Captain Swing (1984)

From the June 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Walking through the Hampshire countryside on a pleasant sunny morning, it is difficult to realise that in the 19th century this was the scene of a violent uprising, one that was to terrify the Establishment and bring down savage reprisals. This is a soft countryside, composed of a hundred shades of green — a land of chalk hills and water meadows, of extensive heathlands and wooded creeks.

This was the world of Jane Austen, who was born and lived much of her life at Steventon, near Basingstoke, and who died in Winchester. The pleasant world she portrayed was Hampshire, where graceful houses and gardens were set in rolling parklands, a world of culture and delicate customs. But it was also a place of grinding poverty, of labourers who worked long hours for eight shillings (40 pence) a week and vicious game laws bordering on the insane. Hampshire contained the appalling Andover Union, perhaps the nastiest workhouse in the country. Dotted about the countryside stood the gibbets, one of which—the Coombe gibbet—still stands at a popular picnic spot on the Downs overlooking the Kennet valley. And at Portsmouth, near the spot where today holiday makers embark for the Isle of Wight, the prison hulks were moored — old, decaying wooden ships used as makeshift prisons. This was the backcloth against which the tragedy of the Swing Riots was played.

The trap that closed on the agricultural labourer in the early 19th century had many teeth. The rapid inflation following the end of the Napoleonic wars, combined with an equally rapid fall in corn prices, brought agricultural wages down to as low as five shillings (25 pence) a week. Large areas of chalk downland went out of cultivation and a run of wet summers caused crop failures and cattle disease. The resulting mass unemployment brought many families to the edge of starvation.

Traditionally the country people had right of access to common land on which to pasture animals, gather wood and fuel, and other rights. The enclosures that had been progressing for many years accelerated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and vast areas of common land were enclosed and sold off to the local gentry at absurdly low prices. The cottage garden with its hollyhocks and honeysuckle round the door was largely a myth. The real cottager, the agricultural labourer, had little scope for such niceties, for their plots were used for growing food and keeping pigs or chickens. But even these were often filched away.

To add to the problems came mechanisation, principally Meikles Threshing Machine, which abolished hand flail threshing — the main source of winter employment. To people already close to starvation, this replacement of labour by new machines was a disaster. A bitter hatred of the machines developed. They were seen as the main cause of poverty, and were the main targets in the uprising.

Often the peasants’ only way of adding to their food supply was by poaching. But the game laws reserved the right to shoot to the rich, and protected this right by severe penalties. Conviction for poaching could mean seven years transportation, while sheep stealing could mean the death sentence. But such was the plight of the rural population that many were prepared to risk even these penalties.

Wessex had long been one of the most highly developed and prosperous parts of England. Winchester was once the capital, but the Industrial Revolution had passed the Southern Counties by. Their ancient industries were left high and dry, and Winchester and Salisbury declined from major cities into unimportant market towns. This is why their ancient buildings have survived for, as their old centres slipped into decay and squalor, they were not swept away and rebuilt. Now restored, they are major tourist attractions, but to the displaced farm labourers, it meant that there were no growing industrial areas to which they could escape. In country areas near to the new conurbations farm wages were to some extent protected by mills and factories. There was in fact a scheme to resettle the farm labourers in the North-West, where wages were higher, but there was no such outlet for the agricultural workers of the South.

The final insult was the adoption of the pernicious Speenhamland system. Speenhamland is a part of Newbury in Berkshire, astride the London road. On 6 May 1795 a meeting of the Berkshire magistrates was held at the George and Pelican, an inn now demolished. They worked out a system of poor relief that was to be taken up right across England (except in Northumberland). Instead of fixing minimum wages, it was decided to make up incomes to an agreed level by payment from parish rates. Needless to say this was abused by employers and landlords, who reduced wages and raised rents, knowing that the cuts would be made up from public funds. Worse than that, the Speenhamland system placed people at the mercy of overseers and subjected them to the indignity of a means test.

So by 1830 the position of the farm labourer was desperate. There was little hope of relief from the authorities. In the pre-Reform Parliament, power both national and local lay in the hands of the landowners and gentry, the very people who stood to gain most from the poverty of the agricultural workforce. Rotten boroughs like Old Sarum (a ruined castle on a hill near Salisbury) returned two MPs. One can still see the tree in the fields below, where a handful of people “elected” the members.

The rural population had been docile, but in November 1830 they exploded into violence. The uprising took the authorities, who had been lulled into a false sense of security, by surprise. The workers’ initial demands were very limited. “All we ask is that our wages may be advanced to such a degree as will enable us to provide for ourselves and our families without being driven to the overseer”. But within a week the whole situation changed. Beginning in Kent, the protests ran like wildfire through Surrey and Sussex into Hampshire and Wiltshire. The violence, once started, accelerated as the pent-up resentment of years burst out. Threatening letters were received by landowners and magistrates, signed by a mysterious “Captain Swing”, or sometimes just “Swing”. Terse and to the point, they condemned the use of machines and threatened violence. Arson, rioting and machine smashing were common, farm houses were broken into and farmers threatened.

At Fordingbridge on the River Test, mobs armed with sledgehammers and crowbars destroyed a sacking mill and the hated threshing machine factory. At Andover an iron foundry was destroyed, and at Wilton in Wiltshire a woollen mill and a clothing factory went the same way. When troops arrested a rioter in Andover and conveyed him to prison, the mob smashed their way in and released him. In West Hampshire operations were directed by an ostler named James Thomas Cooper who styled himself Captain Hunt, and rode a white horse that he had commandeered. Like a latterday Wat Tyler, Cooper led 2,000 rebels into Ringwood to a pitched battle and into Southampton to set fire to a large sawmill. At Selbourne and Headley the workhouses were attacked and destroyed. As the rioting progressed the ranks of the farm labourers were swelled by craftsmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, bricklayers and millworkers, and even small farmers. Right across the South ricks were fired and machines smashed and toll gates — an inevitable target because they effectively stopped the poor from using main roads — were torn down.

When “Captain Hunt” led a mob up the Avon towards Salisbury, smashing machines and firing ricks, farmers besieged insurance offices with claims for fire damage, forcing the companies to default. But along with the destruction went efforts to force agreements raising wages and cutting rents and tithes. Those landowners who resisted had their houses burned down. Others gave money and food to placate a threatening crowd. The Hampshire Chronicle reported that a march on Winchester had been averted by the Mayor, who convened a meeting of farmers and labourers which agreed a wage of twelve shillings (60 pence) a week. Similar agreements were signed all over the area. When a Wiltshire MP, John Bennett, offered to pay £500 (a phenomenal sum to people earning eight shillings a week) to anyone who informed against ten rioters, nobody responded. Instead they stoned the MP and smashed his threshing machines. When the revolt was crushed the agreements were, of course, repudiated.

As December advanced the impetus of the riots slackened and there came savage reprisals. The authorities were in a jittery state, obsessed with fears of revolution. They looked apprehensively across the Channel to France, as they had been doing for 40 years, where in July yet another revolution had toppled Charles the Tenth and driven him into exile. Queen Adelaide’s talk of “playing the part of Marie Antoinette in the coming revolution” was pure nonsense but it reflected the state of hysteria that gripped the upper class. Riots, often serious, were common in Georgian England, often whipped up by the party in opposition in order to embarrass the government. Rumours would run through London and the big cities and bring the mobs onto the streets. But the town rioters had safety in numbers and when it was all over they could fade back into the slums. The agricultural workers had no such anonymity; they were known and could be identified. Mass arrests took place across the whole area and the jails were full to overflowing. Special Commissioners were appointed to try prisoners while Lord Melbourne issued a circular to all magistrates instructing them to “seize suspected persons and deal with them in any way thought fit — with no subsequent enquiries”.

The First Commission of Assize opened in Winchester on 18 December and later passed on to Salisbury. The accused did not stand a chance; they were poor and illiterate with no knowledge of the law. One jury was discharged because of their sympathy towards the accused and their reluctance to convict. These “trials” ran on through December into January. One hundred and one defendants were sentenced to death, 117 to transportation and 68 to various prison sentences. Public opinion was outraged by the death sentences, newspapers condemned them and protests and petitions poured in from all sides. The government bowed to the pressure, and only six were executed, including “Captain Hunt” who, as one of the most prominent rebels, did not stand any chance of a reprieve. Most of the others were transported — a particularly cruel penalty as not only was the convict imprisoned, torn from his family and sent across the world, but his dependants were left to fend for themselves, which usually meant starvation. The revolt was at an end and the notorious convict ships, the Eliza, Proteus and Eleanor assembled off Portsmouth to ferry their participants across the world.

The Swing Riots happened four years before the first agricultural workers’ union branch was formed in Tolpuddle. Certainly they were influenced by an earlier radicalism, as personified by William Cob- bett, the author of Rural Rides, who had defended the agricultural workers and attacked the grim conditions under which they lived. He had stated that it was “better to poach than to starve”. His publication, Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, was read by the more articulate labourers to their illiterate comrades at gatherings in pubs.

In the 1830s the condition of the agricultural workers reached its lowest ebb. Although they were to remain at the bottom of the pile throughout the 19th century, things were never to be quite as bad again. The Reform Bill broke the monopoly of the landed gentry in Parliament. Not that the hard faced industrialists and ship owners had any more regard for the welfare of the farm worker than had their landed oppressors, but from time to time it suited their purpose to support them. The criminal laws, “Britain’s Bloody Code”, were slowly reformed, transportation was abolished, the revolting prison hulks disappeared and the death penalty was removed from over 200 offences. Poaching became a less serious crime, while the coming of the railways and spread of newspapers reduced rural isolation. The growth of seaside towns on the South coast and the establishment of small scale industries opened up alternative employment, but for many young farm workers the army was seen to be the only way out. Right up to the First World War the Shires provided the bulk of the infantry — a fact illustrated by the long lists of names on war memorials in village churches.

So the last “Peasant Revolt” failed. Like its predecessor in 1381, the Swing Riots were doomed from the start. The odds against were too great but in neither instance did the rebels realise the fear that they engendered, or just how powerful they were. Illiterate and unsophisticated, they could never grasp the extent of the forces ranged against them, or understand the system that was crushing them. No 19th century uprising came from greater provocation or was more savagely suppressed.

Les Dale

From market town . . . (1984)

The Place Where I Live Series from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

As you approach Basingstoke from the direction of London, whether by train or motorway, the first thing to loom up through the trees is a giant office block. This is the AA building. Then, as you get nearer, other office blocks appear, together with factories, storage depots and extensive new housing estates, all aggressively modern and encircled by a complicated  system of roads that has given rise to the jibe of "roadites". The immediate impression is of a modern town, but Basingstoke is in fact ancient. Old Basing, now a picturesque village on the outskirts of the town, is of Saxon origin. An important battle was fought here in the ninth century when the Danes defeated a Saxon army and opened the way for a Danish invasion of Wessex. Basingstoke, originally called New Basing, was laid out somewhat later as a market town and communications centre, to take advantage of the growing economic importance of the area. It became known as Basingstoke in the eleventh century, and was dominated by Basing House. As so often happens, the child was to outgrow the parent, and Basingstoke was to develop into an important market town while Old Basing remained a village. Much of the old town still exists, and once can trace remnants of a medieval grid-iron plan with alleys that were once streets.

In the 1960s Basingstoke became a London overspill town and in just over a decade the town more than doubled in size, houses and factories covering what were green fields and woods as late as 1970. The whole place has been transformed; a huge modern shopping precinct was built, and what was the old traffic-choked High Street is now closed to all vehicles, with tubs of flowers dotted about while through traffic is diverted. Many thousands of Londoners have come into the area since the beginning of the scheme, thus reversing a trend that has existed for centuries in which people from the country flocked into London. Now they are moving out. So Basingstoke has grown, but to somebody who grew up in West London between the wars when thousands of acres were covered by urban sprawl and a whole county — Middlesex — disappeared under bricks and mortar, it still seems pretty small. You can still stand in the centre of the town and see the open country which surrounds it, or stand on the hills outside and look right across to the hills on the other side.

The town lies in a valley between chalk hills, a continuation of the North Downs, including the famous Watership Down. The area is officially designated as an "area of outstanding natural beauty", a hiker's paradise crisscrossed by ancient green lanes and footpaths. The beauty of the area has long since been recognised by the wealthy who can afford to choose where they will live, and who used the chalk streams and extensive woodlands for their expensive sports of shooting fishing. The famous trout stream, the River Test, rises within the boundaries of Basingstoke. These activities have been an important factor in controlling the effects of modern agriculture. The sale of fishing and shooting rights are highly lucrative; vast sums of money are involved. Fly fishing requires plenty of insects; these, in turn, require trees and undergrowth near the river. This acts as a check on excessive reclamation schemes by river boards. After all, if you are paying large sums of money to fish, you do not want to do so on a glorified drain. Likewise, game birds require woods, spinneys and hedges in which to to breed, so the grubbing up of woods and hedges is slowed down. Unfortunately natural beauty and wild life do not carry a price tag. This makes their preservation difficult, but a threat to profits is another matter and carries a lot more weight.

The change from market to London overspill has merely accelerated a process which has been taking place in market towns all over the country. When the heavy axes and  ploughs of the saxons began to cut land, a pattern began to emerge. That pattern, of a largely self-supporting rural economy with farms and hamlets centred around a market town was to remain largely unchanged into this century. From time to time other patterns have been superimposed on it — the monasteries backed by the wealth of the Church; manufacturing such as iron and cloth production; huge country houses in their extensive parks, financed by industry, commerce or the profits of the slave trade. However the underlying pattern remained unchanged. Each area had its mills and tanneries, forges and breweries and its skilled craftsmen — the wheelwrights, carpenters and masons. While the country produced food and timber, flax and leather for the towns, it supplied much of its own produce. The towns that formed the heart of these areas became not only market towns but centres of administration, communication and supply. Basingstoke was such a town. The Basingstoke canal was cut through to take local produce to London and Basingstoke later became an important rail junction. This pattern began to alter with the Industrial Revolution, which brought in mass produced goods while the railways brought in newspapers and coal as well as holidaymakers. The growth of population and the growing army of industrial workers first boosted the production of food and accelerated the enclosures, but later the opening of the vast wheatfields of North America and the cattle production of the Argentine undermined British agriculture and produced a slump. But the pattern was still recognisable until the 1939-45 war.

The last forty years have seen the end of that pattern. The isolation of the country is at an end. Modern agriculture is highly mechanised and its labour force is small, while better paid townspeople fill the cottages. Village shops stock the same packaged foods, cartons of milk and imported fruit — in many cases even mass produced sliced bread — that are stocked in the town supermarkets. The car has made transport easy, but the major changes have been brought about by electricity. The ugly pylons which stride across the country like a gigantic clothes line have brought electricity to the most isolated parts of the country. One can go into the most remote farmhouse and find television sets, hi-fi equipment, videos and washing machines. This has completely changed the character if towns like Basingstoke. Before the coming of electricity and piped water the needs of the country were different to those of the town. Oil lamps, stoves and cookers fired by solid fuel and battery powered radios were all stocked by shops in Basingstoke alongside agricultural tools. Today the shop windows look the same as anywhere else and carry the same names over the doors. Its Haymarket is now a theatre and its old town hall has been turned into offices.

Basingstoke is now the centre of a new giant authority called the Borough of Basingstoke and Deane. The top-heavy structure incorporates a large area of countryside with villages and small towns. Not that it is in any danger of going the way of the Greater London Council or South Yorkshire, because it has a large built-in Tory majority, so much so that one suspects they could put up Tony Benn and he would get elected. This does not apply to Basingstoke itself, where political feelings are pretty evenly divided among the main capitalist Parties.

The growth of Basingstoke over the centuries has been pretty low key, but it entered the history books during the civil war with the siege of Basing House. This was the largest private house in England and was converted into a fortress. It held out for the Royalists for years. Astride a main road from London to the West, it was a thorn in the side of Parliament until stormed and destroyed in 1645. Today a tourist attraction, its ruins covered with wild flowers in the spring, fitted with a museum and teashop, it is difficult to realise the savagery that took place there. Today the town is pretty peaceful, only the occasional Saturday night punch-up to disturb the peace, but in 1830 the south was gripped by a wave of unrest known as the Swing riots. Gangs of agricultural workers roamed the countryside smashing machinery and setting ricks afire. This alarmed the government into savage reprisals. Later, in 1880, the arrival of the newly formed Salvation Army alarmed the brewers who feared the pubs would be closed down, and therefore stirred up feelings against them. Riots broke out in which not only the Salvation Army but non-conformists in general were attacked and shops damaged. Rowdies from outside the town swelled the numbers of rioters to over 2,000 and swamped the small police force. Mounted troops were called out to clear the streets. After a couple of years the agitation died down when it became obvious that the pubs were not going to close down. The rioters justified their actions as defending liberty and personal freedom.

While many parts of the country are in decline because the industries on which they were based have become obsolete, the opposite has happened in the Southern counties. Economically important for centuries Wessex, to give it its ancient name, was largely missed by the Industrial Revolution and went into decline, its old industries superceded by the new mass production. But in the last 40 years new modern industries have flooded into the area. It is on the edge of the so-called Silicon valley which runs from Reading to Swindon, and contains many vast government establishments; well-known places like Burghfield, Aldermaston and Greenham Common are near Basingstoke. For years Basingstoke had one of the highest employment rates in the country and although, like everywhere else, it had been hit by the recession, the employment rate is still comparatively high.

Along with the new industries and large concerns moving their offices out of London has come the growth of tourism. New exploration for oil is taking place in three places near Basingstoke. One can only hope that the "uglification" will be confined to the comparatively inoffensive "nodding donkeys".

So the wastefulness of capitalism goes on. Factories stand idle and derelict in one area while in another fertile land goes down under concrete. Fifty years ago it was the market gardens of Middlesex or the farmlands of Kent, today it is Hampshire and the Thames Valley; tomorrow it can be anywhere else. As for the people, if you are in a declining area, that it just too bad — your misfortune in fact. This will continue; that is one thing at least of which you may be sure, until those same people begin to understand what is going on and take steps to change it.

Les Dale