Working Class Politics and Garden Allotments in London’S East End, 1890-1918

COCKNEY PLOTS: WORKING CLASS POLITICS AND GARDEN ALLOTMENTS IN LONDON’S EAST END, 1890-1918 A Thesis Submitted to the College Of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of Saskatchewan Elizabeth Anne Scott © Elizabeth Anne Scott, November 2005. All Rights Reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the Master’s of Arts Degree in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department of History. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or in part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of History University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 i ABSTRACT The allotments scheme was a complex and diverse social, political, and economic movement that provided the labouring classes with small plots of land, usually no larger than one-eighth of an acre, on which to grow vegetables. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the First World War in 1918, the East End of London experienced an overwhelming increase in allotment cultivation and provision. Working- class men in the boroughs of Hackney, Poplar, East Ham, and West Ham participated in the allotments scheme for a variety of reasons. Allotments were places in which a working man could grow his own food with his family’s help to supplement low, casual or seasonal wages, and his gardening kept him out of the pub and on the land. During the war period, food prices increased to intolerable levels in the East End so that the allotment was one of the few ways to reasonably feed the family, especially for the casual dockers. East Enders maintained personal and collective connections to the land that they had lost both through the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the urban sprawl of the early twentieth century. Finally, allotment gardening provided the healthy leisure activities of exercise, horticultural education, and civic participation. The allotment was embedded in a social ethic that espoused industriousness, sobriety, respectability, and independence and in this way was a middle class solution to a working class problem. Yet, working men adopted the scheme as their own with enthusiasm and dedication and created natural spaces in the degraded landscape of the East End. By 1916, with the passage of the Cultivation of Lands Order, the East End boasted thousands of allotments growing vegetables on London’s vacant lots largely due ii to the persistent demands of residents on their local borough councils. The allotment association provided East End men with an unparalleled opportunity for grassroots political participation and gave way to a marked increase in working-class political awareness during the period. East Enders gained a foothold in local, regional, metropolitan, and later national politics for the first time in decades. The allotment in the East End also significantly changed the environment in which it was situated. The green space improved the esthetic of the area, adding to the general well-being of all of the boroughs’ citizens. East End allotments brought life to an area that many believed was lifeless. Not only did working men prove they could bring their sooty surroundings to life, but that they could also bring back to life the long-latent self-sufficiency of their ancestors. They were attracted to the scheme at a higher rate than many of the other 28 London boroughs because of their poverty, their maintained connection to green space, their cultural and political interest in land, and their profound sense of the loss of the land and the independence it brought. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor Professor Christopher Kent for his guidance and knowledge, his continual support and encouragement, and his contagious passion for Victorian history. I am equally indebted to my committee, Professors Gordon DesBrisay and Jim Handy for their many good suggestions and equal encouragement. I would like to thank the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan for their generosity in funding this research. Not only did they award me a Graduate Scholarship in my first year, but funded my trip to England with the Mary Hallett Travel Scholarship and further awarded me the Dr. George Simpson Memorial Scholarship, the Douglas and Merle Bocking Award, and the Buchanan Bounty Trust Book Prize. I would like especially to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding the second year of the research. I would also like to thank the College of Graduate Studies and Research, the U of S President’s Student Fund, and the Department of History for funding my travel to present parts of this thesis at the Land Questions Conference at the University of Hertfordshire in July of 2005. The research for this thesis was largely conducted in the United Kingdom and I would like to thank the very helpful staff, archivists and librarians at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library, the Hackney Archives, the Newham Archives, the British Library, the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, and the London Metropolitan Archives. I would also like to thank Professors Jeremy Burchardt (Reading) and Malcolm Chase (Leeds) for their thoughtful suggestions and for taking an interest in my work. iv Finally, I would like to thank my parents Peter and Barbara Scott and my husband Chris Harris for their unconditional love and support in this and all of my endeavours. I am forever indebted, literally, to you all. v DEDICATION For my ‘Grandpop,’ Allotmenteer, Charles Alexander Scott and for my Gran, Annie Jeannette Scott who learned to grow beautiful flowers in Hoxton, East London. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS PERMISSION TO USE……………………………………………………….. i ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………… iv DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………… vii LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………. viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………. ix CHAPTER ONE Introduction……………………………………………………………………… 1 Brief History of Allotments in the United Kingdom…………………..... 3 Allotments in the East End……..……………………………………….. 6 Historiography…………………………………………………………………... 8 Land Reform and Agrarianism………………………………………….. 13 The Chartist Land Plan………………………………………………….. 18 Intellectual Currents……………………………………………………... 21 Allotments……………………………………………………………….. 26 CHAPTER TWO Green Space in the Eastern Boroughs……………………………………………. 36 Allotments in the East End, 1890-1916………………………………………….. 43 1916 and the Cultivation of Lands Order………………………………………... 52 The Vacant Land Cultivation Society and the East End………….……… 53 War Time Allotments, 1917……………………………………………………... 57 Borough of Poplar…………………………………………………….….. 61 Borough of Hackney…..……….………………………………………… 65 Boroughs of East Ham and West Ham……………………..…………..... 72 CHAPTER THREE Effective Citizens: Becoming Politicized………………………………………... 77 East End Allotments Associations……………………………………….. 78 The Allotments Site………………………………………………………. 92 Essential to the Scheme…………………………………………………... 96 New Relationships: Councillors and Gardeners......……………………………... 100 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….. 113 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………….. 125 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Photograph of Britannia Gardens, Shoreditch: 1937. Photo No. 92/105. Class 91.0 BRI. London Metropolitan Archives. Reproduced with permission. Figure 2. Map of the Environs of London: 1832. Accessed at [http://www.londonancestor.com/maps/london-south-th.htm] 1 April, 2005. Figure 3. Newspaper Clipping from the East End News, 23 August 1910. Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Allotments File No. 630-1. Figure 4. Photograph of Providence Place, Stepney, 1909 as printed in Jane Cox, London’s East End Life and Traditions (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), 32. Figure 5. “A Typical Allotment Holder,” Keeping Fit by Allotment Digging: Annual Report of the Society of Friends Allotments Committee and Central Allotments Committee, September 1936-August 1937 (London: 1937). Figure 6. Photograph of “The Triangle Camp,” West Ham, 1906. Newham Archives Photograph Collection for West Ham. Reproduced with permission. Figure 7. Photograph of the Mudchute Allotments, Isle of Dogs, Borough of Tower Hamlets, 2004. Author’s own. Figure 8. Photograph of Mudchute Allotments, Isle of Dogs, Borough of Tower Hamlets, 2004. Author’s own. Figure 9. Photograph outside of the Mudchute Allotments, Isle of Dogs, Borough of Tower Hamlets, 2004. Author’s own. Figure 10. Photograph of “A London Desert Taken over in 1915,” as printed in Gerald Butcher, Allotments For All: The Story of a Great Movement (London: Allen & Unwin, 1918). Figure 11. “The Better Claim,” Allotments & Gardens, October 1919. British Newspaper Library at Colindale. viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CTAS – Cubitt Town Allotments Society EHAA – East Ham Allotments Association

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