Lords, Labourers and employment in Victorian Dorset

by

Robin Adeney

During the nineteenth century the lot of the agricultural worker in Dorset was not a happy one.  When the price of wheat was high he received a wage that just about provided a subsistence living.  When the price fell his income plummeted and without ‘parish relief’ he and his family would surely have starved. 

The origins of this terrible situation have their roots in the various Acts of Enclosure, which reached their peak in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries and which allowed landlords to literally annexe vast acreages.  This effectively denied the peasants the centuries-old right to graze their cow or pig or even grow vegetables on a plot of land with the result that their diet became very basic.  Poor nourishment derived from just tea, bread and potatoes, led inexorably to a small stature.  Since it became impossible to eek out an existence from the land, the mass of country people were forced to seek paid, but insecure employment on the newly created tenant farms or leave the land altogether to find work in the emerging urban industries. 

In 1815 the Corn Law Act was passed as a measure to protect landowners who had enjoyed artificially high prices for their wheat during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15).  This had a direct effect on the price of bread in England and consequently the living standards of both the urban and rural poor.  Low wages, a poor diet, and uncertain employment, appallingly overcrowded and unsanitary housing all combined to create a sense of worthlessness, which all too easily descended into unfathomable pits of depravity.  Families of anything up to twelve persons were compelled to live in tiny tumbled-down cottages, sometimes as many as seven, of both sexes, sleeping in one bed simply served to compound the problem.  In addition to all these hardships there was the ever present fear of an accident or illness and especially old age because people would do almost anything to avoid the only safety-net, which was the indignity of incarceration in the workhouse, where, as a deterrent, families were broken-up and segregated and the harsh living conditions were deliberately made worse than the lowest paid worker in employment might expect.  Nevertheless, by1851 the urban population was greater than in the rural areas largely because the rates of pay appeared better.  (It has always been difficult to make an exact comparison because the agricultural worker usually received some benefits in kind.)  Working conditions in industry were terrible for most workers, none more so than in mining where children as young as three years old were forced to work ‘traps’, often in total darkness, with their feet in water and troubled by rats, for anything up to 12 hours at a time.  Children in the country were not much better off.  In the eastern counties, gang masters hired out women and children as young as six or seven to work in the fields for nine hours a day and then often expected them to trudge anything up to seven miles to reach home again.  Whilst this appears inexcusable abuse from the view point of the 21^st century, it was the inevitable result of excessively low wages and no effective contraception, which forced a family to look for literally any form of income in order to avoid starvation or the ignominy of the workhouse.

The Acts of Enclosure had a further depressing effect on agricultural wages because they allowed the landowners to levy rents from their tenants.  When the price of wheat was reasonably high, farmers were easily able to pay both the rent and wages to their employees.  However, when the price fell or there was a poor harvest, the rent remained the same so that often the only cost that could be controlled was wages, which were inevitably reduced.  The situation was further exacerbated after 1815 by two events.  Firstly, the labour market was flooded with ex-servicemen returning from the war and secondly, later, by the arrival of mechanical threshing machines, which destroyed much of the winter employment.  By 1830 there was serious unrest in the countryside, which boiled over into the Swing riots with their attendant machine breaking, rick-burning and cattle maiming.  In 1834, after a series of poor harvests, it was the reduction from the barely survivable wage of seven shillings a week to the starvation level of six shillings that propelled a group of Friendly Society labourers into forming the first trade union.  Not in itself an offence, but the thoroughly rattled landowners, led by James Frampton of Moreton House, saw to it that they were illegally convicted of a naval regulation forbidding secret oaths and had them transported to Australia .  As everyone knows, there was a public outcry and the Home Secretary was forced to issue a free pardon.

In 1845, Benjamin Disraeli, who would later become one of this country’s’ greatest Prime Ministers, published a novel called ‘Sybil’.  In this work he touches the very essence of the problem when he stated “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are ignorant of each others habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws… THE RICH AND THE POOR.”  Curiously, some Victorians really struggled to understand or explain poverty.  Was it because the worker was lazy and indolent or was it because of something beyond their control?  Was their condition deserved or simply bad luck? If so, who was responsible?  While some agonised over the question, the majority regarded poverty as the natural condition for those people who worked with their hands.  This was, of course, a crucial element in the rigid class structure, which held Victorian society together.  It was essential that men knew their ‘station’ in life.

By the 1840s farmers were becoming seriously concerned by the threat of the repeal of the Corn Laws, which would lead to cheaper foreign grain entering the country, potentially resulting in a devastating effect on their incomes. 

On the 30^th November 1843, Lord Ashley, later to become the 7^th Lord Shaftesbury, addressed a meeting of farmers and landlords of the Agricultural Society in the Crown Inn at Sturminster Newton. He had become the MP for Dorset in 1831, having entered Parliament as the member for Woodstock in 1826 when he was just 25 years old and had changed his seat in order to represent his home county.  So far, he had made his name championing the rights of lunatics and oppressed workers in industry.  It should, therefore, have come as no surprise, but the members were not pleased to hear their MP tell them that “….Dorset was within an ace of becoming a bye-word for poverty and oppression”.  Nor can they have been happy when he asked them to exercise “a larger self-denial, an abatement of luxuries, a curtailing of what are called comforts…” so that their workers might have improved wages and better homes.  He went on to describe the cottages as “ruinous, filthy, contracted, ill-drained, ill-ventilated and so situated as to be productive of many forms of disease and immorality”.  This was a seriously brave speech because he knew conditions on his father’s 18,000 acre estate were appalling.  There was nothing he could do about it because his father, who was furious about his comments, reckoned “the labourers do very well on six or seven shillings a week” although he didn’t know how.

It may very well be that his speech was, in part, a response to repeated attacks in the press by the popular writer Harriet Martineau.  Miss Martineau, a militant feminist, was deaf and an early example of a campaigning journalist.  She made it her business to point out that while he was advancing the cause of the Lancashire mill workers earning as much as three pounds a week, labourers on his family’s estate had to almost starve on six shillings a week.  This was an indisputable fact and no one likes to be called a hypocrite.   

Pressure was also coming from another source.  The vicar of Durweston.  He was the Rev. Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne who had arrived in 1841.  He was the brother-in-law of Charles Kingsley, the author of 'The Water Babies' who, for a while, was a curate at neighbouring  Pimperne.  Although the aristocracy were well represented among Victorian clergy, it was usually the 'younger son'.  However, 'SGO' as he was known, proved to be an outstanding example of a crusading parson.  He was appalled by the lot of the agricultural labourers in his parish and tirelessly promoted their cause through the press, by giving evidence to the Poor Law Commissioners and any other means at his disposal including reminding the Church of its responsibilities.  Seeing little future, he encouraged many of them to emigrate and in several cases paid their fares.  Of course these activities did not win him too many friends amongst the landowners and efforts were made to muzzle him, although without success.   

Shaftesbury inherited the estate, with all its problems and indebtedness, when his father died in 1851.  He was absolutely determined to improve the housing stock and increase his workers’ remuneration. Unfortunately, he also inherited his father’s agent, one Robert Short Waters who had taken up the post in 1845, aged just 23 years old.   Waters had been careful to keep his nose clean under the ‘old Lord’, but had quickly realised that the new one, being more concerned with parliamentary matters and the plight of the poor, had no idea of how to manage the estate or keep an eye on its finances.  Over a period of ten years he set out to systematically defraud the new earl of a fortune.  Despite an annual income of something over £17,000 (about £880,000 today) Shaftesbury not only ploughed back over 50% into the estate, but was obliged to disburse large sums to pay off past debts and those accrued as a result of Waters’ dishonesty.  On several occasions he was on the verge of insolvency and only the generosity of family members and friends saved the day.   Eventually, Shaftesbury generously allowed his agent to resign rather than be given the sack and was rewarded by being sued for money he claimed was owed.  After a lengthy, costly and extremely acrimonious series of court cases in which Waters was sued for embezzlement, the matter was settled, though only the lawyers benefited.

All this set back his plans to improve the estate, a fact not lost on Sidney Godolphin Osborne who kept up a relentless pressure by making a damming report to the Royal Commission on Employment in 1869, prompting Shaftesbury to observe ‘the truth is, he saw little, he heard little; he took everything from Sidney Godolphin Osborne, who, to maintain his own calumnies, blinded the eyes of his wretched pupil.’  However, the fact remained that the parish of Wimborne St. Giles, the epicentre of the estate, was receiving more Poor Law relief per head than any other in Dorset .  At last, after the appointment of a new agent, the estate slowly improved and with it the conditions of the workers.  After a lifetime of service to the poor and responsibility for numerous reforming employment statutes, Shaftesbury died in 1885 having never completely cleared his debts, but "all England " is said to have wept for him.

Sidney Godolphin Osborne died in 1889 and agricultural workers had to wait until 1910 before the first of the Agricultural Wages Acts provided any real financial security.

What a tragedy it was that Shaftesbury and Osborne could not have buried the hatchet and worked together.  Both were aristocrats, devout Christians and dedicated to improving conditions for the dispossessed working classes.