Friends of Wandsworth Common · Heritage Group Talk · 2021
150 Years of the Wandsworth Common Act
and the starring role of John Buckmaster
Philip will not need any introduction to many of you, but for those who haven't met or seen him before: he is the local historian who came along to our very first heritage group meeting back in January 2019, and from that day onwards enthused us with his knowledge and passion for the history of Wandsworth Common — and in particular for his local hero, John Buckmaster.
Tonight's story is very much the climax of the events leading up to the Wandsworth Common Act that we're celebrating this year. It is also the climax of the introductory section of the book we will be publishing in May — more of that at the end.
Without further ado, I hand over to Philip.
[First slide: "Down with the fence."]
Very resonant.
I'll get straight on, because I've got a huge amount to get through and in fact won't be able to cover more than a small proportion of it. I'll be skimming through the first part very quickly, pausing at certain points to say a bit more. But let's go.
That's me — I call myself History Boy, and I'm developing a website about the history of Wandsworth Common called HistoryBoysWandsworthCommon.org. The logo you can see has been adopted for this year, 2021 — 150 years after the passing of the Wandsworth Common Act.
I'll start with the Act itself, which is in a way the end of the story, but it's the target, so let's look at it. A few passages to read out:
An Act for vesting the management of the open space known as Wandsworth Common in the county of Surrey — which of course it was then; it wasn't part of London — in a body of Conservators, with a view to the preservation thereof, and for other purposes. 31st July 1871.
There is, in the county of Surrey, and in the parishes of Battersea and Wandsworth, an open space of large extent, unenclosed and unbuilt on, known as Wandsworth Common, in this Act referred to as "the Common"; and that the Common is situate within and is, or is alleged to be, part of the wastes of the Manor of Battersea and Wandsworth.
And that the Right Honourable John Poyntz, Earl Spencer, is, or claims to be, entitled in fee simple — that just means he owns it, or claims to own it — in possession to that manor; and that it is expedient that provision be made for the transfer from Earl Spencer of his estate in the Common to a body of Conservators, to preserve the same for public use.
This Act may be cited as the Wandsworth Common Act, 1871.
I'm going to run through the pages so you can see how the Act is constructed. There's a curious schedule at the end which I'll come back to, and it's signed by various people, including Pownall and Hunter.
Here are the key staging posts. Things moved quickly, but I think you'll find the way it developed rather interesting.
It starts in February with a petition for leave to bring in a bill. Moving on: 14th February, Mr. Cooper Temple and Mr. Peek order the bill to be brought — the first time it is ordered to be read a second time. 20th February, the bill is read a second time. It is then committed to the Metropolitan Board of Works, and trouble arises more or less immediately.
The Metropolitan Board of Works was the precursor to the London County Council, and on 3rd March the London and Brighton Railway — the one that runs through Wandsworth Common — petitions against aspects of the bill. The Metropolitan Board of Works, meanwhile, had been making trouble for years with all sorts of objections, and because of those objections the people of Wandsworth and Battersea would eventually have to pay £6,000 in legal bills.
John Buckmaster absolutely loathed the Metropolitan Board of Works — and I'll explain why, just briefly, so you're clear. They wanted to control Wandsworth Common, and every other common, and every other piece of open land in London. They declared they would happily take the Common over from Spencer, but only on the proviso that they could sell perhaps a third or a half of it in order to fund the maintenance of the rest. This did not please John Buckmaster, or anybody else in Wandsworth. No secret there.
17th March, a Select Committee. 4th April, progress — the report doth lie upon the table. 4th May, the third reading — it's looking good.
Now it's the Lords' turn to sharpen their quills. The Lords — "the House of landowners," as one MP called it at the time. They call for amendments and return the amended bill to the Commons. 21st July, it is ordered that the Lords' amendments be taken into consideration on the 24th. There's a delay, but not by much.
The amendments are duly considered, and then some rather funny games ensue. The House proceeded to take into consideration the amendments made by the Lords to the Wandsworth Common Bill, and the same were twice read and — with an amendment to one of them — agreed to. But the Commons then decided to amend an amendment and send the bill back to the Lords, which they did. The Lords agreed to the Commons' amendments to the Lords' amendments, without any further amendment.
So, after to-ing and fro-ing between the two Houses, the job is done. The Wandsworth Common Bill receives royal assent, becomes the Wandsworth Common Act, and comes into force on 31st July 1871.
Phew.
Here are some of the key clauses. the Common is to be kept at all times open, unenclosed — notice: unenclosed rather than enclosed — and unbuilt on. It shall not be lawful to sell, lease, grant, or in any manner dispose of any part of the Common. That clause would prove very important in later years.
The Conservators are to prevent, resist, and abate all encroachments on the Common; to protect it; to preserve it as an open space; and to resist all proceedings tending to its enclosure or appropriation for any purpose.
What exactly are they preserving? The Act specifies "the natural aspect and state of the Common": its turf, its gorse, its heather. I don't know if there's any heather left on the Common — there may be, but I can't remember seeing any for a long time. I hope somebody can tell me otherwise. Also: timber, other trees, shrubs, brushwood.
And in return, payable by virtue of the Act to Earl Spencer and his heirs and assigns forever, a perpetual annuity of £250. I've asked whether that £250 is still being paid, 150 years later. I genuinely don't know — whether it's some bank draft that just gets transferred every year. But anyway: at all times open, unenclosed, and unbuilt on. That's the essence of it.
I don't know if you know this corner. It's Chivalry Road to the left — we're talking about the top right-hand corner of the Common, on Bolingbroke Grove looking towards Clapham Junction. You can see a strip of grass on the left-hand side. Many people don't know that this little strip is actually part of the Common.
Quite a large part of the 1871 Act is taken up with this rather wretched strip. There was a terrific hoo-ha about it, and eventually it was written into the Act that a 20-foot-wide strip had to be kept, that the exceedingly high fence that had been put around it had to be taken down and replaced by one no more than four foot six high, and that there should be two paths across it so that residents could get to and from the road.
I don't know when the spiked fence was finally taken down, but for many years it stood. Anyway, the area has now been more obviously opened up. Opposite is Surry Cemetery on the right-hand side.
The issue centred on a man called Todd. We're going to come across Christopher William Todd several times. He is, one has to say, a bad man — he grasped and grabbed a lot of the land in that area with the intention of building on it, and he did in fact build Chivalry Road. There was a running battle between him and Buckmaster, who was endlessly faced with Todd breaking down fences, and we will see that there's a rather nice irony towards the end.
In the event, it was agreed that the strip should be left, but unfortunately Todd acquired much of the rest of the land — at least half — on which to build Chivalry Road.
This is the Common as it is today. It's actually rather larger than it was in 1871 — the result of those little triangles and wedges being added over the years. You can see that green strip, a little bit of the Common, opposite the cemetery.
And here is a representation of the area the Common would have covered up to about 1800. It stretches not quite as far as Tooting Bec, with a long triangular shape going downwards — all gone now. The slightly unusual shape to the south is because Streatham had a different lord of the manor and therefore different rules. You can see the Common extended right up to Lytton Road and Heathfield Road on the west.
This is the old road that is now North Side, leading into East Hill — an ancient road between Kingston and Southwark, used by pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, which is why its pre-1800 name was the Canterbury Way. It was widely used but not particularly suited to getting into the City of London, so a new toll road was built, running up to Southwark — now St John's Hill.
By the 1820s, long straight roads had been built, many of them funded by Earl Spencer, as it happens: the carriageways of Tooting Road to the left, Bolingbroke on the right, and St James's Drive and Bellevue. No shops, nothing like that. Then the railways arrived — 1838, and another line in the late 1850s.
Put it all together and the Common had been cut up rather badly — fragmented. But those same roads and railways gave far more access to people who wanted to build on or around it. I've called it, simply, "What a carve-up."
The Wandsworth Common Preservation Society — formed a little afterwards, but working from maps of the 1860s — analysed exactly where all the pieces had been taken away. When I first looked at this I was very strongly reminded of meat being carved up. And one of the Society's tactics was to remind people what had been lost — because as newcomers flooded into the area they didn't know the history, and had to be educated into what had gone.
The roll call of losses: 1836, the South Western Railway. St James's School — a kind of approved school — on St James's Drive: 20 acres. An estate by the Black Sea, a large triangular piece running from Tooting Bec all the way up to Bellevue, taken bit by bit: half an acre here, an acre there, 10 acres, 20 acres, 14 acres.
The Patriotic School — the Royal Victoria Patriotic School for Girls, which still stands, and the equivalent for boys, both housing orphans of the Crimean War; the boys' school was eventually taken over by Emanuel School. Then the Brighton Railway taking more; a great strip in front of the prison being sold off by Spencer — that's where Neil's Nursery now is, though it has remained open. The road from the Freemasons Hotel past the pumping mill, now Windmill Road. And then a ploughed green piece — and that is the one that would cause the greatest problems of all in the long run.
Total lost: 173 acres. In 1800 the Common was 300 acres; by 1871 it was considerably less than half that. People were very upset indeed.
Now I turn to the person — or rather the family — responsible for much of this disposal of land: the Spencers.
He is called the Red Earl. Not because of his politics, obviously, but he really is irresistible for a caricaturist, and there are many caricatures of him. This is an ape caricature from Vanity Fair. He was very tall and thin, and somehow every illustration becomes a caricature. But of course, with the English upper classes, you don't really need caricaturists — as you can see from this image of him in his Garter robes.
I'll linger on this image while I tell you a little about the Spencer family.
The Spencers are not from around here. They were relative newcomers — they hadn't been in the area a hundred years when the fight to defend the Common began. People talk about them as though they were a traditional aristocratic family rooted in the area; they were nothing of the sort. They have no links to the Norman Conquest. What they are, very much, is a product of the Tudor enclosure movement. They were brilliant sheep breeders, and later cattle breeders. They began as tenant farmers, bought the farms, and spread outward.
They bought Althorp in Northamptonshire, which remains their seat today. They came originally from Wormleighton in Warwickshire, and owned Wiston in Nottinghamshire. You'll recognise some of those names — Althorp, Wiston, Nottingham: they are the names of the roads off Bellevue. Unfortunately we don't have a Wormleighton. I'm not quite sure why.
In the Tudor period they thrived and acquired land in great quantities, and they were equally productive when it came to sons and daughters. Just off the top of my head: we speak of the Churchill family, but in fact the Churchills are Spencer-Churchills — they adopted the name Churchill; they are actually Spencers. There are two great branches: the Spencers related to the Duke of Marlborough, and the cadet branch that includes the current Spencers — among them John Poyntz Spencer, the Fifth Earl.
I mention all this not merely as historical tittle-tattle, but because it rankled deeply with people in Wandsworth in the mid-nineteenth century. Why should these people buy up all the land? Why should they hold titles? Why should they possess so much open land — and then sell it off, land that ordinary people were using? It was a very powerful feeling.
The Spencers had acquired Wandsworth Manor in a somewhat curious way. One of the Spencers was a grandson of the Duchess of Marlborough, who had hated living at Wimbledon Park. When she died, her children had hoped to inherit, but it was her grandson, John Spencer, who took on the estate — and from there he simply went on acquiring manors: first the neighbouring Dunsford Manor, essentially the land between Wimbledon and the Wandle, then in the 1860s Wandsworth itself.
It's worth noting that Wandsworth is a single manor — Battersea-cum-Wandsworth — not two separate ones, as people often assume. And then in the 1820s they acquired Allfarting Manor, which, as some of you may recall from a previous talk, contributed a small piece to Wandsworth Common — the little Allfarting piece that is now the toast rack.
So we have John Poyntz Spencer. By now you've probably had your fill of seeing him in his dark robes, so here is the kind of life he actually led: hunting — he loved hunting — and shooting, here on Wimbledon Common. And though I have no picture of him playing cricket, he loved cricket too.
I think there is a genuine argument to be made that the reason there are so many areas around here where cricket can be played — Trevelyan Field, for instance, opposite what used to be the Surrey Tavern on the corner of Melbournewood, and the large fields stretching from Magdalen Road across to Beatwood Lane — ultimately comes down to his love of the game.
He's not quite the straightforward villain that I and others sometimes make him out to be, but we'll come back to that. He was also quite a young man at the time of these events — always depicted as elderly, but when he was dealing with Buckmaster he was probably still in his thirties.
Later in life, here he is in Gladstone's cabinet, just to the left of Gladstone himself. I mention this because it's relevant: in the 1860s, at the very time the conflict over Wandsworth Common is at its height, he is serving as Viceroy of Ireland. Here he is arriving in Ireland, the local people apparently cheering him — which is not really how it went.
The connection between Wandsworth Common and Ireland turns out to be quite extraordinary. This article — a brilliant and unsparing portrait of Wandsworth in the mid-nineteenth century — mocks Spencer directly: he owns all these parks, it says, in Wimbledon, Wandsworth, and Clapham; these commons have been used for grazing, recreation, exercise, health, and enjoyment, but where Spencer found paradise he has made morasses, and where life was sustained and prolonged he has striven to produce pestilence and death.
They don't like him, do they?
Under Spencer, the article continues, numerous enclosures are being made; residents are resisting, but hundreds of squatters are permitted to burn their fences, outrage all decency, and accumulate filth until smallpox and typhus are imminent. Once, Wandsworth Common was matchless for beauty and usefulness; now one half of it has been excavated until it is underwater in winter — we talked about this last time.
Rubbish is tipped here; residents for miles around deposit rotting refuse and worse. Buckmaster himself describes a woman from Clapham whose servant arrives regularly with three cartloads of excrement and deposits them on acres of the Common — along with oyster shells, shoe sweepings, and what he calls "an indescribable collection of nuisances which no decent language can designate." Millions of loads of house refuse, sorted and sifted, a fire burning for months generating what he calls "the most unutterable stench." Wandsworth Common, the article concludes, is one of those godforsaken spots that even the police never interfered with.
The article appeared in the Ballyshannon Herald on 26th June 1869. What was it doing in an Irish newspaper? Because Spencer was the Viceroy. The argument was explicit: look what Spencer does to Wandsworth Common — imagine what he will do to Ireland. And it closes with a neat parting shot: it is said that Earl Spencer and his Countess have apostatised to Rome — this is not to be wondered at. So in addition to everything else, he's a closet Catholic. In fact, Spencer's uncle had converted from Anglicanism and became a monk.
Here is a series of portraits of Spencer from the National Portrait Gallery. Wonderful pictures, really — you feel you know him.
Now, I don't know whether it was Ireland or Wandsworth Common that did it to him, but this is him, unmistakably, later in life.
Now we come to John Buckmaster. There is a large portrait of him currently, I believe, in the Orleans Gallery in Twickenham — though it may have returned to the local library, which is why it's there: when Buckmaster left Wandsworth just after 1890 he went to Twickenham and campaigned for a free public library, just as he had done in Battersea, and one was created.
This is the only photograph I know of him. Unlike Earl Spencer, he did not have many pictures taken. But there is this curious image from the New Scientist in 1977, showing five great founders of science education in the nineteenth century: Henry Moseley, Buckmaster, and others — Pepper, Wilson, and Armstrong. Curiously, Henry Moseley also lived on the edge of Wandsworth Common.
The caption, though, is rather startling: "John Charles Buckmaster — a bastard from Buck — who gave science to the working people." I won't go into his family background tonight; there simply isn't time. But it serves as a reminder that, although I tend to focus on his role in Wandsworth politics and the campaign to save the Common, he has a vast backstory which deserves a talk of its own.
This is the Common in the 1860s, coloured in to give a better sense of it. The purply-pink rectangle is where Buckmaster came to live. Before his marriage — in 1854, I believe — he had to find a house on a modest income.
He writes:
We settled on a compo thing, called a villa. "Compo" was what we might call stucco today — a cheap way of disguising inferior brickwork by slapping composite material on the front. I hated it, but my future wife thought it would do very nicely — as all future wives do.
I was only reconciled because it was in a muddy lane, surrounded by cabbage gardens and orchards, and on a spring morning I could sit in a little garden, not much larger than the house itself, and scent the hawthorn and lilac and hear a cuckoo.
The house was a wretched, cheaply built affair. It gave us no end of trouble and expense.
He would, however, live there for forty years — and of course it was not long surrounded by cabbage gardens and orchards, nor much scented with lilac, nor visited by cuckoos.
This is it: St John's Road, St John's Hill, right by Clapham Junction Station, growing and growing. The new road was in fact the path to the booking office. His family house was the one on the end, as far as I can tell.
Buckmaster wrote an extraordinary book called A Village Politician, in which he says nothing at all about his academic or professional life — not a word about the science books he wrote, the schools and courses he helped to create, or his lectures on art history at the Albert Hall.
Instead he writes about his childhood, his political education through the Anti-Corn Law League, and the culmination of all that in his five years fighting for Wandsworth Common against corrupt landowners and property speculators.
He's sitting at home one evening, and this is how the story starts — the story of the gravel diggers:
I was sitting quietly one evening with my family after a hard day's teaching — which is the hardest of all work.
This is a man who had worked as an agricultural labourer from the age of ten, and then as a carpenter — he knew what hard work looked like. And he says teaching is the hardest of all.
When two gravel diggers from the Common wished to see me. They came to tell me that they had been born in the parish and had been gravel diggers for years, as their fathers before them. They had no gardens or allotments, but they had planted a few rows of potatoes on an exhausted part of the pit.
Just as the potatoes appeared above ground, a gentleman who called himself the lessee — and who had recently annexed six acres of the Common to his own private grounds — came with two men, levelled their potatoes, and told them that if they did it again he would have them prosecuted.
I don't think this is Christopher Todd. I believe the man is named Costa, though I may be able to find out more.
The gravel diggers ask Buckmaster for advice:
My first impulse was to go with his men and break down his fence. I felt so angry that had I been single I would have been prepared to risk the consequences.
But it was of no use sacrificing a family — a wife and four sons and a daughter — in what I then believed to be the assertion of a right. If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with laurels, and if I had failed, as I probably should, the public would have called me a fool and allowed me to go to prison while my wife and family went to the Union.
The Union was the workhouse — built a little way along the road. He knew it well.
I'm going to move quickly here, because there's so much to cover.
The railways are cutting through. Land is being seized on every side. He writes: "Horrible houses — the tallest and ugliest production of compo and rotten bricks, with a public house intended for every corner. the Common was threatened on every side. Land-grabbers, an increasing army — jerry-builders would soon have joined hands on the last square foot of turf, and one of the most lovely commons within a few miles of Charing Cross would have become a wilderness of bricks and chimney pots. We were told there was no remedy."
The yellow areas on the map are gravel pits; the blue areas are former gravel pits, now long since filled in.
I was unable to help these poor potato men — but it occurred to me that a letter to the newspapers might attract attention. I wrote three letters, and one paper printed one.
This is his first letter, from 1862. I'd love to read it in full, but in a very formal and rather beautiful way he writes:
Will you kindly permit me, through the medium of your valuable journal, to call the attention of the public to the shameful encroachments on their rights to Wandsworth Common which have been going on for a long time past? The evil is rapidly increasing. Unless a vigorous stand is made at once by the owners of property in the neighbourhood, all that remains of this once beautiful Common will shortly be confiscated to private and moneyed interests.
This is a lightning sketch of his whole argument: private versus public, those with money against those without. He enumerates the abuses and concludes:
I believe I am correct in asserting that the preceding is utterly illegal, and if anyone has the funds or the courage to try the question, I believe this wholesale disposal of land might be stopped.
Of course he had no money himself, and there was very little available. He signs not with his own name but as M.R.C.S. — Member of the Royal College of Science — since at this time he was teaching chemistry at what would become Imperial College.
He arranges to see the lord of the manor. There are two accounts of this meeting.
The public account, in The Times, has a deputation including the Vicar Jenkinson and various others calling at Spencer House in St James's — a pretty fine building, as you can see; massive; and everybody was overawed. According to The Times, Buckmaster makes a statement about the desirability of preserving open spaces for public recreation, Spencer replies that he is most anxious to continue the friendly relationship, has no intention of harming public recreation in populous localities, and believes that outdoor exercise greatly contributes to the happiness and morality of the humbler classes. The deputation thanks his Lordship and withdraws.
This is not how Buckmaster tells it:
We obtained an interview with the Lord of the Manor, and after discussing the matter in the presence of his agents and lawyers, he asked: "Do you question my right to dispose of the Common?"
All the other members of the deputation were dumb. I waited to hear what they would say, but as no one spoke, I replied: "I am sorry to say, my lord, that we do question your right."
He turned on his heel. His lawyers followed, and we were shown the door by his footman. No sooner were we outside than the other members of the deputation turned on me and said I had greatly offended his Lordship and destroyed all hope of a settlement. And yet the question of right was the great question at all our meetings.
He writes to Spencer. Spencer sends back a rough reply about agitation and the rights of property. Buckmaster sends the exchange to The Times, which produces a very angry letter from Spencer saying it had not been intended for publication.
Buckmaster replies that it was not marked "private," and that the subject was of too much public importance to be dealt with privately. He tries to smooth things over, telling Spencer that the fault surely lies with his agents and lawyers, not with Spencer himself. But as he remarks: "Give a liar a few hours' start, and it's impossible to overtake it."
Having exhausted every other avenue, the campaign turns to public meetings — on Clapham Common, Wimbledon Common, all over. And then the great mass meetings begin.
One of these is utterly immense. Perhaps five or six thousand people congregate on Wandsworth Common to protest. The crucial question is where exactly this took place.
On this map you can see Clareville going downhill at the top left, St John's Hill crossing the top, and the Plough, which from this point on is absolutely central to every episode in the story. And there is Battersea Rise.
The area under attack — where Chivalry Road now runs — was still common land, but Christopher Todd had fenced it round, along with the London and Brighton Railway. The campaigners wanted to break down that fence. But Spencer had alerted Sir Richard Mayne — who ran the Metropolitan Police for 39 years — and Mayne sent out hundreds of officers. Spencer also hired thugs to bolster them.
In the end the meeting was held on a triangle of land — the triangle where St Mark's Church now stands, crossed by an extension of Bolingbroke Grove. I always used to think of it as a rather godforsaken triangle; it looks pretty wretched, though a lot of effort is going into improving it, and walking round it recently I found it genuinely heartening.
But for me, now, it is sacred ground. That is where five or six thousand people gathered to hear Buckmaster and others speak, with a hundred or so policemen hidden behind trees and gorse bushes.
There are extraordinary parallels with certain more recent events, but I won't go into that now.
The wagon from which Buckmaster is to speak is placed near the last enclosure — the Chivalry Road fence. Men are assembling in large numbers, armed with pickaxes, sledgehammers, crowbars, and saws. The organisers think better of proceeding, and most of the platform party melts away. Buckmaster is left in the wagon with only two companions out of an expected twenty.
The police inspector rides up to him like a general on a field day and delivers a letter from Sir Richard Mayne: Buckmaster will be held personally responsible for any unnecessary destruction of property. However, the removal of one or two rails to establish the question of right would not be resisted. A useful get-out.
I feared a riot. Could I persuade five or six thousand people to go home?
I saw the peril of the situation and made a speech in which I pointed out that this wholesale robbery of the Common had been carried out by rich men who had acres of their own. I mentioned the potato incident, and that the right of landowners to land which had not yet been disputed would be disputed if they laid claim to the Commons.
I begged and entreated them to go home quietly and avoid the public house. Any conflict with the police would ruin our cause and destroy all hope of success. They all retired peaceably.
This is a man who had been in perilous situations many times before; he knew how easily anger tips into violence, and how badly ordinary people come off when it does.
Five or six thousand people, dispersed by one man's voice. Everything was quiet; the police went home without incident.
I had acquired considerable influence over the men by my deep sympathy with their loss of the Common.
I sometimes read such accounts with scepticism, but in this case there is plentiful corroborating evidence — this is just one of many contemporary articles that go into even greater detail about Buckmaster's role in calming the crowd, and about how close things had come to violence.
Now there is a shift in tactics. Along comes Sir Henry William Peek — you may know the name from Peek Frean, the biscuit manufacturers; he is of that family. He is the MP for Surrey, a very wealthy man who lived in Wimbledon.
Peek offers £1,000 and says: if the people of Battersea and Wandsworth can raise a further £4,000, there will be enough to hire lawyers and challenge Spencer and Todd in court.
This is the context for the poster produced in 1870: "Preservation of Wandsworth Common — to the working men and others of Battersea, Clapham, Wandsworth, Lambeth, and other parts of South and West London." Notice it is not narrowly focused — they were hoping and expecting support from far beyond the immediate area.
What a remarkable list of supporters. Tom Taylor, at the top of the middle section, is the editor of Punch. Hunter on the right is Robert Hunter, the man who would go on to found the National Trust. The character at bottom left is Whistler's lawyer. Mr James Lord, in the middle, is rather curious — a property speculator himself, and a Protestant fundamentalist who lived in South London; it was he who wrote the article that appeared in the Irish newspapers. Buckmaster is listed as secretary.
I'm trying to trace all of these people, because between them they create a remarkably vivid portrait of the social fabric of Wandsworth and Battersea in the second half of the nineteenth century.
People gave money in all manner of ways; street collections were held with boards reading "Preservation of Wandsworth Common — subscriptions received here towards the £5,000 fund." An early list shows Tom Taylor gave £5, Robert Hunter £25, Buckmaster £25. James Lord gave £100 — though within a couple of years he will be bankrupt, and will end his days in a bedsit in Brixton. Of that, another time.
In Wandsworth, James Duff Glasson had one of the largest houses in the district, at the top of East Hill. J.B. Bevington is going to become the first mayor of Bermondsey. Fascinating stories, all of them — but not for tonight.
In the end it transpired that Peek had no legal standing, since his belief that he was a copyholder who could challenge Spencer in court turned out to be mistaken.
[Audience: No, no! One more minute!]
It wasn't only through demonstrations and legal action that the campaign was waged — there was a cultural warfare too.
You'll probably recognise this scene. It's from a lantern slide: the assassination of a president in America. And the play the audience is watching was written by Tom Taylor — Our American Cousin, as it happens — at exactly the time all of this is going on in the 1860s.
Here is Tom Taylor himself. Shortly to become editor of Punch, at this point he was an extraordinarily prolific writer of articles, jokes, and poems. And he returned repeatedly to the theme of Wandsworth Common.
Here is one: "The Warning of Wandsworth Common," 1865:
At midnight lay still on the fair West Hill,
Wandsworth snored, silent, nigh,
But for the yelling scream of the whistling steam
As the darkling trains roared by.'Twixt whistle's yell that rose and fell
I heard a voice of woe —
Through the Black Sea birches it scarcely stirred,
So faint it was, and low...
The Black Sea, if you remember, was the large lake at the top left of the Common. Wandsworth Common is here personified, speaking across the valley of the Wandle to the spirit of Wimbledon Common.
It's not great poetry, but it is deeply felt. I'd love to read and discuss the others, but sadly tonight is not the night.
I'm going to stop there. Perhaps we could take some questions.
Chair: Good. Philip, I'm so sorry — you've only covered about half.
Philip: I know. It's awful, isn't it?
Chair: I was going to say that despite having worked on the book for the last year, I've still managed to learn things tonight I had no inkling of. And as you say, there's a great deal you've had to leave out. So if any of the other editors would like to ask a question that allows Philip to develop the story further, please feel free. Otherwise, let's open it up.
Before we do — I'm very mindful that some people may only have set aside this one hour and may want to leave, and everyone is absolutely free to do so. But I think there's quite a clamour to carry on. So first, at the seven o'clock mark, a huge thank you to Philip. Please either unmute yourselves and give him a round of applause, or do a virtual clap.
[Applause]
Someone is suggesting another talk to finish the story. Philip, it depends how long you think you'd need — if this really is only half, we probably need to schedule a separate session. Or if you could tell the ending in five minutes, I'm sure everyone will stay glued to their seats.
Philip: Oh gosh, this is difficult. There is a lot of very good material — people going to prison in the defence of Wandsworth Common, and much else besides. I feel awful, because I obviously should have used my hour more wisely. But I would be very, very happy to talk again at a moment's notice. People who know me know I'm always delighted to talk about it.
Chair: Lots of people are writing in on the chat to say a second session would be very welcome. Delans is pointing out that this is already part two, following "What a Carve-Up," and is suggesting a further instalment. So shall we agree, Philip, that we'll take a few questions on what you've covered tonight and then schedule another one?
If you're willing — and I'm sure everyone here is nodding — the sense is clear: people want to hear the full story properly, not rushed in a few seconds. We will reschedule.