The Reform Club: Architecture and the Birth of Popular Government Transcript

The Reform Club: Architecture and the birth of popular government Transcript Date: Tuesday, 25 September 2007 - 12:00AM THE REFORM CLUB: ARCHITECTURE AND THE BIRTH OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT Peter Marsh It is a great honour to be asked to provide a short historical introduction to the existing work that Paul Vonberg is doing, designing and carrying through the renewal of the Reform Club building. The Reform Club, the building, is a great stage in the theatre of politics. It often reminds me when I am there of the opera houses built at the end of the Eighteenth or beginning of the Nineteenth Century to bring the affluent middle classes into what had hitherto been an aristocratic preserve. In the Great Hall of the Reform Club, merchants from Manchester could literally rub shoulders with Whig Dukes. No one who enters the Reform Club can mistake it for a setting for democracy. The Reform Club was founded as much to control as to promote the popular form of government to which the great Reform Act of 1832 gave rise. The great Reform Act was breathtakingly radical for its time, and it was breathtakingly radical in order to be the last Reform Act. Yet in no sense that it was the first - to think of that would be failure. It widened the franchise to embrace the whole of the propertied middle class, in an attempt to resist the demands of the Birmingham political union and leader of the Chartists for the enfranchisement of all adult males - no one was so daring as to think of women. I often think as I walk down New Hall Hill in Birmingham that is where the tens of thousands gathered in the autumn of 1831 and really intimidated Parliament into passing a radical reform act. They wanted more than they got. The founders of the Reform Club were the men responsible for the Reform Act. When you go into the Reform Club, you will see high up on the left Earl Grey, who was the Whig Prime Minister, that carried through the Reform Act. There he is, benignly overseeing the Reform Club. The founders of the Reform Club hoped at least to slow down, if not to stop, the march toward democracy. They shuddered at the handiwork of democracy, which they had seen in France, in revolutionary France, in the 1890s. That was back a bit, but in the 1830s, they were seeing the handiwork of democracy also in Jacksonian America. Andrew Jackson had been elected President of the United States in 1828, and immediately introduced, as a measure of democratisation, a spoils system which threw out of office all the well-qualified civil servants and installed in their place his partisan support, the less qualified the better for his purposes, because these were to be the real people. The British governing classes were horrified - Whig as well as Tory - horrified by the democracy that they saw as they were debating the Reform Act in 1832, which is indeed the year in which Jackson was re-elected. The Reform Club Building accordingly furnished to the newly formed Liberal Party in Parliament, and among the enlarged electorate. I will talk about the formation of the Liberal Party in a moment. But the facilities that the Club established were a large central hall where the Parliamentary Liberal Party could assemble, grand dining rooms, rooms for smaller meetings of Party members, and - this is very important - office space in the basement for the creation of a nationwide constituency organisation to register the Party's supporters as qualified under the terms of the 1983 Reform Act. In order to get a properties middle class electorate, you had to establish that they owned the requisite amount of property, and that involved, inevitably, solicitors. They would go over the electoral register, making sure that all the good Liberal supporters were kept on, and all of the benighted Conservatives were kicked off. That organisation was going on in the basement of the Reform Club, and a Library, a wonderful Library - still a wonderful Library - to inform and nourish parliamentary debate. Now, the Reform Club served these purposes well during the middle third of the Nineteenth Century, when the Liberal Party was nearly always in power. The Liberal Party was an alliance of aristocratic Whigs and the likes of Lord Grey, middle class merchants, members of the professions, and moderate Irish Nationalists. They governed Britain and the British Empire for most of the middle third of the Nineteenth Century. As a Canadian, I am continually reminded when I am at the Club of the ways in which those imperial responsibilities challenged and eventually shattered the Liberal alliance. Along, again, the left hand wall of the upper gallery of the Reform Club, there are two portraits: one of Lord Durham; and the other one of Lord Sidnam of Toronto, which is my home town. These are portraits that commemorate, that honour their work in bringing about what was called responsible government to upper and lower Canada. Responsible government simply meant that the executive of these colonies would have to be responsible to the majority of an elected legislature, and the elected legislature, in upper and lower Canada, would be all the adult males. So it was a genuinely democratic assembly that Lord Durham and Sidnam of Toronto were bringing into effect. However, the legislatures in both upper and lower Canada, challenged the Liberal assumptions of the politicians who had given them responsible government. They challenged it by immediately exercising their powers to impose protective tariffs against the goods coming in from the mother country. Now, if there was anything dearer to Liberals than a propertied middle class electorate, it was free trade. It is a classic question: what do you do when liberal institutions adopt illiberal policies? These radical Whigs were liberal enough to say, 'Well, the Canadians are benighted, they are wrong, but we have got to let them, we hope, find out the errors of their ways.' Canadians are very slow to do that. That was a real test of Liberal principles, to which the leaders of the Liberal Party rose triumphantly. But the Reform Club was not designed to cope with democracy on that Canadian scale, certainly not in Britain. The Liberal Party, and hence the Club, failed to accommodate themselves to the further enlargements of the electorate in the Second and Third Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884/5, which enfranchised a substantial proportion of the working class. Those acts unleashed electoral forces and passions which tore the Liberal Party, and hence the Reform Club, apart. They were epitomised by Joseph Chamberlain, not a landed gentleman - no one ever mistook him for that - but a screw manufacturer from metal manufacturing Birmingham. He took to public life in order, with some considerable high principle of a sort, to ensure the wealth that he got from his labour, as a big factory-owning capitalist manufacturer. So he wanted to protect that wealth by ensuring that its benefits were widely spread, but these are not the kinds of issues for which the Whigs of the 1830s, '40s, and '50s had much interest or capacity. Chamberlain, the formation of the National Liberal Party (again in Birmingham) in 1877, the radical programme that Joseph Chamberlain issued in 1883/84, and his unauthorised programme of 1884/5 really shook the Liberal Alliance badly. In the spring of 1884, he used the word 'ransom' - 'What ransom will property pay to ensure the perpetuation of its privileges?' - a word that shook the Whig assumptions of the Reform Club to its foundations. But it was the simultaneous challenge from Ireland that irrevocably split the Liberal Party and deprived the Reform Club of its political purpose. As you enter the Reform Club, to me, the strangest portrait in the whole building is on your immediate left, and it is Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, there with his green sash. He was the most restless, unsettling of the founders of the Reform Club, but he was peace itself compared to the man who took over the leadership of the Irish in Parliament in the middle of the 1870s, Charles Stuart Parnell. It was he, with his uncompromising version of home rule that began the earthquake. In order to calm down the earthquake - never a very good tactic - Gladstone offered to give a very large measure of home rule to Ireland, and it was that that split the Liberal Party and split the Reform Club, depriving it of its political purpose. The Reform Club still served political purposes after its disruption, but those purposes were no longer clear. I came recently upon a bit of information about the Reform Club. In June of 1940 Neville Chamberlain had been thrown out as Prime Minister but still retained an important position really as the right hand man of Winston Churchill in the new Government. It was in the Reform Club that three men - Harold Macmillan, Leo Amery and Robert Boothby met, Conservatives all 'met nightly in June of 1940, plotting to see what they could do to throw Neville Chamberlain out of office completely. He was kept in, interestingly, at the insistence of Churchill. But that is a murky episode far from the broad sunny uplands of the middle of the Nineteenth Century, which were the glory days of the building about which Paul Vonberg is now going to speak. Paul Vonberg **Why would a group of men determined to give 'power to the people' build themselves a socking great palace like this? Because, as we've heard, the aims of the Club's founders, who were also the founders of the 'Great' Reform Act of 1832, were not quite as altruistic as one might have imagined, or as history has generally presented them.

Load more