Rebel Britannia

26th January 1886:

All sorts of events can bring down a government: scandals, wars, splits, mishaps, economic catastrophe, natural disaster. Younger readers may find this hard to believe, but there was even a time in this country when, if literally every member of a serving Cabinet had been revealed to be actively corrupt, the government would have fallen.

Anyway, here's one to add to the list of events that can force the resignation of a Conservative prime minister: a row about allotments.

From their first invention, right to the present day, allotments have always been intensely political and controversial. A very simplified version of the allotment's history goes like this: for centuries, before the industrial revolution, our ancestors had access to small pieces of land on which they could raise sufficient vegetables and livestock to feed their families. After the enclosures of land, and with changes to the pattern of employment meaning that more people worked and lived in cramped cities, this was no longer the case. Now, workers could only eat what they could afford to buy, and hunger was a widespread problem.

Some Liberals and Radicals saw allotments and smallholdings as a solution to this: people should be able to rent, cheaply and securely, a strip of ground on which to plant their spuds and graze their goat. For Liberals, particularly, this also had an important moral dimension - a working man tending his allotment in the evenings was less likely to become ensnared by the consolations of alcohol, sexual promiscuity, or (worst of all) socialism and trade unionism.

Prominent amongst the land reform campaigners was Jesse Collings (1831-1920), a Chamberlainite Liberal of humble background, who served as Mayor of Birmingham and later as MP for Ipswich. He was associated with the slogan "Three acres and a cow," the idea being that every labouring man should be entitled to cultivate enough land to keep him from destitution. Collings's enemies taunted him with the nickname "Three Acres and a Cow Collings." Along with allotments, he was an advocate of free education, public libraries, and public art galleries paid for from the profits of municipally-owned energy companies.

In parliament, Collings won some important victories for the allotment movement, but it was his amendment to the Queen's Speech on 26th January 1886 that secured his odd place in history. The previous year, Lord Salisbury had become prime minister of a minority Conservative administration. His government's Queen's Speech (in which plans for the immediate future are set before Parliament) disappointed old Three Acres and a Cow Collings, because they included no mention of acres or cows.

Collings moved an amendment during the debate on the speech in which he invited the House to "regret that no measures were announced for the present relief of those suffering under economic pressures, especially for affording facilities to the agricultural labourers and others in the rural districts to obtain allotments and small holdings on equitable terms as to rent and security of tenure."

When a government has a proper majority in the House, such opposition amendments are for show only, and are voted down. But on this occasion, amid great drama, a sufficient number of anti-Salisbury MPs joined Collings in the division lobby and the amendment was passed by 329 votes to 250. A government which can't get its Queen's Speech through the Commons unamended must, according to convention, offer its resignation to the monarch - and so Lord Salisbury was out.

Not for long, though - he returned to office later the same year, as the Liberals split over Home Rule for Ireland. (A skilled phrase-turner, Salisbury famously defined his view of conservatism by saying that "Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.") But in 1887, electoral expediency forced his government to pass an Allotments Act, based on Collings's ideas, under which local authorities had a statutory duty to provide allotments in response to local demand. That duty remains in law today, and over the last century or so many politicians have learned to their cost that it's never wise to mess with the spud-growers.

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Sources:

Of cabbages and kings by Caroline Foley (Frances Lincoln, 2014)

A little history of British gardening by Jenny Uglow (Chatto & Windus, 2004)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (at www.oxforddnb.com)