How remarkable is this week’s loss of the Henley seat by the Conservatives?

It has only happened once before in the 150 years since modern party politics began! In 1906, Philip Morrell, husband of socialite hostess and Bloomsbury Group member, Ottoline Morrell, won the seat standing as a Liberal in a similar national landslide, ousting a divided Conservative Party which had also outstayed its welcome. Not even amid the massive electoral shifts of 1945, which brought Clement Attlee’s Labour government to power and delivered the National Health Service, nor the swing in 1997 which brought in Tony Blair’s government ending the Thatcher-Major era, did Henley so far forget itself as to elect a non-Conservative.

In 1906, only a quarter of the adult population in the constituency had the vote. The Conservative who lost was a popular local grandee, Robert Hermon-Hodge of Wyfold Court, who in two previous elections had held the seat against a strong Liberal challenger, Herbert Samuel, later High Commissioner for Palestine and leader of the Liberal Party.  Morrell won his victory on a swing of 4 per cent, although turnout at 88 per cent was far higher than at the recent general election. No doubt the boundary changes this time had some effect, although in 1906, the  large working class population of Caversham, still part of South Oxfordshire, teamed up with Henley’s Liberal establishment of shopkeepers, traders and wealthy local Liberals, like Sir Frank Crisp of Friar Park, to deliver victory for the Liberals.

Then,  as now, local factors played a part, including Conservative legislation compelling non-conformists, Congregationalists, Methodists and Baptists, numerous in the town of Henley and among agricultural workers in South Oxfordshire, to pay towards the upkeep of Anglican church schools; and the charge that the Conservative government was allowing the use of slave labour in the Empire, dramatized by a local woman just returned from South Africa where it was claimed to be prevalent. But the overwhelming cause was the national tide of anti-Conservative feeling, which in 1906 converted the Conservative’s overall majority in the House of Commons of 134 to 130 for the Liberals.

At the Liberal Club in the Reading Road – now Henley Mini-Market –  Philip Morrell made a victory speech from the balcony, which still exists, to a large crowd gathered in the Reading Road. (Imagine trying to do that now.)  And Ottoline, who had done much to further her husband’s victory, it was said impressing particularly rural voters, was presented with ‘a handsome bouquet of scarlet tulips’. Robert Hermon Hodge consoled himself with the thought that he had been trying ‘to swim up Niagara’.

The eclipse of the Conservatives in national politics lasted until 1922 when the party again formed a government in its own right. But the Liberal’s triumph in Henley was much briefer, only until the next general election in 1910. Then, on a swing of over 11 per cent, Valentine Fleming of Joyce Grove in Nettlebed won the seat back for the Conservatives. The Henley Standard recalled the period of Liberal dominance between 1906 and 1910 as ‘the temporary disgrace…..in the insane period of January 1906’. We’ll have to wait to see whether the change we have just experienced is more durable.

Michael Redley – 7 July 2024