Jesse Collings - Land Reform

Land Reform

Collings' background in Devon gave him an appreciation of the problems of the agricultural worker and small-scale farmer rare in a major industrial city like Birmingham. He was a friend of Joseph Arch, the founder of the National Agricultural Workers Union, who lived in Barford, Warwickshire, near Birmingham. Collings believed that education was essential to improving the conditions of agricultural workers and that it needed to be free. The National Agricultural Workers Union joined the National Education League. Collings ensured that Chamberlain, Mayor of Birmingham and a millionaire industrialist, chaired the meeting in Birmingham to support the Agricultural Workers' first strike. When Chamberlain became President of the Board of Trade, Collings acted as his unofficial advisor on agricultural matters affecting peasants in Britain and Ireland.

Collings advocated land reform through providing allotments and small holdings for the rural poor, landless peasants, and even the industrial poor. He cited the Chartist settlement at Great Dodford as a successful example of what could be achieved. The slogan for Collings' 1885 land-reform campaign Three Acres and a Cow became the battle cry of land reform and the fight against rural poverty. Three acres and a cow was seen as being sufficient for a family to live on, particularly when compared to the rural poverty common at that time. To some, however, this slogan was backward looking and the source of amusement amongst many Conservatives and farmers.

Joseph Chamberlain adapted the Three Acres and a Cow slogan for his own Radical Programme: he urged the purchase by local authorities of land to provide garden and field allotments for all labourers who might desire them, to be let at fair rents in plots of up to 1-acre (4,000 m2) of arable and three to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of pasture.

Collings founded the Allotments Extension Association in 1883 to promote the formation of allotments and smallholdings. he also collaborated closely with the Highland Land Reform Association.

The 1882 Allotments Extension Act was put through Parliament by Collings. By 1886 there were 394,517 allotments of under 4 acres (16,000 m2) and 272,000 garden allotments (Haywood, 1991).

In 1886, Collings' work defeated Lord Salisbury's Government, which lost the vote on the Queen's speech, when Collings moved his 'Small Holdings Amendment Act'. A Liberal Government under William Ewart Gladstone took its place.

Collings' work also led to 1908 Small Holdings and Allotments Act (which led to 30,000 families being resettled on the land) and the 1919 Land Settlement Act. However, the programme of land reform via allotments and small holdings never made a considerable impact upon the countryside, either in Collings' time or in the interwar period.