Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 362

When I reviewed the previous book by the same authors, which was a more wide-ranging Irish agricultural history (AgHR 57 [2009], pp. 147–8), I suggested that they had filled a gap by producing a work about the day-to-day business of farming itself rather than the outcomes of farming, which are often of more interest to agricultural and economic historians. Here, I think they have done it again, but this time in the more rarefied ‘do-it-yourself’ world of cottage gardens and allotments. This is a slimmer volume, as dictated by the narrower, specialist nature of the subject, but proportionately it is as lavishly illustrated as their previous work. The skills developed by these two retired curators of Ulster Folk and Transport Museum oozes from every page.

For nearly half of the period covered by the book, the subsistence grower in Ireland was a different person to the labourer and others in town and country, who are the subject of the English allotment story. In Ireland he was often more closely associated with the soil for his entire income. It makes the events of the mid-1840s yet more tragic because so often the potato was the main crop being grown. More generally that class of person – known in Ireland as a cottar – rented a cottage and a plot of one or two acres but paid for it at least partly in labour services rather than wholly in monetary rent. They and their families were tied more aggressively to the land both by their work and their need for sustenance. If they grew anything else but potatoes, or raised animals on their plots, it was as often as not to sell on so that they could buy the other necessities of life. The dependence of the Irish cottar on subsistence cultivation was so much greater than the reliance of the English day labourer on his allotment. The Famine was more or less the final nail in the coffin of this mode of subsistence.

Chapter 1 is devoted to a brief discussion of this cottar system and serves as a reminder that Ireland was different. The remainder of the book becomes a more familiar history of the garden and allotment movement, including a focus on early debates about the efficacy of providing wage labourers with the plots of land, which might – while providing subsistence – divert their attention away from their duties to their masters. But, as in England, there was a tide of opinion from the early nineteenth century in favour of developing allotment gardens or cottage gardens. This is well illustrated in this book with precise references to actual examples of both the debate and the outcome. The rural cottage garden movement developed during the nineteenth century but, with the urban growth of Dublin, Belfast and Cork, the urban allotment movement also developed – especially perhaps from the 1890s – and with it came the development of local produce-growing societies. The outbreak of the First World War accentuated this with government-led leaflets and advice on how best to supplement food sources in times of national shortage. The year 1917 was coined by some as ‘the year of allotments’ (p. 76). Success brings problems, in this case a shortage of land to extend allotments further, and demands for an Allotment Act.

Ireland was in turmoil for much of the next decade but in 1926 legislation was passed allowing local authorities to compulsorily purchase land for subsequent letting on a small scale. Similarly in Northern Ireland an allotment bill proposed putting the regulation of small plots onto a more official basis. It is from the 1930s and this political intervention that the authors are able to give some measurements of change in what has previously has been an enjoyable but largely anecdotal story. The allotment movement took off, accentuated as it was by the pressures of the European war from 1939. Running in parallel with this otherwise chronological story there are chapters on agricultural education at the grass roots and school level, and the role of women and of gardening education in general. Agricultural historians in general will seize upon one or more of the three appendixes to this book, especially the second one, which is more or less a seed catalogue for the 1860s, as provided by Edmondson and Brothers of Dublin. Altogether this is an interesting travelogue through a relatively unknown aspect of Irish agricultural history.