To be a member of Parliament was in those days, of course, a more exacting claim upon one’s time and convenience than it is now. The meaningless tyranny of tradition still made it impossible to be represented in any circumstances by a proxy, and no effort had been made to relieve the burden of legislation except the institution, once a week, of “voting night”: the second and third readings of all bills, which had previously been liable to surprise the House at any odd moment, were now restricted to Wednesday evening, between the hours of nine and eleven. Sunday was, I believe, the day originally chosen, but it was found that this would interfere with too many private engagements. But the duty of presence in person still hung about our necks; and it is with some pride that I can boast never to have missed a voting night during the six years of my experience as a representative of the nation. On the other side, it must be admitted that the writing of a letter to the newspapers every month was then not a duty, but only an honourable understanding. Still, it will easily be conceived how the burdens of my new dignity interfered with the leisure of my quiet life at Greylands.

Every morning a large crate would arrive, containing the records of all the speeches made in the House the previous day. I always made a point of having them all turned on; and if I were called away from the room to interview the cook or for some similar purpose I would always leave Porstock behind me to hear what was said and to report on anything which had struck him: if this seemed sufficiently important, the dictaphone would have to be reversed till the important passage was reached again. Then, if I were down to speak myself the next day, I would have to shut myself up for an hour or so in the dictaphone room, till a perfect record could be secured. Even a question that had to be asked would be a matter of anxious care. I cannot imagine how the Ministers of those days can have found time for all their engagements, when questions had to be answered into the dictaphone, before the invention of the present mechanical process. Really, we are spoilt nowadays!

Nor were the incidental duties of a Member of Parliament inconsiderable. Now I would be writing my autograph in the prizes to be distributed at my old school; now I would be at the telephone opening a bazaar; now I would be trudging out, in all weathers, to the wireless installation at the back of the house to unveil a statue, to lay a foundation-stone, or (for I was still known as a sportswoman) to kick off at some Manchester football match. Now and again my secretaries would come in to consult me as to how they were to answer some troublesome constituent, whose letter they did not feel capable of answering on their own responsibility. There were Committees, too, of the House, one of them (the Kitchen Committee) actually demanding my personal presence. I also became, as was natural, directress of a good many companies, and it became necessary to build on a board-room at Greylands in which to entertain their Committees.

But, although the life of an M.P. was already a busy one, it was not even then an eventful one. Day followed day, and the press of business which had at first seemed so strange and so insupportable fell, as things will, under the enchantment of routine. But there was one period, in the spring of 1956, when the calm waters of Party politics were suddenly disturbed, and that through my agency. The “duodecimal crisis” which was a matter of so much talk and notoriety at the time, is almost forgotten nowadays, and I hope I shall be pardoned for dealing with it somewhat fully, since I was myself the centre of the storm.

The facts were, briefly, as follows. In 1929 the Conservative Government appointed a Commission to enquire into the possibility of introducing into England the decimal system of coinage, weights, measures, etc. Its sittings were interrupted by the accession of the Labour Government in the early thirties, which, among its first and most unpopular actions, drastically cut down the expenses allowed to the members of Royal Commissions. “It comes to this,” said Professor Drywater of Aberdeen, “that if I want to serve my country I shall have to serve it at my own expense.” Under the Independent Government the Commissions were revived, but little interest was shown in this particular enquiry. It was when the Conservatives returned to power in ’44 that the stimulus of public interest made the Commissioners redouble their efforts, and in less than ten years they had produced a series of recommendations which are still on record[[10]]. The shilling was only to count ten pennies, the half-sovereign and the “fiver” being retained at their present value in shillings as the units of gold coinage. There were to be ten inches to the foot, three and a third feet to the yard, and a thousand yards to the mile. The hundredweight would contain its exact 100 pounds, and the ton would weigh twenty-five hundredweight, or a hundred quarters—and so on. The scruple, the noggin, the chaldron, the hogshead, the gill, the pipe, and the rod, pole or perch disappeared altogether.

Mr. Holroyd was not of that narrow, factious spirit which would refuse to adopt a measure because that measure had been first suggested by an opponent. It was characteristic of the man that, when he was elevated to the peerage, he selected Fas est et ab Hoste Doceri for his family motto. The programme was adopted, not in the form of a private member’s Bill, but with the full backing of the Front Bench. The whole weight of the Tory opposition was immediately thrown into the scale against it. Readers of Punch will remember the cartoon of Lord Hopedale defending, in classical costume, the walls of Troy Weight against a serried rank of circular shields. The issue was a critical one; the battle was to be fought, not on the merits of the case, but as a test of Party strength. The by-elections had, for some time, been looking ominous; urgent “whips” were broadcasted by the Mechanics of either party; the Tories appealed to popular prejudice by asserting that they were fighting for the tankards of old England; and in many constituencies, it is believed, the whole proposal was obscurely identified with some measure of Temperance reform.

In an evil hour for my party, I had studied (it will be remembered) the Theory of Statistics at Oxford, and had sat at the feet of that erratic genius, Arthur Tonks. It was his favourite thesis that the whole civilized world was groaning under what he called “the decimal illusion.” Through a disastrous legacy of barbarism, he would tell us, we had all agreed to fix our “round number,” after which we started out on “double figures,” at the number of fingers with which Providence had endowed us. “Ladies,” he would tell us, “we are not barbarians, and we do not count on our fingers.” By his way of it, the multiple of three and four, which we have thrust on, as “twelve,” into the teens, ought to have been the round number of our calculations. He had therefore composed a system of counting of his own, which ran “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, tonk, tink, ten,” and was printed for short as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, *, &, 10. By this system, which at Oxford he always hoped to see universally adopted, and later, in his retirement, came to believe had actually been universally adopted, the whole business of calculation was to be infinitely simplified. His was the passion of a fanatic: he would date a letter, not “Sept. 22,” but as “Sept. 1*” (pronounced “tonkteen”), or tell you that the Battle of Waterloo had been fought in A.D. 1513, or announce his nine-thirty lecture as due to begin at “tink twenty-six.”

How saddening a feature it is of that strange process we call “education,” that while we are still in the pupil’s status we laugh at our tutors and make fun of their pet fads, and yet in later life, when those tutors are dead and can no longer accept our tardy homage, come back to the fads we once derided and make them our own! In this matter of coinage reform, I was determined that we would have no half-measures: we would not blunderingly imitate the clumsy practice of Continental nations. If we were to have reform at all, we would have reform on the right lines; “tonk” and “tink” should find their way into every schoolboy’s arithmetic book. If there were to be ten pennies to the shilling, then a penny should be change for tinkpence, and twopence should be change for tonkpence: if we were to have ten inches to the foot, then an inch short should be tink inches and two inches short should be tonk inches. I wrote a letter expounding and defending this principle to all the daily papers, all of which refused to print it, except the Manchester Guardian, which had little circulation in the metropolis. However, I was in a position to snap my finger at the dailies: Juliet Savage was now editing the Spectator, and she was at one with me in my present determination. Together we organized a violent campaign, reviving as we did so delightful memories of the Bilston Hall Rocket in early days. Poor Miss Montrose, long since gone to her rest, how she must have felt for Mr. Holroyd, attacked by the same two venomous pens that had once marred the peace of her quiet seminary!

My protest, which I had not communicated before to any of my Parliamentary colleagues, took the political world by surprise. The first I heard of it was a letter from Sir Hubert Gunter, the Chief Mechanic of the Democratic Party:

Dear Lady Porstock,—