M.P. FOR CHRISTCHURCH
1885 was an exceptionally busy year for Charles Edward Baring Young. Alf Jarvis has given us a detailed account of his early life. On 1st May 1872, then aged twenty-two, he became a student of the Inner Temple, and was called to the Bar on 26th January 1876, although it seems unlikely that he ever practised. (Foster’s ‘Men-at-the-Bar`). His Chambers were at 2, Harcourt Buildings, Temple. E.C., but since all the records of the Inner Temple were destroyed during the Second World War there is no documentation of his career as a barrister (letter dated 21st April 1965 from the Chief Clerk of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple). It was in the same year that he joined the committee of Quintin Hogg’s Home for Working Boys in London, together with W. Howard Seth-Smith who was to become the architect of Kingham Hill Homes.
Barry Whittaker, in his prize-winning essay (‘New Light on Charles Edward Baring Young`, 1965, unpublished), traced his political career during the years 1885 – 1892. Although much of his work during the year 1885 was inevitably focused on plans for the construction of the first Home on Kingham Hill, Baring Young allowed himself to be adopted as Conservative candidate for the constituency of Christchurch Borough in Hampshire, which was effectively the new and growing seaside town of Bournemouth. The previous member for Christchurch was a Liberal, Sir Horace Davey, Q.C., who seems to have been well-liked in the borough. Gladstone’s second (Liberal) ministry (1880-1885) was coming to an end, troubled by the continuing problem of Ireland and by the unexpected results of Britain’s intervention in Egypt which culminated in the death of General George Gordon, a man in many ways similar to Baring Young. Gladstone was castigated as the ‘Murderer of Gordon` (‘M.O.G`. – an inversion of his former soubriquet ‘G.O.M.`, for Grand Old Man). His ministry affected Baring Young’s career directly in two ways. The Franchise Act (1884) extended for the first time the right to vote to some two million additional electors, largely drawn from the ranks of the agricultural labourers, but his Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act (1883) strictly limited the amount of money that any candidate could spend on his election.
The other effect of Gladstone’s second ministry was that, after the battle of Tel-el-Kebir (13th September 1882), Egypt, to Gladstone’s consternation, fell into British hands, and it became necessary to prop up the weakened government of the Khedive of Egypt by appointing a British resident and Consul-General who, to all appearances, would become the Governor-General of Egypt. The man selected for this invidious task was Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, whose wise and enlightened policies stabilised Egypt. Although Lord Cromer’s relationship with C. E. Baring Young was remote, the Barings had always been a clannish family. Lord Cromer remained in Egypt until 1907, and thus provided Baring Young with a suitable home during his convalescence 1901-2.
We do not know what factors induced C. E. B. Young to stand for Parliament in 1885. It was, of course, customary for wealthy gentlemen, especially for those with a training in law, to think of a political career, but there is something a little incongruous about the shy, retiring squire of Daylesford taking his seat in the House of Commons and allowing himself to be caught up in the seedy machinations of party politics. Perhaps the decision was imposed on him by the Conservative Party who were looking for suitable candidates with enough money to afford to contest what were no doubt regarded as safe Liberal seats. It is less surprising that he should have opted for the Conservatives. The Tory Party had traditionally been the party of the landowner, the country squire and the established church, and on all counts Baring Young was well qualified. There was also one other reason why he might have chosen to identify himself with the party of the late Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield. Because the Liberals had always been the party of the great industrialists and the factory owners who benefited greatly from cheap food for their workforce, the Conservatives under Disraeli had espoused the cause of the factory workers, and, under the enlightened policy of his Home Secretary, Richard Assheton Cross, had introduced legislation that provided a strong support for the industrial working class. Slum clearance, public health, the recognition of the emerging Trade Unions, and the protection of merchant seamen all pointed to a growing social conscience in the Conservative Party.
In addition, Charles Baring Young must have admired the work of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, who died on 1st October 1885. In his work amongst London working boys and orphans, Baring Young followed the example of Lord Shaftesbury, first Chairman (1884) of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, President of the Ragged School Union, and founder of the National Refuges for Destitute Children, which became better known as the Shaftesbury Homes and the sailing ship ‘Arethusa`. Shaftesbury had always been a Conservative, and in his earlier work to protect children and to limit working hours in factories had received the approval and support of Disraeli; his final achievement in the Climbing Boys Act will have appealed strongly to the young Baring Young. It may have been a coincidence that C. E. B. Young’s political career, as well as his imaginative provision at Kingham Hill, coincided with the death of Lord Shaftesbury; but the ‘mantle of Elijah` springs to mind.
C. E. B. Young had been put forward as a possible candidate for Christchurch late in 1884. Barry Whittaker has carefully scanned the pages of the ‘Christchurch Times` to trace the story of his candidature. But the ‘Christchurch Times` was a militant partisan supporter of the Liberals, and not all its comments should be accepted at face value. As early as 10th January 1885, there was still some doubt whether the Conservatives would adopt Baring Young or Colonel Harris for the Christchurch seat, and the paper asserted ‘on reliable authority` that Baring Young had withdrawn. But, a week later, this information was contradicted by the Conservative ‘Bournemouth Observer`. On 5th February, news reached London of the death of General Gordon, massacred at Khartoum by the forces of the Mahdi; this proved to be the final blow to Gladstone’s administration, and on 24th June 1885 he resigned.
During this period, when one would have expected him to be engaged in electioneering, Baring Young seems to have been living at Daylesford. The Cholmondeleys of Adlestrop ‘had a good deal of company` at the spacious rectory at Adlestrop on 14th July, when the guests included ‘the Pennystones, the Youngs, Mrs Daubin`. On 17th July, Mrs Young (the Founder’s mother) called at Adlestrop accompanied by ‘a Miss Praed`. The Praeds were closely related to the Youngs by marriage. On Saturday, 18th July ‘Lionel, Rosie and I walked up to Daylesford, had tea with the Youngs and walked about the garden; they didn’t seem to know how to entertain us much`. It would seem from these entries that the Founder’s mother, and probably his brother, Arthur, and his youngest sister, Margaret Lucia Young, were all staying at Daylesford. The Youngs, with their austere Puritanism, would certainly not have approved of many of the activities that young Cholmondeley found entertaining.
In the custom of those days, much of the hard work and doorstepping were left to the candidate’s local party agent. Mr Horace Davey, the Liberal candidate, did not begin seriously canvassing until 24th October, and it was not until 14th November that Baring Young announced his intention to address the electors at an open-air meeting. The (Liberal) Christchurch Times was scathing:
Whether his reluctance to face an open air meeting, arises from fear, or as some will have it, a desire to shirk an unpleasant contest, we cannot say. We cannot but wonder at the infatuation which led him, at the beck of the Tory Party wire pullers in London to attempt opposition to our old tried member.
We shall be surprised if the electors of Christchurch return Mr Young.
The political situation was transformed a week later when Charles Stuart Parnell, the charismatic leader of the Irish Nationalist Party (who had been educated partly at Chipping Norton Vicarage), ordered the Irish to support the Conservatives. Voting – still a leisurely process in those days – began on 23rd November 1885
In Christchurch, the ‘Christchurch Times` admitted to being duly astonished. C. E. B. Young was elected with 2,184 votes, against Horace Davey, the Liberal candidate, with 2,006. The total number of registered voters in the constituency was 4,626; it was a turnout large enough to break the heart of our modern party agents. The ‘Christchurch Times` was of course appalled
Christchurch has given its voice in favour of squires and factions and against the men who live by toil – in favour of altering the Free Trade policy – in favour of rental and against Free Trade in Land – in favour of ground rents and long leases and against the enfranchisement of leaseholders.
The ‘men who live by toil` were, of course, the agricultural labourers (who were often neglected by the Conservative party) and not the industrial workers.
The national result was that the Liberals secured 333 seats, the Conservatives 251 and the Irish Nationalists 86; the alliance of the Irish and the Conservatives was sufficient to validate the caretaker Conservative government. This uncomfortable alliance between the Conservatives and the Irish gave Lord Salisbury just enough votes to form a Conservative government, which took office on 24th June, but with little assurance of permanence. Parnell, holding the balance of power, was able to keep Salisbury in office only so long as he pursued a policy in Ireland of which Parnell approved. At first, all went well; the Ashbourne Act in August provided £5m to enable Irish tenants to purchase their landholdings on an easy interest, long-term basis, but it was not long before the relationship turned sour. Meanwhile, Gladstone, now aged seventy-five, departed on a cruise to Norway as a guest of Sir Thomas Brassey of Heythrop House. The uneasy alliance soon broke down when it became clear that the Conservatives had no intention of granting Home Rule to Ireland, whereas Gladstone, in his own careful and laborious way, had now committed himself to Irish Home Rule. As a result, Salisbury’s government resigned on 27th January 1886 and Gladstone formed his third administration with the support of the Irish
On Tuesday 1st December young Cholmondeley recorded
I went home by the early train [from Oxford] for the polling of Stow. I drew up Wyatt and Price to vote for Donnington. Major and the Woolliamses provided for the rest of the Conservatives in the village. Adlestrop has a respectable Conservative majority. Anderson found that he had been impersonated. I rode over to Moreton in the afternoon and found that they had got a good majority there. The Youngs called. I came back to Oxford by the late train and travelled with one dreadful Radical and one good Conservative.
Barry Whittaker queries whether the Founder had been down to Bournemouth [at all] during the election. The ‘Christchurch Times`, having so vigorously predicted a Liberal victory in Bournemouth, now had to search for some excuse for their defeat. This, they now found, had been a dirty election; the Conservatives had raised unjustified fears that the Liberals were about to disestablish and disendow the Church, and ‘if intimidation, if not actually of an illegal character, certainly of a disreputable kind, had not been practised by some Tory players, and the Primrose League, Mr Baring Young would not have been elected`. Charges such as this are common in the heat of party politics, and avoided being defamatory by the qualification ‘if not actually of an illegal character`.
Salisbury’s administration was short-lived. Once the Irish had withheld their support, there was little chance of a Tory survival. Salisbury was defeated in January 1886 on a trivial issue and resigned. Baring Young voted twice against his own government’s Irish Land Bill on 25th and 26th January 1886, thus helping to bring down Salisbury and guaranteeing that he would be overlooked in any subsequent Conservative distribution of honours. But the Irish had managed to split the Liberals as well: eighteen voted with the Conservatives, and seventy-six abstained. As a result, Gladstone formed his third administration on 1st February 1886 with a divided party, also dependent on Irish support. . It must have been a strange and confusing period for the newly-elected M.P. for Christchurch to have his initiation into the complex world of disintegrating party politics.
Gladstone appointed the recently defeated Horace Davey to be Solicitor-General in his new government, and the Christchurch Times, ever hopeful, suggested that ‘Mr Young would be thought well of if he resigned his seat so that Mr Davey might be re-elected for his old borough` (13th February). On 27th February Mr Young was asked in the House of Commons if he was prepared to resign in favour of Mr Davey. He responded, very properly, that although he was personally willing to do so, his constituents would not permit it. On 5th March, C. E. B. Young voted in favour of an hereditary House of Lords, and on 9th March against the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. On 17th March he voted in favour of a re-union between the Scottish (Presbyterian) Church and the Church of England, and on 18th and 22nd March he voted against motions seeking to restrict the right of government to make war without the knowledge and consent of parliament, and an immediate increase in the capitation grant to the volunteer force. In this, he can be seen to be acting consistently with his principles, and not altogether following the party line. He was also regular in attendance at the House.
On 1st May 1886, Mr Young attended a formal Conservative Party Dinner in Christchurch. Speaking in his capacity as an M.P., he
Prognosticated that though the House was in its infancy it was near to its dissolution. He criticised Mr Gladstone who, he said, was simply doing the bidding of Mr Parnell who would not be satisfied until he had the entire separation of the Union. Mr Gladstone’s Bill meant nothing less than a repeal of the Union and he (Mr Young) urged his hearers to stand forward and protest in every way they could against this monstrous and unscrupulous attempt on the part of one vain, passionate old man who was blinded by the sense of his own importance and an absurd lust for power, to scatter the constitution and split into pieces the united kingdom of Great Britain.
C. E. B. Young was certainly learning the art of parliamentary rhetoric.
He voted in the Commons again on 11th May (in favour of the death penalty for murder), 20th May (restricting the ownership and carrying of arms in Ireland), and June 8th. This was the critical vote on Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill, which was defeated by 343 votes to 313. The ‘Liberal Unionists` had defected from Gladstone, and he resigned.
A fresh election was inevitable, parliament was dissolved on 26th June and Baring Young sought re-nomination as the Conservative candidate for Christchurch. The hostile Christchurch Times carried an editorial that said
The universal opinion throughout the borough, so far as we have been able to find out … by a pretty wide inspection of it of late, is that Mr Baring Young has forfeited to a large extent the confidence “born of hope”, for it had no other ground, that he would have turned out to be something after his election; and we are assured that in influential quarters among his own party, attempts have been made to replace him by a gentleman of acceptable abilities and one who as a successor to a man of eminence like Sir Henry Wolff and Sir Horace Davey would reflect credit upon the constituency.
The Christchurch Times had not investigated the ‘universal opinion` of the borough very accurately. Baring Young was re-adopted as Conservative candidate, and on polling day, 6th July 1886, he was returned with a majority of 239 votes: Baring Young (Conservative) 2072, A. C. Merton (Liberal) 1833. He thanked the voters and said that he took it that it was a triumph for the cause of the Union between the three countries, which he hoped would continue to exist. Amongst those elected to this parliament were two men who were cousins of the Founder: his second cousin, Stafford Henry Northcote, ennobled in 1885 as Earl of Iddesleigh, Foreign Secretary, and his first cousin, William Frederick Lawrence of Whiteparish, Wilts., M. P. for the Abercrombie Division of Liverpool, who, on 16th February 1887, was to marry the Founder’s sister, Caroline Susan Young. Lord Iddesleigh resigned early in 1887, and died suddenly in 10, Downing Street on 12th January.
The Christchurch Times had not yet given up the struggle. On 14th August they published the details of the election expenses incurred by the two candidates. This was an attempt to invoke the Corrupt Practices Act (1883) limiting the election expenses of a candidate in a borough to £100, and defining the distribution of wines and spirits at election time as bribery. Unhappily for the Christchurch Times, both candidates had exceeded the permitted amount, but they took consolation from being able to show that Baring Young’s expenses (£635 – 18s – 10d) were considerably greater than Mr A. C. Merton’s at £332 – 4s - 2d. These expenses were, of course, incurred not by the candidates but by their political agents, and conformity was not yet strictly enforced.
It is satisfactory to note that on this occasion there is no evidence of any excessive expenditure for wines etc., which figured in the returns for the last election, and for the payment of which application was successfully made later to the High Court. No opportunity was however given for those who desire the purity of the borough to investigate these claims.
It must have been particularly galling to Baring Young with his temperate, if not teetotal, convictions, to be accused of the misuse of alcohol in soliciting the support of voters. The perpetrator was, of course, his political agent, but the responsibility was Baring Young’s. On 19th May 1887 he presented a petition to the House from the Christchurch Good Templars (a temperance society) against the licensing clause of the Local Government Bill. On 11th May 1889 he subscribed one guinea to the fund of the Blue Ribbon Gospel Temperance Union. And on 1st June 1889 he presented a petition to the House from the Christchurch Wesleyans in favour of Sunday closing of licensed premises.
In February 1887, Charles Baring Young was concerned about the situation in Korea where, two years earlier, Britain had seized Port Hamilton on a small island in the Korean archipelago, off the south coast of Korea, in order to forestall Russian intervention in the confused affairs of the Far East. Despite Chinese protests, Britain relinquished the port on 27th February 1887, leading indirectly to the Sino-Japanese War a few years later. There is no obvious reason why Baring Young or any of his constituents in Bournemouth should have had any interest in the events unfolding in the Far East (particularly since, with an endearing disregard for geography, he ascribed these events to the North Pacific) and the most likely explanation for his intervention on 1st February was that the Foreign Office had ‘planted` the questions in order to enable the Foreign Secretary to clarify what appeared to be a rather vacillating policy.
In May an unfortunate confusion occurred in the House:
By some misunderstanding Mr Young was paired in the division list on Thursday night. This was done without Mr Young’s knowledge, and thereupon the Hon Member [Mr Young], anxious to record his vote, arriving at Westminster, found himself debarred from exercising his functions. Unfortunately by this error he also missed a dinner at Boscombe.
How did it happen that the Party Whips omitted to tell their back-bencher that he had been paired?
On 22nd December 1888 (shortly after Clyde House had been opened) Mr Baring Young addressed a meeting of the Primrose League, a Conservative Party support group, reaffirming his strong convictions concerning the issue of Home Rule for Ireland:
[He said that] they were all bound in one common aim – the preserving of the institutions of their country and especially just now the unity of the Empire. … Opponents had lately been beating the big drum to keep up their spirit; they also abused the government, especially Mr Balfour [Secretary of State for Ireland], and further they indulged in misrepresentation of facts. Mr Baring Young said that although the Conservatives were charmed with Mr Gladstone’s eloquence, they found flaws in his arguments. After alluding to the Irish agitation, which was no nearer success, Mr Baring Young said that the government had passed many important bills – principal among them being the Local Government Act and the Conservation of Consols. He hopes that members of the Primrose League would do all they could to keep the present government in power and to maintain law and order in Ireland, and the Parliamentary Union of Great Britain and Ireland.
Alfred Jarvis printed (op. cit. pp.24-26) a full transcript of Baring Young’s first major speech (Hansard Vol. 333), but not his maiden speech, which was made during the debate on the motion ‘That it is desirable to establish a national system of Evening Continuation Schools where children who leave elementary day schools at a very early age may continue their education`. This speech was made on 15th March 1889, four years after he had first been elected, and shortly after he had purchased Kingham Field Farm from the Sarsden Estate. Already, as a consequence of his work with teenage London working boys, Baring Young thought himself to be, or was regarded as an authority on post-elementary education. ‘I have had something to do`, he said, ‘with boys in the early years after they have left school`. Elementary education had effectively become compulsory as a result of Viscount Sandon’s Education Act in 1876; Baring Young was prepared to support ‘extending the time of compulsory attendance at day schools to thirteen years`. He recognised that ‘between the ages of thirteen and sixteen is just the time when the mind begins to expand and to appreciate the instruction offered`, but he was reluctant to support any proposal that would remove responsibility from the parents and from the voluntary education agencies. His objection was to any further extension of state intervention in this area, beyond the provision of elementary education. Evening Schools already existed in London and in most large towns, provided by the Science and Art Department, although voluntary attendance at these night schools seemed to be decreasing.
One of the reasons for this disappointingly low attendance at Evening Schools was the low standard of education provided in many elementary schools:
The whole system of education is such as to deter boys from attending evening schools, and when they have passed the exemption standard [which qualified them to leave elementary school] they fling up their caps and cry, ‘Catch me going to school again!` … I think it would be a fatal mistake to adopt a system of compulsion in higher school just because it has been adopted and been found to answer among other nations [such as Germany]. Boys leave school now, say, at the age of thirteen and most of them go to work of some kind and some of them work long hours; they come home tired in the evening and want long rest. Now, set up classes for these boys which shall be bright and attractive, and invite them to come in, and you may be doing them a benefit just at the time when it will be most advantageous to them. But compel them to attend, and you make that distasteful if not odious to them, which should be a pleasure and a boon; you are cramming them with knowledge with the effect of, very often, permanent injury to the health; you may possibly turn out a very superior wage-earning machine, but it is at the expense of the higher qualities of the man – and the woman too … By this constant and evergrowing interference on the part of the State in matters of individual and family concern, you are doing your best to destroy that spirit of freedom, self-reliance and self-respect which have helped to make our nation what it is.
Five months after making this speech, the Founder opened Stratford House in what had formerly been Kingham Field Farm for the express purpose of providing the sort of continuing education that he had been describing. No boy on the Hill was compelled to remain there after reaching the age of thirteen or fourteen, but those who chose voluntarily to do so were provided with accommodation and an opportunity to acquire skills and a trade in precisely the sort of bright and attractive atmosphere that he had commended in the House. Indeed it is worth noting that Stratford House is surprisingly commodious for the small group of older boys who chose to live there; it is almost large enough for each of them to have had his own room.
In February 1890, the Christchurch Times returned to their attack on their M. P. Apparently a local Conservative Party rally had been held in Christchurch at which Baring Young was absent.
Here’s a crowded Conservative meeting with two M. P. s on the platform – no letter from the M. P. for the borough, no apology for his absence and no cheering for him at the end.
What’s amiss with the Conservative party in our borough? One of the Conservative journals has been calling upon the Secretary of the Association to resign and then, plucking up courage, calls upon their M. P. to resign declaring that somebody must be the Jonah and thus be thrown overboard to save the borough being represented by a Radical. Then again, it finds fault with the manner in which Mr Baring Young’s local subscriptions of £3,000 p.a. are distributed.
Copies of the Christchurch Times for the years 1891-2 are missing, but Barry Whittaker diligently traced further references to Baring Young’s parliamentary career in the pages of Hansard. In April 1890 he asked if it was necessary for Customs Officers to examine every tenth bale of moss litter by cutting it through the centre. In June 1891 he spoke against the Commons Act of 1876 that had enacted that land set aside for fuel allotments should not be diverted for any other purposes than creating recreation grounds and garden allotments. He hoped for a revision that would allow the creation of a borough cemetery in Bournemouth from what had been set aside as fuel allotments.
In June 1891 he opposed the motion that would have given local Guardians of the Poor the right to subsidise parents who were too poor to afford elementary school fees. His objection was that this was a step towards state socialism. Once again, there is an apparent inconsistency between his own unlimited personal generosity towards boys in need, and the provision of a national system that would achieve a similar effect on a large scale. The issue was not one of school fees (although he declared himself to be opposed to free education) but on whether they should be on an individual voluntary basis, or provided universally by the state. This was not inconsistency, but a matter of principle.
In 1892 (the year that Swansea House was opened) he asked two seemingly trivial questions. The first (31st May) was whether voting cards could be sent through the post for a halfpenny postage like other printed matter. Once again, this bears the hallmarks of a question planted by the Postmaster General, who could then reply that a recent change enabled voting cards to be posted this way.
The other question (20th June) is rather more interesting. Tension was building up in the Transvaal between the Boers and the (mainly British) uitlanders culminating in the Jameson Raid three years later. Baring Young asked the apparently innocuous question whether a statement that an English party had been arrested and deported from the Transvaal had been brought to the notice of the Queen. The Foreign Secretary, in whose department fell relations with the Transvaal, was clearly uncertain how to reply. But, if this question had not been planted by the Foreign Office, what interest did Baring Young have in the affairs of South Africa? Was he protecting the interests of one of his Christchurch constituents?
I am deeply indebted to Barry Whittaker for his prolonged, painstaking and exhaustive research in investigating Charles Baring Young’s political career, for which he thoroughly deserved the award of the Old Boys’ Essay Prize. Barry was, I think, unduly influenced by the political stance of the Christchurch Times, and drew conclusions from his findings that were unfavourable to Baring Young. Alf Jarvis responded to these in a lengthy and well-reasoned letter that is now in my possession. But our overall conclusion must be that, although the Founder was fairly diligent in his attendance at the House, his performance was unexceptional, and he was wise not to seek re-election. He made three speeches, two of them on education, and asked five parliamentary questions. He was succeeded as M. P. for Christchurch by Abel Henry Smith, another Conservative. In 1892 Gladstone, with the support of eighty-one Irish Nationalists, was able to form his fourth and last ministry.
Charles Baring Young’s political career was unspectacular. He was a loyal backbencher, but his contributions to parliamentary debate were few and uninspired. He was not cut out for the world of politics, and was right not to seek re-election in 1892. He had other, and greater, things to do.
