Did his audience know anything of land hunger ?sx They ached for allotments and smallholdings .sx Did they know of the effects of land monopoly on the life of a village ?sx A Tysoe man would never take a job that meant living in a closed village .sx No !sx He'd go to Birmingham , rather , or cross the ocean .sx Did they know how wealth from over-large estates gets misused ?sx They'd heard of great estates being enclosed in the past by removing villages ( there was an old example not so far away) :sx of Compton House being emptied and the old place in danger of being pulled down to pay for bribes and oceans of beer at an election .sx Did not the old folk know of starvation and crime here in the old days ?sx Those had not been due to lack of corn in England .sx In a certain chapter of Irish Realities they would read the proof that deaths in the so-called potato famine in Ireland were not due to lack of food in the country .sx The food was there- the deaths were due to the impassable gulfs between classes and to a 'governing class' which did not know how to govern and was not in a position to find out ; and yet would not let the people learn to manage their own affairs .sx In Ireland the gulfs were deeper than they had ever been here- conqueror ruling conquered still .sx Now there was the Home Rule Bill to let the Irish improve their own country , take their own problems in hand .sx There were to be safeguards and compensation .sx Those were right enough :sx over-sudden and over-drastic changes meant trouble and loss always .sx Joseph held up the book again .sx It had been printed seventeen years before , yet conditions were still the same .sx Why ?sx What stood in the way ?sx Who stood in the way of Tysoe's small desires for betterment ?sx Who whittled down the Allotments Bills ?sx Who threw out bills to give farmers security of tenure ?sx And all the bills ever drawn up to allow a village to have a real village school ?sx Who prevented villages two years ago from gaining a reasonable court of appeal from decisions of Feoffees of Town Lands and the like ?sx The House of Lords !sx And the House of Lords would throw out the Home Rule Bill .sx Let Tysoe men never forget it :sx what worked for well-being in Tysoe would work in other communities .sx What went seriously wrong here would go wrong there .sx You can't , he said , turn the Home Rule Bill into an Act :sx but it was the duty of all village wiseacres to vote for it .sx CHAPTER =10 .sx LAND HUNGER :sx .sx THE PROMISED LAND .sx THE main subject of this chapter was too plain a tale , too little lightened by any humour or success ever to be told as a whole in a family circle .sx But though I never heard the story in full I gathered its outline ; its events affected the childish lives of myself and my brothers and sisters .sx They helped , for one thing , to form our economic background .sx They must also have had a certain influence on my father's outlook- not too large an effect on a mind so naturally large , but they must have sharpened its political edge .sx Locally , the events had their publicity .sx By 1896 my father was writing occasional notes for the Warwick Advertiser and counted its editor among his very friendly acquaintances .sx Mr Lloyd Evans was a Radical and a warm-hearted spectator of village struggles .sx So it came about , I infer , that Tysoe affairs were well ventilated in the county paper .sx In the election just passed , of 1885 , Gladstone had been returned to power but , as everybody foresaw , his Home Rule Bill was thrown out by the House of Lords .sx As a consequence , there was another election in 1886 and this time a Conservative majority was returned to the Commons- but the Tysoe labourers had the satisfaction of knowing that their spirited member , the Radical Mr Cobb , still represented the Rugby Division .sx The Liberal programme had included the promise of an Allotments Act and now there was no chance of it .sx True , the new government hastened to promise an Act with the same title but it would not have the same nature .sx It would permit and even encourage ten-pole allotments , which the Vicar already permitted , and would do Tysoe no good .sx Two years earlier Joseph had thought the Labourers' Allotment Committee a waste of effort ; it would be better , he had thought , to wait in the hope of new legislation which would enjoin upon local charities and perhaps upon vestries the duty of providing allotments when they were demanded .sx He had known also that the needs of weekly wage-earners were not the only ones .sx Thatchers , hauliers , carpenters were all trying , and of course failing , to get an acre or two , sometimes to grow wheat and animal feed , in some cases to pasture a horse , or for a cow and pigs .sx The times were discouraging and yet at Southam , not so many miles away , an Allotments Association had been successful in getting a good acreage .sx It was a larger and luckier village , the folk more varied .sx A doctor had grasped that starvation made for ill-health and allotments for good food , and had given help and support .sx Whatever the handicaps , Tysoe men must try again .sx So at Christmas 1886 a new start was made .sx Eighty-six signatures were obtained to a statement of the need for small parcels of land and a public meeting was held early in the next year , fifty men present .sx The Tysoe Allotments and Smallholdings Association was formed and soon had seventy-five members , an extraordinary number , representing a high proportion of the village , but perhaps some were young men living with their parents .sx One may suppose my father's part in all this to have been a large one , possibly indispensable .sx It was the constant calls of members of the Association interrupting the kneading of her bread or causing her to drop the scissors at a crucial point in cutting out her children's clothes that made my patient mother agree that we needed more space .sx But Joseph was far from being the only effective member :sx the inclusion of tradesmen brought in a greater vigour and resilience and more 'know-how' .sx Then also , the Lower Townsmen joined , and in a tough fractious spirit .sx They were sometimes a roughish party , liking to stand apart a little from the other Towns .sx But now they had a story of frustration all their own , and brought power to the common effort .sx Joseph became the first Secretary of the Association and held the office for many years- until all its main objects had been attained and its affairs reduced to routine .sx In these early days he urged his Committee to get influential support from outside the village ; it might be possible to shame obstructors as they had been shamed in the matter of wages , fifteen years before .sx Get the local papers to regard their claim as news , get a well-known president , he urged .sx But to please the old Labourers' Association their President was adopted .sx Mr Daniel Fessey was a notable Tysonian- the only one I ever heard of who made a fortune .sx He was a member of a poor unfortunate family , one of whose members had been charged with manslaughter after the last crude boxing match .sx I remember him well ; he decorated our early childhood .sx He had been the inventor of curious gadgets , for example a new stirrup which was adopted by cavalry regiments .sx With his small fortune he was undergoing a change into a dapper and mannered exquisite , reminding one of Shakespeare's Frenchmen .sx By the time I knew him his clothes were of the finest ; his speech fantastically precise and his manner to man , woman and child elaborate- but as full of friendliness as of formality .sx Just as he was never ashamed of those disreputable ancestors so he sympathised with the poor and stood by their small movements .sx The Committee thought it best to await the publication of the Government's Allotments Bill before moving far , so they drew up regulations for their non-existent holdings , visited the Southam Association and corresponded with the agent of the Compton estate , stating their needs and asking for a first refusal of land .sx When the Bill became law Tysoe's would-be cultivators gave it a sardonic attention .sx Under the Act , if no land were available after elaborate inquiries and other processes , the Sanitary Authority was given power to propose a special Act of Parliament to compel some owner or owners to sell land .sx What a strange body to choose !sx It neither could nor would use such powers , said the Tysoe Association .sx They were right :sx in all England only one of these Acts was ever proposed .sx Meanwhile there was the Queen's jubilee .sx Why should men grudged by a government a scrap of land to dig celebrate the long reign of its head ?sx Majuba and Khartoum and the new imperialism were sharpening the atmosphere .sx Many sensing future trouble looked back thankfully over fifty years of comparative peace .sx Fifty years on the throne , and a woman !sx - the Queen could be acclaimed .sx So the village was at one in a mild rejoicing .sx In May the village made ready- a committee was chosen to plan celebrations .sx The Managers of the School hung up a huge picture of the old Queen with her grey hair , her solemn face and wide blue Garter Ribbon ; and on each side of her , smaller pictures of the neatly bearded Prince of Wales and of Princess Alexandra with a wall of tight yellow curls along her brow ; another of the Queen was hung in the Reading Room , a full-length portrait with a profile of her face and of stout , gathered skirts sloping far back behind her , and yet another in the Peacock , flanked by Disraeli and Gladstone .sx The great day was the twentieth of June .sx After the service in the church , an oak tree was planted on the green by the Vicar's wife , who was that rare thing , a woman of intellectual interests .sx Her speech stressed the hope for village unity .sx Two hundred and thirty years earlier had died , she said , a venerable Vicar of the Parish .sx After forty-nine years of service he had gone- said an entry in the Parish Register for 1654- 'to enter on his eternal Jubilee' .sx In the seventeenth century England had known fifty years of doctrinal quarrels and civil war ; clergymen had been turned from their cures , and churches irreverently used .sx But while in other parishes there had been bitter discord , John Stevenage and another Stevenage , his nephew , had quietly continued their duties in the old peaceful way .sx Let all take example by John Stevenage .sx Let all pray for peace- peace for the nation and within the nation , peace in Tysoe .sx Then the Vicar pointed to the trees , young and old , that had been planted on the green , witnessing to other occasions when the village had been at one- the William and Mary elm , celebrating the coming of that man of peace , the Prince of Orange ; the tree of constitutional liberty ( the 'Franchise Tree' ) ; and now this sapling , the tree of loyalty .sx It was always the same ; all Tysonians felt that the village ought to be at one .sx Those who opposed the Vicar were mischief-makers , disturbers of the peace ; on the other hand he and his missus brought from inferior parishes notions that no self-respecting folk could put up with .sx The different patterns of community at the back of minds , the needs , the passions , the fantasies- these though doubtless understood in part were never made plain in the discussions .sx The Jubilee interval was over .sx In October the Vicar invited the holders of the ten-pole allotments to a tea-party and made a speech to them on their duties .sx Allotments , he said , might be rightly cultivated by them , under certain conditions .sx They must have the necessary leisure to till them ; they must apply manure ; the produce must be consumed at home ( which meant they were not free to sell it) .sx A sixteenth of an acre was the right extent .sx Possibly if a man had no garden at all , it might not be wrong to have two sixteenths .sx