Petersfield

Economic and social profile:

The small market town of Petersfield was an important coaching stop on the main road between London and Portsmouth, where connections could be made to Winchester and Midhurst. By 1830 some 30 stagecoaches were passing through each day, served by numerous inns. Its population, which grew by a third in this period, was chiefly engaged in servicing and supplying the surrounding agricultural districts. But there was also an expanding brewing industry, a church organ manufactory, and for a while, in the 1840s and 1850s, it became a centre for the new postal services of the period.

The opening of the LSWR railway between London and Portsmouth in 1859 put an end to its coaching and postal operations, prompting fears of decline. Its new station, however, facilitated an expansion of its weekly livestock and crop markets, especially after the completion of a branch line to Midhurst in 1864, connecting it with the railways of mid-Sussex. A corn exchange was built in 1866. Thereafter it became the principal retail and administrative centre of the local area and its population grew more rapidly.1VCH Hampshire, iii. 113-6; W. White, History and Directory of Hampshire, 365; The Times, 28 Feb. 1861; http://www.localhistories.org/petersfield.html.

Electoral history:

The ‘rotten’ borough of Petersfield was earmarked for complete disfranchisement in the original reform bill of 1831. It owed its reprieve to a mistake in the calculations of population and wealth used in the final version of the bill, which was discovered too late to rectify. The least significant borough to retain its parliamentary status (with the loss of one of its two MPs), Petersfield is widely cited as an example of an unreformed ‘pocket’ or ‘family’ borough that continued to exist after 1832. Politically, however, it was much more active than this label implies. Before 1841, in particular, it was anything but a servile ‘safe seat’.2The Times, 20 Nov. 1832; History of Parliament, Petersfield 1820-32; N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, 197-8; H. J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management, 42; N. Surry, One Hundred Years of a Pocket Borough: Petersfield and Parliament 1685-1783 (1983).

The Jolliffe family, lords of the manor of Petersfield, had monopolised its elections since the mid-18th century. From 1818, however, there had been a series of attempts to ‘open’ the borough in contests and on petition, organised by Nathaniel Atcheson, a London attorney, and after 1830 by Cornthwaite John Hector, the Jolliffes’s estranged steward. It was only by defending, at considerable expense, a legal ruling limiting the franchise to the owners of ‘certain’ properties within the old boundaries that Hylton Jolliffe, the Tory patron since 1802, had been able to maintain control.3Petersfield 1820-32. In the Commons in 1831, Jolliffe predicted that even a modest enlargement of these boundaries and extension of the franchise would ‘deprive the present patron of all power’.4The Times, 31 July 1831. The boundary act of the following year added a vast tract of surrounding countryside to the constituency, increasing its size from 0.4 to 35.5 square miles and making it the most extensive borough in Hampshire (see map).5PP (1831-2), xl. 211-13; (1859), xxiii. 122.

The first registration revision of November 1832 seemed to confirm Jolliffe’s impotence in the reformed constituency. Of the 234 electors admitted to the rolls (which made it the 15th smallest borough), barely a third were reckoned to be Jolliffe’s supporters. The rest were expected to back the Liberal candidate John Shaw Lefevre, who had come forward after the withdrawal of his brother Charles Shaw Lefevre to contest North Hampshire. However, the registration was not without hope for Jolliffe, since it provided a number of opportunities for legal action in the event of a close contest. Of particular significance was the revising barrister’s decision to admit some shareholders of a cricket field to the unreformed freeholder franchise. These ‘cricket field’ voters had acquired their freeholds from Hector in 1830, in a vote making scheme, but had subsequently been disqualified by an election committee.6The Times, 26 June, 20 Nov. 1832. Assisted by the marquis of Douro, a Conservative candidate for North Hampshire, Jolliffe set about mustering as much support as possible in a heavy-handed canvass, which included threats to evict disloyal tenants. Shortly before the poll Hector was involved in a brawl with the mayor (and returning officer) Dr. Quarrier, a Jolliffe nominee.7Hampshire Telegraph, 8 Dec. 1832.

The 1832 contest, noted the local press, was ‘the first real election that has ever taken place in Petersfield’. Jolliffe initially took the lead, polling his tenants in the old town, but ‘in the afternoon the voters in the liberal interest arrived very fast from the neighbouring villages’. At the end of the first day Lefevre led by 90 votes to 89, following which the ‘greatest exertions’ were made by both parties, with ‘postchaises rattling about the greater part of the night in search of voters’. The final vote of the second day, cast by John Bonham Carter, the Liberal MP for Portsmouth, gave Lefevre a majority of just one (with 101 votes), making a petition against his election certain.8Ibid. 17 Dec. 1832. When this reached the Commons, 7 Feb. 1833, it claimed that Lefevre’s majority included a number of illegal voters and accused him of ‘treating’. On 5 Mar. 1833 an election committee cleared Lefevre of bribery, but agreed that ten of his supporters had been improperly admitted as ‘cricket field’ voters and removed them from the poll and register. Lefevre’s election was declared void and Jolliffe was seated in his place.9Commons Journals, lxxxviii. 13-14; The Times, 7 Mar. 1833; Hylton mss DD/HY/ box 17; P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work, 30.

Jolliffe’s triumph, on this technicality, was shortlived. With the next election not expected until 1839, his agents allowed their attention to lapse. Hector, meanwhile, set about bolstering his personal interest, establishing a rival bank to the Jolliffes’s and expanding his brewing business. In the registration courts, where the barristers were now more cautious, his agents not only successfully objected to Tory voters, but also invalidated the objection notices of their rivals for being ‘improperly signed’.10W. Manning, Courts of revision, 216-18. The unexpected 1835 election caught Jolliffe off guard. Hector was first in the field, and in his address urged the electors to demonstrate that Petersfield was ‘no longer a close borough’ and resist ‘the methods adopted to render it still’. At the nomination, 7 Jan. 1835, many tenants turned up with ‘notices to quit’ (eviction notices) stuck their hats, but offered to remain neutral. ‘Several tradesmen’, who had also been threatened with reprisals, did the same. The two-day poll gave Hector 103 votes, a majority of 16 votes over Jolliffe, and provided little hope of a legal challenge.11Hampshire Telegraph, 5, 10 Jan. 1835.

Shortly after the election, in a move that marked the end of Jolliffe’s ambitions and the beginning of a new style of campaigning, Jolliffe’s nephew Sir William George Hylton Jolliffe announced that he would be a future candidate. In his address, he insisted that his ‘political principles’ were ‘not biased by feelings towards any particular party’, and that he would support any government that would ‘firmly administer the laws of the country’ and ‘carry into effect the reforms which our institutions require’.12Hylton mss DD/HY box 17, election address, 11 May 1835. Around this time he assumed control of his uncle’s extensive Petersfield estates.

Sir William Jolliffe duly stood against Hector in 1837, repeating these principles, but also stating his opposition to the Whig government’s unpopular 1834 poor law, which had led to the construction of a workhouse in Love Lane the previous year. At a Conservative dinner Quarrier, once again mayor, publicly attacked Hector as ‘a man whose democratic and revolutionary principles are dangerous to the very existence of the state’, a charge which Hector vigorously denied in the press. During the contest, which was now restricted to one day, the ‘rabble were so vociferous that scarcely a sentence was audible’ from the hustings and Hector’s supporters complained that they ‘were compelled literally to fight their way to the poll’. The Liberals again alleged that the ‘pigsty and hovel voters’, as they called the ancient-right freeholders, had been threatened with eviction, but this does not seem to have been a major factor.13Hampshire Telegraph, 24 July; Hampshire Chronicle, 31 July 1837.

Jolliffe’s majority of just one (with 124 votes) held out the prospect of a successful challenge against his election. After a Liberal dinner to raise funds, 7 Aug. 1837, a petition was prepared claiming that some of Hector’s supporters who had been unfairly omitted from the registers and that some of Jolliffe’s supporters had lost their voting entitlement since their registration. On 14 Feb. 1838 the election committee examined the poll book, which included ‘tendered’ (rejected) votes, and admitted two more votes for Hector, giving him a single vote majority. At this point Jolliffe’s counsel, evidently acting on instructions, unexpectedly declined to proceed any further, citing the imprudence of prolonging the contest and the inevitable ‘expense’. Jolliffe was declared unduly elected and Hector seated in his place.14Hampshire Chronicle, 14 Aug. 1837; The Times, 15 Feb. 1838.

It was the emergence of the issue of Protection, in what was an overwhelmingly agricultural district, that finally provided Jolliffe with a secure berth. Canvassing in 1841, following the defeat of the Whig’s government’s free-trade budget, Hector was forced to ‘relinquish the contest’. In his address Jolliffe, adopting a tone alien to his uncle, paid tribute to his rival before accusing the Whigs of raising the cry of ‘cheap bread’ in order to cling to power ‘a little longer’. For the first time since 1826 there was no contest and Jolliffe was returned unopposed.15Hampshire Advertiser, 3 July 1841. He was re-elected without opposition as a staunch Protectionist in 1847 and 1852, when he spoke against ‘Papal aggression’, and as Lord Derby’s Conservative ‘whipper-in’ in 1857. Quizzed on the hustings in 1859 and 1865, when he was again elected unopposed, he declared his support for parliamentary reform, including an extension of the county franchise.16The Times, 31 July 1847; Hampshire Telegraph, 19 July 1852, 30 Apr. 1859; Petersfield Express, 18 July 1865.

Jolliffe’s elevation to the peerage in July 1866 caused a by-election. The only candidate was the Liberal William Nicholson, a wealthy London distiller who in 1863 had purchased Basing Park, Froxfield, in the north of the constituency. Bolstered by further land purchases, including the manor of Langrish from Jolliffe, Nicholson successfully contested two of the next three elections before the borough’s eventual disfranchisement in 1885.17The Times, 18 July 1866; Hanham, 42; VCH Hampshire, iii. 70, 76.