Portrait of Jesse Collings
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Another person who became closely associated with Chamberlain’s reforms was Jesse Collings, a migrant from Devon who was to become an important figure in local and national politics. Collings’ social interests, like many reformers of his age, covered many interlinked areas.
Collings spoke out on issues including education, the use of libraries and the need for change in the political system. But one of Collings’ most heartfelt areas of concern lay in the hotly debated issue of land reform, the development of rural allotments and the question of how to manage the dramatic national shift from a rural to urban Britain.
Perhaps surprisingly for a town best known for its role in producing industrial goods and machinery, Collings also called people’s attention to what we might now described as a rural ‘sustainability’ agenda from the platform of local civic politics.
