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 purchased, each covering a wider acreage and commanding a higher price than O'Connorville. There were two sites near Gloucester, one at Minster Lovel near Witney, and another at Dodford near Bromsgrove. A fifth purchase near Gloucester was never completed. It is characteristic of the change that came over Chartism that all these sites were in the South and West Midlands. But the shareholders came largely from the North, and in one week it was boasted that a quarter of the subscription contributed was drawn from Lancashire.

O'Connor found a capable and energetic lieutenant for carrying out his Land Schemes in Ernest Charles Jones (1819–1869). Like O'Connor, Jones was a man of family, education, and good social position. His father, Major Jones, a hussar of Welsh descent, had fought bravely in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, and became equerry to the most hated of George III.'s sons, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, after 1837 King of Hanover. The godson and namesake of the unpopular duke, Ernest Jones was born at Berlin, brought up on his parents' estate in Holstein, and educated with scions of Hanoverian nobility at Lüneburg. He came to England with his family in 1838, but his upbringing was shown not only in his literary tastes and wide Continental connections, but by his very German handwriting and the constant use of German in the more intimate and emotional entries in his manuscript diaries. He entered English life as a man of fashion, moving in good society, assiduous at court, where a duke presented him to Queen Victoria, marrying a lady "descended from the Plantagenets" at a "dashing wedding" in St. George's, Hanover Square. He was gradually weaned from frivolity by ardent