IN THE STEPS OF THE TOLPUDDLE MARTYRS

The history of the Tolpuddle Martyrs is closely linked to the wider economic and political context. In the 1830s the English countryside was a theatre of agitation caused by a succession of poor harvests and the consequent reduction in the wages paid to agricultural labourers. Hay ricks were burnt, agricultural machinery was destroyed, and sporadic rioting took place in county towns. Often these events were laid at the door of a mythical ‘Captain Swing’.

Dorset was no exception. There were riots in Lulworth, Preston, Winfrith, Wool and Tolpuddle and threshing machines were destroyed on many of the county’s farms.

On the death of his father in 1784 James Frampton, at the tender age of fifteen, inherited an estate of around 9000 acres and a modest country house in Moreton. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1791 and immediately embarked upon a tour of Europe, which was then the accepted way of completing a young gentleman’s education. During his tour he visited Paris and witnessed at first hand the violence in Paris which followed the fall of the Bastille in 1789. At one stage he was forced to buy off a mob which had arrested a fellow traveller and himself. His experiences in Paris marked him for life and made him fearful of civil unrest and radical reform movements.

On his return to Dorset, he settled in Moreton House (see Photo 1).

Soon afterwards, at the age of 24, he was appointed High Sheriff of Dorset, an unpaid post which involved a great deal of responsibility for the administration of the County. In 1794 he also became a Justice of the Peace and a colonel in the Dorset Yeomanry.

Local agricultural labourers had been in negotiation with their farmer employers from 1831 onwards to ensure that their wages were maintained at a level equal to the rates generally paid in the county. They believed that they had secured an agreement witnessed by the Vicar of Tolpuddle. When their wages were nevertheless reduced from nine shillings a month to eight shillings, they appealed to a board of magistrates chaired by James Frampton. The appeal was rejected on the grounds that the farmers were entitled to pay their employees what they could afford to pay. Their wages were then again reduced to seven shillings, and they understood that this was likely to be further reduced to six shillings in the near future.

In the autumn of 1833, a group of farm labourers from Tolpuddle gathered under a sycamore tree on the village green (see Photo 2, which shows the current ‘Martyrs’ Tree’, grown from a seedling taken from the original sycamore) to hear two visiting speakers from a new trade union movement explain how they could organise themselves to resist the proposed reduction in their wages. George Loveless, a ploughman and a lay methodist preacher at Tolpuddle Old Chapel (see Photo 3), was part of this group and at his instigation they formed a Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers financed by a joining fee of one shilling and a monthly subscription of one penny.

The inaugural meeting was held in the cottage of Thomas Stanfield (see Photo 4) where the Rules of the Society were adopted. These rules provided for an initiation ceremony for new members. A series of meetings then took place in the cottage at which initiates swore an oath of loyalty to the Society, blindfolded and in front of a primitive painting of a skeleton. The ceremony was designed to impress upon applicants that the oath was a solemn one. Very soon afterwards the Society applied for affiliation of their local union to the Grand National Consolidated Union.

The Combination Acts which had made it an offence for employees to combine together to seek better employment conditions had been repealed in 1824, but then partially restored the following year. However, trade unions remained perfectly lawful although their freedom of action was severely restrained by the revised Law.

The activities in Tolpuddle came to the attention of the local magistrates. In particular, James Frampton was informed of a ceremony held in the cottage belonging to Thomas Stanfield on 9th December 1833 in which initiates, including Edward Legg and John Lock, were asked to swear oaths in the presence of Thomas and John Stanfield, James and George Loveless, James Brine and, allegedly, James Hammett.

On 21st February 1834 the local magistrates ordered notices to be posted up in Tolpuddle warning the population that the swearing of an illegal oath was an offence punishable by transportation for seven years. They had been instructed to do so by James Frampton who had been advised in writing by Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary in the Whig government, that they should use the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797, which had been voted by Parliament in that year to facilitate the suppression of the mutinies of sailors in the Royal Navy at the Nore and Spithead, together with subsequent Acts passed in 1799 and 1817, as a weapon to combat the spread of collective action by farm labourers.

Three days later George Loveless, his brother James, their brother-in- law Thomas Stanfield and his son John, who shared a common employer, were all arrested. They were joined by James Hammett and James Brine.

The local constable, confusingly also called James Brine, was sent to arrest the six men and accompanied them by foot on the seven mile walk to Dorchester. On the way they would have passed by the one-mile milepost on Stinsford Hill, which still exists (see Photo 5).

Once in town they were brought for questioning before James Frampton and his brother-in-law Charles Wollaston, the Recorder of Dorchester, at the latter’s home, Wollaston House (Photo 6). They were then remanded in custody in a room in the County Gaol which was already on the site of the present prison. The only part of the prison building of that period which remains to this day is the gatehouse, albeit in a different place (see Photo 7 and see my previous blog on Dorchester Gaols).

On Saturday 1st March the six men were taken before a bench of magistrates who committed them to trial at the next session of the Dorchester Assizes. They were then confined in the Gaol’s cells. The Home Secretary was informed of the arrests and the indictment of the six men for administering an illegal oath was prepared in London on his instructions.

The Spring Assizes opened in Shire Hall (see Photo 8) on 14th March 1834 and early in the morning of the next day the prisoners were taken to the cells underneath the courtroom. The room next to the cells in which they are said to have been held and the table and bench at which they sat are still there (see Photo 9), as is the small fireplace in which green wood was burnt to offer them some heat at the expense of stifling smoke (see Photo 10).

The judge, Baron Williams, a newly appointed Judge of the Exchequer Court in London, had convened in the Courtroom (see Photo 11) a Grand Jury made up of twenty-three magistrates, including James Frampton and Charles Wollaston, to consider whether the indictment of the accused was valid and, if so, to send them to trial in front of a jury of twelve local men.

The Foreman of the Grand Jury was Lord William Ponsonby, another magistrate and one of the Whig members of Parliament for Dorset who, significantly, was also the brother-in-law of Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary. Grand Juries were abolished in 1933 but survive to this day for some purposes in the United States. The Grand Jury Box in the Courtroom is on the left-hand side in the photo of the Courtroom.

After examination of the prisoners in a meeting room the Grand Jury returned to the Courtroom and told the judge in open court that the indictment should proceed.

The trial itself opened on Monday morning 17th March before a jury of twelve freeholders or leaseholders, selected from different locations in the County, who were seated in the jury box on the right-hand side of the photo. The accused were all placed in the Dock in the middle foreground of the photo.

After the opening speech from the prosecution had been completed two witnesses, Edward Legg and John Lock, were called who had been present at a meeting which had taken place in Thomas Stanfield’s cottage on 9th December 1833 at which an alleged illegal oath had been administered to the witnesses. They were examined by counsel for the prosecution and cross-examined by the judge (from his seat on the dais below the Royal Coat of Arms in the centre rear of the Court) and then by the two barristers who had been appointed to represent the defendants (the Witness Box is on the immediate right-hand foreground of the photo).

It emerged many years later that although James Hammett was a member of the Society, he was not present at the fateful ceremony in December. He had been misidentified by Edward Legg who had confused him with his younger brother John who had indeed been present. James had decided when he was arrested not to clear up the confusion in order to protect John and his new pregnant wife. The other accused had agreed to say nothing to upset this version of the events.

From the contemporary newspaper reports it appears the two barristers argued, one of them particularly convincingly, that there was insufficient evidence to put the charge before the jury and then to proceed to convict them. In particular, they argued that the 1797 Mutiny Act had been passed to deal with mutiny in the Royal Navy and that it had never been intended that its provisions be used to prevent agricultural workers from combining together to defend their wages. It is not clear who appointed the defence counsel, but it must be assumed that the Court did so.

When the defence had concluded and the prosecuting counsel had made his closing speech the judge asked the defendants whether they wished to say anything in their defence. Only George Loveless elected to do so and he passed a written statement to the judge. In this he stated that if he had indeed broken the law he had done so unintentionally, that his action had not caused any damage to persons or property, that he had only acted with the others to preserve himself, his wife and children from starvation. He was asked whether he wished his statement to be read out in Court, to which he agreed.

The Judge then delivered his summing up in which he summarised the evidence which had been produced to the Court and gave his directions to the Jury setting out the options before them.

The jury then retired to the Jury Room to consider their verdict and returned in a very short while (some accounts say as little as five minutes and others that they conferred for twenty minutes or so). Their unanimous verdict was ‘Guilty’.

Sentencing took place in the same Courtroom forty-eight hours later, on Wednesday 19th March. The delay was caused by defence counsel making further representations to the Judge on behalf of their clients. It is not known whether the counsel continued advancing the defence which they had used in open court or whether they concentrated on arguments in mitigation, such as the good character and standing of all the accused.

Despite this further intervention, Baron Williams sentenced all the men to the maximum penalty laid down by the Law for the offence, transportation abroad for seven years. In delivering his sentence he made it clear that he would not take account of the intentions of the defendants and that he wished to make a public example of them to serve as a warning to those who might otherwise imitate them.

The six men were then chained together and marched back to Dorchester Gaol. Two days later George Loveless became seriously unwell and was transferred to the Prison Infirmary.

On 27th March James Loveless, Thomas and John Stanfield, James Hammett and James Brine were shackled and taken together by coach to Portsmouth where they were imprisoned on a floating hulk, a decommissioned warship, pending transportation. On 29h March they were conveyed to the convict ship “Surrey” at Spithead which sailed to Plymouth two days later to provision, and then for New South Wales on 11th April.

Meanwhile George Loveless slowly recovered in the Gaol Infirmary where he received a visit from Charles Wollaston, the magistrate before which the accused were initially taken, with whom he had a spirited discussion. On 5th April George Loveless had sufficiently recovered to be taken in his turn to a hulk in Portsmouth and on 17th May he was conveyed to the convict ship ‘William Metcalfe’ at Spithead which sailed for Van Diemen’s Land.

On their arrival in Australia all the men were assigned to local employers as unpaid labourers.

The sentence imposed on the six men created uproar throughout England fuelled by several popular newspapers. A London Dorchester Committee was set up to raise funds to care for the families of the condemned men. In the light of the scale of the protests the new Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, issued a conditional pardon to all six men in June 1835, which they rejected. As a result of continuing public pressure, an unconditional pardon was granted to them all in March 1836.

George Loveless was the first to return to Tolpuddle in June 1837 whilst his brother James, the Stanfields and James Brine returned in March 1838. James Hammett only returned in September of the following year.

The Lovelesses, the Stanfields and James Brine settled on a farm which was leased for them by the London Dorchester Committee and ultimately emigrated to farm in Canada. James Hammett was the only one to remain in Tolpuddle where he worked as a farm labourer, married three times and sired seven children. He died in 1891 and is buried in the graveyard of St John the Evangelist Church in the village (see Photo 12).

You can visit and experience the courtroom and cells in Shire Hall daily (except for Sunday). The Old Chapel in Tolpuddle has recently been restored and is currently open for two hours on Thursday afternoons. The

Martyrs’ Museum in Tolpuddle is also well worth a visit.

Finally, The play ‘Six Men of Dorset’ by the Hardy Players, based on the saga of the Martyrs and which recently enjoyed a sold-out run, is coming back for two supplementary evenings at the Corn Exchange and Shire Hall on 21st and 22nd September. The tickets are selling fast and can be obtained at Dorchester Arts booking office.