history archive
If you think the 2010 general election campaign is going to be long…
… just be glad you didn’t live a hundred years ago. For the first 1910 general election, Parliament was prorogued on 3 December 1909 and the final day of voting (polling took place across several days) was on 10 February, 10 weeks later. Oh, and then there was a second general election later in the [...]
Edward Everett: the chocolate connection
Earlier this week I blogged about Edward Everett, who is a salutary reminder that more and longer writing or talking doesn’t automatically make for more meaning or greater impact. That’s because he spoke for two hours in 1863, just before someone else spoke for two and a bit minutes. That someone else was Abraham Lincoln, [...]
Book review: Empires of the Sea – The Final Battle for the Mediterranean
Roger Crowley’s book is an account of the naval battles for control of the Mediterranean during the sixteenth century. Predominantly a conflict between the Muslim Ottoman empire and the Christian Spanish empire, the fighting saw many others sucked in – and many people of each religion fighting on the ‘wrong’ side – but that does [...]
What's left of Gladstonian Liberalism in the Liberal Democrats? (25 January)
From the Liberal Democrat History Group’s email list: Since the publication of The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism edited by David Laws and Paul Marshall in 2004, there has been an ongoing discussion in the Liberal Democrats about whether the party needs to return to the nineteenth-century Gladstonian inheritance of non-interventionism in economic and social affairs, [...]
Hansard gems: a sombre final extract
It’s time to bring this series of entries from Hansard’s past to an end as there are only so many speeches about paperclips and potato salad to be written. So to finish off the series, here’s a rather more sombre written question and answer from 1938 which was horribly and tragically overtaken by events: Mr. Mander [...]
Hansard gems: every motor car must have a steam-roller preceding it
It’s an obvious road safety move isn’t it? Don’t lets cars loose in our roads unless each of them has its own steam-roller heading in front of it. And a person with a red flag in from of the steam-roller. So indeed said Patrick O’Brien in 1902: For the protection of the public, he would [...]
Hansard gems: is someone counting ladies rubberised raincoats?
Michael Meacher has been an MP for a long time. So long in fact that it was he who, as a government minister in January 1977, gave a written answer revealing the shocking statistical news that: Ladies rubberised raincoats are not separately distinguished in the overseas trade statistics. Liked this story? Find other gems from [...]
Hansard gems: peanut butter, tooting trains and industrial relations
It’s May 1971 and the House of Lords is debating the weighty matter of industrial relations. Step forward Lord Mansfield: The older among your Lordships may remember a ditty of our youth called “It ain’t gonna rain no mo’” which contained a number of rather amusing verses. One of them was: A peanut sitting on [...]
Lord Grenville, 1759–1834: biography
This biography first appeared in the Dictionary of Liberal Biography, produced by the Liberal Democrat History Group. William Wyndham Grenville, later the first Baron Grenville and more commonly known to historians as Lord Grenville, was born on 25 October 1759. Like many Whigs of his generation, he mixed support for repressive domestic measures with modest [...]
Hansard gems: when is a dog really a cow?
When Parliament gets involved, of course. Step forward Arthur Champion in May 1956: I remember that in commenting on the matter with which this new Clause is concerned [the MP for Leeds West] once used the phrase that the dog was the sacred cow of the British way of life. Liked this story? Find other [...]
