A Life of Sir John Eldon Gorst

Archie Hunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135281892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

This is the first book to tell the story of on eof the most contentious figures in Victorian and Edwardian politics: that of the independent-minded and exceptionally able Conservative politician, Sir John Eldon Gorst.

—1—

Youth

On a cold January morning in 1860 two young men dressed for travel might have been observed on the quayside of the great seaport city of Liverpool. They were surrounded by a throng of people who could only be emigrants. Alongside the quay lay a tall four-masted ship of the clipper class, its sails furled. Activity was immense on board and on the quay, for the ship was being loaded with people, animals, crates, stores and luggage. It was foggy and windless, and the opposite side of the river was invisible.

On closer inspection one of the two young men, slight and bearded, looked desperately ill. While he was mainly silent, his companion seemed cheerful as if he were trying to keep up the other’s spirits. Soon they were joined by two other men who had come to see them off: relatives or friends, no doubt, of the travellers. It was time to board. The young men made their farewells and then walked along the short gangplank onto the ship. The one went slowly as if walking was an effort; the other was watchful, ready to support his friend.

The ship – the 2,305-ton Red Jacket owned by the White Star Company – was due to catch the tide that afternoon. But on the advice of the pilot its sailing was delayed on account of the fog. Then early next morning, on 27 January, the ship with its 500 passengers slipped from its moorings and, towed by two steamers, slowly moved – still in mist – down the river towards the estuary. The 15,000-mile journey to the antipodes had begun.

Two days later as the ship entered the Atlantic the bearded young man had for the first time on the voyage dragged himself on deck. He was leaning over the rail, which he gripped as strongly as his strength would allow. He still looked very ill. For a moment he was watched by the captain and a young woman passenger, to whom the captain spoke: ‘I fear we shall have to put that poor fellow in the sea before we get to the line.’¹

The young man was the 25-year-old John Eldon Gorst. He and his friend Mainwaring were both destined for New Zealand. Gorst had recently been the victim of scarlet fever, a deadly disease in those days. However, the captain was wrong: Gorst had a tough constitution and a strong will, and would live another 56 years.

* * * *

John Eldon Gorst was born in Preston on 24 May 1835, the third child and second son of Edward Chaddock Gorst, a solicitor, and his wife Elizabeth. Six more children would subsequently be born to the Gorsts, three boys and three girls. The Gorsts were a well-established family living comfortably in a three-storied Georgian house in fashionable Winckley Square in the middle of Preston, and respected in their part of Lancashire. Robert Chaddock Gorst, John’s great-grandfather, was born of yeoman stock in Middlewich, Cheshire. He had made a good marriage to Mary Lowndes and moved to Preston in about 1760. His three sons did well. One went to Cambridge and was ordained. The other two became attorneys. One of them, Edward, John’s grandfather, practised first at Leigh and then in Preston with the firm of Blakelock before being appointed deputy Clerk of the Peace for the County Palatine of Lancaster. His son, Edward Chaddock, born in 1803 and John’s father, also went into the law, becoming a solicitor and then in turn deputy Clerk of the Peace. For many years, therefore, the Gorsts were at the centre of legal and administrative affairs in the county. John’s uncle, Thomas Mee Gorst, chose the other branch of the legal profession. After graduating from St John’s College, Cambridge, he was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple.

The Gorsts have been remembered in Preston as strong supporters of the Anglican church. There are memorial windows to John’s grandfather Edward and his grandmother, and to various other members of the family in St John’s parish church. Further, in 1856 Edward’s three surviving daughters gave in their father’s memory a font which still stands in the baptistry of that church. Another Gorst forebear presented communion plate to Christ Church consisting of a flagon, two chalices and two patens of silver. There are also memorials to the Gorsts in St George’s church, Preston.² There is one other memorial to be mentioned. In Winckley Square, close to his parents’ house, John’s birth in 1835 was celebrated by the planting of a chestnut tree. Huge and shady, it still stands today.

About John’s mother, Elizabeth, not a lot is known. She came from a prosperous family who lived in County Durham, her father being John Douthwaite Nesham of Houghton-le-Spring. She was married in 1830, had nine children and died aged 46 in December 1848 when John was 13.

When John was 5 years old an event occurred which would affect the fortunes of the Gorst family to their advantage, including, towards the end of his life, John’s own. His uncle Thomas Mee inherited property under the will of Robert Lowndes of Palterton Hall in Derbyshire. This inheritance was conditional on the beneficiary taking the name Lowndes which Thomas did in 1841. Robert Lowndes had died in 1797, but his sons had no heirs. Accordingly, under his will his property passed to the family of his daughter Mary, who, as has already been mentioned, married Robert Chaddock Gorst.

In 1847 when John was 12 his elder brother Edward was sent off to Rugby, a school whose reputation had revived under its great headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold. However, for some reason – possibly it was due to his mother’s death – John did not follow in his brother’s scholastic footsteps; instead he went to Preston Grammar School, situated just round the corner from where he lived. He was a clever boy but no school records of the time survive, so we do not know his precise achievements, except that he was head boy. Also while there he founded and edited a school magazine, which he called The Scholar. This publication was printed and issued at regular intervals for a year until it ran foul of the school authorities and had to be suppressed. As Gorst was to put it himself:

Obnoxious articles, … written in a mocking spirit were the pretext, and they proceeded from the pen of my father. But neither as editor nor as son could I take shelter under his name, and the paper was condemned and stopped.³

This episode did not stop the Master of the Grammar School, G. N. Smith, himself a Cambridge graduate, from writing to the tutor at St John’s College, Cambridge in April 1853 requesting Gorst’s admission to the College the following October. In his letter he bore testimony to his pupil’s ‘excellent character and conduct’ and stated that Gorst had ‘a very good knowledge of Latin and Greek languages – in mathematics I have much confidence in speaking of his superior abilities and attainments …’⁴ There is an entry for Gorst in J. A. Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigiensis which shows that he matriculated in 1853 and was a scholar.

In those days Cambridge held an honours examination in mathematics only, and until 1858 it was necessary for students to have four years’ residence to obtain a degree. Gorst therefore read mathematics. His progress during his four years was smooth, and in the six examinations he took he was always placed in the first class.⁵ The syllabus for the tripos in those days was an interesting mixture which included the classics, moral philosophy, logic, the study of the gospels and Acts, as well as algebra, Euclid, trigonometry, hydrostatics, mechanics, calculus and geometry. In his third year other subjects made their appearance such as astronomy, dynamics and lunar theory, optics, as well as church history covering the first three centuries of the Christian era and the Reformation. Gorst always set his sights high and in his final examinations he confidently expected to become First Wrangler, his college apparently sharing these hopes.⁶ But he was to be disappointed and had to content himself with being Third Wrangler. On the day the exam results were published, friends were posted between the Senate House and Gorst’s rooms in St. John’s in order that the tidings should be carried to him with the least possible delay. Why he could not have gone himself to the Senate House to learn the results first-hand is unclear. At any rate the news was slow in coming and the disconsolate Gorst guessed his fate. Afterwards his coach consoled him by saying, ‘I never knew a man take so high a mathematical degree who knew so little mathematics as you.’⁷

Gorst had not worked exclusively for the mathematical tripos, for he spent a good deal of time studying under Professor Living at the chemical laboratory that had just been established at Cambridge by St John’s College.

It might be tempting, but almost certainly wrong, to attribute Gorst’s interest in chemistry to the success in that field already being achieved by his brilliant half-brother, Edward Frankland, who had become in 1851, at the age of 26, professor of chemistry at Owen’s College, Manchester. But chemistry midway through the nineteenth century was commanding the attention of many devoted to scientific research. Gorst’s interest will have been another manifestation of his lively intellectual curiosity. In any case Gorst, we can be fairly sure, was unaware of his half-brother’s existence, at least at this time. A word of explanation is necessary. As a very young man John’s father, Edward Chaddock Gorst, had an affair with Margaret Frankland, a domestic servant employed in the Gorst household in Preston, and by her had an illegitimate son. News of Edward’s indiscretion had for obvious reasons to be suppressed, and the Gorsts paid Margaret a handsome annuity which assured the boy’s education and start in life as a chemist in Lancaster. Edward Frankland’s career in chemistry was a distinguished one; he became President of the Chemical Society and, in 1895, was knighted.⁸

Gorst took his degree and on 31 March 1857 he was elected to a Fellowship of his College. The office of Gregson Fellow to which he had been admitted was a distinguished one for it had been founded in 1527. In addition, the Fellowship had just been vacated by Dr Bateson on his appointment as Master of the College. Gorst retained his Fellowship for a mere three years, having to relinquish it on his marriage. He was made an Honorary Fellow in 1890.

There were two other activities which caught Gorst’s attention while at Cambridge. One was rowing. In the May races of 1854 he rowed No. 4 in the second boat of the Lady Margaret Boat Club, the name by which the St John’s boat club was and still is known. It may well have been as a result of boat club festivities that Gorst was admonished by the Dean for bad behaviour in his second year. A very noisy party was held in his rooms in D4 New Court one winter evening. The entry in the College archives reads:

Some [of those in his rooms] were shouting and imitating the voices of strange animals from the window to the court to the great annoyance and disgust of the neighbourhood … a Fellow was obliged to call on the Senior Dean to ask him to interfere.

The offenders, it seems, were friends of Gorst’s such as the captain of boats with a reputation for rowdiness. But this was not all. Perhaps the Dean was unpopular or he may have overreacted to the high spirits displayed. Whatever it was the next night the door to the Dean’s rooms was screwed up so as to make entry or exit impossible.⁹ History does not relate whether the unfortunate Dean was immured or not. Accounts of what happened appeared in the local and even London papers. If he had not been one before, Gorst must have become something of a celebrity.

Gorst’s other great interest while an undergraduate was the Cambridge Union Society in which he played an active part, always as a strong Conservative. The Union had not in the mid-nineteenth century quite emerged as the forcing-house for aspiring young politicians that it was to become. Nonetheless, it attracted those drawn to politics who wished, often earnestly, to debate the issues of the time. Gorst was certainly one of these.

The first time Gorst spoke at the Union was in opposition to a motion condemning trade unions. To oppose such a motion was not untypical of the man he was to become. Trade unions in the 1850s were anything but popular with run of the mill Conservatives. But then Gorst was always inclined to be highly independent in his political views. While Gorst was brought up against a conventional family background of law and administration, discussion and argument on the issues of the day may well have been encouraged by his father, who, after all, had written contentious articles for his son’s school magazine. It is very likely that Gorst’s independence of mind and spirit, which we shall come across throughout the pages of this history, will have had its origin at home in Preston.

Gorst soon made his mark in the Union and became Treasurer at the beginning of the Michaelmas term of 1855. This was quite an onerous position. Apart from all the work to do with accounting and the paying of bills, the Treasurer, if he was absent without good reason from any business meeting, was fined one guinea. The Union finances in Gorst’s time were in a pretty parlous state but, as he recalled years later, they managed by ‘exercising self-denial’ largely to recover the situation.¹⁰

Eventually, the ultimate accolade, Gorst was elected President of the Union for the Easter term of 1857. The President had the task, or some might say the fun, of deciding on the subject for debates. The subjects Gorst chose were both serious and contentious ones, and throw some light on his character. On Tuesday 28 April the motion was: ‘that this House would desire to see a measure of Parliamentary Reform passed by the new Parliament, either in the ensuing or in the subsequent session’.¹¹ The motion was carried by one. The country, however, would have to wait for ten years for legislation to be successfully enacted on this subject.

A week later the motion ‘that the present relations of church and state are anomalous and unsatisfactory’ was defeated by 34 to 27. An amendment to the motion was moved, but rejected, to the effect that the only desirable alteration in these relations concerned the collection of church rates. The subject of these rates has been long forgotten, but in those days it engendered much heat, particularly among nonconformists.¹² It was to be the unpromising subject on which Gor...