Julie Moore - final PhD submission.pdf - University of Hertfordshire ...

eer was a very good thing. He brewed his own and liked it better than that nasty
foreign wine’, is perhaps open to debate, but what he was doing was identifying
himself in this division which was home to several breweries as one who would
defend both the brewing and drinking of the staple of the working man’s diet. 165 One
farmer in the Northern division claimed to have switched political allegiance because
the Liberal attempt to increase the beer duty ‘was a tax on the barley grower equal
to 4s an acre, while champagne only paid 2d a bottle’. 166 Conservative supporters
were keen to exploit this potential for a class division, and on occasion their
adventures into poetry could cause both rich and poor alike to wince:
Let brandy and gin bring Revenue in
Or luxuries, like Champagne, it is clear,
When one’s income is large – it isn’t fair to charge
A tax on malt or the poor man’s beer! 167
As Lawrence identified, the highlighting by the Tories of the threat to the pint carried
with it a wider appeal to an old England of simple pleasures within a paternalistic
structure, and this appeal carried a particular resonance within Hertfordshire,
reaching out to the understanding of those who were moving into the county. Ewen
Green argued that the success of the Conservatives was their ability to relocate
themselves as the party not simply of those who were owners of landed property,
but rather as the party of those who owned property in general, those very villa
owners of whose support Lord Salisbury had been pessimistic, convincing them that
the Liberal party, infected with Radicalism, was a threat to all property owners, not
just the large landowner. 168 Certainly, in Hertfordshire there was some evidence of
Conservatives playing on the suspicion of Radical intentions: H.G. Fordham was
obliged to deny the claims of a Tory pamphlet circulating in the Northern division
that the Liberals wanted to take people’s land for redistribution without
compensation, and at a meeting in the St. Albans division, H.J. Gotto told a
165 ‘Hoddesdon – Conservative Meeting’, HEO, 20 th June 1885 p.3, Whittaker, Brewers in
Hertfordshire, Table 1.1 ‘Breweries in Hertfordshire’ pp.4-6 lists 12 breweries active in the
Eastern division in the period 1885-1900.
166 ‘Baron Dimsdale’s Candidature’, HEO, 4 th July 1885 p.3. Speech by C W Scruby. A
correction appeared in the next edition, 11 th July 1885 p.2, confirming this should have read
4s a quarter, not acre.
167 ‘Correspondence’ from Thomas Garratt, HEO, 13 th June 1885 p.3.
168 Green, The Crisis of Conservatism, see particularly Chapter 3 ‘Conservatism and the
Propertied’.
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