Dilke

by Roy Jenkins

  Such devices were not always open to Gladstone and he frequently sustained Cabinet defeats which he could not circumvent. He even achieved a certain equanimity in accepting them. “At dinner at Lord and Lady Cork’s in the evening,” Dilke noted on one occasion. ‘I was astonished to see in what excellent spirits Mr. Gladstone was, although he had been entirely overruled in his own Cabinet in the afternoon.” Sometimes the Prime Minister sought to overcome his difficulties by postponing issues on which he could not get his way. “Matter adjourned as usual when Prime Minister in the minority,” Dilke wrote after a discussion on New Guinea in July, 1884. But these tactics were more destructive of good government than of Gladstone’s opponents. The best summing-up came from Lord Granville. “I think you too often counted noses in your last Cabinet,” he said to Gladstone in 1886. Dilke would have agreed, for he, like Granville himself, was more often than not on the Prime Minister’s side. In foreign and imperial affairs, and notably in the case of Egypt, Dilke was too much of a jingo and Gladstone too much of a pacifist for each other’s taste, but on the other principal issues which pressed for decision—Ireland, franchise reform, redistribution of seats, local government and the control of the police—Dilke was more closely in accord with the head of the Government than with any other member of the Cabinet except Chamberlain.

  In a sense both the radicals counted themselves as Gladstone men. They regarded him as an essential counter to the Whig influence, and thought it their duty to safeguard his position, even, in certain circumstances, against their own immediate interests. Thus, at the beginning of 1885, when Harcourt, the inveterate retailer of rumours, told Dilke that Gladstone’s resignation was imminent and that Hartington, who would succeed, intended to offer the Exchequer to Chamberlain and the Foreign Office to Dilke, the latter wrote: “But, great as were the offices proposed, Chamberlain and I could not have consented to remain in if Mr. Gladstone had gone out notoriously dissatisfied. If he had gone out on grounds of health alone, it would, of course, have been a different matter.”10

  Dilke nevertheless recognised that there was a vast range of subjects on which he was about as closely in agreement with Gladstone as with the Queen. “Constructive radicalism”—State intervention to remedy the most pressing evils in the condition of the people—of which Gladstone always spoke with severe and slightly incredulous distaste, was the centre of Dilke’s political creed. But the issues which arose out of this did not, for the most part, fall for settlement in the Parliament of 1880. It was, after all, a period in which John Morley, than whom no radical was less of a social reformer, worked in the closest alliance with Chamberlain. Politically, therefore, Dilke could believe firmly in the tactic (and even the principle) of support for the Prime Minister.

  Personally his views were more equivocal. He would never have gone as far as Chamberlain, who, after a trying interview in the autumn of 1884, came rushing into Dilke’s room in the House of Commons saying of the Prime Minister: “I don’t like him, really. I hate him.*11 But, given the fact that Dilke was naturally disposed to admire great men, his attitude towards Gladstone was remarkable more for its cynical coolness than for anything else. “As we went home Chamberlain told me that before the last Cabinet Lord Granville begged his colleagues to remember who Mr. Gladstone was and not to push him too hard in discussion,” he wrote in 1882. “In other words told them to remember that they were dealing with a magnificent lunatic.” “The old gentleman’s storm has blown over,”12 he added tolerantly a few days later. Another fairly typical comment on the Prime Minister can be found in one of Dilke’s letters to Chamberlain at the time of the negotiations over the entry of the former to the Cabinet. “He’s another Bishop to make, so he’ll be happy,”13 Dilke wrote. Nor was Dilke ever loath to record any gossip about the Prime Minister which came his way, particularly in relation to that strange figure, Mme. Olga de Novikof. “She is going to Birmingham to-morrow and Mr. G. wants Chamberlain to cut the Cabinet to go with her though he doesn’t know her. Chamberlain won’t,” he wrote in November, 1882; and a few weeks later: “I breakfasted with Mr. G. to meet the Duc de Broglie. That horrid beast Mme. de Novikof was there and of course the Duc took me into the corner to ask if all the scandal about her and Mr. G. was true. . . .”14

  There was a difference in age of thirty-four years between Dilke and the Prime Minister, and with it went an almost unbridgeable psychological gap. Gladstone probably never ceased to regard Chamberlain as an overrated social upstart with ideas above his station. He did not put Dilke in this category. For one thing Dilke had very much the same social origin as himself. For another Gladstone had the highest respect for his parliamentary and administrative ability. But he was not a man with whom it is possible to imagine the Prime Minister engaging in intimate discussion. Neither would have begun to understand the mainspring of the other’s mind; and Dilke would, in addition, have suffered in the Prime Minister’s estimation from being neither a Whig patrician like Granville nor a fine old “moral force”, pacifist, provincial radical like Bright.

  In the spring of 1883 Ashton Dilke died in Algiers. He had been ill with tuberculosis for some years, and there was no element of surprise about his death; but it was a blow to Charles Dilke, for it left him without any close family connection. A few months before his death Ashton Dilke resigned his parliamentary seat at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and was succeeded there, largely as a result of Chamberlain’s intercessions with Charles Dilke, by John Morley. The other dispositions which Ashton Dilke had to make related to the guardianship of his three children and the administration of his estate, then substantially bigger than that of his brother because of the development of his journalistic properties. “You know Maye (Mrs. Ashton Dilke) well,” he wrote on these points to Charles Dilke in the January before his death. “Would it be safe to leave her in charge, or should I ask Eustace Smith (her father)?” “I think I had sooner you did not put in any of the Smiths—unless Maye wishes it,” Charles Dilke replied. “How would it be to leave Maye and myself executors with full powers to manage the literary property?”15 In the event however, Mrs. Dilke herself retained almost complete control over the “literary property,” although Charles Dilke was given certain responsibilities in regard to the children.

  Dilke suffered another loss with the death of Gambetta, which preceded that of his brother by less than two months. But the interval was sufficient for Ashton Dilke to supply his own summing up of the Frenchman. “Gambetta’s death will I believe be an advantage to France in the long run,” he wrote. “He meant mischief if he could have got power, and his doctrines always seemed to me thoroughly unsound. But he was a great man.” “I agree with what you say about Gambetta,” Charles Dilke surprisingly replied. “I agree exactly on all points.”16 Political disillusionment had not affected Dilke’s personal friendship for Gambetta, however. He had remained Dilke’s principal friend in Paris, and after his death his place in this respect was filled, for many years, by his former secretary, the deputy and historian, Joseph Reinach. Reinach was both a son-in-law and a nephew of the Baron Jacques de Reinach whose death in 1892 set off one of the most unsavoury scandals of the Third Republic, but was himself to be one of the most courageous and distinguished of the Dreyfusards. Dilke’s French visits, both to La Sainte Campagne* and to Paris were becoming less frequent. He had less time for foreign travel, and he was proceding rapidly with plans for building two small villas in the country. The first was at Dockett Eddy, a small island in the Thames near Shepperton, which was designed as a centre for his sculling activities and a replacement for the “village pothouses” of which he had complained to Mrs. Pattison. It was completed in 1885, and was thereafter used as a summer week-end house. Pyrford Rough, only six miles away, was to be a winter house. It was four hundred feet up on a sandy Surrey heath and, Dilke averred, had a climate quite different from Dockett. Both houses were architecturally hideous but he remained devoted to them until the end of his life.

  In the autumn of 1883 he sud
denly contemplated a retirement from the political battle. The Speakership was falling vacant with the resignation of Sir Henry Brand, who had been a rather weak occupant of the chair since 1872 and for whose knighthood Dilke had been inadvertently responsible in 1881.† There was no obvious successor. Courtney was suggested by Harcourt, but Dilke objected on the ground that he dropped his h’s, which more than neutralised his radicalism. Childers, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was then mentioned and so were Dodson and Goschen, but none of these proposals came to anything. “Dear Lady,” Dilke wrote to Mrs. Pattison at this stage, “I suppose you would not like me to go out of active politics for some years . . . by taking the Speakership?”17 What Mrs. Pattison liked is not on record, but this plan (based apparently on Dilke’s very odd view that he might re-engage in party politics as an ex-Speaker) also fell through. The intention then was that Campbell-Bannerman should have the job, but an offer was first made to Arthur Peel, a former Government Chief Whip and the fifth son of Sir Robert, in the confident but false belief that he would refuse. Peel was elected and presided over the House until 1895.

  So far from disengaging Dilke was in fact taking on more work than ever at this stage. He retained, at Granville’s wish apparently, a curious informal position as a second Cabinet adviser on foreign affairs, and saw far more of the telegrams than were normally circulated. In addition, the work of his own department and that of the Home Office was proving unusually onerous. In November Harcourt at last gave way on the question of the London police, and it was possible to draft a Government of London Bill and bring it before the House early in the session of 1884. It secured a second reading, but then died from lack of positive support. “One unfortunate thing about the London Bill,” Dilke wrote to his constituency agent “is that no one in the House cares about it except Dilke, Firth, and the Prime Minister, and no one outside the House except the Liberal electors of Chelsea,”18

  More general local government reform was being considered by a strong Cabinet committee, composed of Chamberlain, Kimberley, Childers, Carlingford, and Dodson, with Dilke as chairman. The scheme which the committee produced, and which was mentioned in the Queen’s Speech as one of the principal measures for the session of 1884, foreshadowed most of the reforms of 1888 and 1894. The main difference was that Dilke’s. bill provided for no aldermanic seats on the county councils. But it did not greatly matter, for this bill made still less progress than the London one. It was abandoned as being too controversial to be introduced in the same session as franchise reform.

  The third and somewhat more productive of Dilke’s departmental activities was the setting up of a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. Conditions in London and the other large cities were appalling, and were widely acknowledged to be so. Cross’s Acts of 1875 and 1879 had produced only the slightest amelioration, and a further step forward was canvassed on all sides. Lord Salisbury was anxious for an enquiry and even the Queen, under the influence of a highly-charged pamphlet entitled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, became almost a social reformer.

  “The Queen has been much distressed by all that she has heard and read lately of the deplorable condition of the houses of the poor in our great towns,” she wrote to the Prime Minister on October 30th, 1883. “The Queen will be glad to hear Mr. Gladstone’s opinion . . . and to learn whether the Government contemplate the introduction of any measures, or propose to take any steps to obtain more precise information as to the true state of affairs in these overcrowded, unhealthy and squalid bodies.”19

  Gladstone passed the letter on to Dilke, who was both delighted and surprised to receive a spur to action from Balmoral. He devoted much of the autumn to a personal investigation of the worst areas in London—some of them owned by Lord Salisbury—and gave as much publicity as he could to his findings. In this way opinion was prepared for the announcement of the Royal Commission.

  The decision was made by the Cabinet on February 8th, and Gladstone immediately asked Dilke to accept the chairmanship himself. The membership was distinguished, but this did nothing to lessen the difficulties of appointment. The Prince of Wales was anxious to serve—there was even a most unsuitable suggestion that he should be chairman, but this was quickly withdrawn—and Gladstone and Dilke were both delighted to have him as an ordinary member. He was not perhaps the most assiduous of the participants,* but his membership underlined both the importance of the Commission and its non-party inspiration. Cardinal Manning was Dilke’s first nomination for membership. He accepted with alacrity, but considerable difficulty arose over his precedence. Was he to come before or after Lord Salisbury, who was also to be a member? The Queen ruled that he was entitled to precedence not as Archbishop but as a Cardinal, i.e. a foreign prince. Harcourt, who as Home Secretary was nominally responsible for the Commission, reacted with radical horror to this suggestion. “This will never do,” he wrote. “The situation is very awkward. . . . Whether as Archbishop or Cardinal he would rank first after the Prince of Wales and before Lord Salisbury.”20 Dilke therefore consulted Salisbury himself, who replied at the time that he did not in the least mind, although six years later, when it was suggested that his complacency had betrayed the rights of every marquess in the kingdom he wrote to a newspaper indignantly but falsely denying that he had ever been consulted.

  For the moment, however, the difficulties were out of the way. Manning became the Commission’s second princely member, and proved a good deal more assiduous than the first. But Dilke was not impressed with the wisdom of his suggestions. “Manning is our only revolutionary,” he wrote on one occasion. But he was soon adding to this judgment, which was not in itself intended to be unfavourable:

  “On Friday the 16th May at the Commission the Cardinal handed me his list of suggestions, which were not only revolutionary but ill-considered, and I have to note how curiously impracticable a schemer, given to the wildest plans, this great ecclesiastic showed himself. He suggested the removal out of London, not only of prisons and infirmaries (which no doubt are under the control of public authorities), but also of breweries, ironworks, and all factories not needed for daily or home work, as a means of giving us areas for housing the working class; suggestions the value or practicability of which I need hardly discuss.”21

  The next difficulty arose from Dilke’s desire to break precedent and have a woman member of the Commission. He nominated Miss Octavia Hill, but Harcourt refused to sign the warrant if there were a woman’s name upon it. The matter accordingly went to the Cabinet. “Mr. G. sided with me, but Hartington siding with Harcourt, and Lord G. saying that he was with me on the principle, but against me on the person. Mr. G. went round, and said the decision of the Cabinet was against me. . .”22 The best that Dilke could do was to appoint Lyulph Stanley (who turned out to be a great time-waster) as a fraternal representative for Miss Maude Stanley, who would have been his second choice as a woman member. Dilke always had the strongest views in favour of the political rights of women. A few months after the appointment of the Commission he almost forced himself out of the Government by abstaining on a suffragist amendment to the Franchise Bill, supported for tactical reasons by many Tories. Hartington wanted Dilke turned out for this offence, but Chamberlain, although not with his ally on the merits, made common cause, and the offence was passed over. A year later, in June, 1885, Dilke returned to the issue with Chamberlain and wrote with singular lack of prescience: “I had a curious talk about women’s suffrage with Chamberlain to-day, as that is the only question of importance on which we differ and the only question which seems likely ever to divide us.”* Sometimes Dilke was able to strike more practical blows for the cause. With doubtful but unchallenged legality he appointed several women members to the Metropolitan Asylums Board; and, although Harcourt frustrated him in the case of factory inspectors, he obtained the appointment of several female Local Government Board inspectors.

  The other members of the Housing Royal Commission included Goschen, Cross, Lord Carrington, Lo
rd Brownlow, the Bishop of Bedford, McCullegh Torrens, Chamberlain’s henchman Jesse Collings, and the former stonemason Henry Broadhurst. Bodley was secretary. It was generally thought a most distinguished Commission, so much so that even the Queen wrote to congratulate Dilke on the excellence of his choice. Dilke himself thought that he had not done badly, but he expressed his own satisfaction in less rounded terms. “Completed, my Royal Commission with fewer fools on it than is usual on Royal Commissions,”23 he wrote on February 16th.

  The Commission began work in March, and met twice a week for some months. It occupied much of Dilke’s time, because apart from the sittings he found all the witnesses, corresponded with them about the evidence they would give, and prepared for the examinations-in-chief, which he himself conducted. The Commission’s labours continued into the session of 1885, and culminated with visits to Edinburgh in April and to Dublin in May. The latter visit gave Dilke his only direct experience of the country for which he had so nearly been made responsible in the House of Commons.* On the whole Dilke found the work unexciting. “But the Commission kept up its character for dullness,” he wrote after a session at which Chamberlain had given evidence and when a memorable clash had been expected between the witness and Lord Salisbury, “and nothing noteworthy occurred.” Its reports led on directly to some minor legislation, and indirectly to a new wave of concern with slum conditions which expressed itself in housing trusts, university missions, a series of private investigations and a generally bad conscience on the part of the more sensitive sections of the upper and middle classes. For Dilke himself the results were a fortification of his reputation for hard, highly competent, painstaking work and the beginning of a cross-party friendship with Lord Salisbury.