did his audience know anything of land hunger ? they ached for allotments and smallholdings . did they know of the effects of land monopoly on the life of a village ? a Tysoe man would never take a job that meant living in a closed village . no ! he &apos;d go to Birmingham , rather , or cross the ocean . did they know how wealth from over-large estates gets misused ? they &apos;d heard of great estates being enclosed in the past by removing villages ( there was an old example not so far away ) : 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 . did not the old folk know of starvation and crime here in the old days ? those had not been due to lack of corn in England . 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 . 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 . in Ireland the gulfs were deeper than they had ever been here - conqueror ruling conquered still . now there was the home rule bill to let the Irish improve their own country , take their own problems in hand . there were to be safeguards and compensation . those were right enough : over-sudden and over-drastic changes meant trouble and loss always . Joseph held up the book again . it had been printed seventeen years before , yet conditions were still the same . why ? what stood in the way ? who stood in the way of Tysoe &apos;s small desires for betterment ? who whittled down the allotments bills ? who threw out bills to give farmers security of tenure ? and all the bills ever drawn up to allow a village to have a real village school ? who prevented villages two years ago from gaining a reasonable court of appeal from decisions of feoffees of town lands and the like ? the House of Lords ! and the House of Lords would throw out the home rule bill . let Tysoe men never forget it : what worked for well-being in Tysoe would work in other communities . what went seriously wrong here would go wrong there . you can n&apos;t , he said , turn the home rule bill into an act : but it was the duty of all village wiseacres to vote for it . chapter 10 . land hunger : the promised land . 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 . 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 . they helped , for one thing , to form our economic background . they must also have had a certain influence on my father &apos;s outlook - not too large an effect on a mind so naturally large , but they must have sharpened its political edge . locally , the events had their publicity . by 1896 my father was writing occasional notes for the Warwick advertiser and counted its editor among his very friendly acquaintances . Mr Lloyd Evans was a radical and a warm-hearted spectator of village struggles . so it came about , I infer , that Tysoe affairs were well ventilated in the county paper . 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 . 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 . the liberal programme had included the promise of an allotments act and now there was no chance of it . true , the new government hastened to promise an act with the same title but it would not have the same nature . it would permit and even encourage ten-pole allotments , which the Vicar already permitted , and would do Tysoe no good . two years earlier Joseph had thought the labourers &apos; 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 . he had known also that the needs of weekly wage-earners were not the only ones . 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 . the times were discouraging and yet at Southam , not so many miles away , an allotments association had been successful in getting a good acreage . it was a larger and luckier village , the folk more varied . a doctor had grasped that starvation made for ill-health and allotments for good food , and had given help and support . whatever the handicaps , Tysoe men must try again . so at Christmas 1886 a new start was made . 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 . 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 . one may suppose my father &apos;s part in all this to have been a large one , possibly indispensable . 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 &apos;s clothes that made my patient mother agree that we needed more space . but Joseph was far from being the only effective member : the inclusion of tradesmen brought in a greater vigour and resilience and more know-how . then also , the lower townsmen joined , and in a tough fractious spirit . they were sometimes a roughish party , liking to stand apart a little from the other towns . but now they had a story of frustration all their own , and brought power to the common effort . 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 . 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 . get the local papers to regard their claim as news , get a well-known president , he urged . but to please the old labourers &apos; association their President was adopted . Mr Daniel Fessey was a notable Tysonian - the only one I ever heard of who made a fortune . he was a member of a poor unfortunate family , one of whose members had been charged with manslaughter after the last crude boxing match . I remember him well ; he decorated our early childhood . he had been the inventor of curious gadgets , for example a new stirrup which was adopted by cavalry regiments . with his small fortune he was undergoing a change into a dapper and mannered exquisite , reminding one of Shakespeare &apos;s Frenchmen . 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 . just as he was never ashamed of those disreputable ancestors so he sympathised with the poor and stood by their small movements . the committee thought it best to await the publication of the government &apos;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 . when the bill became law Tysoe &apos;s would-be cultivators gave it a sardonic attention . 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 . what a strange body to choose ! it neither could nor would use such powers , said the Tysoe association . they were right : in all England only one of these acts was ever proposed . meanwhile there was the Queen &apos;s jubilee . why should men grudged by a government a scrap of land to dig celebrate the long reign of its head ? Majuba and Khartoum and the new imperialism were sharpening the atmosphere . many sensing future trouble looked back thankfully over fifty years of comparative peace . fifty years on the throne , and a woman ! - the Queen could be acclaimed . so the village was at one in a mild rejoicing . in May the village made ready - a committee was chosen to plan celebrations . 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 . the great day was the twentieth of June . after the service in the church , an oak tree was planted on the green by the Vicar &apos;s wife , who was that rare thing , a woman of intellectual interests . her speech stressed the hope for village unity . two hundred and thirty years earlier had died , she said , a venerable Vicar of the parish . after forty-nine years of service he had gone - said an entry in the parish register for 1654 - to enter on his eternal jubilee . 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 . 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 . let all take example by John Stevenage . let all pray for peace - peace for the nation and within the nation , peace in Tysoe . 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 . it was always the same ; all Tysonians felt that the village ought to be at one . 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 . 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 . the jubilee interval was over . 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 . allotments , he said , might be rightly cultivated by them , under certain conditions . 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 ) . a sixteenth of an acre was the right extent . possibly if a man had no garden at all , it might not be wrong to have two sixteenths . 