George Howell
When Manchergee Bhownagree won the parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green for the Conservatives in 1895, his win mirrored the landslide election of that year, as Lord Salisbury’s Tories swept away the Liberal seats of Lord Roseberry. But apart from presaging the final decline of the Liberals as a political force, that election also saw the removal of the first generation of ‘Labour’ MPs, who had used the Liberal Party as a flag of convenience.
Notable among them was George Howell, the sitting MP for Bethnal Green. The determined Howell had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1868, 1874 and 1880, before finally winning Bethnal Green in 1885, standing as a Lib-Lab candidate. He had defended his seat in 1886 and 1892 before his defeat in 1895. His health broken, he then retired from public life, but it was the end of a remarkable story.
Howell had been born in Wrington, Somerset in 1883, the eldest of eight children and was an early scholar, poring over John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’. As the oldest child, though, he had to earn a living and was at work at 12, with his builder father. Six days a week he laboured as a mortar boy, and then a bricklayer, giving over his Sundays to reading.
George hated the work, and became an apprentice shoemaker, and it was here he discovered politics. His fellow workers were Chartists, dedicated to wholesale reform of the electoral system. That meant universal suffrage for all those over 21 (men if not women); a secret ballot; equalising the size of constituencies (thus removing the last of the ‘rotten boroughs’; and pay for MPs (who were exclusively rich men who could afford to treat politics as a hobby).
Howell, who had been raised in the Church of England, also became a Methodist at this point and then a lay preacher. Hard work and religion were allied to temperance, and he also began to lecture against the evils of drink.
In 1854 he moved to London. Failing to find work as a shoemaker he had to become a bricklayer again, but his main aim was political. London at the time was a hotbed of radical politics. Howell attended numerous political meetings and met figures such as Karl Marx, Charles Bradlaugh and Frederick Harrison. He became a leading figure in the nascent trade union movement and led building strikes in search of a nine-hour working day. His reward was blacklisting, and he found it impossible now to get work in the building trade.
In 1861 he was elected onto the executive of the London Trades Council, and in 1865 was Secretary of the Reform League, organising huge demonstrations in London in 1866 and 1867 in favour of electoral reform. He thus played a huge part in getting Disraeli’s government to pass the 1867 Reform Act (reducing the financial and landowning qualifications necessary to vote). But he was disappointed by this peacemeal reform - Howell wanted nothing less than ‘universal’ suffrage.
In 1871 he became Secretary for the newly established TUC, and then began his fight to be elected to Parliament. At that time, with no Labour Party, trade unionists would be aligned with and sponsored by the Liberal Party, as Lib-Lab candidates. Eventually, in 1885, he made it. Part of his roll of honour during his time in the Commons was the passing of the Merchant Shipping Bill, that greatly improved the lot of merchant seaman.
He lost his seat in 1895. The Liberals were a declining force in any event, and the Lib-Labs were quickly becoming an anachronism, as the rising Labour and trade union movements were soon to give birth to the Labour Party.
At that election, there were still only four million votes counted in the United Kingdom. Universal male sufferage would have to wait another 23 years until the 1918 poll, when 16 million would vote (all men, plus women over 30). By then, Howell had been dead for seven years. He lost his seat at the age of 62, in poor health, and with little money. The TUC raised £1650 to buy him an annuity for his remaining years. True universal suffrage would have to wait until 1928, when all women got the vote.