Franchise and felony

In a public debate about the Education Act in 1856, William mentioned that he attended a Chartist meeting “about 25 years ago”, so around 1831. In fact, the actual Chartist meetings didn’t begin until 1837 with the publication of the People’s Charter which called for electoral reform and universal male suffrage. Either William misremembered his dates, or he was thinking of the meetings of 1831 and 1832 prior to the passage of the British Reform Act of 1832. This Act, formally the Representation of the People Act, made significant changes in the British electoral system, but did not, as had been hoped, result in granting the franchise to all adult men.

Either way, we know that as a young man, William had an interest in universal male suffrage. He left England to make a better life for himself and his family, and while he may not have envisaged that in New Zealand the British class system would break down, by the end of his life he knew that it had. He left England as a poor working class tradesman, but by the time he died, he was a successful businessman, well-known early settler, and had been an elected representative on the Blenheim Borough Council.

His first opportunity to cast a vote in a democratic election was been Wellington’s first municipal election in 1842. He would have known from soon after he arrived that a Municipal Corporation Bill had been presented to the Governor, and that the intention was for a universal male franchise. William doesn’t actually appear on the register of electors for 1842, and I’ve always assumed that the registration fee of 20 shillings was the reason why. Twenty shillings was the best part of a week’s wages for a labouring man, and it’s very likely that the Norgroves just didn’t have the money to spare. I’ve imagined William being excited by the sudden opportunity for democratic participation, and then frustrated by the lack of funds to achieve it. I’ve even imagined William and Sarah arguing, him wanting to spend the money and her arguing for paying the rent and buying food and furniture.

What I didn’t imagine was that when William had his first opportunity to read the details of the bill, his dreams of voting would have run into a brick wall. In late January 1842 a summary and extracts of the bill were published in the local newspaper. A few paragraphs in, the details of the franchise were described :

Every male inhabitant of full age, not convicted of felony, bribery or perjury, may claim to be enrolled a burgess on payment of 20s, although he may possess no rateable property within the Borough. 

The brick wall? William was a convicted felon.

Roll back to December 1832. The Reform Act had been passed, and while most of the so-called “rotten boroughs” had been disposed of, and the number of eligible voters had increased, the requirement for property worth £10 still ruled out the bulk of the working class from voting. The protests which had led to the Reform Act continued throughout Britain into December 1832 when the general election took place.

There was evidently a custom in Colchester at the end of elections for members of the public to pull down the hustings and polling booths to take away the materials they were made of, presumably to use or to sell for cash. The local authorities had attempted to prevent this from happening by putting around notices advising that the buildings were the property of the builders, and not to be taken.

On the evening of 12 December, nineteen-year-old William Norgrove was amongst a mob of around 100 people who had assembled around the hustings. Police constables waited nearby in anticipation of trouble. A man by the name of John Grove got the ball rolling, encouraging the mob to take their customary perquisite by pulling down the hustings. The mob respond with some enthusiasm and violence. Rocks were thrown. William apparently hurled a rock which hit two constables. Then, according to an eyewitness, he started pulling down the hustings, while calling out, “Now then, we’ll have a go!”

Nine men, including William, were arrested and appeared before the local justices on 17 December charged with inciting the populace to riot and tumult, and with having demolished one of the polling booths. Three of the men were discharged without conviction; the remaining six, William included, were remanded to stand trial at the next session of the Assizes. They were given leave to apply for bail; all but two were able to afford this, but two remained in jail until the Lent Assizes session in March 1833. These two aren’t named so I have no idea if William was one of them.

At the Lent Assizes, William and the other five men were indicted for riotous assembly and the assault of three constables in the execution of their duty. The prosecutor was determined to prove that John Grove was the ring-leader, but noted that there were differing degrees of “criminality” among the other defendants. A number of witnesses were called, including constable George Gusterson, who said :

I was employed to protect the hustings on the above occasion; large stones were thrown by the mob at the hustings and the constables, one of which, thrown by Norgrove, first struck Hills and then Finch; Norgrove was particularly active in inciting the mob to break down the hustings; the inhabitants were much alarmed by the riot and closed down their shops. 

Grove’s lawyer argued that Grove hadn’t even been there, and produced a number of witnesses who said he had been in the pub at the time. He then tried to muddy the waters by claiming it was all the city corporation’s fault for putting around the notices telling people they couldn’t take the materials from the hustings. The judge took a remarkably lenient view, found the lot of them guilty, fined Grove £30 and the rest of them one shilling each.

They were lucky they got off lightly – if the Riot Act had been read at the time of the riot, they could have all been hanged or transported to Australia.

So back to William in Wellington in 1842, reading about the proposed municipal corporation bill and realising with something of a sinking feeling that he had rendered himself ineligible to vote by his youthful behaviour. It raises some questions, not least of which is whether he had ever told Sarah about this less than stellar moment in his past? If he had, was that before, or after they were married? And if he hadn’t, had the moment for confession arrived? I’ll never know for sure, although I rather suspect that he might have told her at some point after they were married, possibly characterising it as part of a political protest.

In the end, it did not matter. William paid his 20s and appeared on the burgess roll of 1843 – when the Municipal Corporation Act was eventually passed in 1842, it did not explicitly disenfranchise the felons, bribery artists and perjurers of the borough. And, as it turned out, the 1843 election didn’t take place. The first election in which William actually voted would have been the first general parliamentary election in 1853. (Felons were disqualified from registering to vote only if their felony had been committed “within any part of her Majesty’s dominions”. Felons who had committed their crimes anywhere else in the world, including Britain, were presumably free to vote…)

Was William a Chartist?

Was William a Chartist? He went to one Chartist meeting that we know of. This doesn’t necessarily make him one, doesn’t mean he signed any of the petitions or agreed with all of the Charter. He left England before the 3 million signature petition was presented to Parliament, as did many of the Chartists and their supporters. A quick search of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography shows that quite a few former Chartists ended up in Nelson. Former Chartist leader George Binns, in replying to an attack on him in the Nelson Examiner, said “I have nothing to do with Chartism in New Zealand, and my past enthusiasm might have been forgotten where there is no grievance to redress and no enemy to our weal”. It’s possible that many of the former Chartists in New Zealand felt this way – in the new country, where the English class system had not taken root, and where opportunity was available for all who were willing to put in the work, there were not the same grievances as in England. The former Chartists didn’t need to be activists – they could just get on with their lives. It’s possible that this was the situation William was in.

What adds spice to the mystery is that a few months later, in October 1856, at the public meeting for the election of the Superintendent of Nelson Province, William rushed in to propose Dr David Munro as a candidate. William showed a rather strange haste and lack of propriety – the Nelson Examiner noted that the two main candidates were quietly conferring as to which of them should be proposed first; and Munro already had an intended proposer, who was reduced to seconding the nomination. A third candidate, opposing Munro and his main opponent on a number of issues, was a former Chartist, JP Robinson. So why didn’t William support Robinson? Was it that he didn’t agree with Chartist policies? It seems unlikely, given that life in New Zealand had already provided him with a key aim of the people’s charter, the vote. Was he trying to make a bit of a name for himself in Nelson political circles – he had been there for less than a year, so was he trying to get noticed? Did he have political ambitions of his own? He would have known Munro in Wellington, although they moved in different social circles – did he want to win personal favour with the man?

So does it matter whether he was a Chartist or not? I think, for the purposes of telling this story, that it does. I had been wondering how much of “politics” was going to find its way into the story – the more politics, the more work for me. The context is inevitably political – the New Zealand Company and land issues; Maori and land issues; the Maori wars; and local body politics, which we already know William was involved in. And where does Sarah fit into it all, given that it’s her story? It’s even harder to find out what she would have thought about it all – after all, reported history is so much his-story, and very little her-story. There are a couple of clues which suggest to me that Sarah would have taken an interest in politics, and that she and William may have discussed these issues at home. First, William’s sister comments in a letter to her that she remembers “you were very fond of a newspaper when you were at Ilford” – she encloses some of the local ones for her. Well, apart from advertisements, newspapers of the time were almost entirely political – so we know Sarah took an interest in the world around her. Second, two of her daughters signed the huge electoral petition that ultimately resulted in the 1893 Electoral Act giving New Zealand women the right to vote. Sarah died a couple of years before this; I don’t think the earlier petitions survived, and I don’t know if she signed any of them. But Emma and Kate, the two daughters who never married, did sign – and they had to have been influenced by the views of their parents, with whom they lived far longer than their siblings did. Slender clues perhaps, but I’m coming to the view that political issues were probably regular dinner conversation in the Norgrove household, and that therefore there’s a natural place for it in Sarah’s story.

Going with the flow

People sometimes experience moments where something appears in their creative work that seems to come from beyond them – for writers, a character appears fully-formed from nowhere, or a character says something that you know you didn’t think up yourself. Some people think it’s the hand of God at work. William Blake said, “I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.” As far as Puccini was concerned, Madame Butterfly was dictated to him by God : “I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public”. Sometimes it does feel like that – those are my fingers on the computer keyboard, but it’s just flowing through me from somewhere else altogether. I think flow is an explanation which removes the spiritual element which some people find off-putting –flow is just the state where we’re so in the groove with what we’re doing, everything just comes together. You lose track of time and the world around you and it’s like magic!

Last week I had one of those experiences, resulting in a research side-track and some interesting questions. I’ve been working on writing William and Sarah’s last night on the Gertrude – the immigrants are a bit stunned and disappointed by what they have seen of Wellington. They’re feeling a bit misled by the New Zealand Company’s claims about the place, and there is a lot of talk going on in the steerage compartment instead of the usual quiet getting ready for bed. Here it is, still very much messy First Draft :

Below deck, it was noisy chaos instead of the usual quiet bed-time preparations. The curtains were still open in most of the bunks, and somewhere she could hear a woman weeping. The men were clustered around the tables between the berths, several vigorous discussions taking place at once. A small child’s wail rose above the din, and the sudden tightening of her nipples made her realise that she had been so caught up in her own worries that she had forgotten Ovid. Where was he? They had left him sleeping in their bunk, watched over by the neighbouring Plimmers. She was too small to see the far end of the compartment over her thronging ship-mates. She began to work her way past the benches, struggling past backs and elbows and sea-bags, stubbing her toes as she pushed and excused herself. She glanced up to get her bearings in the shadowy sea of dark coats, and found she could see the pale moon of Ovid’s face peering from their bunk. She reached for him, hands quickly checking over his small body as he wrapped his legs around her waist and pushed his face into her neck. “Mama’s here now,” she murmured to him, “Mama’s here”. Over the hubbub, she heard a gruff voice call out their name from the other side of the table.

“Norgrove! You’ve looked longer on this so-called town of Wellington than the rest of us tonight. What say you about the New Zealand Company’s promises now?”

The muttering voices quieted as benches creaked, men turning to see William as he followed Sarah through the crowd. She heard him sigh, and felt his hand on her shoulder, a brief squeeze that sent warmth and tingling quite unexpectedly through her. She leaned into his solid warmth as he turned to look at the expectant faces.

“Well, certainly it’s not a town or city as we know them back in England,” he began.

“Far from it,” came a voice from near the hatch, as other voices called out, and fists thumped the table.

“Friends,” William shouted. “Friends, that is not why we took this journey! If you wanted the familiar, the towns and cities of England, why then are you here? Why did you bring your wives and children on this dangerous voyage if you wanted a world like the one we left behind?”

“Hear, hear!” came a voice from below and to the right of her. Bodies shifted around Sarah as John Plimmer extracted himself from his family’s bunk and stood up. “Norgrove has the right attitude. This place is full of opportunity for us all!”

Immediately, the uproar broke out again, and William broke away from her to move closer to the table. Men shifted to allow him through and she lost her balance, pushed back against the bunks and almost falling into someone’s bed. A tug at her skirt made her look down, and she saw Eliza Plimmer beckoning her down to join her family in the lower bunk. She squirmed between a ship-mate and her own hanging sea-bag and gratefully sat down on the edge of the bunk as Eliza pulled six-year old Isaac onto her lap to make room. “You stayed on deck a long time.” Eliza leaned over and spoke directly into Sarah’s ear to make herself heard. “Does it look any better for looking at it longer?”

“No,” Sarah said, “not in the slightest.” She tried unsuccessfully to hitch her skirt into a cushion without jolting Ovid, or disturbing Eliza’s two younger children, who were nested in blankets at the back of the bunk. The raised edges of the bunks stopped bedding from sliding out, but made for uncomfortable seats, especially since five months of use had reduced the straw stuffing in the mattresses almost to dust. In the end, she did what Eliza had done, and swung her feet up onto the bunk and leaned her back against the rough boards dividing it from the next bunk. They sat toe to toe, unable to talk without raising their voices, and unable to see anything of what was going on through a solid wall of men’s coats. Sarah let Ovid slide down onto the mattress with his head pillowed on her stomach, and twitched the end of a blanket over him. She thought she saw Eliza rolling her eyes in the gloom as outside, their husbands argued the opportunities and benefits of their wild new Eden against those who despaired.

She stroked Ovid’s fine blond hair – it had lightened in the sun since they had crossed the equator. It really needed cutting, but she wasn’t going near him with a pair of scissors in a ship rolling around at sea. It would have to wait till they got ashore, and then she would barber William as well if she got a chance. Who knew? This time tomorrow night, they would probably be sleeping on the shallow beach she had seen from the deck, or somewhere in a forest under one of those towering trees. She didn’t want to think about it – she wanted to be doing something. No wonder the men were ranting and storming, but none of the women seemed inclined to join in, and she wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Eliza seemed to have come to the same conclusion; she had reached around Isaac for work-basket and was digging through it for something to do. Sarah leaned towards her. “You won’t be able to see to sew in this light.” Eliza pulled out a thick skein of grey wool. “No,” she said, “but we may as well finish rolling the wool while we’re stuck in here.” She picked out the end of the yarn, and held the rest for Sarah to take. Sarah tucked her hands inside the skein and then pulled them apart to hold the loops taut. Eliza started to roll the wool around her fingers, forming a squarish lump that slowly took on the shape of a ball as she wound the wool around it. Sarah’s hands moved automatically, easing the wool off the skein. She focused on it in the dim light as they settled into a rhythm, concentrating on the wool and her hands so that individual words from the men’s discussion blurred into a loud hum.

They were just starting on the second skein when Eliza abruptly stopped winding and leaned out of the bunk to look at something. Although the men nearest them were still talking hard, the noise seemed to be dying down, and Sarah thought it was probably the ship’s surgeon, come on his nightly rounds. She was proved right when Dr Garrett’s voice called out above the noise. “What’s this then, a Chartist meeting?” The silence that followed was so sudden and tense that she realised a good number of her fellow passengers must have been more involved in the Chartist actions than merely signing a petition.

© Helen McNaught

I stopped writing in complete surprise when Dr Garrett spoke, because where in the world did “a Chartist meeting” come from?? It’s not something I ever studied in a formal history class, but I knew I had run across it somewhere. Eventually, I tracked it back to the Nelson Examiner’s report on a public meeting held in 1856 to discuss the Education Act. In speaking in favour of the Act, our William “remembered attending a Chartist meeting about 25 years ago, at which one of the great reasons urged for the passing of the people’s charter was that the Government did not make proper provision for the education of the people”.

The rest of his speech is quite fascinating, but I’ll come back to it at another time. I took off into an exploration of Chartism, starting with Wikipedia, and ending up in some fairly scholarly articles. I haven’t quite finished yet – am still wondering if anyone has written a thesis on the links between Chartism and emigration to New Zealand – because obviously there has to be a link.

Just as interesting, though, is whether great-great grandpa was a Chartist, and does it matter anyway? I’ll come back to this in my next blog entry, because this one is already enormous!