I know with this week’s ill-timed police and crime commissioner by-election you’ve already heard enough about the issue of voting for one summer. And, after July’s hyped commemoration of the centenary of Joseph Chamberlain’s death, you’re probably bored with him too.
If so, I apologise – you’ll just have to rip the page out and origami a sun or rain hat because this column is about two Chamberlain-related elections in 1868 (how to really fix a result) and 1870 (how to really screw one up).
In truth, Chamberlain isn’t the key actor in this little history mystery. Rather, it’s the man whose name lives on in Birmingham in the George Dixon Primary School, International School and Sixth Form College in City Road, Edgbaston – and, for those with monochrome tellies in the 50s and 60s, as the longest-running lead character in a British TV police series: PC George Dixon of London East End’s Dock Green.
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The police link is rather a red herring – stemming from the producer of the original Dixon film deciding to name his fictional ‘beat bobby’ after his old junior school. The educational tribute, though, is wholly appropriate.
Few Victorians could lay stronger claim to have been the ‘Father of Free Education’ than the real George Dixon – Yorkshire-born Birmingham businessman, philanthropist, Liberal politician, councillor, mayor, for 20 years a Birmingham MP and, above all, passionate and effective education reformer. The title was accorded by a serious political magazine of the time, and was understandably pinched by James Dixon for his great-great-grandfather’s recent biography, Out of Birmingham: George Dixon (1820-98), ‘Father of free education’.
I had the pleasure of meeting James at last month’s commemorative Chamberlain conference organised by Newman University, and of purchasing a signed and generously reduced-price copy of his book. From which I realised that the ‘Father of Free Education’ tag dated from 1890, much later in GD’s life than I’d previously supposed.
I’d unthinkingly assumed it probably referred to his dedicated campaigning for the famous 1870 Elementary Education Act, both as MP and chairman of the council of the Birmingham-based National Education League (NEL) that he had joint-founded.
Justifiably, the best remembered of the several late-Victorian Education Acts, the 1870 Act set the framework of elected school boards to oversee the schooling of all children between five and 13 in England and Wales.
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It was the first legislative demonstration that national government took the education of working class children seriously, and, you might think, a cue for Dixon and his like-minded NEL reformers to celebrate.
If so, you’d be dead wrong, and seriously underestimating the ‘advanced radicalism’ of Dixon and the NEL, who wanted free, compulsory, non-sectarian education for every child, paid for by local rates/property taxes and government grants – and wanted it ALL NOW.
What they got in 1870 was the first step, the institutional machinery: 2,500 school boards, directly elected by local ratepayers, which could, and eventually would have to, provide most of the above – though even that would take time.
School boards were empowered to make attendance compulsory for five to 13-year olds, but not until 1880 were they required to.
Likewise, they could choose to pay school fees of children whose parents were judged too poor to pay them and in that sense the 1870 Act did introduce the principle of free education. But only in 1891 was elementary education made free for all, thanks partly again to the parliamentary efforts of George Dixon – now sitting as Birmingham, Edgbaston’s first MP, and unofficial ‘Father of free education’.
Back, then, to 1867 and the start of Dixon’s parliamentary career, when, as already a prominent local figure and incumbent mayor, he defeated his Conservative opponent in the by-election following the death of one of Birmingham’s then two Liberal MPs.
Having arrived at Westminster, he helped persuade Disraeli to include in his 1867 Reform Act provision for Birmingham to extend its representation from two MPs to three – the subtle quid pro quo being that, to protect the (Conservative) minority in the still single town-wide constituency, each elector would have only two, not three, votes.
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The problem facing Liberal organisers at the 1868 Election, therefore, was how to ensure the return of all three Liberal candidates – John Bright, Dixon, and newcomer, PH Muntz – a job for which for which the Birmingham Liberal Association (BLA) might unwittingly have been created.
Formed three years previously by Dixon, Muntz and others (though not Chamberlain, ultimately its greatest beneficiary), the BLA was probably a first in British politics: a permanent election committee, a prototype district party.
Its 1868 campaign strategy was centralist, authoritarian and childishly simple. Precisely one-third of party members were instructed to vote for candidates one and two, one-third for one and three, and one-third for two and three.
There were inevitably rebels, but more than enough obeyed for three Liberals to be duly returned.
My rhetorical question, therefore, is: why did this slick election machine so screw up Birmingham’s first school board elections in 1870?
It was a cumulative voting system: 15 board members to be elected by all ratepayers, all with 15 votes that they could distribute however they wished, including ‘plumping’ all on one candidate, should they choose.
BLA members should have been like pigs in clover. They might, like genuine reformers, have nominated some women candidates. They could at least have again organised their supporters to plump for specified candidates, ensuring a clear Liberal majority of, say, 10 out of 15. Almost inexplicably, though, they did nothing.
The poll was consequently topped by the Very Rev. M O’Sullivan, whose barely 3,000 Catholic supporters gave him on average 12 of their 15 votes and a total of 35,000. The Conservatives fielded just eight candidates, all of whom were elected, again through plumping.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Liberals spread their votes fairly evenly among 15 candidates, and elected just six, including Dixon in eighth place and Joseph Chamberlain in an embarrassing 13th – the lowest, I’d guess, the man they’d call ‘the first modern politician’ finished in any political contest in his life.
* Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham