In the fourth part of his new blog series, Stuart Eagles looks at what the communists planned to do and what financial arrangements were reachd with Ruskin. He also introduces two new figures involved in the project. But first, he sets the scene by sharing an unfamiliar and evocative description of the Totley estate.

RUSKIN & THE COMMUNISTS (PART 4):
BUILDING TOWARDS A COMMUNITY
Stuart Eagles

“A few of the Sheffield working-men who admit the possibility of St George’s notions being just, have asked me to let them rent some ground from the Company, whereupon to spend what spare hours they have, of morning or evening, in useful labour. I have accordingly authorized the sale of £2,200 worth of our stock, to be re-invested on a little estate, near Sheffield, of thirteen acres, with good water supply. The workmen undertake to St George for his three per cent.; and if they get tired of the bargain, the land will be always worth our stock. I have no knowledge yet of the men’s plans in detail; nor […] shall I much interfere with them, until I see how they develop themselves. But here is at last a little piece of England given into the English workman’s hand, and heaven’s.” (Ruskin, Works 29.98: Fors, Letter 76 (April 1877) (written 4 March).

INTRODUCTION

Having visited Ruskin’s communist land experiment in Totley on Sunday, 5 August 1877, a correspondent of the Co-operative News, identified only by the initials W. H. C., commented that the question

“What’s in a name? has been asked over and over again a hundred times […:] words are so pliable, and can be made to mean just what the writer or reader wants them to mean.” (Co-operative News, 25 August 1877)

This echoes Ruskin’s statement in Walkley in April 1876 that communism was susceptible of many meanings.

Indeed, there was, W.H.C. believed, no finer an example of such ambiguity than was furnished by the word “Communism”. It conjured up “all sorts of terrible ideas”. But as a Co-operator and a Socialist, W.H.C. openly declared an  intention to supply encouragement to a group of people involved in “the trial of Communism about to take place” on 13 acres of Derbyshire countryside, secured for the purpose by John Ruskin.

The title of W.H.C.’s report, “Modern English Communism”, invited readers to consider this audacious land experiment as an exemplar of a new and distinctly home-grown brand of communism. In other words, it had as little to do with Old Chartism as with Marxist ideas that had not yet penetrated into British political discourse to any significant degree.

The difficulty of pinning down the political essence of the scheme is immediately confessed by W.H.C.’s anxiety about what readers might suppose communism to imply. This highlights one of the main problems that has bedevilled accounts of the Totley experiment ever since. If it has not quite defied description, it has nevertheless evaded satisfactory categorisation. The Totley experiment, and whatever form of communism it may have represented, meant different things to different people.

Subsequent scholarship has been overwhelmed by studies of failure based on slender evidence. Until recently, scholars have relied almost exclusively on retrospective accounts by two early participants, Mrs M. A. Maloy and Edward Carpenter. Both appeared in 1889 in William Morris’s socialist journal, The Commonweal. 

Mrs Maloy, who by then and like Carpenter  identified as a socialist, had been a member of the original group of self-identified secular communists who met Ruskin in Walkley in April 1876.  She would insist in a letter to the Sheffield press that she and her colleagues had formed a “short-lived society, not of Socialists, but of Communists” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1890).

The socialist writer and campaigner, Edward Carpenter, who knew Mrs Maloy and many of the other participants in the Totley experiment, visited the Totley farm and, as we shall see in a subsequent blog, joined in its work during a later period of its development under William Harrison Riley.

Mrs Maloy’s account and Carpenter’s differ on a range of details and points-of-view,, but they both agree that the venture failed, and that part of the blame rested with the communists themselves. Later, Carpenter neatly summed up his observations:

“Unfortunately the promoters of this scheme knew next to nothing of agriculture—being chiefly bootmakers, ironworkers, opticians, and the like—and naturally were ready to dogmatise in proportion to their ignorance. The usual dissensions arose—usual, I would say, wher­ever work of this kind is ruled by theories instead of by practical human needs and im­mediate desire of fellowship—and in a very short time the members of the community were hurling anathemas at each other’s heads—not to mention more solid missiles! The wives entered into the fray; and the would-be garden of Eden became so far a scene of confusion that Ruskin had to send down an ancient gardener of his (with a pitchfork instead of a flaming sword) to bar them all out, and occupy their place.” (Carpenter (1908) p. 198)

Although Carpenter’s account, and Mrs Maloy’s, have hitherto supplied some useful information about the farm, the reliance of historians on their versions of events has also limited and distorted our understanding of what actually happened, how the experiment developed, when and why certain events took place, and who was involved.

Mark Frost’s revisionary history of the Guild of St George during Ruskin’s lifetime, The Lost Companions (2014), significantly altered perspectives on all aspects of Ruskin’s philanthropic work, Totley most of all. His discovery of a range of manuscript letters in archive collections across America offered rich seams of evidence which he mined sensitively and intelligently to reveal unfamiliar perspectives and forgotten details that justified a new interpretation of the scheme.

Building on Frost’s work, and with the benefit of his transcripts of the letters he had found, Sally Goldsmith re-examined the evidence, and with the use of some additional sources, and by bringing to bear her personal connections with Totley itself, she was able further to extend our understanding of those Thirteen Acres, the title of her 2016 study.

As part of the Guild of St George’s Ruskin-in-Sheffield project, Goldsmith had already presented a perambulatory play, Boots, Fresh Air and Ginger Beer, a light-hearted but moving admix of open-air theatre and guided tour which brought history to life in 2015. (A short film of the play can be viewed online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyTOWZtHnN8.)

In these blogs, I re-examine the sources once more and uncover previously neglected ones. Like Goldsmith, I am indebted to Mark Frost’s uncommon but characteristic generosity. I have also discovered a considerable amount of material, mostly contemporary reports, letters, and articles in newspapers and journals, which have hitherto been overlooked by scholars. Taking all this evidence together, it is now possible to present a reasonably comprehensive account of events from a broad range of perspectives, and to clear up most, though not all, of the uncertainties that have hitherto frustrated attempts properly to assess the scheme.

Over time Totley developed from a communist experiment into a straightforward market garden. Hopes that it might form the basis of a new industrial village were never realised. It was the most radical and most troubled of Ruskin’s philanthropic collaborations with the people of Sheffield.

The Totley experiment was, as W.H.C. insisted, a trial of communism that took place in a period of notable political transition. The events of the 1870s occupied the volatile gap between old certainties and a more confident modernity—when the hangover of Chartism would finally yield to burgeoning new forms of socialism more or less informed by the ideas of Marx.

The marriage of Ruskin’s utopian dreams and a form of Sheffield radicalism was made possible by a shared, uncompromising rejection of the brutal realities of nineteenth-century industrial competition. Ruskin and the Sheffield communists both thought that it was essential for people to escape the noise, the smoke, and the overcrowding of the city. A new life, rooted in England’s soil and guided by broad principles of co-operation, offered to provide an alternative to the miserably competitive order of modern capitalism. Their views challenged mid-Victorian notions of society, politics and economics.

At the heart of the relationship was an uneasy but acknowledged tension between different Arcadian visions. Ruskin’s Romantic nostalgia for a quasi-religious, chivalric order was drawn from the pre-industrial, medieval past. The Sheffield communists’ secular vision of an egalitarian future was of a New Jerusalem built for the betterment of the British working class. For them, matters of faith were personal and within, totally divorced from the state. If the communists ever truly “admit[ted] the possibility of St George’s notions being just”, as Ruskin told readers of his monthly letters, Fors Clavigera, then their views seemed to change as theory and practice spectacularly collided.

One of the earliest Guild Companions, Julia Firth (1834/5-1919), who married into the Firth steel empire in Sheffield, unconsciously highlighted the central contradiction in the otherwise shared endeavour. In an intelligent summary of Ruskin’s sense of mission as expressed in his Guild of St George, she wrote in an article for the educational Parents’ Review:

“It is obvious that, without any profession of socialism or communism, the dividing of work amongst all, and the consequent spreading over the whole community of the culture derived from literature, art, and nature (all requiring leisure) is a noble piece of just legislation, promoting social life of a beautiful kind, and enabling people to enjoy in common all that the everlasting inequalities of mind and capacity will allow.” (My italics.)

They agreed on much, but the point is that one side in the original Totley collaboration did profess communism.

The history of the farm divides into three phases. The first phase, the communist experiment, is our immediate concern. In later blogs we will trace how it developed into a managed project under the no-less-radical William Harrison Riley, whom Ruskin directly appointed to the task. The third phase was essentially a retirement project for Ruskin’s gardener and factotum, David Downs, who struggled to run it as a market garden. In the end, the estate was sold into private hands, under George Pearson, though he was himself a socialist and an early supporter of the Labour Party.

THE THIRTEEN ACRES

The Ruskinian trial of communism, which began in 1877, took place at Parker House Farm, on Lower Mickley Lane, in the hamlet of Mickley, in the parish of Totley, Derbyshire.

It lay a mile-and-a-half away from Dore and Totley railway station, which was in turn a four-mile journey from Sheffield Midland station, both of them newly opened in the 1870s.  

Ruskin inaccurately but poetically called the estate Abbeydale. He preferred the mellifluous-sounding name of an area nearby which called forth thoughts of the countryside and of the medieval Beauchief Abbey. Abbeydale seems to have been what Henry Swan called it, too, probably out of deference to Ruskin, or more explicitly an effort to please him: Ruskin told Swan in a letter that Abbeydale was “[t]he very name one would have chosen” (29 December 1876) and so, in fact, it was.

At other times, the thirteen acres were referred to in Guild papers as St George’s Land, or simply as the Mickley Estate. Later, under Riley, it would be called St George’s Farm.

The property had been known locally as Badger’s Farm, informally named after its previous owners (see part two of this blog series for more about William and Jane Badger).

It was in fact an estate of between 13 and 14 acres of grassland with a broad stone farmhouse, outbuildings, and a modest garden. The site was selected in December 1876 by the Sheffield communists themselves, assisted by Henry Swan. “I am much more than glad about Abbeydale”, Ruskin told Swan on 29 December. Ruskin purchased the farm for £2,287 on behalf of what was then officially called the Company of St George. Although the conveyance was dated 8 June 1877, the experiment seems by then to have been under way for a couple of months.

The most vivid description of the landscape and the farm is furnished by W.H.C. in his report for The Co-operative News. The road from Dore and Totley Station

“lay pleasantly situated along the base of a range of hills upon our left, while to the right and stretching far away the land was beautifully undulating and covered with crops of waving corn interspersed with meadows, woods, &c., and beyond this could be seen other ranges of hills extending to the horizon.

“Suddenly we turned to the left to take a short cut across the fields, which brought us to a lane leading up to the promised land. Here we found our progress considerably impeded by a very steep incline; and if our friends find the rise in Communism as steep, they will necessarily progress but slowly, but perhaps all the more sure, for we invariably take a good foothold of terra firma when ascending its rugged sides.”

Parker House was a wide stone farmhouse, probably built in the eighteenth century, and W.H.C considered it, and the other outbuildings, “rather old-fashioned, both as regards their exterior and interior appearance”. With a low ceiling, the farmhouse, which was broad but shallow, was poorly ventilated unless a door on one side and a window on the other was left open, creating a troublesome “draught” or wind-tunnel. George Pearson, who later rented the farm from the Guild before buying the property outright to run as a family business, described it in 1926 as “a small old farm […] with an old house which had been patched up a little; three bedrooms, one rather large, now two” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph (9 January 1926).

W.H.C. reported that the farm boasted “an extensive view of the surrounding hills and valleys; the scenery is at once picturesque and beautiful”, and dotted with “small coppices and woods”. The site was

“elevated so as to obtain pure air, a delightful scenery, sheltered on the north and east by yet higher ground, the south and west sloping downwards towards the sun when in prime; also a good ironstone stream at the lower part of the ground that can be utilised for driving machinery.”

Commenting on the land in April 1877, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph acknowledged its “southern exposure” and told readers that it was “not far from the Totley Orphanage” (4 April 1877). Indeed, Totley or Cherrytree Orphanage was described by the same paper in June 1880 as

“very pleasantly situated in its own grounds, and from it a most extensive and beautiful view can be obtained. The moorlands, in the direction of Owler Bar, can be distinctly seen on the one hand, whilst on the other the eye reaches over Abbeydale, Dore, Ecclesall, towards Greystones. Another attraction the institution has, is that it is not far from the land which was secured by Mr Ruskin some time ago […]” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 19 June 1880)

(Cherrytree Orphanage was founded in 1862 and moved to Brook Hall on Mickley Lane in 1867, before the new premises just described were built on an adjacent site, opposite Ruskin’s Parker House Farm.)

The thirteen or so acres of land, with its subsoil of clay and the hard blue stone beneath it from which many local structures were built, was adjudged (by W.H.C.)

“admirably adapted for a variety of occupations to be carried on simultaneously—such as farming fowls, sheep, pigs, and cows, according to the requirements of the community.”

A portion of the farm, the correspondent of the Co-operative News suggested, might be used to grow vegetables and fruit. When the estate had been auctioned in 1858, it was described in the Telegraph as “near Mickley Colliery” and nearly half the farm at that time was given over to growing white and swede turnips (see 20 December 1858). It had previously been owned by the coal merchant, Joseph Ward (1787-1865), of Brook Hall.

According to W.H.C., the land’s natural advantages, if “combined with the manufacture of such articles as can find a ready sale, cannot, under wise management, fail to secure success to the undertaking.”  If under wise management, they may indeed have been true. Overall, the communists were “exceptionally circumstanced”, W.H.C. promisingly concluded.

As to the Sheffield Communists themselves: “between twenty and thirty persons of all ages” were involved in the settlement by August 1877, many of whom it is not possible to identify (yet, anyway). They were of “varying professions and different creeds—orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and no doxy”:

“but all were imbued with the spirit of earnestness and determination to put their faith into practice; and as in all associations we find radical and conservative parties, so in this instance I soon discovered the two sections, combined with a strongly-marked individuality of character peculiar to most large manufacturing towns.”

Far from being reckless, the conservative (cautious) element was judged to be commendably predominant. It was also noted that the commune’s more modest members disapproved of the reporter’s intention to publish an account of their venture (a position that recalls the opinion expressed by George Dawson as to the report of the communists’ meeting with Ruskin in Walkley in April 1876), while other members thought the publicity might be to the advantage of the scheme.

It is already clear that the Sheffield Communists were, as Carpenter later confirmed, anything but a homogeneous group.

THE COMMUNISTS’ PLAN

Unsatisfactorily, we are reliant for a sense of the Sheffield Communist’ mature plans for Totley on an unsympathetic piece of commentary in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. The occasion for this rather pompous, 1,500-word critique was Ruskin’s announcement in the April 1877 issue of Fors that a little piece of England had been given into the English workman’s hands, and heaven’s—from the quotation with which this blog post began.

The article refers to “the words of the promoters”, suggesting that the communists themselves had recently issued some sort of manifesto which it has been impossible ever since to track down (4 April 1877). The Independent had mentioned in its report about the communists’ meeting with Ruskin in April 1876 that in order to help raise funds the communists were “contemplating issuing a prospectus to the public” (29 April 1876).

Although some elements of the plan remained unclear, the Telegraph commented, “the Communists will no doubt make all things plain in due time” (4 April 1877). Utopias, Lands of Promise, “bits of Heaven below”, and communities “of great expectations” were “not a new thing in Sheffield”. But crucially all of them had failed, the Telegraph allegd.

The paper pointed with particular glee to an initiative of Isaac Ironside’s earlier in the century, in which Sheffield Town Council had purchased 45 acres at Hollow Meadows where they built a new kind of workhouse and permitted paupers to farm the surrounding land. The project, nicknamed New England, collapsed under the pressure of poor management and disputes about strategy.

This new experiment at Totley “may be more successful”, the commentator in the Telegraph sceptically mused early on in the article, only to reveal his hand later when he opines that “[t]he principles of the Commune are strong, and may last for a season even at Totley when the rains fall and the winds beat about those hills”.

It is instructive to sense the paper’s framing of the background to the scheme. For some time, a dozen individuals had been convinced that “the world is out of joint”.

“They were not satisfied with what they were doing for the world, and they were still not satisfied with what the world was doing for them.”

After much cogitation they had concluded that “there was but one cure for the evil in the world, and that the cure was—the Commune”. Looking around them for an Apostle, they were relieved to find John Ruskin, who had recently commenced a museum in Walkley. They had not become Companions of his Company, but they had accepted St George’s “commandments” as just—at least (the paper added pointedly) to the satisfaction of “their own mind[s]”. 

None of “the ‘banded brothers’” had “put down any money for their pretty little project. They applied to Mr Ruskin instead, and Mr Ruskin, with delightful ingenuousness, consented.”

Even the Telegraph conceded, though with a singular lack of grace and generosity, that as communists went, this group was as moderate and reasonable as could be found. “They are good enough to say that their intentions are peaceable. They do not mean to overturn Church and State; they are not bent on any kind of rebellion” and they had even undertaken to pay their “rates and taxes”.

Visitors to the commune would be welcome, but they would be greeted “in the hope of converting them to Communism”.

Summarising the Sheffield Communists’ guiding principles, the Telegraph reported:

“Here, on thirteen acres of soil […], a dozen families are to form a Commune. They will labour in common, and throw all the profits into a common fund. There are to be no masters, but all are to be on an equal footing. The name of the country is to be Equality Country. Their intention is to manufacture everything they need for their own use; and if they have any surplus, to sell it to the outside barbarians.”

This, the newspaper insisted, was their first problem.

“Twelve families, it is clear, cannot make everything they need to eat, to drink, and to put on.”

They probably would “not grow tea and coffee” or

“go into the sowing and reaping of grain, the rearing and slaughtering of cattle, the manufacturing of cutlery, the making of crockery, and the thousand and one things which man, even in a Commune, has come to regard as indispensable.”

Despite this, even the Telegraph did not feel justified in accusing the group of hopeless impracticability. “Our Totley Communists have taken all these things into account”, the paper admitted.

“They do not mean to make everything at once. They are to content themselves at first with being a community of shoemakers and potato-planters. They will give what attention they can to producing pelargoniums as well as potatoes, and though they at present limit their aspirations to vegetables, they hope in later days to reap the fruit of the vine.”

In the absence of whatever document these claims were based on, it is impossible to know whether the Sheffield Communists truly thought their south-sloping hills could triumph over the local, mid–Victorian climate so far as to permit successful grape-growing, but their plan was certainly to slake the thirsts and satisfy the appetites of visitors by the provision of refreshments, as we shall see.

Descending into sarcasm, the Telegraph warned that “Aesthetic souls like theirs [i.e. the Ruskinian communists] are not disposed to have too much trafficking with the ill-conditioned world they have left behind. They are to be a self-contained community.” Nevertheless, the communists would “not be above making a revenue by supplying the visitors with—refreshments.” The mocking dramatic pause gave way to the comment that what the “many pleasure-seekers” that went “Dore and Totley way of a summer afternoon” might expect to sample was yet unknown.

“It is not explained what specific kind of refreshment will be supplied in Equality Country. Mr Ruskin is ‘dead’ upon beer, and the Sheffield pleasure-seeker has rather a liking for the product of the malt.”

Whatever inducements the communists could offer, the Telegraph was never likely to be shaken from its conviction that the scheme was doomed to fail, and with acerbic levity they speculated about what might bring the Commune down. “Of course”, they confidently predicted

“like the more famous Twelve of old, the Totley Disciples of the Commune must have some Judas to carry the bag. Let us whisper a word in their ear. They are ‘sworn together’, we are told. Let them take care that their Judas has had nothing to do with […]  commercial enterprises [… for otherwise] the common stock will be uncommonly small.”

The paper then prophesied that the “feminine affection for fashion” would bring about the Commune’s downfall. In what is undoubtedly the worst display of nineteenth-century male middle-class chauvinism in the whole article, the paper misogynistically asked, “How are the ladies to be managed?” It is notable in this context that the most powerful testimony of the commune’s history would come from one of its female members, M. A. Maloy. The paper continued, “Totley cannot make silks and satins, or compete with Paris in hats and bonnets. If the wife of an Egyptian passes that way with something new in garments, woe to that Communist whose wife sees the stranger.” The danger of accepting female visitors was that they would “revive female love of finery” and “fashion” would once more “assert its force”.

At that point the communists could bid “farewell to all hopes of that thirteen acres becoming a new Eden, where modern Adams may delve and nineteenth-century Eves may spin’. In a final flourish of class prejudice, the paper predicted the demise of the commune, when “no one [would] seek to play the part of gentlemen”. The English workman, in other words, had no business to claim “a little piece of England” for his own, even as part of a collective.

A report in The Times a few days later sought to correct a misapprehension. It was not true that “12 families” had thrown their earnings “into a common stock” as part of the experiment—a claim that was a matter of “surprise to those who have taken a leading part in the movement” (9 April 1877). Rather, , the report stated

“At most two families will live on the estate until it is known that the scheme is a success, the object of its promoters being simply to carry on the boot and shoe-making trade on co-operative principles, in antagonism to the modern system of producing, by means of machinery, cheap and nasty goods, and if in this they succeed, they may gradually increase the number of their dwellings and farm the whole into a co-operative village.”

A QUESTION OF MONEY

Ruskin, The Times continued,

“has expressed his willingness to accept his co-operative friends as tenants until the annual interest they may contribute shall have cleared off the capital.”

It is not entirely clear what this means. Many of the communists seemed to think that they would become outright owners of the land after Ruskin’s investment of £2,287 was paid off by them, meaning that in effect they were not “tenants” but were re-paying a generous interest-free mortgage. Mrs Maloy’s recollection deployed strikingly similar language: each male member of the community, she claimed, was required to pay back his share of the “capital”. But, again, to what “capital” was she referring? She went into greater detail, and said that the repayment was to take seven years and that the men signed an agreement undertaking to do so. Ownership of the land would then transfer to the communists. In the meantime, Ruskin charged no interest, but neither did he grant them “legal authority” of possession, a state of affairs to which Mrs Maloy strongly objected. She, however, was overruled by the majority of the communists who trusted Ruskin implicitly.

Mark Frost discovered a “Memorandum of Agreement” made between the “United Friends Association, Parker House, Abbeydale, Totley” and John Ruskin, copied out by Henry Swan, and dated 6 June 1877, two days before the farm was officially conveyed to Ruskin from the Badgers (Frost, p. 138).

The agreement is signed by nine members of the so-called United Friends’ Association: Edwin Priest, Joseph Daniels, Frederick Williams, John Maloy, W[illiam] Skelton Hunter, Henry Fellows, Ebenezer Richardson, Joseph Sharpe, and Henry Richardson. Most of these names are already familiar to reads of this series of blog posts, and we will return to them, adding something about those not mentioned before (Ebenezer Richardson and Joseph Sharpe).

For now, though, we will stick to the details of the agreement. These nine men undertook to pay Ruskin £50 each within seven years of the date of the agreement, the United Friends Association taking responsibility if any member failed to fulfil his responsibility. But exactly what this agreement and the nine payments of £50 represents has caused confusion. Frost considered that the memorandum “explains [Mrs] Maloy’s belief that the men thought they would become owners of the site after seven years”, but he noted the disparity between the £450 thus guaranteed under its terms and the £2,287 that was the total capital expended on the farm by Ruskin, and he asked “was Ruskin really willing to part with a property at that level of loss? If not, what did the payment represent?” (Frost, p. 138). Frost’s alternative suggestion was that the June 1877 memorandum was a rental agreement, indicating, if Mrs Maloy’s understanding was commonly shared among the communists, that “the two parties were at cross-purposes from the start” (Frost, p. 139).

Sally Goldsmith has suggested that the memorandum was “the agreement to take on the farm” signed by “the original nine” communists, and as such it represented some sort of long-term lease agreement in which the £450 counted as rent, or a form of leasehold mortgage, or a mixture of the two (Goldsmith, pp. 33, 38, 39).

Other possibilities might be suggested, as well as additional questions raised. Some of the differences in the explanations might though be reconciled if one takes it to be a Ruskinian test of constancy and faith: if the nine communists, individually or collectively, could honour the nine £50 payments over a period of seven years, Ruskin would reward them with permanent possession of the farm—if not “ownership” of it in the legal sense, then long-term rent-free occupancy.

Questions remain. We can be pretty sure that George Dawson and George Shaw were still involved in the farm at this point, so why are their names conspicuous by their absence? Most references to the early communists are anyway to twelve families, not nine.

The most likely explanation of the memorandum, I suggest, is outlined in a letter Ruskin wrote to Henry Swan on 12 May 1877:

“I have just received your very precious note, giving me account of the passing of the three resolutions in the working men’s council [presumably the United Friends’ Association].  At their next meeting, will you say to them, that since they thus adopt St George’s rule, he gives them their land rentless, as long as they observe such rule, requiring only in such time as may be convenient to them, return of monies laid out on the estate, in stocking and building: and that they keep their own houses or shops in a manner creditable and secure against dilapidation. Other such conditions I have no doubt we shall easily agree upon.” (My italics.)

A couple of weeks later Ruskin wrote to Swan, “I see you are alarmed at the idea of ‘no rent’, and accepted that “nominal ren”’ and “the delivery of a certain quantity of goods at fixed price” would secure the property and the project to the Guild (4 June 1877). Such goods almost certainly included shoes and edible produce, and Ruskin probably had the shoemaking business specifically in mind when he told Swan, “I am greatly surprised at having no word from any of you about the requirement of open accounts, and of manufacture by our own—not our customers’ patterns” (12 May 1877).

The previously overlooked testimony of W.H.C. in the Co-operative News supports the suggestion in Ruskin’s letter to Swan that the money referred to in the memorandum of agreement Frost discovered, and to be paid back to Ruskin by the nine named communists within seven years, related to the “return of monies laid out on the estate, in stocking and building”. W.H.C. specifically mentions an interest-free loan of £500 from Ruskin to the communists. The loan was intended to help the communists with living costs, the initial acquisition of stock, and/or to finance a building programme. The fact that no loan appears in the Guild’s accounts is not surprising given that the agreement was between the men and their Association on the one part, and Ruskin, rather than St George’s Company, on the other.

W.H.C. had discovered that “the future home of our friends had been obtained under much more favourable circumstances than as stated in the public newspapers”. The rent had been rescinded, and “Mr Ruskin had generously offered to erect all suitable buildings for dwellings and workshops”: an interest-free loan of £500 had been given for the purpose; “the said £500 to be returned” after seven years, “or they are to show cause why”. Why the agreement is signed by nine men, each promising £50 and thus amounting to a total of £450, leaving the total repayment £50 short, remains a puzzle. Would the Association collectively take responsibility for the final 10%, or as a sort of tithe, would Ruskin himself, or the Guild as a corporate body, take responsibility for it? Such questions remain unanswerable. “Now”, the reporter to the Co-operative News concluded, “could any terms be more favourable? Are they generous beyond all praise?” Or was W.H.C. merely under the same misapprehension as the communists, and did Ruskin always remember the details of the agreements he made?

George Pearson, who notably made a commercial success of running the farm as a market garden later on, wrote that he believed “most or all of [the communists] had a business or trade’ before joining the experiment (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 9 January 1926). He continued:

“I understand that Ruskin let them have the place with a sum of money for them to live on until they had got the place transformed from a farm to what they wanted it [to be]; but I never heard of Communism being practical, for, I believe, anyone that did any work received so much per hour. If they did I should think it would be from a different school from that of to-day.”

According to Mrs Maloy, the communists made a regular contribution to a fund, out of which such costs as wages for working managers were paid. Whether Pearson’s testimony is accurate or otherwise, he provides instructive testimony both of the romantic legend that attached to the farm and of the sobering reality of what actually took place.

It is difficult to calculate the contemporary value of such a sum as £500, but a rough estimate was around £30,000 by 2020. This certainly may have been intended for building work. As far back as March 1877 Ruskin had told Swan that “St George” would do “the building work” for the communists, “provided he has security for the return of the money within a given period, without interest” (25 March 1877). This exactly describes the condition of the £500 loan agreement over seven years. But there is also reason to think that the loan might have been for stock. In April 1877 Ruskin had told Swan that he had written to George Shaw, the shoemaker, “saying I will advance the money to stock the estate—with some other particulars” (26 April 1877) (see Frost, p. 140). That could indeed account for the £500, or part of it, though it again begs questions as to why Shaw’s name should not be among the nine signatories to the agreement? Two possibilities suggest themselves: the money was sent to Shaw because the main expense was deemed to be the shoemaking business, and Shaw was the only professional shoemaker in the company; and because Shaw would necessarily lead and manage the shoemaking business, he was exempted from responsibility to re-pay Ruskin for the loan in recognition of his contribution in the form of knowledge, skill and time. 

Shaw was clearly the leading man in the estate’s overall arrangements. Ruskin explained further that he had written to the Guild’s trustee, Mr Temple “enclosing Mr Shaw’s letter; and I think it is likely he may be interested by it, and may help us in the matter of farm stock, more than most landlords”. not least because Temple’s own farm at the Broadlands estate in Hampshire was “very beautifully cared for”. A fortnight later, Ruskin told Swan he was anxious that Shaw had not replied to a long letter he had sent him (11 & 14 May 1877), but by June he mentioned that he was considering Shaw’s suggestion of purchasing a further four acres at Totley—an option evidently never  pursued (4 June 1877).

One matter the memorandum of agreement does partly address is the list of questions Ruskin asked Swan towards the end of March 1877:

“I must know how many men I have to deal with; and what form of association they are in. Is the lease to be drawn to them as a company, or is the ground to be divided, and as much taken by each man as he can manage[?]” (25 March 1877).

This agreement names nine men banded together collectively as the United Friends’ Association, which we should reasonably take to be what the communists called themselves, or at least how their council styled itself. Given its Quakerish undertones, we can also see the influence of Priest and perhaps also of Swan in its creation.

JOSEPH SHARPE AND EBENEZER RICHARDSON

Of the nine signatories named in the agreement with Ruskin, at least four had met Ruskin at the museum in Walkley in April 1876: Priest, Daniels, Williams, and Skelton Hunter; and at least two of the remaining five were involved with the group of secularists at the Hall of Science, namely Fellows and Henry Richardson. Six of the nine—Daniels, Williams, Fellows, Henry Richardson, John Maloy and Sharpe—were named on Swan’s list of (evidently successful) “Candidates for Abbeydale”. Daniels and Skelton Hunter were also on Swan’s contact list of “Working Men”. The order in which the names appear on the agreement is probably not significant, though Priest, as President, of the group of communists, does come first, and Daniels, listed second, was probably the most successful commercially-speaking after Priest.

Of the two signatories whose lives we have not yet explored, much more can be said of Joseph Sharpe than of Ebenezer Richardson. So to start with Ebenezer Richardson: he is the only person whose name does not appear anywhere else. An “E. Richardson” is listed twice in Guild accounts: first, in the museum accounts, on 7 July 1877, paid 10s. for “planting trees” (Works, 30.113); second, more germanely, in Guild accounts, on 31 August 1878, paid £2 10s. in respect of wages for work at Totley (Works, 30.115). Though Sally Goldsmith takes both E. Richardsons to be one and the same, it is not certain that they are, and she acknowledges that this might not be Ebenezer, in any case (see Goldsmith, p. 36). Goldsmith concludes that the man who signed the agreement in June 1877 was 63-year-old engine fitter Ebenezer Richardson (1813-1886) who lived in Totley (see Goldsmith, p. 36) and that might be so.  It might, however, have been his son, Ebenezer Richardson (1848-1926), a sewing machine maker, who by the time of the 1881 census also lived in Totley with his wife and young family. In terms of age, he seems more plausible. If “our” Ebenezer was a sewing-machine maker, it would be interesting to know what he made of Ruskin’s condemnation of sewing machines in his interview with the communists at Walkley in April 1876 (see Works, 30.36). Ruskin, it should be noted, banned the use of sewing machines on St George’s Land in Letter 59 of Fors (November 1875) (see Works, 28.453).

We are on sure ground with Joseph Sharpe (1817-1889), however. A professional harpist, he was immortalized as the communist minstrel in an affectionate pen-portrait by his friend, Edward Carpenter. This portrait first appeared in William Morris’s Commonweal in 1889, but when Carpenter came to revise the account in the chapter, “A Pair of Communists” in his Sketches from Life in Town and Country (pp. 196-205), Sharpe was re-cast, or possibly misremembered, as Joseph Blount. The communist with whom he was paired was another Totley alumnus, William Harrison Riley, whom we’ll meet presently.

Born in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire, Sharpe had been unhappily apprenticed as a butcher, and found that he could not kill a goose. Dejected, he joined the police force, and afterwards worked in a factory (he was still a warp-loom hand when the census was conducted in 1851). By the late 1840s, however, and boasting a good singing voice, he learned to play the harp. He was then in his early 30s with a wife and a young family to support. In the 1850s, however, he made the transition to professional musician, and wandered around the village feasts and floral well-dressings of Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire, sometimes accompanied by a young son, who played the fiddle. Sharpe took his socialist literature as well as his music to the inns, pubs, and taverns of the north and midlands.

Carpenter describes a man of almost military bearing, with a grey moustache, a red scarf, and an old greatcoat, who in his sixties was young of mind and walked as quickly as a youth. After the ultimate disappointment of the Totley years, he nevertheless retained his faith in socialism, and readily worked on Carpenter’s fields at Millthorpe. As the historian Sheila Rowbotham, a biographer of Carpenter, has put it: “Argumentative and obstinate, [Sharpe] was a great reader and debater, wrote poetry and watched stars” (p. 66).

Looking at the ages of those associated with Totley, we find that in 1877 (to present them in descending order of age) Priest turned 63; Sharpe 60; Downs 59; Ruskin 58; Henry Richardson 53; Henry Swam 52; Fellows 50; Shaw and Daniels 43; Riley 42; Hunter 39; Mrs Harriet Shaw and Mrs Mary Ann Maloy 38; Dawson 36; Edward Carpenter 33; and John Maloy 28. Ebenezer Richardson was either 64 or 29 depending on whether father or son was involved. It is quite a mix, and whilst most were involved in some way in ironwork, it is true that none had obvious experience of agriculture or horticulture, and only one (Shaw) had mastered a trade (shoemaking) that would be of immediate use and value to the community.

Next time, I outline the history of the Totley experiment during its first phase which involved the Sheffield Communists. I ask who did what, and trace the fault-lines that led to its first failure and the ending of the original collaboration between Ruskin and the radical group of northern workers… 

Sources Cited

Carpenter, Edward: Sketches from Life in Town and Country, and Some Verse (George Allen, 1908)

Firth, Julia: “St George’s Guild: the Education of the Children” in Parents Review, vol. 2 (1891/92) pp. 276-82

Frost, Mark: The Lost Companions and Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (Anthem Press, 2014)

Goldsmith, Sally: Thirteen Acres: John Ruskin and the Totley Communists (Guild of St George, 2016)

[Maloy, Mary Ann] (M.A.M): “Mr Ruskin and Socialists” (A Letter) in Sheffield Daily Telegraph (13 January 1890)

[Pearson, George] (G.P.T.): “Ruskin Communism at Totley” in Sheffield Daily Telegraph (9 January 1926)

Rowbotham, Sheila: Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (Verso Books, 2008)

1. H. C.: “Modern English Communism” in The Co-operative News (25 August 1877)

 

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