‘Butchers, bakers, tailors, shoemakers, bricklayers, carpenters, thatchers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, labourers, ploughmen, ploughwrights, reapers, mowers, dairy hands, shearers, shepherds, paper makers, hurdle makers, sawyers, ostlers, grooms, craters, wood men, horse breakers, gardeners, road makers, brick makers, tanners, braziers, whitesmiths, servants, malts tears, pond makers, iron founders, plasterers, skaters, porters, jockeys, hedgers, surveyors, fencers, millers, farriers, boat and barge builders, hop planters, drovers, well sinkers, barbers, chimney sweeps, carpet weavers:
The occupations of the women and men
Transported after the 1830 Captain Swing Riots,
On the Eleanor, bound for New South Wales,
Wessex people from Wiltshire,
Hampshire and Dorset…
It reads like the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel…
David Kent and Norma Townsend in their book, The Convicts of the Eleanor Protest in Rural England New Lives in Australia (The Merlin Press Pluto Press Australia), present a compelling account of the ingenuousness of these Wessex folk:
Villagers acting out their customary form of protest:
Rough music, flags, hatbands, a communal march,
Collecting money, and bread, cheese and ale
At farm, church or inn,
Skimmingtons, the blowing of horns,
Ritual and biblical chants:
‘Bread or Blood’,
The ceremony of custom and symbolism,
Following the ritual path of the year:
Plough Monday, 12th Night, Shrove Tuesday, Guy Fawkes Night,
And ‘in Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire the disturbances reached a crescendo on the same day – St Clement’s Day, 23 November … One of the important doleing days before Christmas, a day when it was customary for rural labourers to solicit gifts of food and money. Liminality and commensality were an integral part of all doleing customs … St Clement was the patron saint of blacksmiths and 23 November was traditionally celebrated by a shortening of the working day, the collection of donations during a perambulation, plenty of drinking, and sometimes a supper in the evening.’
Little wonder then that blacksmiths were to the fore in the firelight and in the breaking of machines:
‘Come all you Vulcans stout and strong,
Unto St Clem we do belong…
Come all you Vulcans strong and stout,
Unto St Clem I pray turn out.’
(Clem acts as a musical motif for Joe and Pip’s relationship in Great Expectations, of course, and Magwitch was transported to Australia.)
‘When the behaviour of the Swing protestors is placed in the context of custom and popular culture, their innocent self-confidence and ingenuousness is more readily understood.’
So when I walk and bus and cycle the country lanes in the villages near my Swindon hometown, villages loved by my family, and one – Wroughton – an ancestral family village, where my forebears would have known the local Swing participants, I feel on nodding terms with them all, especially on misty mornings in late November.
(I have the family bible and hymn book on my table as I write these words, together with a memorial card for a distant 19th century ancestor, killed when still a boy, in a threshing machine tragic accident.)
Wroughton was obviously an interesting community, as Hobsbawm and Rude illustrated in their Captain Swing book, when describing a fire at a farm some four years after the Swing incendiarism: ‘most of the villagers did indeed help to put our an incendiary fire in 1834; ” a few, however, assembled at a short distance smoking their pipes and amusing themselves with the utmost indifference, but manifesting their recklessness and malignity by cheers and other tokens when any part of the building fell in.” Moreover, “at a recent fire some of the labourers actually lit their pipes by the burning corn stacks and deliberately smoked them in the farm-yard.”’
But back to St Clem, November 23 1830 and its aftermath in my old Wiltshire village haunts: Wootton Rivers, Aldbourne, Wanborough, Liddington, Wroughton, Hannington, Latton, Netheravon, Alton Barnes…
All these saw a series of ‘Agricultural machines destroyed, food, drink and money levied’ and less frequently ‘wage increase demanded’ and ‘improved Poor Law allowances demanded’ and at Alton Barnes, ‘affray, forced entry’, but all in the spirit of custom and symbolism…
But in the context of agitation for parliamentary reform, a ruling class fear of revolution, and a gimlet-eyed search for any semblance of political thinking on the part of the agricultural labourers, what might have seemed as custom and tradition to the rioters, was perceived quite differently in London and at the Home Office.
Why, it was asked, did the Wanborough rioters march with a tricolor and with a kerchief dipped in blood? Why did the labourers in Hannington declare that there was no law for the night of their action?
And so, as ‘In Wiltshire protest did not gain momentum gradually; it exploded … Within twenty-four hours of the first collective action at All Cannings … scarcely any part remained untouched … In the north of the county near Swindon, many farmers from disturbed parishes like Wanborough, Liddington and Wroughton were sworn in as special constables, and in discussions with the magistrates it was agreed that higher wages would only be negotiated once the protest was suppressed.’
And, of course, magistrates had their own customs, symbolism, ceremony and liminal and commensal traditions to uphold:
“We do not come here to inquire into grievances, we come here to decide law.”
Nationally, over 10% of the nigh on 2,000 persons in the dock were condemned to death. After the theatre of commutation, 19 were executed, 505 sentenced to transportation, and 644 imprisoned.
The authors argue that this represented an extreme ruling class response, not merely disproportionate, in the cant of our day, but rather a ruling class reign of terror behind the be-wigged pantomimic display of the etiquette of the court:
“If the learned Counsel who has painted my conduct to you was present at that place and wore a smock frock instead of a gown, and a straw hat instead of a wig, he would now be standing in this dock instead of being seated where he is.”
In Wiltshire, 339 cases were heard; 200 found guilty, 42 gaoled, 52 sentenced to death, 1 executed, 152 transported…
“Toomer. What do you have to say to the gentlemen of the jury, in your defence?”
Toomer shuffles uneasily; he doesn’t know what to say.
“Nothin’ zur. I don’ know any of ‘em.”
Jury look confused. Then collectively fathom Toomer’s rustic simplicity. They collectively laugh at his innocence.
Toomer is found guilty and sentenced to transportation.
Scenes of lamentation. Heartfelt cries of anguish. Empty hearths. Cold beds. The workhouse. Gaol. Portsmouth. The hulks. The Eleanor. The voyage. Port Jackson. Assignment. Ticket of leave?
EPT Thompson:
‘ For 65 years one woman slept wakefully at nights and moved slowly by day … listening for footsteps … In 1831 her husband and brother had been transported … She hoped through each hour; and she died in her chair turned towards the East; because she had heard that it was out of the sunrise that travellers must come.’
She clutches two letters in her clasped hands in her black gowned lap.
Sir,
This is to inform you that if you don pull down your damned thrashing mashines then we will be forced to do it for ye.
And please rise the married men’s wages and the single men too.
Signed,
On behalf of the whole,
Swing.
My dearest Eliza,
Tis now foive yer since we wrote that accursed letter. As you no, we only writ it for the whole. I didn’t accompanye the village on the march. Nor did Esau. But here we are still.
We hope to gain our tickets of leave, God willin, in two yer. My skills as a sawyer and Esau’s as a carpenter should hold us in good sted to work our passage back to ee.
One day soon, my dear, we shall walk from out of the sun to greet thee in your faverit chair.
Your lovin William,
And thy brother Esau.
