Tag Archives: british history

Immigration and the Windrush story

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When you read the history of Black immigration to Britain, you’ll find the story of the Windrush looming large.

The story of what?

A ship called the Empire Windrush. It docked in Essex (that’s in England; you’re welcome) in 1948, bringing immigrants from the West Indies–and also from other places, including Poland, but only the West Indian immigrants became part of the story. Think of the story as a paper bag full of groceries. The bottom got wet and everyone else fell. They haven’t been seen since. Sorry.

The Windrush gave its name to a generation, not because it was the first ship to bring immigrants from the West Indies but because it was the first to arrive after the passage of the British Nationality Act, which gave people from the colonies the right to live and work in Britain. 

History’s funny like that. A few events get to be fixed points in the story while other things, things that happened before, after, and around those fixed points, go missing. They’re hanging out with those Polish immigrants at the Invisibility Cafe and they’ll be there until a new generation of historians comes along to resurrect them.

Irrelevant photo: Geraniums hanging out with a California poppy.

 

Postwar Britain

Britain came out of World War II exhausted, heavily bombed, and damn near broke. Wartime food rationing continued well into peacetime. To reconstruct, the country needed a lot of things, including workers. Some 260,000 British soldiers had died in the war. (That doesn’t count troops from the colonies, just the ones from Britain itself.) And when after the war some half a million migrants left Britain for the colonies to build new lives, Winston Churchill, by then a mere former prime minister, begged them to stay, saying “We cannot spare you.” 

To which they replied, in unison, “Your problem, buddy,” and off they toddled.

The government turned to its colonies, where they hoped to recruit workers who already spoke English from places where labor was cheap. 

Yes, it was all entirely high minded.

The West Indies were a prime target, since they were struggling economically, and West Indians responded, taking took jobs as manual workers, drivers, cleaners, and nurses, although when I took the Life in the UK test (you have to pass to get indefinite leave to remain), what I had to memorize was that they became bus drivers. Every last one of them.

Listen, when you have to pass a standardized test, you give ‘em what they want, no matter how strained its relationship to fact may be.

People from other colonies also took up the offer, but they too have dropped out of the story. If you want to know more about them, there’s this cafe I can recommend.

 

The welcome mat

So Britain put out the welcome mat, right? 

Sure it did. And the sun shone on this rainy island for 365 days straight. 

What happened was the usual hysteria about immigrants, because the thing about immigrants is that they’re from other countries. Where they do things differently. You know how it works: the country they come to may be divided against itself in six different ways, but drop in enough foreigners to hit critical mass and the country discovers it dislikes them  more than it dislikes its fellow countryfolk.

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound as cynical as I sound. It just sort of happens sometimes. 

Once you’ve cued up the usual hysteria, you can multiply it by the fact that the immigrants were Black and Britain was still overwhelmingly white. 

Result? As much as the country needed workers, jobs were mysteriously hard to find. One man from the Windrush generation said, “Apparently I was always just a few hours too late,” although they were so polite about it that he added, “The Englishman can be the nicest man out when he is telling you no.”    

Housing was equally hard to find. Rooms for rent were generally advertised on notices in the windows of local stores, and a lot of notices said, “No blacks.” Or in some cases, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” 

Yes, kiddies, Irish and Black people were bundled into such a tight package that it was hard to tell them apart. In the rest of this paragraph I’ll be working from memory, so give me some leeway, but Ireland was the place where Britain honed its skills in justifying imperial conquest. It learned to write a story that showed the conquered people as a separate race, so incompetent, so inferior, that conquering them was damn near doing them a favor. In that contest, wrapping them all up together made a kind of sense. 

The things you learn, right?

Maybe the atmosphere of those early years is best summed up by a quick visit to MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech in Parliament. By then, hundreds of thousands of commonwealth immigrants had moved to Britain.

In a decade or so, he said, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

And it wasn’t just the immigrants he was talking about but their descendants, They’d erode the national character. He talked about a constituent who wouldn’t rent rooms to Black people. 

“She is becoming afraid to go out,” he said. “Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.

“They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist,’ they chant.”

He was trying to defeat the Race Relations Bill, and the speech was so over the top that it ended his political career. The bill passed, making race-based discrimination illegal. But the speech did succeed in cranking up antagonism against Black people, so multiply the anti-immigrant hysteria by twelve if you would and write your answer at the bottom of your test paper and leave it in the trash can on your way out. Thank you. Everybody gets an A.

Thousands of people turned out onto the streets protesting Powell. And thousands turned out in support. 

The speech has found echoes in a recent speech by the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, who warned that immigration would make us “an island of strangers.” The speech was somewhat less hysterical but was still full of talk about uncontrolled immigration and incalculable damage to British society.

Starmer’s favorability rating is now – 46. (He’s Labour.) His most vocal opponent–the right-wing voice he’s trying to out-right-wing–is Nigel Farage (Reform), whose favorability rating is -26. Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives) is at – 39. That leaves Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats) at – 8 the clear winner.  

I’d love to explain how those ratings are calculated, but it involves numbers and we’ll all be better off if I don’t try. What we really need to know is that (a) a minus rating isn’t good, and (b) if you want everyone to love you, British politics isn’t the right place for you just now.

 

The Windrush Scandal

But back to our story. The immigrants landed, they worked, they built lives and families. Those who had children back home brought them over once they were settled. The country rebuilt, and–

Do you remember how people in Britain clapped for essential workers during lockdown? Essential workers were the people risking their lives, generally for low pay, to keep the rest of us fed and to keep the lights on, the hospitals running, and the trash collected. Once a week, we acknowledged how much we depended on them, then lockdown ended and the world forgot about them. Did they get a raise? The hell they did. The only visibility they have now is that at our local supermarket the people who round up the shopping carts–or trolleys if we’re talking British–still wear vests (or in British, gillets) with some slogan about essential workers. Probably because the store doesn’t want to spend money on replacing them. 

That was a longish digression, but if you subtract the clapping and the acknowledgement, that’s what happened to the Windrush generation, but again you’ll need to multiply it by twelve. 

Or possibly more than twelve, because in 2012, in the midst of a new wave of hysteria about immigrants, the government introduced a “hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” Landlords had to check a potential tenant’s right to be in the country; employers had to do the same; so did the National Health Service. Bank account? Ditto. Local government couldn’t offer support to people unless they could prove their right to be in the country. 

And guess what: a significant portion of the Windrush generation couldn’t prove its right to be in the country. Not because they’d done anything wrong but because the government hadn’t kept a record of who’d been granted the right to remain. They’d never issued the paperwork people needed to document their status and in 2010 they’d destroyed the landing cards that would’ve documented their arrival. 

Many of the people needing those documents had arrived as children, traveling on their parents’ passports, giving them one less document to rely on. 

Overnight a swathe of people who arrived legally became, officially speaking, illegal immigrants. People lost their housing, their jobs, their driving licenses, their bank accounts, their access to healthcare. Some were deported to countries they no longer remembered. Some were detained within Britain as illegal immigrants. 

As the scandal became public and individual stories emerged, assorted politicians made all the appropriate noises and in 2019 reparations were promised. In 2021, a committee of MPs found that the system of compensating people was so torturous that applying for compensation had become another source of trauma. The Home Office was and still is in charge of the process, which leaves it investigating its own fuck-ups, and many of the people who should get compensation are, not unreasonably, afraid to make themselves known. Some 15,000 people are thought to be eligible for compensation. As of February 2024, 2,307 claims had been accepted. 

The people who have applied have faced long delays, and this is a group of elderly people, and the thing about elderly people is that we keep getting older. If the government stalls this group long enough–apologies for reminding you–they’ll start to die off. We all do that sooner or later.

Many cases that are denied are overturned on appeal, but that depends on being able to launch an appeal.

Is free legal advice available? Don’t kid yourself.

I think it’s fair to say that when compensation has been given, it doesn’t match the wreckage that was made of the recipient’s life. One man who was deported ended up living on the streets in Jamaica for ten years. He’s only just been promised a return, although his case hit the newspapers months ago. Whether he’s actually been brought home yet I don’t know.

What sort of compensation makes up for that?

A quick history of Greenwich Mean Time

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 1675, Charles II appointed  John Flamsteed as the first King’s Astronomical Observator, a.k.a., the Astronomer Royal. For that he got £100 a year, use of the brand new, empty Greenwich Observatory, and no equipment. What a deal! He organized some equipment, supplied whathe couldn’t get donated himself, took on students to stretch his income, and set about studying the sky, which was the key to accurate navigation. This mattered intensely because Britain was increasingly a naval power. That makes this a story about power and money and empire, although they’re not what I’m going to tell you about. Brush the words aside, though, and you’ll find them right under the surface.

Flamsteed had come to Charles’ attention by working out a formula for converting solar time to mean time, and for that to make the least bit of sense, we need to take a step or six back, to the time before time was standardized. But before we do, let me sneak in the information that Flamsteed did something at Greenwich that will become central to our story: he drew an imaginary line right through the place and claimed it as the world’s prime meridian–the line that would divide east from west the way the equator divides north from south. 

At the time, the only people who cared were astronomers. Everyone else measured east and west from wherever they were standing and life rolled on as if nothing had changed.

Vaguely relevant photo: Navigation at sea comes into the story. Do I need to tell you this is the sea?

Clock time and solar time

For those of us who grew up with clocks–and I’m guessing that’s all of us–it goes against the grain to think that the hour hasn’t always been a fixed measurement, but it hasn’t, and this makes a certain kind of sense. As soon as you wander away from the equator, the day’s length varies over the course of the year, and–oh, hell, you know this–in the interest of domestic harmony, so does the night’s. So when people decided it would be convenient to divide the day into twelve equal segments and the night into twelve more, they came up with segments that were the same in the morning, at night, and at noon but that shifted over the course of the year, following the stretch and unstretch of the day.

Why twelve segments? Don’t ask. It’s what they did. Or at least what they did in the ancient Middle East. What they did elsewhere is on a different page of the book and I don’t have time to read it just now.

That system held until the astronomer, geographer, and mathematician Hipparchus (120 to 190 BCE; you’re welcome) realized that if he couldn’t find a more reliable way to divide time his brain would melt, so he took hold of the equinoxes, when day and night are equal, and measured the length of the segments, and said, “That’s it. This is the length of an hour.”

Only since he was Greek and ancient, he said it in classical Greek. And no, I’m not going to translate.

It was a brilliant idea and everybody who wasn’t a mathematician, astronomer, or some sort of specialist ignored it. Daylight went right on lasting for longer and shorter periods of time over the course of the year and in practice so did the length of an hour. And people kept on using those expandable, contractable hours until–oh, let’s say the 14th century, when mechanical clocks ruined the fun.

And that, children, is the difference between clock time and solar time.  

Hipparchus did one other thing that we need to know about: he introduced longitude and its non-identical twin, latitude. Between them, they kept geography from being as slippery as hours.

 

Longitude

Even after an hour in May had been strong-armed into being the same length as an hour in January, time was still slippery. Everyone could agree that noon came in the middle of the day, but the middle of the day came at different moments in different places, and people set their clocks to local time.

Well, what else would they set it to? Since transportation was slow and phones didn’t exist, hardly anybody cared and I’m willing to bet not many people even noticed.

The people did care, though, were sailors, because you need two fixed points to calculate your longitude. Or to put that in plain English, to figure out where the hell you are, and I’d love to explain why and how but it’s way above my pay grade. 

Knowing where you are is less of a problem on land, since you have, ahem, landmarks, and fixed points stay politely fixed, but at sea they’re badly behaved, and the difficulties this posed crashed into public and political awareness in 1707, when four British ships wrecked off the Isles of Scilly and 1,400 lives were lost, all because, through no fault of their own, they hadn’t been able to calculate their position reliably. 

Now let’s circle back to Flamsteed and his imaginary line through Greenwich. It was a fixed point that ships could compare their location to. If I understand this correctly–and that’s not guaranteed–they could use solar time at their location and compare it to clock time at Greenwich. All they needed was a clock they could set to the time at Greenwich. 

Nothing to it, except that the clocks of the era couldn’t keep time on a ship that was going up, down, and sideways. 

At more or less this point, Parliament offered a £20,000 prize–that would be something like £2 million today; in other words, more than enough money to hold people’s attention–for the person who could invent a seaworthy clock, and in 1773 John Harrison, a joiner and watchmaker, did just that. All sailors had to do after that was set it to the time at Greenwich and as long as they remembered to keep it wound they had their second fixed point. 

 

Greenwich Mean Time

For some hundred years, ships used that imaginary line as their ultimate reference point. Think of it as Patient Zero of the world’s time zones.

As the railroads grew, treating time as a liquid began to became less and less workable on land, and Britain’s railroads introduced Railway Time, which was basically Greenwich Mean Time under another name. Localities were welcome to adapt it or not, but since the trains ran on Railway Time, I expect there’d have been a good bit of pressure to reset village and town clocks so people could catch them. 

In 1880, Britain adopted Greenwich Mean Time as the national time.

In1884, the international Global Meridian Conference accepted the imaginary line through Greenwich as the world’s prime meridian. By then, the US had already based its time zones on it and 72% of the world’s commerce used sea charts that relied on it. But the conference’s acceptance didn’t commit individual governments to doing anything they weren’t already doing, and most of them didn’t.

Then the Titanic met the iceberg–this was in 1912–and it turned out that a French ship had radioed a warning of the danger, but it based its time on the Greenwich meridian and its longitude on the Paris one. The article I found that says said it wasn’t “the overall cause of the disaster,” but it made a hell of a good argument for getting everyone to use the same system and it actually swung a few more countries behind it.

The original imaginary line is now marked in brass, making it a real line, even if it’s not exactly the line that’s in use anymore, In the name of accuracy, efficiency, and confusion, it’s been nudged sideways a few times. Never mind, it made its point.

These days, international standardized time is called Coordinated Universal Time. And Greenwich Mean Time? It’s been downgraded to a simple time zone.

Mary Prince & the ambiguity of slavery in England

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In 1831, a couple of years before the British Empire abolished slavery, a former slave named Mary Prince published The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. It’s credited with giving a good strong push to the abolitionist chariot and it’s one of Britain’s pivotal slave narratives, the first written by a woman, remembered with Ottobah Cugoano’s from 1787 and Olaudah Equiano’s from 1789, although Cugoano and Olaudah are, I think, better known.

Why am I weaseling around saying “I think” there? Because I’m not originally British. I’ve lived here for–hang on, I’ll need access to my toes to count this high–18 years, give or take a toe, but when you come to a country as an adult there’s some ground you just don’t make up. You bring other gifts. Immigrants are handy to have around, although you wouldn’t know that if your only contact with us comes from following the news. But some of the stuff that happens in your brain when you’re young doesn’t happen when you’re not. And I’m very much not. So I have the impression that Prince is less well known, but y’know, most of British history is new to me, so I’m not the best judge. 

To be fair, a lot of British history would be new to most of the British if they were to stumble over it, just as most of American history would be new to most Americans, and a lot of people are working overtime to make sure it stays that way.

Irrelevant photo: daffodils growing in a hedge. I’d love to run a picture of Mary Prince but there are none.

 

But back to Mary Prince

Prince was born into slavery in the Caribbean, sold away from her family when she was twelve, and shuffled between islands and slaveholders until well into her adulthood. She escaped once briefly, as a child, and as an adult married a free Black man Daniel James, who offered to buy her freedom but was refused. 

In 1828, about a year and a half after her marriage, the last in that collection of slaveholders, John Adams Wood, took Prince to England as a servant, and–

You remember that first paragraph where I said she was a former slave? That’s both true and not true. Her status in England was ambiguous. 

 

The bit about whether slavery was legal

To make sense of this, we have to go back to a 1772 court ruling involving  James Somerset, a slave who escaped in England just as he was about to be shipped overseas and sold. The court freed him and that ruling was generally taken as putting an end to slavery within England’s borders, although not in its empire. 

In fact, it didn’t end slavery. A year after the Somerset ruling, a newspaper reported that an escaped slave had been recaptured and committed suicide. Other newspapers ran ads for the sale of slaves. In 1788, two anti-slavery campaigners bought a slave in England to prove that slavery continued within the country’s borders. 

In fact, the judge in the Somerset case, was aware enough of slavery’s ambiguous status that his 1782 will freed his grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who’d been born into slavery but who he’d raised and educated and who lived in England with his family. What he had in fact ruled illegal in the Somerset case was taking a slave out of the country without his or her consent. That left England in a thoroughly weird position: none of its laws gave slavery any standing, but none of them made it illegal either. 

 

And back to Mary Prince again

Not long after Prince arrived in London, she walked out on the slaveholders who’d brought her, and I’d love to tell you how long “not long” was but nothing I’ve found makes it clear. The sources I’ve found do say her health was getting worse–she had arthritis–and a couple of the sources make it sound like she struggled to do the work that the Wood family demanded. One source says they threatened to throw her out on the street.

Whatever happened, she walked out and turned to the Moravian Mission, a Protestant church that she’d joined in Antigua, and at some point she found her way to the Anti-Slavery Society and met Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the London branch. She also found work and, the ambiguities of the law be damned, lived as a free woman.

What Prince wanted was to return to Antigua as a free woman, though, and she and Pringle tried, first through a lawyer and later through a minister, to negotiate with Wood for her freedom. Wood refused to free her on any terms. 

In 1829 she petitioned Parliament, asking them to free the enslaved people of the Caribbean, making her the first woman to petition Britain’s Parliament. And in what seems to be a separate petition, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned for her manumission. 

Sorry for the murkiness. I’m working from multiple articles here and frankly some of them are better on rhetoric than on detail. Anyway, if there were two petitions, both failed. If there was one– 

Yeah. You get it.

At some point she became unemployed and the Pringles hired her as a domestic servant, and it was while she lived with them that she suggested testifying, in book form, to the brutality and violence of slavery. 

“I have felt what a slave feels,” she wrote, “and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.”  

Prince could read and write, but she dictated the book to an English abolitionist, Susanna Strickland, who compiled it, and an abolitionist who’d lived in Antigua “helped on the Antigua section,” whatever that means. An additional slave narrative, by Louis Asa-Asa, was added to the book. He testified to his experience of being captured in Africa and brought ashore in St. Ives, Cornwall, when storms took the ship off course. 

Scholars argue about the extent to which Strickland and Pringle shaped the manuscript. By extension, I’d guess they’re arguing about how much the voice is Prince’s. No one these days seems to question the reality of her evidence, which is graphic and raw. 

 

The book and the lawsuits

At the time, though, the book was questioned, and it wasn’t long after the book was published that the lawsuits started. First Pringle, as the publisher, sued someone who claimed in print that the story was a fraud. Pringle won and was awarded £5 (more or less £485 in 2025 money, and from here on I’ll leave you to do the calculations) plus costs–a total of £160. 

Then Wood–the last in that line of slaveholders, remember–sued Pringle for defamation and Pringle countersued. The court decided that story was exaggerated and Wood was awarded £25 but not costs. All of which added to the book’s popularity. It went through three editions in its first year. 

 

And after that . . . 

. . . Prince drops out of the public record and we don’t get the end of the story. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British empire, except for, ahem, the parts controlled by the British East India Company, and that first ahem is followed by a second ahem, because for a period of years slavery was replaced with an apprenticeship system that was slavery under a different name.

Still, it’s possible that Prince returned to Antigua and her husband. It’s also possible that she didn’t. 

Bermuda counts her as a national hero and observes a holiday in her honor.

The early English novel: morality and–oooh–transgression

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It’s easy to think about the past as one long, undifferentiated stretch of sexual repression for women, during which rich men sexually harrassed the servants, kept mistresses, and picked up prostitutes, all while maintaining their status as upstanding members of the community, and single women who had the bad luck to become pregnant were tossed out into the snow to become prostitutes because what else was left for them and, after all, how else was the supply of prostitutes to be maintained?

That’s not completely off base, but it’s also not completely on base either. Nothing’s ever that simple.

 

Irrelevant photo, with an important update: I originally said I was reasonably sure this is a speedwell. I was wrong. It’s alkanet. A wildflower, though, growing in what it decided was the right place.

The Georgian Era

Let’s plunk ourselves down in the Georgian era (that’s, oh, say 1714 to 1830), because sexual attitudes were changing, especially among what one essay I read calls, without defining them, the upper classes. Think of those classes as the zone where the aristocracy met the monied upstarts. As attitudes shifted, upper-class men could be open about having mistresses, and upper-class married women could conduct affairs, although if one of them got pregnant decency demanded that she give up her child.

Decency’s a strange old bird and not prone to making logical demands.

Why the change? Several reasons: One, more of the population had moved to cities, where people couldn’t do as good a job of watching (and gossiping about) each other as they had in villages and small towns, so community sexual policing wasn’t as efficient as it had been. Two, the power of both extreme Protestantism and the Church of England were fading. People were sizing their morality to fit themselves rather than having it handed to them, all stitched and starched into predetermined dimensions. And three, printing–the technology that had made the Bible accessible to anyone who could read it–now made male-oriented pornography (or erotica if you’re happier thinking of it that way) available to anyone who could afford it (and, of course, read–this was before photos).

Increasing numbers of people could read.

That sound you hear is history’s cracked laughter.

Printing also made written advice about sex available, in the forms of both sex manuals and anti-masturbation tracts. You can date the culture’s obsessive fear of masturbation to this era.

Men were assumed to have sexual needs. Women were assumed to be, by nature, more virtuous. This edged out the earlier belief that women were naturally more lustful, which somehow coexisted with the belief that men just kind of naturally raped women if they wanted to and could.

Don’t try to make sense of it. Your brain will catch on fire.

So sexuality (at least for the upper class) was changing, but only within limits. Step outside the limits and society wouldn’t be forgiving–at least not if you’d shown the poor judgement to be of the female persuasion. But society had at least drawn a larger circle for people to stay within, and stepping across that new line was not only imaginable but thrilling. So writing about it could be lucrative.

 

Enter the novel

We could argue about who wrote the first English novel, but since you’re not actually present and I don’t much care, we won’t. Let the experts place their bets on Chaucer or Defoe or–oh, never mind, other people. We’ll just date it to the early eighteenth century (locking Chaucer out; sorry Geoff) and slam the door in case the experts get noisy. We–or to be more accurate, I–are or am more interested in using the novel as a way to drop into eighteenth century English society.

If you want to argue that we should be talking about Britain instead of England, please do. I have trouble finding the borders. They danced back and forth a bit over the centuries, and no matter where they were people flowed back and forth, books flowed back and forth, even kings and politics flowed back and forth, so how would I know where they were at just the badly defined moment when the novel came into existence?

But while you’re putting your arguments together, I’m going to take advantage of the silence and talk about the novel’s position in eighteenth-century England: Decent people looked down their upper-class noses at it.

What was wrong with it? Well, it appealed to–and was often written by–the middle class. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it was read for the most part by (oh, the shame of it) women. On top of which, it was commercial, and that’s another way of saying it was popular, which even today is understood to mean that it couldn’t possibly be any good.

Who understands popular that way? Why, the people who matter, of course, and I’m always in favor of annoying them.

So the novel was a way for silly people to waste their time, and that attitude still hangs in our cultural corners like a cobweb. As late as the 1980s, when a friend of mine taught at a girls’ public school (if you’re not British, understand that public means private; don’t try to make sense of it), the school librarian informed her that one didn’t read novels in the morning. They were (just barely, I’m guessing) acceptable in the afternoon, but the morning was for nonfiction–in other words, for books that improved one’s mind and character.

Ah, but the novel committed worse sins than frivolity and popularity and keeping bad company. Any number of women wrote novels–some even under their own names–and what’s worse they made a success of it.

Well, no wonder people looked down on the form. And by people, of course, I mean people who thought they were better than women and the middle class. In other words, we’re talking about a small but influential number of folks.

 

The middle class

Here we’d better stop and define the middle class, because it’s easy to find people who’ll tell you how important it’s emergence was, politically, culturally, or economically, but it’s hard to find a solid definition of what they’re talking about. Does being middle class depend on your income, your lifestyle (don’t get me started on what, if anything, lifestyle means), your aspirations, your education, your relationship to the means of production? Or since we’re talking about Britain (or possibly England), your accent or your ancestors?

The answer depends on who you ask, and anything that hard to define should be approached with caution and a supply of dog treats in case it bites. As (at least in part) an American, I’m acutely aware of this, since almost the entire U.S. population considers itself middle class. Dog treats may not be enough.

In Britain of the eighteenth century, the definition was either complicated or clarified, or possibly both, by the existence of a hereditary aristocracy and an impoverished urban and rural working class. Pretty much anyone you couldn’t slot into either of those two groups qualified as middle class.

The problem there is that such a varied collection of people got dumped into the middle class bucket that they didn’t have a whole lot in common. The bucket accumulated everyone from threadbare clerks to mega-industrialists, along with lawyers (great and small) and managers and engineers and the most marginal shopkeepers. But hazy as the definition is, large as the bucket had to be to hold them all, it’s the definition we have. Let’s work with it.

Whatever the middle class was, it grew rapidly in the seventeenth century, both in numbers and in (unevenly distributed) power. A number of people who weren’t part of the aristocracy were rude enough to get rich off the industrial revolution, and the aristocracy resented that. In the logic of the times, it made sense that the aristocracy looked down on them all. The only respectable way to make money was from land—preferably land that had been in your family since the Norman invasion—and the newly rich were making their money from (do forgive me if I use coarse language here) trade.

And then, to further complicate the picture, a group of people who didn’t get rich got solvent (in either absolute or relative terms), and they had the nerve to proliferate.

But despise the middle class as they would, the aristocracy was stuck with them–especially with the brash industrialists who had too much money to dismiss entirely. So much money, in fact, that the aristocracy shamefacedly married some of their kids to industrialists’ kids.

So parts of the middle class lived very comfortably, thanks, while other parts clung as hard as they could to the lower edges of respectability. And many of them, on all parts of the spectrum, wanted a bit of culture, some because it brightened their lives and their brains and others because culture was the kind of thing that people with money were supposed to buy and at least pretend to appreciate.

Put that together with the growing number of people who could read and had a bit of leisure and what happened? The publishing industry invented itself. Booksellers popped up–mostly men but a few women–and they often doubled as publishers.

But this growing middle class audience wasn’t impressed with the books the aristocracy liked. They wanted books that spoke to their experience of the world, and when the novel came along, that’s what it spoke to, so the novel became an important part of the book trade. Some of those novels were what we think of today as the classics, but they were joined by any number of now-forgotten (probably forgettable and often anonymous) novels that writers cranked out to pick up on the trend of the moment.

If you want a modern parallel, think about science fiction or mysteries. They’re popular, so a lot of pretty awful ones get published on the theory that someone’ll buy them–and someone often does. If you want to look down on either genre, you’ll find lots of ways to prove they’re schlock. Some, though, are competent entertainment and others are not only well written but look deeply into our convoluted world. Both forms have opened up ways to consider the world that earlier genres didn’t make possible.

The same thing happened when writers who weren’t straight, white, middle-to-upper class, Christian, and male broke into print. They spoke to new groups of readers, and they brought new life, energy, understanding, and excitement to publishing–along with new readers.

And a predictable number of people despised them for it and blew trumpets announcing the end of literature, or possibly Western civilization and culture in general.

That’s what it was like when the novel brought middle-class voices into the public conversation. A whole new world became visible. The books may look like the same-old same-old now, but in their time they were a quiet revolution.

By the mid-eighteenth century, circulating libraries (as opposed to the private libraries belonging to either institutions or the wealthy) had come along, and by the end of the century you could find them even in small towns. Books were expensive, but you could pay a library subscription and borrow one after another after another. And again, novels made up a healthy portion of the libraries’ stock.

The public library hadn’t been dreamed of yet. If a poor person could read and was hungry for books, they’d be well advised to steal them. And to be careful about how they did it, because the punishments for even small thefts were horrifying.

 

What’s all this got to do with morality?

Dragging along in the novel’s wake, with their heads dipping below the waves as they went, came the moralists, sputtering disapproval every time they surfaced. The novel’s reader, they reminded anyone who’d listen, was typically a woman. A young woman. An impressionable young woman (sorry—this level of hyperventilated disapproval demands italics; be grateful I haven’t broken into the exclamation points), who could easily be led astray or overstimulated.

No, I’m not sure what they meant by overstimulated either. I suspect it had something to do with sex, which impressionable young women weren’t supposed to know about or be interested in, although they were prone to falling in love inconveniently, but that, of course, was sentimental, not sexual because see the beginning of the sentence, Q.E.D. And if that seems like circular reasoning, it lost none of its power just because it made no sense. It kept a fair number people trapped in its eddy for many a circuit.

Did I mention that the above applied only to decent impressionable young women? If we’re talking about fallen women and women of the lower classes, a whole different set of truisms would have to be taken out of mothballs.

Middle-class women read novels in part because the more respectable they–that’s the women, not the novels–were, the less likely they were to be able to take any action in the world. They couldn’t work. They couldn’t run a business or own anything in their own names. They couldn’t vote. They had no legal claim even on their children. If their husbands had enough money, they couldn’t clean or cook or get muddy in the garden, because lesser mortals would do that for them. Their education had suited them better for decorative roles than for useful ones.

If they read, it was because they could. Sitting around looking decorative can get old, and a book can open a larger world. And it doesn’t leave dirt under your fingernails, so no one has to know what you’ve been up to.

I started out by saying that sexual conventions were changing, and they were, but they were contradictory and still powerful, especially for marriageable young women, whose sexuality had to be controlled. A good marriage depended on the bride being a virgin, or at least passing for one.

Conventions and morals, though, are never a perfect fit for the real world. Young women faced twin perils: men and themselves. Even the best-protected woman might be raped, and forget the trauma that caused, it would ruin her on the marriage market unless it could be covered up. As for herself, even the most carefully brought up young woman might fall in love with an inconvenient man.

This was the novel’s home turf: convention and transgression. The novel needed both. Without rigid conventions, it couldn’t have transgression. Without transgression, it couldn’t have thrills.

 

Tune in next week . . .

. . . for the next exciting installment, because this is already too long. I’ll post the second half of it, which at long last makes use of a dismal novel I had to read in high school.  What could be more enticing?

A quick history of Britain’s gun laws 

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Britain has some of the world’s toughest gun regulations, and not only do the vast majority of people approve of that, 76% think they should be stricter. That’s from a sober poll taken in 2021, but Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports pretty much the same thing. 

How did I conduct my survey? Effortlessly. I’m an American transplant, which leads British friends and acquaintances to ask periodically, “What is it with Americans and guns anyway? Are you people crazy?”

I’m paraphrasing heavily. Most people are too polite to ask if we’re crazy, but if you listen you can hear the question pulsing away, just below the surface. Basically, they’re both baffled and horrified by the US approach.

I should probably tell them that a majority of Americans (56%) also want stricter gun laws but haven’t managed to dominate the national conversation yet. That’s probably because they haven’t poured as much tightly focused money into political campaigns as the pro-gun lobby. 

Am I being too cynical? In the age-old tradition of answering a question with a question, Is it possible to be too cynical these days?

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal

 

What are Britain’s gun laws?

For a long time, they were somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. 

Way back when William and Mary crossed the channel in small boats, the price they paid to become Britain’s joint monarchs was accepting the 1689 Bill of Rights, which acknowledged that Parliament was the source of their power. It also guaranteed the right to bear arms–unless of course you were Catholic, who were the boogeymen of the moment. You were also excluded if you were some other (and barely imaginable) form of non-Protestant.

The relevant section says, “The subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.” 

That leaves some wiggle room: “suitable to their conditions”; “as allowed by law.” (The US second amendment is ambiguous as well. Maybe it’s something about weaponry.) So when in 1870 a new law required a license to carry a gun outside your home, it wasn’t a violation of W and M’s agreement, because this was a law. As far as I can tell from the wording, if all you wanted to do with your gun was set it on the kitchen table and gloat over it, you could skip the license.

In 1903, a new law required a license for any gun with a barrel shorter than 9 inches and banned ownership by anyone who was “drunken or insane.” 

You could have a lot of fun poking holes in that. Could I get a license if I was sober all week but on the weekend I routinely got so drunk I fell in the horse trough? If I had a title and expensive clothes, would I still be considered a drunk (or a nut)?

Never mind. That was the law they passed. Nobody asks me to consult. It’s a mystery.

But let’s go back a couple of years, to 1901, as Historic UK does in its post on gun laws. Handguns were being widely advertised to cyclists, with no mention of licenses, although the ;need for them may have been so obvious to everyone involved that they didn’t need mentioning. Or enforcement may have been patchy.

Bikes were the hot new thing–the AI of the day–and everyone who had any claim to with-it-ness was rushing around on one. And maybe the cyclists felt vulnerable, out there in the countryside on their own, or maybe gun manufacturers saw an opportunity and manufactured a bit of fear to boost sales. To read the ads, every cyclist needed a handgun. They were advertised, variously, as the cyclist’s friend and the traveler’s friend. One ad said, “Fear no tramp.”

Before World War I (it started in 1914; you’re welcome), Britain had a quarter of a million licensed firearms and no way to count the unlicensed ones. Then the war turned Britain, along with a good part of the rest of the world, on its ear. One of its smaller side effects was that when it ended soldiers came home with pistols. 

How’d they manage that? The army didn’t want them back? I consulted Lord Google on the subject, but I seem to have asked the wrong questions, because he went into a sulk and refused to tell me anything even vaguely relevant. But bring guns home they did, in large enough numbers that the government started losing sleep over it, because this was a turbulent time and  the government had a lot of things to lose sleep over. For one thing, the Russian Revolution not only meant it had to share a planet with a revolutionary socialist government, it also kicked off a wave of revolutions in Europe that must’ve made it look, for a while, as if Britain would end up sharing the planet with multiple socialist governments. 

Life was turbulent on British soil as well. Not all that long before the war, in 1911, a shootout in London involved two Latvian anarchists, a combination of the Metropolitan and City police departments, the Scots Guards, and Winston Churchill. The anarchists might not have been anarchists, though, but expropriators, carrying out robberies to support the Bolshevik movement. Either way, they were well armed and the police were armed only with some antique weapons they pulled together. Until the Scots Guards showed up, they were outgunned. 

In “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain,” Jon Lawrence argues that postwar Britain lived with a fear of violence from returned soldiers, the general public, and/or a government “brutalized” by the war. (The quotation marks are his. I’ll hand them back now that we’re ready to move on.) 

The press was full of violent crime reports. When isn’t it, and when don’t we at least partially believe it’s a balanced picture of the world we live in? Still, the stories are part of the picture: fear was the air people breathed.

The soldiers returning from the war are also part of the picture: they came home to unemployment and its cousin, low pay. A wave of strikes swept the country, including a police strike and in 1919 a strike by soldiers–or if you want to put that another way, a mutiny. Some of that was violent and some wasn’t. All of it kept the government up at night.

In many cases, unemployment led to whites turning their anger on Blacks and immigrants, blaming them for taking their jobs. Familiar story, isn’t it? (Black, in this context, includes people from India. I only mention that to remind us all how fluid the categories that seem so fixed in our minds really are.) 

Longstanding Black British communities were joined by a good number of sailors from both the military and the merchant fleets who were stranded in Britain when they were fired and their jobs filled by white sailors. Their hostels were a particular target for violence. Black and immigrant communities often defended themselves, leading to some full-on battles–and more lost governmental sleep.

For a fuller story on that, go to Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer. We’ll have to move on, because most of that is, again, a side issue to this topic. The point is that that was a turbulent period with a nervous government. In 1920, a new law allowed the police to deny a firearms permit to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm”–a loose category if there ever was one. 

 

And after that?

In 1937–a different era but the midst of the Great Depression, so still a turbulent time–most fully automatic weapons were banned, then in 1967 shotguns had to be licensed. Applicants had to be “of good character, . . . show good reason for possessing a firearm, and the weapons had to be stored securely.” 

In 1987, a man killed 16 people and himself, using two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, and the government came under pressure to tighten the laws. In response, semi-automatic and pump-action rifles were banned, along with anything that fired explosive ammunition and a few other categories of weapons. Shotguns remained legal but had to be registered and stored securely. 

After a 1996 shooting of 16 schoolkids and their teacher, in which the shooter used four legally owned pistols, a new law banned handguns above .22 caliber, and in 1997 .22s were outlawed.

In 2006, in response to a series of shootings, the  manufacture, import, or sale of realistic imitation guns was banned, although it was still legal to own one. The logic there is that they look realistic enough to commit crimes with, so this isn’t exactly gun control; it’s more like toy control. The maximum sentence for carrying an imitation gun was doubled, and it became a crime to fire an air weapon outside. The minimum age for buying or owning an air weapon went from 17 to 18, and air weapons could now be sold only face to face. 

In 2014, police were required to refuse or revoke a firearms license if the applicant or license holder had a record of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or mental illness, which implies that they’re expected to actually check.

 

And the result?

I know a few people in Britain who own rifles and shotguns that they hunt with. When they applied for licenses, they had to show that they had a secure place to store them, that they had a legitimate reason for owning a firearm, and that they were “of sound mind.” They had to pass police checks and inspections of their health, property, and criminal records. If any of them have moaned about it, I haven’t heard it. 

As a way of looking at the impact, I thought I could find a nice, simple set of statistics comparing homicide rates in the US and UK, but nothing’s ever simple. If you use two different sites, one for each country, you end up comparing apples and motor scooters, but I did eventually find one that compares many countries’ murder rate per million people. In 2009 in the UK, it was 11.68; in the US, it was 44.45–four times higher. We’ll skip the intentional homicides, which aren’t  the same as murders, along with the accidental deaths and the suicides. They might all be worth thinking about if we’re talking about the impact of gun ownership on death rates, but they’ll make my life more difficult and I don’t know how you feel about that but it won’t make me happy, so basically, screw it.

Another site I found compares mass shootings between 1998 and 2019. The UK’s had one. Twelve people died in it and one was injured.  The US has had 101, making it the world’s leader in mass shootings. In the deadliest, sixty people died and more than eight hundred were injured. In the second deadliest, forty-nine died and fifty-eight were injured. 

So is the US, with its permissive gun laws, a freer country than the UK? That’ll depend on how you define freedom, and that’s above my pay grade since I do this for free. Some people measure freedom by a country’s voting system, some by people’s sense of security and safety, and some by the right to carry a gun. I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who feels oppressed by the gun laws or measures their freedom by their access to weaponry. I’m sure someone out there does, but they’re a minority, and a small one. 

What about the argument that access to weapons makes the little guy a more powerful political force? My observation is that the little guy struggles to be heard in both countries, but that guns and threats of violence in the US are allowing a minority–a sizable one but still a minority–to increase its power at the expense of their fellow citizens. That’s not a good fit for my definition of freedom.

Inventing the post office: A bit of British history

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Britain’s post office was established in 1660, under Charles II. Or in 1630, under Charles I. Or in 1711, under Queen Anne. Or in 1516, under Henry VIII.

All those dates have at least a semi-rational claim. One of the things I love about history is how clear-cut everything is. 

Let’s start with Henry. What he set up was a national network that would serve the court, although one website dates it to 1512, not 1516, and Cardinal Woolsey gets the credit instead of Henry, but we’re at least all talking the same language here, so it’s close enough for our purposes. 

The system involved relays of horses and messengers, and this was revolutionary stuff–the internet of its day. Up until then, if you wanted to send a letter, you had to send your own damn courier or find someone going in the right direction who’d carry your letter or package through the airport scanner for you. (“Did you pack your own luggage, sir?” “Of course not. I have minions who do that for me.” “Of course, sir. No problem, but you still can’t take your sword on the plane.”)

Or maybe Henry’s system wasn’t so new. According to WikiWhatsia, the first postal service was in Egypt, in 2400 BCE, and Persia had one in 550 BCE. Ancient Rome, ancient China, the Mongol Empire, and assorted other political entities can also stake early claims. Whether anyone in England knew about them at the time is up for grabs.

For us, it doesn’t matter. The system was new to England and people who were important enough to get close found ways to slip their own letters in with the court documents. 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia escaping a neighbor’s back yard in early February.

 

The service goes public

In 1630, the ill-fated Charles I (lost his head in the civil war) opened the service to the public. Or someone did it for him. Monarchs always get the credit for other people’s work, possibly because the initiative was theirs but possibly because they didn’t get in the other people’s way.

Never mind. Here’s how it worked: First we shift into the present tense, because it’s so much more exciting and because you want to drop Mom a note saying you’ll be home next Monday and what’s the point of doing that if Monday’s already in the past? You write your letter and take it somewhere–the write-ups aren’t clear on this, but it wasn’t your local post office and it wasn’t a mailbox, since neither exist yet. Probably to the nearest post, which is not a piece of wood driven into the ground but a place that’s part of the (ahem) postal network. The mail goes from one post to another, and the postmaster at each one pulls out the mail–sorry, the post–for his area and sends the rest on. 

We’re probably correct here in saying “his,” not “his or hers,” “theirs,” or some other awkward variation, although I can’t swear to that. Let’s let it stand this time.

England and Scotland have six main post roads, and letters travel along them, so if you and Mom aren’t that far apart but are in different postal areas that aren’t joined by a post road, your letter will first go to a post before it heads more or less backward to reach her. But it’s not all inefficiency, because the service works night and day, literally. 

Once your letter reaches the post in Mom’s area, it’s handed to a postboy, who’ll deliver it, either on horse or on foot, and if Mom wants it she’ll have to hand over some money, otherwise forget it: no letter. Of course, by the time it reaches her you might already be home, so she can save herself the expense.

How much does she save? It depends on weight and distance. When the system started, the charge was 2d for 80 miles for a single sheet of paper. 

A d? For no reason a rational person will ever remember, that stands for a penny, so 2 pence, or a day’s wage for a skilled tradesman. In other words, not cheap.

How fast was the system? (You’ll notice we’re in the past tense again, having forgotten all about you and your mother. Hope you had a nice visits.) A letter sent from Edinburgh to London might get a reply in something like two months. 

The system had competition from private carriers–hundreds of them, although I haven’t found any information on their systems, costs, or speed.

 

The Civil War and the Restoration

You’d think the English Civil War (it started in In 1642) might’ve distracted people, but staying connected mattered at least as much as it ever did, and the Commonwealth’s postal service covered England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1657, the General Post-Office was granted a monopoly, getting rid of those pesky competitors, and a fixed rate was established for letters. No one seems to list this as one of the post office’s many founding dates, but it strikes me as having a reasonable claim. 

That carries us to Charles II and another founding date. 

In this telling, Charles–or at least his government–gets credit for not just founding the General Post Office (no hyphen this time–think how much time and ink that saved) but for rolling it out across the country, although it sounds like the Commonwealth had already done that.  

How was this different from the hyphenated post office set up by the Commonwealth? Haven’t a clue. It might’ve been a major improvement and it might just be a case of the Commonwealth’s work not being taken as seriously as the monarchy’s. You’re on your own. 

It was under Charles II that postmarks became standard. They showed the date a letter was mailed, pushing the carriers not to stash a bundle at the pub for a week or two when things got busy.

That brings us to postboys, the final link in the delivery chain and a problematic one, which they’d continue to be until late into the 18th century. They were badly paid and some of them dealt with that creatively, by robbing their post bags. Give them an A for initiative. 

However risky it was, it wasn’t uncommon for people to send cash. How else were you going to get money from Point A to Point B? Cheques weren’t used in England until 1640, the first checkbook wasn’t issued until 1830, and checks didn’t circulate widely until the late 1800s. 

But postboys weren’t the only people who thought of looking inside the post bags: highwaymen regularly attacked carriers and stole the mail.  

Even if no money was stolen and the mail wasn’t stashed at the pub for a week or two, the service was slowed down by roads that could be pot-holed, ankle-deep in mud, and in general a mess. And we’re talking about a 24-hour service, remember. In the dark, it wouldn’t have been easy to tell the road from the countryside around it. 

 

Following the money

In 1711, under Queen Anne, a bill created a single post office of the United Kingdom and set postage rates and delivery times, which is why some sources give that as the founding date. The Post Office (what the hell, let’s use caps here*) was now a branch of the Treasury and its goal was to raise money for the state.

Where had the money gone before that? During the Restoration, it was used to pay pensions to court favorites. After the Revolution (I think this means the Glorious Revolution, so 1688-1689) it paid pensions to peers and statesmen. By 1699, a third of the Post Office’s income went to pay pensions. Compare that to what the postboys and highwaymen stole and they’ll come across as minor-league players.

The bill took that nice little pot of money and put it in the state’s hands so it could do something useful with it, like fund a war. 

What war? I find two: Queen Anne’s War, where England and France fought for control of North America, and the War of the Spanish Succession, where assorted countries fought over, um, the Spanish succession. (You’d never have guessed that without my help, would you?) If I’ve missed any, feel free to pencil them in yourself. The point is, think what an improvement this was.

 

I’m bored. Could we have a scandal?

Oh, always. 

From the Restoration on, it was accepted practice for MPs and Lords to send and receive letters for free. That’s called franking, which comes from Latin francus, or free, and I had to look it up too.

By the 18th century, MPs (and I assume Lords) were sending other people’s mail for free under their signed covers–it was a nice little favor they could do for friends and supporters and general hangers-on–and by 1754  that was costing the post office £23,600 in lost revenue, which in 2023 money would be something north of £4,000,000. 

How did the post office deal with that? Why, it set up a system to look for abuse of the system, of course, and that brought in a new way to abuse the system. It could almost make a person cynical, couldn’t it? In 1735, opposition MPs complained that their mail was being opened in the post office on behalf of the ministry. 

What ministry? Damned if I know. Apparently it’s too obvious to need saying, but this was the government snooping on the opposition under cover of being sure they didn’t abuse their franking privileges.

This led to the revelation that the inspector of franks, Edward Cave, had been gathering material for his own publication, The Gentleman’s Magazine, from the newsletters and gazettes that passed through his hands on their way to (or possibly from) MPs. And although I’ve lost the link by now, one source mentioned money being stolen from the mail in the House of Commons post office. By the person in charge of it. In the name of being sure no one was misusing their franking privileges.

To deal with the problem, the Commons decried abuse of the franking system. We can all guess how effective that was. Then in 1764, an act dealing with franking set up “harsh penalties for those trying to defraud the Post Office, including transportation to the colonies.”

I can’t find a record of a single MP or Lord being transported under the act. I’m sure you’re as surprised as I am.

 

Want a bit of corruption that doesn’t qualify as a scandal?

Throughout the 18th century, the post office had two postmasters at a time. These were patronage positions: lucrative places to drop people you owed a favor to and who you knew had no interest in doing any real work. Most of the postmasters were peers or the sons of aristocrats at the end of their careers. One, Thomas Villiers, Baron Hyde of Hindon (later earl of Clarendon), called it “a very good bed for old courtiers to rest in,” 

Why isn’t that a scandal? It was business as usual. It’s only a scandal if enough people are shocked.

 

* My capitalization of post office is wildly inconsistent, but you know what? I’ve worked as a copyeditor and I’m  retired now. That means I officially don’t have to give a fuck. Whee.

The last invasion of Britain

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When was Britain last invaded? 

Sorry, no, it wasn’t in 1066. It was in 1797, France landed troops in Wales, and it played out more as farce than as pivotal historical moment. 

This was toward the end of the French Revolutionary wars, when Britain and France were at war, so invading Britain wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do. The French were backing a hoped-for Irish rising against the English, and invading Britain would make a nice diversion. 

Irrelevant photo: Primroses on a frosty morning.

 

What didn’t happen and what did

The original plan was to land troops in Cornwall, Bristol, Newcastle and–most importantly–Ireland, the last landing planned with the help of the Irish revolutionary leader Theobald Wolfe Tone, who’d convinced revolutionary France that with its help Ireland could free itself of British domination. Before it got far, though, the project was already looking shaky. The raid on Cornwall was canceled, the raid on Newcastle was foiled by the weather, and the ships carrying 15,000 troops to Ireland were also dispersed by the weather and limped back to Brest. 

That left the expedition to Bristol–four ships carrying 1,400 soldiers under the command of William Tate. Why it wasn’t called off is anyone’s guess. 

Tate’s orders were “to bring as much chaos and confusion to the heart of Britain as was possible; to recommend and facilitate a rising of the British poor against the government; but whenever and wherever possible, to wage war against the castle, not the cottage.” 

Disciplined troops might have managed that distinction between castle and cottage, but Tate didn’t have disciplined troops. Over half were newly released prisoners and the rest (including Tate) didn’t have a whole lot of military experience. 

That made no difference to Bristol, because they never got there. The weather was against them and the ships landed instead near the mighty metropolis of Fishguard, Wales. I can’t find population figures for 1797, but the 2021 census reports a population of 3,421, up 2 from the 2011 census. It’s a fair guess that the place had 6 or 8 fewer people in 1797.

The ships actually landed outside Fishguard, not in the metropolis itself, dropping off Tate and his soldiers and sailing back to France and out of our story. 

Tate got down to business and sent out patrols and they set to work looting people’s houses. It’s a well known way of getting cottage-dwellers to support your cause. And since a Portuguese ship had run aground not long before, both houses and cottages were well stocked with brandy. Or in a different telling, wine. 

Okay, brandy turns out to be distilled wine. Lord Google just whispered that in my ear. The things I learn writing this blog.

Before long the soldiers were well stocked with brandy themselves and (I’m guessing here) roaring drunk. One is said to have shot a clock.

Take that, you sumbitch. You won’t try that again, will you?

I’ll guess again and say that had something to do with the brandy.

According to legend, they also cooked some geese in butter and got food poisoning. Now, goose cooked in butter may not be kosher but there’s no reason the soldiers would have known about that or cared if they had, and also no reason that eating goose cooked that way would give you food poisoning. We’re probably missing a piece of the puzzle but I’ve checked under the couch and it’s not there, so let’s go with what we’ve got and not complain. For either one reason or both, a good number of them incapacitated themselves.

One source questions whether the troops were even armed, raising the possibility that they counted on capturing weapons.

 

Meanwhile in the other corner…

…was mighty Fishguard. What did it have by way of defense? The Fencibles, for one thing. They sound like something that could be sold illegally in a back alley but weren’t. They were a militia that could be called up for local service. Their members didn’t have much in the way of training and lived at home, so mobilizing them was slow and probably chaotic, but eventually they gathered at the local fort. Then they abandoned the local fort, marching off in the direction of greater safety, away from the French. On the way, they met the better trained Pembrokeshire Yeomanry Cavalry–professional soldiers–who gathered them up, turned them around, and organized everyone into a night raid on the French position.

At this point, I’m thinking, Hey, night attack. Guerrilla warfare. That’s novel stuff for the era. Shows you what I know. They stumbled along a country lane in the dark with the volume on their fifes and drums turned up to max, alerting (no surprise here) the French, who (as far as I can figure out) took up ambush positions, at which point the British thought better of that night attack idea and marched back the way they came.

 

Does anyone come out of the tale looking competent?

Yes: the local people, who gathered with scythes and pitchforks and rounded up French scouts and stragglers, killing at least one. The local cobbler, Jemima Nicholas, captured a dozen or so while armed with nothing more than a pitchfork.

Did she really capture a dozen soldiers, however drunk, food-poisoned, and badly trained, using only a pitchfork? Who knows. We’re dealing with legend here. She captured some. Presumably she had a pitchfork. She wasn’t a woman to mess with and became a local hero.

Because so much of what happened comes to us by way of legend, though, I’m having trouble putting together a coherent account, so I’ll step back a bit and tell the story from a distance: Local people and British soldiers (back, presumably, from their earlier retreat) lined the crest of the hill, looking to the French like a couple of thousand soldiers–an impression helped along by the local women’s custom of wearing red dresses and tall black hats, which were a fair match for British army uniforms, at least if you didn’t get too close. In fact, the French outnumbered the British but didn’t know it. 

Among the French, discipline was evaporating. Or had evaporated earlier, when all that the brandy signed up. Or it had never been present to evaporate. Tate sent a messenger to Fishguard with a note:

“The circumstances under which the body of French troops under my command were landed at this place renders it unnecessary to attempt any military operations, as they would only lead to bloodshed and pillage. The officers of the whole corps therefore intimated their desire of entering into a negotiation upon principles of humanity for a surrender. If you are influenced by similar considerations, you may signify the same to the bearer. In the meantime, hostilities shall cease.

“Health and respect,

“Tate, Chef de Brigade”

The British bluffed, demanding an unconditional surrender, and got it. The French surrendered and were imprisoned, which seems like an unkind response to someone who signs their note “health and respect.”

 

And then?

Then some of the French soldiers broke out, stole a yacht belonging to Lord Cawdor–the officer they’d surrendered to–and like the ships that had carried them to Wales, sail out of our story, no doubt savoring the occasional sweetness of life’s little ironies.

The building where the surrender was signed became a pub–but not immediately.

After that the story gets serious. Even here at Notes, that sometimes happens.

In 1798, a rebellion did indeed break out in Ireland, but by then the French would only commit enough forces to make minor raids along the Irish coast. Tone landed in Donegal with 3,000 troops and was captured. He was sentenced to be hanged but killed himself before the British got a chance.

Britain meets Napoleon and they fight a few wars

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The Napoleonic Wars dragged on for some 15 years, and although you can draw a neat line between them and the wars with revolutionary France that came before them, it’s not an important line for our purposes. All told, the wars went on for some 23 years.  

Which is a long damn time for the people who had to fight them, for the people at home, and for the person who’s trying to winnow it all down to one or two thousand words. What do you say we focus on the wars’ impact on Britain? Even there we can only slide along the surface. 

What were the wars about? In part they were about France overthrowing a king, along with the aristocracy that used to flutter around him, setting up a republic in its place. That set the ruling classes in the rest of Europe on edge.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: An African violet

But the wars were also the European powers fighting over who was going to be king of the mountain. 

King of the mountain?That’s a kids’ game, or at least it is in the US. It’s simple: Kid A pushes the usually unsuspecting Kid B off of something and pretends it’s a game instead of just Kid A being a jerk. The only rule is that Kid A has to yell, “I’m the king of the mountain.”

Kid B usually retaliates, but Kid A’s expecting it and is harder to push off. Kid A also has a habit of being bigger than Kid B.

Yeah, we knew how to have good, innocent fun when I was young.

The mountain, in the case of both the Napoleonic Wars and the wars with revolutionary France, wasn’t just Europe, though. It included the seas, everybody’s colonies, and international trade. Which is a bigger mountain than we ever fought for when I was a kid. 

 

Eeek! Revolution!

Before we go on, though, we need to nod a little more deeply to the French Revolution, because it scared the pants off the British ruling class. Remember how I said It had overthrown a king and his fluttering aristocrats? It also killed him. Mind you, England had done the same thing some time before, but it had sewn a new king securely onto its throne and was playing nice again, leaving revolutionary France out there on its own among the European powers. 

As Roy Strong puts it in The Story of Britain, “Everywhere the French army went the old order of things crumbled.” 

Scary stuff if your income and possibly existence depends on the old order. So the British upper classes looked at Britain’s restless and impoverished industrial and farm workers, as well as at its skilled artisans who had no political representation, and thought, You know, we could have a problem here.

And in fact they did. All three of those groups were demanding change. And once things start to change, you can’t control the direction they go in, can you?

The obvious solution wasn’t to pay them better or expand the right to vote but to keep them in line more effectively. An assortment of repressive laws were passed: Habeas Corpus was suspended in 1794. (If you’re in the mood for a translation, Lord Google has obligingly led me to a dictionary.) The next year, they passed the scary-sounding Treasonous Practices and Seditious Meetings Acts and a few years after that the more gently named but equally extreme Combinations Acts. Associations of workers were now illegal. Criticizing the king was treason. 

The acts weren’t enforced often, but they didn’t have to be: They drove the radical movement underground, and there we’ll leave it. It’ll dig their way out later. It’s not up to us.

 

The military

It’s bad manners to write about war and not talk about blood, gore, strategy, alliances, and fighting, but my manners are pretty awful and we’re going to skip the battles, the shifting alliances, and the peace treaties. They’d only make you dizzy and I’ve already gotten dizzy for you. Why should we both suffer? By way of a summary: Britain’s interests were centered on keeping its power at sea, protecting its colonies (not as in protecting them from harm but as in protecting them from some other power snatching them away), and protecting trade. 

The fighting was both land- and sea-based, and it spread across Europe and reached into Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In The Story of Britain, Roy Strong says the nature of warfare changed. Armies became citizen armies, drawing in a huge chunk of the fighting-age male population.

That Britain’s power was mostly at sea didn’t keep it from expanding its own army and fighting on land as well. In the past, its army had been made up of professionals and mercenaries. Now it drew in men from every class, every religion, every region. In 1789, Britain had 40,000 soldiers. In 1814, it had 250,000.

If you add the volunteers training to repel an invasion, you’ll get 500,000 people carrying weapons. (That may or may  not include the navy. Toss a coin.) Strong says it was the first time the population of the British Isles had been “forged together in martial unity on such a scale.” Basically, that’s a lot of people swinging their support behind the war. 

In the last paragraph, I casually mentioned the possibility of a French invasion. Did you spot that? If you take a quick run through British history, you can hit Control C on “Britain was worried about a [             ] invasion,” then in some random number of places hit Control V and fill in the blank with the appropriate country. Think of the time you’ll save in case of an actual invasion. You’ll be an entire sentence ahead of everyone else.

I can’t swear that the fear of an invasion has always been justified, but it often was, and in 1803 Napoleon had gathered his Army of England in Calais–that’s on the French side of the English Channel–where they dipped their booted toes in the sea and chanted, “I’m the king of the mountain.”

Did any country ever do more to provoke a war?

No, you can’t believe everything I say here. Salt water does terrible things to leather, so that’s a pretty good hint that I’m messing around. But a French army genuinely was sitting on the coast in Calais, eyeing Britain and justifying Britain’s long-standing fears. 

Britain responded to its fears by building fortifications along the coasts, organizing militias, and spreading rumors: The French were digging a tunnel under the Channel. The French were coming on a fleet of rafts powered by windmills. The French were coming in balloons.

No, that I didn’t make any of that up. And France really did consider the balloon plan. These were the early days of hot-air ballooning. 

The invasions never happened. They were sidelined by other, more important battles, by a peace treaty, by the weather, by a test fleet of barges sinking.

Still, even invasions that don’t happen cost money, and these–at least the ones after 1803–were funded by the Louisiana Purchase. That was when the U.S. bought French land and made it part of the U.S. It was funded with a loan from a British bank, Baring Brothers, which basically means that the British were funding the invasion of Britain.

But hey, that’s capitalism for you. There was money to be made.

I had to go to WikiWhatsia for that, but it’s too good to pass up. It’s decently footnoted and seems to be legit.

The invasion finally foundered on sharp rock of British control of the Channel.

 

The money

But it’s not only invasions that cost money, so do all the other bits and pieces involved in waging war–food, weapons, ships, those defensive towers along the coast, and anything else you can think of. Britain raised its taxes. Food prices rose drastically. Unemployment went up, which the opposite of what I’d expect during a war, but this one put a crimp in trade and also happened at a time when labor-saving machinery was being introduced on a large scale. 

You can multiply all that by some suitable number after Napoleon closed European ports to British trade. Bankruptcies grew, and so did the price of grain. So did industrial unrest and food riots. 

Some people joined the army out of sheer desperation. They were cold, they were hungry, and if they joined upnthey could at least get themselves fed.

What happened to the wives and families left behind when married men enlisted? According the British Library, they earned what they could, they turned to the parish for the little help it gave, or they starved. The Duke of Wellington weighed in against recruiting married men because it would “leave their families to starve.”

He lost that battle.

The later years of the Napoleonic Wars were marked by strikes, riots, and attacks on all that lovely labor-saving machinery that put people out of work. In Yorkshire and Lancashire, the militia was called in not to fight Napoleon but to put down dissent.

When the war ended, the taxes that had been imposed to pay for the war didn’t go down and returning soldiers flooded the labor market. All that fed into the Peterloo Massacre and assorted efforts to raise pay and win the vote for ordinary people. 

 

The settlement

You probably know how the movie ends: France lost. Think of Napoleon’s troops slogging through the Russian snows, defeated by General Winter. Think of Waterloo. Hell, think of rabbits if you like. It’s your mind. Napoleon was exiled. He slipped out of exile and raised an army. He lost again. He was exiled again and eventually he died, as we all do sooner or later. Turn the page.

What happened to everyone else? The peace did a careful job of maintaining the balance of power in Europe–it lasted for forty years–and land grabs outside of Europe were solidified. Britain got Singapore, Malaya, the Cape of Good Hope, Malta, Guiana, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Lucia. Its hold on India was, for the time being, unchallengeable. 

The cult of Britain’s king and queen expanded beyond court circles and became a focus of popular patriotism, with the king cast as the father of the nation (so what if he went mad every so often?) and the queen as the model of British womanhood. And the aristocracy, having entered into the Napoleonic Wars a hard-drinking, hard-gambling, dissolute bunch, emerged pinched and puritanical. 

Some day I’d love to understand how those changes sweep through a culture or a class.

According to Strong, it was a matter of having seen what happened to the aristocracy in France and recasting itself as deserving of respect–and all the more so because its right to rule continued to be under attack at home. 

In 1802, Debrett’s Peerage sorted through the aristocracy and presented it as a more visibly coherent group than it had been. And the growth of public schools–those weren’t schools for the likes of you and me but for the upperest of the upper crust–brought the sons of the aristocracy together, unifying their attitudes and experience, forming lifelong networks that reinforced their awareness of themselves as a class that was meant to rule.

Yeah, I know. It makes me want to throw things too.

How to get to work on time in the 19th century

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Question: In an age before alarm clocks (and then in the one before affordable alarm clocks), how did anyone get to work on time? 

Answer, at least in parts of Britain: Starting in the nineteenth century, they got woken up by a knocker-upper. 

Digression: In American, if you’re knocked up, you’re pregnant. (This does not apply to the male of the species.) In British, though, you can knock up some scrambled eggs without anyone giving birth to little baby scrambled eggs. Knocking something up means you’re building it “very quickly, using whatever materials are available.” In the case of our example, we’ll hope that’s eggs, not cement blocks. 

Being knocked up can also–in British–mean being tired. 

But more to the point, you can knock someone up by pounding on their door when they’re asleep. 

Or on their window.

For the sake of clarity, reproduction takes place in the same way in both countries, it’s only the language that changes. Let’s say you’re talking about waking someone up. By knocking. Take two words, knock and up. Now combine them and shake and you’ll get one of those things we call a phrase–a small number of words that, over and over again, spot each other across a crowded room, run into each other’s arms, and form a unit of meaning.

The American meaning? It dates back at least to 1830 and I can’t begin to explain why it means what it does, but all the same it does.

Where were we?

People were going to work. It was the beginning of the nineteenth century, bang-slam in the midst of the industrial revolution. Industry was (and is) a regimented beast. It depended on everyone being in their place at the same time. Keeping your job meant getting up at the right time.

 

A rare relevant photo. This is a knocker-upper from London. She was known for using a peashooter to wake people up.

Enter the knocker-upper

Actually, knocker-uppers didn’t enter. They walked down a street and tapped on windows, or possibly doors, and they kept going. Because they got paid by the head, and if they were going to make a living they had to get a move on. Getting your butt out of bed was up to you. 

Most of them carried a long pole so they could reach an upstairs window. One, Mary Smith, was known for using a pea shooter. Others carried soft hammers or (so I’ve read) rattles. I’m skeptical about the rattles, because they wouldn’t want to wake the neighbors. Not just because they’d complain, but because they’d be waking them up for free. 

We’ll talk about payment in a minute.

As an aside, you might’ve noticed that “upstairs window” is a little vague. In Britain the floor up one flight of stairs is the first floor. In the U.S., it’s the second floor. The two countries put the numbers in the same order, but they start counting in different places.

Knocker-uppers tended to be old men or women. Does that mean the women were old or just that they were women? I’m not sure. The source I stole the information from lists them that way, either because they didn’t notice that the words can be understood two different ways or because they were doing what I am and dodging the issue. I’m just going to duck behind this nice potted begonia over here and pretend it has nothing to do with me. 

Just think of the women as being a kind of upstairs window.

Don’t think about it too hard.

Occasionally cops worked as knocker-uppers while they were on their rounds, earning a bit of extra income since they were up anyway. Robert Paul, who found the body of Jack the Ripper’s first victim, saw a cop and told him about the dead woman but the cop was knocking people up and couldn’t be bothered.

“I saw [a policeman] in Church-row,” Paul said at the inquest, “just at the top of Buck’s-row, who was going round calling people up. And I told him what I had seen, and I asked him to come, but he did not say whether he should come or not. He continued calling the people up, which I thought was a great shame, after I had told him the woman was dead.”

Knocker-uppers were particularly common in northern mill towns and in London, where dock workers’ shifts changed with the tides, although they also worked in smaller cities and towns. The trade went into decline in the 1940s and 1950s, and the last knocker-upper is thought to have retired in 1973.

I’m not sure why anyone was still paying a knocker-upper in 1972. Maybe out of loyalty. Or because they liked the personal touch.

 

Who paid? 

Customers paid by the week. A knocker-upper named Mrs. Waters (from somewhere in the north of England) told a Canadian newspaper in  1878, “All who were knocked up before four o’clock paid … eighteen pence a week; those who had to be awakened . . . after four gave . . . a shilling a week; whilst those who had to be aroused from five to six o’clock paid from sixpence to threepence weekly, according to time and distance.” She said she “never earned less than thirty shillings a week; mostly thirty five; and . . . as high as forty shillings a week.” 

There were twelve pence in a shilling. I’ll leave you to figure out who got a bargain while I hide behind that begonia again.

How much of a person’s pay would that eat? These were low-wage workers, and in 1880 a male laborer’s average pay was £30 a year; a woman’s was £15. A pound was made up of 20 shillings, and a family’s budget would have had next to no give in it. Still, the knocker-upper’s price had to be within a working person’s reach. 

Mrs. Waters also talked about her customers tapping back to let her know they’d heard her–some cheerily and some complaining and swearing the whole time. 

To keep the times and places straight, knockers-up chalked times on sidewalks and buildings, and some may have hung up signs.

Who woke up the knocker-upper? Themselves, for the most part. They were night owls, sleeping during the day. Think of them as people who worked the graveyard shift. 

How did they know what time it was? Nothing I’ve found addresses this, but cities and towns had clocks–they were an important civic show-off item–and even if you couldn’t look at your wrist and know if you were two minutes ahead of schedule, you’d get a nice loud bong every fifteen minutes, and a count on the hour. When I was a kid–we’re going back to the 1950s here–stores still had clocks in their front windows and long before I had a watch I could walk down the street from clock to clock and know the time. 

Britain’s Corn Laws: that bit of history you slept through turns out to be fascinating

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Britain’s Corn Laws are a bit of long-repealed legislation whose history is wrapped around the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, Ireland’s potato famine, and the struggle for workers’ rights and universal suffrage. So if (as I assume) you slept through them in some half-forgotten history class, it’s time to catch up.

They not only matter, they’re interesting.

Irrelevant photo: an azalea blossom

 

The Napoleonic Wars and the politics of wheat

Let’s start with the Napoleonic Wars. That’s 1803 to 1815, and I had to look them up too. I don’t actually know anything. I just ask Lord Google questions and arrange the information he gives me, usually in odd patterns and after filtering the sites he suggests, because he does try to slip me some losers. 

I also have a growing stash of books on British history. Some are more useful than others.

Where were we?

The Napoleonic Wars. Before going nose to nose with revolutionary France, Britain was in the habit of importing a lot of its wheat, which was its most important grain. It was also in the habit of using the word corn for any old kind of grain. It still is. What Britain calls corn, the US calls grain. And what the US calls corn, Britain calls maize.

How we understand each other at all is beyond me.

There’d been corn laws since as early as the twelfth century, but they didn’t become a political focus until the nineteenth, and that was because during the Napoleonic Wars Britain couldn’t import wheat from Europe, so British farmers patriotically planted more wheat and filled the gap as best they could. Then came the end of the war and British farming patriotically demanded that its price had to be protected from interloping foreign corn that spoke funny languages and, worse yet, cost less. 

Now that’s what I call patriotism.

In 1812, corn cost 126s. 6d. a quarter. Three years later, it cost 65s. 7d. Forget the complicated math it takes to understand that: What you need to know is that the price dropped. Drastically. 

Okay, okay, we’ll break the numbers down. Don’t blame me if we can’t get them back together: 

A quarter, an s. and a d. are long-dead measurements that everyone took seriously and knew how to work with at the time. An s. is a shilling and a d. is a penny, because shilling starts with S and penny doesn’t start with d.

You can see how much sense this is going to make, right?

There were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound, although for reasons I can’t begin to understand no one seems to have shifted from shillings to pounds here when they got to 21, they just kept adding up the shillings. It’s a mystery that only people who’ve lived with the system can explain–maybe–and if we stick around a while it’s possible that one of them will. Friends, I invite you to the comments box.

A quarter is eight bushels. Its full name is quarter-hundredweight and it’s a quarter of a hundredweight. Hang onto that, because it’s the only bit that’ll make sense. A hundredweight doesn’t weigh a hundred of anything: It’s 112 pounds, or 8 stone. In the US, a hundredweight used to mean 100 pounds, but then people stopped using the term. It was too confusing, having a hundredweight weigh a hundred of something.

Try not to think about it too long or your brain will turn to jelly. Which in the US is something you spread on toast but in Britain is a fruit-flavored dessert made with gelatine–that stuff Americans call by the brand name jello, minus the capital letter. We stole the word from the manufacturers.

And how much wheat is 8 bushels? Enough to cover your living room floor nicely, thanks. 

I know. Sometimes it seems like we’ll never get to the point, but here we are.

When wheat prices dropped, British landowners patriotically pushed Parliament to protect their prices (the alliteration’s accidental but fun), and I doubt it took much pushing because the country’s political structure was weighted heavily in favor of landowners. And that last sentence is why the Corn Laws are more than just some ancient bit of legislative history but an entry point to a long battle over the right to vote.

 

Money and power

At the opening of the nineteenth century, women couldn’t vote, the poor couldn’t vote, and most of the not-so-poor couldn’t vote. The richest industrialists could vote but that wasn’t enough to give them the political power that would’ve made such a fetching match for their money, and they weren’t happy about that. Because what good is one measly vote when you need Parliament to pass the laws that protect your interests and your business? For that, you want some serious clout. 

Parliament made no pretense of representing the country as a whole. The lords of many a constituency were able to appoint its Member of Parliament, who the few people allowed to vote would duly elect. In other constituencies, candidates openly bought votes. Big industrial cities often didn’t have their own Members of Parliament, although what were called rotten boroughs, with next to no population, did. To (atypically) get to the point, the House of Commons was safely under the control of landowners, as was the House of Lords.  

In 1815, to protect the price of wheat, Parliament passed the Corn Law, slapping a hefty import duty on foreign wheat unless the price of domestically grown wheat rose to 80s. per quarter. The duty was steep enough that wheat wasn’t worth importing. This protected not just the farmers producing the wheat but also the landlords who owned the land the farmers farmed. If the price of wheat dropped, farm rents would have to drop. And since landowners held the power–

You can see where I’m going with this, right?

Rioting broke out in London while the bill was being debated and soldiers surrounded Parliament to protect it. What with the war and several years of bad harvests, people had lived with high grain prices long enough. This was a time, remember, when you didn’t take it for granted that you could keep yourself and your family fed. Some huge percentage of the population lived on the edge. 

The bill passed anyway–who thought it wouldn’t?–and that focused a lot of people’s attention on getting the vote. In other words, it fed the demand for political reform.

The 1816 harvest was bad, pushing prices up, and that was followed by food riots and strikes for higher pay. 

Which brings us to our next point: If the Corn Laws were a disaster for people who were just scraping by, but they also pissed off industrialists–those rich people whose political power wasn’t a good match for their money. When the price of grain went up, their workers pushed for higher wages so they could afford to eat. People can be so picky about that. For industrialists, that meant either industrial unrest or less profit. 

They didn’t like either choice.

 

Who gets the profit?

From the 1820s through the 1840s, Conservative and Liberal governments tinkered with the Corn Laws but didn’t repeal them, and landowners argued that manufacturers opposed them only so they could drive down workers’ wages and increase their own profits. This was despicable, since the landowners preferred to have the profits in their own pockets. In an improbable convergence of opinion, the Chartist Movement, which was socialist, agreed, as did Karl Marx. 

From what I can see, there was some truth in the argument. A certain amount of profit was kicking around the country and the question was whose pocket was it going to end up in?

Of course, it could go into workers’ pockets through a combination of lower bread prices and stable or higher wages, but, yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.  

Marx seems (waffle word there; I’m working from second-hand sources instead of reading all 74 volumes of Capital plus his 6,739 assorted pamphlets, letters, and whatever’s left) to have gone a step further and seen the battle as one where the industrialists needed the workers’ help against the landowners, but as far as I can tell many of the struggles against the Corn Laws and for the vote came from the ground up, not the top down. Abolition of the Corn Laws was one of the demands at St. Peters Field, site of the Peterloo massacre, where people also demanded universal suffrage.

By which they meant, of course, universal suffrage for men. But that’s a different tale. You can find it here. 

The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in 1838 and advocated peacefully for repeal, and in 1844 the Duke of Richmond countered by founding the Central Agricultural Protection Society (called CAPS) to campaign in favor, which makes it sound like he felt that the pressure against the laws was serious. 

Then 1845 combined a bad harvest in Britain with the potato blight in Ireland, which was very much under British control. If Britain was facing scarcity–and it was–Ireland was facing starvation.

The combination convinced the prime minister, Robert Peel, that the Corn Laws had to end, and for a while it looked like Parliament would rescind them, but after some political jockeying, complete with prime ministers resigning, the laws were still in place. CAPS campaigned fiercely against abolishing them, in some places (according to the New World Encyclopedia) it practically supplanted the Conservative party.

One of the arguments offered in the parliamentary debate was that repeal would weaken landowners socially and politically, destroying the “territorial constitution” of Britain by empowering commercial interests.

In 1846, the Corn Laws were finally repealed, but the potato famine had moved well beyond the reach of half measures. It’s a separate story, and a bitter one. Estimates put the number of Irish people who died of hunger and disease at a million, all in the name of letting the problem work itself out through natural means. 

 

The effects of repeal

Repeal did keep the price of corn down in Britain. Between 1850 and 1870, it averaged 52 s. Britain became increasingly dependent on imported corn and British agriculture went into a depression notable enough to have its own name, complete with capital letters: the Great Depression of British Agriculture. Agricultural laborers left the land and migrated to the cities, feeding the Industrial Revolution.

You can chalk all that up to the repeal of the Corn Laws if you like, or you can chalk it up to railroads and steamships making North American grain easier to import. Britain and Belgium were the only corn-growing countries in Europe not put to a tariff on the stuff.

The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 gradually, under pressure and with much gnashing of teeth, expanded the vote. Repeal of the Corn Laws hadn’t destroyed Britain’s territorial constitution–whatever that is or was–but power was shifting.

The Corn Laws are often presented as a battle between free trade and restrictive tariffs, and that’s how my high school history textbook so forgettably explained them, after which it dropped the subject and my entire class sleepily murmured, “Did something just happen there??”

It wasn’t on the test, so the answer was no, nothing happened.

Free trade is, legitimately, a thread you can follow through the debates and battles over the Corn Laws, and it’ll carry you effectively enough into the next couple of centuries, but unless you’re a policy obsessive it may be the least interesting way to understand the story. I’m a fan of the way political power realigned itself to more nearly match economic power, and how people who had neither kind of power battered away at the system until they forced it to make a bit of space for them.