PEOPLES PUBS

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: march 2011 :: RMTnews 31 This pub is named after a Chartist land experiment on an adjourning settlement in the 1840s. The settlement was called O’Connorville, after its founder Feargus O’Connor (1794-1855), a fiery orator who was jailed several times for his campaign to grant votes to working class people. He was charged with sedition, tumult, riot, and encouraging labour stoppages. This was in the days when only people with land or property had the vote. O’Connor saw the unequal distribution of land as the main cause of economic injustice. But his plan to give land to a select few workers through a lottery was opposed not only by the government, which later ruled it illegal and suppressed it, but also by some fellow Chartists who saw it as a diversion from the main struggle. The aim was to provide smallholdings to a lucky few working men as an alternative to factory employment. O’Connor felt he had the farming experience necessary to make the project a success, as he had published a book called “A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms” in 1843. So he went ahead with it in 1845 through and advert in the Chartist journal, the Northern Star (a journal he had founded with a circulation of 40,000), for shares in the National Land Company for a few pennies a week. These entitled the holders to be included in the lottery for plots of land. Enough money flooded in to buy five settlements around the country - the first being 103 acres near this pub which was divided into 35 smallholdings of four acres each with a cottage. A school was also built, and a cricket match organised between the bricklayers and the carpenters on the village common. The settlers took over their land on May Day, 1847, when O’Connor warned them: “There is a beer shop adjoining your land. Avoid it, I beseech you, as a pestilence, for if any enemy can be the means of ousting you from the lovely spot on which it was my pride to locate you, it will be man’s greatest, most vicious and inviting enemy, drunkenness.” The beer shop became this pub that now honours the Chartist colony (and is recommended by CAMRA). By Christmas 1848 “Chartist pork” reared on the smallholdings proved very popular in London shops. The reactionary government of the day resented the initial success of the settlement and passed an Act to make it illegal and force its closure, forcing the sale of the land between 1851 and 1858. One of the Chartist cottages has now been restored by the National Trust at one of the other settlements. This is Rosedene Cottage in Victoria Road, Dodford, near Bromsgrove, Birmingham, which originally grew strawberries, pears and plums, and reared pigs. It is the last of the original 40 cottages on this site and can be visited by the public. The memory of O’Connor lives on through a statue of him in the Arboretum (known as the People’s Park) in Nottingham, for which he was elected as a Charrtist MP in 1847. It is near the corner of Peel Street and Addison Street. A plaque marking the 150th anniversary of O’Connorville can be seen at the Memorial Hall in Chorleywood, near Heronsgate. On O’Connor’s release in 1841, after 18 months in jail for so called seditious libel, there were huge celebrations and the poet Thomas Cooper wrote about him: “The lion of freedom comes from his den, We’ll rally around him again and again.” An O’Connor Liberation Medal was struck with a portrait of him and the words “Universal Suffrage and No Surrender.” His funeral was attended by 50,000 people. “A Pub Crawl Through History, The Ultimate Boozers’ Who’s Who,” by Mike Pentelow and Peter Arkell, is published by Janus. ISBN 978-1-85756 701-4. PEOPLE’S PUBS - Words by Mike Pentelow, Pictures by Peter Arkell LAND OF LIBERTY, PEACE AND PLENTY Long Lane, Heronsgate, Herts