The Historical Journal, 49, 1 (2006), pp.

217–246 f 2006 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0018246X05005108 Printed in the United Kingdom

‘VILLA TORYISM’ AND POPULAR

C O N S E R V A T I S M I N L E E D S, 1885 –1902*
MATTHEW ROBERTS
Sheffield Hallam University

A B S T R A C T . This article is a contribution to the continuing debate on the character and electoral fortunes
of the Conservative party in late Victorian England. Using the West Riding borough of Leeds as a case
study, this article focuses on suburban Conservatism (villa toryism) and situates it within the broader context
of urban Conservatism in and beyond Leeds. It explores the nature of Conservative electoral dominance in the
period after the Third Reform Act. In doing so, it further challenges conventional interpretations about the rise
of class-based politics. As the example of Leeds demonstrates, villa toryism was not the political expression of
a socially homogeneous, innately conservative suburban middle class. The intense electoral competition that
ensued challenges assumptions about suburbia being politically quiescent and dull. Popular Conservatism, it
is argued, was a protean and socially heterogeneous political culture, of which villa toryism was one
distinctive strand. Villa toryism was the suburban incarnation of respectable, self-reliant, hierarchical, and
domesticated popular Conservatism. This villa toryism was distinct from, but related to, the working-class
Conservatism of the older industrial districts of urban England.

In accounting for the electoral success of the late Victorian Conservative party
historians have subscribed to one of two explanations. Conventional interpret-
ations have fastened on to Lord Salisbury’s reference to villa toryism,1 using it as a
shorthand analytical term to describe the processes by which the Conservative
party (accidentally) consolidated its hold over the urban and suburban middle
class. The concentration of wealthy individuals in suburbia purportedly trans-
formed the politics of the middle class, most of whom had previously formed the
electoral backbone of Liberalism – primarily as a result of their religious non-
conformity. Anti-Liberal rather than pro-Conservative, the suburban middle
class, it was argued, coalesced under the banner of Conservatism in opposition to
‘ radical finance, socialism and working-class spoliation ’.2 In this reading, the rise
of villa toryism in the late nineteenth century was thought to be the inevitable
outcome of the transition to class-based voting, facilitated by the Redistribution

143 Bawtry Road, Bessacarr, Doncaster, DN4 7AH matthew.roberts@shu.ac.uk

* The author would like to thank Jon Lawrence, Peter Mandler, Jon Parry, Helen Smith, Chris
Stevens, and Miles Taylor for their helpful comments on various drafts of this article. He also ac-
knowledges the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board which funded the
research upon which this article is based.
1
Salisbury to Northcote, 25 June 1882, Salisbury papers, Hatfield House, Class E.
2
J. Belchem, Class, party and the political system in Britain, 1867–1914 (Oxford, 1990), p. 3.

217
218 MATTHEW ROBERTS

Act of 1885 which ostensibly divided large towns and cities into discrete socially
homogeneous constituencies.3
The problem with this ‘electoral sociological ’ interpretation is that it paid no
attention to the timing, or to the extent, of the middle-class defection to
Conservatism.4 The vigour and ease with which revisionist historians of popular
politics have taken their axe to the tree of electoral sociology has convincingly
demonstrated that election behaviour cannot be reduced purely to underlying
socio-economic structural divisions like class.5 This ‘ attack on class ’ is evident
in two recent studies of London Conservatism.6 In an essay on villa toryism in
the suburb of Croydon, Frans Coetzee concluded that ‘ the borough’s electoral
geography and political sympathies were more fluid and complex than the broad
strokes of ‘‘ villa toryism ’’ might lead one to suppose ’,7 not least because of the
growing social (and political) heterogeneity of Croydon. A second and more
comprehensive study of London Conservatism by Alex Windscheffel further
challenged conventional understandings of villa toryism. Windscheffel found little
evidence to suggest ‘ that the metropolitan Conservative party regarded itself as a
lightning-rod for conducting the interests of the late-Victorian middle classes, a
strategy which in any case could not have delivered electoral success ’.8 As
London’s parliamentary constituencies were socially mixed it was not evident that
‘ London’s social and cultural structures permitted a class-based political system,
or that a latent ‘‘ villa toryism ’’ achieved political expression after the creation of
single-member, socially exclusive suburban seats in 1885. ’9 In this narrative it
would seem that historians have not only exaggerated the importance of the villa

3
J. P. Cornford, ‘The transformation of Conservatism in the late nineteenth century’, Victorian
Studies, 7 (1963), pp. 35–77, at pp. 52–3 ; P. Smith, ed., Lord Salisbury on politics (Cambridge, 1972),
pp. 95–7; P. Marsh, The discipline of popular government: Lord Salisbury’s domestic statecraft, 1881–1902
(Hassocks, 1978), p. 36 ; E. H. H. Green, ‘Radical Conservatism : the electoral genesis of tariff reform’,
Historical Journal, 27 (1985), pp. 667–92, at p. 679; idem, The crisis of Conservatism: the politics, economics and
ideology of the British Conservative party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995), p. 122 ; R. Shannon, The age of Disraeli,
1868–1881: the rise of Tory Democracy (London, 1992), passim; idem, The age of Salisbury, 1881–1902: Unionism
and empire (London, 1996), passim; D. Steele, Lord Salisbury: a political biography (London, 1999), p. 160.
4
It also conveniently sidesteps the persistence of a strong middle-class Liberalism well into the
twentieth century. For the continuing vitality of middle-class Liberalism in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century see G. R. Searle, ‘The Edwardian Liberal party and business’, English Historical
Review, 98 (1983), pp. 28–60; G. Bernstein, Liberalism and Liberal politics in Edwardian England (Boston,
1986), pp. 1–5, 135–65, and 197–201; B. Doyle, ‘Urban Liberalism and the ‘‘lost ’’ generation : politics
and middle-class culture in Norwich, 1900–1935’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 617–34; J. R. Moore,
‘Liberalism and the politics of suburbia: electoral dynamics in late nineteenth-century South
Manchester’, Urban History, 30 (2003), pp. 225–50.
5
For the attack on electoral sociology see Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor’s introduction to their
edited collection: Party, state and society: electoral behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 1–19.
6
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; A. Windscheffel, ‘Villa toryism? The making of London Conservatism, 1868–1896’ (Ph.D.
7
thesis, University of London, 2000). Coetzee, ‘Villa toryism’, p. 39.
8
A. Windscheffel, ‘ Rethinking Villa toryism: the Conservative party in London, 1868–1900 ’
(unpublished conference paper, delivered at the North American Conference on British Studies,
9
Baltimore, November 2002). Windscheffel, ‘Villa toryism? ’, p. 30.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 219
vote to the late Victorian Conservative party, but also that the Conservative party
itself did not look to the villas for electoral salvation.
Consequently, a second explanation has been advanced for the electoral
transformation of late Victorian Conservatism : the growth of working-class
toryism, and not just in London. Once explained away as deviant, deferential, or
as the product of ‘ embourgeoisment ’,10 recent scholarship on the late Victorian
Conservative party has stressed just how assiduously and successfully the
party cultivated working-class support.11 Revisionist work by Jon Lawrence,
Paul Readman, and Alex Windscheffel has convincingly challenged what has
been termed the ‘negative ’ interpretation of the late Victorian Conservative
hegemony, which assumed that the party’s success was based on low turnout at
general elections, tight electoral registers, Liberal abstentions from voting, weak
Liberal organization, and resistance to Liberal proposals.12 These revisionist
narratives construct a view of the Conservative party that impresses by its ability
to use politics to socialize the masses, by its indulgence of the people’s pleasures,
and by promoting state-sponsored social reform, all of which made for a
genuinely popular and broad-based working-class Conservatism.
This revisionist historiography is to be applauded for treating working-class
Conservatism as a serious historical phenomenon. Yet there is a danger here of
creating a triumphalist and totalizing account of the forward march of working-
class Conservatism. Historians intent on refuting the electoral sociological
interpretation of villa toryism have tended to neglect the suburbs,13 and they have
been rather silent on the question of how, and to what extent, the Conservative
party was able to bridge the gap between the genteel suburbs of the well-heeled
bourgeoisie and the suburbs of the clerks and artisanal workers, to say nothing of
the plebeian manufacturing districts. Historians, therefore, are still largely in the
dark about suburban Conservatism.

10
R. McKenzie and A. Silver, Angels in marble: working-class Conservatism in urban England (London,
1968); E. A. Nordlinger, The working class Tories: authority, deference and stable democracy (London, 1967);
F. Parkin, ‘Working-class Conservatives: a theory of political deviance’, British Journal of Sociology, 18
(1967), pp. 278–90; H. Pelling, ‘Working-class Conservatives ’, Historical Journal, 8 (1970), pp. 33–43;
P. Joyce, Work, society and politics: the culture of the factory in later Victorian England (London, 1980).
11
J. Lawrence, ‘Class and gender in the making of urban toryism, 1880–1914’, English Historical
Review, 108 (1993), pp. 629–52; P. Readman, ‘The 1895 general election and political change in late
Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 467–93; idem, ‘The Conservative party, patriotism
and British politics: the case of the general election of 1900’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001),
pp. 107–45; Windscheffel, ‘Villa toryism?’.
12
For the ‘ negative’ interpretation of the late Victorian Conservative hegemony see Cornford,
‘The transformation of Conservatism’, pp. 35–66; Marsh, The discipline of popular government, pp. 195–6;
Green, The crisis of Conservatism, p. 126 ; Shannon, The age of Salisbury, p. 313. For a recent, and more
subtle, restatement of the ‘negative’ interpretation see Marc Brodie, The politics of the poor : the East End of
London, 1885–1914 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 99, 113, and 200–1.
13
Even Alex Windscheffel’s comprehensive analysis of London Conservatism ultimately has less to
say on villa toryism than other forms of popular Conservatism because he defines London as the area
under the jurisdiction of the London County Council. As Windscheffel himself concedes, this ‘entails
the exclusion of the adjacent extra-metropolitan suburbs’, which, we are told, were more socially
exclusive and predominantly Conservative. ‘Villa toryism? ’, pp. 26 and 29.
220 MATTHEW ROBERTS

This article analyses the ways in which the Conservative party attempted, with
varying degrees of success, to construct broad-based coalitions of electoral sup-
port within the context of the West Riding borough of Leeds, focusing specifically
on the suburbs.14 The archetypal provincial suburb was to be found in the
northern suburbs of Leeds at Headingley. Headingley, along with a number of
other neighbouring suburbs, dominated the constituency of Leeds North. Using
this constituency as a case study, and by situating it within the broader context of
Leeds Conservatism, this article subjects villa toryism to critical scrutiny and
advances some generalizations about the nature of Conservative electoral domi-
nance in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The portrait that emerges
from Leeds suggests that suburbia was neither innately conservative, nor socially
homogeneous. The suburban Conservatism that existed was not the political
expression of residential segregation. Suburbia was politically contested, not least
because a great deal of villa liberalism also existed.15 The electoral competition
that ensued meant that suburban politics were anything but dull or quiescent as
previously suggested.16 Villa toryism, which was sustained by a broad-based
coalition of voters, was the suburban incarnation of the eminently respectable,
self-reliant, hierarchical, and domesticated Conservatism epitomized by the tory
Primrose League. Although villa toryism was distinct from the Conservatism
to be found in the older industrial districts of the town, where the beer-barrel,
hostility to various ‘ others ’, and a latter-day tory-radicalism predominated, there
were points of overlap and synergies between these two forms of popular
Conservatism.

I
Created with the passing of the First Reform Act, the parliamentary borough of
Leeds was a double-member constituency until 1868. Thereafter it returned three
members until its sub-division into five single-member constituencies under the
terms of the Redistribution Act of 1885. By the 1880s the prosperity of Leeds was
built on the ready-made clothing industry, heavy and light engineering, leather

14
‘Suburb’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, as ‘an outlying district of a city’.
For the purposes of this study a more exacting definition is adopted: the privileged suburb of
the middle classes, which was located beyond the core of large towns and cities. See R. Fishman,
Bourgeois Utopias: the rise and fall of suburbia (New York, 1987), pp. 22–3. Fishman notes that suburbia
is ‘defined first by what it includes – middle-class residences – and second (perhaps more importantly)
by what it excludes: all industry, most commerce except for enterprises that specifically serve a
residential area, and all lower-class residents (except for servants)’. However, as a number of other
commentators have pointed out, the suburban reality frequently fell short of the suburban
ideal – a view that this article reinforces. See D. A. Reeder, Suburbanity and the Victorian city (Leicester,
1980), p. 9.
15
It should be noted that villa liberalism, like villa toryism, was not actually a term used by the
Victorians, save for Lord Salisbury’s solitary reference to the latter. For the purposes of the present
study the two terms have been used to denote suburban support for the two political parties.
16
Cf. Coetzee, ‘Villa toryism’, p. 37.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 221
17
manufacturing, banking, and service industries. As with other more established
urban centres such as Bristol, Manchester, and Newcastle, Leeds had a powerful
Conservative interest which dated back to the early nineteenth century. There
had been a highly developed sense of party identity in Leeds since the 1820s. Such
was the enduring strength of partisanship that a unified and coherent middle class
failed to emerge in Leeds during the long nineteenth century. The Leeds middle
class was almost evenly divided in its support for the Liberal and Conservative
parties, with a slight advantage going to the former for much of this period which
reflected the strength of religious dissent. At mid-century some 60 per cent of the
borough’s churchgoers were nonconformists.18
In the thirty-five years between the passing of the First and Second Reform
Acts, the Conservatives held one of the two Leeds parliamentary seats for twenty-
three years, topping the poll on five occasions. After 1868 the party’s performance
was less impressive: they only won a majority of seats in 1874, 1885, and 1900, and
the party only secured more than 50 per cent of the vote on two occasions
between 1868 and 1910. The Conservative party was the dominant electoral force
after 1885 in Leeds Central and Leeds North. While the party was only victorious
on two occasions in Leeds East (in 1885 and 1900) and unable to break the
Liberal monopoly in Leeds West and Leeds South, it did succeed in substantially
reducing Liberal majorities in the 1890s. So although Leeds did not become a
bastion of Conservatism between 1886 and 1906, as was the case in other urban
centres like Birmingham, Sheffield, and London, it did, nevertheless, register
the nationwide Conservative advance across urban England in the 1880s and
1890s.
Throughout the nineteenth century the forces of municipal and parliamentary
Conservatism in Leeds were concentrated to the north of the borough in the
central business districts and in the northern suburbs of Headingley, Chapel
Allerton, and Potternewton.19 Unfortunately for the Leeds Conservative party it
had no political monopoly on suburbia. The continued migration of wealthy men
to Headingley from the 1830s had gradually created an effective Liberal presence
there.20 It was the coming of regular omnibuses in 1839, linking the town centre
with Headingley, which facilitated the mid-Victorian mass exodus to the suburbs.
Between 1821 and 1881 the population of Headingley rose from 2,154 to nearly
20,000.21 For the first time in 1843 the Liberal party contested Headingley at
the municipal elections, and in the following year it succeeded in returning its

17
E. P. Hennock, Fit and proper persons: ideal and reality in nineteenth-century urban government (London,
1973), p. 179; Derek Fraser, ed., A history of modern Leeds (Manchester, 1980), p. xii.
18
Hennock, Fit and proper persons, p. 179; D. Fraser, ‘Politics and society in the nineteenth century’,
in Fraser, ed., A history of modern Leeds, pp. 270–300; idem, ‘Areas of urban politics: Leeds, 1830–80’, in
H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian city: images and realities (2 vols., London, 1973), I, pp. 736–88.
19
For a more extended analysis see Matthew Roberts, ‘W. L. Jackson, Leeds Conservatism and the
world of Villa toryism, c. 1867–c. 1900’ (Ph.D. thesis, York, 2003), especially chs. 1 and 2.
20
Hennock, Fit and proper persons, p. 182.
21
M. L. Ryder, ‘Headingley in the nineteenth century’, University of Leeds Review, 8 (1962), pp. 23–45.
222 MATTHEW ROBERTS

candidate. The politico-religious divisions amongst the Leeds middle class were
henceforth to be played out on the suburban stage : villa liberalism had arrived.
The existence of political divisions in suburbia was hardly surprising during the
mid-Victorian years. However, as discussed below, these divisions would continue
to exist throughout the late Victorian period.
In the aftermath of the Second Reform Act, which increased the electorate of
Leeds fivefold from 7,217 in 1865 to 39,244 in 1868, the Leeds Conservative party
was faced with the double task of consolidating its hold over the middle class as
well as reaching out to the recently enfranchised masses. The party proved itself
to be remarkably adept at appealing to the working class during the late 1860s
and 1870s. The architect of this achievement was William St James Wheelhouse,
a local barrister, who was the Tory MP for Leeds between 1868 and 1880.22
Wheelhouse drew on a tory-radical tradition of opposition to the cold doctrines of
Liberal utilitarianism and improving moral earnestness, which manifested itself in
his support for further factory legislation, social reform, trade unionism, and the
working man’s right to a pint of beer. All this made Wheelhouse a working-class
icon, especially in the industrial districts south of the River Aire.23 Wheelhouse’s
platform, working alongside the ‘ beer and Bible ’ alliance, made for a genuinely
broad-based popular Conservatism, which reached its apogee at the 1874 general
election when the tories captured two of the Leeds seats.24
By the late 1870s, against the background of the nationwide Liberal revival, the
beery atmosphere which had fortified the spirits of the Tory party in 1874 had
turned into a hangover. Wheelhouse’s zealous championing of the drink trade
had become an embarrassment to the Leeds Conservative party because, as the
radical Leeds Express remarked, ‘ his strong championship of the publican interest
has … alienated the sympathies of the clergy and church people – who are chiefly
Tories’.25 Wheelhouse had also aligned himself with the band of neo-
Protectionists in parliament, which alienated the free trade zealots in the Leeds
Conservative party. Consequently, the Leeds Conservative Association tried to
dissuade Wheelhouse from standing at the 1880 general election, but to no avail :
his popularity with the working class ensured that the Association could not
refuse.26 For all his popular support Wheelhouse was defeated only to find that he
had lost the seat to his co-candidate W. L. Jackson, the new darling of the Leeds
Conservative party, who took the third seat. The usually hostile Liberal Leeds
Mercury conceded that Jackson had beaten Wheelhouse because the former ‘had
not identified himself so closely with the publican interest as to give just cause of

22
For Wheelhouse, see Roberts, ‘Leeds Conservatism’, pp. 116–25.
23
Although Wheelhouse only managed to secure the borough’s third seat for the tories in 1868 he
had nevertheless tripled the party’s share of the popular vote, suggesting that a significant minority of
the newly enfranchised had voted Conservative.
24
The tories also succeeded in electing Robert Tennant, a native of Leeds and a man of many
occupations – solicitor, brewer, flax-spinner, director of the Great Northern Railway, and chairman of
several coal and iron companies. Yorkshire Post, 3 Feb. 1874.
25 26
Leeds Express, 9 Mar. 1880. Yorkshire Post, 18 Mar. 1880.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 223
27
offence to the friends of temperance ’. Clearly, being the party of drink was not
always an unproblematic electoral asset for the Conservatives. Thus, the Leeds
Conservative party, like the national party, entered into a period of anxiety,
introspection, and reappraisal – a period which culminated in the Third
Reform Act.
When it became clear in the winter of 1884 that franchise extension was to be
accompanied by a redistribution of seats, the Leeds Conservative party regretted
that Leeds and other large boroughs were to be divided into single-member
constituencies. The Conservative Yorkshire Post believed that the application of the
single-member principle ‘will be the apotheosis of the Alderman, of the Town
Councillor, of the Vestryman, and as far as the rule operates in that way it will of
course tend to lower the tone and degrade the House of Commons ’.28 The real
disappointment for the Leeds tories was that the redistribution proposals
provided no mechanisms for direct representation of minority electoral interests.
The Conservative Leeds Daily News was of the opinion that the ‘ single-vote, single-
constituency system is not so perfect as would have been the cumulative vote with
large constituencies and a large number of candidates ’.29 This latter scheme was a
variation on, and development of, the ‘limited vote ’, which had been introduced
at Leeds in 1867. This was a mechanism which had provided for the direct
representation of minorities.30 However, the triumph of the single-member
principle in 1884 meant that minority interests were henceforth to be represented
indirectly.31 In single-member constituencies such interests would only be
represented insofar as they were sufficiently concentrated in compact geo-
graphical units to form an electoral majority – a point that was not lost on Lord
Salisbury.32 In contrast, the operation of the cumulative vote in multi-member
constituencies allowed dispersed minorities to be represented. Even though the
Leeds Conservative party’s electoral support was concentrated in the northern
suburbs,33 it is interesting to note that the party’s preference was not for single-
member constituencies, presumably because the party had little faith in its ability
to achieve electoral majorities in smaller single-member seats, even in largely

27 28
Leeds Mercury, 2 Apr. 1880. Yorkshire Post, 5 Dec. 1884.
29
Leeds Daily News, 19 Jan. 1885.
30
After 1867 Leeds – like Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool – returned three members to
the House of Commons but electors only had two votes. This was designed to enable the minority
party (in the Leeds case, the tories) to gain representation, the assumption being that the majority party
would only nominate two candidates. See K. T. Hoppen, The mid-Victorian generation, 1846–1886
(Oxford, 1998), p. 252.
31
J. P. D. Dunbabin, ‘ Some implications of the 1885 British shift towards single-member con-
stituencies: a note’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), pp. 241–67, at p. 93.
32
Salisbury, ‘The value of redistribution: a note on electoral statistics’, National Review, 4 (1884),
pp. 145–62, at p. 147.
33
An analysis of the town members of the Leeds and County Conservative Club for 1883 and 1884
revealed that 76 per cent lived north of the River Aire in the suburbs. A survey of every fifth town
member of the Leeds and County Conservative Club was conducted using the Leeds and County
Conservative Club: list of members, 1882–1883 and matched to entries in the Leeds Post Office Directory
1882–1883.
224 MATTHEW ROBERTS

suburban ones. If the Redistribution Act of 1885 was a deliberate attempt to

create the electoral framework under which villa toryism could flourish then there
is little evidence to suggest that the Leeds tories interpreted the Act in this way.
In addition, it soon became clear that the villas, despite the best efforts of the
Leeds tories, were not ‘high and dry on islands of their own ’.34
After single-member constituencies became a reality, the Leeds Conservative
party was determined that the borough should be divided, as far as was practically
possible, along class lines. When the Boundary Commissioners came to divide
Leeds into its allotted five constituencies the Conservative party was adamant that
the River Aire be taken as the basis for division. To the Conservative mind the
River Aire was not merely a physical boundary. The Yorkshire Post told its readers
that the river was ‘a population dividing line, a social dividing line, an industrial
dividing line, and practically a vote dividing line ’.35 The Conservatives invested
the river with an immutability that demarcated the boundaries of two dichot-
omous, and largely imagined, communities : the working class to the south of the
river, and the middle class to the north. It was imperative that these two com-
munities were separated : the tory Leeds Daily News was of the view that : ‘Since all
working men, whether urban or rural, are to have votes, we think it better that
they should have opportunities of returning men of their own choice without the
disturbing of middle-class votes. ’36
In contrast, dividing constituencies according to the pursuits of the population
left the Leeds Liberals deeply uncomfortable, and the party was divided over
redistribution. Majority opinion in the Liberal Association was in favour, but the
Leeds Mercury and James Kitson, grandee of Leeds Liberalism, ‘deeply regretted
that Leeds was to be divided at all ’.37 With Liberal support evenly spread
throughout the borough, albeit with a higher concentration to the south of the
river, Kitson knew that single-member constituencies would disadvantage the
Liberal party. Public Liberal opposition did not of course take this crude electoral
form ; rather the Liberals objected to the apparent disregard for historic com-
munities, a similar rhetoric deployed by Gladstone in the redistribution nego-
tiations that took place between the national party leaders.38 Once redistribution
became de facto the Liberals shifted their opposition to specific details. The
Liberals were opposed to taking the river as the basis for division and refused to
countenance proposals that aimed to divide the borough into discrete social
interest groups. The Liberal Leeds Mercury pronounced that ‘It is not a good
thing that one constituency should be aristocratic and another democratic in its
character. On every conceivable ground it would surely be better to have mixed
constituencies like those to which we have hitherto become accustomed. ’39

34
Cornford, ‘The transformation of Conservatism’, p. 58.
35 36
Yorkshire Post, 22 Dec. 1884. Leeds Daily News, 19 Jan. 1885.
37
Ibid., 15 Dec. 1884; Yorkshire Post, 22 Dec. 1884.
38
For the high-political context of the Third Reform Act see M. E. J. Chadwick, ‘The role of
redistribution in the making of the Third Reform Act’, Historical Journal, 19 (1976), pp. 665–83.
39
Leeds Mercury, 9 Jan. 1885.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 225
This preference for mixed constituencies led the Liberals to propose some very
oddly shaped constituencies with relatively little regard for compactness. The
most alarming, from the Conservative party’s point of view, was the Liberal
proposal for Leeds North which envisaged coupling Headingley with Armley-
Wortley, and Bramley, which were working-class wards south of the river. The
Yorkshire Post and the tory representatives at the meetings held by the Boundary
Commissioners refused to believe that there was any connection between the
industrial and manufacturing populations south of the river and ‘the general
well-to-do classes of Headingley ’.40 The Boundary Commissioners saw no
connection either.
Although the Boundary Commissioners took the River Aire as the basis for
division, ultimately the Leeds Conservative party was not successful in its attempts
to divide the borough along class lines. This was particularly evident in relation to
suburban Leeds North. Whilst the constituency was largely residential,41 it also
had ‘ a considerable industrial population ’, chiefly composed of skilled artisans.42
The Boundary Commissioners admitted that it had been very difficult to
reconcile equality of population and geographical compactness with the pursuits
of the population. Consequently, the Conservatives complained that the con-
stituency was not all that favourable to them. Although the constituency included
‘ the Headingley Ward which was principally residential, and that residential
district extended into the North Ward, [and] polling district fourteen ’, the
Yorkshire Post complained that the Commissioners ‘ as though to counter-balance
any advantage that the party might derive ’ had also included ‘a portion of the
North-East Ward, extending down to York Road, where the population is largely
composed of miners and the Irish ’.43
All five of the new constituencies were characterized by varying degrees of
socio-economic diversity. Leeds Central, from its creation, was the most socially
heterogeneous : ‘Though essentially the commercial constituency of Leeds, it
embraces a great variety of interests’, ranging from the warehouses and business
premises of the ‘ mercantile, moneyed and professional classes ’ to ‘ one of the
poorest portions of the population ’, as well as being home to many Jews.44 The
‘ mixed character ’ of Leeds East, with its ‘ labourers, ironworkers, colliers, mill-
hands, railwaymen and small shopkeepers … left it, to a large extent, at the mercy
of the Irish voters ’ who were concentrated in the division.45 The greater part of
the electorate in Leeds South and West belonged to the working class who were
employed chiefly in the large engineering works. In both these constituencies
there existed a vibrant Liberal political tradition, anchored in what James Kitson
termed ‘solid institutions ’,46 such as Co-operatives and Mechanics Institutes.47

40 41
Yorkshire Post, 22 Dec. 1884. Ibid., 22 Dec. 1884.
42 43
Leeds Mercury, 26 Nov. 1885. Yorkshire Post, 17 Jan. 1885.
44 45
Ibid., 22 Dec. 1884. Leeds Mercury, 26 Nov. 1885.
46
Kitson to Gladstone, 4 Apr. 1885, Viscount Gladstone papers, British Library, Add. MS 46027
47
fos. 137–42. Leeds Mercury, 26 Nov. 1885.
226 MATTHEW ROBERTS

Table 1 An analysis of employment patterns for the twenty-eight enumeration districts com-
prising the parliamentary constituency of Leeds North, based on the 1881 Census, expressed as a
percentage of each district’s sampled adult males

Sub-
Village/ Sampled stantial Lower Skilled
enumeration adult middle middle working Domestic
district (eds.) males class class class Labourers servants Other

Headingley 146 29.5 38.4 15.7 5.5 10.2 0.6

(5 eds.)
Burley 244 4.9 29.9 48.7 13.9 2.5 0
(10 eds.)
Kirkstall 88 3.4 25.0 56.8 11.3 3.4 0
(4 eds.)
Chapel 121 7. 4 22.3 28.1 26.4 14.1 1.6
Allerton
(4 eds.)
Potternewton 120 33.3 27.5 23.3 4.2 10.8 0.8
(5 eds.)
Total/mean 719 15.7 28.6 34.5 12.3 8.2 0.6

Note : Percentages do not sum up to 100 horizontally and vertically because of rounding.
Source : Database constructed from a sample of every tenth adult male drawn from the
enumerators’ returns for 1881 held at Leeds City Library.

Far from the Redistribution Act of 1885 creating the electoral framework for
the transition to class-based politics, single-member constituencies were still
characterized by social heterogeneity, albeit on a lesser scale than in the previous
undivided borough. As for suburban Leeds North, it is not evident that the middle
class dominated the constituency. A detailed analysis of the census enumerators’
returns for 1881 confirms the social heterogeneity of the suburbs to the north of
the River Aire.
Table 1 reveals that even before Leeds North was constructed in 1885 the
districts that were to comprise it were already socially mixed. It can be seen that
the largest single category of adult males was the skilled working class (34.5 per
cent, most of whom were engaged in engineering, the clothing trade, or the
building industry). If the ‘ substantial middle class ’ (large-scale manufacturers,
substantial merchants, and the professions) is combined with the lower middle
class (clerks, journeymen, and shopkeepers) then the middle class – expansively
defined – constituted 44.3 per cent of adult males, but then there was no
automatic socio-economic connection between the two groups, let alone a
given political affinity. The social diversity in suburban Leeds cautions against
reductionist interpretations of electoral politics which attribute tory victories
to the existence of socially homogeneous middle-class suburban constituencies.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 227
II
The Leeds Conservative party’s apprehensions about single-member con-
stituencies not only betrayed an awareness of just how few middle-class electors
existed, but also of the continuing politico-religious divisions within the Leeds
middle class (and the working class). This explains why the Leeds Conservative
party mounted an aggressive campaign to stamp out middle-class Liberalism,
both to reassure and rally its core supporters, but also as a means to expand
beyond its core Anglican support base. The active pursuit of what was increas-
ingly termed ‘moderate Liberal support ’ by the Leeds Conservative party, which
presented itself as the defender of property against the threat of a radicalized
Liberal party, dated from the early 1870s. This led the Conservative party to
exaggerate both the power of the radicals within the Liberal party, nationally and
locally, and the disruptive and destructive effects of the radical programme. On
the eve of the 1874 general election the Conservative Yorkshire Post was making
explicit appeals ‘ to the middle classes and to those moderate Liberals who do
not understand how upholders of the old Whig creed can legitimately ally
themselves with destructives and secularists ’.48 The Yorkshire Post scorned the
very idea of a ‘moderate ’ Liberal.49 By 1885 W. L. Jackson was warning non-
conformists that :
Disestablishment did not effect Churchmen only, but had a much wider bearing. It was in
the interests of the nation at large that property which had been given for a specific purpose
and to a specific body be unquestioningly devoted to that purpose. If the principle was once
violated they could not stop at one institution.50
Despite the aggressiveness with which the tories courted the villas, the 1885
general election revealed a great deal of suburban Liberalism in Leeds North.
The Conservative candidate, W. L. Jackson, had beaten the Liberal A. W.
Rucker, a professor at the Yorkshire College, by a mere 257 votes. Rucker’s
narrow defeat hardly testified to the inherent political conservatism of suburbia.
Ironically, the Leeds Mercury believed that it was the small number of Catholic and
Irish voters who had ‘ turned the scale in Mr Jackson’s favour’ – the English
Catholics endorsing Jackson’s vigorous defence of voluntary education and the
Irish responding to Parnell’s instruction that they vote Conservative.51 The fact
that Rucker was virtually unknown before the contest and that it was the first time
he had stood for parliament spoke volumes for the continued vitality of suburban
Liberalism. Certainly the Conservatives of Leeds North had little faith in the
innate conservatism and uniformity of suburbia. In the five contested elections
between 1885 and 1900 the Liberals secured an average of 44.5 per cent of the
popular vote, a period that actually constituted the Liberal party’s leanest
electoral years in the half-century before 1914. Jackson’s early election victories
were very marginal and with the exception of the 1891 by-election, necessitated

48 49
Yorkshire Post, 3 Feb. 1874. Ibid., 5 Feb. 1874.
50 51
Ibid., 10 Nov. 1885. Leeds Mercury, 4 July 1886.
228 MATTHEW ROBERTS

by his appointment as chief secretary for Ireland, he was opposed at every

election. The changing demographics of the constituency also made it more
difficult for both parties to define and mobilize their constituencies of electoral
support : population growth and residential instability presented many problems.
The electorate of Leeds North was 10,128 in 1885, 12,294 in 1892, 13,563 in 1895,
and 17,387 in 1900.52 Similarly, at the level of municipal politics there was little
evidence of any innate conservatism. The shifting electoral fortunes of the
Conservative party in Headingley, the most socially exclusive ward in Leeds
North, also tells against the existence of a permanent and monolithic suburban
Conservatism.53
It was with good reason then that Jackson and the Conservatives of Leeds
North were anxious about their electoral position.54 Suburban Leeds was also
home to the Liberal nonconformist elite : the Baineses, the Barrans, and the
Kitsons all lived in the Headingley Ward. Whilst this triumvirate dominated
Liberal politics Leeds Liberalism remained thoroughly Gladstonian and
nonconformist – a reality confirmed by the weakness of Liberal Unionism in
Leeds. The outcome of the 1886 general election revealed that the majority of the
Liberal electors were still Gladstonian to the core. The Liberal candidate in Leeds
North, Albert Rutson – a North Riding landowner – was defeated by only 619
votes, albeit on a turnout of 78.8 per cent as compared to 86.2 per cent at the 1885
general election.55
The principal lines of political demarcation between the villas (and
the terraces for that matter) ran along three overlapping fronts – the
position of the Established Church, education, and entertainment, which, as
Kenneth Wald has argued, reflected the continuing importance of religion
in determining political loyalties.56 Virtually all the members of the Leeds
Conservative party leadership were Churchmen during this period, although
there was a small contingent of Wesleyan Methodists amongst the lower
echelons of the party hierarchy led by Thomas Harland – the only
nonconformist to hold office in the Leeds City Conservative Association.57
Jackson also gained electoral support from Wesleyans in Leeds North. At the
1892 general election he was supported on the platform by eight leading

52
Figures from F. S. W. Craig, British parliamentary election results, 1885–1918 (2nd edn, Aldershot,
1989), p. 131. This underlines Frans Coetzee’s comment in relation to Croydon that ‘Conservative
majorities were not simply reproduced from election to election, but reconstituted from a continually
shifting pool of voters’. Coetzee, ‘ Villa toryism’, p. 43.
53
By 1881 Headingley no longer had Conservative representation on the Town Council, and would
not do so until 1888. The Conservatives had re-established their monopoly by the mid-1890s, but by
the early years of the twentieth century the Liberals had once again broken the tory monopoly,
culminating in the latter’s total exclusion by 1911. Roberts, ‘Leeds Conservatism’, ch. 4.
54
On Jackson’s anxiety about Leeds North see Jackson to Salisbury, 6 Nov. 1891, Salisbury papers.
55
A. W. Roberts, ‘Leeds Liberalism and late Victorian politics’, Northern History, 5 (1970), pp. 131–56,
at p. 147.
56
K. Wald, Crosses on the ballot: patterns of British voter allegiance since 1885 (Princeton, 1985), passim.
57
Yorkshire Post, 25 Jan. 1910.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 229
58
Wesleyans. In contrast, Hennock’s study of the Leeds Town Council revealed
that the Church of England was substantially under-represented in the Liberal
party during this period.59 The vitality of suburban Liberalism reflected, in part,
the continued association between chapel, community, and politics. The non-
conformist denominations were well represented in suburban Leeds : by 1902
there were twenty-seven places of worship in the northern suburbs, the ratio
between church and chapel being 5: 4.60
The main organization that brought the Conservative middle class together
was the Leeds Church Extension Society which, as its name suggests, had been
established with the simple objective of building more churches for a growing
population by means of voluntary contributions. With hundreds of subscribers
throughout the borough the Society was at the centre of a nexus that connected
the Anglican Church and the Conservative party, the clergy and the Conservative
elite, and the Conservative elite and the middle-class subscribers. What made the
Anglican Church particularly odious to core nonconformists in Leeds was the
predominance of the high-church party, especially in the northern suburbs,
which was very hostile to religious dissent.
Overlapping with this religious division was the question of education.
Nowhere was the resoluteness with which Jackson and the tories defended the
Anglican Church more evident than in the sphere of education, where the party
worked through the School Board and a number of charities to bolster the
position of the voluntary schools. Elections to the School Board continued to be
vigorously fought and there were frictions over the actions of the Board. Indeed
nonconformist outrage at the Unionist Government’s Education Bill of May 1902
was the decisive factor in breaking the Conservative party’s electoral dominance
in Leeds North at a by-election held in 1902, necessitated by Jackson’s elevation to
the peerage. The fact that the Conservative vote only fell by 731 while that of the
Liberals increased by 2,544 in 1902 on an increased turnout would seem to con-
firm the argument that the tories had previously benefited from some Liberal
abstentions from voting. Nonconformist outrage, allied to the Tory party’s
renewed association with protective tariffs, now enabled the Liberals
simultaneously to mobilize their core constituency to an unprecedented degree
and also expand beyond that core by ‘flying the flag of free trade ’. Villa liberalism
had finally triumphed – and would do so again at the general elections of 1906
and 1910.61
Turning to the question of entertainment, by the 1880s the Leeds Conservative
party had aligned itself with various aspects of popular culture, especially drink

58
Ibid., 1 July 1892. In determining the political loyalty of nonconformity it is important to
distinguish between Wesleyan Methodists, many of whom shared their founder’s attachment
to the Establishment and his political conservatism, and ‘ core’ nonconformists – Baptists,
Congregationalists, Unitarians, and other Methodists – who were overwhelmingly Liberal.
59
Hennock, Fit and proper persons, p. 221.
60
Robinson’s Directory of Leeds, 1901–1902 (Leeds, 1902).
61
Roberts, ‘Leeds Conservatism’, pp. 201–16.
230 MATTHEW ROBERTS

and sport. The party’s identification with the drink interest has already been
noted. Attitudes to drink within the Leeds Liberal party were indicative of the
continuing dominance of nonconformity. Indeed, the ethos of Leeds Liberalism
was still dominated by the values of the elder and younger Edward Baines’s,
which had been widely disseminated through the pages of their newspaper, the
Leeds Mercury, in the early and mid-Victorian years. They had led the crusade
against sin, attacking drink, gambling, the theatre, and Sunday opening. Their
refusal to allow the Leeds Mercury to publish betting news or to pander to the
increasingly popular passion for gambling sports meant that the Leeds Liberal
party abandoned this popular terrain to the Conservatives who were only
too ready to occupy this territory in their own newspapers.62 Thus, religion,
education, and entertainment divided the Leeds middle class along cultural lines.
When these three fronts combined, politics could assume Kulturkampf overtones,
and individually they constituted major barriers to core nonconformists voting
Conservative : the world-views of villa toryism and villa liberalism were the
political, religious, moral, and social antitheses of one another.
The resilience of suburban Liberalism casts further doubt on the applicability
of the ‘ negative ’ interpretation of the late Victorian Conservative ascendancy in
Leeds North. It has already been demonstrated that the Liberal party was hardly
a spent electoral force. Although the Leeds Liberals experienced financial
difficulties after 1885,63 which seriously hampered their organizational efficiency,
to conclude that tories benefited from Liberal weakness rather than their own
strength is too simplistic. There were concentrated pockets of tory strength in
various parts of the borough, mainly, though not exclusively, to the north of the
River Aire. In terms of membership and income the Liberals could not rival the
Leeds and County Conservative Club – the most prestigious tory organization in
and beyond the borough. In addition, when it came to perfecting the machinery
of winning elections, notably in the field of voter registration and canvassing, the
Conservative party’s organization was strong. In 1894 the party had spent 18412
days canvassing Leeds North. This compared to 135 in Leeds Central, 87 in Leeds
East, 13612 in Leeds South, and 164 in Leeds West.64 It is interesting to note here
the relatively even nature of the Conservative effort across the borough. The fact
that the tories were undertaking a thorough canvass in the Central and North
constituencies confirms that their period of electoral success in the 1880s and
1890s did not result in an apathetic and sluggish organizational machine. As for
efforts made in the other constituencies, it is important to recall how close the
tories came to victory in the 1890s, and to recognize that they were able to reap
the dividends at municipal level when they won their first ever majority on the
town council in 1895. There can be little doubt that the battle in the registration

62
On the role of the press see M. Roberts, ‘Constructing a Tory world-view: popular politics and
the Conservative press in late Victorian Leeds ’, Historical Research (forthcoming, May 2006).
63
On the financial difficulties of the Leeds Liberals see Leeds Liberal Association, 1888 Annual Report,
64
Leeds City Library. Figures cited in Readman, ‘The 1895 general election’, p. 486.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 231
Table 2 Relationship between Conservative vote and size of poll in Leeds, 1885–1900

Level of
correlation
Constituency Correlation co-efficient

Leeds Central x0.5 modest

Leeds East x0.3 low
Leeds North x0.9 very high
Leeds South 0.4 modest
Leeds West 0.8 high

Note : The strength of correlations are usually measured as : less than 0.19 ‘ very low’ ; 0.2
to 0.39 ‘ low’ ; 0.4 to 0.69 ‘ modest ’; 0.7 to 0.89 ‘ high’ ; 0.9 to 1.0 ‘very high’. See A. Bryman
and D. Cramer, Quantitative data analysis for social sciences (rev. edn, London, 1994). p. 170.
Source : Figures calculated from F. S. W. Craig, British parliamentary election results,
1885–1918 (2nd edn, Aldershot, 1989), pp. 131–5.

courts was crucial to the tory election victories, not least because it was in this
arena where tory strength was undoubtedly augmented by Liberal weakness. The
Liberals did not have the financial resources to sustain a vigorous assault in the
courts.65 The absence of party records, coupled with the haphazard reporting
of the press, makes it impossible to determine whether the Leeds tory agents
systematically used the annual revision courts to restrict the electorate by raising
more objections than claims, or vice versa, to expand the electorate. Figures have
survived for 1894 and 1896. In 1894 the Conservatives made a total of 2,646
claims against 1,365 objections across the five constituencies, whereas in 1896 the
ratio was 936 claims to 928 objections.66
An analysis of the election statistics for Leeds North and Leeds Central does,
however, support Cornford’s argument that the Conservatives benefited from low
turnouts at general elections, there being a very high negative correlation in Leeds
North, and a modest negative correlation in Leeds Central between turnout and
the Conservative vote. Jackson’s largest majority of 2,517 at the 1900 general
election coincided with the lowest turnout (71.9 per cent) between 1885 and 1900.
This further suggests that the Conservative victories in Leeds North and Central
were partly dependent on Liberal abstentions from voting.
As discussed in the next section, in Leeds North, and to a lesser extent in Leeds
Central, the Conservatives were able to deploy a ‘ One Nation ’, patriotic, and
anti-faddist rhetoric that allowed them to construct a politics of the non-political.
To the north of the River Aire the Liberal platform was partly neutralized by this
anti-political stance; in the south they were mobilized by a more aggressive party
politics. As Table 2 illustrates, the negative correlations in the Central and North

65
Leeds Liberal Association, 1888 Annual Report, pp. 10–11.
66
Liberal Mercury, 19 Oct. 1894, 29 Sept. 1896.
232 MATTHEW ROBERTS

constituencies are offset by the positive correlations for the other constituencies,
and collectively there is no statistically significant correlation either way. Evidence
from Leeds, therefore, would tend to support the aggregate statistical analysis
conducted by Jon Lawrence and Paul Readman for the whole country.67

III
By 1895 the enormous development of the Roundhay Road district and exten-
sions to the neighbourhood of Burley had led to the influx of a large number of
new voters into Leeds North. The Yorkshire Post commented : ‘ A large proportion
of the new voters belong to the class of superior artisans and the lower middle
classes, and, to make a moderate estimate, the Unionist Party claim a good half of
the new voting strength. ’68 Electoral analysis suggests that this was actually a
modest estimate. Despite the rapid growth of the constituency the Liberal vote
remained relatively constant while the party’s share of the vote gradually declined
across the period, which suggests that the Liberal party was unable to attract
much electoral support beyond its core middle-class nonconformist constituency.
Indeed it seems that even some of these did not bother voting – at least until 1902
at any rate. In contrast, as a general trend, the Conservative vote steadily
increased from election to election, as did their share of the vote, which would
appear to confirm the assumption that Jackson was capturing some of the
incoming artisan and clerkly voters. Certainly the Liberal opposition was
more concerned with the fickleness of the working class, rather than with any
middle-class defections.69 How was the Conservative party able to fashion a
Conservatism that reached beyond the party’s middle-class Anglican core voters
in Leeds North ? As I have argued elsewhere, the role played by the political press
was crucial in this respect. The diversification of the press and the targeting
of niche audiences allowed the Conservative party, to some extent, to straddle
dissimilar constituencies of electoral support.70 Here I want to focus on platform
politics and the role played by politicians, focusing on Jackson himself who
represented Leeds North between 1885 and 1902.71

67
J. Lawrence and J. Elliot, ‘Parliamentary election results reconsidered: an analysis of borough
elections, 1885–1910 ’, in Green, ed., An age of transition, pp. 18–28; Readman, ‘The 1895 general
election’, p. 487.
68
Yorkshire Post, 12 July 1895. It is fair to assume that many of these upwardly mobile groups who
moved into the northern suburbs from elsewhere in Leeds brought a pre-existing franchise qualifi-
cation with them. The registration law of successive occupation stipulated that those electors who
moved only within a parliamentary borough would not be disqualified by the move. This clause saved
mobile groups who only moved a short distance, as was the case in Leeds. See J. Davis and D. Tanner,
‘The borough franchise after 1867’, Historical Research, 69 (1996), pp. 306–27, at p. 318.
69 70
Leeds Express, 27. Apr. 1885. Roberts, ‘Constructing a Tory world-view’.
71
William Lawies Jackson (1840–1917). Tanner and currier. Raised to the peerage in 1902 as Baron
Allerton of Chapel Allerton, Leeds. Educated at the Moravian School in Fulneck. Represented the
Headingley Ward in the Leeds City Council between 1869 and 1881. MP for Leeds from 1880 to 1885,
and for Leeds North between 1885 and 1902. Financial secretary to the Treasury in 1885 and again
from 1886 to 1891. Replaced A. J. Balfour as chief secretary of Ireland, serving from October 1891 until
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 233
There was much in Jackson’s platform that seemed negative and resistant, a
platform that was on the surface more in line with the national party’s defence of
property and resistance to Liberal proposals – a toryism that has been interpreted
by many historians as evidence for the party’s growing popularity with the urban
and suburban middle class.72 Jackson was thought to be villadom personified,
being famously and condescendingly described by Arthur Balfour as ‘ all middle
class tact and judgement ’.73 Yet if Jackson was unambiguously identified with
suburban villadom he also embodied the ambiguities of villadom and of the
middle class. The son of an impoverished journeyman tanner, Jackson trans-
formed his father’s precarious business in Leeds into one of the largest tanning
and currying works in Britain. From petty-bourgeois origins to wealthy northern
manufacturer, Jackson subsequently entered the peerage via the ranks of the
metropolitan plutocracy as the prestigious director of the Great Northern
Railway.74 Jackson’s own social mobility was typical of the dynamic nature of the
Victorian middle class.75 Throughout this period Jackson’s social mobility was
matched by residential mobility in the northern suburbs of Leeds as he moved
from the small terraced house of his youth in Meanwood Grove into a house in
the district where his factory was located owing to his financial situation, then to
Union Terrace in Potternewton, and finally to the opulent Allerton Hall in
Chapel Allerton.76 Such was the diversity of the late Victorian villa, and such was
the potential mobility of the villa-dweller.
The Conservatism that Jackson preached reflected, in part at least,
middle-class anxieties about threats to property. Whenever Jackson addressed
the electors of Leeds North crises loomed large: instability, chaos, and ruin were
ever present. He presented the Conservative party as the bulwark against the
disintegration of the ‘ commercial community’ (one of his favourite reference
groups), the viability of which, he told his constituents, was dependent upon a
resolute, but peaceful foreign policy, the integrity of the empire, and domestic
calm. Jackson repeatedly told the electors that he was ‘strenuously opposed ’ to
proposals for the spoliation and plunder of any form of property.77 The threat to
property – whether in the form of the Church, the House of Lords, the pub, or

Salisbury’s government was defeated the following summer. Generous subscriber to a plethora of
charitable and philanthropic bodies. Married in 1860 Grace, daughter of George Tempest, a butcher
from Otley – Jackson’s own place of birth near Leeds. Yorkshire Post, 5 Apr. 1917.
72
See R. Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966), pp. 757–66 ; Cornford, ‘The transformation of
Conservatism ’, pp. 37–53; Smith, Lord Salisbury on politics, pp. 95–7; Marsh, The discipline of popular
government, ch. 2; Green, Crisis of Conservatism, ch. 3; Shannon, The age of Salisbury, passim.
73
A. J. Balfour to Salisbury, 27 Aug. 1891, in Robin Harcourt-Williams, ed., The Salisbury–Balfour
74
correspondence (Ware, Herts., 1988), p. 348. Yorkshire Post, 5 Apr. 1917.
75
For this interpretation of the Victorian middle class see Peter Gay, Schnitzler’s century: the making of
middle-class culture, 1815–1914 (London, 2001), p. 4.
76
Census of England and Wales, 1851, Leeds, township of Meanwood; Register of Electors, Leeds (Leeds, 1861),
p. 134; Borough of Leeds: Burgess Roll, 1865 (Leeds, 1865), p. 851; Borough of Leeds Ward list, 1874 (Leeds,
77
1874), p. 82. Yorkshire Post, 6 July 1895.
234 MATTHEW ROBERTS

private property, especially in Ireland – Jackson argued, was nothing short of a

crime : confiscation of property was robbery.78
Yet for all the negative and resistant tone of this Conservatism there is little
evidence to suggest that it only resonated with the Anglican villas. One of the
principal ways in which Jackson sought to alleviate middle-class anxieties about
property was by emphasizing cross-class common interests. ‘ The Conservative
party’, Jackson told one audience at the 1885 general election, ‘had always
endeavoured to promote measures in the interests not only of a particular class,
but of the community at large. ’79 Similarly, at the 1895 general election Jackson
remarked that ‘There was no greater nonsense than to say that the interests
of the working classes could be separated from the interests of the rest of the
community. ’80 This may have been little more than empty rhetoric, but the
employing of such rhetoric does, at the very least, belie the image of a socially
homogeneous suburban constituency. Thus, Jackson and the tories did not
apologize about class ; rather they celebrated class difference and, as Martin Pugh
has argued in relation to the Primrose League, they attempted to cast hierarchy
and inequality ‘in a bold, appealing light ’.81 Only Conservatism, Jackson be-
lieved, ‘ possessed the elements of justice, and of fairness, and of order, all of which
were necessary to keep society in its present condition ’.82 Rugged individualism,
self-reliance, and respectability were the hallmarks of Jackson’s suburban
Conservatism. The Conservative party, Jackson stated in 1885, ‘desired to make it
free for every citizen to raise himself to the highest position in the land ’. It was
their duty ‘ to inculcate in the minds of men the feeling that every position was
possible to achieve – not to poison their minds and degrade their character, by
teaching them that the only possible hope for them in the future was to share
somebody else’s property’.83 Consequently, the defiantly independent and self-
improving tenor of Jackson’s Conservatism left little space for grand schemes of
state-sponsored social reform or interference with employer–employee relations.
Jackson was not in favour of a universal restriction on working hours and when it
came to the issue of employer liability he maintained that the principal cause of
accidents was not negligence on behalf of the employer but resistance to health
and safety initiatives by employees.84 The scope for social reform was also
limited by the Conservative party’s desire to present itself as the party of cheap
government and of the overburdened taxpayer – an image that Jackson did much
to cultivate in the late 1880s when he was financial secretary to the Treasury.
When it came to income tax Jackson explicitly targeted a middle- and lower-
middle-class constituency. Waxing lyrical about the benefits of the 1888 Local
Government Act, Jackson defended the government’s refusal to finance the

78
Ibid., 10 Nov. 1885, 15 July 1895.
79 80
Ibid., 4 Nov. 1885. Ibid., 6 July 1895.
81
M. Pugh, The tories and the people, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985), p. 41.
82 83
Yorkshire Post, 7 Aug. 1876. Ibid., 23 Sept. 1885.
84
Ibid., 6 June 1891.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 235
scheme by apportioning a penny from the income tax on the grounds that this
would have unfairly taxed ‘ the small shopkeeper, the poor professional man, the
humble clerk, and others ’.85
Jackson’s respectable Conservatism was given organizational expression by the
Primrose League and it is no coincidence that of the four habitations that existed
in Leeds by 1890 the Leeds North Habitation had the most members.86
Addressing the members of the Habitation at a tea party held at Allerton Hall in
1889, Jackson, emphasizing the harmonizing virtues of the Primrose League,
believed that the League existed ‘ for consolidating, and not separating, all classes
of the community’ and it was ‘calculated to bring together from time to time men
and women who did not meet every day in the ordinary affairs of life ’.87
Another way in which Jackson’s respectable and self-improving Conservatism
manifested itself was through his championing of building societies.88 It was those
workers who paid money into friendly societies and especially building societies
that he most admired – money which had been ‘provided with great self-
denial … great self-reliance and thrift ’.89 The incidence of homeownership in
Leeds was relatively high. This was because Leeds was an overwhelmingly free-
hold town with few large landowners, and it was also due to the relative ease with
which artisans could borrow money thanks to the favourable interest rates set by
the Leeds Permanent Building Society. This meant that many artisans and clerks
owned their own homes. A substantial number of these homeowners lived in the
northern suburbs in places like Burley – housing estates which were built in the
second half of the nineteenth century to cater for rising demand.90 The decision to
move into the northern suburbs may have been informed by an aspirational
desire to relocate to an area that was perceived to be socially exclusive. In
this reading, the upwardly social mobile groups who moved into the northern
suburbs were buying into a culture that included the kind of instinctive small ‘ c ’
conservatism that Jackson sough to translate into electoral support for the
Conservative party.
The electoral virtue of rugged individualism, self-reliance, and respectability
was that they were values which chimed with the established villa residents as well
as with the lower-middle-class and artisan voters. Thus somewhat paradoxically,
despite the emphasis on individualism, Jackson’s politics can be read as an
attempt to strengthen the bonds of inter-class community as a means to transcend
social divisions and construct a sense of shared interest and communal identity.
For all that late Victorian commentators (and historians) have made frequent
reference to the anonymity and insularity of suburbia, there were few traces of
this in Jackson’s politics.91 The configuring of the suburb and the city, the suburb

85 86
Times, 8 Jan. 1889. Pugh, The tories and the people, p. 238.
87
Primrose League Gazette, 17 Aug. 1889.
88 89
Yorkshire Post, 29 June 1892, 5 Apr. 1917. Ibid., 29 June 1892.
90
Parliamentary Papers, 1887, XII, p. 719, Report from the select committee on town holdings, p. 682.
91
For a discussion on the alleged anonymity of suburbia see D. C. Thorns, Suburbia (London, 1972),
pp. 14–16; D. J. Olsen, The growth of Victorian London (London, 1976), pp. 214–15.
236 MATTHEW ROBERTS

and the nation, and the suburb and the empire, was central to the mental world of
villa toryism. As a civic dignitary and philanthropist Jackson personified the
continuing link between the suburban middle class and the city. He had lived and
worked in northern Leeds virtually all of his life, and he had represented his
native Headingley Ward in the Town Council from 1869 to 1881. Jackson’s
business acumen played a crucial role in establishing the tories as a credible
alternative to the Liberal regime which had enjoyed uninterrupted power since
1835. When the Conservatives eventually captured the Town Council in 1895
Jackson was elected to the mayoral chair, inaugurating a grand civic building
programme and municipal reform. The architects of this civic Conservatism were
businessmen from the northern suburbs, but the electoral base of the tory
municipal ascendancy was much broader, encompassing villadom in the north
and the industrial districts in the south. The Conservatives were able to reconcile
the competing electoral demands for economies and improved public services by
using corporation profits to reduce the rates and meet rising expenditure. By
appealing to the lofty virtues of civic pride the tories presented themselves as the
‘ non-partisan ’ and cheap alternative to the previous tyrannical and expensive
Liberal regime.92 Consequently, at the level of municipal politics there is little
evidence to suggest that Conservatism was the political expression of a middle
class that had cut itself off from wider society and public affairs.93
Jackson’s own political career was marked by a persistent determination to
make Leeds worthy of its high rank among the cities of Great Britain. One of the
ways in which he was able to engender a sense of community was by continuing
to envisage Leeds as a unitary and organic entity, rather than five constituencies
with discrete interests. It is no coincidence that Jackson, in the words of the Leeds
Daily News, had been ‘ inclined to shed a tear over the division of the borough into
five slices ’.94 As Jackson stated in 1885, although Leeds had been divided, he
entertained the hope that the borough’s elected representatives would continue to
work together and prevent redistribution from diluting the impact of Leeds on the
national stage.95 After 1885 Jackson lobbied for the entire borough by defending
its commercial interests, by raising the town’s national profile, and by winning
specific benefits for locals.96
If Jackson brought Leeds to Westminster (his interventions in the House of
Commons were mostly concerned with the commercial interests of the borough),
he also brought Westminster to suburban Leeds. Judging by the content of
Jackson’s regular addresses to his constituents there was little that smacked of
parochial insularity. His speeches were peppered with reviews of national legis-
lation, along with foreign and imperial affairs. Jackson never grew tired of
reminding his constituents that successful trade depended on a firm and peaceful

92
Roberts, ‘Leeds Conservatism’, ch. 4.
93
Cf. A. Miles and A. Savage, The remaking of the British working class, 1840–1940 (London, 1994), p. 63.
94 95
Leeds Daily News, 19 Jan. 1885. Yorkshire Post, 16 Apr. 1885.
96
For example, Jackson to Salisbury, 14. Dec. 1888 and 13 Jan. 1897, Salisbury papers.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 237
97
foreign policy. In terms of empire, Jackson was a persistent advocate of imperial
federation, and of the need to improve communications within the empire
through the development of railways and the postal service.98 True to the late
Victorian imperial mentality there was a sentimental and emotional dimension to
Jackson’s imperialism, but the overriding emphasis was on the material benefits
that empire brought to Leeds commerce, especially to Jackson’s own leather trade
which worked Indian hides and skins.99 Gesturing to the unitary nature of the
borough, Jackson also noted that India ‘took from us generous quantities of
railway material ’,100 which were produced by, amongst others, Greenwood and
Batley in Leeds West.
Ultimately there was more to Jackson’s appeal than mere rhetoric. His social
and political power was partly dependent upon his position as a paternalist and
philanthropist, a position he frequently used to legitimize his candidatures. As he
told the working men of Burley in 1885, he was ‘a large employer of labour who
had always been on the best terms with his numerous workers ’,101 a fact that was
underlined by the testimonials and gift that Jackson received from his employees
on the occasion of his silver wedding anniversary.102 As a patron of sport, the
Church, and various other charities, as a member of the Leeds Chamber of
Commerce, as a Freemason, and as a member of parliament, and one time
councillor, Jackson could legitimately claim : ‘I am, as you are aware, personally
and intimately connected with and largely interested in everything that concerns
the welfare of this commercial community. ’103 Thus it is important to recognize
that Jackson could also appeal to a more plebeian constituency which was far
removed from the established villas or the upwardly mobile groups. By virtue of
his personality and his brand of politics, Jackson, as one of his supporters noted,
was ideally suited to ‘representing both residential and commercial parts of the
division ’.104
That suitability did not just rest on his position as a local employer and
paternalist. It was the form just as much as the content of Jackson’s platform that
accounted for his popularity with the working class in the industrial districts of
Leeds North. Whenever Jackson addressed the residents of Headingley or Chapel
Allerton it was always in the local school or church hall ; but his meetings in
Meanwood or at Woodhouse, both industrial districts, frequently took place
outdoors. Jackson was more than capable of rolling up his sleeves and playing the
game of mass politics. He was always able to win the popular acclaim of the
crowd – not least by demonstrating physical bravery. When a brawl broke out
between tories and radicals at Kirkstall in 1885 ‘ it was not until Mr Jackson had
used his personal influence with the meeting, by going into the thick of the mêlée

97
Yorkshire Post, 12 Nov. 1891.
98
Ibid., 22 Sept. 1885 and 25 Sept. 1885. Jackson was a member of the Imperial Federation League
and a life fellow of the Imperial Institute. Ibid., 7 July 1892.
99 100 101
Ibid., 25 Sept. 1885. Ibid. Ibid., 24 Nov. 1885.
102 103 104
Ibid., 19 Oct. 1885. Ibid., 5 Nov. 1885. Ibid., 16 Apr. 1885.
238 MATTHEW ROBERTS

that the disturbance was quelled ’.105 His popularity with the masses was also
secured by his indulgence of the ancient right of ‘ chairing ’ after the declaration of
the poll which usually took the form of men pulling Jackson’s carriage, rather
than actually carrying him in a chair, to repeated shouts of ‘good ‘‘owd ’’
W. L ’.106 Jackson’s socially liminal position as a self-made man also endeared
him to the masses. Jackson was presented, and indeed presented himself, as a
role model – one whose success could be emulated. His position as the archetypal
self-made tory was his greatest justification for hierarchy and inequality.
When Jackson is cast in the roles of civic dignitary, philanthropist and
paternalist, and as the custodian of ‘ respectable values ’, it becomes clear why
many Liberals abstained from voting – the final ingredient in Jackson’s electoral
cauldron. There can be little doubt that Jackson’s popularity was not only cross-
class, but also cross-party. At the 1880 general election Thomas Marshall told an
open-air Liberal meeting ‘that if they were to have a Conservative member for
Leeds they could not have a better man than Mr Jackson. He was a man of spirit,
character, and ability.’107 Similarly, at the 1885 general election the radical Leeds
Express acknowledged ‘that the majority of voters in Northern Leeds have no
personal quarrels with Mr Jackson, who had earned the respect of his fellow-
townsmen by his actions in the various relationships of his life ’.108 Against the
background of the divisions within the national Liberal party, especially at the
1886, 1895, and 1900 elections, it is easy to see why disillusioned Liberals did not
bother to vote. In this reading, Jackson’s personal popularity partially diluted
Liberal partisanship. Of course, Jackson’s retirement and the controversy
surrounding the Education Bill in 1902 changed that. Joseph Chamberlain,
commenting on the 1902 Leeds North by-election, was of the view that the Act
had transformed the nonconformists into ‘ active instead of passive opponents ’.109
A similarly inclusive platform to that of Jackson’s was constructed by Gerald
Balfour in Leeds Central. When Balfour was invited to contest Leeds Central in
1885 few expected this young man, the nephew of Lord Salisbury, to be elected,
let alone represent the constituency for twenty-one years. At the 1885 and 1886
general elections he was victorious over two Liberal candidates with impeccable
local credentials. By virtue of his connections Balfour found that he was able to
deflect the charge of carpet-baggery and tar the Liberals with the brush of
parochialism. His presence in Leeds, he and his supporters claimed, symbolized
the aristocratic party leadership’s appreciation of urban Conservatism in general,
and Leeds in particular. Thus, Balfour connected Leeds Conservatism with
Westminster and the national leadership, mirroring the similar connections that
Herbert Gladstone forged for Leeds Liberalism. Although Balfour and the party
identified the business and professional community as their core supporters

105 106
Ibid., 24 Oct. 1885. Ibid., 6 July 1892.
107 108
Ibid., 22 Mar. 1880. Leeds Express, 30 Oct. 1885.
109
Chamberlain to A. J. Balfour, 4 Aug. 1902, quoted in Julian Amery, Life of Joseph Chamberlain
(6 vols., London, 1951), IV, p. 495.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 239
through a general appeal to propertied interests, Balfour, like Jackson, fashioned
an inclusive politics that transcended class and religious divisions in favour of the
nation and the empire. He chastized the Liberals for setting class against class and
appealed to all denominations to unite in opposition to the evils of secularism and
atheism.110 There was more than just a hint of ‘one nation ’ toryism in Jackson
and Balfour’s platform, with both using consensual, patriotic, and anti-faddist
rhetoric. As such, the form and content of Conservatism in Leeds Central was
more in line with Jackson’s suburban brand than the working-class toryism to be
found in the older industrial districts of the town – the subject of the next section.
As Balfour himself stated, he appealed to the men of Leeds Central on the
grounds of ‘culture, education, and refinement ’.111

IV
What impact did the Redistribution Act of 1885 have on the manufacturing, and
largely working-class, districts which formed the other three Leeds seats ?
Arguably, the sub-division of Leeds into single-member constituencies devalued
the electoral currency of working-class toryism. It soon became clear in the
aftermath of 1885 that the former undivided borough had been the most effective
electoral framework for the expression of working-class Conservatism. The
party’s working-class support was spread throughout the borough ; after 1885 this
support was, more often than not, overwhelmed in Leeds East, Leeds South, and
Leeds West by a rival Liberal political culture underpinned by those ‘ solid
institutions ’ which Kitson had identified. In the old undivided borough the tories
had been able to draw support from across the borough. It has already been
noted that the Leeds Conservative party’s electoral performance was less
impressive after 1885, whereas between 1832 and 1885 the tories had consistently
held one (and occasionally two) of the Leeds seats. Between 1885 and 1910 the
tories only held two of the five Leeds seats, with the exception of the general
elections of 1885 and 1900 in which they won three. The view from Leeds
reinforces J. P. D. Dunbabin’s suggestive argument that the establishment of
single-member constituencies in 1885 did not necessarily produce long-term
benefits for the Conservatives.112 The Leeds Conservative party undoubtedly
benefited from single-member seats at the 1885 general election when they took
three of the five seats with an aggregate vote of 19,605 compared to the Liberals
who polled 23,354 votes. But it is not evident that they benefited thereafter. At the
1895 general election it actually worked against the Conservative party when,
despite having polled an aggregate 1,195 more votes than the Liberals, they only
took two of the five constituencies. This did not go unnoticed. One reader of the
Yorkshire Post submitted an astute piece of electoral arithmetic, noting that
the combined tory majority in Leeds North and Central was 2,162, whilst

110 111
Yorkshire Post, 11 Sept. 1885. Ibid., 19 Nov. 1885.
112
Dunbabin, ‘Some implications’, p. 93.
240 MATTHEW ROBERTS

the combined Liberal majority in Leeds South, West, and East was only 965. The
reader lamented that there was an excess of Conservatism to the north of the
River Aire.113 Nevertheless, the establishment of single-member constituencies
should not be allowed to obscure the large number of working men in Leeds who
continued to vote Conservative into the Edwardian period. In the general
elections between 1885 and 1900 the Conservative party averaged 45 per cent of
the vote on an average turnout of 77 per cent in Leeds East, South, and West,
which hardly suggests that working-class Conservatism was based on widespread
apathy. How then is the persistence of working-class Conservatism to be
accounted for ?
As a distinct socio-spatial incarnation of popular Conservatism, working-class
toryism was itself a diverse, multi-faceted, and at times contradictory and
incoherent political ideology. The Conservatism of the older industrial districts,
to be found on the banks of the River Aire and throughout the southern half of the
borough, was characterized by the beer barrel, hostility to various ‘ others ’ –
especially puritanical Liberal nonconformists and alien immigrants – and a latter-
day tory-radicalism. In many respects this was a negative, vulgar, insular, and
xenophobic political culture. On occasions the Conservatives could practise a
form of negative integration : by raising the spectre of alien immigration the tories
were hoping to transcend the divisions between the Irish and English electors
in Leeds East, and incorporate the established Jewish community in Leeds
Central by politicizing the divisions within the Jewish community between the
original immigrants who had arrived in the early nineteenth century and the
impoverished immigrants of the second wave who arrived from the 1880s.114
The prominence given to the defence of popular pleasures, to social reform, and
to demonizing pauper aliens made for a political culture that was quite distinct
from the toryism of the suburbs where defence of property and religion (broadly
conceived) predominated. A zealous defence of the drink trade and xenophobic
hostility always ran the risk of offending the moral sensibilities of villadom,
as Wheelhouse had found in 1880, while the prospect of state-sponsored social
reform ran counter to Smilesean values of thrift and independence, to say nothing
of the fears it generated about cost in cheeseparing villadom.
Nevertheless, a comparison of popular Conservatism on both sides of the River
Aire reveals that it was not so much the content but the form assumed by the
political culture which differed. The matrix of values, interests, and even fears

113
Yorkshire Post, 24 July 1895.
114
D. Charing, ‘The Jewish presence in Leeds’, in A. Mason, ed., Religion in Leeds (Stroud, 1994),
pp. 130–3. Although the number of Jewish voters was small, estimated to be about 100 in 1885, rising to
350 by 1900, the marginal nature of the constituency meant that the Jews, like the Irish in Leeds East,
assumed an electoral importance that was disproportionate to their actual number. Yorkshire Post, 12
July 1895, 22 Sept. 1900. The Irish population of Leeds East in the 1890s was estimated by con-
temporaries to be some 2,000, constituting a quarter of the electorate. Whatever the actual figure, all
political commentators were agreed that the Irish vote determined the electoral outcome throughout
this period. Ibid., 12 July 1895.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 241
that informed the promotion and reception of suburban Conservatism were
remarkably similar to the working-class toryism of the manufacturing districts.
The Conservative party’s defence of the drink trade illustrates this. In the older
industrial districts explicit reference was made to the working man’s pint of beer.
By contrast, when Jackson defended the drink trade in the suburbs he objected to
the confiscation of the licensed victualler’s property, implicit in the principle of
local option, rather than promoting the working man’s pint of beer per se.115
Thus, defence of drink was subsumed into the party’s broader defence of
property. In the suburbs the tories spoke more of temperance than in the older
industrial districts, but it was a temperance practised by the individual not by the
state. True to his individualistic and independent outlook, Jackson told one group
of electors that he was a friend of temperance, but ‘he would rather people should
have the manliness to resist temptation than be muzzled lest they got drunk ’.116
For Jackson, in contrast to moralizing teetotal nonconformists, the mark of
respectability was not abstinence but individual moderation.
Perhaps one of the most subtle ingredients in forging a respectable suburban
Conservatism was Jackson’s association with cricket. Jackson’s identification with
cricket was reinforced through his part ownership of the Leeds Cricket, Football,
and Athletic Club, which was based at Headingley, and through his son
F. S. Jackson who became a famous cricketing hero.117 In this respect, it could
be argued that cricket was to suburban Conservatism what football was to
working-class toryism in the industrial districts.118 It would be absurd to suggest
that cricket, or indeed sport more generally, was self-consciously political or
the monopoly of Conservatives. Nevertheless, the identification of so many
Conservatives with sport, either as active participants or as patrons, allowed the
Leeds Conservative party to align itself with this important aspect of popular
culture, especially in the absence of Liberal benefactors and in the presence of
killjoy nonconformity.
This respectable and responsible identification with popular pleasures was
undoubtedly different from the vulgar working-class toryism that implicitly
sanctioned excessive drinking and the abdication of domestic responsibilities –
one of the more potent criticisms levelled at Wheelhouse’s platform. The social
side of Jackson’s politics was not to be found in the pub or on the football terraces.
In addition, there were few traces in Jackson’s platform of the xenophobic
swagger that characterized the Conservatism of the populist Leeds Daily News
and the rhetoric of tory candidates who contested Leeds East, West, and South
during this period.119 For example, the issue of alien immigration which figured
prominently in the working-class constituencies did not feature in Jackson’s

115 116
Yorkshire Post, 6 July 1895. Ibid., 27 Sept. 1900.
117
Roberts, ‘Leeds Conservatism’, pp. 106–8.
118
On the relationship between working-class Conservatism and football see Lawrence, ‘Class and
119
gender’, p. 640. See Roberts, ‘Constructing a tory world-view’.
242 MATTHEW ROBERTS

platform. Yet even when it came to ‘ sinew and muscle ’ there were synergies
between suburban and working-class toryism.
This was most evident at the 1900 general election.120 Events in the run up to
the general election set the scene for a contest that centred on the war in South
Africa. Having witnessed the impromptu celebrations that took place on 18 May
in response to the relief of Mafeking, the Conservative party decided to stage a
great demonstration on the following day. The carnival organized by the Leeds
Conservative party was perhaps one of the shrewdest moves of the party
throughout the period. The celebration took the form of a procession which
consisted of three or four waggonette-loads of volunteers to raise a collection for
the Mafeking sufferers. The starting place of the procession was the Leeds and
County Conservative Club. The Conservative party exploited the occasion to the
fullest, distributing some 3,000 Union Jacks on the steps of the Conservative Club.
The procession was followed by members of the party hierarchy. In case anyone
had forgotten who had staged the demonstrations, the organizers ensured that the
procession returned to the Conservative Club. The true value of the tory-
choreographed celebrations of the Boer War victories were noted by the Yorkshire
Post : they were an occasion ‘ when the street-loafer shouted with suburban
villadom, and exchanged handshakes as if social distinction did not exist ’.121
Interestingly, the Post also noted, in a somewhat headmasterly tone, that jingoistic
fervour was not the exclusive preserve of the street-loafer : ‘ Conventionality was
lost sight of ; insular reserve was thrown off … Processions were formed, headed
in some instances by sober business men who will recollect with dismay this
morning that they adopted as vests newspaper contents bills proclaiming the
joyful news. ’122
There were two other notable points of contact and overlap between villa
toryism and working-class Conservatism. While both strands of popular
Conservatism were concerned with patriotism and imperialism, they were also
concerned with local ties, loyalties, and interests. As the example of Jackson
suggests, a form of factory and civic paternalism could also exist in suburbia.
Jackson’s tannery was actually located in Leeds North, further evidence
that ‘ suburban ’ constituencies also housed manufacturing districts and were
not free from the influence of major local employers. There were pockets of
factory paternalism elsewhere in Leeds, most notably in Leeds West which was

120
Leeds East witnessed a three-cornered fight due to divisions on the political left where, in a
reversal of electoral fortunes, a previous Liberal majority of 710 was converted into a Conservative
majority of 1,867. Yet the divisions on the left cannot explain why the Conservatives polled an im-
pressive 3,453 votes, which was 601 more votes than the combined Liberal and Labour vote of 2,852,
although it should be added that this was on a relatively low turnout of 67.5 per cent. In addition to the
‘khaki’ factor, the tory candidate, H. S. Cautley, had local connections, whereas the Liberal and
Labour candidates were carpet-baggers. The khaki factor also brought the Conservatives close to
victory in Leeds South and West, although the scope for capitalizing on the Boer War was limited in
the former by the candidacy of a Liberal Imperialist, and by the continued popularity of Herbert
Gladstone in the latter.
121 122
Yorkshire Post, 19 May 1900. Ibid., 19 May 1900.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 243
dominated by Greenwood and Batley, one of the largest engineering works
in Leeds. Its director, Arthur Greenwood, was a prominent tory and archetypal
factory paternalist.123 Greenwood’s attempt to socialize the working class
was spearheaded by the Primrose League, and, as with Jackson’s suburban
Conservatism, the emphasis was on respectability and communal solidarity,
creating a space for the participation of women and children that was altogether
absent in the exclusively masculine politics of the pub.124
Perhaps one of the reasons why the Conservative party did not have a stronger
presence in the working-class constituencies was because the industrial hetero-
geneity of Leeds limited the effectiveness of factory paternalism. As Patrick Joyce
has argued, in smaller, often single-industry, towns, work permeated personal and
social life, allowing employers of large family-owned factories to dominate local
life beyond the factory through their philanthropy.125 Similarly, when a single
industry dominated it was easier for politicians to construct a coherent political
representation of the locality’s interests.126 By contrast, the socio-economic
heterogeneity of large towns and cities, with their more diverse industries, meant
that they were less susceptible to the social and political influences of the factory
owners. The lack of credible local tory leaders and the weakness of factory
paternalism also helps to explain why the Conservative party’s infrastructure was
relatively weaker south of the River Aire. It was no coincidence that the only
sustained attempt to create an effective organization to socialize the working class
was to be found in Leeds West. Elsewhere, there was a dearth of personnel and
money.127
The lack of suitable local candidates meant that the Conservative party was
over-reliant on carpet-baggers, especially in Leeds East and South. With few
opportunities to construct a viable politics of place, tory candidates in these
constituencies tended to campaign on the issue of social reform. The candidatures
of Reginald Neville (a young barrister from Norwich) in Leeds South, along with
J. Danvers Powers (an Irish brewer), Richard Dawson (an Irish barrister), and
Arthur Morton (a London gentleman) in Leeds East illustrated this. They were
each convinced of the necessity to shorten the working day and they also spoke of
the need for measures to alleviate distress in childhood, sickness, and old age.128
Given that the Liberals were presenting a package of negative proposals and
disruptive measures (like home rule), it is important not to underestimate the
electoral potency of the Conservative party’s willingness to discuss social reform,
and its broader attempt to construct a positive platform, and this must have
contributed to the reductions in Liberal majorities in these three constituencies.129
Yet even when it came to social reform this issue did not necessarily constitute a

123 124
Ibid., 20 Jan. 1910. Roberts, ‘Leeds Conservatism’, pp. 132–5.
125
Joyce, Work, society and politics, p. 227.
126
J. Lawrence, ‘The dynamics of urban politics, 1867–1914’, in Lawrence and Taylor, eds., Party,
127
state and society, p. 85. Roberts, ‘ Leeds Conservatism ’, pp. 221–5.
128
Yorkshire Post, 17 June 1892, 12 July 1895.
129
Roberts, ‘ Leeds Conservatism ’, pp. 136–7.
244 MATTHEW ROBERTS

faultline between a penny-pinching laissez-faire villadom and a collectivist

working class.130 While tory candidates in Leeds East and Leeds South spoke of
the need for social reforms they were of the opinion that such provision ought to
be made ‘ by strengthening and securing existing agencies for thrift, such as
Friendly Societies and Building Societies, and thereby encouraging voluntary
effort ’.131 When pressed on the issue of the eight-hour day, Morton ‘was of the
opinion that any alteration of the hours of labour should come, not by law, but by
agreement between employers and employed ’.132 Judging by the level of electoral
support that the tories received in these constituencies it is evident that rugged
individualism, self-reliance, and respectability were not exclusive to the suburbs.
As Martin Pugh has argued, in presenting themselves as the ‘ champions of self-
help at a time when some Liberals were losing confidence in the idea ’,133 the
tories were able to construct a broad-based alliance. Indeed, it was only in the
Edwardian period, when the Conservative party began to abandon these
Smilesean values to the collectivist and interventionist tenets of protective tariffs,
that this alliance disintegrated, resulting in the loss of Leeds Central at the
1906 general election. That disintegration brought the Edwardian ‘crisis of
Conservatism’ to Leeds. Only with the greatest reluctance did the Leeds
Conservative party cease to worship at the altar of free trade and accept the
national party’s eventual conversion to tariff reform.134 This shift illustrates how
the popular Conservatism of the late Victorian period had been, in the words of
Jon Lawrence, ‘a product of a specific historical conjuncture ’.135

V
As a shorthand term to describe the sociological processes by which the late
Victorian Conservative party accidentally conquered the suburban middle class,
isolated in their own constituencies, villa toryism emerges as a phrase largely
devoid of substance. If villa toryism retains any substance then it does so
as a descriptive, as opposed to an analytical, term, which should be defined
expansively. In this reading, villa toryism was a particular form of popular
Conservatism that was sustained by a broad-based coalition of voters, under-
pinned by a matrix of shared values, interests, and fears which assumed a
suburban form. The portrait that emerges from Leeds reinforces the notion
that popular Conservatism was a heterogeneous political culture composed of
distinctive, but related, strands. As this article has argued, the electoral success of
the late Victorian Conservative party rested upon its ability to knit together these
different strands of popular Conservatism.

130
On working-class opposition to interventionist social reform see P. Thane, ‘ The working class
and state ‘‘welfare’’ in Britain, 1880–1914’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), pp. 877–900.
131 132
Yorkshire Post, 23 June 1892. Ibid., 17 June 1892.
133
Pugh, The tories and the people, p. 132.
134
Roberts, ‘Leeds Conservatism’, pp. 284–94.
135
Lawrence, ‘Class and gender’, p. 632.
 ‘V I L L A T O R Y I S M’ 245
The question of how the Conservative party negotiated the suburban terrain
during the late Victorian period and beyond is one that requires further investi-
gation. By focusing on the provincial suburbs this article adds a new dimension to
revisionist interpretations of late Victorian popular Conservatism. By showing
that suburbia was both politically contested and socially heterogeneous, the
article lends further weight to the emerging critique of electoral sociology by
showing that there was no linear and inevitable shift towards class-based politics.
The suburban Conservatism that existed in Leeds was not the political expression
of residential segregation, innate conservatism, or suburban uniformity. The
Redistribution Act of 1885 not only failed to isolate middle-class suburban
pockets from less socially exclusive districts, but also found little favour among
Conservatives, who doubted the efficacy of single-member seats – and not just in
Leeds.136 As the Leeds example illustrates, the lack of tory hegemony among
middle-class voters underlined the electoral importance of the working class who
comprised between two-thirds and three-quarters of the post-1884 national
electorate.137 Historians, in their haste to conclude that the Redistribution Act
of 1885 liberated villa toryism from surrounding and previously engulfing
working-class districts, have failed to consider the implications of the Act
for the Conservatives beyond villadom. The electoral support base of urban
Conservatism was never as geographically concentrated as many historians
have traditionally suggested. The hypothetical psephology conducted by Lord
Salisbury in his National Review article on redistribution suggests that he was only
too aware of the diffuseness of the party’s electoral support.138 It was neither
aristocratic disdain nor ignorance of popular politics, but a penetrating under-
standing of electoral geography that ultimately accounted for Salisbury’s lack of
faith in the villas.139
What made Leeds Conservatism distinctive, therefore, was its relative failure,
not with the middle class, but with the working class. This article has shown how
the industrial heterogeneity of Leeds capped the electoral dividends of factory
paternalism, which worked so well for the tories in those towns and cities which
were dominated by either single industries or by a set of interdependent indus-
tries, as was the case in the Black Country, Sheffield, Lancashire, and to a lesser
extent in the textile districts of the West Riding.140 The industrial heterogeneity of

136
For example, Conservatives in Hull, Manchester, and Nottingham also doubted the efficacy of
single-member constituencies. Manchester Courier, 2 Dec. 1884; Nottingham Daily Guardian, 4 Dec. 1884;
Hull Packet, 5 Dec. 1884.
137
Modest estimates put the proportion of working-class voters at under 60 per cent: H. C. G.
Matthew, R. I. McKibbin, and John Kay, ‘The franchise factor in the rise of the Labour party’,
English Historical Review, 91 (1976), pp. 723–52. Revisionist estimates suggest that it could have been as
much as 76 per cent: D. Tanner, Political change and the Labour party (Cambridge, 1990), p. 119.
138
Salisbury, ‘The value of redistribution’, pp. 146–7.
139
Cf. M. Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s world: Conservative environments in late Victorian Britain (Cambridge,
2001), p. 3.
140
For the Black Country, see J. Lawrence, Speaking for the people: party, language and popular politics in
England, 1867–1914 ( Cambridge, 1998), ch. 5 ; on Sheffield see C. Stevens, ‘The Conservative club
246 MATTHEW ROBERTS

Leeds, which insulated it from the harsher effects of trade depression, explains
why virtually all shades of political opinion were committed to free trade. As such,
Leeds should also be set apart from those places where protectionist sentiments
came to dominate Conservatism, as in neighbouring Bradford and Sheffield.
Nevertheless, Leeds did register the nationwide Conservative advance of the
1880s and 1890s, albeit in a muted form. Both the character of Leeds
Conservatism and its overall electoral weakness also reflected the strength of old-
style Gladstonian Liberalism and radical nonconformity.141 In turn, this served to
reinforce the Anglican/Conservative and nonconformist/Liberal dichotomy,
thereby illustrating the continued importance of religious identity in shaping
political cultures. This also distinguishes Leeds both from London where the
impact of religion on popular politics was much weaker,142 and from Lancashire
where the impact of religion was also important but very different due to the
concentrated presence of Irish Catholics. Thus, Leeds was more typical of politics
in strongly nonconformist urban areas like Newcastle, Bristol, and Nottingham.
Yet as the example of Leeds suggests, historians of urban politics need to be more
attentive to the differences within as well as between towns and cities. Perhaps
there was something, after all, about the Yorkshire Post’s insistence that the River
Aire was a dividing line, but not in the way that the disciples of electoral sociology
would argue.

movement in the industrial West Riding, 1880–1914’, Northern History (2001), pp. 121–43; for the textile
districts of Lancashire and the West Riding see Joyce, Work, society and politics.
141
On the character of Liberalism in Leeds and the West Riding, see K. Laybourn and J. Reynolds,
Liberalism and the rise of Labour, 1890–1918 (London, 1984), passim.
142
Windscheffel, ‘Villa toryism? ’, p. 278.
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