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

faced by the Tories at the end of the nineteenth century as members sought to
incorporate the twin developments of urban growth and an enlarged franchise into
their manifesto and avoid becoming identified as a purely rural special interest
group. 133 As Matthew Fforde has argued, ‘the Tories have been the objects of a
remarkable exercise in self-conservation. To a great extent, British Democracy has
turned out to be a Conservative affair,’ 134 whilst Martin Pugh has noted:
it is a sobering thought that the total paid membership of the ILP
in 1900 has been put at 6,000, a figure equivalent to the paid
membership of the Primrose League in Bolton at that time! 135
In looking for explanations of this Conservative success, Frans Coetzee has
challenged the view of the party as ‘the inert beneficiaries of their opponents’
excesses’ of Home Rule, Disestablishment and the rise of socialism, and argued for a
greater consideration of the dialogue between constituents and the political
parties. 136 Jon Lawrence’s research into the electoral patterns of Wolverhampton
have led him to conclude that historians have placed too much emphasis on class-
based concerns and downplayed the way in which local politicians engaged in a
rhetoric based on an identity of locality, 137 a view echoed in Timothy Cooper’s work
on the growing working class suburb of Walthamstow. 138 As Chapter Five will show,
questions of local identity were employed by both political parties in Hertfordshire as
ways of garnering votes, a strategy which the Conservative candidates were more
successful in deploying. Matthew Roberts has argued that it is too easy to evoke the
existence of a deferential state of mind to explain support for the Tories within the
countryside and that the idea of an ‘innate conservatism’ amongst the occupants of
the farmhouse, the villa or even the cottage needs to be re-assessed against an
1918-39 (Oxford, 2007), which argues that the place of the countryside in Labour party
thinking was more important than historians have acknowledged.
133
E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism. The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the
British Conservative Party, 1880-1914 (London, 1995).
134
M. Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886-1914 (Edinburgh, 1990), pp.3-4.
135
M. Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880-1935 (Oxford, 1985), p.2 Pugh’s exclamation
mark.
136
F. Coetzee, ‘Villa Toryism Reconsidered: Conservatism and Suburban Sensibilities in Late-
Victorian Croydon’ in E.H.H. Green, (ed.), An Age of Transition: British Politics 1880-1914
(Edinburgh, 1997), pp.29-47, p.31.
137
J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People. Party, Language and Popular Politics in England,
1867-1914 (Cambridge, 2002).
138
T. Cooper, ‘London-Over-the-Border: Politics in Suburban Walthamstow, 1870-1914’ in M.
Cragoe, and A. Taylor, (eds.), London Politics, 1760-1914 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp.211-232.
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