In 1832 the borough of Salford elected its first MP, who would represent the constituency for the next quarter-century. Described in 1838 as an ‘ultra Liberal’, Joseph Brotherton was in many ways typical of the industrialists who made up a significant proportion of the representatives of the newly enfranchised textile towns of northern England. He was a second-generation cotton and silk manufacturer who, having made enough money to retire from business in his late thirties, devoted himself to public life, through politics, religion and philanthropy. Like many fellow MPs, he gained experience in local government before embarking on his parliamentary career. He shared the commitment of other Lancashire Liberal MPs to the repeal of the corn laws, and supported a range of other radical causes, including the abolition of slavery, retrenchment in public spending and the removal of capital punishment. He was also a dedicated advocate of reducing factory hours, differing from some of his fellow northern industrialist MPs on this score.

Brotherton stood out from his fellow parliamentarians in other ways, most distinctively through his position as a minister in the Bible Christian church founded by Rev. William Cowherd in Salford. He regularly conducted services when not busy in London with his parliamentary duties. Brotherton and his wife Martha were dedicated practitioners of two key principles followed by Cowherd’s congregation – teetotalism and vegetarianism – and Martha was the anonymous author of the first vegetarian cookbook, originally published in parts in 1812, which went into numerous editions. Vegetable Cookery, as it became known, included an introduction written by Brotherton ‘recommending abstinence from animal food and intoxicating liquors’. He chaired the meeting at which the Vegetarian Society was founded in 1847. Brotherton’s diet prompted consternation at public dinners, but the parliamentary reporter James Grant recorded how the ‘other Reform members and friends with whom he occasionally dines’, including Joseph Hume, ‘take care to provide him with some sort of pudding or vegetable dish’.

For Grant, what distinguished Brotherton most at Westminster was not his dietary habits, however, but his perseverance in attempting to reform the sitting hours of the Commons. Brotherton’s main aim was to prevent MPs from continuing to debate after midnight. As explained in this post by Paul Seaward, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the House drifted later and later in the time that it began to sit (and therefore also to rise), meaning that proceedings after midnight became increasingly common. Brotherton’s desire to end this practice did not stem from any reluctance to perform his parliamentary duties, quite the opposite. One obituary noted that ‘rarely was the Speaker in the chair and Mr. Brotherton absent’, and in 1852 he claimed to have voted in 3,500 divisions during his twenty years in Parliament. He also undertook a vast amount of work in connection with private bills, and was reportedly responsible for guiding at least three-quarters of the 200 private bills carried annually through their various stages in the House.

Brotherton outlined several different reasons for wishing to stop business after midnight. The first was his concern that the late hours were adversely affecting the health of MPs. He also felt that it would make the House more efficient, since time after midnight was often wasted in debating when the House would adjourn, and MPs who were ‘sleeping about on the benches’ did not make effective legislators. Seconding one of Brotherton’s motions on this question in 1841, William Ewart observed

Would it not strike a foreigner with astonishment to witness the dormant legislation which was transacted in that House at a late hour? On one bench a Secretary to the Treasury might be seen extended at full length; on another a Secretary to the Admiralty alike recumbent; on another a non-effective army official; and on another a subdued President of the Board of Control. Last Session, when a question was addressed to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, it was found that he was fast asleep. These were unseemly incidents, which could not occur under a different system.

Another concern was that business after midnight was less well reported in the press, as reporters needed to file their copy in time to meet publication deadlines. Brotherton protested that

The public had a right to know what was done in that House; but under the present system it was impossible they could obtain that knowledge. At midnight the reporters were exhausted, and experience proved that they could not pay attention to matters which occurred after that hour. The public remained uninformed upon topics of great importance if they were discussed after twelve o’clock.

Brotherton’s efforts to curtail debate after midnight took two main forms. The first was to move the adjournment of the House once the clock passed that hour, a tactic he deployed on numerous occasions, prompting one fellow MP to dub him ‘the guardian of the night’. Although weary MPs often voted with Brotherton to adjourn, his interventions sometimes provoked pleas to withdraw his motion so that the remaining business could be completed. Brotherton was not immune to yielding to this pressure, particularly if it was a matter of swiftly getting through unopposed business, but on other occasions he insisted that ‘I shall persist’. He faced accusations both in Parliament and the press that he was inconsistent in his efforts, seeking to curb business after midnight when the Conservatives were in office, but relaxing his vigilance when his own party controlled the legislative agenda. This did not tally with the facts, however, and Lord John Russell was among those who rallied to his defence, noting in 1853 that Brotherton had ‘persevered in his efforts, under several different administrations’. Yet Brotherton was not above bending his own rules – Lord Shaftesbury (formerly Lord Ashley) recollected that to aid the passing of the Factory Act, Brotherton would ‘as the hour of 12 approached, have some particular business which called him out of the House, and while he was away 12 o’clock had struck, and some important parts of the Bill had been carried’.

Given that his motion for adjournment was not always successful, relying as it did on catching the eye of the Speaker – which Brotherton found much more difficult under Charles Shaw-Lefevre (Speaker, 1839-57) than his predecessor James Abercromby (Speaker, 1835-9) – and on enough MPs joining him in the division lobby, Brotherton also tried another approach. At the beginning of several sessions, he attempted to pass a resolution setting out the procedure for ending business after midnight. These proposals varied in their wording over the years. In November 1852 he tried to make the process automatic, rather than relying on any specific number of MPs to request the adjournment. However, his motion ‘That in the present Session of Parliament no business shall be proceeded with in that House after midnight; and that at Twelve o’clock at night precisely, Mr. Speaker do adjourn the House without putting any question’ was defeated by 260 votes to 64. His efforts in other years met the same fate.

Fittingly, in what appears to have been his last speech in the Commons in 1856, Brotherton again called for the House to adjourn. He died of a heart attack shortly before the beginning of the 1857 session while travelling on an omnibus from his home in Pendleton into Manchester. Although his efforts to adjourn at midnight were often greeted ‘by a chorus of cheers, groans, hootings, cock-crowings, bellowings, and other discordant cries’, Brotherton remained a popular figure on both sides of the House. While he never succeeded in setting up an alternative mechanism to curtail debate, his persistence ‘had gradually some effect upon the practice of the House’. In 1871 the select committee on public business recommended the adoption of the ‘half past twelve rule’ (that no opposed business could be debated after 12:30 a.m.), embodying what Brotherton had for so long sought to achieve.

KR

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 27 October 2021, written by Dr Kathryn Rix.

As the Prince of Wales was 26 years old, it was assumed that he would be made regent during his father’s incapacity. Although Prime Minister William Pitt agreed that the Prince was the obvious choice for a regency, he was wary of taking this step because of the younger George’s well-known friendships with Opposition politicians. The Opposition, led by Charles James Fox, clamoured for their ‘friend’ to be made regent on the assumption that George III would not recover. Meanwhile, Pitt and the government stalled, insisting that a full regency was unnecessary, as the king would recover in short order. Instead, the government suggested a restricted regency, which would limit the prince’s powers and place some responsibility in the hands of the queen: Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. This approach was immediately viewed by the Opposition and their supporters as unconstitutional, and as an attempt by Pitt to control the country through Queen Charlotte.

Although Queen Charlotte had never shown any interest in influencing British politics before, she suddenly found herself saddled with a reputation for political meddling. Such was the belief that the queen was colluding with Pitt that her second son, the duke of York, confronted her and warned her that if she sided with Pitt, it would cause a falling out with the Prince of Wales.

Although the Prince was often described within the family as the queen’s favourite child, their relationship certainly cooled in the winter of 1788-89. Courtiers were shocked by the way the two eldest princes treated their mother at this time. William Grenville remarked to his brother, the marquess of Buckingham, ‘I could tell you some particulars of the Prince of Wales’s behaviour towards her [the queen] within these last few days that would make your blood run cold.’ [Buckingham and Chandos, 68] Charlotte Papendiek, whose family were in service to the royal family for decades, recalled that the Prince of Wales was ‘very heartless’ as he ‘assumed to himself a power that had not yet been legally given to him, without any consideration or regard for his mother’s feelings.’ [Papendiek, 15] Meanwhile, Queen Charlotte was deeply affected by the king’s erratic behaviour and the seriousness of his illness; one of her attendants, the author Frances Burney, witnessed her pacing in her rooms and crying ‘What will become of me?’ [Burney, 293]

In the press, the queen’s reputation was dragged through the mud by newspapers and satirical prints produced by supporters of the Prince of Wales and the Opposition. One satirical print portrayed the queen looking on with satisfaction as her son was attacked by British and foreign politicians.

Another showed her stepping on the Prince of Wales’s emblem as she left the Treasury with Prime Minister Pitt. The Morning Chronicle cast aspersions on her devotion to her husband, claiming that she was motivated by a desire to take possession of diamonds worth thousands of pounds, not by any wish to help the king.

When it was suggested that the queen would take charge of the royal household and privy purse in a restricted regency, The Times published a comment made by Opposition MP Edmund Burke in Parliament that he ‘by no means thought her [the queen] the most proper person to be entrusted with the giving away of such an immense sum of money.’ In January 1789, as plans for a regency became more urgent, Earl Harcourt recorded a remark made by Burke during a debate: ‘The question is now come to this. Is it to be the House of Hanover, or the House of Strelitz that is to govern the country?’ [Harcourt, 167] For all its hyperbole, Burke’s question had explicitly marked Queen Charlotte, previously a queen of excellent reputation, as a threat to the established order.

Charlotte wasn’t the only woman whose reputation was tarnished by accusations of political meddling in Georgian Britain. Her mother-in-law, Augusta, Princess of Wales, was accused of influencing her son, George III, for decades. There were also long-term rumours of a supposed affair with the former Prime Minister, the earl of Bute. Horace Walpole recorded that during the princess’s funeral procession to Westminster Abbey, Londoners ‘treated her memory with much disrespect.’ [Walpole, 17] Anxiety over the influence of women in politics was expressed in the contemporary phrase ‘petticoat government’, which suggested that male political leaders were being unduly influenced by women, be they mothers, wives, or lovers.

Most critiques of Queen Charlotte portrayed her as a willing follower of Pitt’s schemes, rather than an active agent in her own right, but the queen was not afraid to stand up for herself and the king when necessary. In January 1789, a further scandal of the Regency Crisis unfolded after the queen insisted that a more positive note be included in the king’s daily health bulletin. The bulletins rarely varied, but in early January, Charlotte was informed by one of the royal physicians that the king seemed slightly better. One of her attendants, Lady Harcourt, recorded that when the head physician argued that he saw no improvement, the queen overrode him and insisted that the phrase ‘His Majesty is in a more comfortable state’ be added [Harcourt, 125-8]. When the Opposition heard of this, they insisted on a government inquiry into the credentials of the king’s physicians: their ambition for power through the Prince of Wales depended on George III’s illness being permanent and any suggestion to the contrary was unwelcome.

Fortunately for Queen Charlotte, just as the government was beginning to put in place a restricted regency in February 1789, George III began to show signs of sustained improvement. By March, he was sufficiently well to make a formal speech in Parliament announcing his recovery. Queen Charlotte led the nation in celebrating his recovery, organising Thanksgiving services and ordering official commemorative gifts for loyal attendants. Despite this happy ending and the ensuing national celebrations of the king and his loyal consort, the spectre of the Regency Crisis would taint Queen Charlotte’s public reputation for the rest of her life.

NG

Further Reading
Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, vol.2 (Hurst & Blackett, 1853).
Charlotte Papendiek, Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: Being the Journals of Mrs Papendiek, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe and Reader to Her Majesty, Edited by Her Granddaughter Mrs Vernon Delves Broughton, vol.2 (R.Bentley & Son, 1887).
Frances Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, Author of Evelina, Cecilia etc, ed. Charlotte Barrett, vol.4 (H. Colburn, 1842-6).
[Anon.] The Restricted Regency (1789).
Morning Herald, 5 January 1789.
The Times, 7 February 1789.
The Harcourt Papers, ed. Edward William Harcourt, vol.4 (Oxford: J. Parker & Co., 1880).
Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of King George the Third, from the year 1771-1783, ed. John Doran (1859).
Report from the Committee Appointed to Examine the Physicians Who Have Attended His Majesty During His Illness, Touching the Present State of His Majesty’s Health, 13 January 1789 (John Stockdale, 1789).

When the HIV/AIDs epidemic arrived in the UK in the early 1980s it was a frightening, confusing time. Little was known about this new disease, other than it appeared to be deadly to all who caught it. As in other countries it spread quickly in certain communities in the UK: haemophiliacs, who relied on blood products, drug users and gay men. The last two groups were already marginalised. As recounted heartbreakingly in the BBC/British Library documentary series based on oral history testimony, Aids: The Unheard Tapes, those living with the disease, and those who loved them, faced discrimination and fear from wider society.

The lack of knowledge about how AIDs spread and how to treat the disease, alongside this marginalisation, made tackling the subject politically a difficult issue. Although homosexuality had been decriminalised in the UK in the 1960s, discrimination against the gay community was widespread and, at times, political debate was homophobic. The MPs we have spoken to as part of our Oral History Project who spoke out about AIDs in Parliament believed other MPs would stay quiet because they could find the whole debate ‘distasteful’, in the words of Labour’s Gavin Strang. This of course made introducing legislation to record and prevent the spread of HIV, as well as support those living with the disease, all the harder.

Some MPs though were determined to address this crucial public health issue. Chris Butler, for example, remembers speaking about HIV in Parliament at a time when its spread felt ‘unstoppable’. Edwina Currie became junior health minister in 1986, partly, in her words, to help front then Health Secretary Norman Fowler’s public campaign on HIV.

The ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ government campaign, and Currie’s inappropriate public comments about AIDS, have been criticised then and after as only encouraging the stigma of those suffering with the disease. The image of a tombstone and the apocalyptic tone of the TV advert in particular were seen by many as ‘demonising’ them as the victims of the disease. However, the campaign has also been lauded for sharing better information, its frank language, and in particular for the attempt to reach the entire country. Fowler remembered in a Guardian interview that Margaret Thatcher had wanted a campaign more targeted to specific communities, and with less direct language. This battle, as shown from the archives, was won by Fowler and the Health Department. The advert and information leaflet reached most of the country, made it clear that anyone could catch HIV, and promoted safe sex. Fowler later remembered that one of his main motivations was to prevent attacks on the gay community, arguing that better information about HIV would help undermine discrimination. He has since continued to be involved in campaigning for both the LGBTQ+ community and for those suffering with HIV.

Others out of government also worked hard within parliament to do what they could to stem the epidemic. For example, Gavin Strang introduced a Private Members’ Bill in 1987, the AIDS (Control) Act, which required reporting on numbers of cases across the country. Neil Gerrard joined, and later chaired, the All Party Parliamentary Group on HIV/AIDs because he had friends diagnosed with the disease and others who worked with AIDs patients. He later sat on an Inter-Parliamentary Union working group advising parliaments across the world on HIV policy.

Of course there were others in Parliament deeply affected by the illness. Robert, now Lord, Hayward, was not publicly out at the time but remembered how ‘frightening’ it felt on the gay scene, how ‘awful’ it was to lose good friends to this disease. Chris, now Lord, Smith – the first MP to choose to come out – was diagnosed with HIV in 1988. He chose to keep this information secret at the time. Smith was at first treated with the more experimental AZT, which he believes may have given him enough ‘breathing space’ to be able to receive better therapy later on.

Here he describes how he reacted to his diagnosis:

Lord Smith describes his ‘determination to fit everything in come what may’ kept up his motivation to continue sitting on Labour’s front bench: ‘If I’m not here in 5 years’ time I want to make the most of what I’ve got.’ Even for a MP though, the discrimination around HIV remained. Lord Smith decided much later to make his diagnosis public and to talk about his experiences. He has since featured in campaigns demonstrating that a HIV diagnosis no longer means a death sentence.

EP

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We’re delighted to say that our latest publication with St James’s House is now freely available online. Hardback and paperback versions can be obtained as well. The book is our contribution to the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the National Health Service in July 1948. Weaving together the medical and the political stories of the development of the United Kingdom’s system of healthcare, it begins with the early history of health provision, from its origins in mostly religious communities to its increasing prominence as a major question of public policy in the nineteenth century. Two chapters chart the growth of the idea of a National Health Service in the early Twentieth Century, up to the refining of those plans in the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Two chapters cover its sometimes chequered history since 1948, as the growth in demand and advances in what was technologically possible constantly stretched the capacity of the state to fund it. A final chapter looks at some big recent themes and recent challenges faced by the NHS, and how the Service has become so prominent a feature of British national identity

Throughout, the book focuses on the politics of the NHS: the politicians whose decisions laid its foundations and brought it into existence, and the politicians who were faced with running it once it was in operation, trying to match demand and resources and struggling with the complex business of planning multi-level healthcare for an entire nation. The book draws on, among other things, the interviews with parliamentarians conducted for the History of Parliament’s Oral History Project, with stories of local and national campaigns, for saving hospitals, exposing scandals, securing – and opposing – abortion. But the book also draws in other stories from the work done by our friends at Manchester University in creating the Voices of Our National Health Service, a collection of oral history interviews with a huge variety of people involved in the NHS, as practitioners of all kinds, managers, and patients. Their work has provided the other side of the coin: the NHS as perhaps the most familiar part of the state, one which millions interact with every day.

The text is written by a team of specialist historians who have written widely on medicine and healthcare and the history of the NHS: Agnes Arnold-Foster, Michael Brown, Jennifer Crane, Ed Devane, Michael Lambert, peter Mitchell, Emma Peplow, Andrew Seaton, Stephanie Snow and Angela Whitecross. You can access a free digital version of the book, which also includes articles by businesses and other organisations involved in healthcare provision, by clicking here.

The book is also available in a hardback version from St James’s House. A paperback version containing only the historical chapters, is available direct from The History of Parliament.

PS

On 10 October 1562 Elizabeth I, England’s 29-year old queen, the last of the Tudors, was suddenly taken ill at Hampton Court Palace. By 16 October it was clear she was suffering from smallpox, which had recently claimed the life of the young countess of Bedford. So severe was her condition that her courtiers supposed that her death was imminent. The queen herself shared this fear, as she urged the Privy Council to appoint as Lord Protector her favourite, Lord Robert Dudley, in the event of her demise. Somehow, though, she pulled through. By 25 October she was on her feet again.

What would have happened had Elizabeth, like Mary II in 1694, succumbed to smallpox? Who would have succeeded her, given that she was unmarried, childless and lacked surviving siblings? And what would have been the implications of her death for the recent restoration of Protestantism? Would England have returned to the Catholic fold, as it had in 1553, following the short reign of the Protestant boy king Edward VI? Or would the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 have endured in some form?

On paper at least, the rightful successor to Elizabeth was her first cousin once removed, Mary Queen of Scots. Mary was the direct descendant of Henry VIII’s eldest sister, Margaret Tudor, and already considered herself the rightful Queen of England, on the grounds that Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate following the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn in 1536. However, Mary was a committed Catholic. As such, she posed an existential threat, both to the Elizabethan religious settlement and to the lives and careers of many on the Privy Council, including the queen’s chief minister, Sir William Cecil, who were not eager to return to the persecution of Protestants that had characterized the reign of Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I. Pointing to the will of Henry VIII, which specifically barred the descendants of Margaret Tudor from the succession, they therefore resolved to set aside the claims of Queen Mary. This had the effect of forcing one of the leading Catholic members of the Council, the Lord Treasurer, William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester, to advance instead the candidacy of Margaret, Countess of Lennox, the daughter of Margaret Tudor by her second marriage (to the 6th Earl of Angus). Unlike Mary Queen of Scots, whose accession threatened not only the Protestant religious settlement but also the intrusion of Scots into English affairs, the Countess of Lennox had the advantage of being English-born. However, her Catholicism made her no less unacceptable to English Protestants.

Since a Catholic claimant to the throne was ruled out by a majority on the Privy Council, who else was in the running to succeed Elizabeth? Perhaps the strongest candidate was the 25-year-old Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon. Directly descended from George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward IV and Richard III, Huntingdon was the sole remaining Yorkist claimant to the throne. Huntingdon enjoyed impeccable religious credentials, having been educated alongside Edward VI, which made him acceptable to leading Protestant noblemen like William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford and Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. He was the brother-in-law of the royal favourite, Lord Robert Dudley and the latter’s brother, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick. Between them, Huntingdon, Norfolk, Pembroke, Bedford, Warwick and Dudley controlled much of the Midlands, East Anglia, South Wales and South-West England.

Huntingdon was not the only Protestant claimant available, though, as Lady Katherine Grey, the eldest surviving great-granddaughter of Henry VII and sister of the nine days’ queen, Lady Jane Grey, also enjoyed widespread support. Her claim was arguably stronger than Huntingdon’s, as she was the direct descendant of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary, whose heirs were favoured by Henry VIII’s will. Lady Katherine was married to the Wiltshire-based Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford. She also enjoyed the backing of the Lord Chamberlain, William Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham, who exercised influence in Surrey. Moreover, when Parliament met in 1563, it also became apparent that she enjoyed considerable support in the House of Commons. However, her candidacy was not without its complications. The legitimacy of her marriage to Hertford was questionable, and she herself was then a prisoner in the Tower for having married without royal approval. Moreover, if Lady Katherine were to be recognized as Elizabeth’s successor, what would be the status of her putative husband, Hertford? Would he accept that he was merely the queen’s consort, or would he demand, like Mary I’s husband, Philip II of Spain, to be recognized as king in his own right?

Because there were two non-Catholic claimants to the throne rather than one, there was a risk that Elizabeth’s death in 1562 would have precipitated civil war. However, mutual self-interest suggests that the two sides were unlikely ever to have come to blows for fear that the ultimate beneficiary would be Mary Queen of Scots. Although Mary had been ruled out of contention by the Privy Council, she might still have tried to take the throne by force. Until recently, she had been married to the French king, François II, who had endorsed her claim to the English throne. Although François was now dead, and his successor was preoccupied with a rebellion of the prince of Condé and Admiral Coligny, this did not mean that Mary would not eventually be able to call upon French support. In March 1563 peace returned to France, in time for the start of the new campaigning season.

Faced with the threat of a Franco-Scottish invasion, the two Protestant candidates for the throne, Huntingdon and Lady Katherine Grey, would either have been forced to bury their differences or fight in the hope of eliminating their rival quickly. In this power struggle, Huntingdon would have quickly gained the upper hand, as his backers were arguably stronger than Katherine’s and Katherine would still have been a prisoner in the Tower on Elizabeth’s death. The outcome of the ensuing struggle between Huntingdon and Mary Queen of Scots is perhaps less certain. However, it is probable that Mary would have been defeated. Her cause would have elicited little support among English Catholics, whose spiritual leaders, the Marian bishops, were under lock and key. Moreover, in the north of England, where Catholicism remained strong, anti-Scottish sentiments would probably have trumped hatred of Protestantism. Mary, too, could not have counted on the solid support of her Scottish subjects. During her absence in France, the Scottish Parliament had embraced the Protestant reformation. In all likelihood, therefore, many of Mary’s countrymen would have taken up arms against her. Of course, Mary’s side would probably have been bolstered by forces provided by France. However, in the recent Anglo-Scottish conflict of 1559-60, the Scots had suffered defeat despite French support. All this means that Elizabeth I’s death in 1562 was unlikely to have resulted in a Stuart succession and an early union of the crowns of England and Scotland.

Elizabeth’s most likely successor, then, was not Mary but Huntingdon. As Huntingdon lived on until 1604, there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he would have held the throne for the next forty years. What might then have occurred we cannot easily guess. However, we do know that Huntingdon’s wife never bore him any children. That alone is grounds for supposing that the early years of Huntingdon’s reign would have been characterized by a succession crisis not dissimilar to the one actually experienced by Elizabeth following her narrow brush with death. Sooner or later, ‘Henry IX’, like Henry VIII before him, would have come under pressure to annul his marriage and take another wife. In that event, his chief supporters, the Dudley brothers, might have experienced a fall akin to the one that had destroyed their father, the Duke of Northumberland in 1553.

ADT

Further reading (for those who enjoy counterfactual history):

Conrad Russell, ‘The Catholic Wind’ in Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (London and Ronceverte, 1990)

Geoffrey Parker, ‘If the Armada had landed’, History, vol. 61, no. 203 (1976)

The NHS which Labour’s Aneurin Bevan delivered on 5 July 1948 survived for just over twenty-five years without major reform. This was far longer than all that followed. Bevan’s combination of political pragmatism and financial concessions created an uneasy consensus which endured a succession of electoral and ministerial changes. The relative stability this provided meant that a nationalised health service quilt was woven from a patchwork of previously public and private providers. This stability was deceptive, though, as the NHS was not one organisation but three, divided between primary, secondary and community care. Bevan’s uneasy consensus only lasted because few had the appetite to stomach the turmoil necessary to create a more integrated service.

Labour’s Kenneth Robinson finally caved with a 1968 Green Paper. However, negotiations proved as intractable as anticipated, not least because the entire fabric of the uneasy consensus was being unravelled, renegotiated, and stitched back together. The reforms passed through the hands of Conservative radical Keith Joseph, whose term was sandwiched between Labour heavyweights Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle, before implementation in April 1974. But it was doomed to fail. The 1973 oil shocks and subsequent cash limits sealed its fate and  in 1976 Labour PM Harold Wilson announced a Royal Commission on the NHS to deflect attention and blame. Few were satisfied with the outcome of the prolonged process apart from its architects seeking to forge a new consensus.

The failure of 1974 and the following Conservative electoral victory in 1979 ushered in a new era of continuous and more politicised reform for the NHS. Patrick Jenkin moved swiftly to remove an entire layer of bureaucracy created in the 1974 reorganisation. In 1982 a three-tiered system of regions, areas and districts designed to integrate services became two with the abolition of areas. This was not enough, and the NHS was not immune from wider public sector cuts. In 1983, at PM Margaret Thatcher’s invitation, the Managing Director of Sainsbury’s supermarket, Roy Griffiths, helped introduce private sector management in place of consensus decision-making. But again, neither of these produced the desired outcomes in terms of improved efficiency, economy and effectiveness, and the NHS battled through the worst winter crisis it had faced by 1987.

The first that Secretary of State John Moore knew about the next reorganisation was when Thatcher announced it live on Panorama in January 1988. The resulting Prime Ministerial review considered a range of ideological alternatives but produced precious little. It was only with Moore’s replacement by Kenneth Clarke that reform gathered pace; his insider experience as a former junior health minister and characteristic tenacity provided the necessary leadership. Competition, rather than integration, was the purpose of the reforms. In April 1991 an internal market was created within the NHS. This restructured the service, dividing it in two between purchasers and providers of healthcare, ending the last vestiges of the old command-and-control model of the nationalised health service.

Although Labour was outspoken against the market reforms in opposition, they retained them in power after 1997. Like Thatcher, the first that Chancellor Gordon Brown and Secretary of State Alan Milburn knew about the next reforms was when PM Tony Blair spoke on Breakfast with Frost in January 2000, where He committed to increase UK health spending to match European Union levels. The partnership between the public and private sectors underpinned the latest reforms from 2002, although competition remained. Milburn expanded market mechanisms and subjected them to new forms of regulation which continued with further reform in 2006 after his departure. Only Brown replacing Blair in 2007 and the 2008 financial crisis could halt the forward march of markets and private sector partnership which characterised the New Labour era.

The reforms introduced in 2013 are more associated with their instigator than perhaps any other in the history of the NHS aside Bevan. Andrew Lansley, responsible for health under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government took reforms faster and further than before. Market mechanisms were strengthened which drastically expanded private sector competition. Wider austerity and the loss of management expertise exaggerated this effect beyond the intentions of the original White Paper. The ensuing disruption caused by the reforms once again led integration to become universally fashionable across the political and professional divide. Not least to modernise and improve social care. The impact of the 2022 reorganisation, implemented against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, remains to be seen.

Since 1948, politicians have seen structural reform as the solution to the ills which beset the NHS. Integration was the remedy for inherited division in 1974. Emulating the private sector and competition were lauded against public sector inefficiency in 1982 and 1991. Partnership and market regulation underpinned third way thinking in 2002 and 2006. Maximising market competition once again prevailed in 2013. This, in turn, led to integration being the answer to fragmentation and division by 2022. Time will tell whether the latest chapter in the history of reform, reorganisation and restructure in the NHS will be the last, or the latest well-intentioned attempt to reform a flawed but loved public institution.

ML

Michael Lambert’s current work on the history of the NHS explores what the cumulative impact of workforce shortages means for spatial and social inequalities of health services since 1948. You can read more here.

Further Reading

Michael Lambert, ‘(Dis)integrated Care Systems: Lessons From the 1974 NHS Reorganisation in Morecambe Bay’, Morecambe Bay Medical Journal, 9 (2022), 33-37. View.

Calum Paton, NHS Reform and Health Politics: Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Covid Crisis (Palgrave Macmillan, published 7 May 2022).

Nick Timmins, Never Again? The Story of the Health and Social Care Act 2012: A Study in Coalition Government and Policy Making (King’s Fund and Institute for Government, published 12 July 2012).

Charles Webster, National Health Service Reorganisation: Learning from History (Office for Health Economics, published 1998).

In my new book, Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best-Loved Institution, I try and answer two questions. First, why did the National Health Service (NHS) assume such a degree of popular acclaim that it could eventually top opinion polls as the thing that makes people ‘most proud to be British’? Second, why did the NHS survive the 1980s to take on this significance, when so many other parts of the universal welfare state or public industries did not?

To address these problems, I adopt a wide lens, combining the high politics of the NHS with both the everyday and international contests over its operation. Across eight chapters, I show the work by the institution’s supporters – including activists and campaigners, trade unions, experts spanning medical professionals to economists, as well as cultural figures like filmmakers and novelists – to embed the health service, tie it to national identity, and defend its principles from neoliberal opposition. I argue that the surprising survival of the NHS by the start of the twenty-first century demonstrates the endurance of social democratic politics in Britain, revealing its strengths – even as it changed or showed other signs of limitation – against historical narratives premised on the triumph of neoliberalism.

As this brief sketch of the outline of my book suggests, I hope to show the value of considering cultural and social history alongside political history when reflecting on the welfare state and modern medicine. Indeed, part of the explanation for the NHS’s survival lay, I argue, in its cultural prominence. At its inception after the Second World War, the service’s supporters promoted the service – in films, on posters, and in radio broadcasts – as a humanistic, futuristic step forward for medical care in Britain. In doing so, these figures and groups challenged older ideas of ‘State medicine’, which predicted that extensive government involvement would lead to a bureaucratic and impersonal health system. In the postwar decades, many other defenders of the NHS’s founding principles started to position the British system in stark opposition to different ways of organising medical services overseas, particularly the US. I describe this historical development as the rise of ‘welfare nationalism’, meaning a belief in welfare services as saying something essential about the nation. This powerful cultural framing gave the NHS resilience, although it could also be weaponised against marginalised groups in society, like immigrants.

One place where some of these trends coalesced is in the emergence of celebrating the NHS’s ‘birthday’ as a popular political tradition. It is here, too, that attending to parliamentary history can not only help us understand the growth of such a phenomenon but also note how the orations of prominent politicians overlapped – or differed – with views outside Westminster. At first, the NHS’s anniversaries were low-key affairs. There were no street parties or charity fun runs held on the 5^th July during the immediate postwar decades. Officials sometimes even expressed hesitancy about promoting the NHS’s anniversary, out of concerns about the expense. For the service’s tenth anniversary in 1958, for instance, one civil servant began by asking ‘what, if anything, should be done’ to mark the date in Scotland. In the end, Conservative Minister of Health, Derek Walker-Smith, completed a short interview for ITV and issued a somewhat cursory statement of thanks to NHS staff.

However, this occasion displayed some of the features that would mark anniversaries out as distinctive in later decades, at least on a parliamentary level. During a debate on the NHS’s tenth anniversary, Labour MPs took more of interest than Walker-Smith. Future Labour Minister of Health, Kenneth Robinson, hailed the service as nothing short of a ‘social revolution’ that provided Britain with ‘without doubt, the finest Health Service in the world’. Such statements signalled the welfare nationalism starting to swell on the left about the NHS. These same MPs also began to position the NHS in contrast to medical arrangements elsewhere. The Welsh Labour MP Rev. William Llewelyn Williams invoked the US, claiming that he had experienced ‘appalling ignorance’ about the NHS during a recent trip across the Atlantic. ‘I am not referring to yokels in hill-billy villages in Tennessee’, he clarified, ‘but to people who hold eminent positions in the medical world’. If not yet on a popular level, parliamentary debates began to showcase ideas of the NHS as a marker of national pride and something that provided a sense of superiority over the US.

In the 1980s, NHS ‘birthdays’ (increasingly described as such) took on a popular dimension through the campaigning of trade unions. Through their efforts to position ‘NHS Day’ on the 5^th July as a moment to both celebrate the institution and point to its condition under the governments of Margaret Thatcher, the unions encouraged thousands of people to bake cakes, organise parties, and attend rallies in the institution’s name. When New Labour came to power in 1997, the government amplified this tradition on a national scale for the NHS’s fiftieth anniversary in 1998 by, for example, placing the NHS on fifty pence pieces or stamps. Even after New Labour left government, the NHS’s ‘birthday’ maintained its prominence, with the seventy-fifth anniversary this year marked by public landmarks lighting themselves up in blue or members of the public attending the ‘NHS Big Tea’.

The growth of the NHS’s anniversaries confirmed, and strengthened, the service’s prominence in public life by the twenty-first century. In doing so, they contributed to its survival, reinforcing its social democratic principles as an expected and welcome part of Britons lives. By scaling our historical approach (attending to both Parliamentary debates and events like street parties), we can trace such an outcome, suggesting the possibilities of taking this interpretive stance when reflecting on other parts of the British welfare state.

A.S.

Further Reading:

Catherine Babikian. ‘“Partnership Not Prejudice”: British Nurses, Colonial Students, and the National Health Service, 1948–1962’, Journal of British Studies 60 (2021): 140–68. 

Jennifer Crane and Jane Hand (eds), Posters, Protests, and Prescriptions: Cultural Histories of the National Health Service in Britain, 25–53. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. 

George Gosling. Payment and Philanthropy in British Healthcare, 1918–48. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. 

Gareth Millward. Sick Note: A History of the British Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Charles Webster. The National Health Service: A Political History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 

Find the inaugural blog for our NHS at 75 series.

Dr. Andrew Seaton is a historian of modern Britain. Andrew gained his PhD from New York University and he is currently the Plumer Junior Research Fellow in History at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. He has just published his first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press, 2023).

This summer we celebrated the 75^th anniversary of the NHS. Alongside the tributes to those who work so hard to keep it running, there were inevitably a lot of political arguments about how the service is run. From listening to our oral history project interviews with former MPs, this was not at all surprising. The NHS was frequently mentioned in our interviews in regard to local campaigns, on the doorstop, or through casework.

As one of the main roles of an MP is defending their constituents’ interests, the fate of a local hospital might make or break a career. A planned closure, or need for significant investment could either be a cause for a great opposition campaign, or the source of embarrassment if one’s own party was in government. Labour’s Eileen Gordon, for example, made her way in local politics through the campaign to save Oldchurch Accident and Emergency department, as we hear in this clip:

She was delighted when the department was not only saved, but the whole hospital rebuilt, the ‘really grotty’ old workhouse buildings replaced with a bright new facility.

It wasn’t just Labour MPs, those from across the political spectrum described campaigns to replace old workhouse hospitals – including Conservative Elizabeth Peacock in Batley, Labour’s Parmjit Dhanda in Bristol and Jenny Tonge in Richmond. Peacock emphasised how significant local facilities were to her constituents:

These local issues meant a great deal on the doorstep come election time. Labour’s David Hinchliffe described how the MP could take a prominent role in these battles, which came up regularly: ‘certainly health stuff we were always campaigning’. They were opportunities for opposition parties: Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge told us ‘There’s always some hospital that’s being closed or converted or something that makes for a campaign.’ For Conservative John Marshall, however, the threatened closure of Edgeware hospital by his own government meant he had to resign his position in government for speaking out against it.

If not raising these issues themselves, MPs would often find they came up on the campaign trail or in casework. Labour MPs in particular claimed waiting lists, and their pledges to cut them in 1997, went down very well with constituents on the doorstep. Harold Best, Sylvia Heal and Bridget Prentice all felt their campaigning in 1997 and 2001 was shaped by this issue. However, the shadow health secretary at the time, Chris Smith, found the focus of the campaign on health issues something of a problem. Labour had committed to match Conservative spending plans for the first two years of their administration, so he had no money to spend.

As well as on the campaign trail the NHS was a key feature in an MP’s case work, and a way that an MP could help make a difference to the lives of their constituents; an MP’s well-timed letter could carry significant weight. At the same time, the issues could just be too complicated for a lone backbencher: Conservative Adrian Flook remembered one couple’s struggle to pay for IVF treatment as it was not covered on the NHS under their health authority. He remembered writing on their behalf, but feeling there was very little he could do.

Some MPs took up these issues and turned them into successful backbench campaigns. Labour’s Peter Bradley, for example, remembered taking up his health authority’s complaint with the ways prescription charges were being abused. These ‘money-spinners’ for some GPs and pharmaceutical companies were costing millions of pounds. Bradley ran a public campaign, but also a parliamentary one: raising the issue as an adjournment debate and holding a debate in Westminster Hall on the issue. The subsequent reforms saved the NHS roughly £250 million a year: ‘I was pretty pleased to play a part in that.’

Specific health campaigns would gain better results when MPs worked across party lines, gathering support widely across parliament and involving outside experts and interests. All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) were an excellent forum to lobby for particular health issues: Conservative Marion Roe, Labour’s Alice Mahon and Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge were all proud of the work they did on the Breast Cancer APPG. These campaigns though often took place on specific bills or amendments to bills. Conservative Thomas Stuttaford organised his party’s support for a Labour amendment to introduce birth control on the NHS in the 1970s. Later Liberal Democrat Jenny Tonge went into parliament ‘screaming and shouting’ to introduce over the counter emergency contraception, despite ‘horrible, twisted’ headlines against her; she found willing support from the then Labour Health Ministers Frank Dobson and Yvette Cooper.

As our interviews reveal, the NHS featured highly in an MP’s life for its first 75 years, and that shows little sign of abating. Yet these campaigns were sources of real pride for the MPs involved: Conservative Roger Sims told us that he now explained to nurses working with him that their ability to prescribe certain medicines was thanks to his Private Members’ Bill, supported cross-party and backed by the Royal College of Nurses. Through this sort of campaigning and work MPs could make a difference to the NHS, and their constituents.

EP

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Death was a crucial moment of transition in the passage of property. At the deathbed of a medieval landowner, particularly a substantial one, there was a pressing question; what lands were to be diverted from the heir? Primogeniture was too harshly restrictive a system to be allowed to operate unmodified. Provision needed to be made for other members of the family and, more contentiously, for the health of the landowner’s soul. The story of the death of Sir Henry Vavasour provides an illustration, albeit an extreme one, of the problems that might ensue when the landowner was inclined to put too great an emphasis in investing in the latter.

The records of medieval government, formal and bureaucratic by their nature, rarely contain vivid stories of the eternal realities of human life. When they do the story is generally worth relating, and such is the case with the moving narrative of Vavasour’s deathbed. The narrative begins with a remarkable act of either generosity or recklessness by Sir Henry in favour of a neighbour, the Cistercian abbey of Louth Park. In late November 1342 he summoned the abbot to meet him at his manor of Cockerington, a few miles from the abbey, and told him that, moved by both his love for the abbey and concern for his soul, he intended to give that manor to the abbey to support as many as ten new monks. Since the manor was one of his principal estates, the proposed alienation promised to compromise the wealth and standing of his family. He was, in short, giving priory to his own concern for his soul over the future interests of his family. If, however, this gave the abbot pause about the wisdom of accepting a gift that contravened social norms, the financial difficulties under which his house was labouring must have stilled them. In any event, the precarious state of Sir Henry’s health meant there was little time for reflection.  If the gift was to be carried through, there was to be no time to lose in drawing up the necessary legal instruments. These were to be made in the abbey itself, and it was there that Sir Henry took up residence for the last days of his life. Annoyed on his arrival to find that the abbot was not there to greet him, he sent his wife to summon him with the admonition that ‘never would he take such a fish in his net’. Duly warned that the ailing Sir Henry might yet change his mind, the abbot came to his bedside to discuss arrangements for the conveyance of the manor to feoffees who were then to settle the manor on the abbey. 

Sir Henry’s servants were then despatched back to Cockerington to put these arrangements into execution. Soon after midnight on the following day, one of the dying man’s female servants, Alice, who had been left as his sole attendant, came and knocked on the abbot’s window and asked him to come and give her master extreme unction, for he was on the point of death. At this stage Sir Henry was still compos mentis, aware enough to gift the loyal Alice a horse as he received that sacrament from one of the monks. As this moving scene was being enacted, the feoffees were at Cockerington, where, soon after first light, they took the attornment of the manor’s free tenants, a necessary formality to establish their seisin of the manor and thus to give legal validity to their later conveyance to the abbey. When they returned to the abbey a few hours later, they found that Sir Henry had died, leaving open the question of whether he had survived until after the feoffees had established their seisin by receiving the attornments. Indeed, it was later to be alleged, quite falsely, that the abbot had forged the deed of feoffment and set Sir Henry’s seal to it after his death.

Given these difficulties, it is not surprising that things did not go smoothly for the abbey and that Sir Henry’s generosity did not bring the much-needed addition to its resources. Instead, it provoked a crisis in the abbey’s affairs. Sir Henry’s widow and his sons sought to overturn his reckless generosity, by both legal and illegal means, and the abbot was obliged to seek royal protection. The matter was discussed in the Parliament of June 1344 and, as a result of these deliberations, the abbey was committed to royal commissioners, ‘in consideration of its impoverished state’. An inquiry was then instigated into the validity of the grant, before which the story of Sir Henry’s deathbed was related. Although, however, the validity of the grant was established, the abbot, perhaps wisely, did not press the matter. In June 1347 he accepted from Sir Henry’s heir a part of the manor in exchange for relinquishing his abbey’s claim to the rest. Two years later the abbot died of the plague, having, in the words of the terse contemporary chronicle of the abbey, suffered ‘a very great persecution’ on account of the grant of the manor. Appropriately, perhaps, he was buried before the great altar close to Sir Henry Vavasour.

S.P.

This year’s annual lecture was given by Professor Chris Given-Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews and former member of the History of Parliament’s editorial board. Professor Given-Wilson presented Parliament, Politics and Pandemics in Later Medieval England to a capacity audience.

To begin the 2022 lecture, Professor Given-Wilson reassured the audience that his talk was ‘not actually about a pandemic’, instead it was ‘about the medium and long-term consequences of a pandemic’. Something I am sure a lot of us are currently contemplating in our own lives. In fact, the key focus of the lecture was on legislation: the statutes and laws passed as a direct result of pandemics throughout later medieval England.

Throughout the many pandemics and health crises during the Middle Ages, the purpose of parliament and the laws it passed changed significantly. The framework and regulation of labour shifted from private, local authority to national and public authority, and the health of the nation became the subject of parliamentary decision-making. As Professor Given-Wilson explained, this was a significant development in English society, and signified a major extension of parliament’s attempts to control the labouring classes.

When the Black Death arrived in England in June 1349, the English government passed the ‘First Ordinance of Labourers’, which attempted to protect livelihoods and incomes – the livelihoods of the rich, that is. The Black Death brought issues for landowners: high death rates created a ‘great scarcity of labourers’, and those still alive were now demanding higher wages. Therefore, the First Ordinance of Labourers was issued to make sure that ‘every able-bodied adult’ under 60 had to work, or they would be imprisoned, and it forbade increases in wages. This ordinance was reinforced in 1351 with the Statute of Labourers. Throughout the many waves of plagues, more and more laws were passed to control the labouring classes.

These laws went from shocking to downright bizarre. In 1388, the Cambridge Statute of Labourers decreed that no agricultural labourer could send their child to school to prepare them for a career in church. Instead, children had to work at the same occupations as their parents, and if they had worked on the land up to the age of twelve, they could not be admitted to a trade apprenticeship. Not only were these laws introduced to control working conditions and career choices, but leisure activities, too. They started to control more and more aspects of the labouring classes’ lives.

Football was banned in 1314 for being ‘too noisy’, and in the fifteenth century indoor games such as dicing and cards were banned, too. Parliament appeared to be worried about these games; Professor Given-Wilson explained that they believed these indoor games might lead to violence and poverty. Throughout the plagues, statutes and laws appeared to become more concerned with the possibility of violence from the ‘lower orders’. As Professor Given-Wilson had mentioned, the ‘scarcity of labourers’ meant that some workers began to demand higher wages and would refuse to work until they received a pay rise. Therefore, statutes began to be passed to prevent ‘insurrection’ from the lower orders. This included the Statute of 1390 which banned the labouring classes from participating in hunting as Parliament worried that these activities would foment rebellion.

Many of the more bizarre laws created incredulous murmurs throughout the audience, but these were most audible when Professor Given-Wilson outlined a statue entitled ‘The Pestilence’ passed by the Parliament of 1439 during yet another plague year. The statute, passed as King Henry VI turned eighteen, forbade those paying homage to the King to partake in the act of kissing him. As Professor Given-Wilson surmised, and the audience appeared to agree, ‘Poor Henry VI – eighteen years old, and couldn’t be kissed’.

The audience remained captivated throughout the lecture and Professor Given-Wilson was met with a flurry of hands when History of Parliament Chair of Trustees Lord Norton of Louth opened the floor to questions. Professor Given-Wilson was able to respond to a wide range of questions, from domestic and international comparisons to the impact of plagues and the discussed legislation on women’s social standing. Throughout his answers, Professor Given-Wilson paid notice to the many other academics in the audience who would be able to add to the discussion, encouraging the conversation to continue after the lecture.

As Professor Given-Wilson concluded, we should not ‘underestimate the consequences of a pandemic’. The Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 was the first of multiple laws that came in to control the everyday life of the individual, extending greatly the jurisdictional scope of the English Parliament. From wage freezes and work becoming compulsory, to the regulation of dress and leisure activities, the English government began to claim a right to intervene. However, as Professor Given-Wilson noted, while we know these laws were passed, how effectively they were enforced is more difficult to know. So, while these plagues may have changed the purpose of Parliament and the laws it passed, how effective these statutes were is a different matter.

A special thank you to Professor Chris Given-Wilson for a fantastic lecture.

KOR