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The more things change, the more they remain the same
Darley Abbey local historian and author Harry Butterton has been looking back at how Derby people voted 100 years ago and what issues were highest on the political agenda. His research has led him to the pages of the old Derby Mercury and the controversial opinions of the editor on matters of immigration, unemployment and war. Not a lot, he concludes, appears to have changed.
A ticket-only meeting was being held by the Derby Peace Society but somehow a lot of tickets had got into the wrong hands and demonstrators had packed the gallery and rear of the hall.
The Boer War was still being fought in South Africa. But, though there were serious division among those present, there was no violence, no serious “horseplay” in the words of the Derby Mercury, and good humour prevailed.
However, the end of the opening hymn was drowned out by Rule Britannia and, as guest speaker Joshua Rowntree, of the famous Quaker chocolate-manufacturing family, rose to speak, he was greeted with a variety of national airs and ditties and cries of “Good evening, Josh!”
In fact, Mr Rowntree failed to get a hearing at all and the organisers had eventually to abandon the event.
Those were the days long before radio, TV, the internet or Ipods, when experiencing by visual proxy wasn't possible: you just had to be there or read the newspaper the next day.
Party enmity was alive and well in Edwardian Derby, stoked to fever pitch by the Boer War and complicated by the fact that the Liberals were split and, in Derby at least, by the presence of a new Labour Party MP, Richard Bell, who co-operated with them.
To cap it all, the town's oldest newspaper the Mercury, whose offices were situated at the bottom of Iron Gate, at the entrance to Sadler Gate from the corner of the Market Place, was most decidedly Tory. The editor was not at all averse to dipping his pen in vitriol!
The following week the editor attacked the Liberal leader at Westminster, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman for being weak and allowing the pro-Boer “Little Englander” tail of his party to wag the Liberal dog.
In June, he asked old home-owning Liberals, members of friendly societies and co-ops what they thought of Mr Bell who, in Parliament, always voted with those who alleged British Army cruelty in South Africa.
Meanwhile, out on the streets of King's Mead ward, the Tories won again by 900 to 769. The victor was carried shoulder-high back to the club on the Market Place! By July, though, they had become extreme and voters wouldn't wear it. But, come November, with six wards contested, The Liberals had won 4-2.
Back at the Conservative Club, there was moaning about the hostility in Becket ward from the socialist vicar of St Werburgh's who, according to the editor again “offered his sympathy and support to the Independent Labour Party and lent a hand in the congenial work of creating class antagonism and bitterness”.
When up-and-coming Liberal star and future Chancellor and Prime Minister David Lloyd George visited the town in December for a National Liberal Federation meeting, he had an enthusiastic reception and tried to cool matters by arguing that the Liberals were simply in favour of negotiating with the Boers rather than just crushing them.
However, he then went onto Wrexham to thunder about the appalling cost of the war and its squandering of resources that could go towards old age pensions.
The war ended later in 1902 but there were plenty of other issues to divide those who took some sort of interest in what was going on around them.
Nearly a year on from Lloyd George's visit, the Mercury mourned that the mills were “a mournful monument to a departed industry”.
“The factories are either empty, or have been demolished, or diverted to other purposes,” it stated.
The paper was referring to Derby’s silk mills but, in fact, unemployment was endemic in Edwardian Derby as a whole and the cause of dire poverty.
The Conservatives proposed a controversial answer to the problem during their time in office at Westminster up to 1906 – tariff reform.
This meant ditching the Victorian recipe of free trade beloved of the Liberals’ Grand Old Man Mr Gladstone, who had died four years previously, in 1898.
One of the Tory leaders, Joseph Chamberlain, wanted to put import duties on goods coming into the country from places that were not part of the British Empire, which then covered a good proportion of the world.
Someone with the moniker "Observer” wrote to the Mercury in November 1903, blaming the low wages among Derby's silk workers on “those statesmen who were willing to allow so many of our great industries to be crushed by unfair foreign competition”.
Yet at their meeting at the Bull's Head Hotel, the Derby Trades Council declared free trade had been beneficial to workers, bringing increased wages and shorter hours.
So who was right? A week later, Labour and Liberal supporters demonstrated against Mr Chamberlain at the Drill Hall in Newlands Street (where the Social Security offices are now), referring to him as the Brummagem idol (he was a former leader of Birmingham Council).
Other Tories pointed in another direction for the cause of unemployment. In December 1902, at Spondon Conservative Club, a guest speaker advocated a limit on “alien immigration” into the country as had been imposed in America. He quoted Charles Booth for figures to back him up, who had found that, in 1897 and 1898, nearly 30,000 Russians and Poles had arrived in Britain who were not in transit for America and most of whom had settled in the country.
A Select Committee of Parliament had concluded that they “unquestionably, materially and prejudicially affect the labour market". When the Government responded with an Aliens Bill, in 1904, the Mercury’s editor, in attacking the Radicals (left-wing Liberals) for voting it down, uncannily anticipated 2007 arguments.
“The ‘right of asylum’ is a very wonderful thing and we have always prided ourselves on providing it,” he wrote. “So much so that nobody would object to any regulation for admitting the decent political refugee.
“But for one bona-fide claimant of the right of asylum, these are probably 10,000 who are chiefly concerned to get away from social conditions which are unpleasant.
“We are no doubt very sorry that they should be poor but charity begins at home with nations as well as individuals and, even at the risk of one or two politicals being refused admission, we are entitled to think of the growing poverty of our own people.
“The Daily News says there are 21,000 new paupers in England and Wales; yet, during the first six months of this year, we admitted 31,000 aliens who are not described as en route to places outside time United Kingdom.”
The worthy editor would surely have been knocking on the doors of the British National Party today. When Derby’s Liberal and Labour MPs, Sir Thomas Roe and Richard Bell, voted against the Bill in the House of Commons, he taunted them with the thought that the unions wanted English workmen to “have the first claim to English work”.
He claimed “the time has come for England to say her first duty is to her own flesh and blood".
With no back-up evidence to support his line, he declared that aliens brought in evils such as overcrowding, insanitary conditions, lower morality and crime.
The question does surely occur to a reflective mind: does it have to be the same old story?
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