Between Empire and Revolution

A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873-1936

Allison Drew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317315094
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Sidney Bunting's life offers a unique perspective on the British Empire, illustrating the complex social networks and values that were carried across the world in the name of empire. Drawing on archival material, including the Bunting family papers and records of Bunting's Oxford years, this work presents his biography.

1 TO SAVE SOULS

The South African mission stations of Buntingville and Old Bunting, founded in the Eastern Cape in the nineteenth century, were named after Sidney Percival Bunting’s great grandfather, Dr Jabez Bunting. Born in 1779 to humble parents in Manchester, England and noticeably bright, Jabez Bunting attended Manchester Grammar School and entered the Wesleyan Methodist ministry in 1799. Convinced of his own rectitude, he sought to change the world around him. Over three decades he built an impressive reputation as a preacher. He moved to London in 1833 and rose up the Wesleyan hierarchy to become the dominant figure in orthodox Wesleyan Methodism. He zealously led the Wesleyan Missionary Society as it spread its tentacles around the globe, reaching from North America to South Africa. Rigid and authoritarian, ‘a born disciplinarian’ who centralized control by expelling critics and dissidents, Jabez Bunting broke Methodism from its Anglican base and established it as an independent self-governing church.¹

The Wesleyan tradition in which Jabez Bunting raised his family promoted the ideal of service to worthy causes. This reflected the personage of its founder, John Wesley, whose message to his followers was unequivocal: ‘You have nothing to do but save souls’. Yet, by attracting the upwardly mobile and economically successful, Wesleyan Methodism was very much ‘a religion for the poor’. In contrast, Methodism’s working-class strand, known as Primitive Methodism, was ‘a religion of the poor’ – but most working-class Methodists preferred compromise and conciliation to class struggle and socialism. Methodist societies were insular and strictly disciplined; marriage to those outside the fold was frowned upon, and a ‘spiritual police’ kept careful watch for signs of moral slippage.²

Jabez Bunting married Sarah Maclardie. They had three boys and three girls. The first son, William Maclardie Bunting, continued in his father’s footsteps as a Wesleyan minister.³ The second son, Thomas Percival Bunting – Sidney’s grandfather – was a Manchester solicitor and, like leading Methodists of his day, ‘a strong party man on the Tory side’. He was also a wit with a flair for writing who loved penning rhymes for his grandchildren. ‘The Duke of York, the Duke of York, Was very fond of roasted pork’, went a favourite ditty. ‘Sir Humphrey Davy made the gravy, And Old John Dalton put the Salt on.’⁴

Inspired by his father and older brother, Thomas Bunting published biographies of both. He married Elizabeth Bealey, the daughter of Lancashire bleachers who had carried on their trade for three centuries. Thomas and Elizabeth Bunting passed on the Wesleyan heritage and high aspirations to their own four children. The eldest child, Percy William Bunting – Sidney’s father – was born in Manchester in 1836. Also intellectually gifted, he was one of the first students at Owens College, Manchester, forerunner of the University of Manchester. He went on to read mathematics at Pembroke College, Cambridge. There, he attended the Jesus Lane Sunday School, where he met Sheldon Amos, another Cambridge man and the youngest son of the noted jurist Professor Andrew Amos. Percy and Sheldon became good friends. Percy graduated as twentieth wrangler in 1859, and then, following his father, turned to law. In 1862 he was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, the oldest of four Inns of Court, centuries-old unincorporated bodies of lawyers who determined who could practise law at the bar.⁵

Nonconformists – those whose religious beliefs led them to dissent from the dominant Church of England – faced political and social disabilities; middle-class Nonconformists felt these keenly and aspired to the social status of their Anglican counterparts. But by the late nineteenth century Wesleyan Methodism had become respectable.⁶ Indeed, its values sat easily with Victorian society’s ‘gospel of work’ and censure of idleness. Methodism remained actively concerned with saving souls but believed that individuals could save themselves by their personal commitment. Methodists encouraged judicious reforms and eschewed open social conflict.⁷

Percy Bunting was a passionate Methodist and, unlike his father, a committed Liberal. His liberal views extended from the political realm to the religious: within the Methodist fold he was ‘the trusted adviser and supporter of all promoters of liberal advance’.⁸ He dedicated his life to social welfare, particularly to what was then known as moral purity. His political and religious activities took him frequently to the continent. There, while walking in the Wengern Alp in Switzerland in 1863, he met Mary Hyett Lidgett. She was a trim, austere woman with a serious gaze who, in the style of the day, wore her dark hair parted in the middle and pulled back in a low bun. They had in common not only their religious and social backgrounds – both born into well-connected, socially prominent Methodist families who had only recently moved to London from the provinces – but a mutual interest in issues of social justice and morality. But theirs was a long courtship. Mary had to overcome her mother’s resistance; she had hoped her daughter would make a better match.

Mary Hyett Lidgett was born in London in 1840, the second daughter of John and Ann Lidgett. John Lidgett, a sea captain and shipowner and the son of a pilot on the Humber, had turned to Methodism as a young man in Hull. His wife, Ann Hyett of Gloucester, was raised an Anglican, but embraced Methodism as a young girl. Ann’s younger sister Mary Hyett remained an Anglican and wed Joseph Shepherd, also a sea captain, who made his fortune in shipping. He had been born in the tiny North Yorkshire village of Appleton-le-Moors, one of sixteen children, ten of whom had died in infancy. Linked as brothers-in-law through their wives, in 1841 John Lidgett and Joseph Shepherd became business partners in Hull.⁹

If Sidney’s paternal line of family first made contact with South Africa through missionary work, his maternal line made it through trade and colonial settlement. Lidgett and Shepherd began trading in guano obtained from one of the Penguin Islands off the south-western coast of Africa – now Namibia. The partnership was short-lived, and John Lidgett tried organizing emigration to Natal Colony; at the time, Wesleyan missionaries were seeking to persuade English Methodists of means to purchase land in Natal Colony to help spread the doctrine.¹⁰ Lidgett found receptive ears in northeast England, which had been hard hit by a depression in the late 1840s. The port of Hull suffered badly with high unemployment, and Hull shipowners petitioned Parliament to retain the Navigation Laws that protected trade. But the Hull Advertiser advocated free trade and railed against ‘those who cling to the last plank in the rotten and sinking raft of Protection’.¹¹ It dedicated a column to the ‘Hull Workhouse’ and ran a series called ‘Inquiry into the Social Condition of the Working Classes in Hull’. Emigration seemed an ideal solution, one that accorded with both economy and gospel.

The attraction of emigration to South Africa was spelled out in January 1849 in a lecture newsworthy enough for the local press. The speaker highlighted the advantages of Natal Colony, not least ‘the cheap supply of labour which could be obtained from the Zulu’s [sic], who are capable of doing a great quantity of rough work, and might soon be trained for all kinds of labour, under the direction of a European labourer’. Adults could purchase ship passage and twenty acres of land for £10. The following year a lecture in nearby Beverley described Natal Colony as ‘one of the most promising sites of emigration’. A local Methodist minister offered prayers for Hull’s renewed commercial prosperity to maintain the ‘missions to the heathens’. Africa was 8,000 miles long and 3,000 miles broad’, he informed his listeners, ‘so there was room enough to work’.¹²

About one thousand people left Yorkshire in 1849–50 on various emigration schemes bound for Natal. John Lidgett’s scheme was ‘perhaps the best managed of all’, even though he never made a significant profit. He purchased ten thousand acres of land along the Lions River in Natal, advertising ship passage and the ‘advantages of beginning a new life in the Colony’. In 1849 four of Lidgett’s ships carried close to 250 immigrants, mostly Methodists dreaming of a better life. The ships landed at Durban. But the aspiring settlers faced a harsh existence. The local buildings, even in Durban, were wattle and daub, not stone and brick, and the journey to the remote site known as Lidgett’s Town took several days by ox-wagon. Many of them gave up their land rights, which reverted to Lidgett.¹³

John and Ann Lidgett settled at Morden Hill, Blackheath, south of Greenwich. Their daughter Mary showed artistic and musical talent but had to leave school at fifteen due to poor health. However, she was able to travel to Europe with her sisters. On a trip to Italy in 1862–3 she became passionately interested in Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy Association and the movement to unite Italy, an issue that attracted the sympathy of many English liberals of the day. On the way back to England, the sisters went walking in the Wengern Alp in Switzerland and met Percy Bunting.

Percy and Mary finally married in 1869. After their marriage they moved to 14 Oakley Square in Somers Town, St Pancras, an area stretching north-west from the main thoroughfare of Euston Road, sandwiched between two railway stations, Euston, and the newly-built spectacular iron and glass St Pancras. They lived comfortably, with two servants. Oakley Square, consisting of smart four-storey houses arranged around a long narrow garden, was one of the better areas of Somers Town, and was situated opposite the red-bricked Working Men’s College founded in 1854 by Charles Kingsley and F. D. Maurice. Between Oakley Square and Somers Town Chapel on Seymour Street, which led down to Euston Road, lay blocks of modest houses, the homes of many of the labourers who had helped build St Pancras Station.¹⁴

The next year, Sheldon Amos married Percy’s youngest sister Sarah. Born around 1840, Sarah had moved to London in 1865, where she helped found the Working Women’s College in Queen Square and became the lady superintendent. Sarah was a plain-looking woman, with a long face and dark hair tied back in a bun. Like her brother Percy she had faced resentment from her mother-in-law for marrying up. In the eyes of Sheldon’s family Sarah was ‘a strange, impulsive, uncomfortable, most unusual young woman; with no money’ – she worked to earn her living – and ‘no family that anyone ever heard of’ – after all, her father was a Manchester solicitor. And to top it off, she was a Dissenter, a Nonconformist. But she had surmounted her father’s prejudices to acquire an education and become a school mistress, and she had an intense, almost mystical personality. She always succeeded in ‘at once establishing an atmosphere of equality’, no matter whom she met.

Sarah and Sheldon were idealists. Sheldon, tall and thin with a dreamy faraway expression in his eyes, wore a moustache and long scraggly beard that pointed in two directions at the end. He had been called to the bar in 1862 and was appointed as reader at the Inner Temple. In 1869 he became Professor of Jurisprudence at the non-sectarian University College, London – the ‘Godless College’ of Gower Street – which had been inspired by the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. A believer in reconciliation, whose views had been shaped by J.S. Mill and F. D. Maurice amongst others, he desired ‘to be a moral teacher’. He taught democracy and government at the Working Women’s College, where he and Sarah had met, and law at the Working Men’s College. The couple were then living in East Street, ‘a mean street in the neighbourhood of Theobold’s Row’, an area they had chosen ‘in order to be amongst the poor’. They were in constant contact with Percy and Mary Bunting.¹⁵ The two young couples had much in common. All four were committed social activists, particularly concerned with moral purity and involved with Josephine Butler and James Stansfeld in the campaign to repeal the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act. This law enabled policemen to arrest alleged prostitutes and subject them to compulsory health checks for venereal disease, even though men were not subjected to similar sanctions.¹⁶ However, Percy and Mary were upwardly mobile and faithfully followed the social conventions of their class, while Sheldon and Sarah were known at times to practice their convictions at the expense of their own comfort.

Yet Percy and his sister Sarah got along famously. Sarah’s interests were many: anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, vegetarianism, homeopathy and temperance to name but few. She loved to argue and would stay up late into the night engaged in all sorts of debates. These were not always lofty: on one such occasion she castigated her brother Percy ‘for wearing elastic-sided boots – horresco referens; that good and clever man was indifferent to appearances’.¹⁷ Following the tradition of the day, Percy and Mary did not wait to have children: their eldest child, Evelyn Mary, was born on 7 April 1870. For most of the century, large families had been the norm, but by the 1870s this was changing. Percy and Mary followed this trend. Sidney was born at Oakley Square on 29 June 1873, three years after his older sister. In the meantime, Sheldon and Sarah’s son Maurice was born on 15 June 1872, and their daughter Cornelia Bonté, on 19 July 1874.¹⁸

By the time Percy and Mary’s third child, Dora Elizabeth, was born on 6 January 1877, the family had moved south to 43 Euston Square, squeezed between Euston Station and Euston Road. Little Sidney was about four. By then, his uncle Sheldon had become debilitated by severe asthma and kidney disease. Percy was so concerned that in mid-1879 he visited a medical clairvoyant in the hope of getting some insight into Sheldon’s condition, to no avail.

In August 1879, when Sidney was six, his uncle Sheldon and aunt Sarah left England with their two children in search of better climes. They ended up in Egypt. Captivated by the country, Sheldon obtained a position at the Alexandria bar. In 1882, when the British army occupied Egypt, Sheldon was offered a post on the newly-created Native Court of Appeal in Cairo; Sarah ran a home for emancipated women slaves.¹⁹ That same year, when Sidney was nine, Percy Bunting’s career took a new turn. It kept him and the family firmly in London, where Sidney grew up, but it brought politics, both national and international, directly into their home and their lives.

2 GOD AND GLADSTONE

Despite Percy Bunting’s highly prestigious position at Lincoln’s Inn, he ‘never attained high place at the Bar nor gained a great practice’. Nonetheless, he earned a good income through conveyancing, and the family was very comfortable by the standards of the day. His middling performance as a barrister may have been because ‘he possessed too much versatility and did not sufficiently concentrate on his legal profession’.¹ Instead, like his father Thomas, he ‘drifted into literature’. In 1882 he became editor of the prestigious Contemporary Review, founded in 1862 by Alexander Strahan. With an editorial style deemed ‘consistently moderate and judicious, eschewing sensationalism of any kind’, he held the position for the rest of his life.² He used his position as editor to ensure that issues he felt were important were given their just due and discussed from a variety of angles and viewpoints, helping to shape the intellectual, religious and political debates of the day.

The Buntings moved again, this time to 18 Endsleigh Gardens in leafy Bloomsbury. The family was moving up in the world. Although Methodists and other Nonconformists still faced social disadvantages, the Buntings’ religious beliefs and championing of unpopular causes did not deny them a secure niche in late nineteenth-century English society. Endsleigh Gardens lay just south of and parallel to Euston Road, off Upper Woburn Place, across from the imposing six-columned St Pancras Parish Church. The houses there were much larger and grander than their first home at Oakley Square. The Bunting household had grown. It included four children (the youngest, Sheldon Arthur Steward, was born on 29 May 1882), Percy’s spinster aunt Emma Bunting, and a number of servants. Several years later they moved a few houses down to number 11, a stately four-storey house, with a two-columned stoop and a narrow terrace elegantly decorated with a wrought iron balustrade that ran across the fron...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 To Save Souls
• 2 God and Gladstone
• 3 A Classical Boy
• 4 Imperial University
• 5 Fighting for Empire
• 6 An Englishman in Johannesburg
• 7 A New Gospel
• 8 ‘The Star in the East’
• 9 ‘The Earth is the Workers’’
• 10 Fighting against Empire
• 11 For a Native Republic
• 12 Into the Wilderness
• 13 Falling from Grace
• 14 A Weary Soul
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index