What are known as scenes in the House were not infrequent in ‘Q’s’ time. He recalls one in which an otherwise undistinguished member for Oxford, one Hughes Hughes, was made the butt. It was a flash of the peculiar, not always explicable, humour of the House of Commons, still upon occasion predominant, to refuse a gentleman a hearing. ‘Hughes’s rising was the signal for continuous uproar,’ ‘Q’ writes. ‘At repeated intervals a sort of drone-like drumming, having the sound of a distant hand organ or bagpipes, arose from the back benches. Coughing, sneezing and ingeniously extended yawning blended with other sounds. A voice from the Ministerial benches imitated very accurately the yelp of a kennelled hound.’
For ten minutes the double-barrelled Hughes faced the music, and when he sat down not a word save the initial ‘Sir’ had been heard from his lips.
The nearest approach to this scene I remember happened in the last session of the Parliament of 1868-74, when, amidst similar uproar, Cavendish Bentinck, as one describing at the time the uproar wrote, ‘went out behind the Speaker’s Chair and crowed thrice.’ This was the occasion upon which Sir Charles Dilke made his Parliamentary début. In Committee of Ways and Means he, in uncompromising fashion that grated on the ears of loyalists, called attention to the Civil List of Queen Victoria and moved a reduction. Auberon Herbert, now a staid Tory, at that time suspected of a tendency towards Republicanism, undertook to second the amendment. Sir Charles managed amid angry interruptions to work off his speech. Herbert, following him, was met by a storm of resentment that made his sentences inaudible.
After uproar had prevailed for a full quarter of an hour a shamefaced member, anxious for the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments, called attention to the presence of strangers. Forthwith, in accordance with the regulation then in force, the galleries were cleared. As the occupants of the Press Gallery reluctantly departed, they heard above the shouting the sound of cock-crowing. Looking over the baluster they saw behind the Chair Little Ben, as Cavendish Bentinck was called to distinguish him from his bigger kinsman, vigorously engaged upon a vain effort to preserve order by a passable imitation of Chanticleer saluting the happy morn.
From ‘Q’s’ report of another outbreak of disorder it would appear that in the House meeting in the ‘thirties of the nineteenth century, exchange of personalities went far beyond modern experience. The once heated Maynooth question was to the fore. In the course of an animated set-to between a Mr. Shaw and Daniel O’Connell, the former shouted ‘The Hon. Member has charged me with being actuated by spiritual ferocity. My ferocity is not of the description which takes for its symbol a death’s head and cross bones.’ O’Connell, as a certain fishwife locally famous for picturesque language discovered, was hard to beat in the game of vituperation. Turning upon Shaw, he retorted ‘Yours is a calf’s head and jaw bones.’
‘Q’ records that the retort was greeted with deafening cheers from the Ministerial side where O’Connell and his party were seated. Mr. Shaw’s polite, but perhaps inconsequential, remark had been received with equal enthusiasm by the Opposition.
AFTER THE BATTLE.
BY BENNET COPPLESTONE.