undermined his constitution and sapped his faculties. The seeds of insanity were already sown, and the Chartist autocrat was rapidly ceasing to be responsible for his actions.
If a shocking man of affairs, O'Connor had still enough wit left to be an ideal Company promoter. His plausibility, his sanguine temperament, his driving force, his rare command over words, his power over his followers, his magnificent assurance, his reckless unscrupulousness, his extraordinary and ubiquitous energy were still adequate to give his Company a good start. The greater part of the capital asked for was subscribed; six small estates were purchased in the open market and broken up into small allotments. The first of these, an estate of about one hundred acres near Watford, was rechristened O'Connorville, and eager artisans set to work to prepare it for its tenants. No device of advertisement was neglected. There was a cricket match on Chorleywood Common, where O'Connor captained a team of bricklayers against an eleven of carpenters and sawyers, employed in getting O'Connorville ready for the Chartist settlement. In this the bricklayers won by twenty-eight runs. "The workmen," says the enthusiastic Star reporter, "having proclaimed a half-holiday, appeared as respectable and much more healthy than the Oxford and Marylebone boys."[1] A Chartist cow, named Rebecca in compliment to the South Welsh destroyers of turnpikes, supplied milk for the needs of the workmen.[2] There was later a ceremonial inauguration of O'Connorville on August 17, for which Ernest Jones, O'Connor's latest recruit, wrote a rather commonplace poem:
See there the cottage, labour's own abode,
The pleasant doorway on the cheerful road,
The airy floor, the roof from storms secure,
The merry fireside and the shelter sure,
And, dearest charm of all, the grateful soil,
That bears its produce for the hands that toil.'[3]
The settlers soon flocked in, proud to be the pioneers of a great social experiment. One of the allottees was a handloom weaver from Ashton-under-Lyne, who brought his loom with him and employed the time not required for cultivating his allotment in weaving ginghams from yarn supplied from Manchester.[4] Nor did the Hertfordshire settlement stand alone. Within less than two years four other estates were
