Suffolk West

Economic and social profile

The maritime county of Suffolk, comprising 471,312 acres and situated between the rivers Stour and Waveney, was overwhelmingly agricultural, with seven-eighths of its land devoted to arable farming.1White’s Suffolk Directory (1844), 15. By 1840 the once-prominent woollen trade had essentially ceased to exist, though silk and worsted production continued in the western part of the county at Mildenhall and Sudbury.2VCH Suff. ii. 250-97; Dod’s electoral facts, impartially stated, ed. H.J. Hanham (1972), 299. The maltings at Bury St. Edmunds and Stowmarket expanded rapidly in this period, with improved railway communication giving the region access to a national market, particularly the London breweries. By 1870 Stowmarket had over twenty malthouses, making the town one of the biggest producers in the country.3C. Clark, The British malting industry since 1830 (1998), 51. In 1846 a railway line was opened from Bury St. Edmunds to Ipswich, connecting the western division with the Eastern Union railway line.4Civil engineering heritage: eastern and central England, ed. E.A. Labrum (1994), 141. The Anglican Church accounted for the majority of the county’s worshippers, though there was a strong Nonconformist presence in the borough of Bury St. Edmunds.5Morning Chronicle, 6 July 1852.

Electoral history

Suffolk West was created by the 1832 Reform Act, which split the county into two divisions. From 1790 until 1830, Suffolk had remained unpolled, with a compact between the aristocracy ensuring the return of one pro-Catholic emancipation Whig and one anti-Catholic Tory.6 HP Commons, 1820-1832, iii. 28-36. The election of two Whigs at the 1830 general election was heralded as a triumph for the supporters of parliamentary reform and became ingrained in local political memory.7Ibid., iii. 32-4. However, the return of two Reformers for Suffolk West at the 1832 general election proved to be the zenith of the local Liberals’ achievements. Diligent and consistent attendance to the electoral register secured the return of one Conservative in 1835 and two years later, after a particularly well co-ordinated campaign, two Conservative MPs. Thereafter Conservative hegemony was maintained, with the Liberals failing to bring forward a single candidate to the polls until 1868, though the local Conservative party experienced some internecine conflict in the late 1850s.

The voters of the western division polled at Wickham Market, Lavenham, Stowmarket, Ixworth, Mildenhall and the election town of Bury St. Edmunds. The composition of the electorate remained steady between the First and Second Reform Acts. The freeholders accounted for 63 per cent of the registered voters in 1837-38, a proportion that had fallen only slightly by 1852. The next largest body were the £50 occupying tenants, who made up approximately 25 per cent of the voters throughout this period.8PP 1837-38 (329), xliv. 570; PP 1852 (8), xlii. 312. In 1852 twelve per cent of the electors were also registered for property in the boroughs of Bury St. Edmunds, Eye, Sudbury and Thetford, a relatively low proportion for borough freeholders in a county.9PP 1852 (4), xlii. 306. The dominant Conservative influence was Frederick William Hervey, first marquess of Bristol, of Ickworth. His son, Frederick Hervey, Earl Jermyn I, MP for Bury St. Edmunds 1826-59, regularly chaired meetings of the Suffolk West Conservative party. Another prominent Tory landowner was the wealthy cleric and patron of the arts, Rev. Samuel Kilderbee, of Easton, who was also heir to the estates of the fifth earl of Rochford. The most important Whig landowners were George Henry Fitzroy, fourth duke of Grafton, of Euston Hall, and Sir Henry Edward Bunbury, of Barton Hall, who had come in for the county as a Reformer in 1830. Another significant organisation in county life was the West Suffolk Agricultural Society, established in 1832, while by the 1860s the West Suffolk Association for the Repeal or Reduction of the Malt Tax played a prominent role in parliamentary elections. The Conservative Ipswich Journal acted as a mouthpiece for members of these organisations, frequently publishing correspondence from local farmers irate at the perceived intransigence of the Whig government to agricultural relief and the abolition of the malt tax. Partisan rivalry was further fostered by the Liberal-supporting Bury and Norwich Post.

The 1832 general election underlined the determination of the local Whigs to capture both of the western division’s two seats. Following the decision of Bunbury, announced in October, to retire from public life, owing to the strain his parliamentary ‘exertions’ had placed on his health, local Whigs invited Sir Hyde Parker, of Melford Hall, to come forward.10Memoirs and literary remains of Sir Henry Edward Bunbury (1868), ed. C.J.F. Bunbury, 164-5. Parker’s brief address, however, upset the division’s advanced Liberals, who were dismayed at his failure to engage with issues such as shorter parliaments and the abolition of slavery.11Bury and Norwich Post, 31 Oct. 1832. A fresh requisition to Henry Fitzroy, earl of Euston, the eldest son of the duke of Grafton, was arranged, but ultimately withdrawn following Parker’s issue of a second address, which stated his support for triennial parliaments, the abolition of slavery and a modified property tax.12Ibid. Charles Tyrell, of Polstead Hall, who had come in for Suffolk with Bunbury in 1830, stood again as a Reformer, though his earlier Tory allegiances – he had been a founder member of the Suffolk Pitt Club in 1821 – remained a source of controversy.13HP Commons 1820-1832, vii. 521-3. The Conservative Bury and Suffolk Herald attacked Tyrell for:

his subservience to Sir H. Bunbury in St. Stephen’s and to ... [his] faction in Suffolk, notwithstanding that he had opposed the one and the other all his life before ... [which] betokened a mind ready to break faith with an old friend the moment it was found a more beneficial collusion could be made with an old enemy.14Bury and Suffolk Herald, 26 Dec. 1832.

Parker and Tyrell were opposed by Harry Spencer Waddington, of Cavenham Hall, who had accepted a requisition from nearly 300 electors to stand in the Conservative interest. He was backed by ‘a tolerably large purse’, with one elector alone reportedly contributing £500.15Bury and Norwich Post, 31 Oct. 1832. In his address Waddington presented himself as a candidate ‘directed by no party ties; fettered by no promises, bound by no pledges’, though he declared that his focus would be ‘directed to the protection of agriculture’.16Ibid.

At the nomination Parker and Tyrell, responding to accusations made in Conservative handbills, took great pains to stress their zealous commitment to the agricultural interest. Both men called for a fixed duty on imported corn and a reduction in the malt tax. Tyrell, who asserted that he came forward on ‘free and independent principles’, insisted that there was no coalition with Parker, though an ‘Independent Committee’ for their return issued an address stating that ‘Mr. Tyrell has no objection whatever to any of his tenantry giving their second votes to Sir H. Parker’.17Ibid., 19 Dec. 1832. The result was decisive. Tyrell comfortably topped the poll, with Parker returned in second place, nearly 400 votes ahead of Waddington. A breakdown of the votes revealed that Waddington had polled respectably in the more rural districts, such as Wickhambrook and Botesdale, but had been comprehensively defeated in the market towns of Bury. St Edmunds, Stowmarket and Hadleigh, where the majority of the electorate resided.18Ibid., 26 Dec. 1832.

Over the next five years, however, the strength of the Liberal vote was eroded an extensive registration campaign orchestrated by the local Conservative hierarchy.19Ibid., 24 Dec. 1834. By 1833 284 electors had been added to the register, with a further 121 the following year.20P. Salmon, Electoral reform at work: local politics and national parties, 1832-1841 (2002), 263. The Conservatives’ belief that the register had begun to swing in their favour was evident at the 1835 general election, when two candidates, both prominent local landowners, were brought forward. They were Robert Rushbrooke, of Rushbrooke Hall, and Robert Hart Logan, of Kentwell Hall, who had made his fortune as a Montreal merchant. Meanwhile, the unexpected retirement of both Tyrell, who wished to return to ‘the repose of domestic life’, and Parker, who declined to explain his decision, put the Liberals on the back foot.21Bury and Norwich Post, 7 Jan. 1835. Henry Wilson, of Stowlangtoft Hall, and John Turner Hales, of Heringswell, also well-known Suffolk landowners, were hastily put up in their place.

Agricultural issues dominated the campaign. As all four candidates supported a repeal of the malt tax, the contest boiled down to who could claim that they best represented the interests of the Suffolk farmers, an argument that became embroiled with personal accusations and intrigue. Hart Logan, who had retained his business links with Canada, was accused of selling, through his farming steward, Canadian corn in Sudbury market, an allegation he swiftly denied.22Ibid., 26 Dec. 1834, 7 Jan. 1835. The Conservatives, meanwhile, asserted that Wilson, whose father, Joseph, had been a silk manufacturer, was an advocate of free trade in corn and ‘ignorant’ of agricultural distress. Wilson’s father had also been a noted follower of Swedenborgianism, which led his opponents to portray him as a ‘radical’ and an enemy of the established church.23Ibid. In response, Wilson, who complained that his ‘family history had been ransacked’ for political purposes, issued an address stating that ‘I hate Radicals, but for that very reason I am a Reformer’. 24Parliamentary test book (1835), 175. He went on to stress that he was a ‘churchman’ who was devoted to agricultural relief.25Bury and Norwich Post, 21 Jan. 1835. Hales, in contrast, was unapologetic about his radical views, calling for dissenters to be relieved from paying church rates and given their own universities.26Ibid., 7, 21 January 1835.

Following a rancorous nomination, which witnessed Hart Logan being mocked by his opponents, who carried sacks of grain labelled ‘for Hard Log-an and Co. From Yankee-doodle and Co. Foreign’, Wilson was returned in first place, narrowly ahead of Rushbrooke, who gained just under 150 votes more than his Conservative colleague Hart Logan.27Ibid., 21 Jan. 1835. Significantly, the two Conservatives polled relatively evenly across the electoral districts apart from Bury St. Edmunds, close to Rushbrooke’s estates, where Rushbrooke received 138 more votes. The effect of the Conservatives’ registration efforts was also evident in the rural districts of Lavenham and Wickhambrook, where Rushbrooke and Logan’s individual tallies were appreciably higher than Waddington’s in 1832.28Ibid., 28 Jan. 1835. Following the general election, a further 1,221 electors were added to the register at the end of the year.29Salmon, Electoral reform, 263.

The 1837 general election was a more partisan affair, with the candidates putting less stress on their independence. Wilson stated that his ‘support must always be given to a Liberal government’, while Bunbury, who had been persuaded to come out of retirement, chided the Conservative party for acting like it had ‘exclusive loyalty’ to the new queen, ‘as if it were necessary to take out a license, and get a certificate from the Tories, to enable us to be honest men’.30Bury and Norwich Post, 2 Aug. 1837; Ipswich Journal, 5 Aug. 1837. Agricultural issues continued to take centre stage, particularly George Robinson’s recently defeated bill which proposed an alteration in the law prohibiting the processing of foreign bonded corn for export, 21 Mar. 1837, a vote which Wilson had missed. His explanation that he had been ‘out of town that evening and not aware that the question was coming on’, made him an object of ridicule throughout the campaign.31Bury and Norwich Post, 2 Aug. 1837. Rushbrooke, who had voted against the bill, described it as the ‘thin end of the wedge’ of a repeal of the corn laws.32Ipswich Journal, 5 Aug. 1837. Irish issues also featured in the contest, with Bunbury defending Daniel O’Connell and calling for Irish church reform, while Hart Logan attacked O’Connell for his perceived poor attitude towards English farmers.33Ibid.

Although Wilson’s and Bunbury’s partisan rhetoric was strong, they ran a lacklustre campaign, with both men absent for long periods due to illness. At the nomination a barely audible Bunbury appealed to the local political memory of the electorate, describing himself as ‘one of the instruments in the hands of the men of Suffolk by whom the liberation of the county was effected in 1830’. He also declared that he was standing to ‘save’ the county from ‘lapsing into the hands of a Tory oligarchy’, a claim that provoked a ‘five-minute uproar’. Meanwhile, anxious to avoid another defeat, Hart Logan implored his supporters to split their votes only between him and Rushbrooke.34Ibid. Crucially, Hart Logan’s appeal appeared to work. The two Conservative candidates were elected by a commanding majority, polling close to identical numbers across the county’s districts.35Ibid., 12 Aug. 1837. Comprehensively defeated, the Liberals failed to bring forward a candidate for the rest of this period.

The first uncontested election since the 1832 Reform Act occurred in May 1838, when Harry Spencer Waddington, who had been defeated six years earlier, came in for the vacancy created by Hart Logan’s death.36Essex Standard, 27 Apr. 1838. Described by his supporters as a ‘well-known and long-tried Conservative who had lived among them for some time’, Waddington, upon his return, declared that he would ‘endeavour to prevent any innovation as to a free trade in corn’.37Bury and Norwich Post, 9 May 1838. With agricultural protection dominating the local political agenda, the Chartist movement made no real, sustained effort to spread agitation in the Suffolk countryside between 1838 and 1841. What little activity there was focused on Ipswich, in the eastern division of the county, where the local association comprised around 150 members. The first association to be formed in the western division was at Stowmarket in February 1839, but the organisation was precarious at best, and soon folded.38H. Fearn, ‘Chartism in Suffolk’, in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (1959), 164-72. Following the 1839 petition, which received 7,100 signatures in Suffolk, there was little further evidence of sustained Chartist activity in the western parts of the county, though the movement made important interventions at the 1847 general election at Bury St. Edmunds.39M. Chase, Chartism: a new history (2007), 315.

The corn laws were the dominant issue at the 1841 general election. Both Rushbrooke and Waddington were adamant that no alteration to the existing legislation should be made, while the former asserted that a fixed duty on the importation of corn was a ‘delusive’ measure that could easily be suspended by a government.40Ibid., 23 June 1841; Ipswich Journal, 19 July 1841. According to reports in the local press, Bunbury, Hale and Wilson were all approached by local Liberals to stand, but no candidature materialised.41Ipswich Journal, 19 July 1841. At the nomination a banner reading ‘Conservatives triumphant’ was unfurled over the wagon reserved for the Liberals.42Ibid. Rushbrooke and Waddington, described as ‘old “true blue” members’, were re-elected without opposition.43Essex Standard, 25 June 1841.

Rushbrooke’s death in June 1845 necessitated a by-election at a time when the Peel ministry’s corn law policy was under intense scrutiny. It was reported in the national press that steps had been taken in London to secure the return of a candidate who would approve of the government’s policy, but the Suffolk Conservative party resisted such a move.44Morning Post, 4 July 1845. At a meeting of Conservative electors to choose a candidate, it was proposed that a ‘respectable tenant farmer’ be brought forward, though the chairman, Robert Bevan, warned that a subscription of at least £600 would be needed for the party to back such a candidature without suffering a financial loss. Philip Bennet, of Rougham Hall, captain of the West Suffolk militia since 1831, was suggested as a suitable candidate, though there was some doubt as to whether his lack of oratorical skills counted against him.45Ipswich Journal, 28 June 1845. After receiving a requisition signed by nearly 100 electors, Bennet duly put himself up for the seat, explaining that, although he was not a tenant-farmer himself, his livelihood as a landowner was at stake. He admitted that ‘he was no orator’ but insisted that ‘he had an independent voice, and he meant to exercise it’.46Morning Post, 4 July 1845. At the nomination, which witnessed banners reading ‘Bennet – no surrender of the agricultural interest’, he was returned unopposed.47Ibid., 8 July 1845. He used his maiden speech in the Commons to launch a visceral attack on Peel, whose decision to support corn repeal ‘menaced the country at large’, 20 Feb. 1846.

Bennet and Waddington duly voted against corn law repeal, 15 May 1846, and at the 1847 general election the former castigated MPs who had broken their promises on the issue, calling them ‘a disgrace on the representation of the kingdom’.48Bury and Norwich Post, 4 Aug. 1847. They were re-elected unopposed. The question of the malt tax, which was much detested in rural Suffolk, now took centre stage, with both candidates calling for its total abolition. Bennet and Waddington were also united in their opposition to the endowment of the Roman Catholic church.49Ibid., 21 July 1847. At the 1852 general election Waddington refused to support a return to agricultural protection, asserting that ‘nothing remained of that word but the odium of it which attached to the agriculturalists’. He went on to lament that the ‘farmer was subject to the taunt of everybody when he asked protection for his important interests’. His views were echoed by Bennet, who merely stated that the current question facing the nation was ‘destruction or preservation?’50Daily News, 4 July 1852. The incumbents were again spared a contest.

At the 1857 general election West Suffolk’s Liberals were determined to bring forward their first candidate for two decades. Dismayed at the success of Cobden’s censure of the Liberal ministry over the bombing of Canton, for which Waddington and Bennet had both voted, 3 Mar. 1857, a group of electors resolved to put up a candidate to ‘afford general support to Lord Palmerston’.51Bury and Norwich Post, 24 Mar. 1857. Significantly, the chair of the meeting, George Gayford, of Barrow, who was a prominent member of the West Suffolk Agricultural Association, was reluctant to make the matter a partisan one, insisting that Waddington should be opposed on the grounds that he was ‘old’ and the division needed a representative who was ‘a young man in the prime of his life’. In contrast, one elector asserted that local Liberals ‘should no longer keep behaving like “very good boys” just so they could say they had not been factious’, only for Gayford to chastise him for being too ‘political’. Despite these divisions, the meeting resolved to invite Fuller Maitland Wilson, of Stowlangtoft Hall, to come forward in the Liberal interest. Wilson duly accepted, but withdrew twenty-four hours later, believing that he had little prospect of being returned.52Ibid. Waddington, who was in his seventy-sixth year, had considered retiring, only to be persuaded by his friends to stand again.53Ibid., 17 Mar. 1857. At the nomination he gave a prosaic speech that made little comment on the events surrounding the bombardment of Canton. Bennet also appeared reluctant to be drawn on the issue. Both men were again re-elected without opposition.54Ibid., 31 Mar. 1857.

The 1859 general election witnessed the first contest in Suffolk West for twenty-two years, though this was down to internecine conflicts within local Conservatism rather than a Liberal resurgence. Following Waddington’s retirement at the dissolution, a meeting convened by the Conservative registration committee adopted Windsor Parker, of Clopton Hall, as their candidate, preferring him to Frederick Hervey, Earl Jermyn II, whose father had recently succeeded as second marquess of Bristol.55Ipswich Journal, 26 Mar. 1859. Undeterred by this rejection, Jermyn offered for the seat, describing himself as ‘a Conservative in feeling’ who would ‘also be a Conservative in action’.56Bury and Norwich Post, 29 Mar. 1859. Despite this pronouncement, sections of the press labelled him a ‘Liberal-Conservative’, owing to his criticism of the Derby ministry’s proposal to strip borough freeholders of their county vote, which had been contained in their defeated reform bill, 31 Mar. 1859.57Essex Standard, 8 Apr. 1859. Fearing for his seat, Bennet accepted Parker’s invitation to form a coalition, but, when this proved unpopular with his supporters, he withdrew from the contest, announcing that his candidature might ‘endanger the cordial union of the great Conservative party’.58Daily News, 11 Apr. 1859; Essex Standard, 15 Apr. 1859. A meeting of his supporters subsequently passed a resolution to return Bennet as ‘he had the greatest claim on the seat’, and duly put his name forward at the nomination, though Bennet, who had given no public response to his supporters’ campaign, did not appear.59Ipswich Journal, 23 Apr. 1859; Bury and Norwich Post, 26 Apr. 1859.

The nomination was an uproarious affair. Bennet’s seconder, William Biddell, claimed that Parker had been selected at a ‘hole-and-corner’ meeting and that his supporters had seized ‘the whole machinery of the Conservative party to work out the objects of only a section of the Conservative party’.60Bury and Norwich Post, 3 May 1859. George Gayford, a leading local Liberal, weighed in with an attack on Parker’s election committee, suggesting the meeting to select Waddington’s replacement had been ‘a small private meeting instead of a public one’. Significantly, he called on Liberal electors to vote for Bennet, who he had previously praised for speaking ‘liberally and straight-forwardly’.61Bury and Norwich Post, 24 Mar. 1857. In response, Parker’s seconder described Biddell’s speech as one being made by ‘a Cheap Jack at a two-penny fair’. Jermyn, meanwhile, dismissed suggestions that his political loyalties were ambiguous, stressing that he endorsed the ‘principles of constitutional Conservatism’ and would give ‘independent support’ to Derby.62Ibid., 3 May 1859. Jermyn’s appeal to both Liberal and Conservative electors proved decisive, as he topped the poll by a commanding majority of nearly 600 votes. Parker was returned in second place, 77 votes ahead of Bennet. A breakdown of the poll revealed stark regional variations in the vote. In the north-west of the division, which contained Bury St. Edmunds and where, traditionally, the Liberal vote had been strongest, Jermyn received 50 per cent of the vote, Bennet 39 per cent and Parker 11 per cent. In the south-east of the division, where the Conservative strength lay, Jermyn received only 31 per cent and Bennet a paltry 15 per cent, while Parker got an impressive 54 per cent share. The enmity between Parker’s and Bennet’s supporters that had been evident at the nomination had thus been reflected by the subsequent polling, with the majority of Conservative electors declining to share their votes between the two men. Significantly, Parker claimed that he had received over 800 plump votes. Jermyn, meanwhile, gained a large number of single votes in the Mildenhall and Clare districts.63Ibid., 10 May 1859. Criticising the contest, the Conservative Bury and Norwich Post described it as ‘the strangest – we fear we must add, the silliest – in England’.64Ibid.

Jermyn’s brief tenure as Member for Suffolk West ended in October 1864 when he succeeded his father as third marquess of Bristol. His younger brother, Lord Augustus Hervey, offered in his place, and with Fuller Maitland Wilson again declining to come forward, Hervey’s unopposed return was seemingly assured.65Daily News, 8 Nov. 1864. His refusal, however, to pledge his support for the complete abolition of the malt tax, calling only for its reduction, upset a portion of the West Suffolk Association for the Repeal or Reduction of the Malt Tax, some of whom called for another candidate to enter the field.66Morning Post, 10 Nov. 1864; Bury and Norwich Post, 15, 29 Nov. 1864. Hervey, though, retained the support of Biddell, who, in his position as a leading member of the association, asserted that Hervey was right to support only a reduction, as repeal was impossible in the first instance.67Bury and Norwich Post, 9 Dec. 1864. Hervey also had the support of Gayford, another prominent member of the association.68Ibid., 29 Nov. 1864. At the nomination Hervey called for a ‘considerable reduction’ of the malt tax and declared that he supported ‘Conservative principles rather than political leaders’.69Ibid., 9 Dec. 1864. He was elected unopposed.

Hervey maintained his stance on the malt tax at the 1865 general election, though Parker called unequivocally for its abolition and argued that it was hypocritical of free traders to oppose such a measure.70Ibid., 4, 18 July 1865. The two candidates were united, however, in their opposition to any significant extension of the franchise, with Hervey declaring that he would oppose any measure which ‘tends to place the chief legislative power in the hands of the mob’.71Ibid. Both men were re-elected without a contest and went on to support the Derby ministry’s reform bill of 1867.

After the Second Reform Act, which modestly increased the size of the division’s electorate, the Conservatives continued to dominate the representation of Suffolk West. At the 1868 general election, the first Liberal candidate to go to the polls in three decades was comfortably defeated by Parker and Hervey, who were returned unopposed in 1874. Fuller Maitland Wilson, who had been close to coming forward as a Liberal in the 1850s, was returned as a Conservative in 1875. Conservative hegemony endured until the constituency’s abolition in 1885, whereupon the county was divided into the single-member divisions of Eye, Lowestoft, Stowmarket, Sudbury and Woodbridge.