Conservative History Journal

It is a general rule that a second is lessfamous than a first. However, this is not the case when it comes to the first and second women to serve in a Conservative cabinet. The second woman was of course Margaret Thatcher whose name is (almost) universally known. The same cannot be said of the first woman to hold cabinet rank in a Conservative government, for few people today have heard of Florence Gertrude Horsbrugh, who was Minister of Education almost twenty years before Lady Thatcher made her cabinet debut. While some writers such as Pamela Brooks and G.E. Maguire have shown at least some recognition of her importance, overall she has received surprisingly little attention by historians of the Conservative party or scholars of Scottish and British politics, with many omitting her entirely. Yet in her day Florence Horsbrugh was arguably the best known woman MP in the UK and she is deserving of being even more widely known.

As a public figure, Florence Horsbrugh enjoyed the advantage of a resonant, well-modulated voice and a tall, dignified bearing. At a time when women were often reluctant to smoke in public she became noticeable ‘puffing briskly at a cigarette held levelly between the lips’ (Horsbrugh MSS, 1/4). Despite a reputation for being severe in the manner of a Scottish schoolmistress, she was a good-humoured woman who enjoyed political controversy; she once described herself as ‘representative of all the maiden aunts in Britain’ (Horsbrugh MSS, 2/12). Although it was claimed in her obituary (The Times, 8 Dec 1969) that she had ‘achieved many victories for feminism’, these successes were of a minor or largely nominal character; for example, in 1936 she was the first woman to move the address in reply to the speech from the throne. In fact she was a beneficiary of gains made by women before and during the First World War rather than an active worker for women's causes.

Martin Edwards's book that is undoubtedly seminal in the study of detective fiction, The Golden Age of Murder, is proving to be as fascinating as it is important. Yes, TH managed to borrow a copy from London Library within two weeks of publication. There is already a queue forming for it among that august institution's members but returning it in time will not be a problem.

Actually, the book needs a proper long review and it shall be done but first, an interesting point analyzed by Mr Edwards and that is the concept of "justified murder" in the writings of the Golden Age authors. It was Julian Symons who was largely responsible for the literary assumption that traditional detective fiction was somehow inferior to the more recent crime books, not least in its social and political conservatism and refusal to look beyond accepted norms in life and writing. (This is a rough and not entirely fair summary but then Symons was not entirely fair to many of the writers he had analyzed.)

There have, of course, been critics who have shown that view to be nonsensical but, unfortunately, the more popular books on the subject, including, sad to say, one by the late, lamented Baroness James, have stuck to a limited view, which ignored most of the writers of the period and a good many books and themes.

The Golden Age of Murder is a study of the Detection Club and its members about whom Mr Edwards has unearthed an astonishing amount of information as well as a study of their writings, which are, as anyone who has bothered to read at all widely knows, considerably more complex and varied in attitude than popular opinion would have it.

So we come to "justified murder", theoretically an anathema to detective fiction writers but a surprisingly frequent theme. It is inevitable that people who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about crime, especially murder, who are also fascinated by real-life crime, especially the unsolved or dubious cases, should sooner or later turn to the question of whether murder can ever be justified. In addition, the mid and late thirties saw the growth and strengthening of extremely unpleasant dictators and the appearance of would-be dictators in other countries, even Britain.

Then again, as this blog has pointed out before, a true conservative would dislike those dictators, real or tin-pot as radical, statist and socialist but that gets us on to the "are fascists right-wing?" discussion, which will, undoubtedly come up again.

Hitler and Mussolini came to power or held on to power through revolutionary means (despite those elections in Germany in 1932 and 1933), changing the political and constitutional structures of their countries as well as attempting to change the social ones. In this they did not succeed nearly as well as their contemporary Joseph Stalin did but none of them can be called conservative or reactionary. By the time Dictator's Way was written (late 1937 or early 1938 as the book came out in 1938) Mosley had put himself outside the political establishment and the couple of disdainful references to him in the book sum up quite well the general attitude towards him. The Labour Party and the trade unions, on the other hand, were by this time an integral part of that establishment and it was hardly radical to support them.

Tory Historian, naturally, wishes to congratulate the Conservative Party on its victory and, more specifically, the new Members of Parliament and the slowly emerging members of the Cabinet. TH is convinced that Lady Knightley, a great heroine of this blog, would have been delighted to find that a third of those now in the House of Commons are women and several Cabinet members are. When the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association (CUWFA) was founded in 1908 and she became its first President, this could not have been even a distant dream. But she would not have been too surprised to find out that the first sitting woman MP was a Conservative as was the first woman Prime Minister.

Tory Historian has been a little busy and has therefore been remiss in welcoming the new Princess of Cambridge. Of course, TH is delighted that she will be known as Princess Charlotte - an excellent name that has not been used by the royal family for a little while,perhaps because of the sad fate of an earlier princess of that name, daughter of George IV. Let us not forget, though, how popular she was.

Working on an article about Lady Knightley, Dame of the Primrose League, Conservative suffragist and an important political activist (mentioned on this blog here, here and here), I am re-reading Mitzi Auchterlonie's excellent Conservative Suffragists. Repeatedly she discusses the difference between the Conservative women's approach to the question of suffrage and of female participation in active politics and that of the Liberals' (other parties at that point not being important enough to discuss in detail).

These paragraphs sum up the different approach and the advantages and disadvantages of both.

The Primrose League was considerably more successful in bringing women into the political realm than its rivals. The fact that women and men worked side by side was a restraining factor but also a liberating one - although the League women were pressured into a position of self-censorship on issues like female suffrage they were able to demonstrate heir competence in  political work, with the result that the men became increasingly dependent on their support.

Single-sex organisations gave Liberal women the freedom to discuss and pursue their own political interests, but they experienced more diviseness and arguably were no less marginalised by their party than Conservative women. The choices that women made about how they wanted to pursue their political activities were influenced by many factors but they invariably centred on whether their party or their concerns as women came frist. It could be argued that the pursuit of a self-consciously separate 'feminist' agenda was not necessarily a better strategy than the encouragement of a more 'domestic-centred politics' within the mainstream, if the latter ultimately led to a greater 'feminisation' of the political discourse.