‘Fake News’: Charles Vine and the Anti-Corn Law League
Dr Louise Ryland-Epton, researching the history of the parish of Bremhill for Chippenham Volume 20, reminds us that Fake News is not a new phenomenon!
Depending on which media outlet you turn to, you may get a very different perspective on the news. There is also the possibility that, unless you are careful, the item could be entirely fake. It is, of course, nothing new. In researching Wiltshire in the nineteenth century, it has surprised me how divisive the local news reporting could become. No news item was more divisive than the coverage of Anti-Corn Law League agitation during the 1840s and no perspectives more locally discordant than the newsprint of Devizes, the Wiltshire Independent and the Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette.
The Corn Laws were probably the most debated political issue of the 1840s. By January 1846 the subject was 'obsessing the whole nation.'1 To protect home producers, the government had added duties onto imported foodstuffs, and this peaked in the period 1838-1846. The action had raised the cost of food. In 1844 and 45 there were terrible harvests which further drove up prices, while wages remained stagnant. Finally, the potato crop, a staple of labourers’ gardens and allotments, failed. In was the depths of winter 1846, and people were desperate and hungry.
On the frosty evening of 5 January 1846, a protest meeting against the Corn Laws took place on the road between Hilmarton and Goatacre. It was addressed by Charles Vine who had walked over 5 miles through ‘dirt and mud’ from Christian Malford. According to the Independent’s reporter, present on the evening, up to 1000 people also attended. Vine was the second speaker and, implied in the column inches, the most prominent one. He appealed in the speech to the South Wiltshire MP, John Brook, and took the crowd, at length, through his travails. ‘I have half an acre of ground, but I have not had a single potato from it this year fit for the pigs to eat. We have not new potatoes until July, and unless something turns up in the meantime starvation stares us in the face.’ He finished the speech with a poem.2 The report suggested Vine was a labourer, although articulate and educated. A simple message ran through his address, he was a hardworking man that was no longer able to feed his family. It struck a chord, and the speech was met with approbation and loud cheering.3
The Gazette offered a different perspective. At first, it poured scorn over the idea that labourers had organised the meeting themselves. Instead, it saw ‘the cloven-foot of the [Anti-Corn Law] League’ whose agents had ‘prompted’ the assembly. It questioned the size of the meeting.4 However, from the following week, it also began to discredit the speakers and attack the ‘string of deliberate falsehoods' which it alleged were contained in their testimonies. It published correspondence that claimed Vine was 'notorious' locally and allusions were made that the speechmakers had been paid.5
When the meeting at Goatacre was discussed in parliamentary debate, the Gazette redoubled its attack on the speakers, especially Vine. It claimed that Vine was not an agricultural labourer, he was a chair maker who had occasionally been in 'gentleman's service'. He was a ‘discontented and violent man' who had been in prison for ten months for riot and assault against the Poor Law Amendment Act. He had been lent money by the parish to undertake his trade but had not paid it back. He had been employed by the curate of Christian Malford, Rev. Brookes, to look after his horse and garden. Brookes had given Vine liberty to continue his trade, but instead, he had rewarded his employer's trust by stealing fruit and vegetables from him. Furthermore, Vine had entered this haul for a local agricultural show and had thus fraudulently won six prizes. Not wishing to make charges against him Rev Brooks had discharged him much later for neglect of service.6
The Gazette went further and pointed to the fact during Vine’s speech he had stated his crop of potatoes was black and inedible. But ‘at the very time, Vines, with unparalleled hardihood, made this declaration, he had, it appears a large supply of sound ones at home!’ Moreover, ‘he offered to sell ten sacks of sound ones to Mr J Hiller.’ He had also sold two bags of good potatoes to Mr Newman, who had no doubt Vine had many more. Their reporting of Vine may seem prosaic, but in a small village where his livelihood was so dependent on his reputation, the character assassination was potentially devastating.7
The following week the Independent responded to the accusations in the Gazette. It printed a letter from Vine repudiating the ‘falsehoods’, Vine wrote, ‘I am sorry he [the editor] should be so wanting in sound judgement’. The Independent also ran several letters from correspondents repudiating various aspects of the Gazette’s story. Vine was 'strictly honest’ and his fruit and vegetables ‘excellent’ and worthy of prizes. 8
But the Independent went further to expose ‘the dastardly conduct of the Devizes Gazette relative to the poor men who took part in the proceedings.’ As part of this reporting, the paper visited Christian Malford and called on Rev. Brookes. Brookes refused to accompany the reporter to the homes of the local poor, but when the subject of Charles Vine, whose character had been ‘traduced’ by the Gazette was brought up, the curate promptly stated he had given the produce to Vine, he had not stolen it. The Independent also ascertained that Vine had won prizes at the Sutton Benger show with his own produce and that of the curate, but those prizes ‘were awarded with the knowledge that the specimens came from his master’s garden.’ The reporter inspected Vine’s potato crop and ‘brought a few of them away, and had them dressed…they proved wet, black and uneatable.’ The paper likewise found the accusations concerning money which had been lent to him to be false. The Independent ended their account of Vine by stating; ‘There are many other inaccuracies, all telling against the man, and showing plainly there is a desire to hunt him down.’9
The 'truth' is, however, more complicated. The papers stood on either side of the debate on the Corn Laws; the Independent wished them to be abolished, the Gazette was for the status-quo. They were engaged in a heated argument, and the character of Charles Vine of Christian Malford was for a time a focus. The Gazette had undoubtedly exaggerated and embellished their story of Vine, possibly even carried untruths, but the Independent did not address all the accusations against him either. It is possible some of the claims against Vine had merit. In 1834, as a young man, Vine had been the leader of protest agitation that had turned ugly. He had been arrested and convicted of riot and assault, although for four months not the ten months reported in the Gazette.10 In his speech at the Anti-Corn Law protest Vine had emphasised he was a labourer, something the Independent’s later recording confirmed he was not [or at least not entirely]. It is likely too that the Rev. Brookes had discharged Vine as, curiously, the Independent did not ask him for his opinion of Vine or whether he had been let go.11 Each paper spun the story to suit their own political ends, the ‘truth’ of Charles Vine’s history and character if not faked then ambiguous.
By mid-March, the column inches on Charles Vine of Christian Malford had stopped. However, the Corn Laws debate continued to rage on through the Devizes press and across the nation. Finally, the Corn Laws were abolished a few months later, controversial to the end, the issue had split the Tory Party and brought down the ministry of the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel.
1 D. Roberts, ‘Charles Dickens and the "Daily News": Editorials and Editorial Writers’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 22(2) 1989, 51-63.
2 The poem Vine quoted was adapted from Thomas Hood’s The Lay of the Labourer which he had adapted for the occasion.
3 Wiltshire Independent, 8 January 1846.
4 Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 15 January 1846.
5 Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 22 January 1846. The Gazette later made snide remarks when other speakers reacted to its reporting of bribes, Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 29 January 1846.
6 Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 19 February 1846.
7 Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 19 February 1846.
8 Wiltshire Independent, 26 February 1846.
9 Wiltshire Independent, 26 February 1846. The Independent’s coverage continued to refer to Vine 12 March 1846.
10 Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, 13 November 1834, 15 January 1835.
11 Wiltshire Independent contained another letter from Vine, on 12 March 1846, and an additional communication from the secretary of the Sutton Benger Floral society, but these elements were not addressed.