Eye

Economic and social profile

Eye, a market town on the river Dove, on the border between the Suffolk West and East divisions, 20 miles east of Bury St. Edmunds, provided a small degree of employment in bone-lace making, brewing, flaxwork and boot and stay making, but there was no significant industry.2Dod’s electoral facts, impartially stated, ed. H.J. Hanham (1972), 112. In 1831 the boundary commissioners concluded that Eye ‘has no pretensions to be considered as a place of trade’, describing it as a ‘large handsome agricultural village’.3PP 1831-2 (141), xxxix. 55. This assessment was shared by William Cobbett, who lectured at Eye in March 1830, and thought it ‘a beautiful little place, though an exceedingly rotten borough’.4Cobbett’s Rural Rides ed. G.D.H. and M. Cole (1930), ii. 618. The Anglican Church accounted for the majority of Eye’s worshippers, though the outlying parishes were home to a number of dissenting chapels.5White’s Suffolk Directory (1844), passim. A short railway line from the Great Eastern station at Mellis to Eye was opened in 1867.6Bury and Norwich Post, 20 June 1865.

Electoral history

Eye returned two members from 1571 until it was reduced to one by the 1832 Reform Act. The borough, which in 1831 comprised 404 houses and paid assessed taxes of £411, was originally placed in Schedule A of the first reform bill, which would have led to its extinction, but it became one of the six boroughs reprieved as single Member constituencies, and was put in Schedule B of the third revised bill.7PP 1830-31 (247), ii. 12; PP 1831-32 (11), iii. 40. To compensate for the small size of the market town, commissioners extended the borough’s boundaries to include eleven rural parishes, increasing its area more than fourfold from 6.8 to 30.4 square miles. This extension, which enlarged the number of £10 houses almost threefold from 119 to 330 and the population more than threefold to 7,015, made the constituency more akin to a county than a borough seat.8PP 1835 (116), xxvi. 149-53; N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1953), 70, 75. With 253 registered voters (53 freemen and 200 £10 householders) in 1832, Eye was one of 31 boroughs which contained an electorate of less than 300.9Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, 75.

The significant boundary extension did little to weaken the considerable influence of Sir Edward Kerrison, who, ever since his purchase of the Brome Hall estate from the 2^nd Marquess Cornwallis in 1823, had enjoyed a controlling interest in the borough.10Ibid., 197, 201. Kerrison, a loyal anti-Catholic Tory who had voted consistently against the Grey ministry’s reform bill, had come in for Eye in 1824 and cemented his leading position in the borough’s political and social life through regular acts of philanthropy and by playing a prominent role in the North Suffolk and South Norfolk Agricultural Association. His wife, Lady Mary Kerrison, was also renowned for her charitable work on behalf of the poorer neighbourhoods surrounding Eye.11Ipswich Journal, 6 Oct. 1838; Farmer’s Magazine (1840), 132. The Kerrison influence was largely untouchable in this period, with the family holding the seat unchallenged until 1866.

The Eye Conservative Association was also strong, with attendance at its annual dinners exceeding 100. In addition to Kerrison, the organisation’s most prominent members were John Henniker, of Thornham Hall, and the Reverends James Campbell, vicar of Eye, and Henry Kirby.12Ipswich Journal, 19 Aug. 1837. Partisan rivalry was limited to municipal elections, where the Whigs triumphed in 1835. Their majority on the town council, however, was short-lived. Despite an aggressive campaign in the municipal revision courts, where, in 1839, the Whigs objected to five times as many names on the register than their Conservative counterparts, the Conservatives dominated the 1839 municipal election, securing eleven out of the twelve council seats.13Bury and Norwich Post, 23 Oct. 1839; Ipswich Journal, 16 Nov. 1839. Thereafter the Conservatives retained a strong grip on the council.

The Liberal-supporting Suffolk Chronicle acted as a forum for opposition to Conservative hegemony in the western division of Suffolk and in 1839 its leading articles were sympathetic to the Chartist movement, which witnessed some activity in Ipswich. The Conservative Ipswich Journal, meanwhile, acted as a mouthpiece for members of the rural community who were irate at the perceived intransigence of the Whig government to agricultural relief and the abolition of the malt tax.

The 1832 general election was one of only two instances in this period when there was the prospect of a challenge to Kerrison. In June 1832 reports circulated that John Henniker, the son of John Major Henniker, 3rd Baron Henniker in the Irish peerage, would contest Eye as a moderate Conservative in opposition to Kerrison, but Henniker eventually decided to come forward for Suffolk East, where he was returned at the head of the poll.14Suff. Chron. 9, 16 June 1832; Bury and Suff. Press, 12, 26 Dec. 1832; Suff. RO (Ipswich) FB135/A3/1. Kerrison, whose address called for strict economy, the protection of the national faith and reform of the poor laws, was elected unopposed.15Bury and Norwich Post, 28 Nov., 12 Dec. 1832. Later, in 1837, Henniker, now 4^th Baron Henniker, married Kerrison’s daughter, Anna, creating an important alliance between Eye’s most prominent landowning families.

Following William IV’s controversial replacement of the Whigs with a Conservative ministry in November 1834, Kerrison, at a Conservative dinner at Saxmundham, praised Wellington’s appointment as foreign secretary, describing it as equivalent to ‘20,000 men at every court in Europe’, and attacked the late Whig ministry for failing to provide adequate relief for the rural interest.16Ibid., 24 Dec. 1834. Kerrison, who had voted for a reduction of the malt duty, was re-elected without opposition at the 1835 general election.17Parliamentary test book (1835), 92. Irish matters dominated proceedings at the 1837 general election. Kerrison asserted that Whig ministers had truckled to ‘reckless’ radicals and O’Connell’s ‘tail’, meaning that there was little time to spend on ‘real and practical’ concerns. Indignant with the course followed by Melbourne’s ministry, he concluded that ‘a more imbecile, a more contemptible administration was never formed’.18Ipswich Journal, 15, 29 July 1837. Returned unopposed, his words were echoed by those attending the subsequent Eye Conservative Association annual dinner, where, after boisterous singing of ‘True Blue’, O’Connell’s perceived influence on the government was the subject of much disapprobation.19Ibid., 19 Aug. 1837.

With agricultural protection and the defence of the established church dominating the local political agenda, the Chartist movement made no real, sustained effort to spread agitation in the Suffolk countryside between 1838 and 1841.20H. Fearn, ‘Chartism in Suffolk’, in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (1959), 164-72. What little activity there was focused on Ipswich, though in 1839 there were some isolated reports of the local movement’s leaders, such as Donald McPherson, lecturing in Eye.21Ipswich Journal, 25 May 1839. The 1839 petition received 7,100 signatures in Suffolk.22Fearn, ‘Chartism in Suffolk’, 164.

Protection to agriculture was Kerrison’s rallying cry at the 1841 general election, which witnessed the faint possibility of a Whig challenger.23Ipswich Journal, 26 June 1841. According to one newspaper report, the Whigs, or ‘Yellows’ as they were known locally, had hoped ‘Toby Tollinson’ would come forward, but no candidature materialised. Indeed the only evidence of Whig opposition at the nomination was a donkey decorated with yellow ribbons, ridden by a man holding aloft a large sugarloaf, a reference to the argument that bread would be cheaper if the corn laws were abolished.24Ibid., 3 July 1841. Kerrison was re-elected without opposition. After voting against Peel’s repeal of the corn laws at the bill’s critical third reading, 15 May 1846, Kerrison used his address at the 1847 general election to assert that protection to agriculture was ‘indispensible to the prosperity of the Empire’.25Ibid., 24 July 1847. He was again spared a contest.26Ibid., 31 July 1847. Kerrison was thereafter a seldom-seen figure at Westminster and there was little surprise when he retired from Parliament at the 1852 dissolution, explaining that ‘I am no longer competent to discharge my trust in a manner satisfactory to myself’.27Ibid., 26 June 1852.

Kerrison was seamlessly replaced by his only son, Edward Clarence, a skilled agriculturalist and prominent member of the East Suffolk Agricultural Society, which in the 1840s had presented itself as a bulwark against any possible encroachment by the Anti-Corn Law League in the county.28Ibid., 13 July 1886. At the 1852 general election the younger Kerrison unsurprisingly called for measures to afford relief to the ‘suffering agriculturalist interest’, though he insisted that he would not vote for the restoration of protection. He took particular care to present himself as the champion of the poorer agricultural labourers, and used his nomination speech to present a detailed account of the rise of indoor relief provided by the Hoxne Union since 1847. Like his father, Kerrison was zealously attached to defending the established church, though he was more progressive on the question of franchise reform, describing himself as ‘open’ to changes. With Kerrison’s unopposed election never in doubt, the nomination was a tame affair, enlightened only by an intervention from an elector, asking Kerrison whether he or any of his relatives were independent of ministerial influence, to which the newly-elected Member retorted ‘what a question to ask! You might as well ask me if I had a cousin who plays the German flute’.29Ibid., 26 June, 17 July 1852. On his father’s death in March the following year, he succeeded to the baronetcy and estates.

Kerrison also assumed his father’s mantle as an important figure in East and West Suffolk’s parliamentary elections, chairing committees and campaign meetings.30Ibid., 13 July 1886. As his hold on Eye was impregnable, he understandably devoted most of his energies to the two county seats. It was later noted that ‘Sir Edward Kerrison would do what was necessary for the borough of Eye before breakfast, and would then undertake the business of the county’.31Ibid., 28 July 1866. Echoing this state of affairs, the 1857 and 1859 general elections at Eye were routine, straightforward events that attracted neither interest nor excitement. In 1857 Kerrison condemned the bombing of Canton, arguing that there was no justification for resorting to the ‘cruel and expensive alternative of war’, while in 1859 he praised Derby’s foreign policy as ‘dignified and pacific’ and wished Britain to remain ‘as far as possible, removed from the fearful consequences of war’. In both elections he was consistent in his call for a reduction in the malt tax and the defence of the established church.32Ibid., 21 Mar. 1857, 16 Apr., 30 Apr. 1859; Bury and Norwich Post, 31 Mar. 1857.

The future of the malt tax was the most prominent issue in Suffolk’s political life in the first half of the 1860s, with the leaders of the West Suffolk Association for the Repeal or Reduction of the Malt Tax particularly vociferous in their denunciations of the existing legislation, a position frequently echoed at the quarterly meetings of the Eye Farmers’ Club, of which Kerrison was president.33Ipswich Journal, 1 Dec. 1860. Kerrison devoted most of his energies in this period to lobbying for a short railway line to be built from the Great Eastern station at Mellis to Eye. The project was briefly given a political dimension when Kerrison’s plan was opposed by Patrick Welsh, of Yaxley, who had previously unsuccessfully contested Kilkenny in the Liberal interest in 1847. Welsh, who owned a portion of the land that the proposed line would go through, complained of Kerrison’s conduct towards him, stating at a local hearing that ‘it would have been different if he had not been a Catholic, Irishman, a Whig and something more’.34Bury and Norwich Post, 20 June 1865. Welsh’s objections came to nothing, however, and the railway line was authorised by an 1865 Act of Parliament (28 & 29 Vict. c. 249) and opened two years later.

At the 1865 general election Kerrison called for a reform bill to be ‘quickly passed’. He was particularly keen that the agricultural interest should be heard and called for a reduction in the £50 franchise and, rather vaguely, for the extension of the vote to those labourers who were ‘industrious and prudent’. He repeated his demand for a reduction of the malt duty, describing it as a consumer tax that disadvantaged the labouring classes, and rubbished the permissive bill, declaring that ‘we can all drink what we like, I hope, in this country’. Following a nomination of ‘an extremely quiet character’, he was again re-elected without a contest.35Ipswich Journal, 8, 15 July 1865.

In July 1866 Kerrison accepted a requisition to stand in a double-by election for Suffolk East, a more prestigious seat than the small borough of Eye, and therefore took the Chiltern Hundreds, 19 July 1866.36Ibid., 21 July 1866. In his place, he put up George William Barrington, Derby’s private secretary, who had unsuccessfully contested Buckingham in 1859 and Durham North in 1865.37Daily News, 11 Apr. 1859; Newcastle Courant, 7 July 1865. According to Barrington, he and Kerrison had been ‘intimate’ friends for twenty-five years.38Ipswich Journal, 28 July 1866. The by-election took place against the backdrop of the recent Hyde Park reform demonstrations. Barrington asserted that ‘intelligent’ and ‘thrifty’ working men should be admitted to the franchise, but opposed giving the vote to ‘the least educated section of the community’. Echoing Kerrison’s position, Barrington also called for a reduction of the malt tax, as beer was ‘part of the food of the country’. He was elected unopposed.39Ibid., 28 July 1866. In February the following year he succeeded his father as 7^th Viscount Barrington, an Irish peerage, giving him an estimated annual income of around £12,000 a year.40Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: journals and memoirs of Edward Henry, Lord Stanley, 1846-1869, ed. J. Vincent (1978), 290.

After the 1867 Reform Act, which tripled the size of the borough’s electorate, the Conservatives continued to dominate the representation of Eye. Barrington was returned without a contest at the 1868 and 1874 general elections, but was opposed by the Liberal Charles Easton at the by-election of March 1874, held following his appointment as vice-chamberlain of the queen’s household. In Eye’s first contested election since 1802, Barrington comfortably defended his seat. Easton stood again at the 1880 general election, only to be defeated by Barrington’s successor, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. The parliamentary borough was abolished in 1885, whereupon Eye became one of Suffolk’s five single-member county divisions.