Political defections, commonly known in Westminster parlance as ‘Crossing the Floor’, have been a phenomenon in Parliament since at least the 17^th century. This has either happened en masse, as part of major schisms within pre-existing parties (such as the establishment of the Liberal Unionists in the late 19^th century, or the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019), or on an individual level, motivated either by political issues of national significance, or as a result of local contexts. In the History of Parliament’s Oral History archive, multiple former MPs have recounted their decision to ‘cross the floor’ and change party affiliation. These were frequently extremely difficult decisions, often at huge personal cost, in some instances causing the end of long-term friendships or associations. They also frequently reflected major changes in British politics happening well beyond their immediate experiences.

Some MPs took the difficult decision to leave their party because of local issues, typically involving conflicts with their constituency parties. In 1973, Dick Taverne, the moderate Labour MP for Lincoln (1962-74), resigned the whip after his local party deselected him due to his pro-European views, particularly for voting in favour of the UK joining the European Economic Community (EEC).

Taverne would subsequently resign his seat to trigger a by-election, which he won under the ‘Democratic Labour’ label. It was the first time a candidate other than the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberals had won an English by-election in the post-war era. While Taverne’s parliamentary career after Labour was brief (he was defeated at the October 1974 general election by Labour’s Margaret Beckett), it anticipated later political events, most notably the defection of Labour’s ‘Gang of Four’ and the establishment of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. Taverne himself would join the SDP, and later stand again for Parliament (in Dulwich, unsuccessfully) in 1983, before becoming a Liberal Democrat peer in 1996. In 1977, Reg Prentice (Newham North-East, formerly East Ham North, 1957-79; Daventry, 1979-87) left the Labour Party due to similar local conflicts, but took the far more controversial decision of defecting directly to the Conservatives. He would later change constituencies and serve as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s first government. Once again, Prentice’s defection partly showcased the various political divisions emerging within the Labour Party at the end of the 1970s.

Other defections were directly motivated by national political issues. In 1976, Scottish MPs Jim Sillars (South Ayrshire, 1970-79; Glasgow Govan, 1988-92) and John Robertson (Paisley, 1961-79) both resigned from Labour to set-up the ‘Scottish Labour Party’ (SLP). They were motivated by the issue of devolution, and frustration with the failure of the incumbent Labour government to establish a devolved Scottish Assembly with substantial economic powers.

While Sillars never regretted his decision to leave Labour and set up the SLP, he did admit that it was a ‘rush to the head’ and not fully thought through.  

Nevertheless, though the SLP ultimately enjoyed little electoral success, and was dissolved by 1981, Sillars and Robertson’s defections reflected the growing influence of Scottish nationalism in British politics, and anticipated the left-wing, pro-European form it would take in the following decades. In 1988 Sillars was returned to Parliament following a by-election in Glasgow Govan, this time standing as a candidate for the Scottish National Party (SNP), on a platform designed to outflank Labour from the left

Like other defections, Nicholson’s departure from the Conservatives reflected wider developments, but was also of notable personal significance, being the member of a very prominent Conservative family.  

Our interviews with both Sillars and Nicholson emphasise the emotional cost of leaving their parties. Party membership is more than a collection of people with shared political outlook; very deep relationships are made and it can be a key part of a politician’s identity.  For Sillars, leaving the Labour Party was ‘like a Catholic leaving the church […] it’s a tremendous trauma, personal trauma’ and the pressure really affected his health (he developed ulcers), his family and marriage. Nicholson described being ‘extremely angry’ with the Conservatives before she left. In part her defection was her response to feeling ‘bullied’ by the whips and a determination to resist that behaviour. Yet it was a decision she reached ‘very sadly, because I am intrinsically a Conservative.’

One of the most unusual political defections recounted in our project was that of Andrew Hunter. Having sat as the Conservative MP for Basingstoke since 1983, Hunter resigned the party whip in 2002, before joining the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 2004. This was the first time an MP for a mainland British constituency represented a Northern Irish party since T.P. O’Connor, the Irish Nationalist MP for Liverpool Scotland (1885-1929). Hunter’s decision was motivated by conflicts with the Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, particularly over the party’s controversial links to the right-wing Monday Club (which Hunter supported), disillusionment with the Westminster system, and a desire to pursue a political career in Northern Ireland, owing to his long-standing connections to the DUP and wider unionist community, particularly the Orange Order.  

Unsurprisingly, many of these defections sparked outrage among their former colleagues. Sillars would describe the ‘vicious’ reaction he received, while others would describe being accused of opportunism, cowardice or treason. In some instances, the defectors’ new political allies were not always entirely welcoming either. Interestingly, in many cases these defections were explained as not due to any significant change in the views of the MPs themselves, but out of discontent with their former party’s trajectory. Versions of the phrase ‘I didn’t leave the party, the party left me’ was commonly used by Labour defectors to the SDP in the 1980s, as well as by Emma Nicholson in 1995. Indeed, while some of these defections proved permanent, such as in the case of the SDP or Sillars, others were ultimately temporary. In 2016, Emma Nicholson rejoined the Conservative Party ‘with tremendous pleasure’ (BBC News, 10 September 2016), while more recently, Luciana Berger, who left Labour to form The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019 and later joined the Lib Dems, now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer. Both instances suggest that while defections have often been dramatic and bitterly divisive, reconciliation has also occasionally been possible.

Ultimately, stories from our Oral History Project reveal that political defections are often highly personal decisions and experiences, but can also reflect wider political developments, and even play a role in shaping subsequent events.

A.S. & E.P.

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Further Reading

Andy Beckett, ‘Emma Nicholson: Not her sort of party’, Independent, 31 December 1995.

Tom Chidwick, ‘“Return Taverne”: 50 years on from the Lincoln by-election’, Mile End Institute blog, 1 March 2023

Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Geoff Horn, Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

Ben Jackson, ‘From British Labourism to Scottish Nationalism: Jim Sillars’ Journey’, Scottish Affairs 31:2 (2022), pp.233-239.

Rebecca McKee and Jack Pannell, ‘MPs who change party allegiance’, Institute for Government blog, 12 March 2024.

Emma Peplow and Priscilla Pivatto, The Political Lives of Postwar MPs (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

On 6 July 1943 the Speaker informed the House of Commons of the deaths of two of its members, Brigadier John Whiteley, MP for Buckingham, and Colonel Victor Alexander Cazalet, MP for Chippenham. They had been killed in a plane crash at Gibraltar alongside the Polish Prime Minister General Sikorski, to whom Cazalet had been acting as Britain’s political liaison officer. They were among the estimated 165 MPs who served with the forces during the Second World War. An initial flurry of enlistment among MPs in 1939 was followed by a further wave after Germany’s invasion of France in 1940.

Commenting on the deaths of Cazalet and Whiteley, Winston Churchill voiced regret that ‘the list of Members who have given their lives in this second struggle against German aggression is lengthening’. He declared that when the Commons chamber – destroyed by German incendiary bombs on the night of 10-11 May 1941 – was rebuilt after the war,

‘we shall take care to inscribe their names and titles on its panels to be an example to future generations’.

Churchill’s proposal was incorporated within the reconstructed House of Commons chamber, opened in October 1950, in the form of 23 heraldic shields commemorating the MPs who died during the Second World War. These featured each MP’s family coat of arms or initials, with their surnames inscribed above. This format emulated the 19 shields installed in 1921 to commemorate the MPs who died during the First World War, which were replicated in the rebuilt chamber.

All those commemorated were sitting MPs at the time of their death, except Roger Keyes, elevated to the Lords in 1943. While most represented English constituencies, they included the MPs for the Welsh seat of Barry and Llandaff and for County Antrim in Northern Ireland, as well as MPs with Scottish connections. Two of the group had first been returned to Westminster at the 1922 election, although the MP with the longest continuous service was Cazalet, who had represented Chippenham since 1924. After his sister Thelma was elected for Islington East in 1931, they had the distinction of being the second-ever pair of brother and sister MPs.

The wartime service of these 23 individuals reflected the wide-ranging nature of Britain’s war effort between 1939 and 1945. Many of the 165 MPs who served undertook home duties, performing valuable organisational roles while remaining engaged in parliamentary and constituency business. Those commemorated in the chamber included James Despencer-Robertson, Military Secretary at Southern Command Headquarters in his Salisbury constituency, where he died suddenly in 1942; Frank Heilgers, who was returning from his Bury St Edmunds constituency to duties as an Assistant Quartermaster General at the War Office when he was killed in the 1944 Ilford train crash; and Anthony Muirhead, who was helping to mobilise an anti-tank regiment in Oxfordshire when he died by suicide in 1939.

Not all the commemorated MPs were on active military service. James Baldwin-Webb was travelling to North America on a fundraising mission for the British Volunteer Ambulance Corps on the SS City of Benares when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 17 September 1940. The vessel was also transporting evacuees to Canada and Baldwin-Webb was praised for his bravery in assisting women and children into the lifeboats, while refusing a place himself. John Dermot Campbell – the most recently elected member of this cohort, having been an MP since February 1943 – was part of a delegation of six MPs visiting troops in Italy and Greece in January 1945. He and another MP, Robert Bernays, who had been serving with the Royal Engineers, were killed when the plane transporting them between Rome and Brindisi was lost in bad weather.

Bernays, a former journalist, had been a notable early critic of the Nazi government after visiting Germany in the early 1930s. This was in contrast with the position taken by another commemorated MP, Sir Arnold Wilson, who had attracted controversy because of his perceived pre-war sympathies with fascist regimes. Once the war was underway, however, Wilson trained for the dangerous role of an air gunner in the RAF, despite being in his mid-fifties. He was killed in May 1940 when the Wellington bomber in which he was a crew member crashed near Dunkirk.

Several more MPs also died in air crashes. Rupert Brabner, a flying ace with the Fleet Air Arm, had narrowly escaped the German attack on Crete in 1941 and the sinking of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle in 1942, but was travelling to Canada to attend a ceremony as Joint Under-Secretary of State for Air when he was killed in a plane crash near the Azores in January 1945. Although he served with the army, Lord Apsley, a keen amateur pilot before the war, had used his flying experience to transport fellow officers while serving in the Middle East with the Arab Legion. He was travelling home on leave for Christmas 1942 when the RAF plane in which he was a passenger crashed in Malta. His widow Violet was elected in his place as MP for Bristol Central.

This was not the only example among these 23 MPs of a widow taking her husband’s seat. John Rathbone had a family tradition of parliamentary service, including his great-aunt Eleanor. He was serving with the RAF when he was reporting missing while piloting his crew’s first operational flight, a bombing raid on the German-occupied port of Antwerp in December 1940. After Rathbone’s death was confirmed, his widow Beatrice was elected unopposed for his Bodmin seat.

Also killed while piloting a plane was Peter Eckersley, who was training with the Fleet Air Arm in Hampshire when his aircraft crashed in August 1940. An experienced amateur pilot, before he entered the Commons Eckersley had captained the Lancashire county cricket team, 1929-35, earning nicknames such as ‘the flying cricketer’ because he often flew himself to matches.

Eckersley was not the only notable sportsperson in this group. Cazalet had been four times British amateur squash champion and competed in tennis at Wimbledon, while Patrick Munro had been an international rugby player and twice captained Scotland. Aged 58, Munro was the oldest MP to die on war service, as a member of the Home Guard. He was taking part in a major military exercise at the Palace of Westminster in May 1942 when he collapsed and died. A year earlier he had been the last MP to speak in the Commons chamber before it was destroyed by bombing.

Munro was not, however, the oldest person among the 23 commemorated. That was the 73 year old retired Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, a peer at the time of his death. He had spent over half a century in the navy, serving across the globe before retiring shortly after his election as MP for Portsmouth North in 1934. In 1940-1 he served as Director of Combined Operations, organising and training the Commandos. Tragically his son Geoffrey died during a commando raid in North Africa in November 1941, posthumously receiving the Victoria Cross. Keyes was an unofficial observer with the U.S. fleet at a battle in the Philippines in October 1944 when he suffered smoke inhalation, which contributed to his death in December 1945. In contrast with the high-ranking Keyes, Dudley Joel was a lieutenant in the navy when he was among 63 crew members killed in the bombing of HMS Registan off Cape Cornwall in May 1941.

Almost half of the MPs commemorated for their Second World War service had also served during the First World War. Others had since gained military experience as members of the Territorial Army. In contrast, the youngest MP of this group, George Charles Grey, was born just after the 1914-18 conflict ended. He interrupted his university studies to serve with the Grenadier Guards after war broke out in 1939 and took part in the evacuation from Dunkirk. The ‘Baby of the House’ (and the youngest MP of the twentieth century), he was just 22 when he was elected unopposed for Berwick-on-Tweed in August 1941. He was killed by a sniper in July 1944 as his tank was advancing through Lutain Wood, Normandy.

While Grey had survived the 1940 retreat through France, two other MPs were less fortunate. The first MP killed in action during the Second World War, Richard Porritt, a captain with the Lancashire Fusiliers, died on 26 May 1940 during a German bombing raid near Seclin, France, where the British army was trying to establish a defensive line behind which troops could retreat to Dunkirk. Ronald Cartland, a major with the Worcestershire Yeomanry, was listed as missing in action during the retreat to Dunkirk, with initial reports suggesting he may have been taken prisoner. However, a few months later his family received confirmation that he had been killed by German fire near Watou, Belgium on 30 May 1940. His sister, the novelist Barbara Cartland, paid tribute to him with a memoir published in 1942.

These 23 MPs served in many different theatres of war. Somerset Maxwell initially served with the Royal Corps of Signals in France, before his duties took him to Palestine, Crete, Libya, Iraq and Syria. He became a welfare officer for forces across the Middle East in May 1942, but requested a return to combatant duties, and was placed in command of signals with an armoured division. Wounded in both knees when Allied troops were machine-gunned from the air during fighting in Libya, he died of septicaemia in a Cairo hospital in December 1942. Another casualty of the North Africa campaign was Edward Kellett, second in command of the 8th Armoured Brigade in Tunisia. He was killed during preparations for attacking the Mareth Line in March 1943, when a shell exploded beside his tank while he was standing up shaving.

Stuart Russell was serving in Sicily with the Coldstream Guards when he contracted a fever, and died in hospital in Egypt in October 1943. After spending time on home defence duties, John Macnamara, who had experience in both the regular and the territorial army, was keen for more active service. He was stationed in the Middle East before being appointed as Chief of Staff with the Land Forces Adriatic. Having been involved in operations in Crete and Yugoslavia, he was killed by a German mortar bombardment in Italy while visiting his former regiment, the London Irish Rifles, shortly before Christmas 1944. He was the last sitting MP to die as a result of enemy action.

KR

Short biographies of these 23 MPs written by the History of Parliament can be found on the UK Parliament website.

The seminar takes place on 28 October 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In 2024, the family of J H Whitley, former Speaker of the House of Commons, most generously gave two items to the Parliamentary Art Collection. These were a rosette attached to a medal from Gladstone’s 1884 reform campaign; and a broken chain with padlocks which had been passed down the generations and reputed to be a ‘suffragette chain’.

John Henry Whitley (1866-1935), known as ‘J H’, was Liberal MP for Halifax between 1900 and 1928. His first wife, Marguerita née Marchetti (1872-1925), was President of the Halifax Liberal Women’s Association; her father Guilio fought with Garibaldi in Italy before settling in the UK.

J H Whitley is best known today for giving his name to Whitley Councils, consultative councils between employers and workers, set up following a committee he chaired during the First World War. Whitley Councils continue today in the public sector. In Parliament, he was elected Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means in 1910 and then Chairman of Ways and Means, and therefore also Deputy Speaker, from 1910 to 1921.

As Speaker between 1921 and 1928 he oversaw the decorative scheme for St Stephen’s Hall. On retiring as Speaker, Whitley refused the customary peerage and went on to other public roles until his death in 1935. He married again in 1928 and his second wife, Helen née Clarke (1882-1981), had been a member of the British community in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Whitley was generally known to be a supporter of women’s suffrage, but this had not been researched in detail until I began to investigate the ‘suffragette chain’. As Deputy Speaker, and then Speaker, Whitley had to be politically neutral, of course; and yet office holders have their own personal opinions, and sometimes these may influence political events.

This image is from a report into all Liberal MPs’ attitudes on suffrage from the papers of David Lloyd George, which shows Whitley as a supporter of the first Conciliation Bill in 1910. He expressed support for married women in particular having the vote a year later; and made it clear in 1913 that he had not changed his mind. The Conciliation Bills were unsuccessful cross-party suffrage bills between 1910 and 1912 which would have given a limited measure of women’s suffrage. As private members’ bills they stood little chance of success without government backing.

The Speaker during the years of militant activism before the First World War was James William Lowther, an opponent of women’s suffrage. Lowther had to respond to various suffragette protests in the Palace of Westminster, including at least two known to involve chains. However, Lowther became most infamous in suffrage history for a controversial procedural ruling which scuppered a women’s suffrage amendment to a government bill in 1913. If Whitley had been in the chair, this may not have happened.

In one of history’s ironies, Lowther went on to (reluctantly) chair the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform during the First World War, which under his leadership recommended a measure of votes for women, implemented in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. The Act gave the parliamentary vote to women aged 30 and over who met a property qualification. The battle for equal franchise went on in Parliament for the next ten years. During this time Lowther took the opportunity to scupper another women’s suffrage bill through a Speaker’s ruling in 1920. He stood down as Speaker in 1921, when he was elevated to the House of Lords as Viscount Ullswater.

In 1924 the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin made a pledge on equal franchise that his party ‘would if returned to power propose that the matter be referred to a Conference of all political Parties on the lines of the Ullswater Committee’. The Conservatives were elected and in due course Baldwin asked Whitley if he would chair another Speaker’s conference. Whitley refused, much to the relief of most of the Cabinet, who wanted to avoid discussion of wider electoral reform issues.

Despite strong opposition led by Winston Churchill, the Cabinet finally agreed to support equal franchise in 1927 and the 1928 Equal Franchise Act was passed the following year. Whitley oversaw all its stages in the Commons, standing down as Speaker shortly before it achieved royal assent in July 1928. It’s impossible to be sure, but it’s entirely possible that the ‘suffragette chain’ had remained in the Speaker’s Office all these years, until the issue received closure and this suffrage-sympathetic Speaker took it home as a retirement souvenir of his long parliamentary career.

The seminar takes place on 28 October 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

MT

Some of this material was first presented by Mari Takayanagi at ‘Breaking the chains: Women’s suffrage and Parliament from the time of J.H. Whitley’, the 12th annual J H Whitley lecture at the University of Huddersfield on 17 October 2024. This year’s lecture will be given by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, on 30 October 2025.

Mari would like to credit Beverley Cook, Curator of Social and Working History at the London Museum; Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor at the History of Parliament; and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, academic historian and archives consultant, for their assistance with research on the ‘suffragette chain’.

Further reading:

J. Hargreaves, K. Laybourn & R. Toye (eds.), Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J.H. Whitley (1866-1935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons (2018).

M. Takayanagi, Votes for Women and the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform 1916-17. History of Parliament blog (2017).

M. Takayanagi, ‘Women and the Vote: The Parliamentary Path to Equal Franchise, 1918–28’, Parliamentary History, 37:1 (2018).

The House of Lords remains a rather neglected subject in modern British political history. One recent study has even suggested that ‘for the last half-century and more it has been largely ignored’ (but note the reading list below). Most studies constructed around the traditional theme of democratic development inevitably tend to downplay the significance of the ‘unelected’ chamber. The Lords, however, should not be under-estimated.

Over half the twenty prime ministers of the 19th century, including the two longest serving (Liverpool and Salisbury), formed their governments as peers, while two more (Russell and Disraeli) started out in the Commons but later served as premier in the upper house. For just over half the entire nineteenth century, the government was led by a prime minister sitting in the Lords. At ministerial level the presence of peers was more striking still, even well into the 20th century. Attlee’s first Cabinet of 1945 and Macmillan’s in 1957 contained five members of the Lords, while Churchill’s of 1951 had seven.

Rather than being separate or even rival institutions, as is sometimes assumed, the Victorian Commons and Lords were in fact deeply integrated in terms of their practical business, politics and personnel. Family ties and patronage networks ensured a close working relationship between members of both Houses, with many MPs either succeeding or being promoted to peerages. Many peers also continued to exercise a considerable degree of influence over elections to the Commons. Where conflicts between the two Houses did occur, as for example over the famous 1832 reform bill, they were primarily shaped by the political composition of the Lords rather than any deep-seated institutional jealousies.

The Lords always remained an overwhelmingly Tory chamber. Even by 1880, despite years of Liberal peerage creations aimed at trying to rectify a long-standing imbalance, the number of Liberal Lords had only just passed the 200 mark, or roughly 40%, of the total. This was then decimated by the Liberal party splitting apart over Irish home rule.

One effect of this was that many Whig and Liberal measures that passed the Commons were often defeated or altered out of all recognition by the Lords, sometimes even against the express wishes of the Tory leaders. The Whigs’ original 1835 municipal reform bill, for instance, was completely mangled by the Lords in defiance of the Conservative leader Sir Robert Peel’s instructions.

The fact that so many controversial reforms of the 19th century ended up being proposed by Tory or Conservative governments, however, also meant that the number of conflicts between the two Houses was far lower than it otherwise might have been. Hugely contentious issues such as Catholic emancipation (1829), the Maynooth grant (1845), the repeal of the corn laws (1846) and the 1867 Reform Act, all of which would surely have been defeated in the Lords if sent there by a Liberal ministry, were allowed to pass by a Tory-dominated Lords, albeit with varying degrees of dissent.

Steady resistance in the Lords to measures such as the abolition of church rates, the removal of religious tests in universities, and allowing Jews to enter Parliament, put them at odds with the Commons on a regular basis throughout the 1850s and 1860s, but again it was at the behest of leaders, notably Disraeli, that they eventually gave way. In 1868 the Lords threw out Gladstone’s preliminary measures for disestablishing the Anglican church in Ireland. Following that year’s general election, however, which gave the Liberals a substantial majority, the Tory Lords reluctantly consented to pass a compromise measure at the behest of their leader Lord Cairns.

One area where institutional conflicts did occasionally occur, however, was over finance. This was supposed to be the exclusive preserve of the lower House. A problem here, however, was what exactly this financial embargo covered. In 1860, in an important showdown between the chambers, the Lords rejected the Liberal ministry’s proposals to abolish the duties on paper. This formed part of the government’s broad move towards obtaining more revenue from income and property, but was seen by many peers as touching on wider national issues as well. Rather than confront the Lords head on, the ministry passed resolutions in the Commons reasserting its exclusive right to deal with all money matters, and in the following session controversially inserted the proposals into their budget. Despite many objections this was duly passed.

The 1911 Parliament Act, and beyond

This increasing practice of ‘packing’ budgets with other measures lay at the heart of the constitutional crisis of 1909-11. After three years of throwing out a series of Liberal reforms, including an unpopular licensing bill, and earning themselves their reputation as ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’, the Lords went one step further and rejected the so-called ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. As well as extending inheritance duties on landed estates, this had also tacked on previously rejected licensing and land valuation reforms.

The Liberal ministry called an election, held in January 1910, but their resulting losses made them heavily dependent on the support of the Irish nationalist MPs and Labour, both of whom shared the Liberal party’s growing commitment to a formal reduction of the Lords’ powers. After months of high political drama and abortive negotiations between the two Houses, and yet another general election in December 1910 that solved nothing, the Parliament Act of 1911 was eventually passed under the threat of mass peerage creations by the king.

Much has been made of the way the 1911 Parliament Act formally ended the Lords’ ability to interfere in money matters (as defined by the Speaker) and its replacement of the Lords’ complete veto over legislation with a delaying power of two years. In reality, however, this was precisely the way in which the Lords had operated for most of the 19th century, rarely intruding into budgetary matters and often postponing rather than preventing the passage of controversial measures (with the obvious exception of Irish home rule).

Not only were the Parliament Act’s provisions limited to bills that originated in the Commons – leaving completely untouched the peers’ powers over bills introduced in the Lords and all secondary or delegated legislation – but also the opportunity for bills to be delayed until after the next election in effect conferred a ‘referendum’ power on the upper house, legitimising its claims to a separate constitutional relationship with the electorate.

Perhaps most significantly, the Parliament Act’s technical requirements – bills delayed by the Lords had to go back through the Commons in the same form three times before becoming law – in practice made it far too cumbersome to be used on a regular basis. Tellingly, during the 20^th century it was implemented just six times. In 1914 Welsh church disestablishment and Irish home rule were enacted under its provisions, only for their implementation to be suspended for the duration of the First World War (and in the latter case aborted owing to Irish independence). The 1949 Parliament Act, which further reduced the Lords’ delaying powers to one year, also reached the statute book without the Lords’ consent, as did the 1991 War Crimes Act, the 1999 European Elections Act and the 2000 Sexual Offences Act.

All other legislation that was passed during the 20th century, however, continued to be debated, scrutinised and where necessary amended by the Lords before becoming law, much as it had been during the Victorian era. The only difference was that after the primacy of the Commons had been asserted during the showdown of 1909-11, the Lords became less disposed to be combative in its approach and more inclined to engage in political manoeuvrings behind the scenes. To this extent, it could be argued that the change implemented in the early twentieth century was as much a cultural as a constitutional one.

Further Reading:

• P. Salmon, ‘Parliament’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000, ed. D. S. Brown, R. Crowcroft and G. Pentland (Oxford University Press, 2018), 83-102 VIEW
• C. Ballinger, The House of Lords 1911-2011: A Century of Non-Reform (2012)
• R. Davis, A Political History of the House of Lords 1811-46 (2008)
• R. Davis, Leaders in the Lords 1765-1902 (2003)
• C. Comstock Weston, The House of Lords and Ideological Politics (1995)
• A. Adonis, Making Aristocracy Work. The Peerage and the Political System in Britain 1884-1914 (1993)
• E. A. Smith, The House of Lords in British Politics and Society 1815-1911 (1992)

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 13 November 2018, written by Dr Philip Salmon.

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

In the wake of the corruption and expense of the 1880 general election, Sir Henry James, attorney general in Gladstone’s Liberal government, oversaw a landmark piece of legislation which aimed to clean up Britain’s elections: the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act. When this measure was first introduced in 1881, The Times remarked that

if passed in its present form, it can scarcely fail to effect something like a revolution in the mode of conducting Parliamentary elections.

Although James accepted several amendments as the bill passed through the Commons, its core principles remained intact. It restricted how much candidates could spend at elections and what they could spend it on; increased the penalties for corrupt practices, including bribery and ‘treating’ voters with food and drink; and introduced the new category of illegal practices, which including illegal employment and illegal payment.

The first English contest under these new rules, the November 1883 York by-election, suggested that the Act would indeed transform the practice of electioneering. In keeping with its limits, York’s candidates spent just over a tenth of what the 1880 contest had cost, and the number of paid election workers and rooms hired for electioneering fell dramatically. However, some small-scale bribery and treating persisted.

The Third Reform Act of 1884-5 had made major changes to the electoral system by the time the first general election under the 1883 Act’s terms was held in 1885. The extension of the franchise meant that the electorate grew from 3,152,000 in 1883 to 5,708,000 in 1885, while the redistribution of seats into largely single member constituencies completely redrew the electoral map. This major overhaul of the electoral system – particularly the removal of small boroughs and the increased electorate – made its own contribution to diminishing corruption. The 1883 Act was, however, crucial in providing the framework within which candidates – increasingly with the assistance of professional agents overseeing local constituency associations – had to cultivate the votes of this mass electorate.

Election expenditure by candidates declined significantly following the 1883 reform. Candidates’ declared expenditure in 1885 was over £700,000 less than in 1880, despite a longer period of election campaigning and a far larger electorate. The average cost per vote polled fell by three-quarters, from 18s. 9d. to 4s. 5d., and never exceeded this in the period before the First World War, as the table below shows. Assisted by the Act’s restrictions, candidates did away with unnecessary expenditure on vast numbers of election workers or decorative items such as flags and banners.

_{Source: Kathryn Rix, ‘“The elimination of corrupt practices in British elections”? Reassessing the impact of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act’, English Historical Review, cxxxiii (2008), 77}

One of the problems revealed in 1880 had been that the total declared in candidates’ election accounts did not always reflect their true expenditure. The 1883 Act made a false declaration of expenses an illegal practice, which undoubtedly encouraged more accurate accounting. However, it remained the case that these official returns did not always present the full picture. One leading Liberal agent claimed in 1907 that

every agent has heard of cases where it has been necessary to “fake” the accounts in order to make it appear that no illegal expenditure has been allowed.

Such falsification of accounts broke the law, but there were also growing concerns about other expenditure which infringed the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1883 Act. Spending at elections by pressure groups such as the Tariff Reform League or temperance organisations – who held meetings, hired committee rooms and distributed leaflets and posters – might benefit particular candidates, but did not have to be included in their accounts.

At the 1892 election the Liberals were particularly concerned about the £100,000 allegedly spent by members of the drink trade in support of Conservative candidates, while in the early years of the twentieth century it was the greater spending power of the pro-Conservative Tariff Reform League in comparison with the pro-Liberal Free Trade Union which sparked most anxiety. The matter was raised in the Commons in February 1908 when 133 Liberal and Labour MPs (and one Liberal Unionist) backed an amendment regretting ‘the way in which large sums, derived from the secret funds of the Tariff Reform League and other similar societies, are spent in electoral contests without being returned in the candidates’ expenses’. A few months later the 1883 Act’s author Henry James corresponded with the lord chancellor about possible legislation to restrict such spending.

These were not the only ways in which the 1883 Act’s aim of curbing the electoral influence of wealth was apparently being evaded. James raised concerns about spending between elections by local party organisations and associated bodies such as the Primrose League on social activities and entertainments. This would have been classed as treating if undertaken in support of the candidate during the election. Yet James argued that

the corruption which causes a man to profess a political faith is as injurious as that which induces him to fulfil it by recording his vote.

In 1892 Conservative MPs at Hexham and Rochester were unseated by petitions because they had subsidised entertainments provided by the local Conservative association or Primrose League, raising hopes that such social activities might be curtailed. These were dashed by the 1895 Lancaster petition, which saw the Conservative MP retain his seat, despite the local party’s extensive programme of ‘politics and pleasure’, from dances to potato pie suppers. Crucially though, the MP had not subsidised these events.

Another continued source of spending to secure political influence was the ‘nursing’ of constituencies by candidates and MPs, who made charitable donations and subscribed to local clubs and institutions, in the hope of winning favour. The Conservative MP Frederick Milner complained in 1897 that

no pig, or cow, or horse dies in the constituency without the member being … asked to contribute towards another. He is expected to assist in the building or repair of each church and chapel … , to subscribe to all the cricket and football clubs, friendly societies, clubs, agricultural shows, and various worthy charities.

Some MPs spent hundreds of pounds annually in this way and the future Liberal prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman warned in 1901 that ‘the spending of money for the purposes of electoral influence’ was ‘one of the great dangers now affecting our political system’. It raised the spectre of wealthy ‘carpet-baggers’ effectively buying their way into seats where they had no local connections. It also had implications for the electoral chances of labour candidates, who could not afford such expenditure. However, suggestions that ‘nursing’ should be prohibited came up against the belief that, as MPs were often prominent local employers or landowners, philanthropy was a natural part of their social duties, irrespective of any political ambitions. Private members’ bills on the question in 1911 and 1912 failed to progress beyond their first reading.

The 1883 Act had clearly done much to curb election spending, but had not eradicated the electoral influence of wealth. A similar pattern emerges when assessing its impact on corruption. The number of MPs unseated by election petitions fell dramatically. Eighteen MPs lost their seats because of bribery and other corrupt practices at the 1880 election. In contrast, despite the law’s increased stringency, there was no election after 1885 which saw more than five MPs unseated. In total, 25 MPs were unseated for corrupt or illegal practices between 1885 and 1911. Cases such as the 1906 Worcester election petition, where around 500 individuals were involved in corruption, demonstrated that the 1883 Act had not been entirely successful.

Moreover, as with election accounts, the fall in petitions indicated a relative decline in corruption, but did not tell the full story. The significant costs and uncertain outcome of petitions deterred petitioners. So too did the unpopularity of petitions among voters, which might prove damaging to future election prospects. Petitioners also had to be sure that the election had been pure on their own side, or risk recriminatory charges. Where both parties had been involved with corruption, it might be better to collude to cover matters up, avoiding the potential threat of the constituency being disfranchised.

There continued to be rumours of corruption in constituencies which escaped petitions. The Liberal election agent for Thanet published a detailed account of the electoral misdeeds of Harry Marks, who won the seat for the Conservatives in 1906. He alleged that Marks had exceeded the 1883 Act’s limits, falsified his election accounts and funded treating and other forms of corruption. Marks had only narrowly survived an election petition against him in another constituency in 1895 and his involvement in commercial fraud was notorious. Thanet’s Liberals did not, however, petition against him, deterred by the expense and the difficulty of securing reliable witnesses who would not be ‘got at’ by Marks.

The complicity of both parties in corruption at Penryn and Falmouth, where it was alleged that ‘every man in the place was bought’, apparently prevented a petition after the 1900 election. Electoral malpractice continued: John Barker, Liberal MP from 1906 until his January 1910 defeat, later admitted to having spent thousands of pounds more than the Corrupt Practices Act’s limits during his two contests.

Yet while corrupt practices were not eliminated, The Times’s forecast of a revolution in electioneering remained accurate. Electoral contests after the 1883 Act were far purer and less costly than before this landmark reform. Sir Harry Verney, a veteran MP who first entered the Commons in 1832, and sat intermittently until 1885, summarised the transformation in 1892 when he reflected on

the great improvements I have lived to see in elections, when I remember the bribery, the drunkenness, and the extravagance of the old political contests.

Further reading:

For the first two articles in this series, see here and here.

The seminar takes place on 3 June 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The commanding Recording Angel memorial in St Stephen’s Porch, Westminster Hall, is dedicated to peers, MPs, officers, and their sons who lost their lives in the First World War. Designed by the Australian sculptor, Sir Bertram Mackennal, and unveiled in November 1922, the Recording Angel memorial includes three English-born sons of Welsh MPs – Iorwerth Glyndwr John (1894-1916), William Pugh Hinds (1897-1916), and William Glynne Charles Gladstone (1885-1915), himself an MP.

Through naming, it demonstrates the ways in which the Houses of Parliament captured expressions of English Welsh dualities within its political iconography in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The memorial also provides a useful vehicle through which to examine the performance of English Welsh dual identities during the war itself and the fluidity of identity formation back and forwards across the borders of England and Wales in the first decades of the twentieth century.

One of the ninety-four sons recorded on the memorial was Iorwerth Glyndwr John, son of the MP for East Denbighshire, Edward Thomas (E. T.) John. The Pontypridd-born MP, a keen advocate of home rule for Wales, had been an iron ore merchant in Middlesbrough before entering parliament. His son Iorwerth, born in Middlesbrough in 1894, was educated at New College, Harrogate and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read jurisprudence. Serving with the South Wales Borderers, he was killed near Loos in February 1916.

On Iorweth’s death, his alma mater recalled:

While at Oxford he showed keen interest in Welsh music and in the political and national life of Wales generally… Doubtless, if he had lived, he would have played a prominent part in the public life of Wales.

For Iorwerth’s epitaph, E. T. John chose an inscription which was drenched in Welsh symbolism, using lines adapted from the bard Hedd Wyn’s wartime poem, Nid â’n Ango ([It] Will Not Be Forgotten):

Un O Feibion Hoffusaf Cymru |  Ei Aberth nid el heibio | a’i enw annwyl nid a’n ango (One of Wales’s favourite sons | His sacrifice will not be passed over | And his dear name will not be forgotten)

This commemorative act signifies a clear desire by the bereaved father to emphasise the deceased’s links to Wales and the Welsh language, and to maintain linguistic communion with his son beyond death, despite Iorwerth’s ostensibly English upbringing.

William Pugh Hinds, who died from wounds in February 1916, was the only son of the Blackheath draper and MP for West Carmarthenshire, John Hinds. Born and educated in Blackheath, Hinds was studying engineering at the Electrical Standardising, Testing, and Training Institution, London before he enlisted in November 1914. He served as an officer in France with the 15^th (1^st London Welsh) Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF), a unit deliberately set up to accommodate Londoners of Welsh heritage and enthusiastically sponsored by his father.

Within months of volunteering, Hinds was severely wounded by a sniper’s bullet. Just days before his death, he was visited in an emergency field hospital by the then Minister for Munitions, David Lloyd George. This encounter had such an impact on the politician that when he returned to London, he confided to his mistress, Frances Stevenson, ‘The horror of what I have seen has burnt into my soul, and has almost unnerved me for my work.’

Hinds’s death continued to haunt Lloyd George. When he returned to France in late 1916, he made a pilgrimage to Hinds’s grave at Merville Communal Cemetery, subsequently receiving a note of gratitude from Hinds MP that he ‘found time to visit our dear lad’s grave.’ As with E. T. John, Hinds selected a Welsh inscription for his offspring’s headstone: Yn Anghof Ni Chant Fod (They Will Not Be Forgotten), from the poem ‘Dyffryn Clwyd’, so that even in death he embraced his Londoner son in a Welsh martial identity.

The final MP’s son listed on the Recording Angel was William Glynne Charles Gladstone (William), also an MP in his own right. He was killed in 1915 whilst serving as an officer with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (RWF) in France. William was born at 41 Berkeley Square, London in 1885, the son of William Henry Gladstone MP, and grandson of the former Liberal Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone.

Like his grandfather, William embodied an attachment to both England and Wales, inheriting the family estate at Hawarden Castle, Flintshire when he was twenty-one. As the Squire of Hawarden, William encouraged those in the district to join up and military service in the RWF further deepened his ties with Wales. In April 1915, for example, William and his mother exchanged correspondence on an orphanage at Hawarden which was being used for RWF convalescent soldiers, the former writing, ‘Please let the Orphanage soldiers know that they can wander over the Park Woods and Old Castle in case they don’t do it.’

William maintained a connection with his Welsh home through discussion of his family’s patronage, on both military and domestic fronts, of RWF soldiers. Following his death, William was often characterised in obituaries as ‘a border hero’ whose life criss-crossed the boundaries between England and Wales; the Liverpool Post noting, ‘the border counties lost a true and devoted son in the late W G C Gladstone, of Hawarden.’

Notably, John, Hinds and Gladstone all served with Welsh regiments: the South Wales Borderers, the 15^th (London Welsh), and the Royal Welsh Fusiliers respectively. This suggests that within Welsh diasporic families in England, those of military age were often prompted by patrilineal ties to approach their military enlistment through the lens of Welshness, seeking to serve in a Welsh regiment.

Ultimately, the Recording Angel memorial is important in acknowledging the existence of English Welsh dualities within wartime memorialisation which, in turn, acts to shore up a sense of shared Britishness. The memorial also highlights the functioning of a form of militarized Welsh patriotism amongst the male diasporic elite, some of whom were MPs, which occasionally demanded the sacrifice of their own sons.

WU

Wendy’s seminar takes place on 3 June 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The seminar takes place on 20 May 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Protest marches in central London today usually follow a regular route. Assembling on the Thames Embankment, they march towards Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, to Trafalgar Square or down the Mall to Hyde Park, where a big rally is held. This route has immense political symbolism and significance, following in the footsteps of previous generations of marchers.

Londoners of all political persuasions and social status witnessed or took part in processions at some point in their lives. The Lord Mayor’s parade and local guild processions marked key points in the civic and religious calendar, while royal processions at coronations and jubilees developed in grandeur during the long nineteenth century.

Electoral processions to and from the hustings at Covent Garden, and the ‘chairing of the member’ around the main streets of Westminster (and on boats along the Thames in the case of Middlesex constituency), enabled popular participation in the era before the 1832 Reform Act. Many of these traditions continued as the franchise widened.

However, this route through central London wasn’t always the same as it is today. The choice of streets and meeting places wasn’t regularised until at least the 1870s. Trafalgar Square wasn’t completed until the late 1840s. So before then, political gatherings assembled in various locations on the fringes of urban London such as Copenhagen Fields and St George’s Fields – which were built upon by the mid-nineteenth century.

Political rallies were banned in Hyde Park until members of the Reform League pulled up the railings to gain access in 1866. Ever since, protest march routes through the capital have been subject to debate and negotiation between protesters, government and police.

With the rise of the working-class parliamentary reform movements and trades unions from the 1790s, political processions became a central element of protest. Processions and marches were active claims by the working classes to form part of the wider body politic. Reform processions were a show of representing the ‘people’ to the public. Leaders and orators of the parliamentary reform movement employed the ‘grand entry’ into the city, in the mode not only of successful MPs after an election, but also of military leaders returning home after a victory, or with biblical allusions to Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem. ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ was a popular hymn played by bands at both electoral and radical processions.

Holding a political procession became a fraught process of negotiation between the political group holding the procession, and various overlapping layers of power in the capital, from the magistrates to the home office and sheriff of London. Legislation aimed at the democratic reform movement further shaped the locations and routes of the protests. The 1817 Seditious Meetings Act prohibited political meetings within a mile radius of the palace of Westminster while Parliament was in session. Protest marches, therefore, tended to avoid starting, ending or stopping in this area.

The Westminster Reform Society advertised the route of a procession to protest against the Peterloo Massacre on 1 November 1819, starting at the Crown and Anchor on The Strand to march down Fleet Street to Finsbury Square in the City, a distance of around four kilometres. The demonstration was held while Lord Liverpool’s government was pushing the ‘Six Acts’ through parliament, including another Seditious Meetings Act that prohibited the display of political banners and ensigns at demonstrations.

Procession routes, of all types of political and social composition, began to coalesce from the mid-nineteenth century into regular routes across London. The dominant direction of processions was pulled westwards as the built environment of the capital morphed, and Hyde Park became the main site for rallies.

The processional geography of London further evolved as the city expanded eastwards around the docklands from the mid nineteenth century. The increasing density of population in the East End pulled the start of trades’ processions to meeting sites of Mile End Waste, Stepney Green, and, after its opening, Victoria Park. Trades and unemployed marches in and out of the East End and the docklands intensified as newly formed socialist movements, most notably the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), took up street meetings and marches as key tactics during the severe economic downturn of the late 1880s.

The right to march was hard fought, and political movements asserted agency by claiming routes physically as well as symbolically. The period after the First World War brought new challenges and movements that again brought the right to march debates to the fore of policing and legislation.

Earlier compromises of non-interference were no longer effective. The emergence of the communist movement and violent clashes between police and the unemployed in the 1920s and 1930s continued the conflicts of the earlier decades. Culminating in the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936, the provocative militant marching of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was opposed by a physical and material defence of territory by Jewish and communist communities in the East End. In response, the 1936 Public Order Act was rushed through Parliament and became law on 1 January 1937.

The legislation did not completely interfere with the popular right of assembly and protest. The tensions between protecting the freedom of passage and the liberty of assembly and free speech became inextricably entangled with issues of race, class and national politics for the rest of the twentieth century.

KN

Katrina’s seminar takes place on 20 May 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The House of Lords Act 1999 was the last major reform to membership of the House of Lords; removing the rights of all but 92 hereditary peers to sit in the House. This act was intended to be a ‘first stage’ but since then other attempts to reform the Chamber have stalled. The presence of any hereditary peers in parliament at all has been called ‘undemocratic and indefensible’ by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer [BBC News, 5 September 2024], and the government included a bill in the July 2024 King’s Speech that would remove them entirely [Lords Library, 6 November 2024].

Almost since it passed, the 1999 Act has been criticised as a missed opportunity. Alexandra Kelso has argued that 1997 Labour government – who enjoyed a huge majority in the Commons and considerably popularity – had an ‘irrational fear’ that the Lords would hold up their governmental programme if reform was pursued, and ‘shrank’ from more ambitious measures [Kelso, 2011, p.111]. Subsequently the elections to choose which hereditary peers kept their seats, and to replace members when they died, have been described by Donald Shell as ‘nonsense’ [Shell, 2000, p.300]. However, reforming membership of the Lords is fraught with controversy, and consensus about what the House should look like is hard to reach.

Without understanding the context of the 1999 House of Lords Act the current composition of the chamber indeed seems rather strange. The decision to save 92 hereditary peers was largely due to behind the scenes negotiations between leading Conservative and Labour peers. The back and forth of negotiations is described by the journalist Michael Cockerell in a 2001 article for the Journal of Legislative Studies, written based on interviews Cockerell held for a BBC documentary ‘The Lady and the Lords’. Our own oral history project has interviews with two of the key protagonists of these talks: Ivor, Lord Richard, who was Leader of the Lords from 1997-98, and Lord Cranborne, now the 7^th Marquess of Salisbury, who led the Conservative peers. Their reflections in our archive suggest further insights into the complicated politics around the 1999 Act.

In 1997 the Labour party were elected with a manifesto commitment to reform the House of Lords in a two-stage process. The ‘initial, self-contained reform’ promised to remove ‘the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote […] by statute’ [Labour Party, 1997]. Whilst this was clearly understood as the start of the process, no detail was included on further reforms. This was a significant change from the 1992 Labour manifesto, which had promised a largely elected House of Lords. A reform bill was not introduced in New Labour’s first parliamentary session, which was dominated by other constitutional changes such as devolution in Scotland and Wales.

However, behind the scenes in 1997 and 1998 talks were already underway between the leaders of the two parties in the Lords. In Salisbury’s 2016 interview for our oral history archive, he remembered that after the 1997 landslide he had accepted that Lords reform was coming, and hoped to reach a compromise to secure both stages of reform. He wanted to avoid a situation where hereditary peers were removed (stage one) with no former reform to follow: ‘unless we had some reminder that we still needed stage two, then we’d just have stage one and a purely nominated House’. This was both a matter of principle and of politics, he remembered, as it was easier to unite pro- and anti-reform peers behind the position ‘no stage one without stage two’. In this extract from his interview, Salisbury explained his tactics, as discussed with his then party leader, William Hague:

Salisbury proceeded to disrupt the government’s legislative programme in their first parliamentary session, notably the European Elections Bill, which was later forced through using the powers of the Parliament Act.

On the Labour side, our 2015 interview with Lord Richard also discussed the behind the scenes negotiations. In line with Salisbury’s reflections, the two sides believed they were getting ‘somewhat near a settlement’ on the full reform package in summer 1998:

As Richard mentions, at this point he was sacked as Labour leader in the Lords. Both he and Salisbury later reflected that this must have been because of opposition to an elected upper chamber at the very top of the New Labour government. This testimony suggests that rather than being ‘frightened’ into accepting hereditary peers in a newly-constituted House of Lords, the government were equally resistant to agreeing to an elected chamber, a deal the peers themselves were close to reaching.

With Richard gone, his place in the negotiations was taken by Blair’s close ally, the Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine. Salisbury describes the ‘utterly loopy’ negotiations to agree that 92 hereditary peers would remain: 10% of the hereditary peerage, with 15 further peers to man committees in the ‘interim’ period before further reform, and then adding in the Earl Marshall and Lord Chamberlain.

However, just before this deal was agreed and a bill to reform the Lords included in the 1998 Queen’s Speech, Conservative leader William Hague and a select group of his shadow cabinet rejected the deal. Instead, they wanted Salisbury and the Conservative Lords to continue to resist any reform. In our interview, Salisbury explained why he would not continue to do so. Firstly, he clearly accepted that Lords membership needed reform, but was opposed to a purely nominated chamber. Secondly, and importantly, he thought resisting all reform would be unconstitutional. The amount of opposition the Lords could give to an elected government was (and is still) governed by the terms of the ‘Salisbury convention’. This had been most recently defined by Salisbury’s grandfather, the 5^th Marquess (Conservative leader in the Lords 1942-1957): the Lords would not oppose a government bill if it had appeared in their manifesto. In his interview with us, the 7^th Marquess respected this as ‘grandfather’s convention’, and was not prepared to ignore it. Salisbury had spent a significant part of his childhood living with his grandfather when his own parents were away in Africa, and spoke about him with pride during his interview.

Nevertheless, Salisbury’s next decision to save his deal with Irvine was unorthodox, as he explains in this extract:

What followed was an extraordinary sequence of events where Salisbury dealt directly with his opponents in Number 10, including Blair and his chief of communications Alistair Campbell, to ensure his deal remained whether Hague wanted it or not. Salisbury and Campbell agreed the plan to save the 92 hereditary peers should be introduced as a crossbench amendment to the government’s bill, according to reporting in the Times the following week as an attempt to ‘bounce’ Hague into accepting it.

On the day the crossbench amendment was due to be announced, however, a furious Hague discovered that Salisbury had gone behind his back. Trying to seize the initiative, Hague announced the proposed deal to a shocked House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions, accusing Blair of reneging on his promise to remove all hereditary peers and trying to create a Lords full of ‘Tony’s Cronies’. Unfortunately for Hague, however, he had acted without knowing the feelings of Conservative peers. Instead of backing Hague they supported the deal to save 92 hereditary peers: indeed Hague was only able to secure a new Leader in the Lords (Lord Strathclyde, Salisbury’s close ally) and keep his front bench by agreeing that they could vote for the deal. Hague had to back down and ended up harangued on Newsnight over the whole episode.

This proved to be the end of Salisbury’s career in the Lords. Unsurprisingly sacked by Hague, he later retired from the House so as ‘not to cause trouble’ for Strathclyde. In his diary, Alistair Campbell expressed astonishment at Salisbury’s motives:

I still could not fully understand why he would do this – he didn’t know me from Adam, and what he did know he probably didn’t like and yet we had just sat down and agreed a line-by-line plan that he must know would damage his leadership, help us through a difficulty, and … he was going to be implicated. [Campbell, 30 November 1998, p.578]

From our interview these motives seem a lot clearer. At the end of the interview he reflected that he was ‘pleased’ with the outcome even if it was ‘a negative achievement’ as ‘if Blair had been able to go full-bloodedly for a stage one reform plan he might put the thing to bed for the foreseeable future’. Salisbury then laughed as he realised ‘You could say that he did that anyway! 17 years later, or whatever it is’ the Lords remains the same. Instead of being frightened into accepting that hereditary peers remain, the Labour government did create a mostly-nominated chamber.

E.P.

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Further Reading

Alistair Campbell, The Alistair Campbell Diaries, Volume Two: Power and the People, 1997-1999 (London: Arrow, 2001).

Michael Cockerell, ‘The Politics of Second Chamber Reform: A Case Study of the House of Lords and the Passage of the House of Lords Act 1999’, Journal of Legislative Studies 7:1 (2001), 119-134.

Alexandra Kelso, ‘Stages and Muddles: The House of Lords Act 1999’, Parliamentary History 30:1 (2011), 101-113.

Labour Party, New Labour: Because Britain Deserves Better (1997) [Accessed online: http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml]

Donald Shell, ‘Labour and the House of lords: A Case Study in Constitutional Reform’, Parliamentary Affairs 53:2 (2000), 290-310.

Even if the statues in Parliament Square are not ‘Made of Stone’, as the introductory music to our feature on Matt Chorley’s Radio 5live programme might suggest, the grand figures give an impression of timelessness. However, Parliament Square itself has developed in purpose and layout in the past 150 years, and of course the figures commemorated are complex and intriguing historical actors. I hope I’ve been able to thank on air my Victorian Commons colleagues, in particular Kathryn Rix, for their help in my research, and acknowledge in particular the work of Geoffrey Hicks, whose work on the square I have relied on.

Parliament Square first became a public memorial space in the 1860s, following the designs of Edward Barry, son of Charles, the architect of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster. As Hicks has argued, the initial aim of the Square was an ‘outdoor mausoleum’ and ‘sacred space’ for imperial Britain’s political leaders [Hicks, 165-67]. This was in the context of what historians have termed Victorian ‘Statue Mania’. Throughout the country, as Rix for example has recently discussed in an article describing public statues of politicians in the north and midlands, statues of ‘Great Men’ were erected as inspirational figures and decoration for new public spaces. Historians Terry Wyke and Donald Read have demonstrated the importance of the death of Prime Minister Robert Peel in starting this craze, which all seems rather strange in our more cynical political times.

The first five statues are squarely in this tradition: five prime ministers, all added in the decades after their deaths. First to be moved to the Square was George Canning (1770-1827), who until recently was the Prime Minister with the dubious honour to have been in office for the shortest time period. Nevertheless, our biography describes him as ‘One of the most singular and remarkable of the leading statesmen of his time’ [Stephen Farrell] – all the more fascinating given his relative lack of privilege for a political figure of his time. Canning’s statue, by Sir Richard Westmacott, had a difficult origin, falling off the hoist in the studio and killing an assistant sculptor in 1831, and moved from New Palace Yard in 1867 during works on Westminster ground station, to the area now known as Canning Green.

Next to follow Canning was a very different figure, a pillar of the establishment: Edward Stanley, 14^th Earl Derby (1799-1869). This statue, unveiled by his close political ally Benjamin Disraeli in 1874, has excellent reliefs by John Thomas on the plinth commemorating Derby’s political life. Henry John Temple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) by Thomas Woolner was added to the square in 1876, after earlier versions were considered too small. Palmerston’s colourful private life, despite being considered ‘the supreme epitome of Victorian pride, respectability and self-respect’ [Stephen Farrell] featured in our piece. Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), whose statue was added fourth, also in 1876 (after an earlier version was rejected after MPs), led a political life so complex and interesting it was very difficult to squeeze any of it into 8 minutes! Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was the last of the Victorian leaders first added to the square, in 1883. The statue’s role as a shrine to Disraeli by the Primrose League, the Conservative grassroots organisation, in the years after his death demonstrated the extent these Victorian politicians were admired.

That, however, all changed with the First World War, as politicians were blamed for the catastrophe and commemoration shifted to honouring the war dead. However the sixth addition, a copy of Augustus Saint-Gardens’ statue of US President Abraham Lincoln in Chicago, was originally due for inclusion in 1914. Almost as soon as he arrived Lincoln left visitors (and Matt!) asking why he was there; the answer to celebrate Anglo-American friendship in the centenary after the end of the war of 1812-14. As Hicks argued, Lincoln was the first figure added to the square to present a different view of Britain to the wider world as its imperial power declined. [Hicks, p.172]

After the Second World War, Parliament Square was reorganised by the architect George Grey Wornum largely into the design we know today. Canning and Lincoln have remained in Canning Green, with the other four organised around a grassy central area. Two spaces were left for new additions, although the Ministry of Works rather felt that the Square was ‘finished.’ [Hicks, pp.174-5] No-one had told Winston Churchill, however, who on his return to government in 1951 proposed a statue to his friend and war cabinet member Jan Smuts (1870-1950). Smuts was probably the most difficult of the individuals on the square to talk about in a short slot on the radio. Reconciling Smuts, the defender of the Commonwealth and liberal world statesman who directly influenced both the League of Nations and the Preamble to the UN Charter, with Smuts as one of the leading figures and chief architects of a racially segregated South Africa is hard to do justice to in a short period of air time. Churchill (1874-1965) himself was added in 1973, apparently having chosen his prime slot close to the Commons in the 1950s (although this story is doubted by many of his biographers). In recent years the wartime leader has also become a controversial and contested figure.

The final four figures in the Square were all added in the 21^st century, in a ‘reinvigorated’ political space, now as much as a place of protest as a ‘sacred’ space to honour parliamentary politics. The final additions were ‘radical politicians that do not proclaim too obviously the conservative nature of the project.’ [Hicks, p.180] Many of their predecessors would also have been shocked to see direct political opponents honoured in the same way they were! Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) and David Lloyd George (1863-1945) were unveiled within a few months of each other in 2007, Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948) in 2015 and Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929) in 2018. As these figures are all much more familiar to a modern audience, the ‘Made in Stone’ recordings focused more on the campaigns for their commemoration. Mandela, Lloyd George and Fawcett all made it to the square after considerable public pressure; particularly Fawcett as the first, and so far only, woman.

Excitingly, we have more in store for those of you who have enjoyed the ‘Made in Stone’ series so far, as we have recently recorded another seven pieces on statues and memorials all around parliament, from Boudicca to George V. So keep tuning in for more!

E.P.

Catch up with the series so far on BBC Sounds.

Further Reading:

Geoffrey Hicks: ‘Parliament Square: The Making of a Political Space’ Landscapes 16:2 (2015) 164181

Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians

Kathryn Rix, ‘Living in Stone or Marble: The Public Commemoration of Victorian MPs’ in Memory and Modern British Politics: Commemoration, Tradition, Legacy ed. Matthew Roberts (Bloomsbury, 2024), 13970

Kathryn Rix: Parliaments, Politics and People Seminar: Dr Geoff Hicks on ‘Memorialising Britain’s politicians: the politics of Parliament Square’

Terry Wyke, ‘Memorial Mania: Remembering and forgetting Sir Robert Peel’ in People, places and identities: Themes in British social and cultural history, 1700s-1980s eds Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt (MUP, 2017)