The Party System has its critics; it will always have its critics. But you will not abolish it; you can do so only by being false to your own principles, and forming an anti-Party Party.—Lord Hopedale.

I had not, up to this time, taken much part in public affairs even on a small scale. I was indeed a member of the Licensing, Aviation, Game-preserving, and Afforestation Committees of the Hertfordshire County Council, and had lent the support of my name, rather than (I am afraid) of my personal endeavours to such unconnected objects as the Life-plane Society, the Nervous Hospitals, the Humane Cattle-killing Association, the I.F.L., and the Criminals’ Protection Society. It was in 1952 that circumstances, rather than any choice of my own, forced me to the front in connexion with the crisis that then occurred in the policy of the I.F.L. The whole thing is a matter of history, and there is no need to go into it in any detail here: it is enough to say that I felt at the time (and subsequent history has, I think, justified my view) that the whole existence of the League was at stake, and that it could only justify its existence by extending its activities on the lines which are now familiar to every one. There was considerable opposition, and many local secretaries resigned, but the party organized by Juliet Savage and myself was upheld by the central body, and the subsequent newspaper agitation only succeeded in making its promoters ridiculous.

In all this I had no intention of thrusting myself into prominence; I acted from a plain sense of public duty. But the proceeding had aroused a considerable amount of interest; and at this precise moment the Democratic Committee were looking about for promising young candidates, known to be in general sympathy with their programme, who would be likely to carry weight at the polls in the general election that was then recognized to be impending. It was a surprise, both to Porstock and to myself, when I got a confidential letter from the Chief Mechanic of the Democratic Party urging me to contest Manchester N.W. (3) in the Democratic interest in the event of an election. He pointed out to me that if I accepted the offer at once I should only have to pay the ordinary premium of £3,000, whereas if I waited till the dissolution actually took place the premium would have risen to £5,000, even if the outgoing Government had not by that time hurried a measure through to increase the rate.^[8] The financial consideration, it will easily be understood, was not very important to us, but the urgency of Sir Hubert Gunter’s tone (he was a personal friend of ours) left me little choice but to accept. I was accordingly nominated Democratic candidate for the constituency in March, 1953, seven months before Lord Hopedale went to the country.

It is necessary for me, I am afraid, at the risk of going over some ground which will be familiar to my more well informed readers, to go back a page or two in political history, in order to explain the complicated and critical position that had arisen at the moment of which I type. Up to 1931 political history is very fully documented, owing to the decision of the then Labour Government to publish all the secret documents which it inherited both from its Tory and from its Cabal^[9] predecessors. This publication has thrown a flood of light on the internal politics of the country, especially during the latter part of the Five Years’ War and the few years immediately following the outbreak of peace. Opinions will no doubt differ as to the propriety of the Labour Government’s action: there is a certain feeling of eaves-dropping when you read, as you may read nowadays, set out in the cold print of a history book, the confidential S.O.S. calls of a sorely harassed minister, with a vast number of conflicting claims to meet. The result, in any case, is that half-an-hour spent with Murdock’s Twenty Years of Diplomacy or Hammond’s George and his Critics will put the modern reader au fait with all that preceded the accession to power of Rosenstein’s Labour Government in ’31. Over its own private difficulties the Labour Administration did not show a similar frankness, nor did its successors, whether Tory, Independent, or Democratic, see fit to avenge themselves in kind. The full history, then, of all this period remains to be written: I can only resume the facts as they are generally known for the benefit of readers to whom (as so often happens) the events to the Boer War are far more familiar than the movements of their own times.

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.

I shall never forget a giant meeting that we held in the large hall of the Catholic Schools at Higher Broughton. My readers will realize how intense was the political excitement of the moment when I say that, although the building was designed to hold 3,000, it was more than half-full. The clapping, in those days, was still mostly done by hand, so that the volume of it hardly represented the full enthusiasm of the audience. The Chairwoman, Dame Horatia Philpotts, rose first and expressed in the usual way our gratitude that Mr. Holroyd, the leader of the Opposition party, had been prevailed upon to speak to us to-night. There was no need to remind her audience how well Mr. Holroyd had deserved of his country, or how his services had been recognized by friends and foes alike. It was unfortunate that Mr. Holroyd could not be present with us in person, but it would easily be understood that at such a moment as this the time of a public man in such a position was very valuable, and, after all, one could not be everywhere! (Actually, Mr. Holroyd was on the Riviera.) However, we should have the advantage of hearing his own words and seeing his own gestures—a benefit for which we were indebted to the unconquerable march of Science. Dame Horatia then sat down; the lights were put at low pressure, and the well-known figure of Mr. Holroyd appeared on the screen, amidst a deafening applause of the rather wooden quality our old thorybophones used to produce.

He proceeded to tell us, with his well-known clutching gesture, that while he had had many proud moments in his political career, none had been prouder than that at which he rose to address an audience so enlightened and so broad-minded as ours, in a political centre of such unique importance as this. We had met at a crisis in the history of our nation. Great issues hung in the balance, to be decided once for all, and to carry with them, in accordance with that decision, the dissolution of our Empire or its reconstruction on a nobler, a fairer, and a more permanent basis. (Here the gramophone was stopped for a few moments, and the statesman’s face was enlarged on the screen, to give us the full benefit of his expression.) There were some, there would always be some, who were ready to cry “Halt!” at the moment of victory, and to arrest the march of progress, if they could, in mid career. He hoped that those were not the feelings with which we had come into the hall to-night. For himself, he was convinced that we stood on the threshold of a newer and a fairer world. (Here a voice interrupted him with “What about McClosky?”—the bomb-thrower who was then under sentence of execution.) He naturally took no notice of the interruption.

Unfortunately, a certain section of the audience were impatient to hear his views on this particular issue, and began to sing “And shall McClosky die?” in a very loud and threatening voice. It being impossible to disconnect the cinemaphone all at once, a large part of Mr. Holroyd’s sentiments were inaudible. The tumult subsided when the lights went up, but, as it proved, only temporarily. The film was no sooner released than a dastardly crowd began to hurl a varied assortment of missiles at the figure of the venerable statesman; which, however, fortunately did no damage, as the pictures were being thrown direct on to a concrete wall: an ink-pot left a slight but disfiguring blotch somewhere in the region of Mr. Holroyd’s waistcoat. The rowdy element, however, were not satisfied with this; several of them made an attempt to rush the cinema-operator. They were thwarted in their purpose and sand-bagged by the police; but the operator seemed to have lost his nerve, and from that time onwards the film was anything but a success. Again and again it was clear that the gestures on the screen were not accurately timed to correspond to the words; again and again the attempt was made to readjust the timing, but always unsuccessfully. At last, at the end of an impassioned period, my leader was seen to refresh himself with a drink of water. But, to our surprise, the glass which he took up in the picture was an empty one, and a moment later, to the vociferous delight of the whole audience, it became painfully clear that the film had been put in wrong end on! I cannot profess that the meeting after that was a wholly serious one, or that my speech was anything but a frost by comparison. Such contretemps are the penalties which attend the pioneers of Science!

On the whole, my electioneering experiences were not very thrilling. My opponent, Sir Philip Hazelbright, made a good stand, but he was not able to stem the flood of popular feeling. The country was tired after nine years of Tory rule, and everywhere showed the intensity of its feeling in the most unmistakable way: in more than one constituency more than half the voters on the register went to the polls. It must be admitted, too, that business losses had hit Sir Philip hard, and his side were not in a position to pay the expenses of their voters as handsomely as ours. The result was a foregone conclusion; yet it was estimated that upwards of 1,000 people assembled in front of the Town Hall to hear the two large gramophones there telling each other that they had fought the contest in a fair and sportsmanlike manner.

I was recalled by serious news from home at the very instant of my triumph. Our younger son, Gervase, had contracted whooping cough severely, and was lying dangerously ill at Greylands. I should explain that in those days, before Hoscher discovered the autococcus—a discovery for which humanity will owe him a permanent debt of gratitude—it was necessary to have one’s children inoculated separately for all the leading diseases, from chicken-pox and measles to sleeping-sickness. This was usually done at the age of three, as soon as they had recovered from the tonsil and adenoid operation. Gervase’s inoculation, we now remembered, had never seemed to “take” very satisfactorily, and we bitterly regretted that we had not had it repeated. I found that Porstock had called in a chest-doctor to attend the cough, and a mind-doctor to cure the whoop; the latter, mindful of my own experiences twenty years earlier, I got rid of on the spot. He had been making the poor child sit up in bed repeating to himself, “It is very rude to hiccough in company.” We had a very anxious fortnight, and the chest-doctor, Mr. Dolman, said he thought he had never come nearer to losing a fee. But in the end our boy’s strong constitution triumphed, and a month in the Fens put him on his legs again.

I must record, in connexion with this illness, a clever saying of our elder boy, Francis. Meeting Mrs. Rowlands in the hall one day while his brother was very bad, he asked “if it would be right to pray that his brother might get well.” Mrs. Rowlands, who had her views on this as on most other points, said perhaps it would be safer to pray to God that His will might be done. The first time he met her again after Gervase’s recovery he said to her very seriously, “Now, Mrs. Rowlands, ought I to thank God for doing His will?” For once, Mrs. Rowlands had to own defeat.