The author of the classic Victorian novel, Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes, is less well known as an active social and political reformer. For more than eight years he was also a Liberal MP, and between 1868 and 1874 he represented Frome.
When he was 40, in 1862, Hughes thought he was by then “sufficiently before the world … professionally and otherwise to risk” standing for Parliament, and at the 1865 general election he won a seat at Lambeth. However his highly individual style of political activism and support for stricter licensing laws alienated many of his constituents, so he began to look for a safer – and quieter – seat.
When the sitting Member for Frome, Sir Henry Rawlinson, had to stand down on accepting a government post just before the 1868 general election, Hughes, as one writer wryly put it “at once and with marvellous agility transferred his affections to the latter locality.” As he had, with Rawlinson, attended and spoken at the inaugural meeting of the Frome Working Men’s Liberal Union a couple of months before the election, setting out his political creed, perhaps there was some element of ‘pre-planning’ involved.
Though Frome was not Liberal territory, he strongly endorsed William Gladstone as the right man to lead the country, and Gladstone’s clear national victory assured Hughes of a comfortable majority of 95, with 571 votes to his only opponent’s 476.
While Frome’s MP, he opposed the custom of Parliament rising for Derby Day, so that parliamentarians could have a day at the races. On 23 May 1871 he opposed the motion (put by the Prime Minister, no less), and denounced English racing as occasions “on which all the rascality of the country met together in a competition, the object of which was a scramble for pounds, shillings, and pence.” He promised he would force a vote in future years if there was important business set down for Derby Day. Two years later, he welcomed the change that placed Derby Day with the usual Whitsun recess, saying that he and his colleagues would be “relieved .. from the humiliation of being parties to voting a special compliment to a national sport which they believed more than any other tended to injure the morals of this country.”
In the Commons, Hughes continued to champion his social and economic causes, promoting bills on issues such as trade union rights, horse-racing, Church patronage and Sunday trading, but he gradually became ever more isolated and ignored within Parliament and unpopular with his Somerset constituents.
A constituency meeting in late 1872 was so completely disrupted by hooligans, thought to be at the instigation of the brewing interest opposed to his stance on liquor licensing, that he decided “probably not to go back there.” So, once again, he looked to jump ship, but an attempt to muscle his way in as a Liberal candidate in Marylebone at the 1874 general election saw him coming bottom of the poll with a derisory vote. That ended his short Parliamentary career.
© JB Seatrobe (Barry K Winetrobe & Janet Seaton) 2018. A version of this article was published originally in the July 2015 issue of the Somerset Leveller, #3.