National Land Company

The Reform Act 1832 extended the franchise. In county constituencies in addition to forty shilling freeholders franchise rights were extended to owners of land in copyhold worth £10 and holders of long-term leases (more than sixty years) on land worth £10 and holders of medium-term leases (between twenty and sixty years) on land worth £50 and to tenants-at-will paying an annual rent of £50. The chartists had, as one of their objectives, the enfranchisement of the working man. O'Connor focussed his energies on enabling working-class people to satisfy the landholding requirement to gain a vote in county seats. In his single minded pursuit of this objective he diverged from the mainstream of Chartism. O’Connor declared that Great Britain could support her own population if her lands were properly cultivated. As has been pointed out, he had no use for co-operative tillage; his plan was for peasant proprietorship. In his book 'A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms' he set forth his plan of resettling surplus factory workers on little holdings of from one to . He held that the only possible way to raise wages was to remove surplus labour out of the manufacturers' reach, and thus compel him to offer higher wages. He had no doubts of the yields obtainable under such spade-husbandry. ==Establishing the company==

O'Connor proposed an enterprise in which working men could purchase land on the open market. The land was to be reconditioned, broken up into small plots, equipped with appropriate farm buildings and a cottage, and the new proprietor was to be given a small sum of money with which to buy stock. The plan was approved at the Chartist conference in April 1845. ==Flaws==

As well as the obvious defects in O’Connor's land plan that he either did not see or consider important, there were flaws in the execution: • Consideration was not given to the difficulty that would be encountered by town people, many who had never lived in the country, in becoming farmers. • If his plan worked, the more land he bought the higher the price of future purchases would become. His plan was built upon the assumptions that land could be bought in unlimited quantities and at reasonable rates. • O'Connor was left in control of the company without check or supervision. He was uninterested in record keeping and detail. It has even been suggested that the National Land Company was a benchmark – sometimes positive, sometimes less so – for subsequent UK land reformers. ==Settling the estates==

Money came in at a remarkable rate, considering the poverty of most of the subscribers. The Labourer magazine was started by O’Connor and Jones to promote the project. Soon hundreds of households were settled, and an outcry of opposition went up from hostile Chartists, the press, the Poor Law authorities who feared the weight of their failures, and other quarters. Among the working men the prestige of Chartism was growing again. The land plan offered more immediate promise of help than the Charter with its long-range promises. O’Connor's carelessness and inaccuracy with financial matters, as well as the free hand he had in purchasing land as he saw fit, were inherent weaknesses in the administration of the scheme. His opposition within the Chartist movement accused him of being "no longer a 'five-point' Chartist but a 'five acre' Chartist". O’Connor replied to his critics in an appearance before a mass meeting of his partisans in Manchester. His followers demonstrated at this meeting how devoted they were to him. ==Continuing efforts to establish the company==

The efforts to establish the company as a friendly society or as a joint stock company had foundered. The effort to collect the signatures of the shareholders was abandoned in 1848. (Later investigation showed that the required number of signatures had been reached, but the company failed to appreciate the difference between the number of shares and the number of shareholders.) O'Connor introduced a bill to legalise the NLC, with a second reading set for 12 June 1848. This prompted some investigation, led by Sir Benjamin Hall, which quickly turned up the fact that O'Connor was registered as the owner of all the estates, and of the associated bank. This prompted the House of Commons to set up a select committee to look into the NLC on 24 May 1848. ==Select committee==

The select committee issued minutes of its hearings, and then a final report on 1 August, delivered in the House on 31 July. Its principal findings were: • Lottery :The select committee found that the company's plans would not ensure that all the shareholders would get a plot of land. It was therefore a lottery, which barred it from registration as a company. They found it to be a lottery by two analyses. :* The financial lottery ::O'Connor's financial projection at the outset was as follows: :::Sell 2,000 shares at £2 10s, raising £5,000. :::Buy at £18 15s per acre (£2,250) and then build, fit out, and stock (£2,750), total £5,000. :::60 two acre plots would each generate £5pa, totalling £300pa. :::The freehold could be sold for 20 years rental, £6,000, which would finance the next, larger, cycle. ::The select committee's figures, based on the reality went as follows: :::There were 70,000 shareholders, each needing a plot & house costing £300. A total of £21 million would be required to satisfy them all. :::There were 70,000 shareholders, fully paid up at an average of £3 18s, yielding £273,000. :::Mortgaging the first tranche would raise £182,000 for the second tranche, based on the two-thirds mortgages, the best then available. By the eighteenth tranche the mortgage would be insufficient to build another. At this point £819,114 would have housed 2,730 shareholders, leaving 67,270 shareholders unhoused. :* The time lottery :::Even if it were possible to mortgage the properties for 100%, so that there would be no limit to the number of times this cycle could repeat, time would be a limiting factor. Assuming a buy-build-settle-remortgage cycle could be completed in a year, it would take 75 years before all the shareholders could be settled. • '''O'Connor's Bill''' ::Since the company was a lottery it was not consistent with the principles of a friendly society. O'Connor's bill was therefore useless. • Expectations ::The National Land Company was an illegal scheme that would not fulfill the expectations held out to the shareholders. • Records ::The books had been imperfectly kept; in fact, O’Connor had lost £3,400 by the company. Ironically, had the records been better kept those collecting shareholder signatures would have realised they had met the threshold to finalise the company's registration. The bill which precipitated the standing committee (and the company's demise) would not have been necessary. • Recommendation ::It was recognised that the parties had got into their predicament in good faith. It was therefore proposed that they should be given the opportunity to wind up the company's affairs themselves. ==Aftermath==

The illegality of the company, and the need to wind it up, exposed the conflicting interests of the four groups involved. • Settled shareholders, did not want to pay the rent which was due, and wanted clear title to their plots. • Unsettled shareholders, wanted the settled shareholders to pay their rents so that the pot of cash to be divided out among all shareholders would be maximised. • Directors, wanted to avoid any liability for outstanding debts of the company. • O'Connor, wanted to recover his expenses before any payout to shareholders. After a number of court cases an act to wind-up the company, the '''''' (14 & 15 Vict. c. cxxxix), was passed by Parliament in July 1851 and all its affairs were passed to the Court of Chancery. The settled shareholders mostly disappear from the records of the estates in the years following, and the estates themselves were auctioned off. Many of the properties are extant, some listed or in conservation areas. ==The settlements==

Heronsgate Also called '''O'Connorville'''. of land at Heronsgate, Hertfordshire were bought in March 1846 for £2344. moved in on 1 May 1847 (Location Day). After the company was wound up, the estate was auctioned on 27 May 1857. By 1858 only three of the original allotees remained, two of whom had rural backgrounds. The influx of more affluent residents provided a market for the produce of the poorer residents. was bought in October 1846 for £11,000. The purchase was completed in October 1847. The ballots Mathon The land at Mathon, Worcestershire (now Herefordshire), was planned, a deposit placed, but never carried through. ==References==