Working men's bodies

Work camps in Britain, 1880–1940

John Field

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526112521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia irlandese

The first in-depth study of Britain's many work camp systems.

1

Colonising the land

In 1850, Britain was reaching the peak of her international power. Hyde Park rang to the hammers and cries of two thousand labourers, erecting the vast Crystal Palace. Most Britons were duly impressed by the Great Exhibition’s eclectic celebration of Britain’s ingenuity, prosperity and power, but not Thomas Carlyle. Faced with such vanity, pomp and pride, the veteran satirist modestly proposed that ‘the Pauper Populations of these Realms’ be conscripted into ‘Industrial Regiments’, recruited to fight not the French, but ‘the Bogs and Wildernesses at home and abroad, and to chain the Devils of the Pit which are walking too openly among us’.¹ In the complacent Britain of 1851, the idea of a regiment of paupers was a satirist’s fantasy. By the 1880s, it had assumed a more realistic shape, in the form of the labour colony.

The idea of the labour colony drew on earlier traditions of thinking about the poor. By the 1880s, workhouses were coming under increasing strain; as well as the able-bodied poor, their inmates included pauper children, the elderly, the insane and the sick. Conservatives such as Carlyle often thought that a dose of rural life would prove healthy economically as well as socially, drawing the poor away from the malign influences of city life, and reminding the landowning class of its obligations. Land settlement schemes took deeper roots among radical and working-class movements. Chartists, Utopian socialists and Owenites all invented schemes for bringing the urban poor into rural communes, where they would live off the land. Robert Owen himself, pioneer cooperator and theorist of the cooperative movement, developed remarkably detailed proposals between 1817 and 1840 for home colonies, on which some 2,500 men, women and children would support themselves.² Later, John Stuart Mill so admired the Chartist Land Plan, which settled urban working-class families on five planned rural estates of well over 1,000 acres, that he considered it as a lasting solution to Ireland’s persistent land problems.³

Visions settling the urban poor on the land captured the imagination of radicals and rural conservatives alike throughout the nineteenth century. Radicals took a particularly active interest in land reform, and debates over the rights and wrongs of landlordism reached a peak in the 1870s and 1880s.⁴ Given increasing public criticism of the Poor Laws, and growing recognition of its inability to deal with unemployment, it is not surprising that these two concerns came together. In his account of public responses to unemployment, underemployment and poverty in Victorian London, Gareth Stedman Jones has explored the unstable balance between belief in civic progress and moral anxiety over urban degeneration that by the 1880s characterised middle-class attitudes towards the poor. Emerging socialist groups occasionally found an audience among the unemployed, organising demonstrations that often spilt over into violent outbursts.⁵ Fears of class war were further inflamed by union activity among unskilled and casual workers and, above all, the London dockers’ strike of 1889.

For many late Victorian Britons, urban conflicts and aspirations were one side of a coin. Land reform, of one kind or another, was the other. In imperial Britain, long-term changes in food supply were producing a contraction in the amount of land under cultivation. Some large landowners turned portions of their estates over to game, causing further resentment and hostility over land ownership patterns, while some land reverted to scrub and moor. From the early 1880s, radicals, socialists and rural traditionalists alike were promoting debate about land reform, and were particularly interested in land settlement, seeing it variously as a means of promoting manly independence and national stability and undermining the power of aristocratic ‘feudalism’ in the countryside while helping resolve the problems of urban life, unemployment included.⁶

During the early 1880s, public attitudes towards the poor started to shift. Stedman Jones highlighted a number of different elements to this process, including recognition of the Poor Law’s failures, changing middle-class attitudes towards charity, the impact of Charles Booth’s enormous survey of London’s poor, and the spread of social imperialist ideas linking British unemployment with colonial settlement.⁷ There were also more proximate causes, including a sharp rise in the numbers of the poor when the severe winter of 1885–86 put a stop to much outdoor work, at a time when depression had already led to job loss. The economists Alfred Marshall and John Hobson had started to write and speak about unemployment, a term that had barely entered the language before the 1880s, as a product of the way the labour market is organised.⁸

The main mechanism for relieving poverty, the Poor Law, was demonstrably ineffective at dealing with cyclical unemployment in the industrial cities, and was under massive strain in cities like London, where the importance of casual labour meant that huge numbers of men and women hovered between work and despair. Nor was the Poor Law any better at handling the other social and health problems, from madness to old age, that were passed on to it. By January 1908, while the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws was chewing over the competing propositions of Fabian socialism and liberal idealism, almost a million people in England and Wales – around one person in forty – were receiving some form of poor relief.

One reason for advocating labour colonies, then, was as an alternative to the existing poor law institutions. Advocates could point to earlier experiments, like the workhouse farm opened by Sheffield Board of Guardians in 1848. Isaac Ironside, a radical Guardian who briefly lived on the Owenite New Harmony community in his youth, vigorously defended the ‘New England’ farm, declaring that it allowed the able-bodied poor not only to provide productive labour but also to become ‘better citizens’.⁹ Once economic conditions improved, the farm declined, and the Sheffield experiment came to an end. Nevertheless, workhouse farms continued to provide a focus for debate. Fifty years later, one poor law guardian presented a paper on workhouse farms at a conference on land reform, citing such examples as the workhouse farm at Wyke, near Winchester, on which able-bodied male paupers grew some of their own food, with the infirm men caring for the workhouse pigs, and the 100–acre Craiglockhart farm, which employed pauper ‘imbeciles’ from Edinburgh poorhouse .¹⁰

The Liverpool Unitarian Herbert Mills, founder of the Starnthwaite colony in 1892, argued in 1886 that unemployment resulted from mechanisation, which then reduced demand for goods, creating a vicious cycle that could not be tackled by existing poor law institutions. For Mills, the workhouse encouraged anything but work: on the contrary, he was impressed by the uselessness of such tasks as oakum-picking and stone-breaking, the disdain with which officials treated the poor, and in general ‘the extraordinary amount of yawning that goes on’.¹¹ What was required, he concuded, was an ‘English experiment’ in cooperative land settlement.¹² He spelt out more detailed proposals in a speech to a Mansion House conference in 1887, claiming moreover the support of the eminent economist Alfred Marshall.¹³

Far better known than Mills, the East Ender George Lansbury was also a Christian Socialist and critic of the workhouse. A radical Liberal who moved steadily towards socialism, Lansbury was also an active campaigner for poor law reform, though as a railwayman’s son Lansbury had not spent his childhood in poverty, and unlike Will Crooks and Keir Hardie he had not spent time in a workhouse until he became a candidate for the Poplar Board of Guardians. ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ was his judgement on the Poplar workhouse, when he visited as a newly elected Guardian of the Poor.¹⁴ Lansbury continued to serve on Poplar Board of Guardians until 1929. His base lay in London, as part of a generation of Labour leaders whose constituencies were associated with populist radicalism and – occasionally – the threat of public disorder.¹⁵ For these politically minded men, poor law boards were a point of entry into local government.

Lansbury was active on a number of fronts, including the drink trade, child labour, advertising, gambling (on the Stock Exchange as much as in the street), and clerical hypocrisy. Perhaps his chief hate – along with freemasonry – was ‘the sinfulness, the crime against society, which the mere fact of landlordism entails’.¹⁶ The land was created by God for all humanity, and Lansbury thought that there was no foundation for private ownership other than past violence and oppression.

The progressive workman is asking himself with a very bitter insistence how it is that he and his should be cooped up, in the great cities (yes, and in the tiny villages too), in little bits of houses with scarcely room to breathe, whilst all around him are hundreds of thousands of acres of land practically unused, and great parks, with walls and railings surrounding them, used only for the pleasure and convenience of just a handful of people.¹⁷

Poor law reform, then, provided an opportunity to pursue practical land reform at the same time.

Initially, Lansbury proposed punitive labour colonies for ‘the treatment of the habitual casual and repression of the loafer’.¹⁸ In 1895 he persuaded the Poplar Guardians to develop plans for a labour colony in Essex which would take both men and women for a one-year period. Alarmed at the cost, the Local Government Board (LGB) rejected the plan, offering instead to allow Poplar to extend its workhouse.¹⁹ By the late 1890s, however, he appears to have shifted gear, moving away from an authoritarian perspective on the ‘under-class’, and developing a view of labour colonies as a school for citizenship on the land. Labour colonies, Lansbury wrote, would help so-called ‘unemployables’ to become ‘self-respecting citizens’ only if they led to land settlement.²⁰ He developed this theme in a speech to the Christian Social Union at Oxford University, proposing that there should be several different types of labour colony – including one for vagrants, one for able-bodied workhouse inmates, and one for ordinary unemployed – all leading to land s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Colonising the land
• 2 ‘We work amongst the lowest stratum of life’: the early labour colonies
• 3 Labour colonies and public health
• 4 Alternative living in the English countryside: utopian colonies
• 5 ‘The landless man to the manless land’: labour colonies and the Empire
• 6 Transference and the Labour government, 1929–31
• 7 Incremental growth: Instructional Centres under the National Government
• 8 ‘Light green uniforms, white aprons and caps’: training unemployed women
• 9 Camps as social service and social movement
• 10 ‘Down with the concentration camps!’: opposition and protest
• Conclusion – Understanding work camps: memory and context
• Select bibliography
• Index