Description:Many of the newspaper cuttings and booklets relating to England’s food supply concern imported Corn, particularly the ‘abolition of registration fees on imported corn’.
One document from the Leicestershire Chamber of Agriculture, advertises ‘a public meeting’ on Saturday May 16th at 2.30pm at the Bell Hotel in Leicester ‘to protest against the abolition of registration fees on imported corn’.
Concern appears to have centred upon the impact which abolition of registration on foreign corn would have on the English market, including the loss of revenue and an increase in competition against England’s ‘Imperial Supplies’.
A document entitled ‘Registration Duty upon Foreign Corn’ referring to a meeting of Agriculturalists at the Corn Exchange in Lincoln on Friday 8th May 1903 suggests ‘such duty’ provided ‘a substantial sum towards the Revenue of the Country’.
The documents suggest that public feeling ran extremely high where the subject of corn tax was concerned. This is reflected in the newspaper cuttings which include a series of letters printed in the press written by Mark Jeans to MP Edward Goulding. As a supporter of the Conservative party, Jeans suggests that he is ‘intensely disgusted…at what seems to us the puerile and cowardly withdrawal of the registration duty on corn’.
Jeans goes on to say ‘I would far rather see a downright Radical party in power, when no imperial interests are threatened, which would attack some of the obsolete forms of land tenure in this country and give us at least free trade in land, as well as other things, than support a party who have not the courage of their convictions and who play battledore and shuttlecock with the rudiments of common sense’.
The papers relating to England’s food supply indicate that the Duke of Sutherland was interested in the corn debate. Amongst the papers is a letter on headed notepaper from the Queensberry Hotel, Dumfries dated February 27th 1903. It has a newspaper clipping attached to it detailing a resolution referred to in the handwritten letter. The letter is from J. W. Mahoney to the Duke of Sutherland saying that he ‘may be glad to learn’ that a ‘Resolution was unanimously passed’ in Glasgow on 26th February that duty should be ‘imposed on all foreign corn imported in favour of Canadian and Imperial Supplies’. Mahoney notes that ‘a similar resolution was passed in Bristol last week’.