[INTRO — SHORTER VERSION HERE here]
[INTRO. Buckmaster meets the two Gravel Diggers — marvellously dramatic.]
"I WAS sitting quietly one evening with my family after a hard day's teaching, which is the hardest of all work, when two gravel diggers from the common wished to see me.
"They came to tell me that they were born in the parish and had been gravel diggers for years, and their fathers before them. They had no gardens or allotments; but had planted a few rows of potatoes on an exhausted part of the pit, and just as they appeared above ground a gentleman who called himself the lessee, and who had recently added six acres of the common to his own private grounds, came with two men and levelled their crop of potatoes, and told them if they did it again he should have them up. They had come to ask my advice.
Buckmaster was outraged:
"My first impulse was to go with these men and break down his fence; I felt so angry that, had I been single, I was prepared to risk the consequences, but it was of no use sacrificing a wife and family in what I then believed to be the assertion of a right. If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with laurels; if I had failed, as I probably should, the public would have called me a fool, and would have allowed me to go to prison and my wife and family to the union [the workhouse].
But who was John Buckmaster? Why did the two gravel diggers go to him to help? Can he really be the "man who saved Wandsworth Common"?
[Estimate when the fateful visit of the gravel diggers took place — probably mid-1850s since he talks of his wife and children — he married Emily Goodliffe in August 1853, and had four sons and a daughter between 1854 and 1868 (Charles Alexander (1854-1949), George Alfred (1859-1937), Stanley Owen (1861-1934), Martin Arnold (1863-1960), Phoebe Emily (1868-1918). All born Battersea.]
When I first started researching John Buckmaster, I drew many blanks.
[I knew there was a Buckmaster Road, off Battersea Rise, and that it had once been called "Middleton Road" — I had seen the names on old maps and found that it was renamed in 1937 (but I still haven't been able to find out exactly why — did it commemorate John or his son Stanley — or both?).]
For one thing — and this is something that really must be rectified — there is no standalone Wikipedia page for him (September 2020). For a long while the nearest I got was a brief reference in his son's entry.
[Stanley Owen Buckmaster, who was born in 1861 and brought up near Wandsworth Common, was made a hereditary peer in 1933. Viscount Buckmaster had been Solicitor-General in Asquith's Liberal Government in 1913, and Lord Chancellor (the highest ranked of Britain's Great Officers of State and the head of the judiciary) in 1915.]
It read: "His father began life as an agricultural labourer, and rose to teach chemistry at the Imperial College of Science and Technology."
There was also an only slightly longer reference, again in the entry for Viscount Buckmaster, in the Dictionary of National Biography:
"John Buckmaster was a remarkable man who, beginning life as an agricultural labourer, became successively a joiner, a well-known platform speaker in the cause of free trade, and, under the patronage of the Prince Consort whom he had advised and helped in the matter of the Great Exhibition of 1851, an inspector in the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington, which has since developed into the Imperial College of Science and Technology.
[Sources: http://www.thepeerage.com/e671.htm (accessed 10.5.2019). Confirm that this comes from his son's DNB entry. ]
But at least (and at last) I was getting somewhere.
Then by chance I discovered he had written an autobiography, with the enigmatic title A Village Politician, under the pseudonym of "John Buckley" (a name which itself put me off the scent for a while).
I found and bought an old copy online.
It was a riveting read, particularly since there was a whole chapter — the last in the book — devoted to Wandsworth Common. I was hooked, as I think you would be too.
[Buckley, J., A Village Politician: The Life-Story of John Buckley (London: T. Fisher and Unwin, 1897). A more recent edition, with an introduction by John Burnett, was published by Caliban Books in 1982. This acknowledges the author as J.C. Buckmaster.]
[My summary: a unique first-person account of rural life in the 1830s, radical politics and religious sects in the 1840s, the first generation of teachers' training institutions, a devastating [exposure] of an orphanage in Tooting ("Druitt's Farm", where more than 300 children died in a cholera outbreak) and Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight for boys awaiting transportation to Australia, and the epic battle to save Wandsworth Common. And much much more.]
As with all autobiographies, Buckmaster's both reveals and conceals. Like his near-contemporary Thomas Hardy (who lived on the other side of the Common to Buckmaster at the end of the 1870s), nearly every name and place is either left vague, or given a pseudonym. There are few [if any?] dates. The book ends with the Wandsworth Common Act in 1871 (though neither the place nor the date is given).
[It is an ongoing project to break the code he uses for placenames — some, like "Oxenbridge" for Uxbridge, "Saltbury" for Salisbury, and "Fogmore" for Bognor, are easy, but others are obscure. Dates are even harder to determine, though I had some luck through searches of newspapers.
[Some placenames are translated in the Caliban edition, and I recall there is a longer list in Mary Tasker's MA dissertation.]
I have now added a page — "Buckmaster's pseudonyms identified — with a considerable number of names and places identified.
In a footnote, John Burnett writes that he had access to a copy annotated by Frederick G. Gurney, then in the possession of Dr. D.J.D. Perrins. I wonder where this copy is now? Try to trace:
[Frederick G. Gurney (1878-1947), from Eggington near Leighton Buzzard, was an archaeologist, local historian and antiquarian. His extensive research notes are held by the Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society.
[Also the Bedfordshire archives?]]
Whole decades of Buckmaster's life and most of his activities are completely ignored — and that means most of his professional life as a teacher, as an architect of the new state schooling system, as a creator of a nation-wide cookery schools, as a public speaker and writer, and as a father and husband.
The omissions are very frustrating. Yet — incredibly — he does tell us an immense amount about the struggle for Wandsworth Common in the 1850s and 1860s — a battle that culminated in the passing of the Wandsworth Common Act in July 1871.
John Buckmaster had lived in the area since the mid-1840s. He moved here to study at England's first teachers' training college, St John's.
[Notice the connection with the St John (or Bolingbroke) family of Battersea. Having joined up with its neighbour across the Thames, St Mark's College Chelsea, St John's relocated to Devon as "Plymouth Marjon University".]
After he qualified and found work, Buckmaster married and moved to a small "jerry-built" house in New Rd, off St John's Hill.
[JCB plans to marry, and finds a house off St John's Hill — then an area rather different from now.]
"Before we got married we had to find a house. Our income was small, and we had to be modest in our rent. After going about within a mile radius of my work, we settled on a compo. thing called a villa. I hated it, but my future wife thought it would do very nicely, as all future wives do.
"I was only reconciled to it because it was in a muddy lane, surrounded by cabbage gardens and orchards, and on a spring evening I could sit in a little garden, not much larger than the house, and scent the hawthorn and lilac and hear the cuckoo.
"The house was a wretched, jerry-built affair, and gave us no end of trouble and expense. [p281]"
Poor Buckmaster can't have heard the cuckoo for very long because New Road became an entrance to Clapham Junction station, when it opened in 1863. Yet he would carry on living and working there for another [30 or so years (until, WHEN? in his late 70s, he retired to Teddington (Ashleigh, Kingston Rd) ). [CHECK DATES — He's in Battersea in 1891 and Teddington in 1891]
Buckmaster's new house was "...in a muddy lane, surrounded by cabbage gardens and orchards, and on a spring evening I could sit in a little garden, not much larger than the house, and scent the hawthorn and lilac and hear the cuckoo." It stood on the right, near the far end.
With no room to run around, his five children played on Wandsworth Common — which at that time stretched conveniently close to their house. But not for long. Many of Buckmaster's battlegrounds involve the enclosure of the Common and the stoppage of paths within a few hundred yards of his home.
"very recently the Brighton Railway Company has enclosed with a well-tarred fence 6ft. high several acres of the very best part of the common, without, so far as I can learn, any authority, and without any apparent necessity.
"The place where my children used to play for hours is now a sort of potato garden, and as I have very little space attached to my house the children must shortly either tramp the dusty roads or be made uncomfortable all day in a small playroom."
[Letter to The Times, 3 September 1863]
Children deprived of the freedom to play is a theme that recurs frequently in his political campaigning, as in his own life.
The evasive John Charles Buckmaster (1823?-1908) — even his year of birth is uncertain — had a dreadful childhood, even by the standards of nineteenth-century England. His mother had died suddenly, probably from smallpox, when he was just two. His father, a farmer, took to drink and sent his son off to "a firm, religious, God-fearing" uncle who regularly beat him with a heavy dog-whip or a knotted rope and made him into a "domestic drudge".
"I saw other boys playing after school hours — why was I not to play? In summer-time nearly all the boys went to a little mill-stream to bathe. Why was I not allowed to bathe? I looked forward to this day like a prisoner for his liberty, but when it came it brought no pleasure.
"When I took off my shirt and saw, what I had often seen before, that my body, from the shoulders downwards, was mottled with bruises, from dark purple to a greenish yellow in colour, I felt so ashamed for the other boys to see it, that I made an excuse that the water was too cold, and I put on my shirt and returned home, to be flogged for not saying where I had been.
But the physical abuse was exceeded by uncle's mental cruelty.
One day, having been tied to a bedpost as a punishment but managing to wriggle free, John drank from a small bottle he found in a cupboard. His uncle flogged him, in the usual manner, but added that the liquid was a poison, and he would certainly be dead by the morning. He made him confess his sins, "which God would now punish", and called in the local coffin-maker:
"The coffin man was instructed to measure me for a coffin. He took a rule from his side-pocket, and as he ran it over my body I felt a cold shudder as he called out, "3 ft. 4 in. by 1ft 2 in. across the shoulders, 9 inches deep; three-quarter elm. Ready tomorrow morning."
After a night of terror in which he contemplated an eternity of pain in "the fire which is never quenched", he woke "with my lips glued together, my body hot and feverish, and my eyes bloodshot."
"But there was another stab. My uncle and aunt laughed at my sufferings, and said, jeeringly, that the bottle contained nothing but dill water, and they said it was poison to frighten me and make me a good boy.
"The cruelties inflicted on defenceless, motherless children have never been properly written", he notes.
At the age of ten Buckmaster was sent to labour in the fields, doing every kind of arduous farm work for long hours and in all weathers for virtually no wages — alongside adult workers who were themselves paid very little by the major landowners of the area. "Scantily clothed in winter and always insufficiently fed, the neighbours, who had some idea of my misfortunes, used to pity me, and often gave me food."Yet almost everyone in the area was poorly clothed, and families often went hungry. Their houses, though undoubtedly picturesque on the outside, were deplorable within. "I began to see that I had exchanged one kind of wretchedness for the prospect of another."
He notes by way of explanation that "the small farms once belonged to the ancestors of the families that occupied them, but they were gradually absorbed to increase the estate of a neighbouring proprietor." Landless agricultural workers were practically defenceless against exploitation.
[I could say more about his work in the fields, which is brilliantly described, but here's just a taste.]
"I was chiefly occupied in the winter in pulling turnips, carrying fodder, often before daybreak, folding the sheep, and cutting brushwood. My hands were so swollen and chilled that I was glad of any opportunity of thrusting them between the collar and shoulder of a horse for a little warmth. My shoes, heavily tipped, carried away the heat from my body, and I suffered during the winter from wet and cold.
That is why farm labourers are often doubled up with rheumatism and unfit for work at a time when other person comfortably off are in the prime of manhood."
"Ploughing heavy clay land, and preparing it for the autumn-sown corn, was anything but agreeable. I have been at plough in winter with five and six horses one after the other, when lumps of clay used to stick to my feet, making it difficult draw one leg after the other, so that our movements were very slow... What a joy it was to get off this stiff clay and walk on to the green sward!"
Is it too fanciful to see in these experiences the source of his tireless campaigns for universal education, for the promotion of science and art, for agricultural improvement, for decent housing, and for the freedom of all people — particularly children — to roam and play unconfined on Wandsworth Common?
Yet in spite of everything, Buckmaster somehow survived and eventually thrived. Indeed, having [overcome] such treatment, it became clear that he would never be defeated by any amount of opposition, from any direction.
Thanks largely to his grandmother, who had cared for him in his early years, and a supportive curate in a local village, Buckmaster learned to read, write and calculate. For a while, he attended a local British school ("I did sums for boys for part of their dinner"), and he went on to become a respected peripatetic carpenter and joiner.
He joined the small congregations of Dissenting sects (Methodists, Quakers, Rechabites and others). Most had no meeting-house, of course, so they gathered in the fields where they collectively voiced their sincerest beliefs — beliefs which often tipped over from religion to politics.
[Open-air gatherings, religious and political, were also widespread on Wandsworth Common before the middle of the twentieth century. Suffragettes, for example, met near West Side before the First World War, and Baptist groups met outdoors until their numbers grew sufficient to build a [chapel? church?], such as ? on the corner of Chatham Road and Northcote Road [CHECK DETAILS].]
Tellingly, one of the phrases Buckmaster recalls, which we will come across again when we look at agitational posters created in defence of Wandsworth Common, was "Cursed is he who removeth his neighbour's landmark, and oppresseth the poor and needy, and joineth land to land."
[REWRITE: The issue here is landlessness and the impoverishment of small peasant farmers — the accumulation of small pockets of land by large landowners, which had the effect — personal and collective, including common land. Many of the themes that recur in his defence of Wandsworth Common are foreshadowed — his hatred of hereditary privilege, the land increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, the loss of open-air amenities for play, for sport, and for health, the closing down of opportunity, the construction of shoddy buildings, the loss of craft skills, the hatred of natural beauty.]
No wonder, then, that he embraced the role of a "political lecturer" or "emissary" on behalf of the Anti-Corn Law League — in short, he became a professional agitator. And he rejoiced in the role.
[REWRITE]
He travelled throughout the country giving famously rousing speeches in defence of "free trade" and against the high taxes on imported wheat introduced in 1815. These, he said, were designed to protect large landowners' interests, but had the effect of increased the cost of living for the majority... make the price of foreign grain artificially high and food supplies keep... outdated feudal privileges were sustained, progress impeded, freedoms restricted, and standards of living and well-being for the majority driven down.
The young Buckmaster organised demonstrations, petitions, letter-writing campaigns that led to articles in local and national newspapers, distributed pamphlets and posters, fund-raised, lobbied people of influence to get them "on-side", but always / and [above all] held local meetings to generate a favourable climate of opinion...
And he was still a very young man [young twenties?] — often pitched at meetings in opposition to older, more established figures — a fact that the local press of the day often drew attention to. Given his experience in agriculture and the building trades, he was particularly [effective in rural settings]. His early political life was all good knockabout stuff, as the following two newspaper articles show.
DARTFORD. On Tuesday last a meeting was held at the Town Hall, convened by the anti-corn law party, for the purpose of a Mr. Buckmaster, delivering a lecture against the "abominable, cruel, and iniquitous Corn Laws" as the bills expressed it.
As generally upon these occasions, the room was crowded almost to suffocation with the rabble of the town, who not being the politest of the polite, were vainly entreated to keep silence.
After some little time order was obtained, and Mr. Hadley (a most strenuous opposer of the Corn Laws) was called to the chair. He opened the meeting by making a few comments the state the country in general, and concluded by saying that was aware that it was usual in other towns, where similar meetings had been convened, to open them by singing a few verses called "Anti Corn Law Hymns," and (if they would allow him) he would read them the first verses of one, and sing the two last.
After reading in a peculiarly solemn and touching voice some lines, depicting in most heart rending-language almost every misery attendant on human life, each misery arising, of course, from the Corn Laws, the two last verses were sung by the whole of the gentlemen constituting the assembly, and this chanson de ble was rendered particularly melodious by each adapting it to whatever tune and key he thought most suitable.
When the singing had subsided, Mr. Hadley once more begged the attention of his "respected friends" in order to introduce to them Mr. Buckmaster who rose amid the shouts and yells of the multitude, and proceeded to set forth, in most glowing and enthusiastic language, the shameful duty imposed on the common necessaries of life, more especially on the poor man's loaf; and again, on the other hand, the small tax levied upon the luxuries of the great.
After quoting from different authors — drawing few exquisite similies — and giving innumerable instances of the poverty so predominant in England, he concluded, after a lecture of about two hours and a half.
What good it will do in Dartford, with respect to any of Sir Robert Peel's measures, we know not, neither will presume to judge.
Another circumstance occurred last week which must inevitably lead to Sir Robert Peel's resignation. A few of the aristocracy of Dartford, to show their utter contempt for that individual, burnt a figure, calling it his effigy.
[Source: Link.]
EXTRAORDINARY PRO-CORN LAW SCENE AT CUCKFIELD.
It appears that a young Anti-Corn-Law lecturer, named Buckmaster, in a recent "agitating expedition" through the southern counties, pulled up at Cuckfield, in Sussex, where he delivered a lecture to the labouring and working classes of the district on the evils of the "bread-tax," as it affects their wages, condition, comforts, independence, and moral and physical existence, and that he was so well received as to be induced to comply with a request to deliver a second address in the locality, choosing the agricultural branch of the subject, and the market-day for the delivery, as most suitable to the farmers, who were to form his audience, and of whose attendance he had a regular bumper.
In the course of the address all things were going ou smoothly, the young lecturer scattering his Anti-Corn-Law seeds and truisms with a lavish hand, and the farmers drinking them in with that degree of thirst that "high rents" and "great discouragements," may be supposed to have engendered, when, all of a sudden, attention was for the moment drawn away from him and fixed on
Dr. Byass, a gentleman of Conservative politics, resident in the neighbourhood, who, flinging up the window of the inn at which he had had a dining party, opened fire on the lecturer in the following terms:
"Halloo! there. You ought to be dragged through a horse-pond" (laughter, surprise, and shouts of derision from the meeting, Mr. Buckmaster looked perfectly astonished).
The Doctor: You have come here to prey upon the vitals of these poor men, ami uught to be well ducked (laughter and cheers, amidst which Mr. Buckmaster was seen to shrug his shoulders).
The Doctor: Were the meeting of my mind, they would forthwith deal with you.
Mr. Buckmaster (amid cries from the doctor's friends of hear, hear, began to fear "manipulation," more especially as the doctor, "suiting the action to the word," flung three handsfull of wheat at him, amid loud cries of "order, order," "shame, shame," laughter, and great confusion).
The Doctor: You are paid by Cobden to come down here (cheers). You are a "bully" of the League (laughter). You are nothing but a "snob" (great laughter). You are "a liar" (order, order). I say so. Men are best off when bread is dear (shouts of laughter, and cries of "oh, oh"). You come here to set men against their masters (cries of no, no, and order, order, and "go on, Mr. Buckmaster, go on, go on," "bravo," cheers, and much uproar).
Mr. Buckmaster accordingly resumed, observing that he hoped the doctor knew more of physic than be seemed to know of the corn-laws; when he was again interrupted by the indignant Doctor, who offered half-a-crown to any one who would "throw a pail of water over the lecturer," when a voice (amidst much laughter) cried out, "Hold, enough! two can play at that game; "a hint which had the effect of throwing "a damper" on the experiment.
In the course of the above scene, a constable of Cuckfield volunteered his assistance to "the doctor", and offered rudeness to the lecturer, for which the great body of the meeting were about to handle him roughly, had not Mr. Buckmaster interposed on his behalf.
The lecturer then had "his say" out, and the meeting separated.
[Source: Link]
When the Corn Laws were indeed repealed, in the mid-1840s, Buckmaster was without work again. But his impressive [contact list] in the League urged him towards England's first teachers' training college — St John's in Battersea. This was funded by his affluent sponsor, the reforming James Kay-Shuttleworth.
Buckmaster was a natural. His manifold abilities — practical and rhetorical — allowed him to knock up cheap experimental equipment for science lessons and to put complex information across in a [compelling and memorable way]. The great local mathematician-scientist-engineer-educator Henry Moseley, who lived on West Side, on the edge of Wandsworth Commmon, hired him to tutor his and his neighbour's children — one of whom (Henry Nottidge Moseley) became a celebrated Fellow of the Royal Society, attributing his success to Buckmaster's early inspiration.
HistoryWandsworthCommon: The Moseleys"I devoted my vacation to science, and the making of models, which were approved. After one of my lessons I was asked to give lectures outside the college, and obtain the permission of the principal to do so. The Government Inspector, who resided not far off, made arrangements for me to attend his house twice a week and give lessons to his two boys with half a dozen others. I took this class for twelve months, when a piece of Church patronage removed him.
"More than 30 years after I met one of his sons at the Society of Arts. He was then Linacre professor at Oxford. When my name was mentioned he looked at me. I hesitated as to who ought to speak first, as our positions in life we are now very different; but I resolved on making myself known.
"He took me warmly by the hand, and said, "I should never have been where I am but for your teaching, which gave me a love for science I have ever since cultivated. The other day I was one of the examiners for the Radcliffe, and there was a candidate of your name up that brought you forcibly home to my memory. I sent for him, but he had gone down. I have since learned he was your son, and I congratulate you on his success. You must promise to come to Oxford and spend a week with me, when we can talk over the past with a cigar in the garden."
[REWRITE]
Thanks also to his prodigious energy and powers of endurance, over the next twenty years he travelled up and down the country promoting science education, wrote numerous popular science textbooks [on Electricity and Magnetism, Physics, Chemistry, Agricultural Chemistry], encouraged the setting up of cookery schools [at the Crystal Palace he showed Queen Victoria how to cook an omelette], and produced Buckmaster's Cookery (various editions, from 1876?).
"The number of inhabitants which may be supported in any country, upon its internal produce, depends as much upon the state of the Art of Cookery" as upon that of Agriculture...but if Cookery be of so much importance, it certainly deserves to be studied with the greatest care... Cookery and Agriculture are arts of civilized nations: savages understand neither of them" — Count Rumford.
[REWRITE]
And even as he was doing all this, he was central to struggles within the Battersea Vestry — the primary agency of local government at that time — for the improvement of the health and well-being of the people of Battersea — including, of course, the battle to prevent the despoliation and imminent disappearance of Wandsworth Common.
The skills associated with professional pressure group politics in the Anti-Corn Law League... with a popular base... would come in handy when it came to protecting Wandsworth Common. For example, you can see Buckmaster's hand everywhere in the agitation for the Common.
[NOTE: For evidence of Buckmaster's influence, see for example the two famous campaign posters from 1869/70: "Down with the fences!", and "Preservation of Wandsworth Common: To the Working Men and others".]
CHECK for Buckmaster and Wandsworth Common in earlier years and those years I have nothing for him. There may be other refs. He appears to vanish in relayion to WC after 1871 — or does he?