George Edward Hukin



George Hukin

The first Sheffield Socialist?

by Chris Weaving

Christine is a teacher with a passion for family history, especially American history, Victorian society and the Merchant Navy.

Ruskin's experiment
An art critic's failed co-operative
It was John Ruskin, England's most famous art critic (1819-1900), who began the seeming flow of a new age of enlightenment to Totley, then an isolated farming village in Derbyshire on the outskirts of Sheffield. According to Ruskin, Sheffield was a "dirty picture in a golden frame", being surrounded as it is by magnificent hill country. He admired skilled craftsmanship and disapproved of the immorality and ruthlessness of capitalistic machine-based industries, which, he argued, simply created a national debt. The only way to help the poor, he believed, was to remove them from the blighted urban areas into healthier places where they could work on the land, manufacture on a small scale and receive mental instruction. By a mutual exchange of products the poor would become independent and not ruled by the factory owners. In an attempt to prove this theory he bought St George's Farm in Totley for his communist experiment of forming a co-operative. Unfortunately, Animal Farm-like, it failed. Edward Carpenter sent £2 to his fund.

A statue is soon to be erected in the centre of Sheffield to commemorate the life and works of academic, poet, writer, and free-thinker Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), considered by many to be a founding father of British socialism. In 1886 my 2x great-uncle George Edward Hukin started to form what was to become a lifelong close friendship with Edward. It led my ancestor from his working class life as a ferociously independent razor grinder in the Chartist tradition into a diverse world of writers, artists, suffragettes, politicians and social activists. The pair’s many letters - housed in the Sheffield Archives - accounts in books and records on Ancestry reveal how George became both observer and participant in the Labour Party’s birth.

In her book Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, Sheila Rowbotham
describes George as a man with “a conscience and strong sense of justice” as well as having “considerable organisational skills and steadiness of judgement”. These qualities ensured he became the linchpin of the small group of Sheffield socialists passionately endeavouring to eradicate the inequalities of working life in the late 1870s in, as the writer George Orwell described it, “the ugliest town in the Old World.

Unlikely Friend
Edward Carpenter, by contrast to my ancestor, was an upper middle class Cambridge graduate and the considered first choice of royalty as a maths tutor. Yet, as he reveals somewhat apologetically in his book My Days and Dreams, he was a young man eager to escape the confines of his opulent life in Brunswick Square, Brighton with its grand balls and dinner parties filled with “amiable nonsense” and defiantly gave away his dress clothes in exchange for the warmth and freedom of Sheffield. By 1886, in these early days of socialism, he and George became firm friends and together experienced their aspirations of turning the ‘trickle down’ Victorian world upside down, for working men and women were beginning to hear their own voices of protest.

As the distress of mounting unemployment persisted in Sheffield during 1886, the small band rented the former debtors’ jail in Scotland Street in the centre of Sheffield where they established the Commonwealth Cafe and the Sheffield Socialist Society. Here in one of the poorest areas of the city they formulated their progressive plans. Each day they offered food to the pale-faced, skinny children and each night speaker after speaker cultivated their purpose. The kindness to the children unfortunately waned as they were “tearing each other pieces” in order to gain admittance. Yet the group’s political principles waxed, the designer and socialist William Morris added impetus when he came to speak at their lowly meeting place and their influence steadily grew. Crowds of up to 300 soon joined their open air meetings beside the monolith in Fargate as the adjacent foundations for the new town hall - a Victorian symbol of power - were laid. Despite this, enthusiasm for change within the populace started fade, forcing the realisation on the friends “that making Socialists was... arduous”. It would take another 40 years for victorious Labour councillors, the first in the country, to enter the town hall’s hallowed walls, a triumph George would sadly never experience.

Totley today
The Sheffield suburb that belies its past
It's perhaps hard to imagine Totley today as a Victorian and Edwardian cauldron of progressive thought, and possibly other contemporary residents are unaware of the political history hidden in every nook and cranny. In George's day it was officially in Derbyshire but the boundaries have changed and it's now in the outer reaches of Sheffield, with ancient buildings interspersed with new, and the Peak District still forming its backdrop. I've lived in Sheffield all my life and in Totley itself for over 20 years, yet my research into my father's side of the family was a complete revelation. I had no idea Ruskin carried out his co-operative experiment so nearby, that relatives George and Fannie lived a stone's throw away or Edward Carpenter lived just across the hill in Millthorpe. But as I stare at George Edward's photo (a name bequeathed to my grandfather and father), the likeness to my nephew, born 118 years later, is uncanny. The joy of family history...

Perseverence
Yet, in the 1880s, they persevered, for Edward had friends in high places. American poet Walt Whitman was a confidant, as were writers EM Forster, Edith Nesbit, Olive Schreiner and Oscar Wilde. Together the friends represented the “new society which was arising and forming within the structure of the old”. Edward pressed for a clean air act in Sheffield (which would take 60 or so years to resolve) and protested against the Duke of Rutland’s enclosure of land surrounding Sheffield. As an environmentalist and socialist Edward’s lectures and writing progressed, and the sound considerations of his friend George Hukin were always available. Edward’s father died in 1882 and with his substantial £6,000 inheritance he bought seven acres of land in Millthorpe in the beautiful Cordwell Valley, nine miles from Sheffield. Here he built his own substantial cottage and simplified his life into a blend of reason and manual labour. His home became a honey pot for progressive thinkers including, as always, my relative. After a day’s walking in the Peak District followed by a simple supper, George, Edward and other guests would settle down to a discussion by the roaring fire, George with his cigar and Edward with a cigarette. They explored the stars, read, talked and occasionally listened to the strains of Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert played by Edward on the piano in the kitchen, all the while contemplating the wretchedness of capitalism with its “worship of stocks and shares”, imagining a fairer, independent world of mutual exchange of produce and one in which women wouldn’t be so cruelly barred from every “natural and useful expression of their lives”. In 1889 George married fellow socialist Fannie Bright in the registry office in Sheffield. The certificate bears Edward’s neat signature as a witness. According to the census they soon moved to the fresher air of Totley in the far south-west of Sheffield, as the inevitable grinder’s diseases of asthma and bronchitis were taking hold. George’s health improved in their terraced cottage on the edge of the Peak District. just a pleasant three-mile walk from Millthorpe. He nevertheless, intermittently, continued his razor-grinding duties with my great-grandfather, William Hukin.

Grinder's disease
When George Hukin was born in 1860 few razor grinders in the centre of Sheffield lived beyond 31 years. They paid the ultimate price for the long hours spent hunched over their grinding stones, inhaling the irritating particles of stone and red hotel metal. George's decision to move to Totley with its great sanitary agents of fresh air, light and unpolluted water added precious years to his life.

Retirement
By 1910 George’s deteriorating health demanded complete retirement and he and his wife moved even closer to Millthorpe where he saw Edward often. His life was now spent enjoying gardening and photography as Britain began a period of great unrest, for, as Lenin declared the workers “have learned to fight”, and strike after strike hit. As World War 1 erupted George spent his days tranquilly at home taking photographs of the villagers to send to their loved ones on the front line and in Edward's company, visits were made to the Royal Oak in Millthorpe where a good old sing song, with Edward centre stage at the piano, was interspersed with intellectual argument. And so the days passed until, after a visit to Millthorpe to see an ailing Edward, George suffered an asthma attack on the steep walk home. A heavy snowstorm stopped Edward from visiting but two days later he managed the trek and found his friend unconscious. George passed away at 10pm on 22 March 1917. A devastated, weeping Edward read the eulogy at his funeral while gazing beyond the cemetery, perhaps half expecting to see his great friend striding once again over the hills with his dog. For Edward life in Millthorpe would never be the same and he returned south to Guildford. On his 80th birthday in 1924 all members of the newly elected Labour cabinet signed his birthday album, as did all his friends including George's widow Fannie. His health slowly faded and with the Labour Party, under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, having gained power for the second time, on 5 June 1929, Edward Carpenter passed peacefully away just 23 days later. 

July 2015