was a political decision in response to unemployment and social unrest in
Britain. Historian Jeffrey Peires calls it a "political manoeuvre by a Tory
Government, desperate to demonstrate public concern for the unemployed
in order to stave off pressures for more radical reform."48 The Colonial
Office in London administered the grant, choosing nearly four thousand
men, women, and children from among eighty thousand applicants. They
reached their destination in 1 820, accompanied by another thousand who
came at their own expense. The immigrants were a mixture of people from
England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Most were from the lower middle
classes-neither
very rich nor very poor. The majority had no farming
experience at all but were urban artisans.f?
The 1820
Settlers, as they became known, did not prosper as the govern-
ment intended. The soil of the area west of the Fish River where they were
located was ill-suited to intensive agriculture. Within a fewyears more than
half of them had abandoned their lots and became merchants and artisans
in the military post at Grahamstown, or in the settlement on Algoa Bay
called Port Elizabeth, or in other colonial villages. Others took to trading
with the African farming communities beyond the frontier-a
practice that