Why did the collaboration in Totley between Ruskin and the original group of Sheffield Communists end in failure? In the sixth post of his new blog series, Stuart Eagles also follows the lives of some of the secularist radicals after their dreams of establishing a co-operative village had been shattered…
RUSKIN & THE COMMUNISTS (PART 6):
FAILURE & AFTERLIVES
Stuart Eagles
DISUNITED FRIENDS: THE FAILURE OF THE FIRST PHASE OF THE TOTLEY EXPERIMENT
The correspondent of The Co-operative News, W.H.C., had grandly concluded in the summer of 1877 that only “total depravity or total incapacity” on the part of the communists could lead to failure:
“the eye of the world will be upon them; they will be like a city set upon a hill, unto which people will turn their attention, some to criticise or laugh at, others to praise or blame.”
And yet, for all that, there were already matters of concern that the reporter could not resist hinting at.
“I was rather surprised to find [that the communists] had not completed the rules of the society; and other matters also presented themselves to me that seemed open to criticism but that is not to be wondered at, when a fair view is taken of all the circumstances by which they are surrounded.”
W.H.C.’s hope—and no doubt that of the Sheffield Communists themselves—was that such matters would soon be resolved and that subsequent reports of its progress, written by future visitors, would “convince the most obstinate sceptic” that the scheme was “superior to any that ha[d] ever yet been tried”:
“I would entreat them to regard themselves as the modern pioneers of a new era of freedom from the powerful grasp of the privileged classes.”
They would, however, be “beset by hostile critics on all sides”. Even so, W. H. C., for his part, kept the faith and continued to have high hopes, which were flamboyantly and floridly expressed:
“Let ‘Excelsior!’ be their motto and ‘Fidelity!’ their watchword, and, with the material advantages which they command, they will become the saviour of their fellows.”
Mrs Maloy made it clear in her letter to The Commonweal in 1889, more than a decade after walking away from the experiment, that William Harrison Riley, who had entered the fray and of whom she took a dim view, had been wrongly described by Edward Carpenter in his tribute to Joseph Sharpe published in the same journal. Carpenter had said that Riley was “the most active and least voluble amongst us” (see Maloy, p. 165). Rather, she insisted, Riley had “no connexion of any sort with us, nor was he even friendily [sic] disposed to us” (Maloy, p. 165). Mrs Maloy’s animosity towards Riley is plain to see, and her language implies that at this time she did not consider George Shaw one of “us” either, since we know that Shaw was friendly with Riley, even after the scheme’s failure.
To be fair to all concerned, Riley himself corrected Carpenter’s serious but unintentional misrepresentation of his own role at Totley: he was not a member of the Sheffield Communists’ committee, he wrote:
“I never attended any of its meetings, and was not responsible for its shortcomings. Indeed, I was the ‘retainer’ of the [G]uild first authorised by Ruskin to check the proceedings of the committee.
“I will not here attempt to explain why the committee failed. Most, if not all, of its members were honest and earnest”. (The Commonweal, 5:171 (20 April 1889) p. 125)
Shortly after it was published in 1889, Mrs Maloy’s article was sent to Ruskin who was, by then, frail with old age and poor mental health. He responded that
“I want to learn all I can of what has been doing, or undoing, since I was last at Sheffield […] assuredly I get no good of the land, but have, on the contrary, paid constantly annual losses on it. […]” (The Commonweal, 5:179 (15 June 1889) p. 189)
Ruskin’s remarks were widely syndicated in local newspapers, from which it was later quoted in the Library Edition of Ruskin’s Works (34.619-620).
Ruskin pointed out that the Guild owned the farm at Totley, and that he did not personally own it, and he blamed “the obsolete language of British law” for many of the difficulties that had beset its faithful utilisation (The Commonweal, 5:179 (15 June 1889) p. 189). Although this letter was reproduced by Cook and Wedderburn, the identity of the man who had sent the a copy of Mrs Maloy’s article to Ruskin in the first place has not been explored. He is named in The Commonweal as H[enry] Sutton Frizelle (1861-1920), an Irish schoolmaster, an ardent socialist and am enthusiastic member of Isaac Pitman’s National Phonographic Society.
Nearly seven months later, on 9 January 1890, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph republished Ruskin’s response to The Commonweal correspondence, under the headline, “Mr Ruskin and the Socialists”. Mrs Maloy wrote in to take exception to the Telegraph’s description of her article as “an attack on Mr Ruskin in regard to his action towards the Dore and Totley commune of St George” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1890).
“Now, sir,” she wrote,
“will you kindly allow me, through the medium of your paper, to correct this by informing you and your readers that there was no attack on Mr Ruskin, but a true and, as far as possible, a full account of the short-lived society, not of Socialists, but of Communists, for whom Mr Ruskin purchased the land now known as St George’s Farm? It is a true and straightforward statement of facts, and I am the writer. And now to correct Mr Ruskin’s correction. I am quite aware that the land is not his now, but I assert that it was his when he placed the man mentioned on it, and it was absolutely his for several years after. It is now legally possessed by the executors of St George’s Guild. M. A. M.” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1890).
The Totley estate was not in fact in Ruskin’s ownership “for several years after” Riley replaced the original Sheffield Communists (the United Friends), but Mrs Maloy was right that ownership did not pass to the Guild for nearly a year after the communists ceased their association with it.
Given the sort of optimism expressed in The Co-operative News, it is no wonder that ever since the communist experiment at Totley failed, people have wanted to understand why it did not succeed.
The anarchist George Sturt (1863-1927) made enquiries about Totley in The Commonweal after reading about it in the pages of the journal courtesy of Edward Carpenter’s eulogy to Joseph Sharpe. Sturt was eager, he wrote, to know why “that unsuccessful Communistic farm at Totley” had failed (George Sturt, “A Query” in The Commonweal, 5:171 (20 April 1889), p. 125).
As George Bourne, Sturt became a celebrated writer on rural life and craft. In his memoir, The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923), he wrote that
“Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera had made me think meanly, if not meanly enough, of the school teaching which had been my work since 1878; and under the same influence of Ruskin’s book I felt that man’s only decent occupation was in handicraft.” (Sturt, p. 12)
It was Sturt’s expression of curiosity about the Totley experiment that in turn prompted Mrs Maloy’s long and impassioned letter of reminiscence.
Edward Carpenter had written that the communists were ‘mostly great talkers’ but little more (Carpenter, Commonweal, p. 74). The communists’ lack of experience in farming and their need to continue practicing their urban trades made the project dependent on hired practical managers, and they did not seem to have chosen their managers well.
On the other hand, George Sturt considered the communists’ independent livelihoods to be a strength.
“Had they been dependent on the farm for their living, their want of practical knowledge would naturally have been fatal; but as they appear to have got their living from other sources, a few mistakes might have been discouraging, but need hardly have been totally disheartening, to men with sufficient initiative to start such a scheme.”
Whilst the communists shared a common desire to escape from urban misery to the clean air, natural beauty and simpler ways of the countryside, they were not “united friends” when it came to the practical steps they needed to take to achieve their goals. They never seem to have agreed on a coherent scheme or programme, let alone a plan of action. Carpenter, who penned the most vividly worded account of the farm’s failings, declared unflatteringly in The Commonweal that the “fiasco of St George’s Farm” ended in “the usual dissensions […]—usual, I would say, wherever work of this kind is ruled by theories instead of by practical human needs and immediate desire of fellowship”.
Whilst some leading members of the association such as Shaw and Dawson were keen to pursue co-operative shoemaking on the farm, and some of their friends seemed willing to learn the craft in support of that venture, others appear to have been less enthusiastic, or at any rate more focussed on producing saleable food like eggs, fruit and vegetables. The two strands of the experiment’s work ought to have been complimentary, but that does not appear to have been the case.
Differences between members of the group were most starkly illustrated by the association’s (or committee’s) refusal to permit its leading and originating member, not to mentions its only shoemaker, George Shaw, to live and work on site. This is not necessarily evidence of a lack of interest in shoemaking per se, but it may have been symptomatic of troubling personality clashes and of a degree of mistrust. It was certainly a result of a lack of confidence: Shaw’s demand for a financial guarantee against loss was dismissed as unacceptably needy; the committee’s reluctance to put the group’s money into the only viable plan that seems to have been proposed seems like an opportunity missed.
Then there was the disagreement over accepting money from Ruskin. If the committee had resolved not to take any more money from Ruskin, then Shaw’s alleged action in cashing a cheque for £100 was at best discourteous and undisciplined, and at worst arbitrary and insubordinate. If the association had no policy on whether to accept further financial support from Ruskin, then the committee was shamefully ill-prepared and Shaw merely acted precipitately; if Shaw’s only offence was not to seek the specific approval of the committee to accept money which the group had accepted in principle, then the objection of the majority was petulant and ill-advised. The lack of detailed information frustrates attempts to reach a clear judgement, but all the plausible scenarios point to deep and growing mistrust among increasingly disunited friends.
In November 1877 Ruskin wrote about the folly of getting on “by vote of the majority” and bemoaned “the incompatibility of getting on in that popular manner” (Works, 29.273). Ruskin dismissed the communists’ commitment to democratic principles as a flawed posture taken because he was absent abroad and had had no opportunity to set them straight. Happily, however, they had since repented, or so he believed: “it is at any rate to be counted as no small success that they have entirely convinced themselves” to abandon democracy (Works, 29.273). What gave him such an impression? Had Shaw declared his intention to disregard the committee’s resolutions? According to Mrs Maloy, it was a majority vote that would, within a couple of months, prove pivotal in the final rupture within the communist group itself and between them and Ruskin. Perhaps Ruskin had at least convinced Shaw to abandon democracy? We do not know. But Ruskin’s satisfaction that he had got his own way was certainly ill-timed, and if he succeeded in anything at this point, it was in stoking a fatal difference of opinion among the communists themselves.
There is no way of knowing whether Mrs Maloy accurately described George Shaw’s hope of relocating both his family and business to the farm. Whatever the details of the case, it is clear that Shaw’s expectations were significantly misaligned with the majority of his friends, and if the group had adopted a mechanism to arbitrate such disputes then it suffered a catastrophic double failure in alienating both sides, only uniting the friends in the one thing they presumably hoped to avoid—their resolve completely to abandon the project. Again, Carpenter puts it best: the “would-be garden of Eden” failed because the communists were
“ready to dogmatise in proportion to their ignorance: and in a very short time they were hurling anathemas at each other’s heads; peace and fraternity were turned into missiles and malice […]” (Carpenter, Commonweal, p. 74)
The many differences between the friends—within the association and committee—ultimately seem less significant than the fundamental incompatibility between the communists and Ruskin. George Sturt remarked that “Ruskin (to whom I owe it that I am a Socialist) has strong ideas on government and obedience” (Sturt, p. 125). Indeed, in the fifth letter of Fors (May 1871) Ruskin had written that “We will have no liberty upon” St George’s Land;
“but constant obedience to known law, and appointed persons: no equality upon it; but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness.” (Works, 27.96)
This would have made for a strange type of “Equality Country” indeed (see The Times, 9 April 1877).
How far could any community founded by John Ruskin have realistically hoped to be “regulated in some measure by the principles of which Robert Owen was the exponent”?
Mrs Maloy’s reply to Sturt confirmed both that the communists understood what they disagreed with Ruskin about and that there would be tricky incompatibilities to navigate:
“Mr Ruskin believed that one man should rule absolutely, and all others should unquestioningly obey. We did not believe this, nor did we believe in taking the vow which was required in order to become members of the St George’s Guild […]” (Maloy, p. 165)
Ruskin acknowledged that, for all the interest he had shown in the project, he was absent in Venice for most of the period of this first phase of the Totley experiment. Moreover, he was simply too busy with other things when he returned to England, and had no spare capacity to be meaningfully involved in the scheme. One advantage of his absence—which Ruskin did not acknowledge—was that he could not interfere in the day-to-day arrangements at Totley, a point that Mark Frost has convincingly argued.
Finally, the vicissitudes of fate caused the final rupture. That is to say that it was a crisis that exposed the weaknesses of the experiment and hastend its collapse. Whilst the exact timings are uncertain, it is evident that the United Friends’ Association waited in vain for a response from Ruskin to the controversies that had erupted at Totley, one of them centred on the cashing of Ruskin’s cheque for £100, the other on Ruskin’s appointment of William Harrison Riley in a position of authority.
Presumably, unbeknown to the Sheffield Communists, Ruskin was then teetering on the edge of mental collapse, or may perhaps have already been completely incapacitated by the first major psychotic episode of his life in February 1878.
The troubling news from Totley may well have been the final straw that broke his mind. Ruskin was unable to respond to the communists at the critical moment. And at the point of maximum jeopardy a strong new personality entered the drama in the form of William Harrison Riley. The quarrelling escalated to a point beyond which relationships could be repaired.
Sheila Rowbotham has memorably written that
“The communists’ farm at Totley was a kind of volcanic mole-hill which left fragments in all directions.” (Rowbotham, p. 67)
But as George Sturt wrote of the group, “That they actually made the attempt” to run a communist farm, “shows them to have been energetic and open-minded to a degree far above the average” (Sturt, p. 125).
George Sturt’s enquiries in The Commonweal stimulated John Greenwood, a secularist and an active member of the Socialist League, to write in and say:
“To provide for the millions, now being killed in towns and cities, is the question on which many others turn; […] The business of agriculture is not the mystery that the land-holders would make us believe. Almost every worker knows what to do and when to do it, and a very large percentage could guide a freshman without external supervision; […]
“The most useful propaganda for the country districts would be co-operative farms. They would excite the deadly hostility of the existing master agriculturist, which in itself would be of the greatest assistance to the [Socialist] Cause. To establish a co-operative farm we should have to face a stiff rent and an equally stiff rate of usury on the cost of implements, cattle, etc., for equipment. […]
“Co-operative farms would bring back the people to the localities where the death-rate is 13 in the thousand instead of 19 to 30; they would transform field-work from its present drudgery into a pleasant occupation carried on by healthy people in its proper season, so as to afford reasonable leisure when the elements prohibit outdoor work; at which times the state of the workers is now that of exceptional misery.” (John Greenwood, “Our Fields and Cities’ in The Commonweal 5:173 (4 May 1889) p. 141)
After reading Mrs Maloy’s account of the failed Totley experiment, Greenwood wrote again.
“The man who was master got his foot between the door and the doorpost by means of the usual levers”, he opined.
“To accumulate subscriptions of a shilling for the equipment of 20 [sic] acres of garden-farm being an heroic undertaking, deserved success, as the man who was master will find ere long.
“It surprises some people that the necessity for cultivating by co-operative effort is not met, and such difficulty as exists overcome. This difficulty differs in important details from those which confront co-operative manufacture. In the latter case the plans and specifications relate to things about which knowledge is not quite so much boxed up, and more, not so much under the influence of the elements which no man can control, though the bare mention of them forms some part of the stock-in-trade of the tools of the land-thieves whose Royal and other agricultural societies, which might be made real and true schools, are positively part of a system of fraud.
“For my part, I confess I should have attached the £100 donation to the undertaking, but my view of that part of the case may arise from having been brought up on the soil, and worked on and in it, being in fact a delver, and recognising the difficulty under present circumstances of supplying thirty-seven millions of people with fairly mixed food from land which has been robbed as much as the workers upon it have been.” (John Greenwood, “St George’s Farm” in The Commonweal 5:178 (8 June 1888) p. 181)
When George Pearson was interviewed in January 1938, Sheffield’s Daily Independent reported that
“Although Mr Pearson never met Ruskin, he was personally acquainted with several of the prominent members of the Guid of St George and he remembered the experiment at St George’s Farm.” (17 January 1938).
Twelve years earlier he had written that
“I believe [Ruskin] thought that able-bodied men under favourable conditions could maintain themselves off the land, but I think he soon found out he had made a mistake.” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 9 January 1926).
As Pearson put it later, Ruskin’s idea was “that if people could get land on reasonable terms anyone could make a living out of it” and he “wanted to try out his idea” (Daily Independent , 17 January 1938).
But, as George Sturt said, at least the attempt was made. The Ruskinian trial of communism at Totley was a failure, but it was a a noble one for that.
COMMUNIST AFTERLIVES
There can be little doubt that one of the reasons for the failure of the original group of Sheffield Communists to make a success of the farm concerns the character of at least some of its members. Rejecting established norms and the existing order if things, most of the men and women involved at Totley were suspicious of experts and of all governing authorities, if not openly hostile to them. They put their faith in the collective, and wanted to run things by committee, governed by democracy. Ruskin, on the other hand, though often hostile to particular and specific authorities and orthodoxies, believed in hierarchy, and in the beneficent rule of a Christian King.
Consideration of the communists’ suspicion or rejection of authority opens up a surprisingly rich seam of research which also serves to expose some of the “afterlives” of those involved in the experiment.
Henry Richardson, for example—the man approved by Ruskin as manager but never appointed, yet apparently one of the most dependable members of the secularist Mutual Improvement Class at the Hall of Science, serving it as secretary for several years—was criticised by Sheffield Town Council for keeping his son (by wife, Elizabeth, a native of Nottingham, born c. 1826) away from school. This was contrary to the terms of the Education Act of 1870 (see Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 13 August 1872). We do not know the parents’ reasoning, though it is likely to have been connected with their secularist convictions. It is a fact that does not harmonise with the vision of the Totley scheme Ruskin outlined in Fors in April 1877 in which he articulated his plan to “have a school built on it for your children, with enforced sending of them to be schooled”, and he heavily underlined his intention that the school would be anti-secular and anti-republican in character: “your old Parish-church golden legend will be written by every boy, and stitched by every girl, and engraved with diamond point into the hearts of both,—’Fear God, Honour the King’” (Works. 29.97).
William Skelton Hunter led a chaotic life. There is some evidence that Ruskin did not have a great deal of time for him. He appears to have been noted by Ruskin in a letter to Henry Swan in which he also mentioned hearing from Burdon and said he had not answered either of them (25 April 1877).
Late one Saturday night in March 1874, Skelton Hunter was viciously assaulted in the street after he had been drinking at the Castle Inn on Snig Hill. His assailant, who punched him on the jaw and in the eye, was imprisoned for two months, but it is doubtful that Hunter was blameless. (see Sheffield Daily Telegraph & Sheffield Independent, 31 March 1874).
Tragically, at the age of 55, Ann, Hunter’s wife of 35 years, committed suicide by hanging herself with a cord that she had attached to her bedroom door. The coroner’s inquest heard how the couple “had not lived a comfortable life together” owing largely to her “continued neglect of her household duties” which had “frequently led to words” (Sheffield Independent, 5 October 1896). Hunter unflinchingly described his late wife in court as “weak and nervous”. He claimed that she had tried to take her life three times before she finally succeeded. The couple had rowed on the day of the suicide.
Even in the unenlightened context of the Victorian legal system which in many respects institutionalised misogyny, the coroner acknowledged ominously that the members of the jury would have “their own opinion […] with regard to the conduct of the husband”. By then Hunter had become a sort of tallyman (a cheque agent and credit draper).
Within months of his wife’s suicide, Hunter had married again, this time to Sarah Jane Taylor, 25 years’ his junior. But his new life did not bring stability. Before the end of the following year he was declared bankrupt (see Sheffield Independent, 16 October 1897).
The most poignant afterlife story of all belongs to John and Mary Ann Maloy. The Maloys’ tragedy provides a stark and harrowing example of how unorthodox beliefs could lead to unforeseen and devastating personal consequences.
In December 1881 the couple’s only child, the fulsomely named Eliza Dora Mabel Eleanor Maloy, died aged only ten months old. A coroner’s inquest heard how the little girl fell ill. The family was then living at the back of 27 Roebuck Road, in the Sheffield suburb of Crookesmoor. Accepting the advice of a neigjbour, the parents administered syrup of violets and oil of almonds to their sick daughter.
Two days later, the child’s health deteriorated, and the parents, having consulted a chemist (pharmacist), administered a dessert spoonful of castor oil.
The following day the baby was even more gravely ill. Mrs Maloy feared her child had measles, and in desperation John Maloy went to Attercliffe to consult Thomas Garbutt (1825-1904), a self-declared “medical botanist” whom Maloy understood was not a “legally qualified doctor”. Given how pivotal Garbutt is to this sorry tale, and what the connection reveals, it is worth pausing here to consider him in some depth.
Garbutt had been a Chartist, and in 1866 expressed sympathy for the Reform League founded the previous year to campaign for manhood suffrage and the secret ballot (see Bee-Hive ,17 November 1866). By the 1870s he was a well-known and uncompromising Yorkshire Radical whom the Maloys are likely to have known personally. In 1871 Garbutt helped to found the Sheffield Republican Club, writing to Reynolds’s Newspaper
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.—The monarchy has been tried for centuries, and what has it produced? Wars and bloodshed, by which the rich alone have profited. You fight their battles—they reap the benefits! You have household suffrage where above three householders out of every five have no vote. All the offices of emolument and patronage are open to the rich, because Government is still in their hands, and they have kept you in ignorance and poverty that they may enjoy them. They have supported a monarchy that has given you a national debt of £800,000,000. They vote, without a scruple, £30,000 as a dowry, and £6,00 a year while living, to a princess, whilst we have 0s[hillings] in every seventeen of our population a pauper, thus adding to your already heavy burden by increasing your local taxation! We desire to substitute in our country morality for egoism, probity for honours, principles for usages, duties for conventionalities, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for contempt of misfortune, manly pride for insolence, love of glory for the love of money, honesty for respectability, good people for good [i.e. polite] society, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for display, the charms of happiness for the ‘ennui’ of pleasure, the greatness of man for the listlessness of the great, a people magnanimous, powerful, and happy, for a people amiable, frivolous, and miserable; in a word, we desire to substitute all the virtues of the republic for all the vices and all the ridiculous fopperies and corruptions of the monarchy. We desire, in short, to fulfil the vows of nature, to accomplish the destinies of her sanity, to absolve Providence from the long reign of crime and tyranny; that England, heretofore, illustrious amongst enslaved countries, may, by eclipsing all the free states that ever existed, becomes a model for nations, the terror of oppression, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the world; and that, in establishing this democratic form of government, we may at least, witness the breaking dawn of universal brotherhood and peace!” (Reynolds’s Newspaper, 31 March 1872)
Verbose, certainly, but powerfully eloquent, too. It is not difficult to understand how a man possessing such rhetorical command might prove beguiling and persuasive, especially to other sympathetic radicals.
The Sheffield Republican Club was thereby formed, and Garbutt became its president.
Garbutt was also the main force behind the Republican Conference held at Sheffield’s Hall of Science in December 1872 which ratified the establishment of the National Republican Brotherhood, of which he was joint treasurer.
Garbutt was also a member of the First International and a reader of its British journal, the International Herald, edited by William Harrison Riley. Indeed, Garbutt sent Riley reports of the Republican Club, as well as letters with news of radicalism in Sheffield. In turn, Riley was duly elected to the National Republican Brotherhood’s executive council, along with national figures like Charles Bradlaugh who did not actually support the establishment of the Brotherhood, had not consented to be elected to the council, and refused to take up his place! He considered the organisation a potentially treasonable conspiracy, as did the then Attorney-General, who decided that the Brotherhood was an illegal society, but chose not to make martyrs of its organisers by proceeding against it. Such controversies and subsequent divisions among republicans effectively rendered the Brotherhood ineffective from the start, and it gradually disintegrated in the course of 1873.
Through the 1870s Garbut, who originally followed in his father’s footsteps to become a weaver, operated as a herbalist and Turkish bath proprietor out of premises at 158 Arundel Street, having moved from a similar establishment in Barnsley which had run there in the 1860s.
As a quack, Garbutt had boasted in a lecture delivered at Sheffield’s Temperance Hall in 1865 of “how Mark Firth [the steel magnate and philanthropist] could have been restored to health in one hour” had he not been so ill-served by orthodox medicine and (professionally qualified) medical men. Garbutt’s own mother, father, and brothers, he claimed, had all been killed by the same charlatanism and charlatans, causing him to embrace what he described as his own “scientific and common sense” approach to medical matters (Barnsley Chronicle, 24 December 1880). Taking this account of Garbutt’s motivation at face value, it is an exemplar of grief-stricken self-deception. Today we might say that he fell down a rabbit-hole adjacent to the anti-vax lobby. It would have the tragic effect of multiplying grief in the future, not least for the Maloys.
Garbutt examined the Maloys’ baby girl and seems to converted Mary Ann’s fear that her daughter had measles into his own diagnosis. John Maloy returned home with the baby and Garbutt’s quack remedies which were speedily administered. Garbutt’s instruction to bath the child regularly was heeded.
The child’s health dangerously deteriorated, and the parents, now frantic with worry, wrapped their daughter in blankets and took her back to Attercliffe. Garbutt told them they were wrong to have moved the baby when she was so ill. He gave her an injection, and then John Maloy took his daughter into the hot room of Garbutt’s Turkish bath where, within an hour, the child died in his arms. Garbutt issued an unauthorised death certificate which was inevitably rejected by the authorities.
The surgeon who conducted the post-mortem found no evidence of measles, and concluded that Garbutt’s homemade medicines were at best ineffectual, but possibly injurious. He considered that the child must have been far too weak to endure a cab journey to Attercliffe. It was this, combined with the bath the child was put in, that had hastened her death, which had been caused by congestion of the brain and bronchial infection. The coroner accepted that though the parents had “acted very wrongly”, they had genuinely intended to save their daughter’s life, not to kill her. He saved his scorn for Garbutt, and despite issuing a subpoena to force Garbutt to attend court and testigy, the coroner refused to hear his evidence on the grounds that he was an “infidel” who would not swear an oath on the grounds that he had no religious beliefs. Yet alongside his rational rejection of religion went an anti-authoritarian and ultimately unscientific approach to medicine.
A police officer then alleged that John Maloy also rejected religion, though he had sworn on oath, and his evidence had already been heard and accepted by the court Recalled to the stand and questioned by the coroner, Maloy replied that while he “had no religious belief, […] he took the oath in order to save trouble, as he could tell the truth as well one way as another”. It was a pragmatic answer that seems to have won sympathy.
(The details of this case are taken from the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 & 24 December 1881, and the Sheffield Independent, 24 December 1881).
The jury’s verdict was one of accidental death to which the conduct of the parents and the treatment of the deceased by a quack had detrimentally contributed. It must have been a devastating judgement for the grieving parents, and within a couple of years John Maloy, too, was dead. He died at his home, 31 Bow Street, on 17 January 1884. Aged only 35, the blacksmith had succumbed to “Brights disease of kidney” (i.e. nephritis) and “anasarca”, that is to say, both a localized swelling of the kidney and a generalized swelling. This also caused a narrowing of the urethra, making it difficult to pass urine. Mrs Maloy reported her husband’s death the following day, having been “present at the death” (which does not necessarily mean that she was in attendance).
Several years later, William Harrison Riley wrote that “One of the best of the men has since died and others could not now go and work as provided, but the Guild should try to make all the amends in its power ’ (letter from Riley to Buchan Graham, 6 February 1891). If one were to speculate about the identity of this anonymous communist then John Maloy must surely count among the candidates
Mrs Maloy’s subsequent outspokenness may in part be a symptom of her grief. In a short space of time she suffered the incalculable loss of her only child and her husband who was also a companion in her idealistic radicalism. Yet, by today’s standards, the Maloys were arguably fortunate to have faced no further legal action. At this stage in Britain’s history, children were treated largely as the private property of their parents, much as wives were the property of their husbands, and the state was loath to intervene. It would have to wait until 1889 before any tangible rights of children would be recognised in English Law, thanks in large part to the growing influence of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
It is difficult to understand how Mrs Maloy and Garbutt could face each other again after what had happened. Yet they would both be active and founder members of Edward Carpenter’s Sheffield Socialist Society, and there is no record of any particular antagonism between them. Notwithstanding, it is notable that by the time Mrs Maloy laid bare her feelings about the communists’ collaboration with Ruskin, she was a widow who had lost her only baby. In this context, her unrelentingly negative tone might be more sensitively understood.
Garbutt’s involvement in Sheffield radicalism continued into the 1890s. George Hukin (1860-1917) provides an insight into the kind of contribution Garbutt made in a letter he wrote to Edward Carpenter in March 1887 when the latter was in Scotland:
“We had a good meeting on Monday, but I did not care for the lecture. It was too dry for me. Garbutt’s remedy was to transform society into one joint -stock company compensating all owners of land and capital. There was a rather good discussion at the close between Furniss and Garbutt, Furniss objecting to any compensation whatever.” (Qtd in Lee, p. 55. For other references to Garbutt, see pp. 59, 79-80, and 85).
Garbutt continued to attract trouble. He was sued for his unqualified medical treatments: one judge, though finding for the plaintiff, nevertheless blamed them for being like the man who went to a blacksmith to have his tooth out, predictably had his jaw broken, then sued for the broken jaw (see Sheffield Independent, 9 April 1891). In February 1888 Garbutt’s Turkish bath was converted into a temporary hospital for the treatment of smallpox (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 16 February 1888). In 1876, the chairman of Sheffield’s Health Committee appears falsely to have accused Garbutt of saying that “the working classes of Attercliffe were too dirty and idle to go to the baths”—he responded that “[a] more wicked and malicious falsehood was never uttered” against him (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 11 November 1876). In his defence, Garbutt sent a copy of his original letter of application to open the Turkish bath in Attercliffe, dated 22 April 1876, in which he laid out the advantages of giving approval of his scheme. Having passed into the hands of successors, the baths were later described as popular and prosperous in Garbutt’s time (Sheffield Independent, 8 June 1899).
In the seventh post of this new blog series we meet the dominant figure in the second phase of Ruskin’s Totley experiment—William Harrison Riley, one of the great unsung radicals of the nineteenth century who deserves to be far better known…
Sources Cited
Anon: “Veteran’s Link With Ruskin and Carpenter” in Daily Independent (17 January 1938)
Carpenter, Edward: Sketches from Life in Town and Country, and Some Verse (George Allen, 1908)
Goldsmith, Sally: Thirteen Acres: John Ruskin and the Totley Communists (Guild of St George, 2016)
Greenwood, John: “Our Fields and Cities’ in The Commonweal, 5:173 (4 May 1889) p. 141
Greenwood, John: “St George’s Farm” in The Commonweal, 5:178 (8 June 1888) p. 181.
Lee, Andrew: The Red Flag of Anarchy: A History of Socialism and Anarchism in Sheffield, 1874-1900 (2017)
Maloy, M.A.: “St George’s Farm” [a letter] in The Commonweal, 5:176 (25 May 1889) pp.164-165
[Maloy, Mary Ann] (M.A.M): “Mr Ruskin and the 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
Sturt, George: “A Query” in The Commonweal, 5:171 (20 April 1889), p. 125
Sturt, George: The Wheelwright’s Shop (Cambridge University Press, 1943)
- H. C.: “Modern English Communism” in The Co-operative News (25 August 1877)
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