The Development of Allotments and Smallholdings in the Fens

As a result of the agricultural depression there was increased poverty in rural areas especially amongst farm labourers and smaller farmers. Several solutions were considered by government to help the situation. Emigration of people from Britain to various corners of the British Empire was one solution, but this was opposed by some quoting the poet Oliver Goldsmith:

Ill fares the land, to hasting ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay,

A breath can make them, as breath hath made;

But a bold Peasantry, their country’s pride,

When once destroy’d can never be supplied.

These words were originally applied to Irish migration to America and elsewhere in the 1760’s, but the issue of losing an active population of workers was feared politically and economically, alongside this was the fear of organised unrest or even revolution. It as to be noted that the policy of emigration of working class was not only applied to the rural poor and we would see it used on the industrial workers as they experienced unemployment and destitution as we entered the twentieth century.

An alternative for the rural poor was to encourage allotments to reduce their pull on parish resources by increasing self-sufficiency. What also arose was the concept of setting up smallholdings. This was a preferred action as smallholders could be fully self-reliant and still be available for seasonal work for the larger farms and land owners.

In 1894 Holland County Council purchased 30 acres of land at Chapel Hill and 20 acres of land at Gosberton for smallholdings and allotments. The drive behind this was so great by Richard Winfrey that between March 1891 and December 1894 he had procured 378 acres to be allocated for smallholdings and allotments within a two mile stretch from the edge of Spalding to Deeping St Nicholas creating 161 holdings with 130 tenants. As trustee of Guys Hospital Estate, Lord Carrington also offered Willow Tree Farm in Deeping St Nicholas to create smallholdings.

Within a year the Willow Tree Farm Syndicate comprised of 63 tenants. Richard Winfrey was challenged as to whether it was paying, so he analysed the activity  of six acres occupied by four tenants: “…..two acres were sown with wheat, two acres oats, one acre barley and one acre potatoes. In the first year after paying all outgoings which include a one off heavy cost of initial equipment he assessed the manual labour put in by the tenants amounted to £18 2s. 8d. plus employed gang labour of £9 paid to higglers[1] who were also tenants. Scaled up the total profit of the Willow Tree Farm tenants amounted to £485, and that is after £240 had been spent on their own labour which was supplied within the tenants and their families.”  I take note that Richard Winfrey gave a value to the tenants work, an omission I have often see being made by modern family farms.

Lord Carrington was highly pleased with the project and pointed out that it had enabled some tenants to get up the next rung of the ladder by acquiring teams (of horses) and cultivation equipment. He stated that in Cumberland and the eastern counties (meaning Norfolk and Suffolk) such projects failed, but in the north of England, in Lancashire, Durham and Northumberland success of smallholdings had been reported. Politically it is interesting that Lord Carrington stated, “Some people had been desirous of turning England into a paradise of small holders only; on the contrary, he contended that there was room for all sizes of farms.” This policy he refers to was first a Liberal and then a Socialist policy that later became a National Socialist policy advocated by H.G. Wells and Oswald Mosely in the 1930’s.

The success of the smallholdings and allotments in the Spalding area was heralded as it ensured more households were self-sustaining. There was less pauperism, resulting in less draw on the parish purse. The late 1890’s saw some severe winters but, “…the home-grown flour, the potato heap , and the bacon flitch, all the outgrowth of the plot of land, have been the salvation of many a family when the purse has been absolutely empty and the ground frost-locked, and when, but for this reserve of food, there would have been no alternative but a visit to the Relieving Officer.”[2]

Across the country in England and Wales as a whole by 1895  only 83 of the 573 Rural Sanitary Authorities of England and Wales had acquired only 1836 acres divided amongst 4711 tenants. Furthermore only 12 County Councils had secured land amounting to 413 acres divided amongst 825 tenants. On a national scale the policy was underfunded and ineffective. However,  the Spalding area and South Holland was punching above its weight. At this time, where smallholdings and allotments were used in rural areas it was deemed that it reduced migration of  rural labour into industrial towns and cities and redirected their emigration abroad.

In my opinion it should be noted that in the Spalding area and across the Fens success was aided because there was already a culture of smallholders. These were the fenmen  that were cottagers – owning their modest homes whilst working for local farmers and reaping the fruits of the fen, such as eels, fish, reeds, wildfowl, eggs and peat. I believe that this culture helped the uptake in success of these smallholdings. This is in contrast to the high failure rate when people were migrated from industrial areas into smallholdings during the inter-war depression as they were effectively dumped into a foreign culture.

The smallholdings did act as an economic and social stepladder and some got larger and became successful farmers and contractors, or grew organically taking over neighbour’s smallholdings and allotments over time. Several family farms in the Fens can trace their roots to these beginnings.

[1] “higglers” was a general term in England referring to travellers selling things, in Lincolnshire  it came to be used to refer to casual workers employed for weeding and the term “higgling” referred to the task of weeding by hand with a hoe regardless of whether the person doing it was a traveller or local.

[2] Richard Winfrey