‘The great problem of our civilisation is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence for abundant wealth and teeming prosperity.’
(Joseph Chamberlain in 1885, quoted on page 122)

Joe Chamberlain was to become the only politician in British history to split two parties and destroy two governments of which he was a member.
(The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley, page 105)

Joseph Chamberlain (1836 to 1914) shot like a charismatic meteor across the late-Victorian and Edwardian political scene.

Chamberlain made his name as a Liberal reforming mayor of Birmingham, where he cleared the slums and introduced municipal control of gas, water and electricity supplies, rousing loyal support and bating entrenched interests with his fire-breathing, radical oratory. He entered the House of Commons in 1876 at the relatively advanced age of 39, as a Liberal Party MP for his home turf, Birmingham. He rose quickly and after just 4 years the Liberal leader, Gladstone, gave him a cabinet position as President of the Board of Trade in 1880.

What is enjoyable and interesting about Judd’s biography is he takes you right into the nitty-gritty of the local administration of a dirty, polluted but relentlessly growing late-Victorian city like Birmingham, and then into the knotty detail of Chamberlain’s Parliamentary career. He gives you a powerful sense of how difficult it is to get into any position of power, how challenging it is to formulate meaningful policies, and then of the struggle to co-opt support and create coalitions ready to take on often very entrenched interests, if you want to change and improve things.

Reforming acts

Take, for example, the acts Chamberlain supervised as President of the Board of Trade, 1880 to 1885:

• a Grain Cargoes Bill for the safer stowing of cargoes
• a Seaman’s Wages Bill for fairer wages
• an Electric Lighting Bill which enabled municipalities to set up electricity supplies either themselves or through private companies
• a Bankruptcy Bill which created a body of official receivers in order to investigate and speed up bankruptcies, where necessary
• a Merchant Shipping Bill designed to stop owners sending to sea unworthy ships, known as ‘coffin ships’, in the expectancy that they would sink and the owners claim the insurance money; due to the resistance of big business, the Bill failed (pages 106 to 108)

Radical Joe

Although Chamberlain rose to prominence as a crusading, reforming mayor of Birmingham, the opening chapter of the book details the surprising fact that he was born and bred in London, first in semi-rural Camberwell, then in smart Canonbury. His father was a successful merchant with a shop in Cheapside and Chamberlain didn’t go to university but left his private school at 18 and went to work for his father’s firm. It was only when a business opportunity arose in Birmingham, to invest in a new firm being set up to exploit a new technique to mass manufacture pointed screws, that his father dispatched him to England’s second city to look into the opportunity.

Chamberlain was by all accounts an extremely effective businessman or, as his enemies put it, relentless and ruthless. But he was from the start interested in local politics, active as a counsellor and then elected mayor in 1873 where he set new standards for slum clearance, clean water and sewage facilities etc. With the same ruthless efficiency he had brought to business, Chamberlain now embarked on a systematic programme of municipal improvement; this included the building of branch and central libraries, raising money for the art gallery and other public collections to be augmented, founding public swimming pools, new parks and gardens.

Judd liberally quotes from Chamberlain’s speeches and letters which are very enjoyable, pithy, clear and forceful. (Many contemporaries testified to what Beatrice Potter called his ‘energy and personal magnetism… [that he possessed] masculine force in a superlative degree.’ p.76.)

These letters, articles and speeches show how, right from the start of his career, Chamberlain really understood the misery and poverty of many in Victorian cities. Take this excerpt from an article in The Fortnightly Review, the Liberal periodical edited by his friend and political ally, John Morley:

We are compelled occasionally to turn aside from the contemplation of our virtues and intelligence and wealth, to recognise the fact that we have in our midst a vast population more ignorant than the barbarians whom we profess to convert, more miserable than the most wretched in other countries to whom we attempt from time to time to carry succour and relief. (p.72)

And he had, right from the start, a firm belief in the ability of local and national government to physically improve the environment of the poor and, by so doing, significantly improve their lives, as expressed in a speech he gave when opening Highgate Park in Birmingham:

‘It is simply nonsense to wonder at the want of refinement of our people when no opportunity is given to innocent enjoyment. We are too apt to forget that the ugliness of our ordinary English existence has a bad influence on us.’ (quoted page 67)

It was this kind of straight-talking support of the poor, and his acts and bills which aggressively took on entrenched interests, which quickly earned him the reputation as a radical, a socialist or even a communist, although Judd makes clear he was neither. Chamberlain is quoted in numerous contexts clarifying that he thought the improvement of the lot of the poor was not only a moral good in itself but was a form of social insurance which would ensure the ongoing survival of the wealthy, propertied classes, classes which he never seriously threatened (p.117).

Nonetheless the accusation that he was a fire-breathing republican led to much popular entertainment, for example the rash of humorous cartoons when he was obliged to kiss the Queen-Empress Victoria’s hand upon taking his Cabinet post (p.102).

In July 1885 Chamberlain wrote the preface to a pamphlet titled the ‘Radical Programme’, the first campaign handbook in British political history. The Programme proposed: free elementary education; land reform including measures to help people buy land, taxes on unoccupied or unused land, provision of allotments and smallholdings by local authorities; higher rates for big landed estates; progressive income tax on land owned; an increase in direct as opposed to indirect tax; encouragement of local government and housing schemes; as well as free public education, the disestablishment of the Church of England, universal male suffrage, and more protection for trade unions.

He also proposed to separate the goal of free education for every child from the religious question. His policy was rejected by groups on all sides, who continued to use education as a political weapon, including the National Liberal Federation, Nonconformists, Catholics, and the Church of England-supporting establishment.

The Radical Programme earned the scorn of Whigs and Conservatives alike. Chamberlain had written to his friend, John Morley, that with Radical solidarity ‘we will utterly destroy the Whigs, and have a Radical government before many years are out.’ But in the event nothing came of it. Gladstone’s Liberal government was defeated on an amendment to its budget and Gladstone resigned, to be replaced by a minority administration led by Lord Salisbury (who had replaced Benjamin Disraeli as leader of the Conservative Party when Disraeli died in 1881; Salisbury led the party from the House of Lords, with a deputy in the Commons, still a possibility in those days).

Insults and abuse

Chamberlain established from the start of his career a reputation for plain speaking which sometimes overstepped the boundaries of decorum. Before he’d even been elected as an MP, soon after being nominated to stand, he rashly denounced the then-Prime Minister Disraeli, as ‘a man who never told the truth except by accident; a man who went down to the House of Commons and flung at the British Parliament the first lie that entered his head.’ (p.75). He was quickly forced to apologise.

During the intense period of manoeuvring between the various factions of both the Liberal and Conservative Parties which led up to the 1884 Reform Act, Chamberlain notoriously declared in a speech that Salisbury was ‘himself the spokesman of a class – a class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin’ (p.118). In response, Salisbury branded Chamberlain a ‘Sicilian bandit’ and his deputy in the Commons, Stafford Northcote, called him ‘Jack Cade’.

1. Home Rule

Chamberlain’s first big contribution to history was to split the Liberal Party in 1886 over Home Rule for Ireland. In early 1886 a new Liberal administration was elected and Gladstone made widely known his determination to push through a bill permitting home rule for the Irish. Chamberlain vehemently objected, on the basis that it would weaken the power of the British House of Commons and introduce fractures into the foundations of the wider British Empire. Chamberlain’s alternative was a plan for a federal system for not only Ireland but Scotland too, which would create an Irish devolved administration with powers over internal affairs. It was a masterpiece of compromise which satisfied none of the parties involved.

After a lot of manoeuvring, Chamberlain led a group which came to be called the Liberal Unionists out of the Liberal Party proper and into independent existence, thus severely weakening Gladstone’s Liberal government. There then followed years of complex machinations, but the Unionists, by their very nature, came into closer tactical alliances with the Conservative Party and eventually merged with them.

2. Liberal Imperialism

Chamberlain’s second massive contribution was to become the cheerleader for British Imperialism during the peak of jingoistic enthusiasm from the mid 1890s to the middle Edwardian years. (The British Empire didn’t reach its geographic peak until after the Great War when Britain awarded itself various colonies belonging to the defeated Germans and also adopted ‘mandates’ in the Middle East.)

Secretary of State for the Colonies

When a Conservative government was returned after the 1895 general election with the help of Chamberlain’s bloc of 50 or so Liberal Unionists, the new leader, Lord Salisbury, offered Chamberlain a cabinet position. To many people’s surprise, Chamberlain turned down more senior departments and chose the Colonial Office, becoming Secretary of State for the Colonies, an office he held for the next eight years.

It is fascinating to read about how the British Empire was actually administered. In modern cultural discourse it is dismissed as one big evil monolith but, of course, it was a lot more complicated than that, run, like most British affairs, in a ramshackle, amateurish way. The Indian Empire was run by a separate office, the Secretary of State for India and, anyway, Chamberlain never showed much interest in it. His responsibility was for 11 self-governing colonies of white settlement with a European population of 11 million, and a jumble of crown colonies, protectorates and chartered territories, with a population of around 40 million (p.187).

Chamberlain’s Liberal Imperialism was an extension of the Radical reforming approach he’d brought to Birmingham. He thought that by wise investment, the disparate territories clumped together as ‘the Empire’ could be made more economically efficient and productive, its people educated and provided better jobs, housing, amenities, infrastructure and so on. He was a hard-working and diligent colonial secretary (notably unlike many of his predecessors) but his tenure is remembered for two policies which were out and out failures.

1. The Boer War

Chamberlain encouraged the ill-fated and derided Jameson Raid of December to January 1895, a force of 500 British soldiers led into the Boer-held Transvaal in expectation that the large number of British labourers working in its gold mines would rise up, join them, and together the Brits would seize government from the properly constituted Boer government. Not only was this a shameful attempt at a coup, but a shambles and dismal failure. How much exactly Chamberlain a) knew about it b) encouraged the conspirators, is unclear to this day, but the fact that establishing his role was one of the aims of the subsequent British government enquiry shows there was widespread belief that he was involved.

His continued support of the parties who wanted to take on and conquer the Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) so as to absorb them into an unambiguously British country of South Africa, meant that when the Boer War commenced in October 1899, many critics saw it as ‘Joe’s War’. Thus his name became associated with the military disasters of the first six months of the war, with the humiliating failure to end it, with its long drawn-out two years of guerrilla fighting, with the shameful policy of rounding up Boar farmers’ wives and families into concentration camps which were so appallingly run (by the shambolic British army) hat some 28,000 died of hunger and disease. Not a good look for someone who had once been a radical, reforming politician, always on the side of the poor.

What makes the Boer War all the more of a pitiful shambles was that, within a few years, the Boers were restored to full power over their own republics. It need never have been fought at all.

2. Tariff reform

As to tariff reform, Judd details the complexities of Chamberlain’s decisions, first to commit himself wholeheartedly to trying to create a tariff or customs union between the nations of the empire, and secondly, once he’d made this decision, the very complicated negotiations with Arthur Balfour, who had taken over leadership of the Conservative Party in 1902 and which led Chamberlain, ultimately, to resign from the Conservative cabinet and to set up a well-funded and well-organised national campaign for tariff reform.

And then shows in sad detail how it was doomed, for at least two reasons. Chamberlain, like plenty of other British politicians, businessmen and commentators, had realised that British business was being out-performed by its international rivals, America and Germany. His solution was to unite the white imperial nations – Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – into a customs union to encourage mutual trade and create a powerful economic and agricultural bloc which could hold its own against competitors. The only problems were:

a) Economic reality

• Experts showed him that trade between the colonies and Britain had been steadily declining i.e. we did more trade with the rest of the world and that percentage was increasing.
• There was no getting round the fact that, if we imposed extra tariffs on goods entering the union from outside, that would increase the cost of food, seeing as most of the UK’s foodstuffs were imported. Hence the slogan developed by the Liberal opposition, ‘Big loaf, little loaf’, meaning big loaf under the Liberals, little loaf under the tariff reforming Tories.

So Chamberlain was forced to abandon hard facts in preference for rhetoric about the Empire as a civilising force and the power of the Anglo-Saxon peoples when united, and so on. Although he started from Radical roots, he ended up sounding as pompous as the windiest Conservative. And this kind of rhetoric about the great British Empire and the great Anglo-Saxon peoples was extremely popular, his movement distributed posters and banners and badges and placards, and held countless meetings, and was widely supported by leading newspapers of the time. It was wildly popular and it was a complete failure.

b) Political reality

Unfortunately, the other ‘white’ colonies, or the dominions to give them their technical name, weren’t all that interested in Chamberlain’s rhetoric. A meeting was held of all the leaders in London at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee (1887), another one was held (in Ottowa) in 1894, then Chamberlain organised another one in 1897 and arranged for them to be held at regular intervals thereafter. And so they were: 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, 1918, 1921 and so on, being replaced, after the Second World War, by the Commonwealth Prime Ministers meeting.

But at those early meetings Chamberlain was disappointed to discover that the colonial governments were very hard bargainers indeed, cared nothing for his imperialist rhetoric, and were only prepared to negotiate tough deals in their own advantage.

The 1906 Liberal landslide

Balfour’s Conservative government was plainly running out of steam during 1905, and Chamberlain’s aggressive tariff reform campaign did it a lot of damage by attacking Balfour’s refusal to commit to it wholeheartedly. The election held in January 1906 was a devastating defeat for the Conservative and Unionist Party, leaving them with the fewest seats in the party’s history (156), and the Liberal Party with a record landslide victory which kept them in government till the middle of the Great War.

Summary

So it’s a fascinating story, fascinating in the detail of Chamberlain’s youth and young business success, and how he parlayed that into a dazzlingly successful career in local politics leading to him becoming the superstar mayor of Britain’s second city. Fascinating to learn how, when he entered Parliament then government, he continued his radical approach with bills and acts designed to help the poor and exploited. And then fascinating to watch the distortion of these early principles when he came to apply them as Colonial Secretary, the man who had once been feared as a communist revolutionary ending up encouraging the Boer War and trying to create an entirely impractical policy of imperial union which ended up dividing the nation.

When I picked up this book second hand I didn’t realise it was quite so old (1977). Partly because it comes from the era before critical theory became widespread in the humanities, it is a wonderfully readable account, short on politically correct carping and long on a sympathetic understanding of the Unitarian, non-conformist origins of the Chamberlain family. The older reader such as myself is perfectly capable of recognising the racism and the sexism prevalent throughout the age and  often found in Chamberlain’s attitudes, without having it made the centre of the account to the neglect of the other important aspects of his political theory and practice. The sympathetic way Judd handles Chamberlain’s non-conformist origins makes it all the more poignant when we read the letters in which he confessed to close friends how the death of his wife in childbirth had made him question and then completely reject his native religion.

The art of the possible

More interestingly, like the Richard Shannon book I read recently only more so, Judd’s account takes you deep into the nitty-gritty of real, actual politics, which is the art of the possible and how this, in practice, comes down to endless number-crunching – how policy-makers are mainly concerned with: a) how many people will vote for them at a general election; b) what number of MPs they will gain; and then c) how to mobilise these numbers in order to get actual bills passed into law.

(It was, apparently, Bismarck who said that: ‘Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best’.)

It is eye-opening to read so many accounts of the back-room horse-trading and negotiations, of the creation of coalitions, of the offers and counter-offers and endless behind-the-scenes negotiations which were required to get even the simplest piece of legislation passed through Parliament.

It makes you realise the immense distance between, on the one hand, the grand and rousing rhetoric of politicians’ speeches and articles and party manifestos and the broad hopes of commentators and critics on the Left or Right for sweeping social change, for Noble Principles and Grand Visions – and, on the other hand, the extremely cramped and narrow room for manoeuvre most actual governments and politicians in power have to operate within.

Immersing yourself in the clotted realities of the politics of this faraway era, and studying Chamberlain’s brilliant but ultimately frustrated career, really helps you understand why politics so consistently results in disappointment. It suggests that the high hopes of all commentators, of both left and right, are always going to be disappointed.

Remember the high hopes which greeted the election of Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997? How is he regarded now? Remember the high hopes of Gordon Brown’s supporters that, when he assumed the leadership, we would finally have a proper democratic socialist government. How did that pan out? Remember the Liberals going into coalition with the Conservatives telling their supporters how it would allow them to implement lovely Liberal policies? How did that end up for them?

And then the past five years of Brexit mayhem, 2016 to 2021, including the hilarious decision of Theresa May’s advisers to go for a snap general election in April 2017, promising it would lead to ‘strong and stable’ leadership? But which in fact led to a hung parliament in which she was entirely dependent on the support of the tiny Democratic Unionist Party to stay in power? And then faced a series of no confidence votes until she was replaced by Boris Johnson, the same Boris Johnson who sacked all his moderate MPs and bulldozed through the worst possible Brexit deal, which we will all now have to live with for a generation?

Politics = disappointment.

In fact it was in an essay precisely about Joseph Chamberlain that Enoch Powell MP wrote his often-quoted judgement:

‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

So Chamberlain is not just a disappointing politician but, in Powell’s view, the epitome of the politician who had all the gifts, who worked hard, who had deeply held principles and yet…whose political career fizzled out in failure and disappointment.

Two divorces

The book features two high-profile divorces from the period.

Dilke and the Crawford divorce

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Second Baronet (1843 to 1911) was an English Liberal, Radical politician and good friend of Chamberlain’s. He helped the passage of the Third Reform Act and supported laws giving the municipal franchise to women, legalising labour unions, improving working conditions and limiting working hours, as well as being one of the earliest campaigners for universal schooling. In July 1886 the MP Donald Crawford sued his wife, Virginia, for divorce, citing Dilke. At the trial in February 1886, the judge found in Crawford’s favour.

Two months later, determined to clear his name, Dilke reopened the case but was subject to a withering cross-examination from which he emerged much worse off. Virginia alleged that Dilke had introduced her to every type of French vice and even that he had introduced a serving girl into their bed. The result was that Dilke’s name became a byword for lurid sexual scandal and he became the butt of music-hall songs. Dilke lost his seat in the 1886 general election, the Queen demanded he be stripped of his membership of the Privy Council and his career as a high-flying politician was over.

What is, in a way, most striking about the whole story is that modern historians now think Dilke was actually having a long-term affair with Virginia’s mother, and it was this fact which made so many of his answers during the cross-examination evasive or contradictory – and that he knew the family in the first place because his younger brother, Ashton, was married to one of the other Crawford daughters. In other words, Dilke was accused of having an affair with his brother’s wife’s married sister, but made a hash of denying it because he was in fact having an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother! (p.142)

Parnell and the O’Shea divorce

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 to 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who was Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, then leader of its successor, the Irish Parliamentary Party, from 1882 to 1891.

It is vital to an understanding of the politics of the period to realise just how much the issue of Irish Home Rule dominated British politics from, say, 1880 right up to the outbreak of the Great War, and the fact that the bloc of 80 or so Irish MPs who sat in the House of Commons often held the balance of power. Parnell rose to become leader of this bloc and the decisive figure in Irish nationalism, the man who Gladstone and all English politicians had to negotiate with.

Parnell was at the peak of his power when, in December 1889, one of his most loyal lieutenants, Captain William O’Shea, sued his wife, Katharine O’Shea, for divorce and named Parnell as co-respondent. In fact, political society had known that O’Shea and his wife had been separated for years and that Parnell was her lover. In 1886 he moved into her home in Eltham and had three children with her (!). Political leaders knew all about the situation and accepted it; Mrs O’Shea even acted as liaison in 1885 with Gladstone during proposals for the First Home Rule Bill. However, the wider public, and the devoted members of Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party knew nothing.

Parnell assured his followers that he had nothing to hide and would be exonerated in the divorce proceedings, and loyal supporters, not only in Ireland but in faraway America, held meetings, passed resolutions, created posters and leaflets and bullishly supported their Chief. So it came as a devastating shock to all these people, many if not most of them devout Catholics, when the full details of Parnell’s living in sin with a married woman came out in the divorce case in November 1890. Supporters were dumbfounded and heart-broken. The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland condemned him. Gladstone, as always having to cater to the very strong non-conformist faction of the Liberal Party, was also forced to abandon Parnell as his negotiating partner.

The crunch came at a committee meeting in Whitehall where senior figures in his party tried to expel him, he refused to go, and so the majority of anti-Parnellites left to form the Irish National Federation. The bitterness of the split tore Ireland apart, set back the cause of Irish independence by decades, and resonated well into the next century. (p.145)

The record from Parnell to Matt Hancock shows that: a) politicians are just normal people like you and me, with messy complicated private lives, and b) how rubbish British society, or political and media society, has always been at dealing with fairly straightforward relations between the sexes i.e. how scandalous the Press still find the crushingly banal idea of a politician having an affair. Who cares.

Credit

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1977. All references are to the 1993 University of Wales Press paperback edition.

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