Nationalisation

Question 1

Banner bright: an illustrated history of the banners of the British trade union movement–Williams, 1973
BookRecommended

Answer 1

union men in inter-war yrs reluctant to move out of tradition

certain themes central nationally: unity, brotherhood, mutuality, assertion of essentially moral and innocent character of the organization

Celebration of brotherly virtues

drive to build up on one single banner a huge and complex structure of pictorial representation and craft

Under the first impact of the new unionism the world of banners visibly expanded

The banner was essentially an expression of local, of branch pride and in a few years of tumultuous growth there was a profusion of new ideas.

Banners moved with public art, most notably with the poster and advertisement art of the 1920s

Only when the living connection with working people was broken from the 1920s that banner art became a petrified sub-culture, a conscious archaism expressing ‘tradition’ and in due time a collector’s item.

Shift towards realism and humanity. Exact representation.

Use of old Victorian device of juxtaposing contrasting pictures in a two-sides-of-the-question form. Could be used to tackle any problem and became very popular after 1918 particularly in the hands of miners and transport men to support the argument that ‘Organisation is security’

From the 1890s, the local worthies of an earlier day disappeared or were overpainted, to be replaced by branch officers carefully chosen by committee and increasingly by the national spokesmen of Labour. The Durham Gala became a barometer of popularity

Both the impulse to produce banners and the public proclamation of socialism upon them fade out rapidly after 1926.
Shattering defeat of trade unionism.

With the exception of the miners and the agricultural workers, banner-bearing and banner-making went into a long decline

Time after time, Gorman discovered that it was in the 1920s that an old neglected banner had last seen the air

Banners have flourished at moments of breakthrough.
Efflorescence among mines and rural workers after 1945 can be interpreted in such terms

Demand shrinks as pitts close

Question 2

Tutill’s

Answer 2

manufactured 75% of trade union banners since 1837

1889 Tutills made more banners in a single year than ever before or since (year of great dockers’ strike)

1967, for first time in its history, no trade-union banner came out of Tutills

Question 3

First Trades Union Congress

Answer 3

1868

Question 4

TUC 1874

Answer 4

over 150 affiliated unions, over 1 mill mems

Question 5

London branches of the Society of Watermen and Lightermen, est 1872

Answer 5

Painted into their benners prominent men who had assisted them. Admiral Bedford Pim and councillors, etc

Question 6

Ipswich dockers’ banner

Answer 6

‘justice to the toilers’

beneath this, angel presides over a handshake between a workman and a capitalist

Question 7

1888 banner of Watford branch of the Operative Bricklayers

Answer 7

Centre is a scene of the first bricklayers building the Tower of Babel. Around it climbs up to Heaven a massive and almost indescribably complex structure, crammed to the limit with medallions, verse, symbols, scenes

Question 8

Walter Crane

Answer 8

Designed banners

Converted to socialism around 1884

1885, angel of freedom

Another widely imitated design was Crane’s engraving for the great May Day of 1891 0 ‘ The Triumph of Labour’

Question 9

Gorman, num of banners produced 1832-1939

Answer 9

10,000

Question 10

Decline in banners

Answer 10

May Day 1898, 400 banners on show 1967, 10.

Question 11

The press and the party system between the wars-C. Seymour-Ure, 1975, in Gillian Peele, Chris Cook, The Politics
Of reappraisal, 1918-1939

Answer 11

Overall trend was toards a set of dominant national newspapers, squeezing out the provincials, whereas before the war the nationals were more accurately described as ‘metropolitan’ and the provincials flourished

Question 12

Decline in the num of provincial morning papers (evening papers less vulnerable)

Answer 12

43 1919 to 25 in 1939

Question 13

Ch 8, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, in Elections and party management: politics in the time of Disraeli and Gladstone-H. J. Hanham1978

Answer 13

As
a con equ nee, the reforms of the 1830s, which in England had
the effect of transferring political initiative to the provinces-to
the Manchester school and eventually to the Birmingham caucus
-had the effect in Scotland and Ireland of restoring the representation
to the nation at large. The

Scots reacted to the change
by giving their wholehearted support to the Whigs and the Radicals
who had come to be regarded as the champions of the
national int rest.

The Irish, whose nationalism was more ardent
and who, unlike the cots, regarded themselves as a temporarily
conquer d people, were also sympathetic to the Whigs

Only Welsh nationalism was unaffected
by the reforms, and that because it was essentially a development
of the forties.

Question 14

Scotland (Hanham)

Answer 14

The closeness of the English connection and the predominance of the English Liberal party caused Scottish politics to develop along the same lines as those of England.
Scottish elections were ultimately decided by issues which affected the whole of the Liberal party in the three kingdoms, or which were purely local, not by those of a Scottish character.
Leaders of the Scottish parties, w exception of Duncan McLaren, were all English.

1870s, control of party HQ in London was strengthened by the formation of branches of the party organisations in Edinburgh. More efficient of these was that created for the Liberals by WP Adam, inaugurated in January 1877, which lasted until the First World War.
Scottish Liberal Association, 1881
Reginald Macleod appointed Conservative Central Office agent in Edinburgh 1883.

Overwhelmingly Liberal character of the Scottish burghs (1832-1885). Conservatives never held more than 3 of the 23, or after 1867 26, burgh seats.

Oligarchical character of Scottish Liberalism. Respect of age and experience led Liberal associations into choosing retired soldiers, sailors, Indian civil servants, merchants and manufacturers as candidates, rather than men of dash and ability

Question 15

Wales (Hanham)

Answer 15

Feeling of signif political diffs between Wales and Eng still quite new 1868.

Modern Wales is a product of the industrial revolution and of the evangelical revival of the early nineteenth century. The one created a new urban Wales alongside the old Wales of the hills, the other cut off the mass of the people from the old ruling classes.

Dissent was a popular Welsh movement. It emphasised Welshness, and the need to revive the national language and culture.

Influential dissenting press sprung up, which used the Welsh language and agitated nonconformist grievances, and which in 1859 was reinforced by the most influential of all Welsh-language newspapers, Thomas Gee’s Baner ac Amserau Cymru

Stuart Rendel. Captured Welsh imagination in 1880 by winning Montgomeryshire. Formed Welsh national party within the Liberal party. By restricting his objectives to purely Welsh ones Rendel reduced English opposition to the minimum, and created a Welsh party in the House of Commons

1885 - only 4 Conservatives, 30 Welsh Liberals or ‘Lib-Labs’

Question 16

Ireland (Hanham)

Answer 16

1868 superficial resemblance to England.

Tradition of Irish politics to employ mobs to ‘protect’ the candidates on each side. Contested elections thus particularly violent.

Party divisions of English politics had meaning only in Ulster, where strongly Protestant w-c with Conservative sympathies which made Belfast a Conservative stronghold

1885, Parnell.

Home Rule movement introduced a purely Irish party into Irish politics, while the ballot destroyed the political power of the landowners who were the principal supporters of the two English parties

1874 - Liberal party destroyed as an Irish Party. 55 Home Rulers returned for the 3 southern provinces, but only 5 Liberals. Conservative minority thus became only effective representative of the English ascendancy

Question 17

LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy (1988)

Answer 17

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the development of popular national daily newspapers, the cinema, the gramophone and other forms of mass entertainment threatened to upset traditional patterns of British culture. Attracting an audience of unprecedented size, this ‘mass’ or ‘commercial’ culture was created for profit, dependent upon new technologies, and often dominated by individuals outside the mainstream of British cultural life

Question 18

The spectacle of women: imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14-Lisa Tickner1987

Answer 18

drew on iconography of woman in late and dilute Pre-Raphaelitism, and in contemp advertising and magazine illustration that surrounded them, much of it influenced by art nouveau

WSPU representations - voteless, helpless female of the WSPU representations centred around forcible feeding and the Cat and Mouse Act

By the end of the nineteenth century public advertising had shifted from a predominantly verbal to a predominantly visual means of representation, a development facilitated by refinements in colour reproduction and registration, and accelerated by a parallel shift from indiscriminate bill-posting to a more orderly display

Question 19

Artists’ Suffrage League (Tickner)

Answer 19

est Jan 1907, to help w the NUWSS demonstration the following month.
chromolithographed posters, deriving mainly from fine art and illustrational styles which match the gentle symbolism of a helpmeet for John Bull

Question 20

The Suffrage Atelier

Answer 20

Est Feb 1909

most trained as fine artists

hand-printed publications, made from wood blocks, etchings, stencil plates.
Fresh cartoons could be got out at v short notice and little expense.

Most Atelier posters = block prints.

Laurence and Clemence Housman. From 1885 Clemence Commercial engraver for weekly papers like the Graphic and the Illustrated London News

Sylvia Pankhurst - embryonic socialist realism of her paintings of w-c women, and dilute Pre-Raphaelite allegory, derived from Walter Crane

First large scheme produced for lecture hall in a building erected by the ILP in mem of her father

Question 21

Crane

Answer 21

SDF, Hammersmith Socialist League

1885 Angel of Freedom widely copied. Revitalised ideal woman of Pre-Raphaelite imagery and adapted to iconography of socialism.
Influenced Sylvia Pankhurst

Tutill’s quick to systematise Crane’s motifs and reproduce in imagery adequate to the aspirations of the organised working-class.

“Triumph of Labour” inspired Sylvia

Question 22

Anti-suffrage imagery

Answer 22

browbeaten husbands, neglected homes

Question 23

WSPU representations

Answer 23

voteless, helpless

Question 24

golden age of the picture postcard

Answer 24

between about 1904 and 1910
By 1910 866 million cards were sent through the post each year, and by 1913 more than 900 million

Fraser – great vehicle for messages of the new urban proletariat between 1900 and 1914

Question 25

Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1848-1914-Patrick Joyce1991

Answer 25

custom has been seen as everywhere in retreat in the
nineteenth century, dissolved from within by the subscription of
working-class leaders and autodidacts to the canons of rational
reform, progress and revealed religion, and from without by the
increasing structural limitations on time and space as industry and
towns grew.4
The growing significance of the regulative functions of
an increasingly interventionist local and national state were
important, as evident for instance in policing, the control of leisure
and the provision of education. The confluence of utilitarianism and
evangelicalism in upper-class attempts to reform popular manners
also contributed much to the assault on custom. While there is much
of value in this picture it does raise certain problems.

The importance of regional factors will be evident from the
treatment of unions. Like the cultural factors considered in the next
section there is much evidence of the persistence of diversity until at
least 1914

Turning more directly to custom, its presence in popular culture
was more tenacious than is sometimes thought. One may certainly
discern the two currents of outright suppression, and a more-or-less
deliberate higher-class remodelling of custom. The latter may be
seen in the nineteenth-century English countryside, farmers, landowners
and the clergy remodelling older practices along neopaternalist
lines as a means of handling agrarian social change.6
It
was also the case that for a variety of reasons much of custom simply
became obsolete. Equally, a surprising amount of custom continued
in place: this was so in the area of workplace and trade custom,
particularly outside the factory,7
but was evident too in the area of
leisure, for example, the persistence of wakes and fairs

Cultural adaptation

The popularity of the broadside ballad continued much later than is commonly allowed. Far from being a hostile environment the industrial town seems if anything to have been congenial to the ballad. The banning of street music in 1860s’ London hastened the ballad’s decline there, but in regions such as industrial Lancashire one many note a living practice in the street ballad singing of out-of-work operatives in the 1860s Cotton Famine. Men toured Lancashire and Yorkshire singing traditional songs as well as songs especially composed and printed for the occasion. In normal times, too, as late as the 1870s and 80s, the streets of Lancashire mill towns were reported to be full of street singers. In 1879 the citizens of Oldham got up a petition against the ‘profane and debauched’ singing of ballads in the street, especially on Sunday and by women as well as men. Ballads were published and sung to aid the victims of industrial accidents in mid-1880s’ Bradford. Party political agitation relied on the ballad form to the end of the century. The proponents of the Manchester Ship Canal, advocates of economic modernity in the 1880s and 90s, turned with alacrity to the old established ballads in propagandising their case. The longevity, and something of the uses, of the ballad will be apparent.

there was something like a
fairly uniform ‘national’ ballad culture which was yet inflected in very important regional and local ways

there is no doubting how profoundly important were
regional and local differences in the work, culture and politics of the
time. Because of the early formation and centralisation of the English
state, this diversity is often lost to view. In the talismanic significance
of figures like Gracie Fields one begins to appreciate something of
this localism of spirit. Not that ‘the north’ or ‘the industrial north’
was all of one piece: the industrial districts of Lancashire, Yorkshire
and the north-east were often profoundly different in their industrial
histories and experiences. Lancashire towns were just not like
Yorkshire ones: they had different sports, different sorts of
architecture, different churches and chapels, different ways of
speaking.

in the north, the old localist message seems
to have held into the inter-war years, despite changes of emphasis
and changes in the material conditions of life and art.

Performers were quick to respond to the expectations of audiences,
inflecting their performance to meet local demand. Twentiethcentury
accounts testify to the longevity of these characteristics. In
inter-war Britain the renowned northern comic Sandy Powell
adopted the manner and costume of the Scots when in Scotland, and
of the miner when playing in the pit districts.15
Writing in 1925 on
the patter comedians’ ‘poetry of the gutter’ D. C. Calthorp noted
this acute responsiveness to popular tastes, especially in the case of
the perennially favoured dialect turn. These took the forms of Scots,
Cockney, Irish, ‘Mummerset’ and ‘Lancashire Lad’. The latter,
invested with the cultural symbolism of football, clogs, and the
whippet, was the very epitome of heartiness and honest forthrightness.

There is no doubting the dialectal changes already
mentioned; the greatly decreasing importance of dialect vocabularies,
the erosion of local, rural dialects in favour of new, urban ones
(especially the linguistic imperialism of cockney), and the rising
importance of standard forms of pronunciation. The reasons for this
undoubted decline of dialect are not far to find, among them
increased migration and education, new and improved systems of
transport and cultural communication, and the development of
large-scale towns and industry. Changes in values and ideas were
also significant, among them the decreasing hold of customary
practices and beliefs. The period when dialects seem most quickly to
have gone through this process of standardisation was that from the
1880s to about 1914

in the industrial districts of the time, dialect did
not simply decline but took new forms based heavily on the
experience of labour and common living in these new regions. It was
standardised, but standardised around what were still powerfully
regionalised and localised forms.

The association of strong dialect attachments and thriving local
cultures apparent in the case of Rochdale, and evident also in the
sociolinguistic literature, is reflected in the other districts considered
in the 1861 reports

To this sense of local history they wedded a large sense
of history, in both cases one derived from the Nonconformist vision
of the Protestant heritage. The people’s own English was in fact
perhaps the chief sign that this tradition and history lived

Class in England was largely built up out of the often
ill-fitting bricks of these distinctive local and regional experiences, in
which the parochial and the sectional were often finely balanced
with the catholic and the solidaristic.

Question 26

Langton

Answer 26

industrialisation, at least up to the last quarter of the century,
actually increased the degree of economic and cultural distinctiveness.

Question 27

Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815-1867-James Vernon1993

Answer 27

Westminster’s national party identities played a limited role in popular electoral politics

local political organisations identified themselves with colours, individual leaders and even particular symbols like flowers.

Prominence afforded to local political identities suggests deep-seated antipathy to the concept of party.

persistence of 18th C creed of electoral Independency

Up to 1860s elections dominated by uses of languages of colours.

Colours firmly rooted in local political histories and cultures.

Heathcote’s Old Orange Cause was that of his Ancaster family’s interest

We should not assume that colours were local shorthand for national party allegiances, rather they cut across those allegiances and created their own local constituencies of support

1868 election - Liberals fought under blue in Grantham and Cambridgeshire, red and green in Burnley, yellow in Nottingham.

Not until the formation of the Conservative Association in 1865 and the Liberal Registration Society in 1866 that national party-political organisations existed in Lewes.

Individuals as likely to command popular constituencies of support as party organisations.

Cobbett - populist, radical in 1852. Increasingly associated w the Conservatives during unsuccessful campaigns 1857, 1865, 1868.
Movement across party boundaries by Cobbett reflects the fragility of party-political categories, demonstrating that they were not hermetically sealed categories w discreet ideological platforms.

Competing groups tried to ascribe opponents perjorative party labels.

As party organisations grew, so too did the perception of them as hierarchical and unaccountable bodies dominated by sinister individuals and agents lining their own pockets.

Vilification of Meaburn Staniland, lawyer, agent, and leading activist for Boston’s Blues, exemplified this fear of the manipulative self-serving party ‘fixer’.

Party as agent of social disruption.

assertion of popular liberty, rights of freeborn Englishmen, in vein of pop constitutionalist discourse

older 18th C political identities and organisational forms were most persistent in constituencies which ahd long electoral histories before 1832 - Boston, Lewes, Devon.
Easier for national party organisations and identities to establish themselves in Oldham and Tower Hamlets, where they had no local

Question 28

Independency alive and well in Cornish borough

Answer 28

1880, Liskeard

Question 29

Rise of party (Vernon)

Answer 29

Increasingly by the 1860s culture of national party politics had begun to dominate, until by 1880s it was these party-political cultures that defined the parameters of the public political sphere

Tory association with beer and the politics of the good time became stronger 1870s and 1770s when many of its characteristics were institutionalised in the club movement.

Radical uses of ticketing.

From late 1830s ticketing increasingly became an exclusive, rather than an inclusive weapon

New cultural styles and their role in the mid-Victorian invention of party were less marked in Devon and Tower Hamlets. Culture of Devon’s county politics changed v little bc of Conservative domination

feminisation of radical culture - meeting outside the pub, as well as using ticketing and social entertainments designed to attract family units. Reinforced primacy of their private roles as wives, mothers and sisters.

Disciplining of popular politics critical to the mid-Victorian invention of party

Question 30

Vincent’s account of the rise of party

Answer 30

by the social and religious cleavages left in the wake of the forward march of British history.
‘broad church of Liberalism’.

Sustained by increasingly assertive middle class through the vehicles of non-conformist religion and the provincial press.

In response to these forces that Disraelian Conservatism organised itself

Increasingly this account being questioned as historians have recognised that parties actually created their own identities and constituencies of support, rather than reflecting the identities of existing social groups

emergence of provincial press following the repeal of the stamp duties in 1854 explaining the growth of party-political identities in the constituencies. Repeal of Stamp Act 1855

Invention of party reqorked the languages of the independent citizen in increasingly restrictive and masculine ways

Question 31

Joyce

Answer 31

beer, Britannia and bonhomie central to the style and appeal of popular Toryism in late Victorian Lancashire

Question 32

Hollinwood’s Constitutional Working Men’s Club

Answer 32

est 1868

only room was a well-stocked library

Question 33

Robert Michels

Answer 33

Growth of nationally organised mass political parties irrevocably shifted the balance of power in favour of the leaders over the led

Question 34

Vernon, Power and Print

Answer 34

Decline of street lit - views of moral and political reformers and disapproving autodidacts slowly began to predominate, and these forms of printed media were increasingly deemed inappropriate to a political system which placed a premium on ‘rational’ debate between individuals.

Proliferation of the penny press 1850s

Unlike the popular, flexible and formulaic oral and visual uses of the past and present, print imposed fixed, verbatim meanings.

Small group of people responsible for the production of the political uses of print e.g. Butterworth family of Oldham.

Audiences divested of much of their power to lead and shape the direction of the speeches they heard by press. Growing use of ticketed media

Secret ballot - legislated public nomination out of existence

National political organisations dependent on print to break down the isolation of individuals within local communities through membership cards, rule books, correspondence, and press.

These printed technologies enabled the creation of a nationally organised mass political democracy with the Reform Acts of 1884 and 1918.

As politics became increasingly organised and national in character, ever greater distances placed between individuals and their political leaders.

Political parties perceived as oligarchic cliques

Far from representing a triumphant march towards the model parliamentary democracy, nineteenth-century English politics witnessed the gradual and uneven closure of the public political sphere.

Question 35

After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, John Reith-D. LeMahieu, in Mandler and Pedersen, After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain, 1994

Answer 35

The Left welcomed an experiment in public control w BBC monopoly

firmly believed that broadcasting soothed public opinion

Reith - “If there had been broadcasting at the time of the French Revolution, there might have been no French Revolution

By 1929, daily service and weekly evensong

Reithian ethos allowed the BBC to portray itself as the embodiment of British culture and tradition

Increase in light entertainment
1930s in response to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Normandie competition - dance music and jazz

1933 separate variety dept.

Systematic listener research. Hired an advertising expert to discover what the public wanted

Question 36

Reith, Broadcast Over Britain, 1924

Answer 36

high culture need only be made available for most people to embrace it

Question 37

1935 radio

Answer 37

98% of the population had some access to programmes

Question 38

Launching of Empire broadcasts

Answer 38

1932

Question 39

Speaking for the people: party, language and popular politics in England, 1867-1914-Jon Lawrence1998

Answer 39

almost general agreement, even in more recent ‘revisionist’ accounts of
nineteenth-century politics, that, in the wake of the Second Reform Act
of 1867, not only did political parties become firmly established as permanent
organisations of mass mobilisation, but they exerted increasing
control over the forms of popular political expression.

the primary institutions ‘socialising’ the new mass electorate
into the norms of the pre-existing political system.

belief that new social and economic forces
began to undermine the equilibrium of popular politics established
during the 1860s and 1870s. This equilibrium, it is argued, had been
rooted in the strength of non-class, and essentially local political loyalties.
Denominational loyalties were perhaps pre-eminent, but partisanship
was also cemented by broader civic loyalties - including loyalty to the
powerful new provincial urban elites which had done so much to stamp
their identities on the emerging industrial communities

After 1867, it is suggested, these powerful elites were able to use
their wealth and social prestige to establish political structures capable of
integrating the new voters into established patterns of partisanship -
plebeian politics were ‘tamed’ and a narrow partisanship instilled.
Political parties came to ‘manage’ popular politics as never before, and
continued to do so, it is suggested, long after the decline of the local elites
which had created them.3 Parties evolved into primarily national organisations,
dominated by professional politicians, and united around programmatic
politics rooted in material (and at heart class) interests. The
present chapter questions this orthodox account of the ‘triumph of
party

relationship between ‘party’ and ‘public’
remained highly ambiguous down to 1914

Many Radicals were never wholly
reconciled to the Liberal coalition, and they were often highly suspicious
of attempts to control local politics through the machinery of ‘the
caucus’

the late nineteenth-century ‘triumph of party’ was qualified firstly by
electoral logic (which dictated that ‘improving’ voters must take a backseat
to the more pressing need to win their allegiance), and secondly by
the widespread belief that political legitimacy still rested, at least in part,
in the open public meeting

This belief placed a premium on the political
occupation of public space, and helped sustain a continued role for disruption
and physical force in English electoral politics. Connivance in the
orchestration of popular disturbances inevitably involved some loss of
‘elite’ control over the political process, but it also legitimated a set of
practices which ‘subaltern’ groups, such as the Radical and Irish activists
of London’s East End, could appropriate for their own
purposes

ambiguities of the ‘politics of place’ are further underlined by the
fact that ‘outsider’ candidates often augmented the nursing of a constituency
by taking a house in the district so that they could qualify as
local burgesses with full voting rights - essential for any credible appeal to
‘local’ credentials
Ernest Benn recalls his father renting a villa in
Cable Street when he was nursing the East End seat of St George’s-in-the
East

recent work of historians such as Eugenio Biagini important,
underlining the extent to which nineteenthcentury
popular politics were preoccupied with questions of state policy,
rather than just with the resolution of local status conflicts

political meetings were often highly controlled
affairs by the late nineteenth century, not least thanks to the frequent use
of’ticketing’, hired party stewards and the services of the local constabulary,
such control tended to break down at times of great political excitement
such as elections.

rational democracy described
by Colin Matthew and others thus represented only one facet of Victorian
party politics.80 Indeed if this were not so, it would be difficult to explain
why so many Liberal intellectuals had become doubtful about the
prospects of reconciling popular government with efficient government by
the 1880s
‘modernisation’.

By imposing upon them sociological models such as ‘modernisation’, which
assume a strictly linear course of development, we lose sight of this
complexity. Seeing change as linear and progressive leads naturally to the
assumption that inexorable external forces are at work, rooted in society
and economy, and that the fortunes of political parties are determined
largely by developments at this ‘deeper’ level.

Question 40

in the 1900s Black

Country Liberals

Answer 40

made great capital out of the fact that the Unionist
owners of the Patent-Axle Box works at Wednesfield chose to march their
employees en masse to the poll

Question 41

Willy Gladstone and nursing

Answer 41

because the
‘nursing’ of a constituency had become such a widespread custom, it
could easily be understood by the electors, not as a gift enshrining unspoken
assumptions of reciprocity on the part of recipients, but as a form of
popular taxation exacted on the politically ambitious

As Willy Gladstone found at Whitby, declining to ‘play the
game’ of cultivating a local presence could involve a candidate in endless
conflicts both with his local party, and with the wider electorate

since all candidates were
expected to act as benefactors, it is far from clear that such displays of
paternalism did much to influence party allegiance at elections

Question 42

Problems with approaches which emphasise the integrative role of local elites (Lawrence

Answer 42

tend to underestimate
the antagonism that often existed within local Liberal and Tory organisations
between factions with very different political agendas

they tend to underestimate the extent to which,
even in the nineteenth century, popular partisanship was shaped by
national rather than local political struggles, and was rooted in a welldeveloped
sense of both Toryism and especially Liberalism as national
political movements

Question 43

Even during the ‘golden age’ of popular Liberalism in the

1860s and 1870s, the Radical press frequently sounded a sceptical note in its treatment of mainstream Liberalism

Answer 43

September 1867 one finds The Bee-Hive
lamenting the recent failure to secure full manhood suffrage in the
Reform Act
The Bee-Hive, like many of the radical activists who bought it, remained
strongly committed to the goal of independent political representation,
advocating that the working classes should select representatives ‘wherever
practicable from the ranks of labour

If,
Radical
inclusion within the Liberal coalition was always partial and conditional,
then it becomes easier to understand the strong Radical contribution to
late Victorian Labour politics without resorting to models of class
polarisation.

The Radical press of the 1870s and
1880s repeatedly attacked local Liberal parties for conspiring to block
Radical and Labour candidates

Question 44

Dewsbury, in west Yorkshire, is a classic example. There had
long been tensions between the different factions of the town’s Liberal
movement

Answer 44

well-to-do local Liberals and
the Dewsbury Trades Council selected rival Liberal candidates to
contest the new borough.43 The Trades Council denounced the selection
of the west country coal owner Handel Cossham by a self-appointed
committee of prominent Liberals, and upheld the principle of selection
by open public meeting. Their chosen candidate, the Chartist veteran
Ernest Jones, overwhelmingly won the support of the 15,000 towns-folk
who gathered in Dewsbury Market Place for a special selection meeting,
but the Cossham camp refused to accept the decision.
Jones withdrew to concentrate on his
Manchester candidacy, but his supporters refused to give up. Instead
they persuaded local Conservative leaders to back John Simon, the
radical Jewish lawyer, as an alternative ‘independent Liberal’ candidate.

Simon portrayed
himself as the working-man’s champion against the power and wealth of
the town’s Liberal elite

Only after this third contest was a reconciliation finally brokered
between the MP, his diverse supporters, and the powerful Liberal
leadership which dominated municipal life in Dewsbury

inherent
ambiguity of many ‘democratic’ innovations in party organisation after
1867. L. A. Atherley Jones, one of the politicians interviewed by the
Dewsbury ‘Liberal 300’ before the 1880 General Election, later lamented
that local politicians had sought to unseat Simon ‘because he was not
sufficiently submissive to the will of the local Liberal Caucus’.51 At issue
were two contrasting conceptions of democratic representation. Simon,
like other Liberal opponents of the ‘Caucus’, upheld the importance of a
direct relationship between politician and constituents, rather than one
mediated through party organisations

Simon continued to hold an
annual open public meeting where as many as 10,000 people, voters and
non-voters, men and women, might attend to hear an account of his work
as borough MPs

Question 45

George

Potter’s Industrial Review

Answer 45

successor to The Bee-Hive, was perhaps predictably
critical of the caucus in the wake of the editor’s rejection by the
Liberal Hundred at the Peterborough by-election of 1878, but many trade
union leaders shared the belief that ‘caucus’ organisation would make
Radical and Labour candidatures more difficult in most constituencies

Question 46

Birmingham during the 1870s

Answer 46

trade union leaders who were strongly
Liberal in their sympathies, none the less sought to organise a Labour
association, and run their own independent Labour candidates in order
to preserve some independence from Chamberlain’s powerful political
machine

Question 47

Pelling

Answer 47

decision to establish the
Democratic Federation in 1881 (forerunner of the socialist SDF) was in
large part a reaction against Chamberlain and the new Caucus politics
which were coming to dominate Radicalism - hence Cowen’s prominent
role in the early stages

Lawrence –>
On the other hand… also many Radicals who saw the new
constituency organisations as a means of undermining the political power
of the shadowy, self-nominated ‘Liberal Committees’ which had traditionally
controlled the representation of many constituencies

Question 48

Lawrence - two camps of rise of party historians

Answer 48

those who stress how the
growth of formal party organisation completed the ‘taming’ of popular
politics,63 and those who stress how party organisation was able to integrate
the new electors of 1867 and 1885, so that they posed little threat to
the existing political and social status quo.

two sides of the same story, though the first
approach undoubtedly lays greater emphasis on the highly developed
political traditions of non-electors before 1867

Question 49

incompleteness of party control (Lawrence)

Answer 49

Throughout this period party elites were obliged to engage with, and
adapt to, aspects of popular culture but dimly understood, and in some
measure feared.

Most political leaders
had read their Bagehot - they knew that they were meant to be moulding
the new democracy

Shouldn’t take them at their word

as John Garrard appears to do in
his influential article ‘Parties, members and voters’

Question 50

Wolverhampton Tories

Answer 50

when the
Wolverhampton Tories opened the town’s first Working Men’s
Conservative Club in 1884, local leaders spoke of the valuable contribution
the club would make to the education and ‘improvement’ of the
working classes. In contrast, however, contemporary accounts of the
working-men’s clubs set up in the 1880s stress their fine surroundings,
excellent facilities for billiards and other games, and the ready-supply of
good cheap beer

Question 51

internal party paper on ‘The condition of the

Conservative Party in the Midland Counties’

Answer 51

acknowledged immediately
after the Act was passed, the new conditions made it imperative that
in future local politicians should be able to call on the services of volunteer
workers. This, the report concluded, meant setting up new mass
organizations, regardless of the consequent danger of encouraging an
‘abundance of zeal’ among the rank and file which might challenge traditional
party structures

Question 52

Metropolitan police vs protestors

Answer 52

metropolitan police went to great lengths
to curtail the right of socialist agitators, and their libertarian supporters,
from holding political meetings in public places such as Dodd Street in
the East End, and most controversially, Trafalgar Square in the West
End

Both in 1885 and 1887
Initiative from the police themselves

Home Office, under first Cross and later Matthews, was decidedly
reluctant to give the police full backing in their attempts to stop the
socialist gatherings - primarily because of its greater sensitivity to issues
of free speech and the right to public meeting.

Question 53

Labour (Lawrence)

Answer 53

Taken together, the
work of Howell and Tanner suggests that one facet of the call for independent
labour representation was a conscious revolt against the nationalisation
of politics in the late Victorian and Edwardian period

local Labour politicians did frequently espouse what might be
termed a politics of community

Howkins has argued that one of Labour’s
greatest strengths before the First World War was that its political leaders

tended to be rooted in the communities they represented, whereas the
champions of the ‘New Liberalism’ were often carpet-baggers foisted on
constituencies they hardly knew.9 This whole emphasis on the ‘politics of
locality’ must not, however, be pushed too far. From the outset many
Labour politicians believed that the local and the particular must be transcended,
not championed, if Labour was to transform politics and break
the hold of the old parties. The strongest proponent of this argument was
probably Ramsay MacDonald,

Even if the cultural and physical
gulf between Labour activists and the mass of the working population did
not undermine the project from the outset,14 the financial and organisational
frailties of local Labour parties could make it very difficult for them
to mount a credible campaign from their own resources

Labour activists generally
cherished their links to national organisations with national political agendas

By selecting the nominee of a powerful national trade union a
local party might hope to cover the cost, not simply of the election itself,
but of a full-time election agent,

Overall just over
half the twenty-two trade-union sponsored Labour (LRC) MPs elected
in 1906 lived either in their constituency, or in a neighbouring constituency
(see table 9.1)

figures for MPs sponsored by ILP branches and local
Labour Representation Committees are broadly similar - exactly half
lived locally,

departure from earlier practice.
During the 1890s, ILP branches had shown a strong tendency to prefer
well-known national celebrities as candidates rather than local political
Hardie’s wanderings

When Freddie Richards spoke out in Parliament against the
appalling slums of Wolverhampton, local Tories condemned him as an
outsider who had insulted the town and its people before the nation.

most successful exponents of’localist’ Labour politics appear to have
embraced two quite distinct, but complementary, political roles: within
their communities they were political trouble-shooters

on the national
stage they were the lone figures defending their communities against the
ignorance and hostility of malign outside forces.
Ben Tillett
recalls Crooks as a Londoner straight out of Dickens - born and brought
up in Poplar, where he continued to live, Crooks was probably as close to
being an ‘organic’ Labour leader as England has come

Crooks’ Poplar home was the first port-of-call for any local resident in
trouble
mid 1900s he felt obliged to turn down the
chance to move to a larger, more comfortable house because he knew
that, ‘[m]y friends among the working people would fear I was deserting
their class

Lansbury was renowned for
keeping an open-door for those in need.

in most cities and towns Labour politicians found that political
success depended partly on brokering alliances between diverse and
potentially antagonistic groups, and partly on the painstaking process of
constructing a sense of shared political identity. It was not a case simply of
articulating a pre-existing ‘Labourist’ consciousness within the community

Labour’s
fortune^ in a sense3 was that a second global war allowed it to ‘nationalise’
its politics in a way that the first most definitely had not. During the First
World War Labour’s influence over the management of the home front
was partial at best3 and trade unionists remained suspicious of the state
and unconvinced about the practicality of defending their members
through political as opposed to industrial strategies

James Mawdsley, the Tory cotton spinners’ leader, argued that,
it was time they showed they were neither a Labour Electoral Congress, nor an
Independent Labour Party Congress, nor a Liberal nor a Conservative Congress,
but a Labour Congress (Applause).

socialist
opponents like Tillett actually welcomed the exclusion of ‘mere professional
politicians’ such as Burns, Broadhurst and Hardie - their primary
objection was to the unconstitutional methods used by the Parliamentary
Committee to introduce the new procedures

in his election address at Leeds South in 1895 Arthur Shaw, the ILP
candidate,
“Party!”, “Party”! has broken down, and against that I raise the cry of
“Principle!”’.

Such anti-party rhetoric became more difficult to sustain
after the formation of the LRC in 1900. Gradually, but inexorably,
‘Labour’ became more and more clearly the label of a political party,

Edwardian Labour party was emerging as a highly
centralised, and increasingly disciplined organisation. It was also emerging
as a party more determined than any before to reshape popular politics
- to reform ‘the Democracy’ through education

Socialists such as Hardie and MacDonald had long argued that what
Britain needed was not more democracy, but more education - why, they
suggested, prioritize the creation of yet more ignorant, frivolous electors,
surely it would be better to focus energy on securing the social reforms,
and the cultural enlightenment, necessary for the growth of a truly ‘rational’
democracy.

MacDonald
In 1919
he described how ‘the governing classes’ had come to understand the
weakness of democracy, namely that ‘the masses’
could be stirred into passion by things which were trivia

Question 54

Party politics and the provincial press in early twentieth century England: the case of the south west-Dawson, Michael1998

Answer 54

Based on the evidence of Devon and Cornwall, politicians continued to regard
the provincial press as highly influential in determining their readers’ party political
affiliations well into the twentieth century. Until at least 1914, many of the leading
local and regional newspapers were owned by prominent local politicians. After
1918, especially following the amalgamation of the two main Conservative and
Liberal papers, local politicians felt keenly their lack of a reliable source of press
support. The cost of funding a party political newspaper became too high for all
but the richest politicians. Moreover, the status of the provincial press was increasingly
undermined by improved rail communications, allowing the national
press to compete even in farthest Cornwall. The wireless also reduced the importance
of the provincial press from the late 1920s.

Question 55

The making of modern British politics, 1867-1945-Martin Pugh2002

Answer 55

1880 general election 1st modern one:

5/6 of constituencies actually contested.
Produced national campaign as distinct from the sporadic, localized contests typical of mid-Victorian elections

hitherto leaders had usually avoided speaking in other men’s constituencies after nominations lest seen to interfere in community’s private affair.
Gladstone pioneered nearest approach to a whistle-stop tour as journeyed up to Edinburgh, descending from train at Grantham, Yorka nd Newcastle to deliver short harangues, up and down the country

elections characterized by popular participation. Attendant disorder obliged authorities to extend the poll over two to three weeks. Not until 1918 did they feel confident enough to risk one-day polling

Ribbons and rosettes in party colour - worn by millions. Primroses on Disraeli’s birthday

Question 56

Married Women’s Property Acts

Answer 56

1870, 1874, 1882

Question 57

Inequality lay in marked variation in constituency size

Answer 57

despite the effect of the 1885 redistribution in correcting the historic over-representation of the South and South-West
Ireland, 103 mems repd an average electorate of 6,700 by contrast with English average of 13,000

Question 58

Rise of the Party Activist (Pugh)

Answer 58

striking feature of mid-Victorian elections - barely half constituencies actually experienced a contest. Where seats contested a third or more of voters normally split their two votes across party lines - indication that Whig and Tory were not sharp political divisions but amorphous and overlapping groupings

After 1885 single-member constituencies eliminated traditional Whig-Tory collusion, and the advance of formal party organization, stimulated by the franchise extensions, may be measured from the decline in unopposed returns.

Professional party agent began to displace the solicitor for whom electoral work was just a sideline. Responsibility = to ensure party’s supporters appeared on the preliminary list of voters in May, to put in further claims and defend them before the revising barristers in the autumn, and particularly to lodge objections against the names of known opponents

Question 59

Decline in uncontested seats

Answer 59

333, 1857
43, 1885
63, 1892

Question 60

Conservative agents in Gateshead

Answer 60

population rose by 16% 1885-1891, but electorate dropped by 301

Question 61

Rise of local party-sponsored club (Pugh)

Answer 61

Keighly 13 Conservative clubs 1907

Question 62

Rise of formal constituency associations (Pugh)

Answer 62

Representative constituency bodies pioneered by radical Liberals
‘caucus’ system.
Central institutional form given in National Liberal Federation (NLF)

by mid-1880s few candidates stood w/o the benefit of an agent, a permanent organisation

Question 63

National Liberal Federation (NLF) est

Answer 63

1877

Question 64

National Union of Conservative and Constituency Associations (NUCCA)

Answer 64

attained official approval and spawned affiliated associations across the country during the mid-1880s.

Question 65

A L Lowell, The Government of England, 1908

Answer 65

centralization of power in the Cabinet and corresponding decline in the authority and independence of the House of Commons

Question 66

Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties (1902)

Answer 66

drew attention to what he saw as the debilitating effects of caucus politics upon Parliament

Question 67

Ostrogorski’s pessimism exaggerated (Pugh)

Answer 67

despite the pretensions of Victorian party organisations in 1870s, by 1900 both Liberal and Conservative parliamentary leaders had harnessed their extra-parliamentary forces to serve their ends.

Appealed directly to voters over the heads of their critics for the ‘mandate’

Chamberlain and Churchill merely toyed w party organization before reverting to playing the game by the existing rules

Question 68

Professionalization (Pugh)

Answer 68

under Gladstone and successors parliamentary year grew longer than August-Feb.
Pressure upon govt business caused by regular Irish Nationalist obstructionism prompted Gladstone in 1882 to pioneer the procedure for closure of debate by simple majority vote - a practice ritually condemned but nonetheless adopted by all govts anxious to squeeze legislation through.

Lengthier and more complex legislation

1850s govts - 10 to 15 defeats a year.
1900s, only one per session on average

Growth of disciplined party behaviour

After 1886 govts ceased to be able to rely upon support from oppositions which now criticized everything but without prospect of defeating anything. All now turned upon maintaining the allegiance of one’s own party majority. Older traditions of cross-bench voting by a large proportion of members gradually died out

Party loyalty now demanded that aspiring members should first tackle one or two hopeless or marginal constituencies before being nominated for a safe seat for life.

Politician’s essential lifeline lay through his party rather than in his roots in his locality

Question 69

changing social composition of Commons 1868-1910

Answer 69

landowners 46% to 26% among Conservatives and 26% to 7% among Liberals

industry and trade, 31% to 53% of Conservatives and 50% to 66% of Liberals

Dominance of lawyers at cabinet level noticeable feature of Liberal govts 1906-14

Question 70

Increase in creation of peerages

Answer 70

1880s and 1890s - 2x that of the 1830-60 period

Question 71

MPs’ salaries 1911

Answer 71

£400

Question 72

A Media Monarchy? Queen Victoria and the radical press 1837-1901-John Plunkett04/2003

Answer 72

News of the World, Lloyd’s
Weekly Newspaper and the Weekly Times began publication in October 1843, January
1843 and January 1847, r

all aimed at a broadly artisan market.
Similarly, the more expensive 6d. Illustrated London News began its influential life in
May 1842

changes in print culture

became bound up with a new style of monarchy

symbiotic relationship between the civic publicness of
Victoria and the extensive royal reportage

Reynolds’s Newspaper and the Northern Star explicitly sought to challenge the
populist discourse dominating the media coverage of Victoria’s tours and visits.

progressive royal role

public duties undertaken by Victoria and Albert also
mitigated utilitarian inspired demands that

call into question David
Cannadine’s argument that the British monarchy reinvented its popularity in the late
nineteenth century through the organization of large-scale pageants [10]. Cannadine’s
claim ignores the abiding memory of George IV’s expensive love of pomp and
circumstance. Victoria’s first tours were so successful because she adopted an active role
that was devoid of ceremony

Most metropolitan and provincial
newspapers cast Victoria’s tours as her recognition of her reliance on the approval of her
subjects, a celebration of the inclusivity and participation of the People in the political
nation.

Natural feminine sympathy for her subjects,
one of the most prominent features in Victoria’s portrayal,

faithful belief in her agency

Victoria’s visit to Napoleon III in August 1855

Whereas periodicals like the Illustrated London News sought to place Victoria at the
heart of the imagined community of the nation by imagining her place in the hearts of
the nation, Reynolds’s Newspaper sought to factionalize and deride her appeal.

sustained critique of the diverting role of the Queen’s public figuring. Here, we can see
the emergence of the notion of monarchy as harmless entertainment

Reynolds’s Newspaper

derided the language of royal reporting and the royalist
news-values of the press. During the 1840s and 1850s, attacks on the intrusion and
deference of royal journalism were commonplace. Punch , now in its most radical period,
frequently parodied the official language of the Court Circular

During Victoria’s reign, this traditional radical concern with the
imaginative enchantment, fictionality, and, ultimately, emptiness of the monarchy,
metamorphosed into critiques of the way it was fabricated through the newspaper and
periodical press.

Question 73

Home and Politics: Women and Conservative Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain- Thackeray2010/10

Answer 73

WUTRA central role in advancing women’s position within Conservative politics

Uses case studies of women’s activism in Birmingham and Leeds to challenge McKibbin’s claim that Conservative success after the war relied on fostering conventional wisdoms adverse to the culture of organized labor

WUO able to expand significantly in industrial areas after 1918 through championing the Conservatives’ progressive record in municipal politics and by expressing empathy with working women’s social cultures.
Through its attempts to create a more consensual ethos of activism that could appeal to all classes, the women’s Conservative organization played a pivotal role in establishing and advancing the discourse of Baldwinite Conservatism in the localities

WUTRA offered more substantial opportunities for female leadership than Primrose League

Chairman = Mary Maxse - keen believer in letting the local branches of the association act as the female voice of tariff reform in their localities

WUTRA - tariff reform = housewife’s question. By taking intelligent interest in fiscal q, women could play significant role in political life

WUTRA defence of Ulster following introduction of the Third Irish Home Rule Bill, “Help the Ulster Women and Children” campaign. British women encouraged to offer promises of shelter to potential Ulster refugees. (Later provided nucleus for Belgian Refugee Committee)

Strength of women’s tariff organisation concentrated in county and suburban seats of southern England and West Midlands. Largest branch Mid-Devon (4,800 mems)

Edwardian period, Conservative women managed to establish a more politically effective form of female Tory activism during Edwardian period.

Women’s Institutes of WW1, patriotic war work, less hierarchical

WUTRA presented socialism as one of the many threats to the home that Conservative women needed to counteract

Early 1920s characterised by proliferation of localized antisocialist discourses. Local dimension remained vital to British politics in this decade. Not until 1930s that newsreels and radio came to play key part in the election campaigns.

Labour’s substantial breakthroughs at the 1919 municipal elections, on the back of a low turnout, demonstrated to Conservatives that they needed to enthuse the public with an interest in local affairs to avoid socialists taking control of municipal govt as the result of popular apathy.

WUO encouraged branches to produce localized versions of its journal Home and Politics so that women could keep up-to-date with party activities and thereby canvass effectively.

By 1926, 39 local editions of Home and Politics.

Nationally produced antisocialist propaganda limited influence in shaping the party’s electoral appeal during the early 1920s.

Labour great lengths to counteract hostile antisocialist propaganda. Promotion of “mass canvassing” early 1920s emblematic of its vigorous attempts to engage w the daily life of working women and overcome their oppenents’ antisocialist slurs. Involved holding open-air meetings in residential streets and distributing literature to house-bound women.

WUO’s most significant growth in immediate postwar years was concentrated in urban seats w large w-c populations

Leeds, periodical The Conservative Woman (1921) - attention to work of party’s fem mems on Board of Guardians

Annie Chamberlain at forefront of Birmingham Conservatives’ response to rise of Labour in the city.
Unionist Women’s Institutes in deprived Ladywood in 1919. Social centre for women along w talks on citizenship. At least 115 mems canvassed for Conservatives during 1923 election.

Historians of Conservatism during this period have tended to view the party through its national appeals. Yet the women’s Conservative organizations encouraged a highly localized politics, especially after 1918 when the WUO came to focus on municipal affairs.
Thus, party’s identity and social culture varied across the country

Popular following enjoyed by the WUO during the 1920s helped to give Baldwin’s rather abstract discourse a coherence and meaningful ident on the ground

Question 74

McKibbon

Answer 74

Conservatives able to steal a lead on the other parties in appealing to women by portraying their interests as antithetical to the masculine culture of the organised working class.

Development of Conservative organization in 1920s chiefly concentrated in the suburbs and nurtured by a nationally produced antisocialist propaganda

Question 75

Philip Williamson

Answer 75

ideological stereotypes promoted by Conservatives during the 1920s were by no means hostile to the organized working class.

Baldwin’s leadership key to Conservative success
After 1923 Baldwin reformed the party by promoting a consensual language, which celebrated commonsensical, decent, self-reliant, contented working men and women

nationally produced appeals key to Conservatives’ success after 1918, revitalizing a party grassroots that had become demoralized by the traumas of three consecutive election defeats during the Edwardian era

Question 76

Amy Moreton, play Happy England (1911)

Answer 76

Warwickshire Conservative activist.
Parody of a free trade film produced for previous year’s elections

Bill, firm struggling to compete against tariff-protected German rival, confronted by canvasser working on behalf of Liberal candidate, Karl Schutzman

Question 77

Helen McCarthy

Answer 77

nonparty organisations were keen to establish a space in British political life where issues could be discussed free from acrimonious party debates

Question 78

Conservative women’s organization mem by 1928

Answer 78

nearly 1 million.

WUO membership around 4x size of Labour rival, dwarfed WNLF w fewer than 100,000 mems

Question 79

The Culture of Elections in Modern Britain-JON LAWRENCE10/2011

Answer 79

By the 1930s
some felt that the spread of radio was making it harder to draw an
audience, and that voters paid more attention to broadcasts by national
leaders than they did to candidates’ speeches, but we should not exaggerate
the extent of change.55 Only in 1935, the last election of the interwar
period, did a majority of British homes possess a radio, and even
then they were barred from using it to follow the election because the
BBC maintained a moratorium on election news both to placate Fleet
Street and to protect itself from charges of partisanship

Both local and national election
campaigns continued to be shaped largely by speech-making at public
meetings. The balance of power between local and national campaigns
gradually shifted to the centre as the readership of the London dailies
grew, and as radio and cinema created the illusion of a more personal,
even intimate, connection between voters and party leaders.56 But
national leaders had loomed large in British politics since the days
of Gladstone and Disraeli, and their increased media exposure as yet
did little to diminish the centrality of the public meeting to electoral
politics. Candidates continued to hold multiple daily election meetings
throughout a campaign, and down to 1945 they continued to draw large
audiences

Question 80

A Model MP?-Laura Beers06/2013

Answer 80

1930s the large newspaper conglomerates began hiring
research agencies to study how men and women of different age groups and different
social classes consumed the news – which papers they read, which sections of the paper
they preferred, and even what order they read those sections in

Readers – both men
and women – were found to prefer human-interest stories and celebrity gossip over any
other sections of the paper, but women professed even less interest in domestic and
foreign news than men, and more interest in fashion and celebrity.

shift in the style and content of campaign
literature does suggest that they believed that women were more interested than men
in seeing who they were going to vote for.

only became common practice to run campaign
photographs in 1918. The link between this trend towards a more personal visual
appeal and the women’s vote is underscored by several candidates’ inclusion in their
election addresses not only of their own head shots but also of photographs of their
wives and families, occasionally accompanied by a special appeal to women voters
written by the candidate’s wife.39

also identifiable. Those female politicians, such as Susan Lawrence, who could not be
represented as feminine garnered less press scrutiny than those, like Wilkinson, who
exhibited more stereotypically ‘womanly’ behaviour – behaviour with which female
readers could easily identify,

Her early work as a speaker for the
Manchester branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies had never
brought her a national profile.

Camrose
newspapers headlined ‘Ginger for Pluck’
Wilkinson’s politics have been described as ‘Red like her hair’ … [which] does some
injustice to Miss Wilkinson’s views as well as her hair. The latter is of a really attractive
shade, and the former may be less impracticable than some of her colleagues
She has a sense of humour

Her hair, in particular, remained a popular press topic. When, in February 1925,
Wilkinson decided to shingle her long locks, the ‘story’ received coverage not only in
the national press but also in provincial papers such as the Liverpool Echo,
fashion choices
Evening Standard, and the pictorial Daily Sketch. Thus, we learn that in March 1923
Miss Wilkinson appeared in the House sporting a ‘gipsy scarf

when Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill imposed a tax on
artificial silk in his 1925 budget, she was able to command press attention when she
spoke out for the interests of working girls whose wardrobes consisted largely of that
fabric.77 In November 1927 a judge in a debt dispute pronounced it ‘shocking and
scandalous’ that a working girl had paid a milliner £13 8s for clothes

‘No
working girl’, he declared, ‘should wear clothes which cost such scandalous money.’
Singled out by the press to comment on the case, Wilkinson let loose:

The demand of the modern working girl is for a decent standard of life
and dress

She cultivated a close relationship with the Beaverbrook press, and her articles
frequently appeared in the Daily Express and the Evening Standard. Her two novels,
Clash and The Division Bell Mystery, were both serialized in the Express.
Wilkinson’s sex initially struck editors and journalists as a way to make politics
accessible to women readers.

During the Jarrow Crusade in October
1936, she exploited her own ‘newsworthiness’ to keep the marchers in the public eye,
writing articles and posing for photographs. Although the march was organized by local
leaders of all political parties, and remained ostensibly non-party-political, Wilkinson
proved remarkably successful in identifying the march both with her own personality
and with her party’s campaign for relief of the distressed areas; newsreel footage as well
as press coverage identified her as the political face of the marchers

Question 81

The Great War and the Moving Image-Adrian Smith,Michael Hammond02/10/2015

Answer 81

Harrison’s contribution to this special issue of the HJFRT
provides a sharp reminder of how far the military authorities were prepared to go
in sanitising the bloody consequences of modern warfare. Her inquiry into cinematic
representation of British and imperial ambulance trains constitutes a persuasive
argument for revisiting films which were strikingly sophisticated in projecting
an artificial – indeed downright deceitful – narrative of how well the wounded
were treated between casualty station and hospital ward. Harrison demonstrates
how newspapers and magazines, not least the Illustrated London News, conspired to
reinforce the illusion that casualties were carried home in a suitably clean and sterile
environment: skilled manipulation of monochrome film facilitated an intensity
of light such that the overwhelming whiteness of the carriage interiors blocked out
in the viewer’s mind any disturbing images of disfigurement and dismemberment.

The Battle of the Somme
Shocking reality of the scenes

number of civilians – many not regular cinema-goers – who viewed the film following
its release in August 1916.1 Equally striking is the number that returned
for a second or even third screening

. In an age of silent cinema visual comedy cut across barriers of culture
and language, reinforcing bonds of kith, kin and alliance, and even surmounting
deep political and military divide

The war’s legacy for the commercial film industry seems primarily to have
been to usher in social acceptance of cinema as a modern mode of entertainment
and information; and increasingly once the war was over, as a means of memory
and myth making.

Cinema’s
ability to depict apparently realistic images contrasts with its almost limitless plasticity
and capacity for manipulation. That paradox was premiered emphatically with
the coming of the Great War.

Question 82

Labour and Gender-M. Francis in Labour’s First Century (2000)

Answer 82

WLL membership 5,000 till 1918, when disbanded and replaced by women’s sections affiliated to local parties

1922 - 100,000 women joined women’s sections

Average interwar female party membership = >250,000

1930s - Elen Wilkinson Lucy Cox, Leah Manning prominent in campaigns to support the republican cause during the Spanish Civil War

National lvl, Edwardian era - Fabian Women’s Group and key individuals such as Margaret MacD, Margaret Macmillan and Mary Macarthur had considerable impact on the development of the party’s policies in relation to education, children and social services.

This was reproduced at local level.

Edwardian Wolverhampton - leading Labour activists had shown little stomach for campaigning among the slum dwellers of the city’s ‘east end’, regarding them as intellectually stunted and morally degraded.

However, the local WLL and Co-operative Women’s Guild in 1913-14 demanded the introduction of free baby clinics and free school meals in the poorest districts of the city, and urged the party hierarchy to be more sensitive towards, and less judgemental about, the least fortunate stratum of the w-c.

In doing so they redefined Labour politics so as to be less exclusory, based on a broader conception of the working class than the archetype of the ‘respectable’ artisan

Pressure from Labour women widened Labour’s welfare agenda.
Women little evd that poverty they saw in their neighbourhoods and homes could be alleviated by trade-union action alone

In the years immediately after 1918 the Labour Party in Preston
education and nurseries became central to
Labour’s campaign strategies after 1925 and helped generate unprecedented
level of electoral support, culminating in the party’ impressive performance in Preston in the 1929 election

1918 Labour constitution treated women as distinct interest group, recognising their desire for their own local sections and annual conference. However, these institutions were marginalised from the party’s real centres of power, the annual party conference and the National Executive Committee (NEC)

under-rep in elected office

But in inter-war yrs hundreds of Labour women elected to local councils and Boards of Guardians

a quarter of the
newly elected Labour councillors who took their seats on the LCC in
1934 were women

But post-war decline in the status and responsibility of local government

Feminist issues rarely registered in isolation in the Labour Party, and were enmeshed in a rich and complex web of interlocking dialogues

Friction in WLL over dispute between equal and universal franchise proposals - Selina Cooper vs Margaret Bondfield. McD’s opinion - contrib to premature death of his wife

long-term consequences of the suffrage campaign - Labour deeply hostile to issues which might encourage ‘sex antagonism’

Male breadwinner, not the citizen mother, was at the centre of Labour’s conception of family endowment in the 1920s.

Labour policy-makers felt that, given the limited public funds available, expenditure on social services such as housing and healthcare was more likely to be implemented, and was more likely to improve the lives of w-c women (esp the v poor) than the payment of allowances

Labour frequently responded w impatience, if not hostility, towards those women who dared to complain about the burdens of austerity.

Labour Party’s attitude, from the beginning, dominated by traditions of working-class moralism and Fabian puritanism

Party’s women’s conferences frequently urged the party to make birth control a national issue, but the national conference insisted that such subjects were a ‘private’ rather than a ‘public’ matter

Masculinism fairly constant, but masculinity divergent, competing and changing forms

LP oft vested the strength and hope of the working class in the female rather than the male. 1920s, despite ambivalence about issues such as family allowances, party's campaign posters frequently deployed visual images of the w-c mother.
Dominant image of working women became that of sweated labour, the shame of capitalism
W-c 'Mam'. Import demonstrated that Labour was willing to see its essential values represented in femenine as well as masculine terms, but the party's conception of acceptable womanhood ultimately proved to be relatively narrow, especially when compared to the various genres of manliness permitted to men.

Partly as a result of female activism that Labour became the party of social welfare

Question 83

Major feminist pressure group of the 1920s

Answer 83

National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC) - did support Labour parliamentary candidates financially

Question 84

Election Cartoons and Political Communication in Victorian England-Matthew Roberts09/2013

Answer 84

Election cartoons did more than simply visualize the written and spoken word. They
were an important, distinctive medium for political communication in their own right, and a study
of them suggests that the character and conduct of later Victorian electoral politics was far from
being the elevated, sanitized and dispassionate affair that conventional accounts have often
suggested. Initially a demotic and locally produced form of political communication, by the
1890s the election cartoon had been subordinated to the centralizing and controlling forces of
national party politics.

Enquiries further afield (for
Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, Manchester and Norwich) also suggest that local
election cartoons took off in the late 1860s and declined in the 1880s

local election cartoons were primarily urban phenomena, a reflection – it
could be argued – of the more vibrant public spheres of the large towns with their
larger, more concentrated populations and greater numbers of resident artists, printers
and publishers.2

Most local election cartoons were black-and-white pen-and-ink sketches

Several newspapers make reference to cartoons being displayed in the windows of
bookshops, stationers and news-vendors.

not uncommon for crowds to assemble around these shops to view cartoons

conceivable that this public and shared viewing of cartoons worked in a similar way
to the collective reading of radical newspapers earlier in the century: those who were
literate read aloud to those who were not,37 a reminder, contrary to the claims of
Vernon, that rational political debate could take place in the ‘passionate and emotive
public arena of the streets’.

At the end
of a contest election cartoons were often collected together and sold as a complete set
and marketed as souvenirs, and in some cases reissued years later.42 The election
cartoon, then, was not only a form of visual political communication but also an article
of popular consumption

As Vernon has argued, the ‘views of moral and political reformers and
disapproving autodidacts slowly began to predominate’.49 Bawdy street literature was
increasingly deemed inappropriate; rational debate was to be the order of the day

yet the election cartoons of the Victorian period bore some similarity to the
caricatures which they had replaced. Both, by definition, focused on individuals –
cartoons even more so

Very few featured electors

cartoons were media for turning the spotlight on
politicians, not the electorate

Like some of the caricatures of the late eighteenth century, part of
this was the playing out of fears of mob rule,53 and of the need to draw safe boundaries
of inclusion and exclusion in the political nation

Yet next to nothing like this is registered in election
cartoons

directed at a broader audience which included the working class, a growing number of
whom now had the vote.
Like Punch, but unlike earlier caricatures, election cartoons chastised politicians for
‘public faults not their private vices

The development of
photography and the popularization of photographic images in the mid-Victorian
decades fuelled the demand for true likenesses of famous people. Political cartoonists
strove increasingly to make their subjects instantly recognizable

At the time of the 1886 general election
the Pall Mall Gazette
writer was struck by the paucity of visual propaganda in
central London
your correspondent was a provincial, accustomed to the turbulent
furies, the fierce personalities, the din of diatribes, the paper war, and the campaign of
cartoons

sheer size of London

not conducive to
locally produced and tailored cartoons

Leafleting and door-to-door canvassing were apparently more effective
tools for voter mobilization in London

Reporting on the 1868 general
election campaign in East Derbyshire, the Daily News noted how a series of cartoons
issued by the local Liberal Association had ‘agreeably relieved the weariness of a long
contest’

cartoons began to take off just at the moment when the more traditional, festive and
raucous aspects of electoral culture were in decline.
What, then, was it about election cartoons that made them so popular with the
electorate? Part of the answer has to be the ease with which they linked aspects of
popular culture with formal politics – a linkage that was central to the process by which
political parties adapted themselves to mass politics.77

‘As a general rule, the successful
political cartoonist takes some passing incident in our humdrum life which has excited
popular feeling or laughter and applies it to a political situation.’ The likening of the
election to a horse race was the most ubiquitous device,

On the other hand, sporting analogies could be used to lampoon the
masculinity of politicians

centrality of the individual
candidates themselves.While conventional accounts presented elections as expressive of
underlying social cleavages, notably class conflict, revisionist interpretations have
tended to emphasize the role of issues, policies and rhetoric. Neither of these models
leaves much room for the role of personality, and yet during an election contest it was
arguably the candidates that assumed central importance

One of the most important functions of
election cartoons was to humble politicians,

Cartoons could be made to serve the politics of
disruption. One of the ways that the crowd made its presence felt at meetings was by
displaying cartoons and other visual material.

cartoon representing Roebuck at the bottom of the
poll.88

Passing
round a cartoon or displaying other visual material provided members of the audience
with the means to interrupt speakers and to subvert what was being said. Over the
Pennines, at the Birkenhead nomination in 1868, the assembled crowds created such
a furore hoisting effigies and passing around cartoons that ‘it was utterly impossible
to hear the candidates and their movers’.89 Here

displaying of cartoons became part of a
political battle for the control of public space

cartoon served to initiate a new generation of voters into the
political process.

Question 85

elderly Sheffield alderman, writing in the 1930s,

Answer 85

recalled that the election cartoons in the late 1860s and 1870s ‘were not published in
newspapers, nor … were they promoted by the candidates themselves’. Rather, the
cartoons were ‘the speculative enterprises of various local printers

Question 86

The cartoon in Figure

1, issued in connection with the 1868 general election contest at Sheffield,

Answer 86

emphasizes
the electoral vulnerability of Roebuck, who had represented the borough since 1849.
The cartoon is an instance of how dissonance between text and image works to
produce meaning: Roebuck appears all the more vulnerable precisely because the
cartoonist refers to him by his popular nickname ‘Tear’em

symbolized Roebuck’s
renowned independent and belligerent political style.83 Despite his ferocious
reputation, ‘Tear’em’ is in danger of drowning in a sea of hazardous issues

fallen out of favour with the workers due to his aggressive and accusatory questioning
of trade unionists and what appeared to be his growing support for capital against
labour,

Roebuck’s undue favouring of capital has made him dangerously over-reliant on
the support of one class: the rod of ‘class interest’ is in danger of breaking under the
weight. Roebuck further damaged his popular credibility by resorting to ticketed (as
opposed to open) meetings as a means to rescue his candidature from abusive heckling;
hence the reference to ‘ticket meetings’ on the brim of the floating hat

Roebuck’s two faithful supporters are not confident that
they can save him. The figure undressing is W.C. Leng, editor of the Tory Sheffield
Daily Telegraph (transliterated into the life-ring), who in the early stages of the
campaign, when there had been no Tory candidate, had come out in support of
Roebuck.8

Question 87

cartoon in Figure 2 is a futuristic portrait of Sheffield under the
contrasting regimes of the radical Liberal Mundella and the increasingly right-wing
Roebuck.

Answer 87

Mundella’s enemies in Sheffield alleged that he employed cheap foreign labour from
Saxony, thus taking work away from the British working class – hence the reference in
the cartoon to foreign competition.92 Under Roebuck’s regime the workers are wellclothed,
well-fed and there is full employment

Question 88

The issue of whether to disestablish the state church was controversial and complex,
but it was not a particularly popular issue

Answer 88

and
popularize the issue by arguing that the state church belonged to the people of the
nation, a claim made frequently by the Church and its defenders. Here we see Edward
Miall, the advanced LiberalMP for Bradford and leading figure in the disestablishment
campaign, reduced to the instantly recognizable figure of the common robber who is
attempting to steal from the people who are personified by John Bull

The ability of cartoonists to simplify issues such as ‘Church in Danger’ did lead some
political commentators to voice concern that cartoons were indicative of a new
sensationalized and obtuse popular political culture

Question 89

chronology of local election cartoons (Roberts)

Answer 89

local election cartoons that have been the focus of this article flourished only for
a relatively short period of time – from the late 1860s through to the 1880s

significant increase in the number of cartoons from
the late 1860s, and not just in the West Riding. Technological advances in printing
from the 1850s, with the development of steam-driven presses, facilitated the largescale
lithographic reproduction of local election cartoons

more satisfactory explanation for the proliferation of cartoons from 1867 is to be
found in political developments, and in the commercial response to those
developments. In 1867 Disraeli’s Conservative government passed the Second Reform
Act. This gave the vote to many urban working men, and in doing so increased the size
of the electorate by 88 per cent. Both the Liberal and Conservative parties quickly
realized that they were facing a daunting new electoral world in which new means
would have to be employed to appeal to the ‘ordinary elector’. One of the first elections
to be held after the Reform Act was the Bradford by-election of 1867 – the first contest
in the West Riding in which the press made reference to election cartoons

some evidence to suggest that the rise of election cartoons
was, at least in part, a commercial venture. With so many people now in possession of
the vote, politics had the potential to be big business

Mass politics
and mass consumerism were now working in tandem.
The more difficult question to answer is why local election cartoons went into rapid
decline from the 1880s

what was once
produced locally was increasingly produced nationally. Kathryn Rix has argued that
centrally produced visual propaganda on a mass scale was apparent from the time of
the 1885 general election.108 The case study of election cartoons in the West Riding
suggests that the 1880 general election was the turning point, which suggests that one
should not put too much emphasis on the impact of the 1883–5 electoral reforms as
national influences were already exerting considerable pressure

Huddersfield most of the cartoons had been national in focus with only ‘a few of a
local character’.111 The discernible shift towards national cartoons lends support to
Martin Pugh’s argument that the 1880 general election was the first ‘modern election
… in that it produced a national campaign as distinct from the sporadic, localized
contests typical of mid-Victorian elections’.112 The locally produced election cartoon
had been a medium par excellence for registering this sporadic and localized electoral
culture, but its days were now numbered.
The extension of the franchise under the terms of the Third Reform Act to
agricultural labourers and village artisans led to a further expansion of all kinds of
political communication as the propaganda drive of organizations such as the National
Reform Union and the National Liberal Federation testifies. Although some cartoons
had circulated in county constituencies prior to the Third Reform Act, it is surely no
coincidence that there seems to have been fewer of them

Nationally produced cartoons were noticeably different from those produced locally.

focus was now more on the conflict between the national party leaders,116

shift that was being actively promoted by some national figures. Not only Gladstone
but a younger generation of politicians, notably Joseph Chamberlain and Lord
Randolph Churchill, were increasingly image-conscious and so began to court the
provincial press. This new visual politics of national celebrity began to overshadow the
local candidates who had formed the staple of local election cartooning. By the time of
the 1885 and 1886 general election the balance had shifted even further towards
nationally focused and produced cartoons. The Tories had recently established a
Conservative News Agency whose functions included the production and
dissemination of ‘tracts, leaflets, cartoons, and pictorial productions’.117 In addition,
the new stringent limits placed on the amount of money candidates could spend on
elections meant that there was a greater need for cheaper, mass produced material.118
By the 1890s advertisements began to appear in the provincial press for nationally
produced cartoons, for which there was clearly a growing demand

One of the major differences between national election cartoons and the older local
ones centred on their respective stance towards partisanship. Whereas local cartoons
had often been ambiguous and circumspect in their partisan affiliation, the party loyalties of national cartoons were almost always recognizably clear-cut. The trend
towards national cartoons also received a boost from the arrival of the Independent
Labour Party.

nature of the election cartoon had thus begun to change by the mid-1890s.
What had once been part of an autonomous local political culture was now increasingly
under the control of centralized party bureaucracies and newspaper editors rather than
local cartoonists and printers

enhanced the sense of membership of a local political
community.124 The local election cartoon

not merely been passive
reflectors of electoral culture, they had been part of that culture

As the focus and production shifted from the local to the national, something of this
local autonomous political culture was lost

in this respect the decline of local
election cartoons supports Vernon’s argument that with the rise of professionalized
party politics power shifted from the localities to the national centre

Whereas local election cartoons had formed part of a
vibrant inclusive street politics, epitomized by crowds viewing them in shop windows,
national cartoons were far more likely to be consumed privately in one’s home

1860s and 1870s local
election cartoons had been one of the few virtual means through which the people had
been able to view their political leaders. By the 1890s this was no longer the case as it
was becoming standard practice for candidates to issue photographs of themselves,

Local election cartoons had been one of the
few pictorial forms of political communication in the 1860s and 1870s. Yet by the
1890s they were competing with a whole range of pictorial material

Even
polling cards and other electioneering ephemera were adorned with illustrations.

As
newspaper and centralized party-political bureaucracies assumed more control over the
production and dissemination of election cartoons from the 1880s, they lost some of
their potency – much of which had lain in their partisan ambiguity, local spontaneity
and festivity.

rise of election cartoons was a response to mass enfranchisement, the view
that they were indicative of a ‘dumbing down’ approach to politics cannot be sustained.
Cartoons could be quite sophisticated and convey complex messages, or at the very
least function as an aid to the furtherance of political knowledge, and, as we have seen,
election cartoons and the press enjoyed something of a symbiotic relationship

proliferation of election cartoons after
1867 was part cause and part consequence of the politicization of the people

. Contrary to Vernon’s claims,
printed forms of communication, especially those that contain both image and word,
do not necessarily impose fixed verbatim meanings.129 While the present article
supports Vernon’s argument that there was a shift from the local to the national as party
bureaucracies sought to control the political message, the initial rise of election
cartoons in the 1860s cannot be interpreted as part of the transition to centralized party
control of print, a conclusion that Vernon implies by lumping election cartoons in with
the rise of other forms of printed political communication from the 1830s. As far as
election cartoons are concerned, that transition dates from the 1880s