TOLLEMACHE (formerly HALLIDAY), John (1805-1890), of Tilston Lodge, Cheshire, Helmingham Hall, Stoneham, Suffolk and Peckforton Castle, Tarporley, Cheshire.

Tollemache has been dubbed ‘the greatest estate manager of his day’.1R. Durdley, ‘John Tollemache and his Castle’, Cheshire History (2007-8), xlvii. 77. The phrase is attributed to the prime minister Gladstone, but the original source is not cited and has yet to be discovered. An ‘exemplar of enlightened landlordism’, his provision to his tenants of ‘three acres and a cow’ originated that phrase, later popularised in the land reform campaigns of Jesse Collings MP and Joseph Chamberlain MP.2P. Readman, ‘Conservatives and the Politics of Land: Lord Winchilsea’s National Agricultural Union, 1893–1901’, English Historical Review (2006), cxxi. 67; Durdley, ‘John Tollemache’, 78. The allotments and three-bedroom cottages he built for his labourers over many decades, at a cumulative cost of about £280,000, brought him to national attention in old age, when he was feted by organisations like the Allotments and Small Holding Association.3E. Tollemache, The Tollemaches of Helmingham and Ham, (1949), 166; F. Impey, Three acres and a cow: successful smallholdings and peasant proprietors (1885).

Today Tollemache is probably best known for constructing Peckforton Castle in Cheshire.4Tollemache, for instance, receives no mention in Jeremy Burchardt, The Allotment Movement in England: 1793-1873 (2002). He does, however, feature in P. Readman, Land and nation in England (2008). This vast mock-medieval fortress on the Peckforton hills, which became the family seat around 1852, neatly embodied the eccentric and anachronistic values of its owner.5Tollemache, Tollemaches of Helmingham, 165-6. An independent Tory landowner of the ‘old school’, who refused to ‘submit to the thraldom of party’, Tollemache’s much-vaunted benevolent paternalism was evidently coloured by a highly authoritarian regime on his extensive estates and at home, where he was said to have fathered at least 25 children.6Chester Courant, cited in Ipswich Journal, 9 Jan. 1872; Tollemache, Tollemaches of Helmingham, 167. Many of his offspring appear to have died in infancy, but the precise number remains unclear. According to his literary son, he was a ‘despotic’ autocrat, who expected ‘absolute submission’ to his will, which was reinforced by his ‘great muscular strength’. His many foibles included the burning of clothes left in hallways and the adoption of a wig, despite no loss of hair.7L. Tollemache, Old and Odd Memories (1908), 25-6, 46-7, 57, 65; Tollemache, Tollemaches of Helmingham, 169.

Tollemache’s equally peremptory father, an admiral in the navy, had changed his surname from Halliday to Tollemache on inheriting his mother’s share of the 6th earl of Dysart’s estates in 1821. His inheritance included Tilston Lodge and almost 29,000 acres in Cheshire, making the family the county’s largest landowners, though not the wealthiest, since their neighbours included the marquesses (later dukes) of Westminster.8Tollemache, Tollemaches of Helmingham, 136; S. Matthews, ‘Running the countryside: the Tollemache estates 1860-72’, Cheshire History (2006-7), xlvi. 75. In 1832 Tollemache’s father had stood unsuccessfully for the county’s northern division as an advanced Liberal, without the approval of the sitting Whig E. J. Stanley, then home secretary. Another attempt by the admiral to offer as a more moderate ‘constitutional Whig’, citing his ‘independence’ from party, also came to nothing in 1835.9VCH Cheshire (1979), ii. 150, 156; Tollemache, Tollmaches of Helmingham, 137.

At the same election Tollemache suffered a similiar fate in South Cheshire. Initially brought forward by the Westminsters as a Whig replacement for Lord Grosvenor, he failed to impress during his campaign and like his father withdrew before the poll. As Lady Grosvenor noted in her diary, ‘our poor young friend Tollemache [is] such an utter goose ... it is impossible that he can make it ... writing letters and making speeches in contrary directions, in one a Whig and in another a Tory’.10G. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth and the Grosvenors. Life in a Whig family, 1822-39 (1965), 108. Two years later Tollemache succeeded to his father’s ‘great wealth’ and property, including six plantations and 822 slaves in Antigua, for which he eventually received £12,669 compensation under the terms of the abolition of slavery.11Tollemache, Tollemaches of Helmingham, 162; N. Draper, The Price of Emancipation: slave-ownership, compensation and British society at the end of slavery (2010), 190. See also Legacies of British Slave Ownership at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/256. In 1840 he inherited additional estates from his great-aunt Lady Louisa Tollemache at Helmingham Hall in Suffolk.12Tollemache, Tollemaches of Helmingham, 162. By now Tollemache had accepted a requisition from the South Cheshire Conservative Association to offer at the next general election, prompting taunts in the press about his political ‘inconsistency’. Rejecting their charges of ‘duplicity’, in early 1840 Tollemache publicly associated himself with Sir James Graham and Lord Stanley, both former opponents but now supporters of Sir Robert Peel, saying that he wished to see them form a ministry.13The Examiner, 22 Dec. 1839; Morning Chronicle, 8 Jan. 1840.

Assisted by his stint as the county’s high sheriff and his promotion of a controversial 1840 Act (3 & 4 Vict. c. 24) allowing extra Anglican churches to be built in Cheshire, using funds from the river Weaver tolls, at the 1841 general election Tollemache offered again for South Cheshire as ‘an uncompromising protector of our Protestant privileges’ and a staunch Protectionist.14Morning Chronicle, 8 Jan. 1840; The Times, 13 July 1841. After a violent contest, in which he denounced the Whig ministry’s ‘union’ with Daniel O’Connell as a ‘political disgrace’, he was elected comfortably in second place, amidst allegations of ‘intimidation and undue influence’ by Tory landlords. Talk of a petition against his return, however, came to nothing.15The Times, 13, 15 July 1841; Morning Chronicle, 15 July 1841. Thereafter Tollemache, bolstered by his substantial landed interest, enjoyed a string of uncontested returns at every general election before February 1872, when he took the Chiltern Hundreds.

An independently-minded Tory backbencher with ‘the courage of his opinions’, Tollemache’s votes against Peel over the reduction of the sugar import duties (1844), the permanent funding of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth (1845), and the repeal of the corn laws (1846) have attracted the attention of a number of historians.16L. Tollemache, ‘Lord Tollemache and his anecdotes’ in Gladstone’s Boswell, ed. A. Briggs (1984), 222. One study places Tollemache among a hard-core of 16 ‘inveterate malcontents’, including Disraeli and Newdegate, who ‘ranged’ against the premier ‘on almost every major issue’ dividing the Conservative party after 1841.17D. Fisher, ‘Peel and the Conservative party: the sugar crises of 1844 reconsidered’, Historical Journal (1975), xviii. 288. Another notes his association with the ‘Protestant faction’ that ‘seceded’ from the Conservative party and the Carlton Club over Maynooth in June 1845, when Tollemache became a founder member (and trustee) of the ultra-Protestant National Club.18G. Cahill, ‘The Protestant Association and the Anti-Maynooth agitation of 1845’, The Catholic Historical Review (1957), xliii. 300. See also J. Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829-1869 (1991), 212-13. He later claimed to be ‘tied to no party’ and to have never given a party vote, attended a party meeting or answered a Conservative whip.19Chester Chronicle, 23 July 1847; Chester Courant, 21 Nov. 1880, cited in F. O’Gorman, ‘South Cheshire’, HP Commons, 1832-68. Silent in debate until 13 Mar. 1846, when he uttered a few words against free trade, his independence in the lobbies first surfaced in July 1842, when he voted in the minority against the annual grant to Maynooth.20He was in the minority of 48 against the grant, 20 July 1842. A steady presence in anti-Maynooth divisions for the rest of his career, he was not above berating his more moderate colleagues for ‘giving public money to support Popish error’, on one occasion unwittingly chastising Wilson Patten, MP for North Lancashire, on the issue in a railway carriage in which Cardinal Wiseman was also travelling.21Tollemache, Old and Odd Memories, 59.

On most other issues, including Peel’s modification of the sliding scale on corn, amendment of the poor law, and introduction of income tax, Tollemache was a loyal supporter of the ministry prior to the ‘sugar crisis’ of June 1844, triggered by its proposals to lower the sugar duties. Explaining his opposition in 1848, in a rare major Commons speech, Tollemache urged the moral case for protecting British colonial sugar from cheaper slave-grown imports, insisting that ‘free labour never could compete with slave labour’. Defending the evidence he had given to the 1848 sugar committee, he described how he had ‘considerably reduced the cost of production’ on his five Antigua estates, and was even prepared to ‘incur a certain degree of loss’, but would be forced to ‘throw up his estates unless he was protected against slavery’. The removal of colonial protection, he warned, was actually increasing the slave trade in Brazil and Cuba.22Hansard, 30 June 1848, vol. 99, cc. 1441-4. See also R. Martin, The sugar question: being a digest of the evidence taken before the Committee on Sugar and Coffee Plantations : which was moved for by Lord George Bentinck, M.P., 3rd February 1848 (1848). Unlike many other Protectionists, following the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 Tollemache rallied to Peel on the Irish coercion bill, 25 June 1846.

Thereafter Tollemache, who on the hustings in 1847 disclaimed allegiance to any party leader, followed Lord Derby’s Protectionists into the lobbies on most major issues, whilst remaining staunchly opposed to further Catholic concessions and Jewish emancipation.23Morning Chronicle, 9 Aug. 1847. Most of his speeches were short and related to constituency matters. Reflecting his concern for Cheshire’s dairy farmers, for example, he unsuccessfully moved for the omission of butter and cheese from tariff reductions, 2 June 1853. He also campaigned steadily for improvements to ‘the estuary of the Mersey’ and its Cheshire ports.24See, for example, Hansard, 25 Feb. 1856, vol. 140, cc. 1366-8; 21 July 1857, vol. 147, cc. 133-4. An active committee man, in July 1855 he broke ranks with Disraeli to back Palmerston’s handling of the Crimean war, as he did again in the crucial vote on the Canton question that precipitated the 1857 general election, 3 Mar. 1857. He also took a contrary line in support of the Palmerston ministry’s budget, 23 Feb. 1857. Commenting in his election address on the ‘two recent and important occasions’ in which it had been his ‘responsible duty’ to act ‘in direct opposition to the party to which I belong’, he explained that he had ‘refused’ to censure ‘a minister who did not deserve it’, or to ‘turn out a government’ when it was ‘doubtful whether the Conservatives ... could substitute a better one’.25Cheshire Observer, 21 Mar. 1857. He was absent from the crucial division on the conspiracy to murder bill that ended Palmerston’s premiership, 19 Feb. 1858, and rallied more firmly behind Derby thereafter, backing his abortive reform bill of the following year and speaking in support of the redistribution of seats at the ensuing general election.26Chester Chronicle, 30 Apr. 1859.

Although Tollemache remained a firm opponent of the ballot and universal suffrage, he became a keen advocate of transferring the franchise from corrupt boroughs to large unrepresented towns, and campaigned steadily for the enfranchisement of Birkenhead (then located in Cheshire), whose importance as a port he considered ‘greater than London, and greater than New York’.27Hansard, 17 June 1861, vol. 163, cc. 1197-8. See also Adam’s Parliamentary Handbook (1854), 140. He also lobbied tirelessly on behalf of Cheshire’s salt trade against French import restrictions and for access to markets in Poland and Russia.28See, for instance, Hansard, 18 Mar. 1862, vol. 165, cc. 1747-8; 7 Apr. 1862, vol. 166, c. 636; 15 May 1865, vol. 179, c. 292; 7 Mar. 1867, vol. 185, cc. 1443-4. He was no slave to constituency pressure, however, and happily backed an 1865 bill making all property in a union ‘contribute to the support of the poor, according to its rateable value’, despite the ‘unpopularity’ this ‘would bring down upon him in South Cheshire on the approach of a general election’.29Hansard, 27 Mar. 1865, vol. 178, c. 315.

Much of Tollemache’s energy following his re-election that year was devoted to the cattle plague, which affected Cheshire more than any other county.30See S. Matthews, ‘The cattle plague in Cheshire, 1865-66’, Northern History (2001), xxxviii. 107-119. Both on his own estates, where he experimented with ‘some success’ using carbolic acid and fumigation, and in the Commons, where he pressed for greater compensation for destroyed herds, he was active in seeking to alleviate distress and repair Cheshire’s dairy industry.31Matthews, ‘Running the countryside’, 84; Hansard, 15 Feb. 1866, vol. 181, c. 563; 19 Feb. 1867, vol. 185, cc. 586-7. After opposing the Liberal reform bill the following year, and backing the Conservatives’ subsequent measure in all its key details in 1867, he was re-elected for the newly created division of West Cheshire at the 1868 general election.

On 6 Feb. 1872 Tollemache, by now regarded as ‘one of the nestors of parliament’, vacated his seat citing the ‘very delicate health’ of his wife, and was succeeded by his eldest son Wilbraham.32Ipswich Journal, 9 Jan. 1872. Earmarked for a peerage by the premier Disraeli in November 1875, for which Lord Derby considered him ‘in every way fit’, Tollemache was given a barony in January 1876.33Derby Diaries 1869-78 (1994), ed. J. Vincent, 248. His only known speech in the Lords was in support of the Salisbury ministry’s compulsory allotments act (1887).34Hansard, 28 July 1887, vol. 318, c. 291; Readman, Land and nation, 166.

Tollemache’s death aged 85 occurred after catching cold from driving his open gig on a wintry day to visit a sick tenant.35Tollemache, Tollemaches of Helmingham, 172; Tollemache, Old and Odd Memories, 68. The episode seemed to encapsulate his reputation for ‘old-fashioned benevolent paternalism’, though it is worth noting that some contemporaries attributed his success as a landlord to ‘good management, not patronage-philanthropy’.36Readman, Land and Nation, 164; Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Art (5 Dec. 1885), ii. 771. By his will, proved under £145,000, the family estates passed to his eldest son and successor in the barony Wilbraham (1832-1904), Conservative MP for West Cheshire, 1872-1885.

Peckforton Castle, now a Grade I listed hotel, remains the only intact medieval style castle in England, but suggestions by architectural historians of a link between Tollemache and the Young England movement overlook his aversion to their religious outlook.37Durdley, Tollemache and his Castle, 76-8. Indeed, according to his second son Lionel (1838-1919), who achieved literary fame as ‘Gladstone’s Boswell’, Tollemache was even more intolerant of Anglo-Catholics than he was of ‘honest Catholics’.38On Lionel see Gladstone’s Boswell, ed. A. Briggs (1984) and his entry in the Oxford DNB, also by Briggs. ‘Though he was neither politician nor orator, nor philosopher not scholar’, his son added, ‘I believe him to have been the grandest specimen of a country gentleman that our generation has seen or is likely to see’.39Tollemache, Old and Odd Memories, 43, 61-63.