Dilke

by Roy Jenkins

  We are the jovial Foresters,

  Sir Charles shall be our man;

  We’ll send him back to Parliament

  To help the Grand Old Man.

  Of that there’s not the slightest doubt

  The Tories ne’er shall turn him out

  For we will stick; his foes we’ll lick

  And send him up a jolly brick.

  Sir Charles when up in Parliament,

  He soon again will spout;

  For he can catch the Speaker’s eye,

  He knows his way about.

  And when we ask about deep gales[5]

  Sir Charles will open wide his sails,

  And steer right through, with merry crew

  A Bill, that will our hopes renew.

  To him we will in future look,

  And shall not look in vain;

  For he will all our interests back,

  And in our hearts shall reign.

  When re-instated in the House,

  What greetings there he will arouse!

  What welcomes back to public life!

  Thus end all strife—and won’t his wife

  Thank us, the jovial Foresters,

  Whose trade is getting coal. . . .

  Sir Charles and Lady Dilke’s health

  We’ll not forget to drink

  For we’re the lads, when free from toil,

  That can our glasses chink.

  And this shall ever be our toast,

  (And this shall ever be our boast),

  Success to Sir and Lady Dilke

  And he shall long our member be.

  The result was as great a triumph as the campaign. Dilke polled 5,360 votes against Colchester Wemyss’s 2,520; at the 1887 by-election the Liberal vote had been 4,286, and the Conservative 2,736. He had secured a safe and loyal seat for the rest of his life. He was to be overwhelmingly re-elected at five subsequent general elections, at one of which he was unopposed. His hold on the constituency became such that, even at one of the opposed elections, he was able to confine his address to the admirably laconic:

  Gentlemen,

  I solicit with confidence the renewal of your trust.

  Believe me, your devoted servant,

  Charles W. Dilke

  He had decisively re-established his position in a constituency. Whether he could repeat this in the national political life was a much more doubtful question.

  Chapter Eighteen

  An Independent Expert

  The General Election of 1892 gave an almost equal number of seats to the Liberals and the Conservatives. Allied to the former, however, were 81 Irish Nationalists as against only 46 Liberal Unionists on the other side. There was therefore a small but clear Gladstonian majority in the new House of Commons. Nevertheless, Lord Salisbury waited to meet Parliament, and did not resign until he had been defeated on an amendment to the address. Gladstone kissed hands for the fourth and last time on August 15th.

  The new Prime Minister made no offer of a post to Dilke. It is doubtful indeed if the question even presented itself to him as one for decision. In 1886 when he had left Dilke out he sent him a letter of apology and explanation. In 1892 Dilke did not even get a letter. He had clearly to prepare himself for a long period on the back benches. This exclusion was a heavy but not unexpected blow. He was, however, still only 48. He did not accept the exclusion as being necessarily permanent.

  He had, nevertheless, to prepare himself for a considerable period of parliamentary life in which he would have no official position. Apart from any question of personal exclusion he was still sufficiently under Chamberlain’s influence[1] to believe—and believe correctly—that for some time to come the Liberal party’s share of power was likely to be small. This prospect led him to no lack of interest in the Parliament to which he had striven so hard to return. He found that he was tolerably well received, and he quickly attracted to himself that vague but persistent label of “a good House of Commons man.” He was regular in his attendance at the House, so much so, that except on the occasion of the Forest of Dean miners’ annual demonstration, he never left London during the session. He always sat in the same place—the next to the corner seat on the front bench below the gangway—and he was at the House at the beginning of each day’s sitting in order to claim it.[2] He never appeared except in the most punctilious of parliamentary dress—tall silk hat and frock-coat—but he added a touch of eccentricity by using his hat as a receptacle for his discarded notes and documents, and habitually stuffed it to overflowing in the course of a speech.

  He had a wide range of parliamentary interests, and he used his Privy Councillor’s precedence in order to speak frequently about most of them. His oratory gained nothing in lightness as time went by, but the scope of his knowledge and the force of his reputation often gave him an attentive audience. He was an expert on the rules of the House, and he used this expertise both to instruct young members and to raise procedural points. Outside the chamber he became notable for the speed with which he moved through the lobbies and about the corridors—he was commonly to be seen with his coat-tails flying behind him; for his habit of sitting in the library snipping away at his papers with his scissors; and for the quantity of tea which he daily consumed in the tea-room. The smoking-room saw him less often, for although he had ceased to be a teetotaller in 1886 and was a great smoker of cigars, he believed that he had little time for such indulgences when the House was sitting. He quickly managed to fill in his time with a mass of detailed work, and to become a key figure in the life of the House of Commons, a man whose absence would be noted, who was pointed out to visitors, and whose features were a normal component of any picture or cartoon of the working of the House. Whether his diligence and his fame were matched by real influence is another matter. After nine months he recorded that “I had now regained the position which I had held in (the House) up to 1878, though not my position of 1878-80, nor that of 1884-5.”1 He never recorded any advance beyond this point.

  The main business of the first session was the Home Rule Bill, in which Dilke took almost no part, intervening only once on a technical point concerning Irish electoral registration. Much of his interest was devoted to labour questions and in particular to the Miners ‘Eight Hour Bill. On this latter point he tried to revive his old habit of co-operation with Chamberlain, acting partly on the assumption that a measure which was unwelcome to Gladstone and Morley, preoccupied with their political objectives, might per contra make a certain appeal to the Birmingham Unionist. But Chamberlain was as contemptuous of the labour leaders as he was of the Prime Minister—“I am . . . impatient of their extremely unpractical policy, and . . . I believe their real influence is immensely exaggerated and Dilke got little beyond a general expression of sympathy.

  This was their last attempt to work together. While Dilke had been out of the House of Commons they had retained at least the shell of intimacy, and had pretended that the future was likely to bring them together again. Even during this period there had been difficulties. Dilke became somewhat disenchanted with Chamberlain after the Home Rule dispute and wrote in his diary on February 4th, 1887: “Chamberlain very sore and vindictive against Labouchere and others. I fear all this split has spoilt Chamberlain and that he will be very difficult for all men to work with in the future.”2 A couple of years later, however, Dilke could show a wistful regret for the old closeness with Chamberlain. “All day Sunday probably,” he rather pathetically wrote to the latter in July, 1891, “I and Wentie will be at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham, if there is anything I can do for you.”3 Chamberlain, too, could show something of the same feeling, although in a slightly more patronising way. “In fact I have been thinking that owing to the changes in our lives and the pressure on both of us,” he wrote from Highbury in November, 1890, “we have been slipping away from one another—and this I do not desire or intend.”4

  After the general election of 1892 a new situation presented itself. It could no longer be pretended that it
was only circumstances which kept Dilke and Chamberlain apart. But Dilke’s return to the House coincided with Chamberlain moving closer to the Conservative party. He sat on the front opposition bench and he excelled everyone in the mordancy of his attacks on Gladstone. The way was being rapidly paved for his acceptance of office under Lord Salisbury. Dilke found his former friend’s debating power to be formidably improved, but thought that “he had sold his old true self to the devil.”

  Nor was there any return to personal intimacy—which, except on a firm political foundation, would probably have been impossible for Chamberlain. The nearest approach to this was in 1893 when Dilke consulted Chamberlain about the best wine-merchant from whom to buy champagne, and in 1894 when Chamberlain wrote to Dilke to protest against a rumour that the latter was to speak in Birmingham. “I can hardly believe the enclosed announcement to be true,” he remonstrated. “I certainly should have declined to speak in your constituency, and as a general rule I think that personal friends might avoid what looks like direct attack.”5 Dilke replied that the announcement was false, and Chamberlain wrote again accepting the denial in terms which were still a little truculent: “I am glad that the report is untrue. When you have all the rest of the world to go to, I could not but regard it as an unfriendly act that you should address my political opponents in Birmingham.”6

  Almost the only subsequent letter of any interest in their correspondence (and this from the viewpoint of the rapid growth of Chamberlain’s Toryism rather than of their intimacy) was one written in July, 1895, about university representation in the House of Commons. “Personally I doubt whether ‘one man one vote’ would do as much good to your Party as the wire-pullers suppose,” Chamberlain complacently wrote, adding magnanimously, “but there is a great difference of opinion on the subject.”7 After this date most of the letters were in a secretary’s handwriting. When Lady Dilke died, in 1904, there was a very distant expression of sympathy from Chamberlain, and one subsequent letter, written in February, 1906, six months before his stroke. Thereafter there was no correspondence and no other intercourse. When Dilke died, Chamberlain was an invalid. Austen Chamberlain attended the funeral.

  Dilke never found another political friend to replace Chamberlain. He found loose allies like Labouchere and temporary disciples like Reginald McKenna, for whom, in 1893, he secured the Liberal nomination in North Monmouthshire. He found new men like Asquith—“a bold, disagreeable, strong man, of great intellectual power”—for whom he had some admiration but with whom he was never intimate. He maintained relations with old friends like Harcourt and Morley, to whom he had some nostalgic attachment but whom he most certainly did not admire. And he cultivated the new Labour leaders. But with none of these did his relationship approach the close and equal partnership which had once existed with Chamberlain.

  The Labour leaders did not belong to any one group. “Mabon,” who was authentically working class but rather right wing in that, like almost all the miners’ leaders, he believed in working within the Liberal party, was a frequent dinner guest at 76, Sloane Street. So was Cunninghame Graham, the Scottish laird who had sat as a radical for Northwest Lanarkshire in the Parliament of 1886, but had been defeated at Glasgow, standing as a Labour candidate, in 1892; he, however, was regarded as sufficiently athletic to be asked more often to Dockett Eddy. Hyndman, the Marxist old Etonian who had led and then split the rigidly sectarian Social Democratic Federation, was another occasional guest, as well as being a frequent correspondent.[3] Through Hyndman, Dilke arranged to meet Jaurès, the French Socialist, who came to London in 1899. Keir Hardie, who was in the House of Commons from 1892-5 but was then out until 1900, also corresponded occasionally, sometimes during the latter period asking Dilke to put down a question on his behalf. In August, 1894, he had made a more surprising and important request to Dilke. He had asked him, if Dilke’s testimony in his memoir is to be believed, to assume the leadership of the Independent Labour party, then in its second year of existence. Dilke tells us that he refused the offer, principally because he was at the time deeply concerned at the danger of war with Russia, and believed that if this occurred he would find an alliance with the Tories both more useful and more congenial than one with this new socialist organisation.

  What is difficult to credit is not that the offer was refused but that it was ever made. In the first place, the I.L.P. was not a body which particularly required a leader. It had Hardie himself, its most dominant figure, as its first chairman. Hardie was not a good leader, as emerged in the next decade when he presided for some years over a parliamentary Labour party of twenty-nine members. But it was not for this reason that the chairmanship did not remain in his hands but rotated amongst other leading I.L.P. figures. It was because the I.L.P. was an aggressively democratic movement which resisted the idea of any one man’s authority. Furthermore, the tone of the I.L.P. in its early days was bitterly anti-Liberal. “I would consider it a stain on the Labour party to have any dealings with the Liberals,” Hardie had proclaimed at the inaugural Bradford conference. “I would as soon have dealings with the devil.”8 He went on contemptuously to reject the idea that the I.L.P. was ever intended to be “a halfway house between Liberalism and Socialism.” But this was precisely what Dilke would have wished it to be. As a result he was much more in sympathy with the “Lib.-Labs.” like Mabon, Broadhurst and Joseph Arch than with Hardie. Hyndman and some of the continental Marxists, with their heavy theory and their more “realistic” approach to questions of foreign policy, would also, in a way, have been more to his taste than the somewhat imprecise pacifist idealism of Hardie. Altogether, a marriage between Dilke and the I.L.P. would clearly have been a most unhappy affair.

  More fruitful was Dilke’s co-operation with the Trades Union Congress. When he had been in office, in the early ’eighties, he had begun the practice of starting each session with a luncheon for the Parliamentary Committee (the forerunner of the General Council) of the T.U.C. At this gathering they discussed the strategy for dealing with labour questions in the House of Commons during the coming year. Dilke revived the practice in 1898, and within a few years the luncheons began to be followed by a conference of the Parliamentary Committee and the radical and Labour members in the House. The conferences continued until 1906, when the great inflow of new Labour members made them inappropriate. The luncheons went on until Dilke’s death, and in the last year were supplemented by a dinner at which the T.U.C. and not Dilke was the host, and at which a presentation was made.

  One of the fruits of this consultation was the Trades Disputes Act of 1906. Immediately after the Taff Vale judgment of 1901, which made it possible for employers to compensate themselves for the effects of the strike by suing for damages the union concerned, Dilke was called in by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. He secured the support of Asquith for the calling of a conference which led to a Liberal commitment to legislate in the union’s interest. He also led a deputation which was received on behalf of the Cabinet by his old lawyer who had become Lord James of Hereford. They made some impression on him, but not enough. D. J. Shackle-ton, the Labour member for Clitheroe, introduced a private members’ bill in 1903, and again in 1904 and 1905. It was defeated on second reading on the first occasion, and perished in committee on the latter two. A Liberal Parliament had to be awaited before further progress could be made. When this came, in 1906, it still remained to be decided how strong a bill was to be, pushed through. Most of the lawyers in the Government were in favour of one which would give only a qualified exemption to union funds. Dilke’s influence was thrown strongly the other way. He urged the Labour M.P.s, who showed some sign of weakening, to stand out for the measure they wanted; he exerted great pressure on the Government, and he did something to neutralise Tory opposition. He was successful, and the bill which passed was one involving the complete reversal of Taff Vale. “In so far as (trades unionists) have now a charter invulnerable alike to the prejudice and the caprice of those who administer the
law,” Miss Mary MacArthur wrote in 1917, “it is largely due to the clear vision of Sir Charles Dilke, and to the skill and invincible courage with which he followed his aims.”9

  Dilke’s main labour interest, however, was with those in the dangerous and sweated trades. In part this was due to the influence of his wife. Lady Dilke was long associated with the Women’s Trade Union League and took her association sufficiently seriously to attend every Trades Union Congress from 1889 until her death. In trades like match-making and white lead the majority of the employees were women, and the statistics of industrial disease were appalling. The Dilkes between them succeeded in effecting a substantial improvement. In the china and earthenware trade, too (although this was not primarily a woman’s trade), the industrial processes in the ’nineties involved a ten per cent casualty rate, with the victims suffering blindness, paralysis or death. Dilke kept up a constant pressure on the Home Office, raising the matter in the House year after year, securing the appointment of several committees, and eventually having the satisfaction of seeing the number of cases reduced to a fifth of those which had existed when he first took up the issue.

  Many of the trades in which women were employed had practically no trade union organisation and a level of wages far below the average even for those days. Nor was there much prospect of building up a level of union membership which would make collective bargaining a possibility. Many of the employees were home workers; the rest were grouped in small scattered workshops. Dilke believed that the only possibility of attacking this problem of sweated labour was by legislation. He was himself attracted by the idea of a statutory national minimum wage, but he recognised that in practice he could hope to do no more than secure action to deal with the problem in specified trades. With this object he introduced his Wages Boards Bill in 1898. Boards comprising representatives of both sides should be set up for a limited number of trades and should have power to fix differing minimum wages in each case. It was a modest proposal, but it made no progress for a number of years, even though he continued to lay it before Parliament at the beginning of each session. In 1906 the climate of opinion changed and the outlook became far more favourable. In 1908 Dilke and the Archbishop of Canterbury jointly introduced a deputation to the Prime Minister, which led on directly to the Trade Boards Act of 1909. At first only four trades were covered by the act, but a considerable improvement was effected in these, and it was later given a wider application.