U.K.: THE PARLIAMENT PROJECT
last century – although it is often surprising to find people of quite humble origins elected even before the age of democracy. And many of them turn out to have fascinating stories which tell us a lot not just about politics, but also about the society they lived in. The History of Parliament project
was originally conceived by Josiah Wedgwood (1872-1942), a Liberal, then Labour, MP from the Midlands. First elected in 1906, he became a Minister in the Ramsay Macdonald government of 1924. Wedgwood was a keen local historian, particularly interested in his forebears as MPs for his own constituency and area. From 1928 he began to try to persuade the government to fund a national dictionary of parliamentary biography. A committee of the great and good, set up by the Prime Minister, agreed that the project was a worthy one, but by the time it reported in the 1930s, the government was unwilling to provide the money to fund it. Wedgwood started work anyway,
using a small staff, and raising some private money. Apart from publishing two volumes on Parliament in the Middle Ages, he also sent round a questionnaire to all of those who had served as MPs in the period up to the end of the First World War, allowing them to provide him with the basic information which would ultimately become the foundation for their own biographies. It was only after his death, and after the end of the Second World War, that the project succeeded in gaining government support when in 1951 the Treasury finally agreed to fund it. From the beginning, it has been overseen by a body of trustees who are composed of Members and officers of both Houses of Parliament, but also by an editorial board of expert historians from universities across the country. Since 1994 the History has been funded directly by the two Houses of Parliament.
Who served and what they did The project has come a long way. The History of Parliament is now one of the most ambitious, authoritative
and well-researched projects in British history. It consists of detailed studies of elections and electoral politics in each constituency, and of closely researched accounts of the lives of everyone who was elected to Parliament within the period, together with surveys drawing out the themes and discoveries of the research and adding information on the operation of Parliament as an institution. We have published 41 volumes,
covering in total 338 years of parliamentary history, containing 21,500 biographies, 5,000 constituency articles and 25 million words. We have recently placed all of our articles on a website, which is freely available to all (www.
historyofparliamentonline.org). The result is that for most of Parliament’s long and exciting history it is possible to discover not only who served as a Member of Parliament for any constituency and when they did so, but also, in many cases what they did when they got to Parliament, and much about their lives outside Parliament. Of course the key figures in
Parliament are covered with major biographies: Prime Ministers, Chancellors, Speakers, Leaders of
64 | The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue One
the Opposition. But our work covers everyone, including the humblest Backbencher. It also includes those people who were famous for other reasons, but who were also MPs for part of their lives – people like Sir Christopher Wren, the architect, or Sir Isaac Newton, the mathematician, both MPs in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Quite recently, we have started
to work on the House of Lords as well as the House of Commons. The upper House presents with a whole set of different challenges. Here, it is usually a lot easier to know who was who – at least after the beginning of the eighteenth century – and our problem is often one of having too much, rather than too little, information.
The great, the good and those who were neither To take as an example of what we are writing about, one of the most recent sets of volumes to be published covers the political battles that resulted in the “Great Reform Act” of 1832 – Britain’s first step on the road to democracy. It contains biographies of the
1,982 MPs who sat in the House of Commons during that period.
They include, naturally, the front rank politicians whom we still remember, like Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and even the young William Gladstone. But they also include accounts of hundreds of second rank parliamentary figures, like Peel’s friends and ministerial colleagues Henry Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1828- 30, a saintly man with a head for business but no talent for speaking, or the foul-mouthed Irishman “Black Billy” Holmes, the Chief Tory Whip, who was driven to exasperation by Peel’s aloofness towards the rank and file. They include prominent Backbenchers like William Wilberforce, the campaigner for the abolition of slavery; “Orator” Henry Hunt, the hero of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, the champion of the poor; and the burly Scotsman Joseph Hume, a former naval surgeon, who relentlessly harried Ministers over their spending. They include MPs by accident, like the poet and pamphleteer Robert Southey, who was returned to Parliament without his knowledge or consent and resigned as soon as the new Parliament met.
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