John Charles Buckmaster
A Biographical Study

The evidence of official records of the period in which he was active suggests that John Charles Buckmaster was, superficially, a pain in the neck for the authorities. Complaining about the stopping of public footpaths, protesting about meeting proceedings, waging a campaign against a professional local government officer — all combine to create the image of a man negative in attitude and hidebound by tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth.

During a life of nearly ninety years, which spanned the greater part of the 19th century, this man of humble rural origins witnessed at first hand the great change in English life: the metamorphosis of productive agricultural soil into profitable building land. The consequential restructuring of English society was one of which Buckmaster himself was part. Starting life as an agricultural labourer and ending as a retired civil servant living a comfortable life in suburban retreat, he epitomised the changed society. The move from ‘working’ to ‘middle’ class was not one which, however, made him deny his roots. In fact the very opposite was true with the publication of his autobiographical work in 1897.

A contemporary of Charles Dickens, his was a life spent working for a living, involving himself actively in the causes of society and community concern.

For the first third of his life he engaged in activity supporting causes of reform, particularly the Anti-Corn Law League, and participating in that major feature of the whole Victorian age, the rise to prominence and influence of the professions. In his case teaching was the skill — Buckmaster being one of the early recipients of the opportunities offered by a recently founded teacher training college, the concept itself being novel. His move to St John’s College, Battersea, began a connection with the area which lasted until 1890, when he took what was, and still is, a demographically typical south-westward move away from the Metropolitan area, across the Thames to Teddington. Here he remained until his death, aged 89, on 20 July 1908.

Just as his actions provide a commentary on the Victorian age, so in his words, reflections of the nature of the man can be found.

In his will Buckmaster stated that he did not want relatives or friends to be miserable at his departure, “as I have finished the work I had to do.” Some forty years earlier, in 1870, he had made a statement consistent with the content of that will. He acknowledged that he had “sometimes increased hostility and a feeling of social antagonism, and might have said hard things, but if he had erred it was not an error of intention or heart.”

This was a man whose life was one of struggle, involving himself with campaigning issues, sometimes gaining success, sometimes being rebuffed. A life-long active involvement with all manner of issues, an ability to communicate well with people at all levels, a sense of ‘virtuous indignation’ (South London Press, 21 May 1867), were combined with the good fortune of making connections with men of influence who were prepared to offer opportunities for his personal development.

He was born at Slapton in Buckinghamshire in 1823.

The Anti-Corn Law League, 1839–46

The Anti-Corn Law League was founded in March 1839, when a large delegate conference agreed upon the single object of repealing the Corn Laws. Essentially composed of the middle class, it is not entirely clear how Buckmaster came to be involved with the movement rather than the more directly political Chartists. There is nothing to associate Buckmaster with the latter in his autobiography — although this could have been the result of deliberate omission.

All that can be gleaned from A Village Politician is that he was engaged wholeheartedly in the work of the movement by the first half of the 1840s. Travelling primarily through southern England, he spoke at rallies designed to convey the message of the League to tenant farmers and village labourers like himself. In 1841 he was still living at Slapton with his relatives, so it is highly likely that his activities with the League post-dated that time.

Returning to London from a period of active campaigning in the south of England, Buckmaster took the opportunity to call at the London residence of a contact he had made when working in Yorkshire — ‘the member for West Riding’, as he puts it in A Village Politician. Although not named in the autobiography, this can with virtual certainty be identified as Viscount Morpeth.

It seems it was Morpeth who suggested to Buckmaster that he should enrol at a teacher training college. Institutions of this nature were themselves innovatory in the 1840s, the product of new thinking about the need for teachers to be adequately educated and trained.

St John’s College, Battersea

One of the first teacher training colleges was St John’s College, Battersea, originally established as a privately funded organisation by two Assistant Poor Law Commissioners, Dr James Kay and Mr Edward Tufnell. Management and control of the College was assigned to the Church of England’s National Society in 1843.

In determining the date of Buckmaster’s entry to St John’s, it should be noted that he refers to Morpeth as a sitting MP in his account of the period. This would place his association with the College after January 1846. Although Kay had by then ceased to have direct control, it appears to have been he who — via a letter of introduction from Morpeth — arranged for Buckmaster to enter St John’s.

The local environment is fully described by Buckmaster in his autobiography:

I passed through endless cabbage gardens to what was called a square, a triangular piece of ground surrounded by quaint old houses and shops. And a few yards from the extreme point, facing the Thames, was a large square house, standing in about two acres of ground; it had a large garden, with several large cedar and other trees, and had once been the residence of a wealthy city merchant. It was now called a college. It was pleasantly situated and inside there was evidence of comfort and substantial workmanship. (A Village Politician)

It was, however, ‘the idea of two or three years with these men’ (i.e. his fellow students) that suggested an age of doubt and uncertainty about the direction his future would take. In practice the doubts were short-lived, and in late 1848, after two years of study, he received a certificate for completing the approved course and examinations.

From his autobiography it appears that at some point, possibly during 1847 or even 1848, he was fortunate enough to be engaged to undertake private tuition — to the children of the Revd Henry Moseley, MA, a former Professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s College London, and from January 1844 an Inspector of Training Colleges including St John’s. Moseley lived just across the Battersea parish boundary in Allfarthing Lane, Wandsworth.

The 1851 census confirms Buckmaster’s presence at the College on 5 April of that year (see Census Extracts below), recording his age as 25, his birthplace as Dunstable, Bedfordshire, and his occupation as Industrial Master.

Meanwhile, changes were taking place at the College. Late in 1848 the Principal, the Revd Thomas Jackson MA, had resigned his post to go to Austria. The College was left under the temporary direction of the Vice-Principal, the Revd John Hunter, required to run things on a shoestring and without any clear view of the future. A new permanent Principal, the Revd Samuel Clark, eventually arrived. Despite glowing accounts in the official history of the College, his appointment did not bring contentment. Buckmaster described the situation:

One master after another resigned, until I was the only one left, and I felt my days were numbered. (A History of St John’s College, p.286)

After ‘a heated discussion’ with Principal Clark, he left and “never set foot in the place again.” The exact date of his departure is uncertain. Yet the evident animosity between Buckmaster and Clark did not, it seems, extend to his students in science. Former students were later moved to record:

I must not forget Mr Buckmaster who worked hard with us, over his lessons or lectures upon “physical science and industrial matters.” (A History of St John’s College, p.152)

Here was the “old lab”, designed in Principal Clark’s early days, when Mr Buckmaster taught chemistry. (A History of St John’s College, p.239)

The Tooting Disaster, 1848–49

Having become qualified and ‘just settled down to work’, Buckmaster was informed that his services were required for a week or two to assist the Poor Law Inspector in examining a large pauper school a few miles from town. What appeared to be an excellent opportunity turned out to be an experience of nightmare proportions, whose consequences were to affect not only Buckmaster’s thinking, but the lives of countless poor London children.

The establishment concerned was a Poor Law District School in Tooting, about four miles from the training college at Battersea. The premises and grounds comprised some 52 acres, close to the junction of the main London to Epsom road. Over 1,400 children of both sexes, aged one to fourteen, were accommodated there, farmed out by various parochial and district Guardians of the Poor. For each child in his ‘care’, the proprietor Drouet received 4s 6d per week.

Buckmaster found bedrooms lacking fireplaces and ‘an open stinking sewer ditch into which the filth and sewerage filtered.’ The buildings were old, some being the outbuildings of an old manor house, others temporary wooden barracks.

Almost immediately Buckmaster found himself embroiled in what his contemporary Charles Dickens described as ‘an enormity’. Cholera broke out. Between the first deaths on a Monday and 18th January 1849, 118 children died and were buried in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Tooting, about half a mile away. ‘For several days and nights,’ wrote Buckmaster, ‘the case was sorrowful beyond description.’

The impact of the experience on Buckmaster is evident from his writings. His phrase ‘the four and sixpenny greed, the desire to make money out of the flesh and blood of poor children’ conveys his abhorrence of the contracting system. The tragedy did in fact mark the end of this particular system of child care; Drouet’s asylum was closed within a few months, and an improved arrangement was before long introduced.

Parkhurst Prison, 1849–51

Following his return to the College, Buckmaster was, in his words, ‘assigned to take charge of the education of the junior division in a juvenile convict prison.’ Nowhere in his autobiography does he specifically name this as Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight.

1851–53: The Great Exhibition and Marriage

Buckmaster participated in the Great Exhibition of May–September 1851. It is conceivable that it was there that he established contact with Henry Cole, said by some to have been the person primarily responsible for the presentation of that Exhibition.

Roger Logan notes: ‘1852 is a mystery.’

By the middle of 1853 he had met and was engaged to Emily Goodliffe, who hailed from Trumpington in Cambridgeshire. With her he found a house in Battersea, away from the village and from the scrutiny of St John’s College. It was there that the couple spent their lives until the death of Emily in 1890.

The house was in St John’s New Road, off St John’s Hill — immediately adjoining the site of what was later to become Clapham Junction station. When Buckmaster moved in there was no station; two railway lines, those of the London and South Western Railway and the London and Richmond Company, were in the vicinity. The houses in St John’s New Road had been built in 1852, though many remained unoccupied. In the event this was fortuitous, since a further railway company, the Crystal Palace and West End of London, began to take interest in the area and required the acquisition of properties on the road. By November 1857, the original 21 buildings had been reduced by demolition to a much smaller number. All this happened under the nose of J. C. Buckmaster, and may well have been influential in forming his attitude to issues where railway companies were concerned.

Buckmaster described the home they chose:

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. I was only reconciled to it because it was in a muddy lane, surrounded by cabbage gardens and orchards, and on an early spring evening I would sit in a little garden, not much larger than the house, scent the hostas and the lilac and hear the cuckoo. The house was a wretched jerry affair and gave us no end of trouble and expense. (A Village Politician, p.280)

What Buckmaster does not mention in his autobiography is that the house into which he and Emily moved was next door to one occupied by what appears to have been a relative of his wife — possibly her sister, Mary Goodliffe, who had married a Mr Stevens. The 1851 census records the next-door household as that of Charles Stevens, described as a Spanish merchant, born in Oxford, with his wife Mary, born in Cambridge, and their two children, both born in Battersea.

A significant feature of Buckmaster’s choice of home was its rateable value. Initially the rental was £22 and the rateable value £16, increased after a general review in 1859 to £24 and £18. This had an important consequence: under the Metropolitan Management Act 1855, eligibility to stand for election as a Vestryman was confined to those rated at not less than £40. Buckmaster was therefore ineligible to serve as a Vestryman — nor, since Battersea sent its representatives to the Wandsworth District Board of Works, could he be a member of the single most important locally active body. He could vote, but not stand. This constraint shaped the particular and persistent form that his local political engagement took.

The Wandsworth Trade School and the School of Mines, 1854–59

By May 1854, with a wife and a child to support, Buckmaster’s future was again doubtful. Fortunately, not far from his home, a Trade School — in which science and drawing as applied to industrial arts, together with French, were the principal subjects — was being established in Wandsworth. Here he was appointed science master, attending two to three days each week. He held this post for four years, until the school was closed by order of the Science and Education Department.

During this period his own education took a further turn when he obtained a scholarship to study 30 hours a week at the Royal School of Mines, walking there and back daily. On the eve of his examination, Buckmaster wrote, ‘the confusions of his life reached new heights’:

My wife was ill in bed; the girl had gone out and I had to take care of the child to prevent its falling into the fire or eating cinders. At the same time, I had to read up for the next day’s examinations, which lasted several hours. (A Village Politician, p.295)

The results were published the day after the examinations and to his ‘restrained joy’ he found himself one of the two successful candidates. Two years later he received from the Board of Trade his certificates indicating success in the final examinations. No appointments were immediately offered to him, and he continued the scholarship for a further year. Until the closure of the Trade School he was ‘in receipt of an income to which I adapted my wants’, but when that closed he was compelled to seek employment elsewhere.

As before, his acquaintanceship with men of authority helped him. Through either Professor Moseley or Henry Cole, he secured an appointment to the Science and Art Department, a comparatively new body created in the wake of the Great Exhibition. It was reorganised in 1858, when Cole was appointed as its Secretary. Buckmaster’s post was titled ‘Organising Master’, although in successive censuses he described himself as an examiner.

Buckmaster and the Battersea Vestry

Buckmaster’s associations with the Vestry coincide almost exactly with his taking up residence in St John’s New Road. He makes his first appearance in the official records on 29 March 1853, when — although not present — he was nominated to be one of the Overseers of the Poor for Penge, then a detached hamlet administered from Battersea. From his first attendance on 30 September 1853 he appeared consistently at meetings until August 1854, after which there is no record of attendance until the restructuring of London’s local government in 1855.

In late 1853 and early 1854 he was appointed to the Compensation Fund Committee of twenty Vestrymen, whose objective was to consider proposals for utilising the sum of £1,500 paid by the Commissioners under the Battersea Park Act 1853, together with £450 paid by Daniel Watney for the stopping up of a footpath. The project selected by the Committee was for ‘a building for general and public purposes’, which eventually came to fruition as Battersea Lammas Hall.

Although unable to stand as a Vestryman owing to the rateable value of his house, Buckmaster remained an active and often forceful presence at vestry meetings, proposing slates of candidates, demanding polls when he thought results had been improperly handled, and — from 1867 onwards — serving as Churchwarden, which gave him the right to chair meetings of the elected Vestry. The full record of his appearances is set out in the appendix below.

Census Extracts

The following census entries place Buckmaster in Battersea at key points in his career.

The birthplace given as Dunstable is almost certainly inaccurate; Buckmaster was born at Slapton, Buckinghamshire. The census entry for age (25) suggests a birth year of 1826, inconsistent with other sources. Such inaccuracies were common in self-reported census returns.

The proximity of the Stevens household (whose wife Mary was born in Cambridge, consistent with the Goodliffe family’s Cambridge connections) supports the suggestion that Mary Stevens was Emily Buckmaster’s sister. Note also the children named in the Buckmaster household: Martha (aged 8) is not otherwise recorded in family records; she may be a child who died in infancy before the 1881 census. This may be the ‘unknown sixth child’ of John and Emily.

Appendix: Buckmaster’s Vestry Attendance Record

The following is a meeting-by-meeting record of Buckmaster’s appearances at Battersea Vestry meetings, compiled by Roger Logan from the Vestry minute books. ‘B’ throughout refers to Buckmaster.

Church Vestry (annual and general meetings)

Elected Vestry (annual elections and key meetings)

Biographical Reference Notes

The following facts are drawn from Burke’s Peerage and Roger Logan’s notes.

Children:

Stanley Owen Buckmaster, 1st Viscount Buckmaster (1861–1934)