Granting land 1788-1794

Governors of NSW were given authority to make land grants to free settlers, emancipists and non-commissioned officers but not initially military officers.[1]  However, in 1788 there was no land policy and little attention had been paid in the selection of men who understood farming for the First Fleet. This combined with the unproductive land round Sydney Cove initially led to food shortages and the need to import food to the new colony from South Africa, India and the Dutch colonies to the north. Phillip quickly concluded that reliance on imported food was untenable and that the colony should, as quickly as possible, become self-sustaining. Early exploration of the immediate area identified two possible sites both of which had good fertile soil: Rose Hill, which later became Parramatta and the valley of the Hawkesbury River.[2] However, by the end of 1788 only twenty acres had been sown, the convicts proved more adept at stealing than producing food and the government farm at Rose Hill produced insufficient grain to feed the population of convicts and marines.

Phillip’s solution was free settlers who, he wrote in 1790, were ‘absolutely necessary’. For Phillip, free settlers meant landed proprietors who could ‘bring with them people to clear and cultivate the lands, and provisions to support those they bring with them’. Effectively he wanted to transport existing English farmers to NSW rather than ordinary settlers who he thought lacked that ‘spur to industry’ provided by the possession of capital. Phillip was hampered by his instructions: his first commission did not mention land and his second dealt only with emancipated convicts who would be allocated 30 acres of land and a further 20 acres if married with 10 acres for each subsequent child. This established the basic allocation of 30 acres. It was not until August 1789 that it was provided that encouragement should be given to marines and free settlers but ‘without subjecting the public to expense’. [3] Marine privates were to be allocated 80 acres (30 acres basic allocation plus 50 acres bonus) and non-commissioned officers were entitled to 130 acres or more if they were married and had children. The regulations did not provide for retired commissioned officers to receive grants and since grants for free settlers were not to exceed non-commissioner officers, the expectation in NSW was that grants around 100 acres became large farms.

Phillip had little choice but to disobey these instructions since he had little faith in the marines as potential settlers and was forced to extend government aid for longer than was intended. In an attempt to deal with the food crisis, Phillip in November 1789 granted James Ruse, a freed convict the land of Experiment Farm at Parramatta on the condition that he developed a viable agriculture and became the first person to grow grain successfully in Australia.[4] However, lack of transport meant that crops, when harvested, would not be readily available for Sydney.[5] Three free settlers, Phillip Schaffer perhaps the most important, soon settled at Parramatta. It is difficult to under-estimate the importance of this early farming at Parramatta since had it failed it is possible that the colony would also have failed. Phillip strictly followed his orders with regard to and grants to emancipists and during 1791-1792 he allocated 63 farms to 64 emancipists around Parramatta. However, he used his discretionary powers to give 60 acre basic allocation to those applicants with low social standing, such as seamen with the additional entitlement of 2 acres for a wife and 10 acres for children. Finally, Phillip allocated a minimum of 130 acres to free immigrants. The system introduced by Phillip ensured that every group of colonists (emancipists, those with low social standing and free immigrants) apart from officers and serving military could receive land grants. By 1791, there were 87 settlers, emancipists and seamen or marines of whom 50 were on Norfolk Island but the focus for cultivation was on the Parramatta. By October 1792 when Phillip left the colony, some 1,700 acres were under cultivation.[6]

This ensured NSW’s survival but the expansion of the original settlement at Sydney Cover had thrown up new problems. Many of the early free immigrant settlers proved to be poor farmers. In addition, there was a problem of officers being granted land on which to grow food but without tenure. By mid-1791, several officers agitated to become official part-time settlers whilst remaining on full pay and doing garrison duty and in November 1791 Phillip wrote to Grenville asking for approval to allow officers to own land whilst on a tour of duty.[7] Although approval did not arrive until 16 January 1793, two weeks earlier Grose had already granted 25 acres of land at Parramatta to Ensign William Cummings.[8] The problem was that Grose was given no indication of the appropriate grant size and his method of calculating this for the officers was unclear. In practice, by the beginning of 1794 almost all of the civil and military officers on the mainland had received grants around 100 acres. Although Portland had spoken decisively of a grant to an officer in the singular, under Grose second grants were also made. Of the 39 grants he issued on the mainland, only 29 officers were involved. Grose provided no explanation to London explaining his decision and this represented the beginnings of a land policy that advantaged officers. Under Grose, at least 157 of the free population including serving officers and soldiers received land. Some were given what the regulations dictated while others received a second grant increasing their holdings. Grose may have been generous to his officers but he also began downsizing some grants without any authorisation to do so. In 1794, only three of the 140 mainland grants to emancipists were over 30 acres, despite many of the grantees being eligible for larger acreages.[9] This applied particularly to the developments on the Hawkesbury where ex-convicts were evidently being reduced to small farmer status.

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[1] Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, (Melbourne University Press), 1924, reprinted 1968 remains, despite its age, the most systematic study of land policy.

[2] Ibid, Barkley-Jack, Jan, Hawkesbury Settlement Revealed: A new look at Australia’s third mainland settlement 1793-1802, is a revisionist study that is valuable on land policy generally in the 1790s.

[3] Phillip’s instructions on land grants, 22 August 1789, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 256-259, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, pp. 124-128.

[4] An account of Ruse’s methods is given in Tench, Watkin, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, pp. 80-81. Initially Ruse was only give 1½ acres but was promised 30 acres if his experiments proved successful and on 22 February 1792 Ruse was given the first formal grant in NSW. See also, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, pp. 277-282.

[5] The problem of the lack of artisans and farmers identified by Phillip was quickly acknowledged in London and ‘it is advisable that twenty-five of those confined in the hulks...who are likely to be the most useful should be sent out in the ship [Lady Juliana] intended to convey provisions and stores’: see Lord Sydney to the Lords of the Admiralty, 29 April 1789, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 230-231.

[6] HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 540-541 lists the 87 settlers and their grants.

[7] Phillip to Lord Grenville, 5 November 1791, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 532-539. It was approved in Dundas to Phillip, 14 July 1792, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp.631-632 and reached NSW on the Bellona on 16 January 1793.

[8] HRNSW, Vol. 2, p. 35 lists the grants made from 31 December 1793 to 1 April 1793.

[9] See HRNSW, Vol. 2, pp. 212-213.

Settler Australia, 1780-1880, Volume 1

JUST PUBLISHED

Settlement, Protest and Control examines the way in which Australia developed. It is divided into two parts: establishing a colonial state and violence and protest. Uniquely in Britain’s growing empire, the colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were established as penal settlements. Why the British government decided to settle Australia and the problems encountered by the first three fleets in transporting convicts to the other side of the globe demonstrate the scale of the endeavour. Between 1788 and 1823, the two colonies were ruled by a naval and then military autocracy unaccountable for their actions to the growing number of free settlers and the emancipists, convicts who had completed their sentences and, because of their distance from London, accountable with difficulty to the Colonial Office in London. This was, for instance, evident in the Rum Rebellion in 1808 not a populist uprising but a coup within the governing elite for whom Governor William Bligh’s ‘tyranny’ challenged its political and economic hegemony.

By the 1820s, there were calls from the British Parliament for a more responsive system of government for New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land that reflected demands from settlers in Australia. The result was a gradual process of constitutional evolution away from an autocratic system of government towards one that was more responsive to local inhabitants, a process completed in the 1850s with the introduction of responsible government, a devolved system of rule that combined local hegemony over colonial issues within an overarching and developing notion of imperial sovereignty. This process of constitutional change occurred at the same time as the territories of New South Wales were divided and new colonies founded: Western Australia in the late 1820s, South Australia from 1836, belatedly Victoria in 1851 and Queensland in 1859. The ways in which the land was settled concludes the first part of the book.

State violence accompanied the birth of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land and was a constant presence during the following century. Nowhere was this more evident than in the punishment settlement on Norfolk Island, ‘Hell in Paradise’ as it was termed by contemporaries, where those already transported were re-transported for further transgressions. So brutish was it that convicts in New South Wales often preferred to be hanged than submit to its regime. Convict society was often volatile and resistance to the arbitrary character of colonial rules was widespread as the attitude of women prisoners amply demonstrates. Rebellion or the threat of rebellion was infrequent although New South Wales experiences a spate of rebellious conspiracies in the first decade of the nineteenth century including the rebellion at Castle Hill in 1804 and rebellion on Norfolk Island was an endemic problem. Those convicted of political offences such as Swing rioters in 1830 and Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s were, from the 1790s through to the end of transportation in 1868, frequently dispatched to the Australian colonies. This was particularly the case with political prisoners from Ireland with Young Irelanders and later Fenians exiled to the colonies to serve their sentences. The violent and militarised character of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land was gradually diluted with the establishing of the rule of law and the emergence of colonial policing though this could be as arbitrary and harsh as the use of the military to control the population.

Terra nullius and Australia

When the British settled at Sydney Cove in 1788 the colonial government in Australia claimed all lands for the Crown from the formal declaration of annexation on 7 February 1788.[1] The notion that Australia was terra nullius was used as justification for it being settled not invaded and that the Aboriginal population had no territorial rights over it.[2] The first test of terra nullius in Australia occurred with the decision of R v Tommy[3] indicating that the native inhabitants were only subject to English law where the incident concerned both natives and settlers and not where the case concerned only natives. The rationale was that Aboriginal tribal groups already operated under their own legal systems, a position supported by the decision in R v Ballard. Chief Justice Forbes stated that

I believe it has been the practice of the Courts of this country, since the Colony was settled, never to interfere with or enter into the quarrels that have taken place between or amongst the natives themselves.  This I look to as matter of history, for I believe no instance is to be found on record in which the acts of conduct of the aborigines amongst themselves have been submitted to the consideration of our Courts of Justice.  It has been the policy of the Judges, & I assume of the Government, in like manner with other Colonies, not to enter into or interfere with any cause of dispute or quarrel between the aboriginal natives.  In all transactions between the British Settlers & the natives, the laws of the mother country have been carried into execution.  Aggressions by British subjects, upon the natives, as well as those committed by the latter upon the former, have been punished by the laws of England where the execution of those laws have been found practicable.  This has been found expedient for the mutual protection of both sorts of people; but I am not aware that British laws have been applied to the aboriginal natives in transactions solely between themselves, whether of contract, tort, or crime.[4]

Although these judgements recognised the legal status of Aborigines as subject to English law but also to tribal law, they did not address directly the question of Aboriginal sovereignty with regard to the land. However, they did recognise that the Aborigines had a primitive form of legal system in relation to resolving disputes within and between tribal groups. This did not, however, void the principle of terra nullius.

In 1835, John Batman, one of the founding pioneers of Victoria, first settled at Port Phillip and made an attempt to buy the land from the Aboriginal people through a ‘treaty’.[5] His treaty was signed on the banks of a creek on 16 June 1835 and was an agreement with eight Aboriginal leaders to transfer 100,000 acres of prime farming land in the Port Phillip area to Batman. However, this transaction was not as straightforward as it appears. Batman’s claim to this territory was based on the European idea of land ownership and legal contracts, a concept that was completely foreign to the indigenous people of Victoria. For them land was not about possession, but belonging. Territories may belong to different groups, but land cannot be bought or sold. Batman also claimed that he had negotiated with Aboriginal ‘chiefs’ who were in charge of this land. But he was actually negotiating with tribal elders who were not in a position to sell their people’s land, even if they had wanted to, and it is probable that none of the ‘signatories’ thought that this was what they were doing. The local Aborigines were as unable to comprehend the idea of selling their land as Batman was of appreciating the value it held for them. The exchange that took place that day, and the ‘treaty’ that marked it, was at best the result of a cultural misunderstanding by both sides. Inconsistencies in Batman’s accounts of how the ‘treaty’ was signed throw his claims of legitimate purchase into doubt. The story on the treaty deeds differs from the story in Batman’s journal and his report to Sir George Arthur, the VDL Governor. Historians now question whether the eight Aboriginal chiefs signed their ‘marks’ on the contract and Batman’s journal describes how he actually made the chiefs ‘signatures’ on the deeds himself.

Both the transfer to a person rather than the Crown and its implicit recognition of indigenous ownership and occupation of the land prompted Bourke to act. He effectively quashed the treaty with his Proclamation on 26 August 1835 and its republication on 3 May 1836 restating the doctrine of terra nullius upon which British settlement was based, reinforcing the notion that the land belonged to no one prior the British Crown taking possession of it in 1788.

Whereas, it has been represented to me, that divers of His Majesty’s Subjects have taken possession of vacant lands of the Crown, within the limits of this Colony, under the pretence of a treaty, bargain, or contract, for the purchase thereof, with the Aboriginal Natives; Now therefore, I, the Governor, in virtue and in exercise of the power and authority in me vested do hereby proclaim and notify to all His Majesty’s Subjects, and others whom it may concern, that every such treaty, bargain, and contract with the Aboriginal Natives, as aforesaid, for the possession, title, or claim to any lands lying and being within the limits of the Government of the Colony of New South Wales, as the same are laid down and defined by His Majesty’s Commission; that is to say extending from the Northern Cape, or extremity of the Coast called Cape York, in the latitude of ten degrees thirty seven minutes South, to the southern extremity of the said territory of New South Wales, or Wilson’s Promontory, in the latitude of thirty nine degrees twelve minutes South, and embracing all the country inland to the westward, as far as the one hundred and twenty ninth degree of east longitude, reckoning from the meridian of Greenwich, including all the islands adjacent, in the Pacific Ocean within the latitude aforesaid, and including also Norfolk Island, is void and of no effect against the rights of the Crown; and that all persons who shall be found in possession of any such Lands as aforesaid, without the license or authority of His Majesty’s Government, for such purpose first had and obtained, will be considered as trespassers, and liable to be dealt with in like manner as other intruders upon the vacant lands of the Crown within the said Colony. [6]

Its publication in the colony meant that people found in possession of land without the authority of the government would be considered trespassers.[7] Although some contemporaries recognised that the Aboriginal occupants had rights in the lands, something confirmed in a House of Commons report on Aboriginal relations in 1837[8], the law followed and almost always applied the principles expressed in Bourke’s proclamation. Glenelg supported Bourke’s position completely rejecting the view that Aborigines had any rights to dispose of their land. Any recognition of Batman’s treaty would have had a catastrophic effect of Australian land policy and would have amounted to recognition that Australia was not the property of the Crown but of its indigenous population. It would have been an admission that since 1788 the British had been freely disposing of land that did not belong to them.

There is no reason to assume that the British government would not have entered into treaty arrangements with the Aboriginal people as it did in New Zealand and elsewhere had it recognised their ‘ownership’ of the land. William Blackstone, who was regarded as authoritative on the matter in subsequent cases in several countries with legal systems based on English common law, drew a clear distinction between colonies won by conquest or treaty and those where ‘lands are claimed by right of occupancy only, by finding them desert and uncultivated (though he was unclear on whether they were uninhabited), and peopling them from the mother countries.[9] This ambiguity enabled later commentators to argue that only cultivated land was in actual possession and that in colonies of settlement English law was ‘immediately there in force’ on the assumption that no prior legal code and no land tenure had ever existed’: in other words it was terra nullius. The words of the Privy Council in Vajesingji v Secretary of State for India in 1924 are among many other pronouncements that defined the concept of terra nullius unambiguously: ‘territory hitherto not occupied by a recognised ruler’.[10] New Holland was considered a paradigm case of terra nullius because the British could identify no territorial units with a recognisable form of government, not because there had been no Aboriginal inhabitants. It is the High Court that was mistaken in believing that British explorers, Whitehall officials or Australian colonists held the false belief that Australia was uninhabited or nearly so. The consistent legal doctrine from 1788 was that the original British claim of sovereignty extinguished all prior rights to property and that after 1788 ‘all titles, rights, and interests whatever in land which existed’ were the ‘direct consequence of some grant from the Crown’. This would not change until the Australian High Court’s decision in the Mabo Case in 1992.[11]

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[1] The principle of British sovereignty over Australia was asserted on four occasions: in 1788, 1824, 1829 and 1879.

[2] See Reynolds, Henry, Aboriginal sovereignty: reflections on race, state, and nation, (Allen & Unwin), 1996, pp. 1-15, 86-107 and especially Attwood, Bain, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History, (Melbourne University Press), 2009.

[3] Monitor, 28 November 1827.

[4] Sydney Gazette, 23 April 1829.

[5] Brown, P.L., ‘Batman, John (1801-1839)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 67-71. See also, Bonwick, John, John Batman, the founder of Victoria, (Fergusson and Moore), 1868, pp. 66-83.

[6] Public Record Office: PRO: CO 201/247 ff 411 r + v. It was published in the New South Wales Government Gazette, 2 September 1835.

[7] In practice, although Bourke’s action had voided any ‘treaty’ that was made, it did not prevent significant movement of settlers of the Port Phillip Association from VDL and from other parts of NSW into the Port Phillip District from late 1835 onwards. In his despatch of 10 October 1835, Bourke recommended that the settlement should be recognised and, though initially the Colonial Office had doubts about doing so, Lord Glenelg supported Bourke’s recommendations and on 9 September 1836 a notice recognised the existence of a settlement that had already existed for a year.

[8] Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements): with the minutes of evidence, appendix and index, 1837, pp. 10-15

[9] Prest, W., ‘Law for Historians: William Blackstone on women, colonies and slaves’, Legal History, Vol. 11, (2007), pp. 105-115, especially pp. 109-111.

[10] Law Report, 51 Ind. App. (1924) at 360, cit, Dawson J. in 107 Australian Law Report, 1, p. 94.

[11] The Mabo case radically altered this position and increasingly historians view Australian colonisation as ‘conquest’ rather than ‘settlement’. Stephenson M.A. and Ratnapala, Suri, (ed.), Mabo: A Judicial Revolution, The Aboriginal Land Rights Decision and its impact on Australian Law, (University of Queensland Press), 1993.

Elitism, democracy and the European Union

The Algerian hostage crisis has resulted in David Cameron delaying his speech on the EU today in Amsterdam and, as yet, no new date for the speech has been set.  However, it appears that what he intended to say was that he wanted to set out a ‘positive vision’ of Britain’s future role in Europe but that, unless  Britain’s concerns about the direction the EU appears to be moving down are not resolved then Britain could ‘drift towards’ exit.  Gavin Hewitt is right in his blog that whatever Cameron says ‘he will inevitably disappoint’.  It is clear that he will not call an in-out referendum, so he’ll disappoint UKIP and those with a Eurosceptic stance but he will persevere with trying to re-negotiate Britain’s position disappointing those with a federalist agenda.  If there is a referendum it will be on the terms renegotiated: so, do you agree with the terms or not?  Either way, Britain would still be in the EU: if the vote was in favour of a revised membership then we stay in the EU; if it was a no vote, then it will be presumed that people are happy with the existing situation even if, in reality, it means that people are not happy with the EU at all.  For Mr Cameron if the public gave their consent to any changes in membership, then the issue would be settled ‘once and for all’.  So, at least as far as the political elite were are in the EU and will remain in the EU irrespective of the outcome of a referendum.  All the public is being asked is about the detail of membership not the the broader principle of whether we should be in the EU at all.

Across Europe, the political elite have for centuries shown scant regard for the ‘wishes of the people’ and this remains the case despite the democratic nature of modern European politics.  It’s not that there is simply a democratic deficit at the heart of the EU but at the heart of European politics.  It’s a case of giving people the right to vote for their representatives every four or five years but then failing to take account of what that vote actually means between elections.  This, as much as anything, explains why people have become disillusioned with politics and have, in some countries, turned to extreme parties of the right or left that offer a more aggressive expression of what people believe or want.  It also explains the upsurge of support for UKIP in Britain.  David Cameron appears to recognise this when he says:

‘People are increasingly frustrated that decisions taken further and further away from them mean their living standards are slashed through enforced austerity or their taxes are used to bail out governments on the other side of the continent.’

He also says that ‘more of the same’ is not an option but is under pressure from business leaders (it will be an economic disaster and jobs will suffer), the United States with pressure from President Obama (the US values a strong UK in a strong EU) and other EU leaders.  He may also be right that he has allies in other EU members who share his view about the need to reform institutions and alter the balance of power between Brussels and national capitals but it’s still a position that is based on tinkering with the EU system for Britain’s advantage.  The problem with institutional change is that the institutions involved will resist proposed changes with vigour and for the EU, the institutions have always at the heart of the system.  They will resist any power being taken away from them and restored to national governments and institutions.  The issue, as it has been since the 1980s, is one of the popular legitimacy of the EU and the unwillingness of the federalist elite to acknowledge that they need to carry the people with them if there is to be any enthusiasm for the European project.  It is no longer sufficient to call a constitutional change a treaty as in the case of Lisbon and deny the European citizenry any say in whether it is introduced or not.  Tinkering with the system by Britain renegotiating its role is no longer enough if Europe is to become a strong economic and political force in today’s global society.  What we need is not an elitist vision of Europe but a democratic one that is legitimised by referendums in all member states at the same time about whether they want to be in or out. 

Turning the clock back or the problem of referendums

The issue of Britain’s membership of the European Union has bedevilled British politics since the 1960s.   There was the initial failures to gain entry into the Common Market during the 1960s largely because Charles de Gaulle said ‘non’.  Then there was the final agreement to enter under Heath’s government in 1973 and a referendum confirming this decision by a significant majority in 1975.  Why people voted in favour of the EU in 1975 was a combination of things: for some who had been fought or been brought up in the aftermath of the Second World War, it was about establishing European security; for others in was about the potential for British economic development within a free trade area, a truly ‘common market’; what it was not for the overwhelming majority of people was support for a federal vision of Europe and therein lies the problem.  As the EU expanded, the argument for greater federalism became stronger, reinforced by the introduction of the euro while Britain stubbornly held on to its notion of the EU as a free market for Britain’s goods.  The result has been an increasing mismatch between what Britain wants from the EU and what the overwhelming majority of countries now in the EU want.  While Britain’s economy was growing, despite calls from some for withdrawal, had there been a referendum on continued membership it is likely that it would have been won.  The benefits of membership outweighed its disadvantages but the banking crisis after 2008 changed that.  Britain had become increasingly sceptical about the EU and the unwillingness of the Labour government to do what it promised in terms of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, a fundamental constitutional change in all but name and the chaos within the euro-zone reinforced this. 

Not only do we now have a mismatch between the political classes in Britain and the developing European project but we also have a growing mismatch between the views of the general public and the political classes who appear unwilling to do what the public has long called for, a referendum on the issue.  This is hardly surprising since the three main political parties in Britain are all committed, in one way or another, to continued membership of the EU with only UKIP taking the alternative view.  The mainstream politicians do not like referendums unless they know they will get the answer they want and this explains why, despite fulsome promises in the past, no government since 1975 has been willing to carry their promises into practice.  In fact, many argue that referendums do not sit well with representative government: we elect politicians every five years on the basis of their manifestos and if we do not like what they do we have the opportunity to vote them out at the next election.  But Europe has become such a corrosive issue within all political parties, despite the focus on divisions within the Conservative party, that a referendum on Europe now seems almost inevitable in the next five years.

The difficulty is what will the referendum be about.  Broadly, the political classes and the public generally fall into one of three positions on Europe: those who want to leave; those who want to re-negotiate membership but want to remain in the EU; and those who take a more federalist stance.  Those who want to leave call for an in-out referendum to settle the issue; those who want to re-negotiate are willing to accept a referendum on the terms agreed; while those with a federalist position want no referendum at all.  As David Cameron prepares or revises his speech on the EU, the harbingers of doom have emerged from the woodwork with the American government, British business leaders, politicians ‘close’ to the German Chancellor and today Michael Heseltine all warning about the consequences of leaving or re-negotiating Britain’s place in Europe.  But, as committed Europeans, they would say that wouldn’t they just as those in favour of leaving say that this would provides opportunities for Britain to exploit and would not result in an implosion of Britain’s economy.

The critical question is whether re-negotiating Britain’s position in the EU will actually work.  Looking at the issue from continental Europe, why should other members of the EU allow Britain to re-negotiate its role at all?  European politicians are becoming increasingly and justifiably irritated by Britain’s position and could easily turn round and say you’re either in or out…a view with which I entirely sympathise.  Alright, you don’t have to go down the federalist route if that’s what you want to do but, if you want access to the ‘common market’ then you have to accept that this comes with existing obligations.  If not, we can do perfectly well without you.  So have your in-out referendum and make up your mind. 

The problem is that it isn’t as simple as that despite all the rhetoric from UKIP and other politicians.   You can’t turn the clock back to 1973 and unpick all those directives, regulations and statutes that have come from Brussels or that have been produced by the British Parliament and if you cannot do this, then concrete links with Europe will remain but without any of the benefits we do gain from membership.  Those who seek exit see the issue as one of constitutional sovereignty while those in favour tend to look at the matter from an economic perspective and, of course, both are right.  If we do have a referendum and, despite different pronouncements on the issue I am yet to be convinced that we will, whatever the question I have grave doubts that it will resolve the issue: if we voted to leave, then those in favour of remaining will still be calling for this and vice-versa.  My own view for what it’s worth is this: we made a decision in 1975 and, despite the way in which the EU has evolved since them, I still think this was the right decision. 

Richard Oastler and factory reform

John A. Hargreaves and E. A. Hilary Haigh, (eds.)

Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution

(University of Huddersfield), 2012

238pp., rrp £24 paper , ISBN 978-1-86218-107-6. The book is also available at £20 from www.store.hud.ac.uk.

In Kirkheaton churchyard near Huddersfield there is a fifteen-foot stone obelisk topped by a flame that commemorates ‘The dreadful fate of 17 children who fell unhappy victims to a raging fire at Mr Atkinson’s factory at Colne Bridge, February 14^th 1818.’ All the dead were girls; the youngest nine, the oldest eighteen. The fire started when at about 5 am a boy aged ten was sent downstairs to the ground floor card room to collect some cotton rovings. Instead of taking a lamp, he took a candle that ignited the cotton waste and fire spread quickly through the factory turning it into a raging inferno. The children were trapped on the top floor when the staircase collapsed. The entire factory was destroyed in less than thirty minutes and the boy who had inadvertently started the fire was the last person to leave the building alive. It is not surprising that child labour and the need to regulate it became a national issue in the early 1830s. There had been factory acts in 1802 and 1819 and further agitation between 1825 and 1831 but the legislation was too limited in scope and its enforcement proved difficult. There were, for instance, only two convictions while the 1819 Act operated. It was at this stage that Richard Oastler, a Tory land steward from Huddersfield, burst upon the scene when his celebrated letter on ‘Yorkshire Slavery’ was published in the Leeds Mercury on 16 October 1830.

It is over sixty years since Cecil Driver published his study of Richard Oastler and fifty years since Ward’s study of the factory movement in the twenty years after 1830 appeared. This excellent volume, a fitting conclusion to the University of Huddersfield Archives’ Heritage Lottery-funded Your Heritage project, re-examines Oastler’s impact and draws parallels between the campaign to abolish transatlantic slavery and the campaign to restrict the use of child labour in Britain. Written by some of Yorkshire’s leading historians, the collection of essays provides a rounded assessment of the contribution of Richard Oastler to both the emancipation of children from the horrors of factory labour and the broader emancipation of society from the evils of slavery whether in Britain or in its Empire. The book is introduced by University of Huddersfield historian and Pro-Vice Chancellor Professor Tim Thornton and the foreword is from the Methodist minister Revd Dr Inderjit Bhogal OBE, who chaired the initiative Set All Free that marked the bi-centenary of the act to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. The volume begins with an elegantly written introduction by John A. Hargreaves who positions Oastler and the subsequent chapters within the context of the four decades from the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the passage of the Ten Hours Act for factory workers in 1847. This is followed by James Walvin, the doyen of the abolition movement, on William Wilberforce, Yorkshire and the campaign to end transatlantic slavery from its inception in 1787 to the end of the apprenticeship system in 1838. It is a succinct, synoptic analysis not only on what happened and why but also an acute critique of the prevailing historiography especially in its discussion of the impact of the abolition movement on reforming movements from factory reform to Chartism. It was Oastler who maintained that the cause of anti-slavery and Chartism were ‘one and the same’.

The remaining chapters focus on Oastler and provide important reappraisals of different aspects of his life. D. Colin Dews examines Oastler’s Methodist background between 1789 and 1820 demonstrating that his association with evangelicalism stimulated and sustained his commitment to the ten-hour movement while John Halstead explores the Huddersfield Short Time Committee and its radical associations between c1820 and 1876, a particularly valuable discussion of generational differences with Huddersfield radicalism. Edward Royle considers the Yorkshire Slavery campaign between 1830 and 1832 through a close consideration of coverage in the regional press. Janette Martin examines Oastler’s triumphant return to Huddersfield in 1844 after he had served more than three years in jail for debt relating this to Oastler’s skills as an orator and the importance of processions to nineteenth century radicalism; for instance, John Frost’s equally triumphant return to Newport in 1856 after over a decade as a transported felon. The volume ends with a chapter reassessing Oastler and his impact on the factory movement and on radical politics more generally.

Oastler and other reformers may have been successful in their campaign for the ending of child labour but coerced labour remains an important problem in a global economy where labour costs need to be kept low to meet consumer demands for affordable products. The ‘Yorkshire Slavery’ that Oastler so eloquently exposed can still be seen not just in the developing world but, as recent cases of ‘slavery’ brought before the courts demonstrate, in Britain as well. This excellent volume, beautifully illustrated and presented by the University of Huddersfield Press shows not simply the contribution Oastler made to achieving a sense of childhood largely devoid of economic exploitation but that the campaign he initiated in late 1830 remains a campaign that has yet to be concluded. After nearly two centuries as a global community we have yet to eradicate economic inhumanity and exploitation for profit.

Three Rebellions: an interview

This interview was originally published on Mark Crail’s excellent Chartist Ancestors Blog (http://chartist-ancestors.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/interview-richard-brown-on-three.html).  As the trilogy of books that stemmed from it is now complete, I thought it might be worthwhile reprinting it.

Mark Crail: Three Rebellions is a monumental work of over 1,100 pages. What inspired you to write it – and how long did it eventually take?
Richard Brown: The inspiration for the book came from a comment made by a sixth form student in 2004 who asked, I think to get me off the subject of the Plug Plugs, ‘I don’t suppose Chartism was exported was it?’  It was one of those off the cuff comments that gets you thinking.  In truth, I didn’t really know the answer but remember saying that as many people emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the 1840s and 1850s, they would have taken their beliefs with them and that presumably Chartist principles would have been part of their intellectual baggage.  What began as an off-hand remark led me to spend the next four years exploring the question.  I found that, although there was a widely held assumption that Chartism had played a role in the democratising of the Australian colonies, little had been written on the subject from a global perspective.  It was this that led me to explore the issue of rebellion in the colonies to see how far Chartist ideas contributed to the development of colonial reformist and radical thinking.   I did much of the research, drafting ideas and working out the structure for the book in my final two years of teaching when I was increasingly relieved of worrying about the next educational initiative.  Once I retired I was able to focus on the writing that took about eighteen months.

Mark Crail: Your book deals with events that took place on three separate continents and spread over a period of nearly two decades. What is the common theme or central argument that makes sense of bringing them together in a single book?
Richard Brown: The reasons why I chose to consider three rebellions in different parts of the British Empire fall into two categories.  First, in each of three areas there were tensions between the colonial authorities and the ways in which they wished to govern and reformers who sought a greater say in the ways in which they were governed.  Secondly, it was the abject failure by the authorities to recognise the depth of anger on the part of reformers and its unwillingness to introduce some form of responsible government that led to rebellion.  Violence was born of frustrated dreams turning individuals such as Papineau, Mackenzie, Lalor and John Frost from supporters, even if critical, of the existing system of government into increasingly radical individuals who concluded that ending the existing despotism of the colonial state, if necessary by direct action, was justifiable.  It is this which is central to the book and brings together South Wales, the Canadas and Australia into a common political and constitutional context.  Once I had decided this, then the structure of the remainder of the book fell into place.  Before explaining the causes of the rebellions, they needed to be placed within a chronological context.  After the rebellions had failed, their aftermaths, links and how they were and are remembered needed to be considered.  Finally, I wanted to place the rebellions within some sort of overall framework and this forms the basis of the final chapter.

Mark Crail:  Is this a book aimed squarely at specialist historians, or is it accessible to a wider readership? What would you hope non-specialists would take away from reading it?
Richard Brown: As I see myself as a teacher as well as a historian, I would hope that my book will appeal to both specialist historians and to a more popular readership.  I’ve always believed that a good story is the best way to engage people with the past and this is a great story.  It has its heroes and villains and its martyrs to the cause.  It raises questions about ‘what if the rebellions had succeeded?’  It is also about how people remember the past and how the past is constructed and reconstructed across time.  The events happened but the ways in which we see them today is very different to how they were regarded by contemporaries.    Through reading the book I would hope that non-specialist readers would know about rebellions in Canada and Australia as well as in Newport and that they would recognise that though the rebellions ended in failure they played a critical role in the development of the democratic systems of government that we have today and that people were then as now prepared to stand up and fight for the democratic principles in which they believed against the heavy-handed dictats of the state.

Mark Crail: In closing the book you talk about the tension between heritage and history and to the later interpretations we put on Chartism (and the Canada and Ballarat rebellions), what part do you think the growth of interest in family history has played in that?
Richard Brown: There is no doubt that the growth of interest in family history, especially through the Internet, has played a seminal role in the burgeoning development of interest in and understanding of people’s heritage.  I remember talking to a history lecturer who saw this as a ‘dumbing down’ of his subject and that the heritage of the past was history itself.  Though his second point may be debatable, his view of ‘dumbing down’ missed the point big time.  The study of history has always had its populist dimension and family history is part of this search for understanding where we are now by seeking to understand where we’ve come from.  It was for that reason that I included the chapter on remembrance in the book.  If history is simply what happened without considering how what happened impacts on us today and how our view of events changes, then it is simply a good story but little more.  The key to the development of the subject is establishing the connections between the past and the present, not in a pedagogical sense of learning lessons, but as an essential part of understanding what humanity is and was.

Mark Crail: Finally, as a history teacher, you will doubtless have ended up covering everything from the Romans to the fall of the Berlin Wall. What brings you back time after time to Chartism? Have your students been particularly drawn to the period – or is it just we obsessives?
Richard Brown: My interest in Chartism and those who supported the Charter comes from two sources.  First, I was brought up as a Liberal radical in a family with a long tradition of political activity.  My father had fought, as a teenager in the Spanish Civil War and then against Hitler from 1939 though to 1946 (he always said his war did not end until he had finished the process of denazification in Germany).  His mother, my paternal grandmother came from a very political family.  Her sister was a suffragette; her brother a trade union official.  As I was growing up, I was told stories (fascinating to an eight year old, though rarely fully accurate) about the emergence of the labour movement and of the need to fight injustice wherever and whatever it was.  My own political apprenticeship was served in the student protests against Vietnam in the mid-60s and continued during the next four years at university.  Then teaching rather than politics, a decision I never regretted.  Secondly, I was brought up in a village where there had been major riots in 1816 after which my great-great-great-great uncle had been hanged for sedition.  Weaned on the tales of his sacrifice (in fact it appears he was in the wrong place at the wrong time), I turned both to history and to the question of what motivated people to act in the ways they did.  Was it need, greed or circumstance?  How far were people driven by ideals and principles or was pragmatism the key to understanding people’s experiences? Studying Chartism ticked all the right boxes for me...and if that’s obsessive, then and I’m certain my students would agree, I’m a dyed in the wool obsessive!

The Anti-Suffragist movement

The anti-suffragist movement aimed to resist any proposal to admit women to the parliamentary franchise and to Parliament but to maintain the principle of the representation of women on municipal and other bodies concerned with the domestic and social affairs of the community. The more active anti-suffragists were prepared to argue about their role in society, speak on public platforms, write articles and campaign for the causes which they believed allowed them to realise their potential for service and self-expression. As Violet Markham said in 1912:

We believe that men and women are different – not similar – beings, with talents that are complementary, not identical, and that they therefore ought to have different shares in the management of the State, that they severally compose. We do not depreciate by one jot or tittle women’s work and mission. We are concerned to find proper channels of expression for that work. We seek a fruitful diversity of political function, not a stultifying uniformity. [1]

The first meeting of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League took place on 21 July with Lady Jersey in the chair. [2] In addition to Mary Ward, its executive committee included Gertrude Bell, the writer and traveller, Ethel Bertha Harrison, a writer and reformer and Joseph Chamberlain’s daughter Beatrice, an active social worker. A small number of men were already actively involved in the League including John Massie and Heber Hart on its executive committee. The first issue of The Anti-Suffrage Review appeared in December 1908 that, especially when Mary Ward wrote for it, gave some intellectual respectability to the anti-suffragist cause. The organisation also included ultra-conservatives such as Lady Havesham and Frances Low who did not believe in Ward’s progressive social feminist view of ‘civic housekeeping’ but in maintaining the separate sphere ideology and resisted her desire for a ‘Forward Policy’. This linked anti-suffragism to calls for social reform, women’s participation in local government and to womanly self-development through the performance of womanly duties to God, family, nation and empire. It emphasised women’s service not women’s rights. [3] Difference between reformers and conservatives did not prevent them collaborating in a membership drive and publicity campaign that resulted in over eighty branches by July 1909.

Anti-Suffrage postcard, 1908

The rhetoric that informed both ‘anti’ and suffragist political argument was remarkably similar. Ward’s view of differentiated citizenship celebrated the distinctive roles of men and women in society while suffragists emphasised what men and women had in common. [4] Her reforming imagination, commitment to women’s service, and sympathetic literary depictions of friendships between women, the hallmarks of much of her fiction, lend weight to the argument that there is more common ground between suffragists and ‘antis’ than is sometimes supposed. [5] Suffragists and anti-suffragists shared beliefs in sexual difference but disagreed about the extent to which women should carry their particular gifts to the national arena. Suffragists believed that women should reshape national government through the vote, ends with which anti-suffragists disagreed. Millicent Fawcett always considered that Mary Ward was a social reformer whose forte was philanthropic work and that she had somehow wandered into the wrong camp on women’s suffrage.

The earliest achievements of the anti-suffragists were impressive. The Women’s Anti-Suffrage League expanded rapidly and developed a considerable number of branches throughout Britain. In December 1908, it had 2,000 members and by October 1909, around 10,000 members. By April 1910, there were 104 branches; and by April 1912, 235 branches. Analysis of the branch distribution shows that London and the southeast accounted for most of the anti-suffragist effort, 42 per cent of the total membership between 1908 and 1914. The League’s regional pattern of support paralleled Edwardian rural and suburban Conservatism and Brian Harrison argues that, despite its elitist leadership, it appealed widely to the conservative working-class. [6] The movement was weaker in the industrial north and in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. [7] By 1910, Scottish anti-suffragists had established their own affiliated anti-suffrage organisation, the Scottish National Anti-Suffrage League, presided over by the duchess of Montrose and in 1913 affiliated to the League as the Scottish League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. The annual council of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage was told in 1914 that membership stood at ‘42,000 subscribing members and 15,000 adherents at the end of six years' work…a very good record which compares very favourably with the records of the associations organised by our opponents’. [8] This total included the members of the affiliated Scottish League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. Other records reveal that about five out of every six members of the League were female, and that branch leadership remained largely in the hands of women.

Charles Lane Vicary, Ye Anti Suffrage League, (Printed and Published by the Artists Suffrage League), 1908

In December 1908, male anti-suffragists launched a parallel and much less active Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage. Although it was skilled at fundraising, it failed to gain popular support. Dominated by the imperialist leadership of Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, it was a collection of major public figures rather than a nationwide movement. Its supporters also included Rudyard Kipling, and A. V. Dicey but also newspaper editors such as Charles Moberly Bell, editor of The Times and John St Loe Strachey, editor of The Spectator. In a still largely deferential society, a great strength of the anti-suffragists was the list of great men who gave it support. Both groups were set up to be non-party organisations and had members from all parties even though Harrison maintains the Conservatives were the natural home of the anti-suffragists.

Within two years it was clear that both Leagues faced serious practical problems. The Women’s League had little parliamentary influence or sufficient campaign funds, while the Men’s League lacked active campaigners and female support. It was its success in raising a £20,000 anti-suffrage fighting fund that made the prospect of a merger enticing to the anti-suffrage women. They were eager to put their faith in complementary gender roles into practice though not at the cost of abandoning important priorities of the Women's League. In addition, both Leagues feared that a majority of MPs were now in favour of giving votes to women householders. Amalgamation was achieved after months of tortuous negotiation over the name of the new organisation, its constitutional gender balance and the continued endorsement by the Women's League of women's local government work within the objectives of the new, mixed-sex league. [9] In December 1910 the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage was formally launched, with Lord Cromer as president, Lady Jersey as vice-president and an executive of seven men and seven women. [10]

Between 1911 and 1914, the League’s performance was disappointing, though its achievements were far from negligible.[11] Lord Cromer wanted to focus the campaign on Parliament but anti-suffrage interventions during by-elections proved ineffective and the League was notably unsuccessful in influencing the views of Parliament itself. A parliamentary committee of the League led by Mary Ward’s son Arnold, MP for Watford between 1910 and 1918, failed to rally a united opposition, even though growing militancy checked the advancing tide of parliamentary suffrage support. [12] In addition, the League’s leadership suffered from divisions exacerbated by Cromer’s difficulty in collaborating with independently-minded women. Supporters of the ‘forward policy’ attempted to press ahead with a positive agenda of local government work and womanly social action, initially organised under the auspices of a separate women’s Local Government Advancement Committee and publicised through the Anti-Suffrage Review. Despite opposition from the League’s male leaders, Mary Ward firmly believed in increasing the role of women in municipal affairs and that the League should do more than occupy itself with ‘opposition and denial’. Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon were hostile to such diversionary activity, a position reinforced by their growing awareness that the anti-suffrage women themselves were far from united behind such a programme. Their hostility was further aggravated by local government campaigning that cut across party politics and appeared to set women’s perceived social needs above those of the anti-suffrage movement.

Although local government work was gradually relegated from the League’s programme during 1911 and 1912, Ward’s backing of Dr Elizabeth Jevons as a candidate for a seat on the London County Council contributed directly to Cromer’s resignation in early 1912. He may have been right in his belief that any attempt to promote wider women’s issues would be politically divisive but his resignation was testimony to the problems he encountered in holding this particular line. He commented to Curzon that he did not have the ‘health, strength, youth and I may add, the temper to go on dealing with these infernal women’. [13] Efforts by the League’s leaders to impose masculine authority within their own headquarters proved equally counter-productive. Lucy Terry Lewis, the leading Women’s League administrator, refused to be upstaged by inferior male colleagues and drew support from fellow supporters of the ‘forward policy’. [14] Though she was driven from office shortly before Cromer’s resignation, male replacements proved ineffective and antagonised the leading women. Peace was only restored when Lord Curzon, Cromer’s successor as president, acknowledged the formidable skills of Gladys Pott, another woman administrator during 1913. [15]

The League could justifiably claim some success in holding a number of large-scale public meetings that demonstrated the harmonious collaboration of male and female opponents of the vote. The most famous, at the Albert Hall on 28 February 1912, attracted 20,000 ticket applications and an audience of over 9,000.[16] Violet Markham, a Liberal Unionist, imperialist and womanly social reformer, made an imposing defence of progressive anti-suffragism, alongside male speakers from both major parties. The marchioness of Tullibardine had almost equal success at a 6,000-strong meeting in Glasgow a few months later, though on that occasion the most striking speech was undoubtedly Lord Curzon’s resounding defence of the British Empire against the suffragist threat. [17] Despite these successes, the anti-suffragists proved less efficient than the suffragists. There is little evidence of working-class women taking part in the anti-suffrage movement though there is some evidence for tacit male working-class support. They also found it difficult to recruit younger middle-class women. Anti-Suffrage League meetings were drab and its press office less effective than either the WSPU and NUWSS. Nonetheless, the League did have most of the press on its side ensuring it communicated its message effectively.

With the outbreak of war, the League swiftly suspended all campaigning, devoting its resources to the war effort. [18] This proved difficult to maintain when patriotic suffragists grasped every opportunity to strengthen their cause through well-advertised war service. Though weakened by the departure of male supporters, the League continued to publish its journal and maintained a low level of anti-suffrage propaganda throughout the war. By 1916, some London branches were demanding a more active stance. During the following year the suffrage issue was again before parliament and women leaders were once again to the fore at the highest levels of the League. By this stage, many long-term supporters including Lord Curzon were prepared to bow to the inevitable. By contrast, Mary Ward, confident in the latent anti-suffragism of the silent majority of British women, was acting chairman as the Representation of the People Bill passed through parliament but her frantic last-minute attempts to check its progress failed. At a determinedly positive final meeting of the League in April 1918, Lady Jersey, Mary Ward, Gladys Pott and Beatrice Chamberlain emphasised the justice of their cause to a post-war future in which women would need to be educated to use their votes wisely. For them, the gendered values of British womanhood remained worthy of defence.

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[1] Markham, Violet, Miss Violet Markham’s Great Speech at the Albert Hall, (National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage), 1912.

[2] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 163-192.

[3] Bush, Julia, ‘British Women’s Anti-suffragism and the Forward Policy, 1908-14’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 11, (3), (2002), pp. 431-454.

[4] This position was evident in the 1889 Appeal and especially in Harrison Ethel B., The Freedom of Women: an argument against the proposed extension of the suffrage to women, (Watts & Co.), 1908.

[5] For the contradictions in Ward’s work see, Saunders, Valerie, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists, (Palgrave), 1997, and Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth, ‘Shot out of the Canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminisms’, in Thompson, Nicola Diane, (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, (Cambridge University Press), 1999, pp. 204-222.

[6] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp. 140-141.

[7] For the regional impact of anti-suffragism see, ibid, Wallace, Ryland, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1868-1928, pp. 184-218, and ibid, Leheman, Leah, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland, pp. 70, 106, 192, 215.

[8] Anti-Suffrage Review, Vol. 69, (July 1914), p. 110.

[9] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp.128-130.

[10] Owen, Roger, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul, (Oxford University Press), 2004, pp. 374-378, examines his anti-suffragist activities.

[11] Ibid, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, pp. 310-337, considers Mary Ward’s role between 1910 and the outbreak of war.

[12] Arnold Ward was dropped by the Conservative Party as their candidate in Watford for the 1918 General Election. His anti-suffragist credentials would have been a liability in the first election when women could vote.

[13] Cromer to Curzon, 8 February 1912, cit, ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, p. 134.

[14] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp.131-132.

[15] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, p. 184.

[16] Ibid, p. 149.

[17] Ibid, pp. 43, 75.

[18] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 257-287, examines the anti-suffragists during the War.

Shifting Sands

Whether the Coalition Government will survive until May 2015 has been one of the questions posed by political pundits since it was formed in 2010.  My gut feeling is that it will be that the relationship between the two unequal partners will change the closer we get to 2015 but that it will survive in some form or another.  Yesterday’s speech by Nick Clegg, a leader whose political star has now sunk so low that it is almost imperceptible, appeared to take the line that ‘if it wasn’t for the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives would have made even greater cuts to the welfare budget and to public services’.  He may well be right but it’s an incredibly weak argument to say you can thank us that things aren’t worse when the public think that they are bad enough already.  So vote Liberal Democrat because the others would be worse is hardly a recipe for electoral revival!! 

As for the Conservatives, well electorally in as bad a place and in the shire constituencies threatened by UKIP especially if it persists with David Cameron’s morally right but politically inept desire to introduce gay marriage.  Whatever the justifications for gay marriage as opposed to civil partnerships and there are many, it was not in the Conservative manifesto in 2010 and in the midst of economic crisis it appears to have little resonance with the public. I can’t see any electoral advantage to be gained by pursuing it at this time, not that politics should be all about electoral gain.    Prime Ministers do have to make decisions that the public may not like and their parties find unpalatable, that’s what leadership is all about.  The problem is that the ‘Westminster village’ is becoming increasingly divorced from the realities of people’s lived experience and with their political aspirations.  If you’ve lost your job, your benefits have been cut and the local government services you used have been closed, gay marriage really is an irrelevance.

There have been two seminal events in British politics in the past fifty years.  The Profumo Scandal in 1963 shattered what was left of the mystique of British government as the press circled the declining power of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government.  The bank crisis and the MPs’ expenses scandal after 2008 reinforced the public’s view that politicians had little control over global crises and that their primary motivation appeared to be self-aggrandisement at the public’s expense.  That most MPs had acted honourably did not make up for the malfeasance of the minority.  The result is a ‘crisis of governance’ as states adopt policies that have little popular support justifying them as being ‘for the greater good’.  The chimera of representative government has been exposed and increasingly there are calls for a ‘new settlement’ between the people and the state in which the responsibilities of the people and the nature of the modern state are redefined. 

Opposition to women’s suffrage

Organised opposition to women’s suffrage has almost as long a history as women’s suffrage. [1] A Parliamentary Committee for Maintaining the Integrity of the Franchise was formed in 1875 after the 1875 suffrage bill failed to pass its second reading and was in action when the bill was against debated in 1876 and 1878. The backbone of the Committee was a group of Conservative MPs led by E. P. Bouverie and including Lord Randolph Churchill. Some Liberal MPs became members and some peers. Little more is heard of the Committee after the 1878 bill was defeated and it is probable that it did not survive the election of a new parliament in March 1880. [2]

The first collective protest against suffragism occurred in 1889. [3] Encouraged by Frederic Harrison and James Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century, Mary Augusta Ward, the writer Mrs Humphry Ward published an article against demands for the extension of the suffrage to women, signed by 104 prominent women, prominent largely because their husbands were prominent. [4] More than 2,000 women from many parts of Britain signed an accompanying ‘female protest’, though they declined to form a continuous anti-suffrage campaign group. [5] Harrison suggests that this appeal had a considerable effect on decision makers and may have finally persuaded William Gladstone to reveal his opposition to women’s suffrage in 1892. The appeal did not result in the creation of an organisation to fight the growing popularity of the suffragist movement and the case against the vote was advanced largely through the journalistic and literary debate over gender roles during the 1890s, a reaction to the prominence of the ‘New Woman’ in fiction and growing concerns over Britain’s imperial future caused by fears of social and racial degeneracy.

Organised anti-suffragism revived after 1900 especially after the House of Commons passed a suffragist resolution by a large majority in 1904. [6] Some parliamentary anti-suffragists were active and vocal supporters of organised anti-suffragism while others were more reluctant to fuel party divisions and confined their opposition to parliamentary debates and to the voting lobby. Within the Liberal Party, some members such as James Bryce, who had believed in organised opposition for twenty years, provided support for the ‘antis’ even when he was ambassador to Washington between 1907 and 1913. [7] Several MPs played an active role in the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage including John Massie, Rudolph Lehmann and Alexander MacCallum Scott. Asquith, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Prime Minister, could not become a member of the National League but he was undoubtedly supportive of its aims telling a deputation of anti-suffragists in Downing Street in 1910 that they were ‘preaching to the converted’. More Conservatives and Unionists supported anti-suffragism especially after 1906 when not in government and could be more forthright in their views. In addition to Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, successive presidents of the National League who feared that women’s suffrage threatened the Empire, other front-bench politicians supported the League including Joseph and Austen Chamberlain, F. E. Smith and Walter Long in the Commons and Lord Lansdowne, Lords George Hamilton and Lord Northcote in the Lords.

Anti-suffragist cartoon, c1910

Women were also mobilising opposition with a number of women writing in The Times and The Spectator in 1905 and 1906 expressing their concern about the growing activity of the suffragists and suffragettes, arguing that it was time for the ‘antis’ to become active. They argued that there was a ‘silent majority’ that supported their views and later during 1908 produced an anti-suffrage petition containing 337,018 signatures. [8] The launch of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League in July 1908 largely through the efforts of Mary Ward who remained as intransigent in her opposition to women’s suffrage as she had been two decades earlier. [9] Her obstinacy cost her dear and is one of the reasons why Edwardians such as Lytton Strachey and H. G. Wells were so keen to abuse and posterity to forget her as a traitor to her sex. Although progressive in her thinking about women’s education and their potential in social reform and local government, Mary Ward was unwavering in her opposition to women’s suffrage. [10] She thought that for women to want to vote was somehow unseemly and instinctively associated the militancy of the WSPU with the Irish outrages that had terrified her in the 1880s. She could tolerate constitutionalist suffragists even if she disagreed with them, but as Sutherland commented, ‘suffragettes were hardly better than Fenians’. [11]

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[1] Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, (Croom Helm), 1978, should be complemented by ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain. See also, Faraut, Martine, ‘Women Resisting the Vote: a case of anti-feminism?’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 12, (2003), pp. 605-622.

[2] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp. 115-116.

[3] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 141-162, examines anti-suffragism after 1889.

[4] Ward, Mary A., ‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage’, The Nineteenth Century, June 1889, pp. 781-788, and see also, Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, ‘The Appeal Against Women’s Suffrage: a Reply’, Nineteenth Century, July 1889, pp. 86-96.

[5] Joannou, Maroula, ‘Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry) and the Opposition to Women’s Suffrage’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 14, (2005), pp. 561-580. See also, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, (Oxford University Press), 1990, pp. 197-200, and ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp. 252-253.

[6] Bush, Julia, ‘National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (act. 1910-1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/92492, accessed, 25 April 2012]

[7] Like his friend Frederic Harrison, Bryce was a radical by temperament but this did not prevent him strongly opposing women’s suffrage; see Bryce, James, The Hindrances to Good Citizenship, (Yale University Press), 1909, pp. 85, 90, 98, 175, 181, and Seaman Jr., John T., A Citizen of the World: The Life of James Bryce, (I. B. Tauris), 2006, pp. 96-97, 198-199.

[8] This was the largest petition on women’s suffrage since 1874 and the following year suffragists could only manage 288,736 signatures.

[9] Ibid, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, pp. 299-309, considers her role in 1908 and 1909.

[10] See, for instance, Ward, Humphry, Mrs, ‘Why I Do Not Believe In Woman Suffrage’, Ladies’ Home Journal, Vol. 27, (November 1908), pp. 21-22, ‘Women in Politics and the Vote’, The Times, 20 June 1910, and ‘Mrs Humphry Ward and the Suffrage’, The Times, 19 December 1911.

[11] Ibid, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, p. 200.