Wandsworth Common

This Association match took place on the ground of the Casuals at Wandsworth Common, resulting in a victory for the home team by five goals to two. Neither side played full strength. The ground, owing to recent frost and heavy rains, was in very rotten and sloppy condition, but the play throughout was wonderfully fast. Farmer scored two goals in the second half to secure the victory for the Casuals.

It was agreed that Mr Meaden be reappointed as the representative of the Wandsworth District Board at the Board of Wandsworth Common Conservators. He lived in the neighbourhood of the Common and had served the Metropolitan Board well in the past.

The Wandsworth working men's Conservative dinner was reported with some sarcasm in the "Peter Pickup" column of the South London Press. The committee could have sold another hundred tickets. "Conservatives working men who with a shilling... received a pasteboard in golden letters... indicating that [they] could enjoy... roast beef, roast chicken, ham, boiled [vegetables] etc." One speaker desired to have Mr Rose's language recorded on imperishable stone; another (Mr Kimber MP) had made his debut in the House of Commons, he claimed, in obedience to a special request from the front Treasury bench. "Lord Salisbury must have been in a parlous state when he had to send express requests to the member for Wandsworth to support him with his maiden oratory."

"Attracted day after day by the headline 'Spoliation of Wandsworth Common' in my favourite morning paper, I journeyed south of the Thames two days since to see the encroachment for myself. For an hour I failed either to find it, or to meet anyone who could tell me where it was. At last one of the keepers of the Common pointed out the corner, and thither I repaired. At first I confessed to being fairly astonished that so much fuss had been made about so trifling a matter — the denounced spoliation consisting merely of a couple of tracks, very ugly, certainly, across the furze, to give approach to a farm."

The inhabitants of Battersea and Wandsworth had a clear grievance against the Royal Commissioners of the Patriotic Fund. In 1858 the lord of the manor and commoners of Battersea and Wandsworth had "generously allowed some fifty-five acres of the common... to be transferred to the Royal Commissioners of the Patriotic Fund, for the purpose of a site for two schools for the maintenance and education of the orphan children of our soldiers and sailors." Since then, the Commissioners had sold the boys' school with eleven acres, and had leased for profit nearly twenty acres of the girls' school site to a market gardener who was also "a lime and cement merchant, a tar pavior, and a contractor for public works, whose horses and carts have for months past been working over a portion of the common, doing damage to the turf and the footpaths."