Robert Owen and his Utopia Britannica

[Tony Gosling]

Harmony, climate change and why the sky is blue

http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/362
Posted on 
<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/362>August 
11, 2013 by 
<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/author/chris-coates>chris-coates

I was recently at the annual conference of the 
European<http://www.utopianstudieseurope.org/> 
Utopian Studies Societyheld at 
<http://www.newlanark.org/>New Lanark, the model 
industrial village set up and run by Robert Owen 
on the banks of the Clyde. Utopian Studies is a 
very mixed academic bag with conference papers 
ranging from one entitled ‘On the Possibility of 
a Constructive Dialogue Between Marxism and 
Anarchism: The Case of Ursula K. Le Guin.’ by 
Tony Burns, from the University of Nottingham, 
through to more prosaic ‘Change and longevity in 
intentional communities’ by Professor Tim Miller 
from Kansas University. Sadly, the opening talk 
of the conference due to have been given by 
Scottish author <http://www.iain-banks.net/>Iain 
Banks about his science fiction novels about the 
interstellar anarchist utopian society known as 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture>The 
Culture had to be cancelled due to his untimely death from cancer.

Utopia Britannica


Much of the conference proceedings were, perhaps 
naturally given the location, taken up with 
discussions around the legacy of Robert Owen with 
papers exploring the wide influence of his ideas 
and trying to unpick some of the more obscure 
moments from his long life. The model village at 
New Lanark, now a world heritage site, pretty 
much steals all the Owenite glory these days with 
the other communities started by Owen and his 
followers obscured by its shadow. Largely it has 
to be said due to the lack of anything tangible 
on the ground left from the other communities to 
act as any sort of focus of attention. While 
researching the Owenite legacy for my book on 
early British utopian 
experiments,<http://www.edgeoftime.co.uk/index.php?p=u1&c=d>Utopia 
Britannica, I tried to track down and visit the 
locations of all the known Owenite communities in the UK.
<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Orbiston.jpg>
Orbiston Pillar © Copyright Lairich Rig and licensed for


Orbiston Pillar © Copyright 
<http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/22713>Lairich 
Rig and licensed for reuse under 
this<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/>Creative Commons Licence

This variously involved trips to the Cambridge 
fens in search of the 
<https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m2034&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF>Manea 
Fen Colony, a stroll round a Scottish housing 
estate which has street names such as Babylon 
Road. and Community Road the only signs, along 
with a plaque in the local park, that the 
<http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/1635.pdf>Orbiston 
Community ever existed. I took a trip 
to<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwood,_Caerphilly>Blackwood 
in the Welsh valleys looking for any evidence of 
“
an experiment for improving the condition of 
the labouring classes of society, in the hills of 
Monmouthshire.” started by local magistrate and 
industrialist John Moggridge who had been 
inspired by Owen’s ideas – I didn’t find any. 
Scoured the local history section of Irlam 
Library for any mention of the Chat Moss 
community . And finally with my 
<http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/>Diggers & 
Dreamers editorial colleague, Jonathan How, I 
spent an afternoon looking for the remains of 
Harmony Hall at East Tythersley in rural 
Hampshire. The description we had of the site 
mentioned that there were a few remains of the 
building foundations and, sounding somewhat 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia>Narnia 
like, two lampposts in a wood. Alas the lampposts 
had gone and though we searched in the 
undergrowth for any sign of the buildings 
foundations we never found any. A bit further up 
the road was Queenwood farm and cottages and a 
section of wall from an old and obviously once 
very extensive walled garden. We weren’t sure at 
the time but these turned out to be part of the Owenite community estate.
<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Wall-At-Queenwood-Farm.jpg>
Walled Garden at Queenwood Farm. © Trish Steel may be reus


Walled Garden at Queenwood Farm.
© Trish Steel may be reused subject to this 
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/>creative commons usage licence.

Following the success of New Lanark Robert Owen 
had spent the early years of the 19th Century 
trying to persuade the great and good to back his 
schemes for reordering society along co-operative 
lines. When the great and good refused to respond 
Owen turned to the working classes and instigated 
a grassroots Owenite movement with branches 
across the country. It was this movement with its 
network of halls of science and social 
missionaries that was the driving force behind 
the attempt to set up Harmony Hall.

  “I have named our new Establishment “Economy” 
and the new Parish “Harmony”

 It will be then 
“Economy in the Parish of Harmony.”  Robert Owen. New Moral World Sept 1841

Economy however was far from Owen’s mind  when 
drawing up the plans for the community – and in 
fact the name was dropped, the place becoming 
known to all as Harmony Hall. Instead of building 
‘a village of cottages, each with a garden,’ 
(which one visitor thought would have been more 
appropriate to an agricultural community), Owen 
didn’t even build a community based on his own 
<http://www.historyhome.co.uk/peel/ruralife/owenvill.htm>‘villages 
of co-operation’ plan, but commissioned 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hansom>Joseph 
Hansom, architect of Birmingham Town Hall, 
patenter of the Hansom Cab and founder of the 
influential architectural magazine The Builder, 
to design a lavish 3 storey red-brick mansion 
that resembled a cross between Drayton Manor, the 
residence of Sir Robert Peel, and a 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier>Fourist 
Phalanx. The ground floor included a library and 
dining rooms, with sleeping apartments for single 
persons above; the central block contained 
offices and storerooms; a third section contained 
schoolrooms and baths.The whole building was 
equipped with an advanced heating and ventilating 
system, and a small steam engine to pump mains 
water to each room. There were various mechanical 
contraptions including a miniature railway to 
carry dishes into the kitchen. Around the 
building were wide promenades and landscaped 
gardens. Even in a half-finished state the cost 
was in the order of a phenomenal £30,000. Yet 
Owen had his sights on still greater things – a 
community from whose towers‘would be reflected at 
night, by powerful apparatus, the new 
koniophostic light, which would brilliantly illuminate its whole square.’
<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Harmony-Hall1.jpg>
Harmony Hall


Harmony Hall

The first colonists arrived in the early winter 
of 1839, sponsored by their local Owenite 
branches, mainly from northern industrial towns. 
By the following February they were busy digging, 
gardening, manuring and ploughing, excavating 
clay for bricks, and attending evening classes in 
dancing, drawing, grammar, geography, elocution, 
agriculture and music. In contrast to the 
extravagance of the building works, the colonists 
themselves survived on little more than subsistence rations.

“When we reached the turnip field I remarked to 
my friend that if these were Socialist turnips 
they promised well. They were Socialist turnips, 
and we soon after found seven hundred Socialist 
sheep, which made my friend exclaim, “Lord bless 
me!  Who would have thought it!”‘. Visitor to Harmony Hall

Visitors to Harmony Hall were impressed by the 
effectiveness of the organisation and the 
advanced techniques that were employed in the 
gardens and fields. The gardener was busy 
directing operations on a twenty-seven acre 
market garden, shepherds were with the sheep, 
nine ploughs were at work, and over a hundred 
acres were sown with wheat. Compared to local 
farms the socialists were able to get good yields 
from the shallow, flinty soil – one of the 
reasons for this was the systematic manuring they 
practiced – they had constructed a reservoir to 
store liquid manure and in the woodlands 
vegetable matter was mixed with lime and piled 
into compost heaps for use on the fields. It was 
as much the success of socialist farming that 
posed a threat to the local establishment as socialist theories and propaganda.

In contrast to all this practical organisation 
and efficiency the management of the community 
was fraught with problems from the start – Owen 
had resigned as Governor before the project was 
even started. The managers appointed were often 
at odds with the central committee of the Owenite 
Rational Society, which felt that it should have 
a say in the day-to-day running of the place. 
Numbers started to dwindle and by the summer of 
1840 they were down to 19 and having to hire 
local labourers to bring in the harvest. Somehow 
the remaining members carried on but with little 
support from the branches and by the end of the 
following year they were in dire financial 
straits. At this point Owen reappeared with a 
group of middle-class investors, who were 
prepared to ‘rescue’ the community as long as 
they had the governing control, which in effect 
meant dictatorship by Owen – Owen then embarked 
on a spending spree, extending the farms and 
setting up a fee paying school with fees so high 
that no working class Owenite could possibly 
afford them.This was done at the expense of other 
projects; by sacking the Social Missionaries and 
cancelling grants to the halls of science. When 
the promised money from his friends failed to 
materialise he instigated austerity measures 
sacking all the hired labour, increasing the 
residents workload and putting them all on a 
bread and water diet . Demoralised and 
disillusioned the rank and file members with the 
support of socialists in the branches finally 
revolted and removed Owen as governor at the 1844 
annual congress. There followed a series attempts 
to turn it into a democratic working-class 
controlled community by a succession of managers, 
but the financial burden was too great. It was 
left to William Pare to try and sort out the 
mess. The community officially coming to an end 
in mid-1845 amid acrimonious scenes.

“A community was regarded in social mechanics 
then as a sort of flying machine and it fulfilled 
the expectation of the day by falling down like one”   G. J. Holyoake

Harmony Hall was advertised for sale in The Times 
as suitable for use as a lunatic asylum. The Hall 
was eventually leased by the Lancaster Quaker 
George Edmunson who set up an early progressive 
school called Queenwood college.
<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Queenwood-college.jpg>
Queenwood college


Queenwood college

Edmondson had been running a school at Tulketh 
Hall, near Preston, and had previously spent a 
decade in Russia at the behest of Tsar Alexander 
1st. teaching agriculture and reclaiming large 
tracts of Russian bog. He was almost headhunted 
by the Owenites and the college was remarkably 
similar to the schools that had been planned as 
part of the Harmony community. Queenwood was 
established as a ‘Superior Scientific and 
Agriculture College’. It was one of the first 
schools in the country to use laboratory work to 
teach science and promoted vocational training 
with carpenter’s and blacksmith’s workshops. 
There was also a printing-office which produced a 
monthly magazine, edited by the boys. Robert Owen 
visited the new college a few months after it 
opened and the Owenite John Finch later wrote to 
him suggesting that his principles were now being 
“carried out in practice there better than they ever were before.”

Among the staff at Queenwood were two teachers 
who had been at the Swiss educator 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Emanuel_von_Fellenberg>Philipp 
von Fellenberg‘s school at Howfyl in Swizterland. 
Other staff would go on to have distinguished 
scientific careers, perhaps the best remembered 
now being 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall>John 
Tyndall who laid the foundations for the 
understanding of the modern science of climate 
change.Tyndall was a largely self-taught 
scientist. Born in into a Protestant family in 
Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow,Ireland, he started 
his working life with the Irish Ordnance Survey 
as a surveyor/draughtsman in 1839 and moving on 
to the English Survey in 1842. From which he was 
sacked in the following year partly because he 
protested at the Survey’s treatment of the Irish. 
He then worked for three years surveying on the 
British railways before coming to teach natural 
science(physics) and mathematics at Queenwood 
College. Though he only spent two years teaching 
at the college, during that time he also acted as 
the school’s secretary and later donated his 
books and Lab equipment to the school.

It is for the work carried out in various 
scientific feilds after he left Queenwood that he 
is remembered. In a paper published in 1861, 
entitled<http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~vijay/Papers/Spectroscopy/tyndall-1861.pdf> 
On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases 
and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of 
Radiation, Absorption and Conduction, he outlined 
the basis of the greenhouse effect.

“The solar heat possesses
 the power of crossing 
an atmosphere; but, when the heat is absorbed by 
the planet, it is so changed in quality that the 
rays emanating from the planet cannot get with 
the same freedom back into space. Thus, the 
atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar 
heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a 
tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.” John Tyndall



<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tyndall-lecture.jpg>
John Tyndal givern public lecture


John Tyndall giving public lecture

The paper was the text 
of 
a<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakerian_Lecture>Royal 
Society Bakerian lecturegiven by Tyndall, who was 
a gifted public lecturer and great advocate of 
the public understanding of science. He was also 
a noted mountaineer and made many trips to the 
alps to climb and study glaciers, making the 
first ascent of the Weisshorn and would have been 
first to climb the Matterhorn, but his guides 
refused to attempt the final peak. He has both a 
mountain, 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tyndall>Mount 
Tyndall in the Sierra Nevada in California and 
three glaciers (one in 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndall_Glacier_%28Chile%29>Chile, 
one in the Rocky Mountain National Park 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndall_Glacier_%28Colorado%29>Colorado 
and one at Ice Bay in 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icy_Bay_%28Alaska%29>Alaska.) 
named after him. Among the list of his other 
eclectic scientific achievements are the 
invention of thefireman’s respirator and the 
invention of a ‘light pipe’ that led to the development of fibre optics.
<http://blog.utopia-britannica.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tyndall-respirator.jpg>
Fireman's respirator invented by John Tyndall


Fireman’s respirator invented by John Tyndall

To a great extent Tyndall is one of the lost and 
forgotten greats of 19thCentury science who 
should arguably be remembered alongside the likes 
Darwin and Huxley. In scientific circles, he is 
recognised with both Ireland’s 
<http://www.tyndall.ie/>Tyndall National 
Institute and the UK’s 
<http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/>Tyndall Centre for 
Climate Change Researchbearing his name. He is 
most regularly remembered in the popular 
imagination for his ‘Blue Sky thinking’, as the 
man who explained why the sky is blue through his 
discovery of what is known as 
the<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndall_effect>Tyndall 
Effect whereby the Sun’s rays are scattered by 
molecules in the atmosphere making it appear blue to the human eye.


In September 2011Professor Richard Somerville, of 
Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the 
University of California, San Diego gave a Public 
lecture celebrating the life of John Tyndall as 
the opening address at the Tyndall Conference at The Mansion House, Dublin.

Note: Queenwood College ceased to function as a 
college in 1896 and became a centre for teaching 
poultry farming and electrical engineering, The 
entire building was destroyed by fire on 10 June 
1902 and was demolished in 1904.
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