; a prudent building up of finances, so that if a fight was forced, it should be undertaken from a position of strength; and, in due course, the fostering of union benefit schemes.10 To succeed, this more conservative approach required a large membership firmly under the control of a strong central executive. By the end of 1872 the Kent Union had achieved just this, with neary 6,000 paying members in about eighty branches,11 and a firmly established constitution, of which the central feature was a strong executive in Maidstone. A rule that the central executive was to take charge of all disputes with employers was effectively enforced. Delegate meetings of representatives from all branches decided union policy. There was some resistance to the centralising of union funds in Maidstone, but this was accepted by January 873.12 In March 1873, after repeated requests from across the border, the Kent Union moved into Sussex. Fifteen branches were quickly established just across the Kent border, but thereafter progress was slow. The union was renamed the Kent and Sussex Labourers' Union, but its main strength remained in Kent throughout the 1870s. By the end of its first year the union claimed 130 branches with over 8,000 members, and a credit balance of £950.13

Nevertheless the Kent Union's story had not been all success. In West Kent it had lost some ground to the National Union. Simmons told a delegate meeting on 22 June 1872 of his endeavours to establish relationships with Leamington. His letters had been ignored, yet the Leamington executive had corresponded with several Kent branches, inviting them to join the National.14 Thenceforward a deep rift developed between the two unions. The National executive's determination that control of the movement should be firmly in the hands of agricultural labourers probably accounts for the spurning of Simmons. For its part, the Kent Union was strong in local county loyalty, and therefore unwilling to forward the bulk of its fund to Leamington, as the National's constitution required. The National's high-handed poaching in West Kent further embittered relationships. The National captured several strong branches and founded others, to form a West Kent District, whose greatest reported strength was 1,271 members in twenty-nine branches, in January 1874.15 From 1875 on it shared the National Union's decline, with a number of its members joining the Kent Union. This inter-union conflict was the more regrettable in that the Kent Union owed a debt to Arch and his movement, which extended far beyond the initial triggering of the Revolt in Kent. Simmons's more cautious conservative policy had one major defect. It did little to answer one of the major questions facing the leaders of the Revolt – how were the rural labourers to be aroused to a sustained repudiation of the servile ‘Hodge’ image, and the assertion of their human rights, and the dignity of their manhood. The Revolt had ‘freedom movement’ characteristics, and its deepest aims required the use of effective social protest strategies, both to change the labourers' self-image, and to impress their claims upon society at large. Arch's leadership in the Revolt was an effective embodiment of this note of social protest, both in word and in deed. Through his own personality he showed the village labourer how to be something other than ‘Hodge’, and in this respect his influence went beyond the bounds of the National Union. He also developed effective protest tactics which appear to have deeply influenced Simmons's leadership of the Kent Union.

In reviewing its first year, the Kent Union's executive discussed requests which had come from several districts for permission to ask for a wage increase. The executive's decision was that as ‘many of the employers were meeting the members of the Union in a very fair manner’ it would be best to wait a few months longer.16 Yet clearly some action was needed to maintain the union's morale and momentum of growth. Drawing on a variety of tactics, for some of which he was clearly indebted to Arch and the National Union, Simmons succeeded in projecting an image of his union as a successful and spirited movement, while delaying a direct wages approach for a further year. One tactic was the adaptation of a technique developed by the mining unions – the anniversary ‘Demonstration’. On 14 May 1873 unionists from all parts of Kent, with their wives and children, converged on Maidstone, to celebrate their union's first birthday. The union had negotiated cheap railway fares for the day, and a reported 7,000 men marched through Maidstone, to the music of six bands, to an open air annual meeting of 12,000 to 13,000 persons.17 This occasion doubtless strengthened the courage and purpose of the union, by making its members aware of their own collective strength. It also provoked immediate and widespread retaliation by the farmers, and over fifty men were dismissed, and many of these evicted, for their attendance. The union responded by paying all the men full wages, in some cases publicly, at well attended ‘indignation’ meetings, and several of the men were assisted to emigrate to Australia. A common result of this and other examples of victimisation by farmers was that a spirited response from the union led to further growth of the branches concerned. If farmers proved obdurate, the union resorted to boycott tactics, and by means of an excellent intelligence network found work for dismissed unionists elsewhere in the county. Testimony to the effectiveness of such boycotts is borne by an item appearing in 1876 in the National Union's English Labourer. It tells how a union delegate travelling by train from London to Peterborough got into conversation with a Kentish farmer. Concealing his own identity, the delegate drew the farmer out on the problems of running his 300 acre farm:

Delegate – I suppose you have some men by the day; what do you give them? Farmer – Only one man at this time, and he is horseman; four years ago I gave him 12s per week, house and firing; now I give him 17s., house and firing, and have to be very careful to keep him at that price. Delegate – That appears strange; how is it you can't keep them? Farmer – Oh, bless you, they are so united together, we dare not offend them; if we do, it's no use to go after them, they are gone right away. Delegate – I can't understand that; where do they go to? Farmer – I expect their society takes them away.18

As time went on, however, it became clear that these tactics were not achieving any considerable advance in wages. The union's large membership and growing funds suggested that the time had come for more direct action. The strategy which the union now developed under Simmons's guidance consisted of a strong emigration drive over the winter of 1873–4, to improve the labourers' bargaining position, followed by a membership drive in the early spring of 1874, and a direct approach for higher wages in selected districts, made to coincide with the new season's rising labour demand. These tactics proved successful and the summer of 1874 saw the striking contrast of the defeat of Arch's union in the great eastern counties lock-out, and the success of the wages movement which Simmons directed in Kent. As we shall see, Vogel's dynamic entry into the New Zealand immigration portfolio contributed significantly to the Kent Union's success.

In its first eighteen months the Kent Union had not been able to make a strong feature of emigration. The best available proposition had been free passages to Queensland, but a charge of one pound per head for ship's furniture, and the expense of necessary clothing, was beyond many village labourers, even with the union's emigration allowance. The union despatched a party of nearly 100 at Christmas 1872, and several smaller parties during 1873, but nothing approaching an emigration drive could be mounted. This became possible when in quick succession more generous offers of free passages came from South Australia in September 1873, and from New Zealand in November. A flow of enthusiastic letters from the earlier emigrants to Queensland helped to prime recruitment. On 25 November 1873 a party of 232 emigrants leaving for South Australia were farewelled by the union at the Drill Hall attached to the Bell Hotel, Maidstone. The hall, decorated with flags and bunting, was packed with about 3000 persons. In his address Simmons pointed out, as ‘a sweet morsel of consolation to grasping employers’, that the evening saw nine empty cottages in one parish in Kent, and eleven in another. He warned the farmers of Kent that they would speedily have to meet their men more fairly, or the country would gradually be drained of its labour.19

Three evenings later, at a union meeting in the White Lion Inn, Canterbury, Simmons revealed that the South Australian offer had been withdrawn after the despatch of the one party; but he already had something just as good to take its place. The Agent-General for New Zealand had offered to provide a ship with free passages for a party of 350 to go out to Canterbury, New Zealand. Simmons explained that the union had no difficulty finding emigrants – he had that very morning received thirty-two letters applying for passages – the greatest difficulty was to get passages. The union meant, if they could, to get a dozen ships and fill them.20 During 1874 the union in fact achieved an emigration of about this magnitude, mainly through its association with the New Zealand recruitment drive. The first New Zealand party was a large one of over 400, and in keeping with his strategy of using emigration to raise Kentish wages, Simmons stage-managed their departure to gain the maximum publicity.

Apparently the party was originally scheduled to leave around Christmas 1873,21 but their departure was postponed, probably as a result of the upsurge in recruitment throughout Britain. Meanwhile the public of Kent had been invited by advertisement to send money and gifts for an ‘Emigrants' Giant Christmas Tree’ which was to be ‘abundantly stocked with Articles of Clothing, including Trousers, Jackets, Shawls, Scarfs, Crossovers etc., Books, Toys, Fruit and other Articles.’22 During Thursday, 8 January 1874, emigrants from all parts of Kent, and a few from Sussex, finally assembled in Maidstone. A farewell ‘soirée’, of which the Christmas tree was to be one feature, had been arranged for them in the Corn Exchange. At 5.30 p.m. the Corn Exchange doors were thrown open for the emigrants only, and sums of money varying from ten shillings to two pounds ten shillings were paid to them, to assist with the expense of their accommodation over the period that they had been delayed.23 When this was completed, 1200 members of the public were admitted by means of complimentary tickets – probably this method was adopted after the experience of the suffocating attendance at the farewell to the South Australia party a few weeks earlier. The Corn Exchange was suitably decorated for the occasion, a band had been engaged, and ‘several well-known singers, musicians, and other gentlemen’ took part in the amusements of the evening. C. R. Carter, along with Roots and Simmons, addressed the gathering. Carter told the emigrants to be of good cheer, for if English farmers were foolish enough to offend and underpay their labourers the farmers of New Zealand would be glad of their services, and would treat them as men and brethren. The gifts from the Christmas tree were then distributed by the wives of the union's leaders, according to cards drawn earlier from baskets by the emigrants. Dancing, singing and refreshments filled the evening until ‘Auld Lang Syne’ at 11 p.m. The union's newspaper proudly commented that the evening was ‘certainly the first of its kind that was ever held in Kent’.24

At nine o'clock the next morning the emigrants assembled at the Corn Exchange, and headed by a band and a large union flag, marched down High Street to the railway station, where they were farewelled by a large crowd. They travelled by train to Gravesend, but as their ship had not arrived there, they were taken by steamer to London. Most of the party were allotted to the William Davie, which was finally farewelled from Gravesend by Simmons and Roots on 14 January, bound for Bluff, Otago, with 287 emigrants.25 About eighty of the party were allotted to the Wennington, which sailed on 21 January with 294 emigrants for Wellington. Thus none of this Kentish party were sent to Canterbury, as originally advertised. Many of them had originally put in their applications for South Australia. The location of their new homes was clearly more a matter of chance than of choice. Both ships had successful and uneventful voyages. Deaths on the two ships totalled twelve, all children, and there were also fourteen births.

By the time the winter was over the Kent Union had despatched about a thousand emigrants to New Zealand. A party of about 125 sailed on the steamship Atrato on 10 February. They included sixteen families from the parish of Burham near Rochester. From the address which Simmons gave at a farewell meeting held in the Walnut Tree Inn, Burham, it appears that the Burham emigrants were largely brickmakers, and their families. The closing of Kent's widely-scattered brickfields each winter aggravated the seasonal slackness of work in the rural parishes, and brickmakers competed with agricultural labourers for such work as the digging of the hop gardens. It thus made good sense for the Kent Union to admit general labourers as well as farm labourers, and by the end of 1873 over a thousand general labourers had been enrolled.26 Following the Atrato party, two further parties totalling 170, mainly agricultural labourers sailed from London before the end of February in the J. N. Fleming and the Rooparell. The Kent Union's next large party was one of 200 which sailed from Plymouth in the Waikato on 24 March. They were in charge of John Venner, a 41-year-old engine driver, leaving the employ of the South-Eastern Railway after twenty-three years service. The party assembled in Maidstone on the morning of Monday, 16 March 1874, and travelled by special train to Plymouth, accompanied by Simmons. At Plymouth Simmons found the Atrato's party, their ship having suffered an engine breakdown when about 1,500 miles on her journey and returned for repairs. The Atrato had been built as a paddle steamer in 1853, but in 1870 was converted into a single-screw vessel, and fitted with new engines and boilers.27 Simmons found that her Kentish emigrants had exhausted ‘the little stock of extra necessaries for their wives and children’ so he paid out a further sovereign to each family and half a sovereign to each single man.28 Simmons used the recruitment commission from the New Zealand Government for payments such as these. At Plymouth the later party showed their appreciation of Simmons's work by presenting him with a pocket Bible. The emigrant who made the presentation was George Tapp, who had been secretary of the Lamberhurst branch, and a member of the union's executive committee. The party had a week in the Plymouth depot, before the Waikato, a new ship making her first voyage for the New Zealand Shipping Company, set sail with 365 emigrants. The Atrato sailed for the second time, crowded with 755 emigrants, on 6 April. She called at Cape Town for bunker coal, but could not get all she needed, and for much of the latter part of the voyage her engines were disconnected and she sailed under canvas. However, she made a fast voyage of sixty-two days. All the sailing ships taking these early parties from the Kent Union had good voyages. The Waikato had only four deaths, all children; the Rooparell had only one; and the J. N. Fleming had none.

We must now return to the National Union, following first the recruitment of Joseph Leggett's party. The campaign was given an enthusiastic launching by Henry Taylor, whose initial announcement in the Labourers' Union Chronicle began, ‘New Zealand! New Zealand!! New Zealand!! Off we go; now's your time, my boys.’ Leggett was described as ‘the valuable and zealous district secretary of Oxford’, and as ‘a sterling friend and brother, to whom we are so much indebted for the success of that district, and whose services we are sorry to lose.’29 The strong links developing between the union and the New Zealand emigration drive are well illustrated by the largest emigration advertisement appearing in the Labourers' Union Chronicle of 17 January 1874. In this the Agent-General for New Zealand gives notice of the impending departure of the Ballochmyle, and announces that ‘Mr Leggett, Secretary to the “Oxford District Agricultural Labourers' Union”, will accompany the party of Union Emigrants who embark by this vessel.’ The advertisement concludes by directing enquirers to write either to the National Union's General Secretary, or to Leggett, or to the Agent-General. On 27 January C. R. Carter travelled to Oxfordshire expressly to address a recruitment meeting arranged by Leggett in the village of Islip. In a report to Featherston dated 5 February 1874, Carter noted that the results of the meeting had been very satisfactory leading to ‘about fifty eligible emigrants of the rural class’ being procured. Since the date of the meeting, over a hundred more applicants had been approved – probably Carter had spent a day or two in Oxfordshire making the selection. Carter described Leggett as ‘a most intelligent country mechanic’. The agreement which Carter made with him stipulated that he was to have a free passage for himself and his family in an enclosed cabin in the steerage, and a free provision of ship's outfit, bedding, etc. He was also to receive £20 for the family's outfit expenses and railway fares to Plymouth, and was to be appointed the ship's schoolmaster.30 He appears on the Ballochmyle's passenger list as a 37-year-old carpenter, accompanied by his 38-year-old wife Ann, and seven children, aged ten months to 14 years.

The Ballochmyle sailed on 4 March 1874, and before the end of the month two further parties to be led by union men were being advertised in the Chronicle31. The recruiting for these various union parties helped to fill other ships, besides those they travelled on. The chartering and despatch of the emigrant ships to match the flow of recruitment was inevitably a rather improvised business, and there had to be a good deal of give and take in the arrangements. The personal circumstances of emigrants also came into play either to hasten or delay their departure. Thus Leggett had originally begun recruiting for a party to go on the Atrato,32 which was at first scheduled to leave late in January. Some of his recruits went by her, rather than wait for the main party.33 Others who at first planned to go with Leggett will have been delayed. This was probably the case with the Harris family of eight, and the Beckley family of seven, from Islip. They may well have given in their names at Carter's meeting there, but sailed by the Stonchouse, which left five weeks later than the Ballochmyle. It would, of course, be impossible to apportion credit for the recruitment of the emigrants between the various influences and agencies at work persuading them to come forward. The rural unions were undoubtedly a major force, but the Agent-General ran an extensive advertising campaign which must have brought in many rural recruits unconnected with the unions, as also must the free nomination scheme which Vogel launched in New Zealand in October 1873. Featherston's agents and sub-agents were doubtless greatly helped by the Revolt's stirring of the rural world, but the more enterprising of them also did some stirring on their own account.

One example of such enterprise is described in a letter written from London on 26 July 1874, and published anonymously by a Wellington newspaper. The writer is referred to as ‘a gentleman at home, who has taken a warm interest in promoting emigration to this Colony’, and he tells how he and his son assisted a shipping agent and broker who took a sub-agency for four counties from the Agent-General, when the free passages were introduced. The gentleman himself attended meetings on Saturday evenings, and others during the week if he could reach the towns concerned after office hours, and get back to London in time next morning. By 30 June 1874 his son had arranged fifty meetings, and was well on the way with a further fifty when the agency was closed, the Agent-General no longer requiring ‘an extra aid’. The method used was to work up the meetings well with posters, hand bills, ‘sandwich men’, newspaper advertisements, town criers, and a New Zealand banner outside the place of meeting for a few days before. The result was large audiences, sometimes up to 2000 people, which filled county town Corn Exchanges and Town Halls to overflowing. An ‘electrical effect’ was produced on these crowds by the unrolling of immense sheets, on which the son, who was an excellent sketcher, had produced water colour illustrations for the lectures:

One was an agricultural labourer at home in England with his smock frock and heavy boots (10 or 12 lbs weight); another was navvies in New Zealand at work in a cutting – those were the fellows we wanted, and what we wanted them to work at; another was a pay table and big piles of money ready for the men; another was a fellow ‘pocketing’ his £8 11s … with his face beaming with delight; another was the smoking meal of joints of mutton waiting for the New Zealand workman, enough to make him dance after a hard day's work; another showed his progress as a small sub-contractor, giving his directions to his gang of men; another his new home, built after 10 years of steady industry and perseverance – a nice comfortable looking homestead; another shows him riding on a handsome steed to the House as M.H.R. or M.L.C.34

Applications were not taken in the excitement following a meeting, but on a further visit to the towns, after which the recruits were examined, and were ‘finally approved by Mr Carter’. Because those interested were not immediately rushed into signing up, some were ‘picked up by the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, or applied direct to the Agent-General.’ There had been farmers' opposition to contend with, and New Zealand had been held up as ‘a land of cannibals, earthquakes, murders, poverty, wretchedness, disaffection, etc.’ Despite this, the methods used were so effective that the writer had been told at the Agent-General's office that they could always tell where meetings had been held by the flood of letters of enquiry.

Canterbury's agent, Andrew Duncan, had decided to make Glasgow his headquarters for his first five months, concentrating on recruitment from Scotland and Northern Ireland, and then move to England for the remainder of his twelve months' term of appointment. However, he proposed while based on Glasgow to make short forays into England as opportunities presented themselves.35 The first such journey resulted from a correspondence he opened, immediately on his arrival in Britain, with James Jenkins, the Gloucester friend of New Zealand emigration. This led to a five day visit to Gloucester at the turn of the year, during which Duncan spoke at meetings which Jenkins had arranged in the towns of Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Cheltenham and Cirencester, and the village of Staunton.36 Duncan had to contend with the caution created by the sufferings of the hundreds who had emigrated from the county to Brazil in 1872 and early 1873. At his first meeting, in Gloucester on 29 December 1873, he was clearly very much on trial both with the audience, and with the chairman, a local Quaker philanthropist. Jenkins describes how, by telling a plain unvarnished tale, Duncan made his own headway. The chairman had been very cautious in his opening remarks, but at the close he complimented Duncan highly and expressed his readiness to help him in any way he could. At least two of the other meetings were also chaired by prominent local nonconformists – one a Quaker, the other a Baptist minister. As a result of the meetings, a number of people gave their names in to Duncan, and others applied later to local sub-agents. From Tewkesbury, where there was no sub-agent, five or six young fellows walked the twelve miles to Gloucester, for their application papers. At Cirencester there was also no sub-agent, but ‘a Mr Gwillian, a person who has been district secretary to the Agricultural Labourers' Union’ came forward and offered to take the post. As the first fruits of these lectures, small parties left the county in February and March 1874, to join the Atrato and the Ballochmyle37

Although winter was the least favoured season for emigration, the diverse forces working in favour of emigration to New Zealand were so powerful that all records were broken in the January-March quarter of 1874. In February no less than 2,821 assisted emigrants left English ports for the colony, and the total for the quarter was 7,417, not far short of the total of 8,513 for the whole of the previous year. But spring was the most favoured emigration season, and right through the April-June quarter the village labourers of the eastern counties had also the great lock-out to hound them to the emigration agents. A staggering 9,758 assisted emigrants passed through London and Plymouth, the two English ports of despatch, during these three months – more than had been sent in the first eighteen months of Featherston's campaign. The peak month for nineteenth century emigration to New Zealand was May 1874, with a total of 4,720, of whom 3,935 passed through the two English ports. Fortunately Featherston's organisation had attained some maturity before the flood came. Thus negotiations for a London emigration depot came to a timely fruition with the opening of the Blackwall Depot on 1 May 1874. In New Zealand itself local resources were strained by the great influx during the southern winter of 1874, but by resorting to various improvisations the colony managed to cope.

The coincidence of the peak of English emigration to New Zealand with the great lock-out is noteworthy. The lock-out was made possible by the banding together of many of the farmers of East Anglia to form Defence Associations against the unions. The occasion of the lock-out was a strike by a union branch in the small Suffolk village of Exning, after workers had been refused a demand for a rise of one shilling in their weekly wages. This led the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk farmers who had formed the Newmarket Farmers' Defence Association to resolve on a lock-out of all union men, beginning on 21 March. Other Defence Associations quickly followed their lead, and soon thousands of union members were locked out in Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Essex, Bedfordshire, Hampshire and Lincolnshire. While most of these were members of the National Union, the Peterborough District Union and the Lincolnshire Amalgamated Labour League were also involved. The latter two belonged to the Federal Union, and the cause of unionism was weakened by the bad feeling which existed between them and the National Union. For all, what was now at stake was not any detail of wages or conditions, but the very right of agricultural labourers to belong to unions. Joseph Arch realised that his union could only win the struggle if it could secure generous financial help from town workers and the general public. He therefore worked himself to the limit on a fund-raising campaign mainly in the industrial Midlands and the North, while other members of the executive did what they could to help in the areas of the lock-out. About a hundred of the locked-out Suffolk labourers, led by Henry Taylor, went on their own fund-raising ‘pilgrimage’ to the industrial cities. In all, the National was able to pay over £24,000 to its locked-out members between March and August. But it was not enough. By making a greater use of labour-saving machinery, and employing non-union men and Irish as blacklegs, the farmers managed to carry on without the union men. When it became clear that they were determined to tackle even the harvest without making any concessions, Arch and his colleagues knew that they were beaten. On 27 July it was decided that the men would have to go back on the farmers' terms, and all assistance to locked-out men was to cease on 10 August. Inevitably, confidence in Arch and the union was seriously undermined, and hopes for a better day for the labourer in the villages of England began to wane. The allurement of the promises flowing from New Zealand could only gain from the contrast they offered.

The New Zealand agents were not slow to take their opportunity. On 7 April 1874 the locked-out labourers made a great demonstration in Newmarket. A thousand men, women and children marched in procession through the main street to the Heath, a large open common, and among those who addressed them there was Andrew Duncan. He painted a rosy picture of the prospects awaiting them in New Zealand. He told them that in the colonly it was thought a shame that women should work in the fields, and that there were no boys and girls running about barefooted. He had seen legs of mutton hawking about for a shilling. Young girls were scarcely there eight months before they found husbands and comfortable homes. Any sober, steady industrious man could expect to have from 50 to 100

‘THE FARMER HIS OWN LABOURER’ GRAPHIC 16 May 1874 Every well-wisher to his country must hope for some settlement of this unhappy dispute before all the old links are broken, and before the men whose ancestors have tilled the soil for more than a thousand years, take flight to other fields of labour, either in England or far across the sea. Meanwhile the farmers are, in many cases, as dependent on their own physical exertions as if they were in the backwoods of Canada, and our picture represents an actual incident. The master is doing his own work, his wife is bringing him his dinner, and the man who once did his ploughing and reaping looks idly on, being bound for the Land of Promise

acres of his own within five years. Duncan made an offer of free passages to New Zealand for 500 men and women. All they would have to pay was one pound each for the outfit, and the union was arranging to meet this. Duncan concluded by saying he would pay half of the outfit cost himself.38 This was, in effect, a considerable New Zealand contribution to the lock-out fund. For about three weeks, from late March to mid April, Duncan campaigned vigorously in the main lock-out counties. He gave lectures in three centres in Suffolk, four in Essex, two in Norfolk, four in Bedfordshire and two in Oxfordshire. He reported that at most of these places he held two meetings a day, some of them out of doors and to audiences of over 2,000.39

In a report home, dated 5 May 1874, Duncan mentioned a recent brief visit to north Lincolnshire, where he had given lectures at Ulceby and Brigg.40 This visit, and others by C. R. Carter at about the same time,41 marked the beginning of the development of close links between the Lincolnshire Labour League and the New Zealand immigration movement. The village labourers of Lincolnshire had begun to stir during the winter of 1871–2, even before Arch raised the standard at Wellesbourne. By the spring of 1872 many separate village trade unions with a variety of titles and varying rules, had come into existence. On 27 April a delegate meeting of these local unions met at the Spread Eagle, Grantham, to form a county union. The meeting was chaired by Auberon Herbert, M.P. for Nottingham, and it led to the forming of an amalgamated association, whose title in the course of time became the Lincolnshire and Neighbouring Counties Amalgamated Labour League. Its secretary was William Banks, a Boston journalist, who early in 1873 launched the League's official organ, the weekly Labour League Examiner. As in Kent, not all the Lincolnshire unionists joined the county union. Arch's National Union formed two Lincolnshire Districts, Market Rasen and South Lincolnshire, which by 1874 claimed about 3,100 members, while the League's membership in the county has been estimated at about 9,500 in 1873.42 The first evidence of the League's association with New Zealand emigration appears in the Stamford Mercury of 13 February 1874. The Agent-General had been running an advertisement in the paper for a time, but in this issue enquirers are for the first time directed not only to his London office, but also to ‘Mr Wm. Banks, Secretary Amalgamated Labour League, 5, Witham-street, Boston’. However, Banks also became an agent for the Canadian government, and the Boston area had strong traditional links with North America. The main parties to leave the county for New Zealand during the Revolt came from north Lincolnshire, following the visits to this area by Duncan and Carter in April and May 1874. At one of their meetings a young grocer and draper, John H. White, was unexpectedly called upon to take the chair.43 White lived in the village of Laceby, on the edge of the wolds, four miles inland from Grimsby. As a result of this experience White became deeply interested in New Zealand immigration, and, on Duncan's recommendation he had, by May 1874, been appointed a ub-agent working closely with the Labour League.44 Throughout the summer he campaigned to make New Zealand known in his area, and although at first only a few recruits came forward, he persisted, to become one of Featherston's most valuable local agents. The lock-out ended in the Labour League's districts on 23 May, as a result of an agreement between the farmers and the League, brought about by the conciliation efforts of influential friends of the labourers. This helps to account for the slow start to New Zealand emigration in north Lincoln-shire.

The emigrant flood of the April-June quarter of 1874, then, included the first trickle from the Lincolnshire Labour League, a great flow from the National Union's districts, a considerable part of it resulting from the lock-out, and further contributions from the Kent Union. Early in the quarter the National despatched two organised parties. The first, led by ‘Mr Smith, a Union delegate from North Essex’, sailed from London on the Peeress on 5 April. The Labourers' Union Chronicle of 4 April described this as ‘a large party of Union emigrants’ from Essex, Warwick- shireWarwickshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Hampshire, and one or two more counties. The other party, also described as ‘large’, was led by ‘Mr Streatfield of West Kent’, and sailed by the Adamant on 7 May.45 The Kent Union's recruits included a party of ninety by the Adamant sailing on 7 May. They left just as several farmers in East Kent endeavoured to spread the lock-out movement to their county. They ordered their men to hand over union cards to be destroyed, or face dismissal. Simmons warned that the union had 2,000 members in East Kent, and gave the locked-out men the usual strong support, with the result that the union enrolled many new members.46 Further dismissals followed the union's second annual demonstration on 20 May, but most of the farmers of Kent were not in the mood for a fight, and the union coped with the situation without difficulty. A donation of £20 for the ‘Kent Lock-out Fund’ from the Agent-General for New Zealand, acknowledged in the union's paper of 9 May, was welcomed, but obviously not really needed. In mid-April the union began its wages movement with direct approaches to farmers by four union branches in West Kent. By the end of June the approach was judged to have succeeded, and the procedure was then successfully repeated with ten further branches.47 The Kent Union throve on these successes, over the very months in which the National Union was beginning its decline following the lock-out defeat.

By June 1874 it was clear to Featherston that he would have no difficulty in meeting the year's quota of immigrants ordered by the colony, and some of the pressure was taken off the recruitment campaign. Applicants continued to come forward in large numbers. In the third quarter of the year, 6,479 were despatched from English ports, and in the last quarter 4,978. Parties sent by the Kent Union included nearly 100 by the Carnatic in September, 170 by the Berar and 180 by the Avalanche in October, and 100 by the Gareloch in November.48 The Lincolnshire Labour League's first large party, of about 200, left Grimsby railway station on 15 September to join the Geraldine Paget, sailing for Canterbury. They had been recruited by John White, selected by Andrew Duncan, and were led by Henry Tomlinson, who had been foundation secretary of the League's Laceby branch. When they arrived at Lyttelton on 27 December they were met by Duncan, recently returned from his mission in Britain.49 Smaller parties of League emigrants sailed in at least eight further ships before the year's end. The National Union also sent further parties, including 200 by the Crusader in September, led by George Allington, a Warwickshire delegate of the union, and 222 by the Lady Jocelyn in November, led by Thomas Osborne, another union leader from Warwickshire.50

Throughout the year the union papers had stimulated the emigration movement with optimistic letters from immigrants in New Zealand. By now they were able to place alongside the first flush of enthusiasm of recent arrivals, the solid reports of progress towards prosperity sent by those who had been in the colony for a year or two. But there was another side to the story, which may not have been altogether fairly presented by the union. The deaths of children at sea, for example, must have featured more prominently in the letters sent home than they did in the selection that were published. The first issue of the Chronicle for 1875 did something to redress the balance. Along with several favourable letters it printed one written on 11 August 1874 from Southland by John Charles Wood, a young man who was not finding New Zealand a paradise:

This country is not what the agents represented it to be; they are sending out thousands into a country where there is no work. Every step you take you sink up to the waist in mud or sand. There are no bridges, so you have to swim across the river. I went twenty miles to get work, and then they would not employ me unless I took a contract, so I undertook to dig a cutting for the railway, at 10 ½d per square yard. I shall never make my fortune at that if I were to work like a horse…. If you know anyone that is coming out here warn them of what they will have to go through….51

And to give would-be emigrants further cause for thought, the same issue carried the first report of the loss of the Cospatrick by fire in the south Atlantic. The report expressed the fear, which was to prove correct, that all of her 429 emigrants, bound for Auckland, had perished.

Cospatrick Memorial, Village Green, Shipton-under-Wychwood

Port Chalmers

5 Colony and Hearthland, 1874–80

ON THE FINE morning of 19 February 1874 Christopher Holloway was liberated from quarantine on the Mongol and boarded the small steamer Peninsula for the journey via Port Chalmers to Dunedin. His voyage to New Zealand as a saloon passenger must have seemed to the erstwhile farm labourer, a most gratifying promotion even though his union associations had led to animated arguments with some of the more class conscious of his fellow passengers,1 but before he reached Dunedin he was to realise that in the colony he would enjoy an even higher status, as a visitor of real importance, to be consulted and courted by the greatest in the land. Halfway between Port Chalmers and Dunedin, James Macandrew, Superintendent of Otago, came on board the steamer from his home on the hillside above the harbour, and gave Holloway ‘a most hearty welcome to the colony’. Holloway found him to be ‘a free, pleasant and agreeable gentleman — a fine specimen of the Scotch race’.2 The conversation on ‘the great and important object’ of Holloway's visit was continued in Macandrew's room in the government offices. It was arranged that Holloway should stay at one of the city's best hotels, as the guest of the government, and that he should have all possible assistance in planning and carrying out his tour of the province. The pattern which Holloway worked out in consultation with Macandrew and other Otago leaders was followed throughout the New Zealand tour. He spent some time in the main centres and a number of the larger towns, staying in the best hotels, while local worthies conducted him on visits to the various industries and public institutions. Excursions were also made to nearby country districts, sometimes with overnight stays at hotels or with local settlers. The journeys between the various centres were designed to allow Holloway to see a good deal of the country and its resources. Travel was by train or coach, or on horseback, usually in company with a knowledgeable person, such as a government surveyor. Wherever he went, Holloway took every opportunity to mix with all classes of the community.3

At the end of his first day in Dunedin Holloway returned to the Mongol for his last night on board. In his journal for the following day he endeavoured to sum up his first impressions of the people of Dunedin:

Everything here betokens prosperity, the inhabitants are well dressed, thoroughly respectable. The children with their shining rosy cheeks are the very picture of health. — A man's a man here, as you see them walking along the streets, their head erect, and their whole bearing impresses one with the idea ‘that Jack is as good as his master’. No cringing here, — yet there is no rudeness — but everything around betokens comfort, respectability, and happiness.4

The gold rushes of the 1860s had made Dunedin the foremost city of New Zealand, and by 1874 it had consolidated a position of commercial and industrial supremacy which it was to hold for the next two decades. In his first ten days Holloway visited the hospital, museum, and a number of schools; and also various industrial works including a soap factory, a clothing factory and a foundry. His main guide round the city was John Bathgate (1809–86), who was just resigning as the colony's Minister of Justice, to take up an appointment as Resident Magistrate and District Judge for Otago. Holloway also drove out to the Taieri Plains to see the farm of provincial councillor James Shand, and to Mosgiel to see the woollen mills, and Andrew Todd's farm. One day was spent at the immigration barracks with the Mongol's immigrants. Holloway's first impression that New Zealand was something of a workingman's paradise was repeatedly confirmed by what he saw and heard.

On 2 March, accompanied by an officer of the province's survey department, Holloway began an extended tour of Otago and Southland. He travelled by coach through Milton, Balclutha and Mataura to Invercargill, taking careful notes on the quality of the land, and the facilities of the townships, on the way. From Invercargill he visited Bluff Harbour, and Riverton. From Riverton he was taken by provincial councillor Theophilus Daniel, a settler with a whaling background, to see the Pahia Plains. This entailed a boat trip round the coast with a party of Maoris, and an overnight camp on the beach. While in Invercargill Holloway met some old acquaintances from Oxfordshire. James Palmer, whom he had recruited from Bletchington for Brogdens, told of wages averaging ten shillings a day, since he had arrived in New Zealand on the Zealandia on 4 January 1873.5 From Palmer, Holloway had good news of William Terry, a union man from Kirtlington, who had also come out on the Zealandia for Brogdens. In a letter printed in the Labourers' Union Chronicle of 27 December 1873, Terry had reported that he was about to take a place on a farm on 1 October. His wife was to look after the house, and their wages were to be £70 a year and all found, including the children. The Chronicle also printed a letter, dated from Invercargill on 18 March 1874, from Charles and Matilda Town, who were possibly also Brogden immigrants recruited by Holloway. They seem to have been well on the road to prosperity when Holloway called:

… My dear father and mother, Mr Holloway was here yesterday (Sunday), and he came to see me in the afternoon, but I was not at home. He told Tilly that we looked very comfortable and happy … Wages here are now ten shillings per day; but I have not been working for wages now for this last six months, for there is me and three more of my ship mates together; we have been taking contracts of the Corporation — making roads and ditches or anything … Harry and two more men are working for us … we are paying ten shillings per day for eight hours' work … Dear father and mother, Tilly has bought her a sewing machine, and she is very busy learning to work it … Charley is a big boy now, and he has got a pig and three goats and a lot of fowl …6

From Invercargill Holloway began a tour into central Otago on 16 March, travelling via Winton and Benmore into the high country. From Kingston he travelled by lake steamer the whole length of Lake Wakatipu. From Queenstown he travelled by coach through Alexandra, Roxburgh and Lawrence back to Milton, visiting gold mines and farms on the way. He reached Dunedin again on 29 March, and the following day saw some of the Scimitar's party and heard news of their voyage. Taking Dunedin again as his base, he now began to examine the country to the north. His diary for Thursday, 2 April gives a good idea of his stewardship in the use of his opportunities.

He left Dunedin at 7 a.m. that day, by coach for Palmerston, and on the journey took careful note of the quality of the land by the way. After lunch at Waikouaiti, Palmerston was reached at 1 p.m. Holloway immediately made his way to the home of W. A. Young, to whom he had a letter of introduction but that gentleman was not in. Having considered how he could improve his time to the best advantage, Holloway decided to climb Mount Puketapu, which rises about 1000 feet above the town. In his diary he remarks that he was amply repaid for his trouble:

The scenery from the top of this mountain is magnificent. At its foot lies the pretty little town of Palmerston. Then you have a beautiful view of Shag Valley well studded with smiling homesteads and flocks of sheep, and other cattle. Then you behold the River Shag winding its serpentine course through the valley till it empties itself into the sea. — In the distance you behold the wild mountain range — while on the eastern side of the mountain you have a splendid view of the ocean for many miles.7

Having descended from Puketapu, Holloway came upon four men stone breaking by the road side. He questioned one of them, and found that they were paid three shillings a yard for the work, and that a good hand could break three yards a day. The man assured him that New Zealand was a fine country for working men. Leaving the stone breakers, Holloway next fell in with a Mr J. Keen. Keen told him that ten years before he had had scarcely a shilling in his pocket, but now by industry and perseverance he was in an independent position. Keen showed him the Town Hall and the new English Church, for the erection of which he had collected £700, and next door to which he was erecting a new house for himself. Leaving Keen, Holloway reached his hotel in time for dinner at 6 p.m. He had just dined when Mr Young walked in. Young introduced him to Mr Main ‘a large squatter’, Mr Gilligan, mayor of the town, and a number of others. From their conversation, Holloway gained an insight into squatter life. In his diary he remarked that some persons were very bitter against the squatters, but his own view was that they should receive fair consideration for having opened up the country when population was scarce, though they should not be allowed to stand in the way of progress when the land was required for closer settlement. In the course of time the group turned to a good deal of grumbling about ‘the government — the brokenness of the land, etc.’, but Holloway was amused to notice that when someone asked about the time, these gentlemen all pulled out valuable gold watches. Having listened to the opinions freely expressed and the advice very generously given, Holloway records that ‘I very quietly resolve to think for myself and draw my own conclusions’.

Next day Holloway travelled by coach to Oamaru, where he spent several days. He describes it as a busy thriving town, the centre of a fine farming district. Here he spent some time at Windsor Park, the 14,000 acre estate of Edward Menlove. He found that Menlove ran 19,000 sheep, as well as growing large crops of grain. He was employing about a hundred men at average wages of twenty-five shillings a week and keep, but at harvest time had employed 180. One thing which Holloway noticed here and on other large properties did not please him so well — there was no accommodation for married men with wives and children. Instead large bunk houses were provided, reminiscent of shipboard, and here large numbers of single men lived and slept. Holloway asked if he might see how the men were fed, and Menlove told him to go in and see for himself.

… I entered the room as desired, and saw some 40 men set down to as good substantial dinner as one could desire. There was roast beef, vegetables, and plum duff. I was told that the men get beef or mutton 3 times a day, and plum duff 4 times a week, — the employers here say that if a man is to work well, he must live well.8

Holloway took up with Menlove the question of accommodation for married men, and suggested that he should erect a number of decent cottages.

On 8 April Holloway returned to Dunedin, and prepared an address for a public meeting which had been arranged for the 10th. The address was given to a crowded audience, chaired by the mayor, in the Masonic Hall. Holloway explained his reasons for visiting the colony, and gave his impressions of the province as a field for immigration. At the question time which followed he was disappointed at the shortsighted selfishness of many present. They were opposed to immigration because they wanted to keep the good things for themselves. Holloway spent a few more days in Dunedin, writing and posting to England, visiting members of his party still detained on Quarantine Island, and seeing further places of interest. On 15 April he set out by coach for Canterbury, and after a night at Oamaru, crossed the Waitaki, having spent fifty-seven days in Otago and travelled 1,334 miles in the province.

Holloway travelled at a leisurely pace through South Canterbury, taking over a week to reach Christchurch. He spent a long weekend in and around Timaru, and noted that ‘the land in this neighbourhood is very fertile, and is pretty well all occupied by small cockatoo farmers.’ Holloway was coming increasingly to understand that an important theme of New Zealand politics was the conflict in interests between the growing number of small farmers, the ‘cockatoos’, and the entrenched large pastoralists, ‘the squatters’. As the extention of small farming would be in the best interests of emigrating English farm labourers, Holloway was encouraged by meeting squatters who also believed it would be in the colony's best interests. He had the company of one such, a gentleman with a 30,000 acre run, when after an overnight visit to Geraldine, he travelled by coach to Ashburton. The company of this ‘free, intelligent and communicative’ squatter enlivened the drive over broad, empty monotonous plains. Throughout his travels, Holloway showed a good eye for country, and he noted how the Canterbury Plains varied from fertile silt to almost worthless gravel. His journal also expresses something of the varied beauties of the New Zealand landscape. Thus even while commenting on the monotony of this coach trip, he notes the grandeur of the backdrop of the snow-capped Southern Alps to the west, and the great sweep of ocean beach to the east.

At Ashburton Holloway found that, as at Timaru and Geraldine, the province's superintendent had made every possible arrangement for his comfort and convenience. Canterbury seemed, in fact, to be determined to outdo its rival, Otago. It had been arranged that Alfred Saunders, a founding settler and former superintendent of Nelson, should be his companion while in the Ashburton district. Together they visited a number of the ‘small cockatoo farmers’, and Holloway's report on the careers of several of them, published in the Labourers' Union Chronicle of 25 July 1874, must have served to spur the emigration movement:

… I came across a Mr Joseph Hunt, formerly of Great Rollright, in my own county of Oxfordshire. He told me that he was working in that village for 8s a week — house rent to pay, and a wife and three children to support out of that. He had heard of New Zealand, and Joe thought within himself that he couldn't worse his position by removing to another locality … In the year 1856 he bade farewell to Old England and after a long voyage he landed safely in New Zealand, with 2 ½d in his pocket … He set to work in real good earnest, and being a sober, energetic and persevering man, determined to get on if possible. He succeeded beyond his most sanguine expectations; and today I had the pleasure of visiting him in his own freehold house, which he has erected upon his own freehold farm of 210 acres. He has given his children a good education, and I thought within myself, as I sat with my friend at the tea-table, what would have been Joseph's prospects had he remained an agricultural labourer in Great Rollright, in England? In all probability he would have been over head and ears in the baker's and grocer's debt, without any possibility of paying it; with the Chipping Norton union staring him hard in the face, and the prospect of being buried in a pauper's grave … On the morrow, after leaving Mr Hunt, I called upon Mr Church, a small farmer; he is brother of Mrs Taylor, our General Secretary's wife. He was formerly a carman, in London, but not succeeding so well in life as he could wish, he emigrated to New Zealand a few years ago. On his arrival in the colony, he did as every man should do who wishes to make his way out here, that is, pitched into the first employment which presented itself, determined, in the first place to get a knowledge of colonial life, and work his way upwards, if possible. And what has been the result? — why this — when I visited him today he was owner and occupier of a very fine fertile farm, well fenced and watered, of 200 acres of land, and has succeeded in placing himself in very easy and comfortable circumstances. He, too, has in his turn become an employer of labour. I was very agreeably surprised to find that Joseph Smith, a young man who came out with me in the “Mongol” from Chesterton, Oxfordshire, had been engaged by Mr Church to work for him at £50 a year, with board and lodging — and my word they do live here, no red-herring diet, but beef or mutton three times a day. Smith laboured at home for 12s or 14s a week, and kept himself …

On 25 April Holloway was driven the eighteen miles to the railhead at Rakaia, to catch the train to Christchurch. To his surprise William Rolleston, the Superintendent of Canterbury, had come out to Rakaia to welcome him and accompany him to the city. He found that two rooms, sitting room and bedroom, had been engaged for him at Warner's hotel in Cathedral Square, and that a room was also at his service in the Government Buildings. He at once set about a busy programme of visits in the city, and excursions into the surrounding countryside. On longer trips of a day or two he visited Rangiora and Oxford, Sheffield and the Malvern Hills, Akaroa, and Leithfield, Weka Pass and Waikari. In the vicinity of Christchurch he was repeatedly surprised at the mature, English appearance of the countryside. Throughout his journey Holloway attended church services regularly each Sunday, giving the preference to his own Wesleyans, but sampling some of the other protestant options from time to time. While in Christchurch he twice preached at St James Wesleyan Church, and records that on the second occasion the church was crowded, and some turned away. On 26 May he attended the winter show of the Canterbury Agricultural and Pastoral Association, and found that the

Christchurch1877 quality of the stock and produce bore out what he had been told of the productiveness of the New Zealand soil. He was invited to attend the dinner in the evening, and to his surprise, was called upon to respond to the toast of the ‘Strangers’. He made full use of the opportunity, and was reported at length in the next day's newspapers. He praised the province's education system, its welfare institutions, and its agricultural progress, but he had one or two criticisms to make. He told of his annoyance at reading advertisements by influential Canterbury people for ‘a man and his wife without encumbrance’, and he wanted to see something done about erecting cottages for ‘these objectionable people with families’.9

During Holloway's visit to Christehurch, four emigrant ships arrived at Port Lyttelton, and he found time to visit three of them. On 27 April he went with the Superintendent, Rolleston, to see the 359 immigrants who had arrived on the Rakaia from London the previous day. All was found well on board, and Holloway was then taken to the quarantine station on Ripa Island, where he was pleased with the spacious well fitted buildings. On his return to Christehurch he visited the emigration depot, and with this also he was well satisfied. A month later, on 27 May, he went with Rolleston to welcome 251 of Andrew Duncan's recruits, on their arrival on the Varuna from Glasgow. On 1 June he had the great pleasure of accompanying Rolleston to board the newly-arrived Ballochmyle, and meet his friend Joseph Leggett and many other Oxfordshire acquaintances in his party. He was able to arrange for Leggett to be allowed ashore to spend his first night in the new country with him, and they spent a very pleasant evening together chatting over old times. Within a couple of days Holloway had found Leggett a situation at his trade, working at twelve shillings for an eight hour day on the building of a new school in the city. He left Leggett well pleased with his first impressions of New Zealand, and with his own prospects.

On 5 June Holloway set out by coach to cross the Southern Alps and visit Westland. He was astonished at the mountain scenery of Arthur's Pass, and decided that it must be some of the grandest in the world. At Hokitika he was met by James Bonar, Superintendent of Westland, who took him to be guest in his own home. Holloway spent a little over a week in Westland, visiting sawmills, farms, goldfields and coal mines. He then set out for Nelson by the difficult overland route via Reefton, Lyell and Lake Rotoiti. His midwinter journey on horseback through this mountainous interior must have provided the most unpleasant travelling of his entire trip. The accommodation houses were primitive, there was a day of torrential rain, and at times his guide was not very sure of the way. Apart from the area around Hampden (modern Murchison) he saw little worthwhile land until he reached the Waimea Plains on 25 June.

The last twenty miles by coach from Foxhill to Nelson provided a strong contrast to the rugged interior. On each side of the road were well tended farms with neat wooden houses and well kept garden plots. In Nelson the Superintendent welcomed him and conducted him to a comfortable boarding house. During the next ten days he had a good look around Nelson and its vicinity, and went by sea for a two day visit to Collingwood, on the shores of Golden Bay. He liked the district and its pleasant climate, but decided that with its limited area of agricultural land, it was hardly the place for a person who still had his way to make. On 7 July he left by sea for Picton, and spent a little over a week in Marlborough. Here he considered that the immigrants' prospects were restricted by so much of the good land being tied up in large sheep runs.

On 16 July, after a very rough crossing of Cook Strait, Holloway reached Wellington. Parliament was in session, and he was able, over the next few days, to have valuable interviews with various leaders and officials of both the General and the Provincial Governments. On the evening of 17 July he visited a session of the House of Representatives. As soon as the premier, Julius Vogel, was made aware of Holloway's presence, he arranged to be introduced to him, and retired with him to an adjoining room for ‘a lengthened conversation upon the nature and object’ of his visit. Thus began an acquaintance which was to be renewed a year or two later in England. Vogel was very interested in Holloway's impressions of the South Island, and in his account of the position of the agricultural labourers in England. Holloway decided that Vogel was ‘evidently a man of very great abilities, large powers of mind, very far seeing, and in every way fitted to be the leader of a powerful nation’. He had another long interview with him a day or two later, when the subject of immigration was discussed from various angles. Vogel was interested in Holloway's views on whether English immigrants would object to repaying part of their passage money. Holloway pointed out that if New Zealand wished to secure her share of emigrants, in competition with the great inducements offered by Canada and Queensland, it would be in her interests to continue free passages. Vogel considered that New Zealand offered better prospects than these colonies both in climate and in other ways. The following evening Holloway was able to attend the House to hear Vogel present the budget. Before beginning his tour of Wellington Province, Holloway learnt all he could from the provincial officials concerned with immigration and land settlement. He also had interviews with the Superintendent, William Fitzherbert, and at his invitation went out one Sunday to his home at the Hutt. Holloway was not able to use Wellington as a base for extensive excursions into the country districts. The high hills and mountains that hemmed it in from its hinterland had yet to be effectively mastered, but its magnificent harbour augured well for its future.

On 27 July Holloway travelled by coach over the hills to the Horowhenua Coast, and began a five weeks' tour of the coastal lowlands of western Wellington and Taranaki. For the purposes of his visit, this was one of the most promising regions that he saw, with large areas of fertile, well-watered land waiting to be colonised. Development had been delayed by problems of communication, conflicts with the Maoris, and the need to clear large areas of dense forest. With good prospects for a lasting peace, and roads and railways advancing as a result of Vogel's policies, the pace of settlement was beginning to quicken. The first day's journey to the little river port of Foxton was largely through uninviting sandhills, and Holloway learnt that a belt of fertile land between the sand hills and the mountains was still in Maori hands. Inland from Foxton an extensive area of fine bush country had been sold by the Maoris. Here Holloway visited first the recently founded township of Palmerston North, pioneered largely by Scandinavians. A tramway had just been completed linking the settlement with the port of Foxton, and as a result a timber industry was beginning to flourish. Holloway found that settlers who had been there for three or four years were well established. Thirteen miles to the north Holloway visited the six-month-old township of Feilding. It had been founded by the Emigrant and Colonist's Aid Corporation, an English association under aristocratic patronage, combining philanthropic and commercial aims in the development of a block of 106,000 acres acquired from the New Zealand Government a year or two earlier. Holloway found that there were already over six hundred souls in the settlement, that a railway through the district had been begun under an agreement with the government, and that a sawmill was operating, and others about to be erected. He visited some of the settlers' homes and found them well pleased with their choice. He travelled on to Wanganui through the older settlements of Bulls, Marton and Turakina, and was well pleased with what he saw.

After a day or two looking around Wanganui and the nearby countryside, Holloway moved north along the Patea Coast, a region devastated in the fighting of the late 1860s, but now re-occupied and with settlement beginning to flourish. For a week from 7 August, Holloway made his headquarters the frontier town of Hawera, a few miles from the Waingongoro River, which for the meantime had been tacitly accepted as the boundary for settlement and the white man's authority. Holloway described Hawera as a considerable town, but still in the course of formation. The accommodation was good, but recent rain had turned the unformed streets into almost impassable mud. The large block house was now used as a school and place of worship. In visits to the surrounding countryside Holloway was impressed with the fertility of the land, and the peaceable outlook of the Maori settlements. He found that new areas of forest land were becoming available for settlement. He learnt that beyond the Waingongoro the notorious Maori Chief Titokowaru, who had led the latest campaign against the Government forces, was turning to cultivation of the land and had sent to Wanganui for the plants to establish a hop garden; while the chief Honi Pihama, another former foe, held the contract for carrying the white man's mails in the area beyond the pale between the Waingongoro and Stoney Rivers. For one of his excursions from Hawera Holloway lists his entourage as consisting of ‘Commissioner Parris — Captains Wray & Skeet — Mr Kennedy, clergyman — Pepe Heke, a chief's young wife — Honi Pihama, the chief, as our leader — and several other natives, all mounted’. There is not a hint of the fact that ‘Mr Kennedy, clergyman’ was the Revd H. M. Kennedy, who had taken social precedence over Holloway on the Mongol, now recently installed as incumbent of the frontier parochial district of Patea. Holloway would not have been displeased to find that on the New Zealand bush frontier the Anglican church limped in poverty behind more vigorous rivals.

On 13 August Holloway left Hawera by coach on the seventy-six mile journey round the coast, through the Maori district to New Plymouth. He described the Waimate Plains between Hawera and Opunake, as a ‘fertile and beautiful piece of country’, and hoped that it would soon pass into the hands of settlers, to be covered with smiling homesteads. Throughout the day, he judged the land he passed through to be ‘very fine country’, and noted that it was well watered by the streams radiating from the cone of Mount Egmont. Late in the evening he reached New Plymouth, the capital of Taranaki Province. Isolation through lack of a good port, Maori wars, and dense bush, had combined to make Taranaki the colony's most backward province. Three weeks in the New Plymouth settlement confirmed the impression Holloway had begun to form in South Taranaki, that the province had prosperous days ahead, and had much to offer the emigrating English village labourer. Holloway found that his visit had been eagerly awaited in New Plymouth.

Three months earlier, on 16 May 1874, the Taranaki Superintendent, Frederick Carrington, had arranged for the gifted Harry Atkinson (1831–92) to assume the leadership of the provincial government. Atkinson had acted vigorously to move the settlement out of the doldrums into which it had drifted. Early in the year the Moa Block, of nearly 50,000 acres of good forest land inland from New Plymouth behind Mount Egmont had become available for settlement. Atkinson was determined that it should be opened up promptly and vigorously, but he was aware that this would only be possible if a stream of immigrants began flowing into the settlement. Exactly six weeks after accepting office, Atkinson farewelled William Mumford Burton (1830–93), an experienced Taranaki settler appointed to proceed to England as Taranaki's own emigration agent. Atkinson used the occasion to warn the Taranaki settlers that they were gaining a reputation for indolence in the other provinces, and that if they were ever to be spoken of as other than a small fishing village they would have to introduce immigrants.10 In appointing Burton he had brushed aside suggestions that he should wait for Holloway's visit before doing anything. While waiting for the fruits of Burton's mission, Atkinson pressed Taranaki's claims for some of the free immigrants already on the way. Vogel offered him 100 immigrants from the Waikato, and when she reached Wellington on 11 July 1874, Carrington, who was in Wellington for the parliamentary session, boarded her and persuaded 119 to proceed to New Plymouth.11 The majority of this party were recruits from Alfred Simmons's Kent union. They reached New Plymouth on the coastal steamer Luna on 15 July, and were royally welcomed as the settlement's first significant party of immigrants for many years. A number of them were sent to begin clearing the site for the future township of Inglewood, deep in the bush on the Moa Block, and here Holloway went on horseback to visit them on 20 August. He found that the provincial government had been providing them with steady work at five shillings per day, wet or dry, and that it was now intended to put them on contract work at five shillings per yard for stone breaking and three pounds per acre for bush felling. These, Holloway found, were ‘tip top’ prices.

Holloway's journal records a variety of experiences which left him with a favourable impression of the New Plymouth district. On the afternoon of the weekly market day, Saturday 15 August, he was visited in his hotel by twenty or thirty old settlers, and he remarks that ‘really it was amusing as

Inglewood [1876] well as instructive’ to hear them one by one tell of their impoverished arrival, the struggles and difficulties of their early days in the settlement, and the comfortable circumstances which had eventually rewarded their energy and perseverance. As he rode out day by day to the various farming districts, Holloway gained a more detailed understanding of what they had accomplished. Among the examples which he recorded at some length was that of Peter Elliot, who had emigrated from Devon with the first party of settlers more than thirty years before. As he looked round Elliot's farm, Elliot told how he had arrived one pound in debt, and with his wife and child had made his first home in a shanty so wretched and exposed that he awoke one morning to find ‘one of Captain Cook's descendants (a wild pig)’ stretched at his feet. By dint of hard work he had prospered, and the farm which he showed Holloway was one which he had bought for a thousand pounds after the war. It was a fine property, well stocked with sheep and cattle, and had a first-rate dairy. Besides this he had other farms on which he had established his sons. While out on one of these rural rides on a calm sunny day Holloway's thoughts turned to the contrast between the recent days of war and the tranquillity which he was enjoying, with

… the larks singing joyously over head, the sheep and cattle quietly grazing in the well fenced paddocks, and the jolly settler whistling behind his plough as he turned over the fertile soil …

His main criticism of the settlement concerned the uncertainty of its link with the outside world, as a result of its dependence on an open roadstead. Towards the end of his stay a party of seventy German and Scandinavian immigrants being forwarded from Wellington had to be carried on to Auckland on account of bad weather, and he himself was detained for a week when the steamship he intended to travel on was unable to put in.

Holloway finally left New Plymouth for Manukau Harbour on 4 September, and arrived in Auckland by train from Onehunga the following morning. He was welcomed by the Superintendent, John Williamson, and various provincial officers, and accommodated in the Waitemata Hotel. He spent the next fortnight seeing Auckland and the surrounding countryside, and travelling by sea with Williamson for a visit of a few days to the thriving goldmining district of Thames. Here a meeting of the local Maoris had been arranged so that Holloway could be introduced to them. On 21 September he set out for North Auckland, but the steamer had to put back after losing her propellor. While she was being repaired he accompanied Williamson on a visit by steamer to the Coromandel gold fields. He arrived back at Auckland on the evening of 29 September, and sailed immediately on the repaired steamer for the Bay of Islands. In three weeks in North Auckland he first visited the various settlements around the Bay of Islands, and then crossed by way of Ohaeawai and Taheke to the Hokianga where he visited Judge F. E. Maning, famed as a Pakeha-Maori (i.e. a European who has become a Maori cribal member and married a Maori wife). He then travelled overland via Waimate and Hikurangi to Whangarei, and thence continued south through Waipu, the Albertland settlement, Warkworth and Waiwera to reach Auckland on 21 October. From what he saw in North Auckland, Holloway decided that if new settlements were to succeed there, much more would need to be done about roading, and in the wooded country the settlers would have to be given part-time employment to help them get on their feet.

With his time now rapidly running out, Holloway left immediately for a quick look at the Waikato, travelling by road to Mercer, and thence by steamer on the Waikato River to Hamilton. After meeting some of the settlers there and learning that they were anxious to see some of the class of men he represented, he travelled by road to Cambridge. Both these townships had been founded ten years previously by military settlers, on land confiscated from the Maoris. Holloway then returned by way of Te Awamutu to Ngaruawahia, and thence back to Auckland, having been impressed by the fertility of much of the Waikato. After a short rest in Auckland he went by sea to Tauranga, and travelled inland to see something of the thermal wonders of Rotorua, including the famed Pink and White Terraces, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Tarawera some twelve years later. Returning to Auckland, he took a steamer to Wellington, and after a few days of visiting in the capital, sailed for London on the sailing ship Halcione on 24 November. In his diary he had kept a careful record of his journeys and when he added them up, found he had covered 6,430 miles in the colony. Few colonists could have claimed to have seen as much of their country as he had.

Holloway arrived back in London on 9 March 1875, and immediately took up his old links with the union, resuming his attendance at district committee meetings in Oxford, although he was, of course, no longer district chairman. He had returned just as the weakened National Union was beginning to be riven by internal dissension. Joseph Arch came under attack from former friends and allies, unity was broken when Matthew Vincent formed his own union, whose main purpose was to acquire land to be shared by its members, and his Labourers' Union Chronicle shifted from being the organ of Arch's union to being one of its most bitter opponents. Arch and his executive were able to launch a fresh newspaper, the English Labourer, on 26 June 1875. By vigorously defending themselves and their policies they prevented Vincent's movement from making any great headway among the rank and file. Nevertheless, this disunity following industrial defeat had a serious effect on the memberships, which dropped from over 86,000 in June 1874 to 40,000 at the end of 1875. The decline of the union also owed something to the emigration movement, which had removed so many of the more vigorous and able members. Holloway remained loyal to Arch, and soon after his return gave public expression to his admiration for his leader. This was in a lecture on New Zealand, delivered late in April in his home village of Wootton, in the open space in front of Killingworth Castle. He began the lecture by sketching the position of the rural labourer on the eve of the Revolt, and then proceeded: When the Almighty had a great work to be done, He raised up suitable instruments for accomplishing it, and he believed that their noble President, Joseph Arch, was raised up by Divine Providence to be the deliverer of the farm labourers, as Moses was to be the deliverer of the Israelites. Joseph Arch was trained up in the school of poverty and privation, and, possessing good natural abilities, which he improved by self-culture, he was pre-eminently qualified to be the leader of this great movement.13

Holloway went on to tell how the farmers had forced the union to turn to emigration, with Arch going to Canada and himself to New Zealand. He described the many attractions of New Zealand, a land where labouring men ‘did not look down at their toes so much’, but went around with their heads erect.

The Labourers' Union Chronicle's report of this address was reprinted in full in the New Zealand parliamentary papers, as also was the full and carefully written report Holloway prepared for the union. In this he remarked that ‘perhaps no one individual had ever before had afforded to him such rare opportunities for acquiring a general knowledge of the colony’, and he told of the excellent facilities provided for him by both the general and provincial governments. Yet he had been left quite free to draw his own conclusions:

I mixed pretty freely with all classes of the community — from the Hon. J. Vogel (Premier) down to the lowest settler … I have associated with the great landed proprietor, and with the less affluent settler, who is steadily advancing upward to a more prosperous position. I have met with the employer of labour and the employed, with the prosperous and the unsuccessful, and I have come to the conclusion that any of our labourers, gifted with temperate habits, such as sobriety, industry, frugality, and perseverance, may, in the course of a few years, become occupiers of land themselves, and have placed to their account at the bankers a considerable sum for times of sickness and old age. Indeed, gentlemen, I feel convinced that New Zealand, with its fine, healthy climate, its salubrious air, its fertile soil, its mild winter, its temperate summers, its liberal land laws, its fine educational system, its freedom from State-Churchism, and its civil and religious privileges, is secondary to no other colony in point of the advantages and privileges it has to offer to intending emigrants of the proper class.14

In expanding in detail on these various advantages, Holloway referred, as supporting evidence, to ‘the immense number of letters which reach our shores by every mail’ with glowing and encouraging accounts of the success of new colonists.15 Running through the report are Holloway's views on the best approach to colonial life for the English farm labourer immigrant. He should not stay in a town, where house-rent was higher than at home, but push up into the interior of the country, where it would be much easier to secure a piece of freehold and run up ‘a neat wooden cot’ of his own. In most parts of New Zealand he would find wood for firing abundant and easy of access — a great attraction to a man who may have shivered through every winter of his life before emigrating. While there were special settlement and deferred payment systems which made it possible for an immigrant of limited means to get almost immediately into possession of land, Holloway advised working for an employer for the first year or two, to gain a knowledge of colonial life.

In view of Holloway's excellent first hand knowledge of New Zealand, and his enthusiasm for emigration to the colony, it comes as no surprise that Featherston enlisted him onto his staff, ‘as Emigration Officer for the purpose of lecturing and giving information as to the prospects of persons emigrating to New Zealand’.16 C. R. Carter was wanting to resign his appointment, and was apparently only continuing out of a strong personal loyalty to Featherston, who had persuaded him to withdraw a resignation he had submitted on 7 July 1874.17 To replace him, Featherston needed a man of similar oratorical and organising gifts; one also who was knowledgeable on New Zealand conditions, who had an affinity with the English rural labourer, and who was willing to accept the whole country as his brief. Holloway seemed clearly to be such a man. He began his new duties on 17 May and quickly settled into his new position. On 1 September 1875, Featherson accepted a month's notice of resignation from Carter.18 From this time until April 1880, when his services were finally dispensed with on the closing of the emigration drive, Holloway was New Zealand's principal peripatetic agent in England.

Holloway joined the Agent-General's staff at a time when rural emigration to New Zealand had lost a good deal of the impetus that had carried it to such heights in 1874. On 1 June 1875 Featherston reported that he considered that the feeling in favour of emigration was not as strong in the agricultural districts as it had been in 1874.19 No doubt there were several reasons for this — including the effect of the earlier exodus on local wage rates, and the fact that those best fitted for emigration by personal temperament and circumstances had already gone. The tragic loss of the Cospatrick, which became known in England right at the end of 1874, and the continuing publicity provided by the official enquiry, also had a dampening effect. An ‘anti-emigration agent’ from New Zealand may have had a little influence. This was a Mr McPherson who had given a public lecture on the ruin ahead for the New Zealand working man during Holloway's visit to Dunedin. When Holloway had asked the superintendent, Macandrew, about him, Macandrew explained that McPherson had called on him a few days earlier to say that he was about to visit Britain and would appreciate a commission to lecture on New Zealand as a field for emigration. On his request being refused, he had said he would do his best to dissuade emigrants from coming to the colony.20 At a public meeting sponsored by the Oxford District of the National Union in the Oxford Town Hall on 16 December 1874, McPherson obtained the chairman's permission to address the audience, and with the authority of nine years' residence in New Zealand, gave a warning that the colony was not a good field for emigration. There were cries of ‘no’ when the chairman asked those present who had relations in New Zealand whether they had received any complaints from them, but the doubt had been sown.21

When Holloway joined Featherston's staff it included, besides Carter, one other full-time emigration agent — William Burton, the Taranaki Provincial Agent. Upon his arrival in England towards the end of 1874, Burton visited several districts, but was unsuccessful and returned to London much discouraged. Vogel, who was in London at the time, suggested to Featherston that Burton should be invited to visit the Grimsby district of Lincolnshire, where a lecturer was wanted to help the Laceby local agent, John H. White, who was continuing the good work he had begun in association with Carter and Andrew Duncan. Carter accompanied Burton to Lincolnshire, and introduced him to White.22 Burton began his Lincolnshire campaign with a public meeting in Laceby on 14 January 1875,23 and was soon having increasingly encouraging results. A firm friendship seems to have been quickly established between the Burtons and White, and together they made a good working team. Their first party, of ninety-two emigrants, sailed by the Collingwood on 13 April, and larger parties sailed by the Halcione on 27 May, the Chile on 11 June and the Hurunui on 23 November. On 1 June 1874 Burton was transferred from the service of the Taranaki Province to that of the General Government, and Mrs Burton was also placed on the payroll as Assistant Emigrant Agent.24

Holloway's work as a New Zealand agent began with meetings at Twyford and Castle Thorpe in Buckinghamshire on 17 and 18 May 1875. He attended the National Union's Annual Council at the end of May, and then gave further lectures in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.25 He apparently gave his audiences good measure, as the correspondent who reported his lecture in the Oxfordshire village of Minster Lovell on 4 June noted that his address lasted one hour and three-quarters.26 It seems that Holloway took some time to adapt his methods to the needs of his new task. His experience as a union delegate, organising and encouraging union branches across the English countryside, and surveying the scattered settlements of New Zealand, had made him too disposed to travel rapidly from district to district. In emigration work this produced little in the way of demonstrable results. Thus during 1876 he addressed 137 meetings, and his agency cost the New Zealand government £312 7s., yet the number of emigrants whose papers bore his name totalled only 39 ½ ‘statute adults’.27 His work must have had some influence on many more emigrants than this, but the completion of the process of recruitment had been left to local agents, or the London office. In comparison, the Burtons, concentrating on north Lincolnshire, in joint agency with John H. White, obtained 247 statute adults during 1876. This agency cost the New Zealand government £733.14s. 10d. for the Burtons and £130 in commissions to White.28 When Holloway began work for the 1877 season, the Agent-General instructed him to concentrate his work more, and remain in districts likely to give the class of emigrants wanted.29

Even the Burtons' 1876 recruitment figures clearly indicate a striking decline in the flow of emigration to New Zealand. This was due to changing conditions in the colony as well as the decline of interest in emigration in rural England. For reasons partly personal, partly political, Vogel's dominance of the colony's policies began to wane. Suffering from gout and the effects of overwork, Vogel left New Zealand in September 1874 to attend to the raising of a further loan in London, and to reorganise the Agent-General's office there. Featherston's relations with the cabinet had become strained, largely because it was difficult for politicians in New Zealand to understand the problems he faced in Britain. Featherston was also now a sick man, and the arrival of a sick Vogel to virtually take over his functions as Agent-General for the first half of 1875 created an unhappy situation. Meanwhile apprehension was growing in the colony as the burden of debt rose while export prices fell. Working men also were becoming fearful that a continuing flow of immigration would eventually glut the labour market. The abolition of the provincial governments, set in motion by Vogel before he left for England, and completed by his colleagues the following year, added further strains to the uncertain political scene. For the next few years the immigration work of the Agent-General and his staff was plagued by the shifting policies and contradictory instructions of cabinets unsure in their reading of the signs of the times. News reports and private letters must also have been carrying contradictory messages to potential recruits in rural England.

These vacillations in New Zealand government policy and public opinion began to appear during 1875. Featherston was initially given an order for 25,000 immigrants for the 1875–76 year, by Vogel. The New Zealand cabinet, probably influenced by the appearance of unemployment in some districts during the winter of 1875, reduced the order to 13,000, though considerably more were sent because Vogel read this to mean 13,000 statute adults.30 By the time Featherston received the reduced order he had already accepted almost enough applicants to fill it, and as a result recruitment had to mark time for nearly six months.31 Because of this the campaign was not very much affected by discouraging news arriving from the colony at the turn of the year. On 6 October 1875 a public meeting in Dunedin, claiming to consist of some 1200 persons, passed a unanimous resolution to be forwarded to the House of Representatives, expressing ‘increasing alarm’ at the government's bringing further immigrants to a country ‘already crowded with unemployed workmen … who are now bordering on starvation’. This was answered in the house on 8 October by Harry Atkinson, who had taken over the immigration portfolio on Vogel's departure. The meeting, he had been informed by the Immigration Officer at Dunedin, had been got up by three well-known local demagogues, and most of those present had not been unemployed, but had attended ‘to have some fun’. Over 600 new immigrants had arrived in Dunedin since 18 September, and all had readily obtained work. Undeterred by this rebuttal the Dunedin demagogues got up a further meeting on 18 October, at which it was resolved to acquaint the people of Great Britain with the real state of the country, and the miserable fate which awaited any intending to emigrate to it. Reports of both meetings were supplied by the organisers to the British press, and appeared in The Times of 20 December 1875, as a reprint from the Liverpool Albion. A letter from Featherston, refuting the various allegations, appeared in The Times the following day.32 Featherston's own confidence may, however, have been a little shaken by the telegrams he was receiving from the colony. One of 17 December instructed him to stop sending emigrants to Hawke's Bay, another of 17 January 1876 stopped all except nominated emigration to Taranaki, and a third of 26 January 1876 asked that no more emigrants be accepted for despatch to Auckland, Taranaki, Hawke's Bay and Nelson until June.33

On 21 April 1876 Vogel, now back in New Zealand, and once more premier, cabled Featherston an order of 5000 adults for the year to 31 March 1877. The first ships were not to arrive till October, so as not to affect the labour market in the southern winter.34 As it was, the mid-winter labour reports from local immigration officers showed that there was a good demand for rural workers in most districts. A ‘great scarcity of labour’ was reported from Hawke's Bay, with wages higher than for years, so the assessment cable to Featherston six months earlier had obviously been wrong.35 The abolition of the provinces meant that local needs were not now assessed by provincial executives with some power to control labour demand, but by purely administrative local immigration officers, who naturally tended to play safe. On occasions they apparently underestimated the labour demand which the opening of new country was to create, as the public works policy began to bear its delayed fruits. Despite the reduced order from the colony, in the northern summer and autumn of 1876 it did not prove easy to find enough English rural labourers to fill the immigrants ships.36 In the midst of these difficulties the ailing Featherston resigned his post, and died a few days later, on 19 June 1876. Vogel, eager to return to the excitements of the metropolis, resigned the premiership to take up the vacant post. He arrived in London early in 1877, to face the, to him, irksome task of carrying out retrenchments ordered from Wellington.

To bring his agency's expenditure within the reduced budget, Vogel had to dispense with the Burtons, who returned to Taranaki later in 1877. Holloway he considered too valuable to let go, and he was able to arrange for him to take leave of absence, with a retainer of thirty-five shillings a week, until the now shortened emigration season began.37 In May 1877 Holloway was recalled to active duties, and concentrated initially on the neighbourhood of Yeovil in Somerset.38 In the face of renewed instructions to reduce expenditure, Vogel decided in August to give Holloway notice that he would not be required after 1 December, but he later reconsidered the matter, and decided to once more give him leave of absence until the spring, with a thirty-five shilling a week retainer.39 Holloway's background made him invaluable in selecting farm labourers, as well as in drawing applicants. He must have travelled extensively over these years, interviewing applicants as directed by the London office. In a despatch of 23 May 1878, outlining the working of his office to a new Minister for Immigration, Vogel explained that applicants residing within a reasonable distance were required to call at the office and see the secretary, and ‘Mr Holloway has personal interviews also with a larger number’.40

Early in 1878 the Minister for Immigration wrote to Vogel that the power of the colony to absorb immigrants of the right stamp ‘may be said to be unlimited’, but when the year's order was telegraphed on 23 March it was for only 5,000.41 The demands of the colony's labour market were at odds with the government's financial position, which called for retrenchment. When the shortened emigration season began in the northern spring, Vogel reported that agricultural labourers did not seem disposed to come forward in good numbers, as they were obtaining better wages than in former years.42 The shortened recruitment period was arranged so that ships did not arrive in the colony until October, to coincide with the rising labour demand of the southern spring. This meant that emigrants were being sought only during the northern busy season, and put New Zealand at a disadvantage in competition with the Australian colonies which maintained a fairly steady flow throughout the year. While recruitment was thus proceeding haltingly in the English countryside, an unusually strong winter demand for labour was becoming apparent in many New Zealand districts. From Lawrence in Otago the chairman of the Tuapeka County Council telegraphed the Minister for Public Works on 15 June to inform him that ‘never in any period of the history of the colony have the requirements for immigration been so great as at present’.43 He advised that although contractors were offering up to eleven shillings a day for labourers, they were still in some cases being forced to throw up contracts and forfeit their deposits. The Mayor of Invercargill also telegraphed the Minister for Immigration in similar terms, asking that 1200 emigrants be despatched to Bluff Harbour for the coming spring. This request came from a crowded public meeting, held in response to the largest requisition ever presented to the mayor of the town.44 The minister responded by cabling Vogel to send 600 agricultural labourers to Southland. The mid-year survey of the labour market brought further reports of strong demand from Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin.45 Orders for additional immigrants were accordingly sent to Vogel. A cable of 9 August asked for 1,000, chiefly for Canterbury, and another of 15 August instructed that 300 be shipped to Timaru direct.46 Yet a hint of warning of things to come had been provided by the experience of the Nelson district. All immigration to Nelson had been suspended on 17 May, following a petition from labourers and others advising of hard times in the district.47

The interaction between the New Zealand immigration drive and the Revolt of the Field which began in Warwickshire in the spring of 1872, reached a fitting culmination in Kent in the winter of 1878–9. Under Simmons's astute leadership the Kent and Sussex Labourers' Union had grown steadily in strength throughout the ‘seventies, easily warding off sporadic attacks by its opponents. After making a strong feature of emigration while launching its successful wages movement in 1874, the Kent union had shown only a limited interest over the following years. But when in the autumn of 1878 the farmers and landowners of Kent began to organise a widespread ‘show-down’ with the union, the thoughts of Simmons and his executive turned immediately to an emigration drive as one effective counter-measure. The Kentish lock-out of 1878–9 may be taken as a belated closing episode of the Revolt, and the special endeavours which the New Zealand Government made to recruit the locked-out men represent the last major episode of the ‘Vogel’ immigration drive. It was appropriate that Holloway, who had been so closely involved in both movements, should be sent by Vogel to Kent to work with the union in recruiting emigrants for New Zealand.

Vogel had already despatched his year's quota of emigrants when the Kentish lock-out began towards the end of October 1878. If the pattern of the previous year or two had been followed he would have marked time as regards recruitment until the following May. That events took a different course was due to the lock-out's coinciding with an unusually strong demand for labour in New Zealand in the southern spring of 1878. The link between the two was provided by the personalities of Vogel, and of the New Zealand premier, Sir George Grey. Vogel, ever the opportunist, saw in the lock-out a repetition of the possibilities he had helped to seize in 1874, and Grey, at this stage of his career an erratic demagogue almost obsessed by the injustices imposed on the common people of Britain and New Zealand by land monopolists, apparently could not resist going to the aid of the oppressed ‘serfs’. Already on 3 October the Minister for Immigration had written to Vogel that ‘the Government believe there will be employment for far more immigrants than they have authorised you to send’.48 Well before this letter reached Vogel, he must have been approached by Simmons, who told his executive on 13 November of interviews with various emigration authorities.49 On 21 November Vogel cabled Grey, ‘Kent and Sussex labourers have struck; seems splendid opportunity obtaining immigrants. Could send several hundreds by steamer, arrive February, or later by sailing vessels. Reply. Vogel’.50 The completion of a direct cable link between Britain and New Zealand in 1876 made possible rapid negotiations on urgent matters. On 28 November Grey cabled in reply that additional emigrants should be sent for Otago, Canterbury, Wellington and Taranaki Provinces. In transmitting a copy of the telegram by mail two days later, the Minister for Immigration wrote of almost unlimited demand for more labour in these districts, with repeated applications being made to the government by local bodies and private employers.51 In the colony the government proceeded to negotiate with the New Zealand Shipping Company for a large steamer, while in England Vogel opened negotiations with Simmons. On 13 December his government cabled Vogel that a steamer for 600 emigrants had been arranged to sail in January, and on 16 December Simmons told a mass meeting of labourers in the Canterbury theatre that he had that day concluded negotiations for free passages to New Zealand for 700 farm labourers and their families.53 Vogel promptly despatched Holloway to Kent, where he spoke at a large union meeting at Faversham on 20 December, and thereafter addressed union branches in all parts of Kent. He was shortly joined by the Revd Joseph Berry, recently arrived from New Zealand, with a contract from the government to give eighty lectures, as mutually arranged by him and the Agent-General. Vogel had offered Simmons a first-class passage to accompany the party, provided a reasonable number were recruited, and on 28 December he was able to announce that he was going. He sailed with a party of about 400 on the steamer Stad Haarlem from Plymouth on 14 February.54

As Simmons's party set out for New Zealand, reports of widespread distress in the mother country moved Grey to a further initiative. On 15 February he cabled the colonial secretary offering to find employment for six thousand able-bodied emigrants, in addition to those whose passages were being paid by the colony, should the Imperial Government be prepared to forward them to the colony, and Vogel was instructed to assist by indicating the classes of labour in demand.55 The Imperial Government declined the offer, but it was passed on to the Local Government Board, who in turn circulated it to the Boards of Guardians.56 This, of course, was not the type of immigrant that Grey had intended in his offer, and the New Zealand community was strongly opposed to the recruitment of poor house inmates. It was as well that the offer came to nothing, as the labour market had begun to deteriorate by the time the Stad Haarlem arrived, and those of her immigrants who landed at Christchurch had difficulty in finding work. Simmons spent several weeks touring New Zealand, and wrote an enthusiastic book on the colony57 on his return, but he had apparently correctly assessed the country's economic future. He revealed five years later that he had sought an interview with Grey and urgently advised the discontinuance of free passages for a few seasons.58 He gave no hint of this on his return to Kent, as he obviously wished the farmers to believe that there was a danger of further parties being sent. However, neither such subterfuge, nor the strength of the Kent union, was able to protect the wages of the farm labourers of the county from the effects of the prevailing depression.

New Zealand also was moving erratically towards depression during 1879. The cabinet finally accepted the reality of the situation in August and on the 15th telegraphed Vogel putting an end to free emigration for men. They were now to pay five pounds in advance, but women were still to come out free, on account of the imbalance of the sexes in the colony.59 The government now endeavoured to shift the emphasis of its immigration policy to the recruitment of farmers with capital, who would pay their own way out, and assist in employing the colony's surplus labour. Several lecturers were engaged especially to appeal to this class, among them Arthur Clayden, the Berkshire supporter of the Revolt of the Field, who had spent some time in New Zealand in the late ‘seventies, and went back to England on the Stad Haarlem's return voyage, to begin his lecturing engagement.60 The Grey ministry fell in October 1879, following a general election, and the new government was forced by the colony's deteriorating economic circumstances, to move steadily towards phasing out assisted immigration. In the past nominated immigrants had been sent out throughout the year without restriction, as their applications were approved, but on 27 October 1879 Vogel was instructed to suspend all nominated immigration except those already promised, and females.61 On 6 November he was instructed that apart from single women the government wanted no immigrants to arrive during the following winter.62 On 26 February 1880 Vogel was informed that the colony's unemployed were numerous and increasing. Not only should he send no immigrants, but he should also warn men without means against making their own way out.63 On 2 April 1880 Immigration Officers throughout New Zealand were advised to discourage all nominations as much as possible, and that they were even to advise men who wished to bring out their wives and families that nothing could be done for them in the meantime, except in very special cases.64 Finally, on 24 April, officers were advised to take no more nominations, but to tell applicants to make their own arrangements with one of the shipping firms.65

Ironically, just as New Zealand was finding that it could absorb no more immigrants, applicants began to come forward spontaneously in unprecedented numbers in Britain. On 7 April 1879 Vogel reported that he was receiving 500 enquiries a day,66 and on 1 May he wrote that he had received as many as 1000 enquiries in one day, and had accordingly withdrawn all advertisements, as he already had enough applicants to fill the year's order of 3000 emigrants.67 He had also by 1 September 1879 once again stood down Christopher Holloway on a retaining allowance.68 But with neither advertisements nor agents to encourage them, the enquiries kept flooding in. Thus, on 23 October 1879 Vogel advised that an ‘immense number’ of nominated men were coming forward, undeterred by the five pounds payment.69

The New Zealand Government finally dispensed with Holloway's services in April 1880.70 His departure thus coincided with the end of an era in the peopling of New Zealand. He settled back into his home village of Wootton, as a shopkeeper, of apparently moderately prosperous circumstances. He lived to see both the sons of his second marriage established as clergymen in Anglican orders.71 Certainly, in terms of his origins, he had ‘made good’. So also had a large proportion of those whom he had launched on a new life in the antipodes.

Part Two The Hearthland

6 Oxfordshire and Wychwood Forest

UP TO THIS point we have been concerned with giving a broad view of the course of the New Zealand immigration drive of the 1870s, and with relating this drive to the changing fortunes of the English agricultural labourer, and more particularly to his Revolt of the Field. We will now undertake a study in greater depth of some of the districts of England which provided strong contingents for the immigrant ships. The rural world of Victorian England was rich in its variety, and our closer study will illustrate the diversity of circumstances that led to emigration, and indicate the variety of traditions and skills which the villagers brought to the task of shaping a new life in a new land. But while providing examples of this diversity and variety we will also be searching for underlying patterns which may give unity and significance to the flow of emigration. Did the villages that the New Zealand agents found most fruitful possess certain common features? Is it possible to discern the profile of a typical emigrant, by discovering circumstances, qualities and attitudes in which he differed from those who stayed? And what was the significance of the movement in the continuing history of those villages which lost large numbers to the colony? How were they affected both by the exodus, and by the reports which were sent back from the antipodes? The history of rural life in both England and New Zealand poses questions to which our closer enquiry may suggest some answers.

New Zealand's National Archives hold almost complete files of passenger lists of the colony's assisted immigrants of the 1870s.1 These record counties of origin for all males and unmarried females of 12 years and over. Unfortunately there is a certain ambiguity about these county entries. The question posed to applicants for passages was, ‘County, where born, and where living lately’.2 Presumably applicants were supposed to treat this as a double question. The passenger lists, however, have only a single county entry, and it is not clear on what principles it was selected from the application forms. The failure to allocate wives and children to counties is a further defect.3 Despite these deficiencies, the records do enable one to discern the broader patterns of emigration. Our map is designed to show these broad patterns. By relating emigration to each county's population, the varying impact of the New Zealand recruitment drive is shown. Clearly, the great majority of the emigrants came from a wide stretch of southern England, with almost all counties south of a line from Herefordshire to the Wash feeling the pull fairly strongly. North of this line, only Lincolnshire was much affected, and the industrial north was little influenced. The most fruitful counties were all rural counties, such as

IMPACT OF NEW ZEALAND EMIGRATION DRIVE 1873–76

New Zealand immigration records list county of origin for all males and unmarried females of 12 years and over. They are here related to English county populations as at the 1871 census. The figures approximate to the number emigrating per 100,000 of county population

Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Dorset, that had been little affected by the Industrial Revolution and were remote from the great industrial centres. These were, of course, the counties where wages had remained low, but we may also surmise that their villagers were more deeply committed to the rural life, knowing too little of the industrial cities to be attracted by them. A decision to emigrate to New Zealand was a continued commitment to rural life. For villagers living nearer to the industrial centres, the city was already well established as a powerful magnet.4

The county unit is, however, in general too large for the close study which we are about to undertake. Fortunately, a detailed study of individual villages is made possible by the good coverage of local union branches provided by the newspapers of the Revolt, and the information which can be derived from collating New Zealand immigrant passenger lists with the enumerators' schedules of the 1871 English census. Nevertheless, some guidance is needed for the selection of smaller districts, as the coverage of emigration by the union newspapers was fairly haphazard, and searching the enumerators' schedules is an onerous task, for which some leads are needed if it is to prove fruitful. The evidence suggests Oxfordshire as the most profitable county in which to begin our search. Only in Cornwall did the New Zealand emigration drive make a greater impact, but Cornwall was, of course, a special case, brought about by the collapse in mining; it lay outside the range of the Revolt, and its social conditions were not typical of rural England in general. Oxfordshire, on the other hand, lies in the heart of the recruitment area, and was deeply involved in the Revolt. The Oxford District of the National Union decided at an early stage to foster emigration rather than migration within Britain, and it was with emigration to New Zealand that it was mainly concerned.

Oxfordshire occupies the central portion of a strip of still largely rural country that stretches diagonally across England, separating the two industrial realms of London and the Midlands - what has been described as a no-man's land between metropolitan and industrial England.5 Prior to the 1974 boundary revisions, the country was of a very irregular shape, an artificial division formed mainly by historial agencies, but given some natural definition by being shut in to the north-west and south-east by the limestone and chalk escarpments of the Cotswolds and the Chilterns, and watered throughout by the tributaries of the Thames, which forms its southern boundary. Water-ways and water-power have played their part in the county's history. The streams of the Cotswolds contributed to the past glories of the woollen industry, and the city of Oxford grew up near the navigational head-waters of the Thames. But with the coming of steam and electricity, the world of industry largely passed Oxfordshire by. While Oxford itself has, through its great university, spoken down the centuries to the world, the city itself has been described as an overgrown market, cathedral and county town. The city's wider concerns have often led to a neglect of the welfare of the county's rural districts. C. S. Read, writing on Oxfordshire farming in 1854, noted that Oxford was an exception to the rule that ‘towns encourage their markets'.6 He also remarked that nearly one-sixth of the county's rents and tithes belonged to Oxford colleges and other religious bodies, and that generally speaking the property of the university was badly managed.7 Half a century later the Victoria County History gave the same picture of a rural world relatively unaffected by the intellectual stimulus of its county town:

The flood of modern progress has overwhelmed the city of Oxford, but the rural villages have slept on undisturbed in their peaceful seclusion. Yet still, on market days the flocks and herds obstructing the narrow mediaeval Oxford streets, and the carriers' waggons clustered about the church of St Mary Magdalen, recall the fact that only a few miles from that busy centre of activity lies a county of archaic survivals and old-world traditions.8

We must now examine this rural world with its hundreds of villages, and endeavour to discern any significant patterns which underlay the emigration movement that stirred some areas of its peaceful seclusion’ in the 1870s. We have already noted that two of the county's union leaders, Holloway and Leggett, led parties of emigrants to New Zealand. It is of significance that both these men came from open villages, and that both were able to recruit numbers of emigrants from their own village. From the nature of the case, it would not be surprising if the majority of the recruits for New Zealand came from open villages. As we proceed we will test this as one possible pattern. Another is suggested by the fact that there were two districts in the county where the interest in emigration was such that the union arranged for C. R. Carter to pay special visits to address mass rallies. One was the Wychwood area of Oxfordshire's western margin, which, as we have seen,9 Carter visited twice in November 1873 - on 4 November to address some 500 to 600 persons assembled at Milton-under-Wychwood, and on the 25th, when ‘a very large number of labourers’ gathered to hear him at Charlbury. By April 1875 the Milton branch claimed that it had sent away ‘upwards of two hundred souls’, most of them to New Zealand.10 A search of the 1871 census schedules shows that this area was indeed one of the most fruitful for New Zealand recruitment. The other district visited by Carter was in the region of Islip, where, as we have seen,11 he addressed a large meeting on 27 January 1874, and subsequently selected 150 emigrants. What characteristics, if any, have the Wychwood Forest villages, and the area around Islip, in common?

While reading J. N. Brewer's Topographical and Historical Description of Oxfordshire, published in 1810, I was struck by the significance of his comments on the wastes of the county:

Except the dreary district termed Otmoor, and the extensive wilds appertaining to the forest of Whichwood, the waste land of Oxfordshire is comparatively small. The common of Otmoor is situate near Islip, and contains about 4000 acres, the whole of which lie nearly on a level, and are completely inundated in wet seasons.

Eight adjoining townships possess a right of commonage on this dismal tract; but, as this right is possessed without stint, the abuses are very great, and many cattle are placed there, to feed which really belong to persons who have no privilege to reap benefit from the waste … the cottager appears to reap the greatest benefit from Otmoor. He turns out little except geese; and the coarse, aquatic, sward of this waste is well suited to the wants and constitution of his flock …

In the purlieus of Whichwood Forest there are extensive tracts of waste ground, the commonage of which is confined, by right, to horses and sheep; but the instances of illegal assumption are numerous, and cattle of almost every description may be seen nearly in every part …12

Both these extensive wastes had been enclosed by the 1870s - Otmoor by an enclosure award of 1815, and Wychwood Forest by an award of 1857, but it is surely significant that the two areas where Carter held mass rallies should be precisely those with recent memories of the freedom of the waste. There is good evidence that the existence of the waste had fostered a spirit of virile and unruly independence in the neighbouring villages. The Otmoor villagers bitterly resented the enclosure of their waste, and when in 1830 they were led to believe that the enclosure was illegal, they came out in their hundreds to tear down the fences.13 When troops were called out, they refused to disperse on the reading of the Riot Act. Numbers of them were thereupon seized and sent off to Oxford Gaol in wagons under an escort of yeomanry. Oxford, however, was crowded for St Giles' Fair, and when the prisoners raised the cry of ‘Otmoor for ever’, the crowd fell upon the yeomanry and released the prisoners. Although the prisoners were later rearrested and convicted, the spirit of rebellion simmered for some years, with fences being pulled down at every full moon, and the local magistrates making frequent appeals to the government for troops to suppress the Otmoor outrages. With village traditions drawing on events such as these, and memories of a recent past when every cottager had livestock on the common, it is not difficult to understand why Carter found men here who were prepared to venture in order to escape from servility and to gain access to land.

The enclosure and clearance of Wychwood Forest in the late 1850s did not cause resentment among the common people, for such rights as they possessed were treated with due respect. There is, however, copious evidence that in villages neighbouring the forest there was a long tradition of independence of spirit, and of lawlessness. Arthur Young, in his View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire, published in 1809, had recommended the enclosure of Wychwood not only on economic grounds, but also because:

… the morals of the whole surrounding country demand it imperiously. The vicinity is filled with poachers deer-stealers, thieves, and pilferers of every kind; offences of almost every description abound so much, that the offenders are a terror to all quiet and well-disposed persons; and Oxford gaol would be uninhabited, were it not for this fertile source of crimes …14

And writing about the same time, on the same subject, J. N. Brewer commented on

the dangerous species of semi-barbarous freedom produced by large

Wychwood district, Oxfordshire tracts of woodland, only partially appropriated, or vested, for the chief parts, in hands too dignified and remote for the due execution of immediate authority.15

Clearly servility would not come easily to these villagers, and it is not surprising that so many of them opted for colonial freedom.

These two districts, then make a special claim for our detailed study. Our choice between them is aided by comments from the Oxford District of the National Union on their emigration work, published in the English Labourer of 14 October 1876. Favourable labour conditions in the district were attributed to the way in which the work of emigration had been vigorously pushed. ‘Most of the Oxfordshire emigrants have gone to New Zealand,’ the item explains, ‘a few to Canada, while Queensland has taken a large number from the Buckinghamshire side of the district.’ The emigrants to Canada were probably from the north of the county. Here the unionists had close links with their Warwickshire neighbours, and would have been particularly influenced by Arch's advocacy following his visit to Canada. The Otmoor villages, lying along the Buckinghamshire border, were probably among those affected by emigration to Queensland. If, therefore, we choose the Wychwood villages for our special study, we will be dealing with an area where a strong flow of emigration was directed almost entirely towards New Zealand.

The area with which we will principally concern ourselves lies on the western borders of the county, where two tributaries of the Thames, the Evenlode and the Windrush, have carved their valleys deep into the Oolite limestone of the eastern edge of the Cotswolds. Between these rivers rises the range of downs that through the centuries was clothed by the royal forest of Wychwood. We will first describe this district as it was in the early 1870s, and then examine some features of its earlier social history that are relevant to our story. The area had two little local ‘capitals’, Burford to the south, and Charlbury to the north, both market towns in the 1870s. Our description will move from south to north, beginning with the large village of Burford (1871 population 1,403). This was one of the loveliest of the Cotswold towns, with substantial buildings in the beautiful Cotswold stone along its wide High Street that sloped towards the Windrush. Yet it had a languishing air, as if it had known much better times. Many of its finest buildings dated from the fifteenth century, when it shared in the prosperity of the flourishing Cotswold woollen industry. The famous quarries at nearby Taynton, and a remunerative toll-bridge, added to its prosperity. The good times passed, but the town had revived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, partly through its position on the main route from London to Gloucester and South Wales. For many years it rivalled Newmarket as a horse-racing centre. Then, early in the nineteenth century, the through traffic was diverted to a shorter route along the ridge south of the town, and the railways chose to avoid it by a good five miles. Burford had reverted to the role of a quiet rural centre. Its liveliest days were now the mops or hiring fairs, when men and girls offered themselves for hire, the shepherds with a bit of wool pinned to their hats, carters with a piece of whipcord, housemaids displaying a mop and so on. The ‘fasten penny’, the shilling accepted from the employer, sealed the engagement.16 In the early 1870s the town's labourers were experiencing hard times. The district's relieving officer reported low wages of from eight to eleven shillings a week, and numbers unemployed for much of their time.17 In summer many migrated in search of work, though the best workers managed to find work in their home district.

The traveller going north to the Wychwood villages crossed the Windrush by a narrow three-arched bridge. To his right the river flowed on down through the little villages of Fulbrook, Swinbrook, Asthall and Minster Lovell, to the larger town of Witney, where blanket-making continues as a survival of the old Cotswold wool trade. But Witney lies outside our district, and contributed little to New Zealand immigration. More important for our story was the little village of Taynton (1871 population 335), lying upstream, above the banks of the Coombe Brook, a tributary of the Windrush. Here lived the latest generation of the army of men who had raised the famous Taynton stone from the long range of quarries further up the Coombe Valley, since before the Norman Conquest. The beauty of this stone could be seen in many buildings in the neighbourhood, and also in some of the finest buildings in Oxford, in Blenheim Palace and at Windsor.

The traveller leaving Taynton to take the road to Charlbury had to climb the slopes of the downs. Here grazed the sheep whose fine wool had contributed so much to Burford's medieval prosperity. By the 1870s farming had become more mixed.18 Since early in the century the farmers had begun to rear cattle in a district where it had formerly been considered impossible to do so. They were mainly Herefords, raised to be sold as store beef cattle, chiefly to the Buckinghamshire graziers. Some of these beasts were broken in at two years old and worked till five years old, when they were disposed of in store order. Three or four made up a plough team, and in this district a typical 400 acre farm would keep two teams of working bullocks. Proficiency in breaking and working these animals would be one useful skill taken from these hills to far-off New Zealand. The cultivation was clearly for large fields of both root and grain crops, the roots being used as stock food.

Reaching the ridge of the downs, the traveller would see stretched before him one of the finest pieces of scenery in Oxfordshire.19 The Evenlode comes down from the north-west to Shipton, where it swings to the north-east past Ascot. The ridge on which he stood parallels the course of the river, as also does the sweep of the hills on the far side of the broad valley. From these heights he would see that the villages along the Evenlode are set in a vast amphitheatre, almost too grand for the little Evenlode. At closer quarters he would find that the river has a more humble intimacy, well caught in Hilaire Belloc's lines:

She lingers in the hills, and holds A hundred little towns of stone Forgotten in the western wolds!

But there is more to be seen before leaving this vantage point. In the distance, between himself and Charlbury, the traveller would have made out the remaining remnant of Wychwood Forest, preserved as part of Cornbury Park, the seat of the Churchill family. Nearer at hand were the seven farms created following the enclosure and clearance of the forest. There are few cottages on these new farms, for most of their labour was drawn from the villages in the valleys below. But not all who climb the slopes each day were farm labourers. As he passed the road leading from the ridge down to Milton-under-Wychwood, the traveller could glimpse George Groves's Milton Quarries, just below the summit, where a score of stone masons earned their livelihood.

Moving northwards we would have been able to chose a route that passed through the remnant of Wychwood Forest. From the local villagers we could, in the 1870s, have gathered many memories of its broader reaches before the clearance. Some might have told us of spring days when with the village children they had wandered abroad like Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gipsy to gather a

… heap of flowers plucked in shy fields, and distant Wychwood bowers.

For many, the highlights of their youth would have been the revelry of the annual Forest Fair. The Fair was held late in September, when the forest was in the full beauty of autumn, and even the small forest remnant would have been at its most glorious at this season.

There are parts in it where the hoary and heavily ancient thorn trees are almost primeval in aspect, yet even their lichened and wizard-like age is magically kindled in autumn. Then the scarlet and crimson of holly and spindle berries turn the sky over them to aquamarine; the Old Man's Beard streams in silver cascades; and the colour of the beach leaves runs through lemon and orange to flame. The bracken everywhere has been breast high and overhead in a great many places; its height is shrinking a little in September, but it spreads everywhere tawny and golden.20

Moving onwards past Rangers Lodge one would soon have reached the northern edge of the forest remnant, and found Charlbury just ahead, on the opposite bank of the Evenlode. Approaching the town on a fine summer's day in the 1870s the traveller would have had another feature of life in the Wychwood villages brought forcefully to his notice. Here and there the hedges would be covered with sheepskins and goatskins bleaching in the sun. These were the raw materials of the flourishing gloving industry that employed so many of the women of the region. Small groups of women were to be seen gossiping in the cottage doorways, enjoying the sun as they plied their needles. Charlbury (1871 population 1,335), owed its size and relative prosperity partly to this industry, of which it was one of the main centres. Upstream from Charlbury, were the other little ‘towns of stone’ of the Evenlode - Ascott-under-Wychwood, Shipton-under-Wychwood, Milton-under-Wychwood, and Lyneham. After travelling through them, a visitor in the 1870s would be left with an overall impression of rural beauty and a grasp of one or two general social facts. As in Burford, the labourers outnumbered the general level of local demand. But employment provided by gloving, a cottage industry which the Industrial Revolution had failed to destroy, had helped to alleviate the situation. Another striking social fact was the strength of nonconformity throughout the Wychwood region. Both Burford and Charlbury had Baptist, Quaker and Wesleyan chapels. Milton (1871 population, 962) had three dissenting chapels. Ascott (1871 population, 462) had two, while in the hamlet of Lyneham (1871 population, 249) it was the Wesleyan chapel, not the Anglican church, which dominated the scene.

From our survey of the district in the early 1870s, we now turn to some aspects of its social history. The royal forest was undoubtedly the most important general influence down the centuries.21 In medieval times it provided the crown with both a hunting preserve and a source of income. The king had, for feudal times, a singularly direct control over such a district, exercised through special forest laws and forest officers. When the Crown was strong, the forest bounds were enlarged, when it was weak, feudal nobility and common people worked together to have the forest area reduced. In the course of time the kings ceased to use the forest for the royal chase, and there was a gradual breakdown of crown rights in the forest. In 1792 the Commissioners of Woods and Forests made a report, after examining the forest to assess its value for naval timber. They found it almost entirely surrounded by a stone wall, and managed by a team of forest officers, with the Duke of Marlborough, as Ranger, at their head. There were about a thousand head of fallow-deer. Many of the surrounding parishes and hamlets had rights of pasture for horses and sheep. The coppices were granted by lease, and thus privately harvested. All these arrangements were, however, vitiated by various forms of lawlessness. The lessees of the coppices were taking much wood that they were not entitled to. In other parts of the forest there was much lopping and cutting of young trees ‘which is done in open day, and carried away often in waggons, in the night’.22 The rejuvenation of the forest was further hindered by the fact that it was over-run with swine, for which there were no common rights. And there was also, of course, poaching. Not surprisingly, the forest was of little use for naval timber. The advocates of complete clearance and enclosure had a strong case.

The Forest Fair originated at about the same time as serious official thought was first being given to the forest's future.23 It apparently began about 1790, as a simple picnic arranged by the local Wesleyans to enable their Witney members to escape the unseemly frivolity of carnival day in Witney wake week. Unfortunately for them, theirquiet picnic on Newhill Plain above the upper lakes in the forest, was invaded by the very merry-makers they were trying to avoid. Through the second quarter of the nineteenth century the fair was the neighbourhood's great annual event, with an average attendance of 20,000 persons.

From two days before the Fair every available nook and cranny in Charlbury was filled. An army of entertainers, as well as those to be entertained, had to be housed; for there were ‘Wild West Shows’, ‘travelling theatres’, ‘Atkins and Womwell Menageries’, ‘Monsieur Columbier and his French Company with Fireworks’, and last, but not least, ‘the Vauxhall dancing saloon, with harps and violins, lit up at night with hundreds of lamps’…. Music of kinds must have been plentiful; for almost all the shows and booths had their gangs: many local fiddlers and one or two clarionet players were present; and the Charlbury Yeomanry Band performed from Lord Churchill's boat on the lake.24

Although year by year Lord Churchill, as forest ranger, drove his carriage with coachmen and footmen in full glory, down the broad streets of booths, he was not really in favour of the occasion. The fair had developed something of a name for petty crime and debauchery. In the early 1830s Lord Churchill endeavoured to have it discontinued, but failed. Finally, at the time of enclosure, he succeeded in suppressing it - but only after he had had great trenches dug to make it impossible for the vans and shows to reach the plain.

The enclosure and clearance of such an extensive area of forest land aroused considerable interest, and it was described at length in a prize essay by C. Belcher, published in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society.25 The area was first opened up by public roads. The greater part was allotted to the Crown, and the work of clearance was carried through in sixteen months, beginning in October 1856. First the deer were removed - a few being taken alive to stock distant parks, but most being killed. For a short period the taste of venison was legally enjoyed in cottage as well as hall. Then an army of hundreds of men and boys began a steady advance, clearing the brushwood and felling and cutting up the trees. This part of the operation showed a handsome profit from the sale of the timber. Next came the expensive work of grubbing out the roots and stumps. Great quantities of rough firewood had to be burnt on the ground, but much was carried away by the cottagers. Finally the land was subdivided with hawthorn hedges, and the seven new farms, totalling 2,843 acres, were let by public tender. The new tenants had plenty of work for the village labourers over the next few years. There was a great deal of grubbing and breast-ploughing before the land was brought into full cultivation.

The gloving industry of Oxfordshire dates back to remote times.26 Its long history owes a great deal to the deer of Wychwood Forest, and to the Cotswold sheep, whose skins have provided much of its raw material. Various centres have from time to time been associated with the industry, including Oxford, Woodstock, Charlbury, Wootton, and Chipping Norton. In Charlbury the industry was flourishing early in the eighteenth century, but had died out by its end. It was revived in 1808 by a local Quaker, partly to relieve distress in the town and its neighbourhood.27 In 1823 the glove industry was reported to have drawn so much population to the town that there was ‘hardly an old malt-house, barn, stable, or hovel but is converted into a dwelling house’.28 The industry continued to flourish throughout the century. Thus in the census return of 1851 a population increase at Charlbury is put down to the fact that people were attracted by the glove industry.29 The gloving industry must undoubtedly have had an influence on the outlook of the women, and also on the home life of the Wychwood villages. George Hambidge, born in 1840, recalling his youth in Leafield, remembered that the girls there made gloves, and very seldom ‘went to service’. They would meet in each others' homes, to talk as they worked, and in cold weather warmed their feet around a large ash-pan.30 In 1867 a good sewer was said to make up one dozen gloves a week, earning five shillings to seven shillings. Unlike some other cottage industries, such as straw plaiting, gloving was not suitable for young girls. A Wootton gloveress told the 1867 Royal Commission that ‘a girl ought to be 14 or 15 before she is trusted with a glove’.31 In various ways, the industry would seem to have worked to enhance the independent spirit of the cottagers. It must have encouraged them to keep their daughters at school until they reached their ‘teens. They could then begin work in their own homes, without experiencing the subservience of ‘service’. Their craft was a skilled one, in which they could take a justified pride. By keeping the older women away from field service, it would have served to encourage good house-keeping and the creation of comfortable homes, and this would have had its effects on the morale and ambitions of their menfolk.32 The social intercourse which it encouraged among the village women must also have had a considerable influence on the spirit and outlook of the women themselves. All this helps to explain the forthright involvement of the women of Ascott in their men's union conflict, with which we shall be dealing shortly. Over these years English cottage women seem often to have been opposed to their menfolk's interest in the union and in emigration. It seems likely that in the Wychwood villages it was more common for them to share their men's outlook.

In the Wychwood area of Oxfordshire, the village of Milton was apparently the first to raise the banner of the Revolt, and it continued to be the organising centre after the movement had been spread to neighbouring villages.33 As Milton was also to be very deeply affected by emigration to New Zealand, it will repay our closer study. The 1871 Census schedules show it to have been a fairly typical moderate-sized open agricultural village. Its 10 farmers were providing employment for 58 men, 6 women and 21 boys, but as about 100 of the village men were farm workers, many of them will have had to find their work elsewhere. The quarry was employing 18 men and 2 boys; 10 women were returned as gloveresses; and there was the usual range of village craftsmen, with indications that in building the village was serving a wider district. The 1873 Register of Electors for Oxfordshire shows that over 20 of the inhabitants of Milton had voting rights through owning houses or cottages in the village. Several of these were labourers, craftsmen or small tradesmen. From these facts and figures we can deduce some of the circumstances underlying both unionism and emigration. The labour surplus provided the incentive for working-class action, while the existence of diverse avenues of employment (agriculture, quarrying, gloving, building) and of some freehold working-class homes, must have helped to sustain the spirit for action. A local historian depicts early nineteenth century Milton as a lawless place, in which Sundays were ‘profaned and given over to prize-fighting, bull-baiting, and all ungodliness’.34 Milton, it seems, shared in the general unruliness of the Wychwood area. Many of those who followed more ‘godly’ ways, did not support the Established Church. An earlier Quaker movement in the village had apparently died out,35 but as the century progressed three other forms of dissent became firmly established. First came the Strict Baptists, who initially suffered considerable opposition from the village roughs. The house in which they met was stoned, and more than once a stream was diverted to run through it ‘to give the dippers plenty of water’.36 Primitive Methodism came next, with ‘glorious camp meetings’ held on the village green.37 Among its staunchest supporters was a more well-to-do villager, Isaac Castle, who was to give valuable assistance to the union movement. In the interests of temperance he built a house with a room for a coffee tavern, and he invested in a large tent for use in religious and other causes. In due course Wesleyan Methodism also became established in the village, and by the mid-century all three groups had built themselves chapels.

Stirred, no doubt, by the news from Warwickshire, the labourers of Milton met on the village recreation ground on 16 April 1872 to discuss forming a union. About fifty of them agreed to proceed with the venture.38 A committee of six labourers from the villages of Lyneham, Shipton and Milton was set up, with Joseph Leggett as secretary. Leggett is listed in the Milton 1871 census schedules as a 34-year-old carpenter and joiner, born at Windsor, Berkshire. He must, however have been living in Milton since at least 1860, as his wife, and all six of his children (aged two months to eleven years) are shown as born in the village. He and his family apparently attended the Baptist Chapel.39 Under Leggett's guidance the union spread rapidly. As in Warwickshire, a member's weekly contribution was set at two pence, and it was agreed that some of the funds should be used to hold meetings in the surrounding district.40 These Oxfordshire developments became known to the Warwickshire union, and by early May the two movements were in touch with each other, with the result that a member of the Milton Union attended a Whit-Monday demonstration of the Warwickshire Union at Wellesbourne.41 At this meeting a Warwickshire spokesman described the Milton Union as an independent movement with thirteen branches and over five hundred members.42 The Milton Union sent Leggett and two other delegates to the conference at Leamington on 29 May 1872, and on their return the executive of the Milton Union, at a meeting on 1 June 1872, unanimously agreed that their organisation should join the newly created National as a district.43

Meanwhile, on 29 May 1872, a branch of the Milton movement was established at Wootton, with Christopher Holloway as chairman.44 In less than a month its membership grew to about 185, and the men decided to take action to get their basic wage raised from eleven shillings to sixteen shillings a week. A respectful letter, dated 22 June 1872, and signed by Holloway, was distributed to the farmers of the parish, advising them of the required five shillings a week rise in wages to come into effect on 6 July, but inviting them, if they could not agree with the terms, ‘to appoint an early time to meet us so that we may fairly consider the matter and arrange our affairs amicably’. The Wootton farmers' response was a meeting held on 3 July at which resolutions were passed requiring the immediate discharge of all union men, and setting up a Property Protection Society, to compensate members for malicious damage to their property, prosecute anyone caught doing such damage, and offer rewards for information leading to convictions.45 On 13 July, at a meeting after market in Oxford Corn Exchange, a gathering of 200–300 farmers and their sympathisers, agreed to set up a larger defence association to be known as the Oxfordshire Association of Agriculturists. This Association met with little success, as the majority of farmers stood aloof. Meanwhile in Wootton the failure of the farmers to either meet the union's terms or negotiate had put most of the local farm labourers out of work either by lock-out or strike. The dispute lasted for nearly two months, and during its course there were several developments which must have helped to decide some of the labourers on emigration. Contrary to the Queen's Regulations, a number of soldiers were made available to several of the farmers, to help get in the harvest. The Duke of Marlborough also came to the assistance of the farmers, offering to transfer to them the renting of any cottages or allotments which labourers were renting directly from him, so as to strengthen the farmers' position when bargaining with the workers.46

Richard Heath, a contemporary journalist who sympathised with the labourers, wrote perceptively of this particular conflict and its setting:

In passing rapidly through the villages which lie under the Blenheim aegis, one's sense of the orderly and the beautiful is certainly gratified. The white cottages and pretty porches overgrown with jasmine and honeysuckle, the small gardens just now blazing with gorgeous hollyhocks, and often well stocked with fruit trees, seem at first sight to leave little to be desired.

But look deeper. Talk with the peasantry, and you will find discontent everywhere. Not a grumbling, unreasonable discontent, but a deep sense that things are very far from what they should be.

… in the Duke's manifesto the reason avowed for putting both cottages and allotment-grounds into the hands of the farmers is the attitude of labourers in forming a Union. Moreover, these cottages are mainly in villages, so that the result is to place one class of the community directly under the control of another. This is still more shown in the determination to take away the allotment-grounds, since it proves that it is considered unwise to allow the labourer to feel, even in the slightest degree, independent of his employer. As there are 914 allotments, the greater proportion of which are forty poles in extent, and 360 cottages on the Duke's estates in Oxfordshire, it will be seen how numerous are the persons likely to be affected by the manifesto.47

Commenting on the illegal use of the military, Heath reported that the soldiers were ‘somewhat disconcerted at the sight of groups of sad-eyed men standing about in enforced idleness …’ and he considered that their employment ‘envenomed a dispute hitherto carried on by the men without the least desire or sign of violence’.48

Through his resolute leadership of the struggle at Wootton, Holloway was emerging as the main leader of the Oxfordshire movement. Goaded by the tactics of the opposition, he spoke out in strong terms at a meeting in Oxford early in August, advising the labourers: ‘Let them … have a revolution rather than go back to the dark ages and be serfs and slaves of the farmers’.49 Meanwhile the unionists of the Wychwood villages were not only assisting their brethren at Wootton, but also facing some local opposition. At a meeting of the Oxfordshire Farmers' Association late in July, Mr J. Maddox of Shipton-under-Wychwood remarked that he had dismissed six out of his twenty-five labourers for having joined the union.50 The ground was obviously well prepared for an emigration agent. It was probably through the union that arrangements were now made for C. R. Carter to hold a meeting in the interests of John Brogden and Sons. ‘At Shipton, in Oxfordshire,’ Carter reported, ‘the agricultural labourers mostly came from the harvest fields to meet me. At this place I selected ten married men, who, with their wives and children, embarked in the Chile for Napier.’51

The close links between the Oxfordshire rural unionists and the New Zealand emigration drive date from the recruitment of this party, and it is therefore unfortunate that New Zealand's Brogden immigrants are very poorly recorded. There is, however, good evidence that the letters written home by members of the Chile party did much to stimulate the flow of emigration to New Zealand of the following years. The fortuitous circumstance that Brogdens sent this shipload to their contract in Hawke's Bay led to strong links between the Wychwood villages, and the new bush settlements of southern Hawke's Bay. The Chile sailed from London on 12 September 1872, and reached Napier on 28 December 1872, with 220 assisted immigrants, of whom 192 had been recruited by Brogdens, mainly from Cornwall.52 A rather carelessly copied list of the immigrants expected by this ship was published by the Hawke's Bay Herald of 29 November 1872, and from this it has been possible to identify several of the families recruited by Carter from the Wychwood villages. Thus ‘Thos. Howse, 25, laborer’ listed with his wife Caroline, aged 22, seems very likely to have been the ‘T. House, West Clive’, who on 1 July 1873 successfully nominated ‘Timothy House, Milton nr. Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire’ for consideration as an assisted immigrant.53 By 1882 Thomas Howse was a settler with 50 acres freehold at Makaretu.54 These men may well have been sons of Daniel Howse of Milton, who was appointed to the executive of the Oxford district on 13 June 1872.55 He appears in the Milton 1871 census schedules as a 62-year-old agricultural labourer living with his 61-year-old wife, and an unmarried son, John. He is very probably the Daniel Howse, 52, labourer, who sailed for Hawke's Bay as a nominated immigrant in November 1874.56 Probably he was joining his emigrant sons, after having been widowed. George Franklin, who appears on the Herald's list as a labourer of 29, with his wife Emily, 23, and two young children, can be definitely identified in the 1871 census schedules for Milton as an agricultural labourer, a native of the village. He is probably the ‘Geo. Franklin’ who on 13 November 1873 nominated two other Milton farm labourers and their families for the free passages which Vogel had just introduced. These two men were Lawrence Franklin and William Jackson,57 who both left for Hawke's Bay, with their wives and families, by the same ship, in March 1874. Also probably from the Wychwood area, was William Cook, listed as a 36-year-old labourer, with his wife Elizabeth, 32, and children, Clara, 9, Albert, 7, and Alice, 4. A William Cook is listed in 1882 as a settler with 100 acres freehold at Makaretu.58 This family is identified as almost certainly among Carter's Wychwood recruits, through an account of the career of the son, Albert. According to the Cyclopaedia of New Zealand,59 Albert William Cook, J.P., and member of the Waipawa County Council, was born in Oxfordshire, England on 22 April 1866, and came to New Zealand as a lad. He had had a successful career as a storekeeper and farmer, and in 1908 owned a general store at Ashley-Clinton, a 900-acre farm with nearly 2,000 sheep, and considerable property in Takapau. If the Cooks had emigrated to improve their children's chances in life, they had certainly succeeded with Albert.

The interplay between the members of the Chile party and the villagers back in Oxfordshire can be well illustrated by the case of George Smith, who appears on the Herald's list as a 31-year-old farm labourer, with his wife Maria, 31, and children George, 11, Ellen, 9, and Lydia, 111/2 months. The brief introduction which the Labourers' Union Chronicle provided for a letter from George Smith which it printed on 20 September 1873, the Oxford District Minute Book,60 and comments in letters from later emigrants to Hawke's Bay,61 together provide a good deal of information about him. He had been an active unionist, representing the Burford branch at delegate meetings. The published letter was to John Pinfold, secretary of the union's Taynton branch. Both Pinfold and Smith were local preachers. Smith's recommendations must have helped decide both Pinfold and Edward Harding, a foundation member of the Taynton branch, to follow him to Hawke's Bay. His letter is therefore worth quoting extensively. It is dated from Kaikora, Hawke's Bay on 28 May 1873:

… If any of you are willing to come out to this sunny land you don't need to fear the sea; if you have a passage like ours it will be quite a pleasure trip … The day we arrived in the port of Hawke's Bay we had a first rate dinner on board - fresh beef, young potatoes and carrots…. I had no difficulty in getting work. I was employed soon after I got here. I am now working on the road for the Government. I have 6s. a day from eight o'clock in the morning to five in the evening. If I had been in Bourford [sic] I should have worked three days for that. Working men in this country don't believe in much walking; I have a horse and new saddle and bridle to go to my work on. I bought the horse for £4, and saddle and bridle for about £3, so you see I got rigged out very soon; and now I am about getting a cow; my wife has got her fowls. The house we are living in is a two roomed cottage with a garden. I give 5s. per week, and I have firewood and the food for my cow for that. You must understand that we burn nothing but wood. Most provisions are cheap. Flour is about the same as at home; beef is threepence or fourpence per pound, and mutton, 21/2d. We used to be told that the beef and mutton of this country were not so good as at home; come and try them, and I assure you you will find out your mistake. We thought it a fine thing to get a pig's cheek or three or four pounds of bacon in old England; but now I can have half a sheep at a time, and sometimes a whole one, and about 80 or 90 pounds of beef. We can sometimes get a leg of mutton for sixpence. This is really the land of Goshen, and if you acted wisely you would come; there is plenty of work for you. Shearing is a fine trade in its season; a good shearer will get £1 a day. A shepherd with not more than one or two children will get from £60 to £70 a year, and all found. Clothing is a little dearer here, but not a great deal. If you come, provide yourselves with a good supply, but if you cannot, still come, and you will soon get clothes when you get here. I will send you a newspaper, and enclose two papers showing you how you can come. Read the papers well and lend them about, and please send me a newspaper sometimes; you can send one for a penny stamp. George has been to school, but he has now gone to work. He has 6s per week and his food. I am very glad I came here, I wish I had come years ago. I have no anxiety now about how I am to get food and clothing for myself and children … I have not been to class yet out here, but as I am now living within five miles of Waipawa, where the class is held, I intend to go and give my name as a member with the United Methodist Free Churches. The minister comes to Kaikora to preach every fortnight, and at Waipawa every Sunday night. Be sure to write and tell me how the Union is getting on, and how you are getting on with your chapel affairs …62

Smith listed eleven folk to whom he wished his letter shown, ‘and as many more as you think proper’. There is a footnote by the Revd George Taylor of Waipawa, who had written the letter for Smith, which indicates that although Smith was a local preacher and therefore undoubtedly literate, he was not a confident writer. Taylor endorsed all that Smith had written about the colony, remarking that, ‘It is a fine country for working men. I wonder that more don't come.’ The repeated persuasions of this letter are obviously well supported by its content. With copious down-to-earth detail, New Zealand is depicted as a land of plenty, where the hard-pressed English labourer is freed from want. In place of a hopeless future, he is offered ample opportunities of bettering himself. The prospect of almost immediately acquiring a good riding horse must have been a potent bait. Valued features of the home village, such as chapel and old friends, are shown to be already waiting in the new land, for any who will make the venture.

While the Chile party were establishing themselves in Hawke's Bay and their letters were creating a growing interest in New Zealand among their friends and relatives back in Oxfordshire, developments in one of the Wychwood villages led to a clash which caused a widespread stir throughout England. This was the notorious ‘Chipping Norton Case’, in which two clerical magistrates sentenced sixteen women from Ascott-under-Wychwood to imprisonment with hard labour for a comparatively mild act of picketing in support of a strike by their menfolk. In an editorial of 30 May 1873 The Times commented that ‘had the Magistrates at Chipping Norton desired to illustrate the existing agricultural system in its worst light, to show beyond a doubt its severance of social ties and its moral mischiefs, they could not have done more than they have done’. Not only do these events throw further light on the English rural scene, but they also merit our attention in that many Oxfordshire emigrants to New Zealand would have been deeply affected by them, while some were directly involved.

Immediately after the Chipping Norton case, Holloway, as chairman of the Oxford district of the National Union, carried out an investigation into the wages and conditions of the Ascott farm labourers. He found that prior to the appearance of the union, wages had been nine shillings a week in winter, ten shillings in summer, with two shillings a week extra for 13 or 14 weeks at busy seasons, when hours were 12 to 16 a day. There were no perquisites, and no wages when time was lost on wet days. Following the forming of the union branch, wages were raised by two shillings per week. Holloway considered many of the Ascott cottages to be ‘simply horrible and a disgrace to a Christian country’. He described the homes of two of the women who had each had to take an infant to prison with them. These belonged to a block of three cottages:

Imagine a narrow place, like a coal cellar, down which you go two or three steps, no flooring except broken stones, no ceiling, no grate, rough walls, a bare ladder leading to the one narrow bedroom about 6ft. wide, containing two bedsteads for a man, his wife, and three young children, the whole place as wretchedly bad and miserable as imagination can conceive, and only divided by a rough wooden partition not reaching to the roof, but over which you may look into the bedroom of the next adjoining house, equally wretched and miserable, and with the additional evil that the only way to the bedroom of a third house is through the bedroom of No. 2 house, and that in No. 2 live a man, his wife, and six children, and till recently the third house (one room down, one up) was occupied by a man, his wife, and also six children …63

The farmers wrote in reply to Holloway, contending that in Ascott the general condition of the labouring poor was above the average of their class. The building of which Holloway complained was ‘a large old building erected in the time of Queen Elizabeth for a village workhouse, and so used until the establishment of the union workhouses’. It was now used only by those who would not pay more than a shilling a week for rent, or who were so objectionable as tenants that owners of better accommodation refused to have them.64 In an earlier letter the farmers had complained of the effect the unionists were having on ‘the peaceful and orderly condition of the village’. No one who was not favourable to union principles could appear in the village without being annoyed and assailed with ‘Ba, Ba, Black legs; old black legs, Ba, Ba, Ba,’.65

In April 1873 the union decided to move for a further increase of two shillings a week in wages at Ascott. Following a not uncommon union tactic, they picked upon one leading farmer. This was Robert Hambidge, who had the parish's largest farm -one of 400 acres, provided by the recent clearance of Wychwood Forest. Hambidge with his wife and young family had come to the village from Gloucestershire about seven years earlier. The 1871 census shows him as a 43-year-old farmer employing ten men and four boys. He was no doubt chosen for the union's attention because he was particularly vulnerable to a strike, as all his men were unionists, and also, probably, because he had attended union meetings and taken the names of those joining.66 When presented with the union's demand for a wage of fourteen shillings a week, he agreed to pay this amount to his most efficient labourers, but not to those whose work was affected by age or infirmity. This offer was refused, and his men left him in the middle of a backward barley sowing with twelve agricultural horses, four working bullocks, a flock of 500 sheep at turnips, milking cows, bullocks and young stock, and only two yearly servants, a shepherd and a youth to man the establishment. Hambidge's neighbours rallied to his support, a parish meeting was convened, and it was agreed that none would pay their labourers more than twelve shillings a week. The following Monday morning, 21 April, the union retaliated by calling out all its members in the village, paying them an allowance of nine shillings a week. After a fortnight, work was found for about twenty of them, felling and barking timber about five miles away. The farmers meanwhile sought out what non-union labour they could find, and Hambidge was able to engage two young men from another village.67

The strike was three weeks old when the village women took the action which brought them before the court. Their unusual display of spirit was commented upon by contemporaries, and probably owed a good deal to the social effects of their working together at gloving.68 A special correspondent of the Daily News who visited the district at the time, commented on this aspect of the affair, and remarked that:

Not long since I sailed down the river with a party of emigrants, selected partly from this and partly from the Buckinghamshire District, and I could not fail to perceive that the women were in many, if not most instances, the ruling spirits. But for them the little allotment and the uneventful routine of the hamlet would never have been given up; they it was who, when the ship started on her way, struck up the jubilant songs and choruses which gave life and cheerfulness to an otherwise dismal scene.69

The Ascott women chose Monday, 12 May, for their intervention, as all the farmers of the village had left at an early hour to attend the large annual horse fair at Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire. The women assembled at about half-past-six and waited in the turnpike road for labourers coming to Ascott. According to the union they had no sticks or weapons of any kind with them.70 When Hambidge's two young labourers appeared, the women asked them if they thought they were doing right in taking the Ascott men's places, and offered to buy the two youths a drink if they would leave the work. The young men refused this offer, but when they went off, the women thought they had gone to collect their wages. However, someone in the village had sent for the neighbouring policeman, and he shortly appeared with the two labourers, who went to work under what The Times ironically described as his ‘powerful protection’. The women were in due course summoned to appear at Chipping Norton Petty Sessions on a charge of a breach of the 1871 Criminal Law Amendment Act, a harsh measure designed to restrict picketing.

The case was brought to trial on 21 May 1873 before two clerical magistrates, the Revds Thomas Harris and W. E. D. Carter. To the surprise of the accused, Hambidge's two labourers gave evidence that the women had carried sticks and had threatened them with violence. The union's own subsequent investigation led it to believe that the men had been improperly influenced and had given false evidence. In support of this conclusion it claimed to have collected abundant contrary evidence in the village, pointed to the conduct of the two witnesses in court and their prompt disappearance from the neighbourhood. Henry Taylor, the National Union General Secretary, bluntly charged that a very little false swearing seemed to have been necessary ‘to make the cause of justices’ justice, priestism and slave-owner a common one, and make felons of as honourable and respectable a company of women as you could select from a score of villages'.71 But the union, being, like the women, unaware of the danger they were in, had failed to see that they were adequately defended in court. The labourers who attended the case were not as sweeping as Taylor in their condemnation of the bench. They even had some sympathy for magistrate Carter, who must have been known to many of them, as he lived at Sarsden, only a mile or two from Ascott. They noticed that he shifted uneasily on his seat during the magisterial investigation, and more than once requested to be informed whether Hambidge really wished to press the case.72 But Hambidge was determined, and magistrate Harris was adamant that a real example must be made of the accused. Of the seventeen women charged, sixteen were sentenced to imprisonment - seven to ten days' hard labour, and nine to seven days' hard labour.

Both the wealth and the calling of the two magistrates added to the notoriety of the case. The Revd Carter was a wealthy landowner, and the 1871 census schedules show eight servants living in at his Sarsden rectory, and his butler living next door. The Labourers' Union Chronicle commented bitterly:

Parson Carter's living is worth £439 per annum, besides perquisites. He has only 808 souls to ‘cure’. He has also a farm which he lets out at a rent, as well as being an employer of labour, direct. He is an M.A., Surrogate rural dean, rector of Sarsden, and a vicar of Churchill. Parson Harris, his fellow magistrate, is a B.D., rector of Swerford, has the cure or keeping in fettle of 402 souls; his living brings him in £496 per annum, besides perquisites. This is the ‘craft’ which points at the ‘agitator’ and cautions the labourers against paying them, and tells them to trust their friends who have always kept a paternal eye over them. Yes, truly, like a vulture!73

The union had already suffered repeatedly from clerical opposition, arising from the close links between the clergy and the social hierarchy which ruled rural England. In the Chipping Norton case the provocation to bitter comment is undeniable. Yet, in steering the National Union towards a strongly anti-clerical line, the union leaders were being less than wise. They had already won some support from the rural clergy, including several in Oxfordshire, and they had everything to gain from a judicious presentation of their cause as a righteous one with an unanswerable claim on the Christian conscience.

The heavy sentences on their womenfolk shocked and angered the labourers. After the woman had been removed from the court, the husbands present were allowed to see their wives before they were taken to Oxford gaol, on condition that they then returned quietly to their homes. But when the news reached Ascott, a large number of unionists set out for Chipping Norton, which they reached about seven in the evening.74 Reinforced by a large number of inhabitants of Chipping Norton, they marched on the Police Station, in the hope of rescuing the women, who they presumed were to be taken to Oxford by the last train. The Police Superintendent telegraphed to Oxford for reinforcements and a conveyance to take the women to Oxford, and settled down to withstand a siege.

As darkness fell, the crowd grew. Amid repeated cheers for the ‘Union’ and ‘the women’, the Police Station and Superintendent's residence were stoned, a number of windows being broken and slates dislodged from the roofs. About ten o'clock the mayor and ex-mayor of the town addressed the crowd, begging them to disperse to their homes, but with little avail. Eventually, around 1 a.m., the crowd melted away. Shortly afterwards a drag with four horses arrived bringing the reinforcements from Oxford. The Superintendent decided to despatch the women to Oxford immediately, while all was quiet. The women were therefore bundled hurriedly into the drag, two of them with infants in their arms. On their release from prison both these women signed statements complaining of the inhumanity of this trip, and of their treatment in prison.75 Mary Pratley, who had a ten-weeks-old child at breast, claimed that she had not even been allowed to dress the infant before being hustled into the open van, and that although she wrapped the child as best she could, it caught a severe cold. Although she had ‘as good a breast of milk as any woman in England’, she found that she was unable to suckle the child on the poor prison fare of bread and skilly. Elizabeth Pratley claimed that she caught a very bad cold on the night journey, and that her seven-months-old baby was so poorly fed in prison that it could not sleep at night for hunger.

The sudden removal of so many wives and mothers presented the village of Ascott with various problems, including the feeding of many motherless children. The village women tackled this task, at first on the village green, and later in a suitable cottage. Meanwhile the press blazoned the case throughout the land. Both The Times and the Daily News sent special correspondents down from London, and the treatment of the women was widely condemned. As a result of the outrcy, on the 29 May, the day after the first nine women were discharged, the governor of the prison received a telegram from the Home Office intimating that the Queen would be advised to remit the remainder of the sentence on the other seven women. The Queen's warrant arrived on 31 May, the day the full sentence expired.76

The leaders of the National Union had obviously decided that their opponents had played into their hands, and they proceeded to make the maximum capital out of the case.77 When the last seven women were released on Saturday morning, 31 May 1873, they found Christopher Holloway and Henry Taylor awaiting them. Taylor, meeting them for the first time, described them as ‘seven as respectable looking well-dressed women as you need wish to see’; one of them, a young newly-married wife - a teacher in a Sunday School; two others Sunday School scholars; and the other four respectable mothers of families. They were immediately conducted to the union's district offices, Joseph Leggett's house in Botley Street, where Mrs Leggett had prepared a breakfast for them. Various officers and friends of the union gathered here to greet them, and Joseph Arch himself was half expected. Following breakfast the women and an escorting party, making about eighteen in all, mounted a large brake drawn by four horses, and set off on a triumphal progress through the Oxfordshire countryside, with the driver blowing his horn, and crowds gathering to cheer them as heroines and martyrs. At Woodstock, where they stopped for refreshments and a brief visit to Blenheim Park, a large crowd had gathered to cheer them. On the road out of Woodstock Henry Taylor noted an example of the injustice done to the labourers:

Here, by the side of the road, for a long distance is a good wide strip of land, immediately outside the park wall, with another outer fence by the roadside. Only a few years since the whole of this land was used as chain land - garden ground - by the cottagers of Woodstock; but now the good old paternal and parental paw of the duke has grasped it from them, not having sufficient inside the park, and there are now trees, brambles and weeds where not long ago we cultivated gardens.78

Not long after the brake had left Oxford, Joseph Arch arrived in the town. Finding that the women had already left, he spent some pleasant hours ‘lionising at Christ Church’ and seeing the sights of the town. He then took the train to Chipping Norton, where a great demonstration had been arranged to celebrate the women's release. On the same train was a posse of police from Oxford, sent to preserve order. For the last stretch of the journey the nine women released earlier, joined the train. Large numbers of agricultural labourers, many of whom had travelled long distances, crowded the meeting, which was held in the Chipping Norton marketplace, a wagon serving as the platform. Arch and various other officers of the union addressed the gathering on such topics as the necessity for manhood suffrage, and the evils of clerical magistracy. This meeting by no means exhausted the union's exploitation of the affair. The following Monday evening a tea was staged on the village green at Ascott, for the women ‘martyrs’.79 This was a more local affair, attended by unionists from the Wychwood villages. On 20 June 1873 a much more ambitious meeting was held on Ascott green in order to make a presentation of five pounds to each of the women, the money having been raised by public subscription.80 Joseph Arch was accompanied on this occasion by some notable friends of the union, including Jesse Collings and the Revd Frederick S. Attenborough. The proceedings began with a procession headed by the women ‘martyrs’, and a demonstration in front of Hambidge's house, but the crowd then proceeded to the green for the main business of the evening. One of the women was still too ill to attend, and her infant was also reported to be ‘in a poor way’.

There were various other repercussions of the Chipping Norton affair. The complaints made by the two mothers with infants led to questions in the House of Commons,81 and an urgent enquiry addressed by the Secretary of State to the Oxfordshire Quarter Sessions.82 After due investigation the justices reported that all had been carried out in due conformity with the rules, and with the dictates of humanity. The Lord Chancellor wrote to the Duke of Marlborough, who was Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, remarking that he was ‘unable to conceive any state of circumstances which would make it necessary or calculated to promote the real ends of justice, to send so large a number of persons simultaneously to prison in a case of this nature’,83 and asking for the observations of the Duke and the two magistrates, on the subject. The Duke replied that he considered that the magistrates had exercised their discretion ‘not unwisely’, and enclosed a testimonial to the magistrates from the inhabitants of the neighbourhood.84 To this the Lord Chancellor replied that he was still unconvinced that a mistake had not been made, and that the very fact that occasion had been given for so unusual a step as the presentation of an address to the convicting magistrates seemed to support his opinion. He desired his views to be given more serious consideration if similar circumstances should again occur.85 Farmer Hambidge saw to it that the magistrates should have an opportunity to exercise greater restraint. On 24 July 1873 the Ascott branch of the union celebrated its anniversary with a tea on the green, in a large new marquee belonging to Isaac Castle of Milton.86 The programme included entertainment by the Chipping Norton Temperance brass band, and speeches by Holloway, Leggett, and other union leaders. Soon after the meeting began, Hambidge and his wife appeared, and under the protection of the police constable, tried to disrupt proceedings by shouting. The policeman was alleged to have done his best to provoke a brawl, and in due course one William Pratley was summoned for assaulting him. The case came before the Revds Carter and Harris at the Chipping Norton Petty Sessions.87 This time the union had engaged a London barrister for the defence, and produced ample evidence in refutation of the charge. The bench could not agree in their opinion, so the case had to be dismissed. The union had another success in a legal clash with Hambidge in June 1875. Hambidge had summoned a labourer for absenting himself from his service, but the union's London barrister was able to prove the contract defective.88

By the time New Zealand introduced free immigration late in 1873, the Wychwood villages were offering her agents a ready harvest. We will now look more closely at C.R. Carter's meeting in Milton-under-Wychwood on the evening of Tuesday, 4 November 1873.89 The meeting was held in Isaac Castle's large new marquee, pitched for the occasion in a field near the village. In the dim light of a few tallow candles, some 500 to 600 persons ‘from villages far and near’ listened to a lecture that lasted for an hour and forty minutes. Carter first discussed the farm labourers' prospects in England, likening them to ‘one continued march down a hill with the workhouse at the bottom’. He then described his own experience of twenty years of colonial life. With the help of a large map he presented New Zealand as ‘offering advantages superior to any other colony in the world’, and described its climate and beauty by saying that ‘if we threw Italy and Spain and Switzerland together we would have a fair representation of New Zealand’. He told how, in the two years since the colonial agency had been set up, eighty or ninety ships with some 13,000 emigrants, had been sent out without a single shipwreck. He dwelt at some length on the attractions of ‘the fertility of the soil, the cheapness of the land, and the civil, religious and political privileges of the people’. At the close of the meeting seventeen pounds was collected to outfit a party about to leave for Hawke's Bay. The negotiations which shortly led to Holloway's departure with the Mongol party were also begun

The Hawke's Bay party of about eighty souls sailed from London by the Invererne on 22 November 1873. There were three families from Milton; John Ireland, a 45-year-old farm labourer, with his wife and ten children, Joseph and Ann Wheeler with their six children and Edward and Eliza Groves with their six children. Wheeler and Groves both entered themselves as farm labourers, but they had also worked in the quarry, as

John and Phillis Ireland and family as New Zealand settlers. Photographed at Waipawa c. 1881. All but the two young boys were English-born the 1871 Milton census schedules show Wheeler as a 39-year-old stone quarry labourer, and Groves as a 32-year-old mason's labourer. From Taynton came Edward and Sarah Harding with five children. Edward Harding had been a staunch unionist representing his branch at delegate meetings.90 From Fulbrook came George and Mary Millin with four children, and from Charlbury John Maycock, a 44-year-old glover, and William Hope, a 42-year-old farm labourer, with his wife Sarah and six children. The Invererne reached Napier on 8 March 1874, and it was not long before members of the party were mailing enthusiastic letters to Oxfordshire. Sarah Harding wrote home on 29 July 1874, from Waipawa, to say that she and the children had stayed for fourteen weeks with their old friends, the George Smiths from Burford, while their own cottage was put up. She reported that George Smith was doing very well, having acquired two horses, two cows, two calves and between sixty and seventy fowls. Her account of her own family's response to colonial life, and the comparisons she draws with the English rural scene, make interesting reading:

… I must tell you the children are all getting quite fat, and so is Ted; as for myself, I can't remember the time when I felt so strong and well; I suppose it is having plenty to eat of good substantial food, for we do have plenty of good food - beef, mutton and pork. You know we did not have enough in the old country, we could not have it and pay for it, but there is no fear of that here, if a man will keep himself steady and will work, and you know there is no fear of Ted working, if God spares his health and strength…. We were put down free of charge; you know we expected to have £14 to pay, but we were quite free. Ours was the first free emigrant ship that had arrived in New Zealand … I think it was the best thing we ever done for ourselves and children … Ted is at work on the line and Frank with him. The price of wages out here is seven and eight shillings per day (chiefly eight) from eight o'clock in the morning till five at night. If it keeps fine this month Ted's wages will be about £13. Don't you think that is better than working at home for two pounds sixteen shillings? … I suppose John Pinfold is still at Taynton…. Is he still working for Mr Lousley? Tell him there is no sitting under the hedge knawing [sic] a piece of bread and an onion, and talking over the bad times…. I wrote to John Pinfold as soon as we arrived; did they receive it? Ted has not got a horse yet but thinks of getting one soon. I have been on Mr Smith's pony; they say I am a good jockey, better than Mrs Smith. Ted thinks of getting some land before the summer is over.91

Sarah Harding proceeded to explain the time payment terms on which land could be acquired. She asked after friends in Taynton, and wanted her letter shown to friends who were ‘too many to mention their names’. She concluded her letter by listing the price of provisions in Hawke's Bay. John Pinfold, the Taynton branch secretary, forwarded this letter for publication in the Chronicle. His employment by the Mr Lousley92 whom Sarah mentions must have come to an end about the time the letter was received, as it was resolved at a meeting of the committee of the Oxford district on 28 October 1874 ‘that J. Pinfold be allowed Lock-out pay until the time of his Embarkation’.93 He sailed for Hawke's Bay on 20 November 1874. The passenger list shows him as a 37-year-old shepherd, accompanied by his wife Mary, and five children.

In her letter Sarah Harding mentions that: ‘Our Fanny and Harry live on a station; they get £75 a year and all found. They have three children’. This family can be identified on the Invererne's passenger list as Henry Cox, a 30-year-old miller, his wife Frances J., and their three children aged three months to 4 years. On 2 June 1874, Henry Cox wrote from Te Aute, Hawke's Bay, to Mr G. Blackwell, Old Steam Mill, Snow Hill, Birmingham:

… I have been working on the line, making a new railway. It is a very good job. We do it by piece-work; it averages from 8 shillings to 10 shillings per day of eight hours only we have had a good drop of wet. We had to lose a good bit of time, as it was all flooded. We have been living in a tent put up in a large shed. There are four families beside us; we each have a tent to ourselves. It is very comfortable and we like it very much. We have had a good deal of sport since we have been out here with our guns. We find them very useful. We often shoot a pig and ducks, and swamp fowl, all wild, but they are very nice … We have got a very kind gentleman here, a missionary. He has recommended me to a gentleman about 14 miles further up the country, to go and live on his farm. We are to have seventy-five pounds per year, with house, firing and provisions all found. My wife will have to cook for eight or ten men, and I shall have to get wood and water. The gentleman is going to send two horses and a waggon to fetch us next Monday …94

Cox then tells of the voyage out on the Invererne, on which his three children were ‘poorly’, but now ‘the two youngest are getting as fat as pigs’.

Although he does not mention the fact, Cox must, like the Hardings. have had ambitions of owning land. The Return of Freeholders shows him with 58 acres freehold at Woodville in 1882. It also shows that of the ten married men in the Oxfordshire party on the Invererne, seven owned freehold land by that date, in amounts ranging from 55 acres to 314, the total owned by the seven being 805 acres. Members of the party may also have been purchasing land on deferred payment, for which they did not hold the freehold in 1882. Their letters, giving details of steady progress in land ownership and farm development, cannot have been without significant effects back in the Wychwood villages.

The next party to leave Oxfordshire was that recruited to sail with Holloway. We have already followed their train journey to Plymouth, and the voyages to New Zealand of the Mongol and Scimitar, but we must here note that a significant number of them came from the Wychwood villages. C. R. Carter made a further contribution to Wychwood recruitment with his meeting in a tent at Charlbury on 25 November 1874 - probably the tent used was Isaac Castle's ubiquitous marquee. The Mongol's party included two families from Charlbury: Thomas Morris, a farm labourer in his early fifties, with his wife Eliza and four children; and Edwin Gardener, a young carpenter, with his wife Jane and their infant daughter. Gardener appears in the 1871 Charlbury census schedules as a 20-year-old unmarried carpenter and wheelwright, living with his widowed mother, a gloveress. From Milton came two farm labouring families, those of Thomas Turner, with eight children, and of James Mills with two children. Mills was a member of the original committee of six elected at Milton in April 1872, and so also was another of the party, William Tripp of Lyneham,95 a widowed farm labourer emigrating with six children. Also from Lyneham came Frederick Tripp, 38, farm labourer, with his wife Leah, 36, and Charles and Ann Jeffrey with their four children. From Ascott-under-Wychwood came Phillip Pratley, 25, farm labourer, his wife Jane and three young children. The Pratleys had probably been deeply affected by the Chipping Norton affair: three of the imprisoned married women were surnamed Pratley. From Churchill came Charles Pearce, 38, labourer. He had represented his union branch at delegate meetings.96

A study of New Zealand Immigration Department passenger lists shows that approximately two-thirds of the assisted immigrants who left Oxfordshire for the colony in the 1870s, sailed in 1874. During this year eighty-one immigrant ships were despatched from London and Plymouth, the two English ports used by Featherston's organisation, and sixty-seven of these carried some immigrants from Oxfordshire. Several patterns can be discerned in this flow of emigration. Of seven ships despatched from England to Hawke's Bay during 1874, six had parties from the county; in the case of the seventh, two ships sailed on the same date, with one of them taking all the Oxfordshire emigrants. The county's strong support for the National Union is apparent in the substantial groups that joined each party that left the Midland counties under the leadership of a delegate of the union. Four such parties left during 1874, all for Canterbury, with a total of 315 Oxfordshire emigrants. Another pattern, apparent also with other counties, is that whenever a successful recruitment campaign was run in this way, for a particular sailing, other ships leaving just before and just after tended to have significant numbers from the county. Often this was caused by the emigrants' particular circumstances in their home village. In some cases preparations for emigration led to immediate dismissal by employers, and a family would leave earlier than the party they had intended to join. Conversely, sometimes families were unable to gain their freedom from local obligations until after the main party had left. In other cases, the New Zealand authorities had to break up parties, in order to match the capacities of the immigrant ships.97

Recruitment in Oxfordshire for the 1874 year got off to a strong start with Joseph Leggett's drive for his Ballochmyle party.98 The work was obviously helped by the fact that he was travelling in the combined capacities of emigration agent and union organiser. Thus, after a good meeting on 2 January 1874, in the Primitive Methodist Chapel at Benson in south Oxfordshire, concluding with the union song ‘Stand like the brave’, several men gave their names in for New Zealand.99 Although it was mid-winter, Leggett was daily receiving applications for New Zealand.100 He was now widely known in the county, and emigrants were coming forward from many parts. The party of forty-one which joined the Atrato, on which Leggett had originally been intending to sail, seems to have been drawn from the south and east of the county. However, the 111 who sailed with Leggett on the Ballochmyle included three large families from his old home village of Milton-under-Wychwood. Alfred Groves appears on the passenger list as a 44-year-old quarryman, accompanied by his wife and five children. Edwin Stringer is entered as a 36-year-old farm labourer, emigrating with his wife Ann, and seven children. The 1871 census schedules list Ann as a gloveress. Although this family emigrated to Canterbury, and settled at Geraldine, the strong links between the Wychwood villages and Hawke's Bay appear in the fact that one of the sons, Joseph, later moved to Dannevirke, where in 1885 he married a Danish immigrant, Marie Mortensen.101 The third Milton family in Leggett's party was that of Daniel Wilks, a 43-year-old farm labourer, emigrating with his wife and five children. Another family from the Wychwood area was that of Frederick Barnes, who appears in the 1871 census schedules as a 34-year-old shepherd living at Fifield. He brought a wife and five children with him. In July 1875 Ann Leggett wrote home to her mother that ‘Fred Barnes says he should want five thousand a year for them to live upon if they came back again’. The Ballochmyle party also included the first fruits of C.R. Carter's very successful meeting at Islip on 27 January 1874: Richard Miles, a 32-year-old farm labourer with his wife and three children, and Joseph Webb, a 25-year-old shepherd with his wife and two children, were living a few doors from each other in Mill Street, Islip, at the 1871 census. Two neighbouring families from Mill street shortly followed them to New Zealand; the James Beckleys in April, and the William Fawdrays in October. Beckley and Fawdray were both farm labourers in their late thirties, and Beckley had represented his union branch at a delegate meeting of the Oxford district.102

The next union party from the Midlands, sailing by the Peeress on 5 April, had thirty-four Oxfordshire emigrants, but none appear to have been from the Wychwood area. On 26 September 101 Oxfordshire emigrants sailed from Plymouth in the Crusader, as members of a party led by George Allington, and several families from Ascott-under-Wychwood were among them. They included Frederick Pratley, a 31-year-old farm labourer, his wife Mary Ann aged 31, and their six children. This is almost certainly the Mary Pratley who was imprisoned with her ten-weeks-old child in May 1873. The child appears as Thomas, aged one, on the passenger list. Among the single women imprisoned was a Mary Smith, who also appears to have been in the Crusader's party, as the oldest of the family of eight travelling with Edwin Smith, 43-year-old farm labourer, and his wife Harriet. Mary was not at home the night of the 1871 census, but she is listed as an 18-year-old servant girl in the ship's passenger list. The secretary of the Ascott branch of the union, John Tymms, a 33-year-old farm labourer, accompanied by his wife and six children, also sailed with Allington. He had been a regular member of delegate meetings of the Oxford district.103 Two other small Ascott families were in the party, headed by younger farm labourers, Peter Honeybone, 30 and Eli Pratley, 28. Possibly all of these families had been represented at the meeting held in the Ascott Baptist chapel on Monday, 1 June 1874, to celebrate the first anniversary of the release of the imprisoned women.104 The last union party of the year was that led by Thomas Osborne, sailing by the Lady Jocelyn on 3 November. Among her seventy-two Oxfordshire emigrants were at least nineteen from the Wychwood villages of Milton and Lyneham. They included four married farm labourers; from Milton, William Gardner, 52; and from Lyneham, Henry James, 43, Henry Rooke, 30, and George Watts, 22.

The ships despatched to Hawke's Bay during 1874 took nearly 150 Oxfordshire emigrants, including nearly forty from the Wychwood villages. They included four family men from Milton: William Alden, 38, Lawrence Franklin, 53, Joseph Franklin, 22, and William Jackson, 31. Family men from other villages in the area included John Pinfold, the Taynton branch secretary; Charles Coombes, 28, from Lyneham; William Maisey, 38, from Fulbrook; and from Churchill, across the Evenlode valley, James Hoverd, 37, and David Margetts, 42. All of these were farm workers. The men in the largest of these parties, that sailing on the Hudson on 20 November, and the two autumn parties to Canterbury, led by Allington and Osborne, must have carried the voice of Joseph Arch ringing in their ears. He had addressed a meeting of about 3,000 at Fulbrook on 10 September, and thirty names had been taken for Canada and New Zealand.105 By the northern autumn of 1874 ‘New Zealand’ must have been a household name in the Wychwood villages along the Evenlode, and Milton, which had sent about 140 emigrants there, must have had links with the colony as strong as any place in England.

It is rather strange to find that the village of Shipton-under-Wychwood, lying between the two radical villages of Milton and Ascott, was slow to follow their lead in unionism and emigration. After a meeting in the village on 8 May 1874, presided over by Isaac Castle of Milton, and addressed by a union delegate, the district secretary commented in the Chronicle that though Shipton was surrounded by union influence, it was so cold that unionism had not yet permeated it. He described it as ‘a large, respectable village, with only about 14 or 16 in Union’.106 Apart from the possibility that there were Shipton folk among those recruited by Carter for Brogdens after his meeting in the village in the autumn of 1872, only one family of three had left Shipton for New Zealand before the autumn of 1874. This was Richard Wiggins, a 40-year-old farm labourer, his wife Eliza, and her 15-year-old son Henry Greenaway, who joined Leggett's party on the Ballochmyle. Early in September 1874. however, a party of seventeen left Shipton to join the Cospatrick, which sailed for New Zealand on the 11th of the month. The party was made up of members of the Hedges and Townsend families. Richard Hedges, 56, was accompanied by his wife Sarah, and four sons. Two of the sons, Henry, 30 and John, 24, were accompanied by their wives. Henry had married Mary Townsend, a daughter of the second family in the party, and Henry and Mary took their three young children with them. Henry Townsend, 62, was accompanied by his wife Ann, and his two married daughters. The second of these was Jane, 35, who had married George Charter, 31, a Cambridgeshire man. They had two young children.107 All the men were agricultural labourers. Around midnight on 17 November 1874, when the Cospatrick was in the South Atlantic, fire was discovered in the vicinity of the boatswain's locker. It spread rapidly, and panic ensued. The ship had only two lifeboats, which were successfully launched, and filled with sixty-two persons. The majority of the passengers perished by fire, or drowned when they jumped overboard, one of the lifeboats was never heard of again, and the only survivors of ten nightmare days in the other were four crew members, one of whom died soon after rescue. This disaster, involving the loss of 429 emigrants, was one of the worst shipping tragedies of the nineteenth century. The official enquiry led to the conclusion that it was caused by members of the crew or emigrants yielding to the temptation to raid a large consignment of wine and spirits among the cargo, which also included inflammable items such as varnish, linseed oil, turpentine and candles.108 News of the disaster reached England in the closing days of 1874. In 1878 the villagers of Shipton erected a memorial stone and fountain on their green, inscribed with the names of the seventeen parishioners who had perished. It may be seen there today, opposite the Shaven Crown Inn, providing a permanent reminder not only of the disaster, but also of the district's considerable contribution to the peopling of New Zealand.

The burning of the immigrant ship Cospatrick, off the Cape of Good Hope

After 1874 there was only a meagre flow of Oxfordshire emigrants to New Zealand, and of these very few were from the Wychwood district. No doubt the shock of the Cospatrick disaster dampened interest, but there are also other likely factors. The emigration policy of the Oxfordshire unionists was doubtless by now paying off, giving them a stronger bargaining position in the labour market. Most of the rural labourers therefore turned a deaf ear to the urgings of friends and relatives in the antipodes, and settled down to enjoy the improved conditions at home. Thus, on 10 November 1874, the Milton branch inaugurated a social club meeting in the Butcher's Arms Inn.109 Probably, as they warmed themselves by the inn fireside that winter, their conversation often turned to the pros and cons of emigrating when the better weather came, and letters spelling out the attractions of New Zealand must have been read out from the original scripts or from the pages of the Chronicle.

In the issue of the Chronicle for 20 February 1875, James King Peirce of Wardington, secretary of the Banbury district of the union, announced his intention of accompanying a party of farm labourers to New Zealand. When he sailed on the Alumbagh on 9 May, he had only succeeded in recruiting thirty-two emigrants from Oxfordshire, and none of them appear to have been from the Wychwood area. A week or two earlier, the Milton branch had celebrated its third anniversary, packing Isaac Castle's marquee to overflowing. The Chronicle's account of the occasion reported that ‘Upwards of two hundred souls have left the village since the formation of the branch. Most of them have gone to New Zealand’, but there was no mention of current interest in emigration.110 On 27 May 1875 Christopher Holloway visited the district for the first time following his return from New Zealand. He addressed an audience of about 300 in the British school-room at Charlbury. The union had not previously succeeded in gaining the use of this room, and Holloway was further honoured in that his meeting was chaired by Jesse Clifford, who had been schoolmaster there since 1851, a popular and able man.111 He may well have had a son in New Zealand, for a Jesse Clifford, who appears in the 1871 census schedules of Charlbury as a 28-year-old glover, living with his wife Mary Ann, a gloveress, and his 2-year-old son, had sailed for New Zealand on 1 September 1874 with his wife and child, as assisted immigrants on the Assaye. But Holloway apparently found no new takers for New Zealand. Nor can this lack of interest be put down to any decline in local unionism. Union leaders who visited the area at this period found the branches in good heart. Even laggard Shipton was coming to life. When Thomas Bayliss, who succeeded Leggett as district secretary, held a meeting in the village on 13 July 1875, he found that more than forty new members had lately joined. On Wednesday, 28 July 1875, Milton-under-Wychwood had one of the great days of its branch history. A huge demonstration, attended by three or four thousand people, was staged, with addresses by Joseph Arch and John Charles Cox as its highlight. It was about one o'clock when the train reached Shipton station bringing Mr Arch and his companions. A trap was in waiting and as it entered the village of Shipton a halt was made to allow the villagers to greet their leader. A first rate branch of about sixty members has been formed here within the last few weeks, though hitherto Shipton has been behind its neighbours. Here too the brass band and several hundred of Unionists and their wives awaited Arch's arrival, and a procession was soon formed headed by the Milton flag. The street of Milton and the village green presented quite a gala appearance, flags flying, bands playing, booths erected, roundabouts in full swing, cricket and other games in active operation, and all the concomitants of a rustic fair. At one side of the village green was a large and handsome tent, where nearly eight hundred people sat down to tea during the course of the afternoon.112

With the union thus riding high, and looking as if it might even revive the vanished glories of the Wychwood forest fair, there was little drawing power in the pioneering privations of the New Zealand frontier, half a world away. A letter which Thomas Rathbone wrote home to Lyneham, from Westport, on 2 May 1875, must have been circulating about this time -it appeared in the English Labourer of 11 September 1875. He reported: Our boys are looking well, and they often inquire how it was that we did not get such joints of meat when we was at Lineham … Dear brother, you would laugh to see me with my swig [sic] at my back, consisting of a blanket, frying pan, boiler, etc., going off to work …113

But in Milton of 1875 the rewards of ‘swagging it’ in the New Zealand bush could not compete with the prospect of a life enlivened by union festivals in Castle's marquee and convivial winter evenings at the Butcher's Arms.

The Harvest - Carrying

7 Lincolnshire and the Northern Wolds

TO THE EYES of a rural New Zealander the wolds of northeast Lincolnshire seem at once familiar and different. This rolling chalk upland has an appearance of emptiness and openness to the sky that is reminiscent of many landscapes in his own country. From vantage points on the wolds one can see, in any direction, great fields sweeping across the slopes, with seldom a copse, hamlet or village to break their flow. When Tennyson, who grew up in the wold village of Somersby, wrote of

… long fields of barley and of rye That clothe the wold and meet the sky

he captured this feeling of uncluttered space. Yet the New Zealander does not feel altogether at home, for there is something unfamiliar in the gentle swell of the soft rounded contours, and in the well-cared-for neatness of the trim low hedges and narrow road side verges. Most of the more than two thousand emigrants recruited by the Laceby local agent, John H. White, between 1874 and 1879, had spent their working lives on these northern wolds and on the coastal marshlands between them and the North Sea. Many of them came from open villages such as Keelby, Laceby, Caistor and Grasby, built around springs emerging at the edge of the wolds, which provided much of the labour for these thinly populated uplands. In this chapter, while we will give some attention to emigration from all parts of Lincolnshire, and more special attention to White's recruits from various parishes in the Parts of Lindsey, our main concern will be with the area which he worked most assiduously - the wolds from Binbrook to the Humber, and the adjoining coastal marshlands. Possibly for no other district in England is there a better coverage of first-hand reports on the human experience of the 1870s emigration movement. Before we turn to this, however, we must first sketch in the relevant background of agrarian and social history.

Two facts of Lincolnshire agrarian history are of particular significance

North Lincolnshir to our study.1 The first is that the county had a deeply rooted tradition of peasant farming, and strong peasant communities survived into times when the general trend was towards a more hierarchical class structure. The second significant fact is that the northern wolds had been largely a waste of furze and rabbit warrens until an era of improvement, beginning in the late eighteenth century, and largely completed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, transformed them into profitable farmlands, with a landscape altered out of recognition. The peasant tradition, persisting throughout the nineteenth century, especially on the marshlands and fens, may well have been one of the influences that caused many Lincolnshire farm labourers to opt for rural New Zealand rather than urban Britain. The late full flowering of a strong rural class hierarchy in North Lincolnshire associated with the agricultural revolution on the wolds, helps to explain why the Revolt of the Field here assumed proportions unusual for a high wage district.

The Lincolnshire wolds are a belt of upland, some forty-five miles long, and from five to eight miles wide. The northern wolds, extending from the Humber to just north of Caistor, have at their western edge a marked escarpment rising in places to 300 feet. They are simple in relief, with few streams and valleys, a few villages, but the soils are relatively deep and fertile. The central wolds, from near Caistor to a few miles south of Binbrook, are wider and considerably higher, with a more complicated relief. The western escarpment is less steep, but the countryside is more broken, by comparatively deep valleys, some of which contain streams, flowing out to the east. Villages are more numerous, nestling unobtrusively in the valleys. From the higher points one gets far-stretching views over the wolds, and across the marsh to the North Sea. The southern wolds are more varied again. Much of the chalk has been washed from the hillsides, exposing clay and sandstone. This part of the wolds is a gently undulating country, and from early times its sheltered valleys attracted settlement, so that villages are more numerous again than in the central wolds.

The marshland is a belt of clay and saltmarsh, up to ten miles wide, paralleling the wolds from the Humber Estuary to Wainfleet. If we begin our survey of the agrarian past with the sixteenth century, we find that this coastal strip was then a region of large villages, in which the wealth was fairly evenly distributed, and the average farmer was comparatively well off. In a mixed farming economy the rearing and fattening of cattle and sheep was the most important element. A good deal of improvement had been carried out in the way of drainage, protection of the coastal lands by sea walls, and recovery of land from the sea. In contrast, the northern wolds had a great deal of waste, small villages, a small minority of fairly well-to-do farmers, and a majority who were considerably poorer than the average marshland peasant. The mainstay of wold husbandry was sheep, producing a highly prized fine wool. Barley was the main crop.

Until late in the eighteenth century farming in north-east Lincolnshire experienced only slow change. As elsewhere, there was enclosure, leading to improvements in husbandry, but the early results were not dramatic. On the wolds the main change was that early in the eighteenth century turnips began to join sheep and barley in the crop rotation. However, more fundamental changes were needed before the full benefit of the turnip could be realised. On the marshlands there was some decline in the prosperity of peasant farming, mainly through the Crown, native gentry and upland farmers taking over considerable areas of good grazing land. In part this was the beginning of a process whereby marshland farming became merged with that of the wolds. By the seventeenth century the marsh was no longer considered a suitable place for a country squire's residence.2 As the lead in the adoption of improved methods of husbandry usually came from resident gentry, it is not surprising that it was on the wolds, where their numbers increased, that an agricultural revolution got under way. By the end of the eighteenth century the wold farmers had virtually annexed the marsh.

The revolution on the wolds is believed to have begun some time shortly after 1770. In the past the soil had been considered too thin and infertile to be used as arable. Sheep had fed on the poor quality hill pasture during the day, and been folded at night on the lowland arable. Now the soil was transformed by chalking, boning, and growing turnips for the sheep to eat off, thereby returning rich manure to the ground. Flocks were no longer folded at night, but kept on the hills, and so that they would enrich the soil still further, they were fed oil cake. Within a few years the land could be put under the plough to produce worthwhile crops of barley, and later wheat. In his dialect poem ‘Northern Farmer, Old Style’, Tennyson has one of the improving farmers on his death bed protesting at this untoward interference in his affairs by God Almighty, and telling of the great work of his life:

Dubbut looök at the waäste: theer warn't not feeäd for a cow; Nowt at all but bracken an’ fuzz, an’ looök at it now — Warnt worth nowt a haäcre, an’ now theer's lots o’ feeäd, Fourscoor yows upon it an’ some on it down i’ seeäd. Nobbut a bit on it's left, an’ I meäned to ‘a stubbed it at fall, Done it ta-year I meäned, an’ runned plow thruff it an’ all, If godamoighty an’ parson ‘ud nobbut let ma aloän, Meä wi haäte hoonderd haäcre o’ Squoire's, an’ land o’ my oän.3

In the course of time the method of bringing the waste into cultivation had developed into a fairly standard system. Gorse and bracken was ‘stubbed’ or grubbed, and the old grazing herbage pared. All this rubbish was then burned, and the land heavily dressed with chalk and bones. After ploughing the land was first sown with barley and seeds and the seeds grazed for two years by sheep fed on oil cake. Crops of wheat and turnips followed, and a husbandry based on variations from the Norfolk rotation then became established.

This transformation of the wolds involved a tremendous expenditure of labour and capital, and it is not surprising that it took some decades to

The Harvest — Stacking accomplish. When Arthur Young reported on the wolds in 1799, great stretches of country were still in waste. ‘From Louth to Caistor, 18 miles;’ he writes, '10 of it are warrens, chiefly silvers; rent 2s. to 3s. an acre’.4 Near Brocklesby and at Cabourne and Swallow, he found that there were ‘large tracts of excellent land under gorse’. Half a century later J. A. Clarke's essay on ‘The Farming of Lincolnshire’ depicts the transformation virtually completed:

… the whole length of the Wolds is intersected by neat white-thorn hedges, the solitary furze-bush appearing only where a roadside or plantation border offers an uncultivated space. And the whole of the improvements have been accomplished on a grand scale; the holdings are large, there being scarcely a single farm under the size of 300 acres; many contain 800, 1000, 1500 and more acres.

… the fields are all of a proportionate magnitude, varying generally from 30 to 100 acres, presenting to the eye of a stranger the aspect of open-field lands, the fences being often concealed by the surface swelling into hills or descending steeply into deep hollows. There is only a trifling proportion of grass-land, which is found beside the rivulets in the valleys, and is mostly mown for hay.5

In keeping with the scale of farming, and the size of the farms, the farmhouses and buildings erected during this agricultural revolution were well-built and commodious. Even after several decades of depression they could be described in 1906 as ‘particularly good’ and ‘the best in England’:

The houses, generally well situated, with good gardens and pretty surroundings, are most commodious and well appointed, some of them containing three reception and a dozen bedrooms; while there is often stabling for half a score of hunters and carriage horses. The farm buildings are all exceedingly well built and up-to-date, and great neatness and tidiness is observed in the roomy, well-filled stackyards.6

Clearly the wold farmers aspired to a gentry style of living. While the landlords did their tenants proud, however, there was no corresponding provision made for the labourers. The transformation of the countryside created an unprecedented labour demand, and when the new level of farming was established, the small villages of the wolds were quite unable to supply the needed large increase in labour. But the landlords were extremely reluctant to build more labourers' cottages, lest their occupants should later become a charge on the parish. Some landlords, indeed, even pulled down cottages over these years, to keep down the poor rates. Most of the muscle which transformed these uplands was therefore drawn from open villages adjacent to the wolds. To staff the new husbandry, the farmers hired a few unmarried men to live in, mainly to work their horses, and for the rest, continued to draw from the open villages, often seven or more miles away. Many of the Lincolnshire emigrants of the 1870s, who carved pioneer farms from the Taranaki bush, must have been the children and grandchildren of men who had yearly trudged their thousands of miles to the work of taming and farming the wolds.

The growth of marshland villages to supply labour for the wolds was one aspect of the change which made the marsh an adjunct of the wolds. Another was the continuing amalgamation of marshland with upland farms, so that the rich marsh pastures could be used for the fattening of sheep bred on the wolds. This came about partly by the migration of marshland landholders to the wolds, and partly by the acquisition of marsh pasture by wold farmers. Despite this trend, the marshland continued to support an extremely high number of smallholders. In 1870 between 60 and 65 per cent of the holdings were 20 acres and less — a fact of some significance to both the experience and the motivation of the region's emigrants to New Zealand.

Between 1801 and 1871 the marshland experienced the most remarkable population growth of all Lincolnshire's regions, with 40 per cent of the villages more than doubling their population. This was only partly due to the transformation of the wolds, for the marshlanders had also turned to the sea. The port of Grimsby, after a long decline since the Middle Ages, caused by silting, was given new life by dredging and dock constructions, and in 1847 was linked by rail with industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire. Fisheries, and trade, especially with the Baltic, began to thrive. The north Lincolnshire coast was also becoming a popular holiday resort. The growth of fishing and the holiday industry helped to offset the relative stagnation of marshland farming.

We must now move from our general survey for a more close-up look at particular villages and individual persons from our chosen area of north-east Lincolnshire. Some we will choose for their particular importance in the region, others because they were typical of their class, and yet others for the part they were to play in the Revolt of the Field and emigration to New Zealand. Our examples will illustrate the range of social class in the rural hierarchy and the inter-action between the various ranks. They will also introduce two important influences on the lives of the village labourers — philanthropy and Methodism. We will look first at the Earls of Yarborough and their Brocklesby estate.

The 1873 Return of Owners of Land shows the Earl of Yarborough as Lincolnshire's largest landowner, possessing 55,272 acres in the county with a gross annual rental estimated at £72,226. The first member of the line to settle at Brocklesby was Sir William Pelham, a distinguished military commander of the reign of Elizabeth I. The line was raised to the peerage in 1794, and the earldom was created in 1837. The first earl's father, who succeeded to the Brocklesby estates in 1763, gave a lead in the transformation of the wolds. In his report of 1799 Arthur Young wrote of excellent examples of reclaimed wolds on Lord Yarborough's estate. The first Lor