MY PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION
The Party System has its critics; it will always have its critics.
But you will not abolish it; you can do so only by being false to
your own principles, and forming an anti-Party Party.—LORD HOPEDALE.
I had not, up to this time, taken much part in public affairs even on a
small scale. I was indeed a member of the Licensing, Aviation,
Game-preserving, and Afforestation Committees of the Hertfordshire
County Council, and had lent the support of my name, rather than (I am
afraid) of my personal endeavours to such unconnected objects as the
Life-plane Society, the Nervous Hospitals, the Humane Cattle-killing
Association, the I.F.L., and the Criminals’ Protection Society. It was
in 1952 that circumstances, rather than any choice of my own, forced me
to the front in connexion with the crisis that then occurred in the
policy of the I.F.L. The whole thing is a matter of history, and there
is no need to go into it in any detail here: it is enough to say that I
felt at the time (and subsequent history has, I think, justified my
view) that the whole existence of the League was at stake, and that it
could only justify its existence by extending its activities on the
lines which are now familiar to every one. There was considerable
opposition, and many local secretaries resigned, but the party organized
by Juliet Savage and myself was upheld by the central body, and the
subsequent newspaper agitation only succeeded in making its promoters
ridiculous.
In all this I had no intention of thrusting myself into prominence; I
acted from a plain sense of public duty. But the proceeding had aroused
a considerable amount of interest; and at this precise moment the
Democratic Committee were looking about for promising young candidates,
known to be in general sympathy with their programme, who would be
likely to carry weight at the polls in the general election that was
then recognized to be impending. It was a surprise, both to Porstock and
to myself, when I got a confidential letter from the Chief Mechanic of
the Democratic Party urging me to contest Manchester N.W. (3) in the
Democratic interest in the event of an election. He pointed out to me
that if I accepted the offer at once I should only have to pay the
ordinary premium of £3,000, whereas if I waited till the dissolution
actually took place the premium would have risen to £5,000, even if the
outgoing Government had not by that time hurried a measure through to
increase the rate.[8] The financial consideration, it will easily be
understood, was not very important to us, but the urgency of Sir Hubert
Gunter’s tone (he was a personal friend of ours) left me little choice
but to accept. I was accordingly nominated Democratic candidate for the
constituency in March, 1953, seven months before Lord Hopedale went to
the country.
It is necessary for me, I am afraid, at the risk of going over some
ground which will be familiar to my more well informed readers, to go
back a page or two in political history, in order to explain the
complicated and critical position that had arisen at the moment of which
I type. Up to 1931 political history is very fully documented, owing to
the decision of the then Labour Government to publish all the secret
documents which it inherited both from its Tory and from its Cabal[9]
predecessors. This publication has thrown a flood of light on the
internal politics of the country, especially during the latter part of
the Five Years’ War and the few years immediately following the outbreak
of peace. Opinions will no doubt differ as to the propriety of the
Labour Government’s action: there is a certain feeling of eaves-dropping
when you read, as you may read nowadays, set out in the cold print of a
history book, the confidential S.O.S. calls of a sorely harassed
minister, with a vast number of conflicting claims to meet. The result,
in any case, is that half-an-hour spent with Murdock’s _Twenty Years of
Diplomacy_ or Hammond’s _George and his Critics_ will put the modern
reader _au fait_ with all that preceded the accession to power of
Rosenstein’s Labour Government in ’31. Over its own private difficulties
the Labour Administration did not show a similar frankness, nor did its
successors, whether Tory, Independent, or Democratic, see fit to avenge
themselves in kind. The full history, then, of all this period remains
to be written: I can only resume the facts as they are generally known
for the benefit of readers to whom (as so often happens) the events to
the Boer War are far more familiar than the movements of their own
times.
Lord Billericay, who took an active interest in politics in his young
days, used to tell me that the Labour Government, in his opinion, might
have lasted sixteen years instead of six if they had only let racing
alone. The truth was that Charles Ropes, although he seemed the only
possible leader of the party when Rosenstein went into his cure, was a
doctrinaire of the old Nonconformist type. The result was that when the
Horses Utilization Bill was thrown out and the Government resigned on
it, there were bills for the disestablishment of the Church, universal
secular education, the taxation of town sites, the abolition of the
House of Lords, and the demobilization of two-thirds of the army, all
waiting to pass their third reading and all regarded as non-contentious
measures. In the very hour of its achievement the Government had gone
out, leaving no permanent memorial of its tenure of office except Indian
Home Rule and the Entente with Russia. Its publication of our treaties
with foreign powers, from which such a commotion was expected, proved
after all to be a false alarm; for the terms of them were so
inconsistent with one another that they were immediately treated as
forgeries.
It was a far more difficult question who was to take up the reins of
power which had been thus abruptly dropped. Lord Hopedale’s efforts to
form a Conservative ministry were at once greeted with the threat of a
strike from 138 separate industries. The Liberals vainly appealed for a
lead to six different statesmen, all of whom refused to leave their
retirement. The attempt to form a new Labour Government, which would
disown Mr. Ropes and his Horses Utilization Bill, the “Sporting Workers”
as they were called, proved a fiasco. People were seriously questioning
whether the affairs of the nation would not have to be openly
administered by the Crown. And then began that unique political
expedient which has gone down to history with the short-lived
dictatorship of Sulla and the Jesuit Government of Paraguay.
I see that Mrs. McKechnie, in her _Reminiscences_, attributes the
suggestion to a letter in the _Daily News_. I am sorry to have to supply
a correction to a work otherwise so distinguished by accuracy; but I
happen to remember the circumstances with peculiar exactness, because I
was at Oxford at the time, living in a whirl of political activities
such as one only makes for oneself at Oxford, and consequently in a
better position to give first-hand evidence than a writer who is
speaking of a period when she had not yet left the nursery for the
schoolroom. For about a fortnight on end the _Daily Mail_ had a series
of letters saying, “Dear Sir, Why do you not save the country by taking
its destinies into your own hands? Yours etc. INDIGNANT ENGLISHMAN,” and
so on. At the end of this time an article in the _Daily News_ (not a
letter) made the suggestion that newspaper proprietors should become a
ruling caste according to the size of their circulation: but any one who
read the article in the spirit in which it was written could see quite
clearly that _it was all meant for a joke_, a satire on the wearisome
correspondence which was being printed by its contemporary. That the
_Mail_ took the initiative in treating the suggestion seriously is
evident from the fact that its circulation at the time was nearly half a
million ahead. It was the _Mail_, too, which first proposed that the
less popular dailies should combine with the more widely sold ones, so
as to avoid group Government: and it is noteworthy, that the _Evening
News_ fell in with this suggestion two days before the _Star_.
Mrs. McKechnie’s whole account of the matter seems to me to be something
of an _ex parte_ statement. It is quite true in an ordinary way that
“one does not take in a paper unless one agrees with its politics,” but
a list of the “insurance claims” paid at that time to readers of the
more prominent organs is a valuable commentary on the doctrine. That the
Independent Government left behind it a quite innocuous record may also
be admitted, but it must be admitted on the other side that it has left
behind it no single important legislative bequest. It disappeared
without leaving a ripple upon the surface of National politics.
It remained for Lord Hopedale’s Administration to reinstate the Party
system. Some have held that they showed vindictiveness in their
management of the situation, but it was a situation which needed strong
measures. Party Government is surely not possible without party funds,
and these had to be recruited somehow. The old system of “bought
peerages” had, as Lord Millthorpe said, “done its work”; in fact, there
was a glut. The Americans, too, were insisting very strongly that the
purity of the aristocracy should be safeguarded. There seemed nothing
for it but to place a slight premium on all elections to Parliament,
which was almost negligible when compared with the honourable status
given by a seat in the House of Commons, quite apart from the business
advantages. At the same time the new arrangement discouraged, once for
all, the appearance on the hustings of candidates who were only anxious
to promote some doctrinaire fad of their own, and had not enough sense
of discipline to “toe the line” with either of the great political
parties. There was another novelty in the Parliamentary Elections Act,
which it is difficult to imagine as having been dispensed with by
earlier Governments—the provision, namely, by which any member who votes
against his own party has thereupon to seek re-election.
But the raising of the premium from £5,000 to £7,500 was a piece of
frank electioneering, and it is difficult to see how a statesman of Lord
Hopedale’s honourable record can have made himself a party to it. The
Party in power had always the advantage in finding candidates, since it
was possible to guess with some sort of accuracy what programme they
meant to take to the country; whereas the Opposition, since their
programme was seldom worked out in detail until a week before the
elections, had to ask their candidates to take their policy on trust.
Since the Democrats were, on the whole, men of a more moderate income
than the Conservatives, it seemed at one moment that it would be
well-nigh impossible to fill the coupons. As it was, old Sir Arthur
Bates had to appeal to his constituency from a bath-scooter, and Mrs.
Farnham, though the doctors said she might wave her arms, was not
allowed to speak.
In those days it was customary, at election time, for candidates to
travel down to their constituency and address the electors by word of
mouth. This was indeed necessary, for the cinemaphone was not yet
properly perfected. The speech of the evening was, of course, delivered
by the leader of the Party by this means, but it had the disadvantage
that any loud interruption from the audience could prevent a part,
sometimes a large part, of the cinemaphone record from being heard: and
at that time (it seems hard to believe!) it was impossible to reverse
the cinemaphone without starting the record all over again! I confess
that, to my mind, the personal presence of the candidate has always
seemed an advantage; it stimulated a local interest in politics such as
you rarely see nowadays; nor was it possible for the electresses to
complain that they had chosen their representative without ever really
knowing what he looked like, having only seen what a cinema director
could make him look like at a pinch. And there is something, after all,
in the personal touch, in the direct intercourse between the member and
her constituents: the wax dummies of to-day can indeed chuck babies
under the chin with as much precision as we used to, but they cannot win
the heart.
Anyhow, I travelled down in person to Manchester N.W. (3). I had never
been in Manchester before, and admired the city from the first moment I
set foot in it. The municipal buildings, noble examples of that
Waterhouse Gothic which we vainly try to imitate nowadays; the moving
platforms in Market Street, said to be the fastest in the world: the
wireless installation on the Cathedral, which records all the movements
of German theology several hours ahead of any other English centre: the
marble cupolas of the Synagogue in the Bury New Road: the
“super-landing-stages” on Kersal Moor—all spoke of a city full of
vitality and unceasingly awake. I had been fortunate enough (owing to my
early candidature) to secure the Midland Hotel as my Head-quarters. This
enabled my supporters to refresh themselves, between business hours,
with unlimited games of tennis, water-polo in the large swimming bath, a
continuous day-and-night cinema in the theatre, continuous concerts in
the Winter Garden, and continuous cocktails at the American Bar. An
enormous sky-sign over the roof invited the public to elect “a
Lancashire lass for a Lancashire Borough”—this was a bright thought
which occurred to my head agent as soon as he realized that the
Linthorpes had property in Westmorland.
The Parliamentary Elections Act had already abolished the vicious system
by which candidates used to take pledges, i.e. to promise their support
beforehand to this or that measure in deference to the wishes of the
electorate. As Lord Hopedale finely said, it was a system which “stifled
conscience, muzzled freedom of speech, hampered the operation of
salutary afterthoughts, and left the Government free indeed to
interpret, but not free to direct, the will of a civilized nation.” (His
great speech on Parliamentary Elections is still shown nowadays, though
the film is somewhat marred through the head and shoulders of the
statesman being slightly fogged throughout.) I have been told by old
Parliamentary hands that the relief afforded by the abolition of
“pledges” was inconceivable. In elections previous to that of 1953 they
used to be subjected to an elaborate catechism as to their intentions
over this or that question of public policy. It meant almost
uninterrupted wireless communication with head-quarters for more than a
week; and even so it caused great difficulty when head-quarters, as was
naturally liable to happen, changed its policy as the election
proceeded. With the best intentions in the world, it was often almost
impossible to satisfy all the demands made upon you from different
quarters by a hundred conflicting “leagues,” “associations,” and
organizations of all sorts. Further, if you were successful in your
candidature, it meant that for at least six months after your election
you were liable to be cross-examined by your constituents as to why your
vote in the House of Commons had not been in strict accordance with the
intentions you had expressed at an earlier date in quite different
circumstances. It made the individual member individually responsible
for the policy of his party leader, in a way that is to our minds
fortunately unthinkable. “They expected a feller,” Tommy Lieberts
complained to me, “to remember which jolly old way he had voted and
explain why the jolly old deuce he had done it.”
As I say, I escaped this vicious legacy of an earlier Parliamentary
theory. But it was still customary, in my time, for deputations to call
upon the candidate and urge upon her consideration the claims of their
various interests. My constituency was full of Jews and Catholics, and
their denominational schools were, then as now, a constant source of
difficulty: there was the inevitable rumour that the Democrats intended
to reduce the wages of denominational pupils. There was a local
murderer, who had bombed his wife and children in an attic: several
charitable deputations were loud for his reprieve, while several others
seemed equally bent on his electrolysis. The employees of a large
cellulose firm had gone on strike without being able to show possession
of the statutory minimum of funds—there was the question of these being
reinstated: and so on. Naturally, the complaints were only received by
the dictaphone, but the mere effort of shaking hands with all these
people was considerable.
I shall never forget a giant meeting that we held in the large hall of
the Catholic Schools at Higher Broughton. My readers will realize how
intense was the political excitement of the moment when I say that,
although the building was designed to hold 3,000, it was more than
half-full. The clapping, in those days, was still mostly done by hand,
so that the volume of it hardly represented the full enthusiasm of the
audience. The Chairwoman, Dame Horatia Philpotts, rose first and
expressed in the usual way our gratitude that Mr. Holroyd, the leader of
the Opposition party, had been prevailed upon to speak to us to-night.
There was no need to remind her audience how well Mr. Holroyd had
deserved of his country, or how his services had been recognized by
friends and foes alike. It was unfortunate that Mr. Holroyd could not be
present with us in person, but it would easily be understood that at
such a moment as this the time of a public man in such a position was
very valuable, and, after all, one could not be everywhere! (Actually,
Mr. Holroyd was on the Riviera.) However, we should have the advantage
of hearing his own words and seeing his own gestures—a benefit for which
we were indebted to the unconquerable march of Science. Dame Horatia
then sat down; the lights were put at low pressure, and the well-known
figure of Mr. Holroyd appeared on the screen, amidst a deafening
applause of the rather wooden quality our old thorybophones used to
produce.
He proceeded to tell us, with his well-known clutching gesture, that
while he had had many proud moments in his political career, none had
been prouder than that at which he rose to address an audience so
enlightened and so broad-minded as ours, in a political centre of such
unique importance as this. We had met at a crisis in the history of our
nation. Great issues hung in the balance, to be decided once for all,
and to carry with them, in accordance with that decision, the
dissolution of our Empire or its reconstruction on a nobler, a fairer,
and a more permanent basis. (Here the gramophone was stopped for a few
moments, and the statesman’s face was enlarged on the screen, to give us
the full benefit of his expression.) There were some, there would always
be some, who were ready to cry “Halt!” at the moment of victory, and to
arrest the march of progress, if they could, in mid career. He hoped
that those were not the feelings with which we had come into the hall
to-night. For himself, he was convinced that we stood on the threshold
of a newer and a fairer world. (Here a voice interrupted him with “What
about McClosky?”—the bomb-thrower who was then under sentence of
execution.) He naturally took no notice of the interruption.
Unfortunately, a certain section of the audience were impatient to hear
his views on this particular issue, and began to sing “And shall
McClosky die?” in a very loud and threatening voice. It being impossible
to disconnect the cinemaphone all at once, a large part of Mr. Holroyd’s
sentiments were inaudible. The tumult subsided when the lights went up,
but, as it proved, only temporarily. The film was no sooner released
than a dastardly crowd began to hurl a varied assortment of missiles at
the figure of the venerable statesman; which, however, fortunately did
no damage, as the pictures were being thrown direct on to a concrete
wall: an ink-pot left a slight but disfiguring blotch somewhere in the
region of Mr. Holroyd’s waistcoat. The rowdy element, however, were not
satisfied with this; several of them made an attempt to rush the
cinema-operator. They were thwarted in their purpose and sand-bagged by
the police; but the operator seemed to have lost his nerve, and from
that time onwards the film was anything but a success. Again and again
it was clear that the gestures on the screen were not accurately timed
to correspond to the words; again and again the attempt was made to
readjust the timing, but always unsuccessfully. At last, at the end of
an impassioned period, my leader was seen to refresh himself with a
drink of water. But, to our surprise, the glass which he took up in the
picture was an empty one, and a moment later, to the vociferous delight
of the whole audience, it became painfully clear that the film had been
put in wrong end on! I cannot profess that the meeting after that was a
wholly serious one, or that my speech was anything but a frost by
comparison. Such contretemps are the penalties which attend the pioneers
of Science!
On the whole, my electioneering experiences were not very thrilling. My
opponent, Sir Philip Hazelbright, made a good stand, but he was not able
to stem the flood of popular feeling. The country was tired after nine
years of Tory rule, and everywhere showed the intensity of its feeling
in the most unmistakable way: in more than one constituency more than
half the voters on the register went to the polls. It must be admitted,
too, that business losses had hit Sir Philip hard, and his side were not
in a position to pay the expenses of their voters as handsomely as ours.
The result was a foregone conclusion; yet it was estimated that upwards
of 1,000 people assembled in front of the Town Hall to hear the two
large gramophones there telling each other that they had fought the
contest in a fair and sportsmanlike manner.
I was recalled by serious news from home at the very instant of my
triumph. Our younger son, Gervase, had contracted whooping cough
severely, and was lying dangerously ill at Greylands. I should explain
that in those days, before Hoscher discovered the autococcus—a discovery
for which humanity will owe him a permanent debt of gratitude—it was
necessary to have one’s children inoculated separately for all the
leading diseases, from chicken-pox and measles to sleeping-sickness.
This was usually done at the age of three, as soon as they had recovered
from the tonsil and adenoid operation. Gervase’s inoculation, we now
remembered, had never seemed to “take” very satisfactorily, and we
bitterly regretted that we had not had it repeated. I found that
Porstock had called in a chest-doctor to attend the cough, and a
mind-doctor to cure the whoop; the latter, mindful of my own experiences
twenty years earlier, I got rid of on the spot. He had been making the
poor child sit up in bed repeating to himself, “It is very rude to
hiccough in company.” We had a very anxious fortnight, and the
chest-doctor, Mr. Dolman, said he thought he had never come nearer to
losing a fee. But in the end our boy’s strong constitution triumphed,
and a month in the Fens put him on his legs again.
I must record, in connexion with this illness, a clever saying of our
elder boy, Francis. Meeting Mrs. Rowlands in the hall one day while his
brother was very bad, he asked “if it would be right to pray that his
brother might get well.” Mrs. Rowlands, who had her views on this as on
most other points, said perhaps it would be safer to pray to God that
His will might be done. The first time he met her again after Gervase’s
recovery he said to her very seriously, “Now, Mrs. Rowlands, ought I to
thank God for doing His will?” For once, Mrs. Rowlands had to own
defeat.