Memories of the future

by Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

Lord Billericay, who took an active interest in politics in his young days, used to tell me that the Labour Government, in his opinion, might have lasted sixteen years instead of six if they had only let racing alone. The truth was that Charles Ropes, although he seemed the only possible leader of the party when Rosenstein went into his cure, was a doctrinaire of the old Nonconformist type. The result was that when the Horses Utilization Bill was thrown out and the Government resigned on it, there were bills for the disestablishment of the Church, universal secular education, the taxation of town sites, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the demobilization of two-thirds of the army, all waiting to pass their third reading and all regarded as non-contentious measures. In the very hour of its achievement the Government had gone out, leaving no permanent memorial of its tenure of office except Indian Home Rule and the Entente with Russia. Its publication of our treaties with foreign powers, from which such a commotion was expected, proved after all to be a false alarm; for the terms of them were so inconsistent with one another that they were immediately treated as forgeries.

It was a far more difficult question who was to take up the reins of power which had been thus abruptly dropped. Lord Hopedale’s efforts to form a Conservative ministry were at once greeted with the threat of a strike from 138 separate industries. The Liberals vainly appealed for a lead to six different statesmen, all of whom refused to leave their retirement. The attempt to form a new Labour Government, which would disown Mr. Ropes and his Horses Utilization Bill, the “Sporting Workers” as they were called, proved a fiasco. People were seriously questioning whether the affairs of the nation would not have to be openly administered by the Crown. And then began that unique political expedient which has gone down to history with the short-lived dictatorship of Sulla and the Jesuit Government of Paraguay.

I see that Mrs. McKechnie, in her Reminiscences, attributes the suggestion to a letter in the Daily News. I am sorry to have to supply a correction to a work otherwise so distinguished by accuracy; but I happen to remember the circumstances with peculiar exactness, because I was at Oxford at the time, living in a whirl of political activities such as one only makes for oneself at Oxford, and consequently in a better position to give first-hand evidence than a writer who is speaking of a period when she had not yet left the nursery for the schoolroom. For about a fortnight on end the Daily Mail had a series of letters saying, “Dear Sir, Why do you not save the country by taking its destinies into your own hands? Yours etc. Indignant Englishman,” and so on. At the end of this time an article in the Daily News (not a letter) made the suggestion that newspaper proprietors should become a ruling caste according to the size of their circulation: but any one who read the article in the spirit in which it was written could see quite clearly that it was all meant for a joke, a satire on the wearisome correspondence which was being printed by its contemporary. That the Mail took the initiative in treating the suggestion seriously is evident from the fact that its circulation at the time was nearly half a million ahead. It was the Mail, too, which first proposed that the less popular dailies should combine with the more widely sold ones, so as to avoid group Government: and it is noteworthy, that the Evening News fell in with this suggestion two days before the Star.

Mrs. McKechnie’s whole account of the matter seems to me to be something of an ex parte statement. It is quite true in an ordinary way that “one does not take in a paper unless one agrees with its politics,” but a list of the “insurance claims” paid at that time to readers of the more prominent organs is a valuable commentary on the doctrine. That the Independent Government left behind it a quite innocuous record may also be admitted, but it must be admitted on the other side that it has left behind it no single important legislative bequest. It disappeared without leaving a ripple upon the surface of National politics.

It remained for Lord Hopedale’s Administration to reinstate the Party system. Some have held that they showed vindictiveness in their management of the situation, but it was a situation which needed strong measures. Party Government is surely not possible without party funds, and these had to be recruited somehow. The old system of “bought peerages” had, as Lord Millthorpe said, “done its work”; in fact, there was a glut. The Americans, too, were insisting very strongly that the purity of the aristocracy should be safeguarded. There seemed nothing for it but to place a slight premium on all elections to Parliament, which was almost negligible when compared with the honourable status given by a seat in the House of Commons, quite apart from the business advantages. At the same time the new arrangement discouraged, once for all, the appearance on the hustings of candidates who were only anxious to promote some doctrinaire fad of their own, and had not enough sense of discipline to “toe the line” with either of the great political parties. There was another novelty in the Parliamentary Elections Act, which it is difficult to imagine as having been dispensed with by earlier Governments—the provision, namely, by which any member who votes against his own party has thereupon to seek re-election.

But the raising of the premium from £5,000 to £7,500 was a piece of frank electioneering, and it is difficult to see how a statesman of Lord Hopedale’s honourable record can have made himself a party to it. The Party in power had always the advantage in finding candidates, since it was possible to guess with some sort of accuracy what programme they meant to take to the country; whereas the Opposition, since their programme was seldom worked out in detail until a week before the elections, had to ask their candidates to take their policy on trust. Since the Democrats were, on the whole, men of a more moderate income than the Conservatives, it seemed at one moment that it would be well-nigh impossible to fill the coupons. As it was, old Sir Arthur Bates had to appeal to his constituency from a bath-scooter, and Mrs. Farnham, though the doctors said she might wave her arms, was not allowed to speak.

In those days it was customary, at election time, for candidates to travel down to their constituency and address the electors by word of mouth. This was indeed necessary, for the cinemaphone was not yet properly perfected. The speech of the evening was, of course, delivered by the leader of the Party by this means, but it had the disadvantage that any loud interruption from the audience could prevent a part, sometimes a large part, of the cinemaphone record from being heard: and at that time (it seems hard to believe!) it was impossible to reverse the cinemaphone without starting the record all over again! I confess that, to my mind, the personal presence of the candidate has always seemed an advantage; it stimulated a local interest in politics such as you rarely see nowadays; nor was it possible for the electresses to complain that they had chosen their representative without ever really knowing what he looked like, having only seen what a cinema director could make him look like at a pinch. And there is something, after all, in the personal touch, in the direct intercourse between the member and her constituents: the wax dummies of to-day can indeed chuck babies under the chin with as much precision as we used to, but they cannot win the heart.

Anyhow, I travelled down in person to Manchester N.W. (3). I had never been in Manchester before, and admired the city from the first moment I set foot in it. The municipal buildings, noble examples of that Waterhouse Gothic which we vainly try to imitate nowadays; the moving platforms in Market Street, said to be the fastest in the world: the wireless installation on the Cathedral, which records all the movements of German theology several hours ahead of any other English centre: the marble cupolas of the Synagogue in the Bury New Road: the “super-landing-stages” on Kersal Moor—all spoke of a city full of vitality and unceasingly awake. I had been fortunate enough (owing to my early candidature) to secure the Midland Hotel as my Head-quarters. This enabled my supporters to refresh themselves, between business hours, with unlimited games of tennis, water-polo in the large swimming bath, a continuous day-and-night cinema in the theatre, continuous concerts in the Winter Garden, and continuous cocktails at the American Bar. An enormous sky-sign over the roof invited the public to elect “a Lancashire lass for a Lancashire Borough”—this was a bright thought which occurred to my head agent as soon as he realized that the Linthorpes had property in Westmorland.

The Parliamentary Elections Act had already abolished the vicious system by which candidates used to take pledges, i.e. to promise their support beforehand to this or that measure in deference to the wishes of the electorate. As Lord Hopedale finely said, it was a system which “stifled conscience, muzzled freedom of speech, hampered the operation of salutary afterthoughts, and left the Government free indeed to interpret, but not free to direct, the will of a civilized nation.” (His great speech on Parliamentary Elections is still shown nowadays, though the film is somewhat marred through the head and shoulders of the statesman being slightly fogged throughout.) I have been told by old Parliamentary hands that the relief afforded by the abolition of “pledges” was inconceivable. In elections previous to that of 1953 they used to be subjected to an elaborate catechism as to their intentions over this or that question of public policy. It meant almost uninterrupted wireless communication with head-quarters for more than a week; and even so it caused great difficulty when head-quarters, as was naturally liable to happen, changed its policy as the election proceeded. With the best intentions in the world, it was often almost impossible to satisfy all the demands made upon you from different quarters by a hundred conflicting “leagues,” “associations,” and organizations of all sorts. Further, if you were successful in your candidature, it meant that for at least six months after your election you were liable to be cross-examined by your constituents as to why your vote in the House of Commons had not been in strict accordance with the intentions you had expressed at an earlier date in quite different circumstances. It made the individual member individually responsible for the policy of his party leader, in a way that is to our minds fortunately unthinkable. “They expected a feller,” Tommy Lieberts complained to me, “to remember which jolly old way he had voted and explain why the jolly old deuce he had done it.”

As I say, I escaped this vicious legacy of an earlier Parliamentary theory. But it was still customary, in my time, for deputations to call upon the candidate and urge upon her consideration the claims of their various interests. My constituency was full of Jews and Catholics, and their denominational schools were, then as now, a constant source of difficulty: there was the inevitable rumour that the Democrats intended to reduce the wages of denominational pupils. There was a local murderer, who had bombed his wife and children in an attic: several charitable deputations were loud for his reprieve, while several others seemed equally bent on his electrolysis. The employees of a large cellulose firm had gone on strike without being able to show possession of the statutory minimum of funds—there was the question of these being reinstated: and so on. Naturally, the complaints were only received by the dictaphone, but the mere effort of shaking hands with all these people was considerable.