Dr. Edward Kenealy
‘the vilest reviler of the century’
and the Parliamentary by-election in
Stoke-upon-Trent 1875
Politics in Stoke-on-Trent reached depths of shame in 1875 almost unequalled anywhere else – or at least so some thought at the time. In February the borough sent Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy, a former QC, as its new Member to Parliament at a by-election. He defeated two other candidates after a brief winter campaign and as a consequence roused fierce emotions locally and in the wider world. “The name of Stoke-on-Trent has become a political byword in the land”, wrote William Owen as editor of the Potteries Examiner, “and papers of all political creeds have already given effect to public opinion by pouring contempt upon the electors who find their beau-ideal of a legislator in the vilest reviler of the century”. Small wonder, Owen mused further, that there was a view that here was proof that the franchise had been extended too far. [i]
This is a largely forgotten episode in the history of Stoke-on-Trent and one of the lesser events in the biography of Edward Kenealy. There are serious lessons here, however, for the student of North Staffordshire politics and a revelatory lightening flash in the story of one of the Victorian era’s more colourful characters whose actions obliquely illuminate the workings of society in the later nineteenth century.
Kenealy was nationally notorious when he came to the Potteries. He was the lawyer who had fought a legal battle on behalf of a fraudster claiming to be the inheritor of the Tichborne estate. Of course, the whole point of the series of court cases this involved was to decide whether a man from Australia was the rightful heir or not, and what the result should be if he proved false. Kenealy had used publicity tricks to gain public sympathy for his man, but in the end he had lost. Moreover, he behaved in court disastrously, berating the judges and mistreating witnesses. He was disbarred as a barrister as punishment for his behaviour. Articles he published in The Englishman, for example, were taken to be libellous. In other words, he was a legal disgrace.
As an Irishman born in 1819, and trying to make his way at the English Bar since 1847, Kenealy had some difficulties to overcome. He never made life easy for himself though despite his contributions to literary journals. He went to prison in 1850 for cruelty to his illegitimate son aged six, and on regaining his legal practice had a junior role in defence of Palmer the notorious poisoner from Rugeley. His political ambition showed itself most obviously in 1868 when he put up as a Parliamentary candidate in the Liberal interest for the new seat at Wednesbury. This was suspected by local spokesmen to be disadvantageous to the Liberal cause promoting division rather than unity. [Staffs Advert 19 Sept 1868] According to a fellow QC on the Oxford circuit, Kenealy was a man of remarkable ability, shunned by his colleagues for his behaviour towards his son, but restored in reputation by writing poetry! [ii]
It was not in Kenealy’s nature to accept his disbarment as the end. He advanced himself as a defender of the rights of all Englishmen creating a Magna Charta Association to mobilise support. He used the newspaper he had launched with an appropriate title to publicise his struggle. On January 1st, 1875, a new opportunity for publicly flaunting his cause occurred – George Melly announced his resignation as MP for Stoke-on-Trent. A Parliamentary by-election, which would have had considerable interest anyway as a battle between class interests, was transformed into an altogether different kind of contest. It was potentially a referendum on Kenealy’s claim to be the ordinary man’s champion in a national arena. He was dismissed immediately in newspapers as a man without a hope. No one of any sense at all would vote for him.
A timetable of actions shows that Kenealy moved quickly and fearlessly. Within a week of Melly’s news being published the Staffordshire Daily Sentinel (the principal newspaper for the Potteries) carried a letter floating the idea that Kenealy was ready to stand. The local Liberal and Conservative parties were caught totally by surprise, neither having any candidate already endorsed. They too had to gear up rapidly, especially the Liberals for they had a long-standing argument to resolve about the qualifications their man needed to possess. Melly, a Liverpool businessman of good standing, had been their contestant for nearly ten years and their MP for six. The party leaders had no wish to lose the seat. Stoke was a two member constituency and both seats had been taken by Liberals in 1868. They had lost one in 1874 through self-inflicted injury. To lose the other would have been a disaster.
The manner in which Melly acted, however, seemed suspiciously like an attempt to bounce the party into a particular choice and thus to bring forward a ‘working man’s’ Liberal candidate at the expense, for example, of a pottery manufacturer or other local employer. This kind of class war reflected a broader national trend in Liberal politics, but one not yet fully appreciated. It was still more or less effectively contained at local level within a few constituencies. A loose canon like Kenealy could shoot away the camouflage hiding the tensions between trade-union led demands for working class representatives as Liberals in the House of Commons and the vested interests of professionals and industrialists who held the reins of power in the Liberal Party at grass roots level.
Kenealy had committees of supporters at work canvassing for votes within twelve days of Melly’s resignation. The Liberal activists were in some turmoil, however, for an equally rapid movement by the working man’s Liberal, Alfred A.Walton, whose wish to stand was published on the same day that Melly’s letter of resignation was printed in the Staffordshire Daily Sentinel, appeared to have stymied any alternative choice. The Conservatives had less of a problem and quickly selected Harry Davenport of the Longport pottery family to challenge the Liberals. Kenealy was not thought of as a serious threat to men from either of the two established parties, at any rate not in the Potteries. He disdained to claim conventional party ideology and appealed over the heads of Conservatives and Liberals alike to the male voters at large. They were predominantly working men enfranchised under the 1867 Reform Act which made Stoke-on-Trent a constituency of some 18,600 voters. Moreover, since 1872 they cast their votes in secret. There would be little opportunity for manipulating and managing polling through threats or bribes as many would remember had been the case in the 1830s and 1850s, for instance. The 1875 by-election was a popularity contest and personality counted as much, if not more, than party allegiance. This gave Kenealy an edge few at the time recognised.
The election address Kenealy published announced that he came forward as “a people’s candidate” He said, “I belong to no party but to England”. He considered that the badly fed and housed English had “limitless acres of fertile soil and I am prepared, if no one else will, to initiate legislation in the interest of making Colonial lands the heritage of English working men and women”. He was not the first to suggest that emigration was the best hope the lower classes had, though whether he knew that potters had tried this in the 1840s with almost no success cannot be discovered.
Civil war in the Liberal Party between those fiercely advocating Walton’s right to represent the Potteries in Parliament and a group equally hotly opposed to adopting a representative of working men was only just avoided in public. Walton’s claim lay in the actions of Liberals in the 1874 General Election when moves inside the Party over several years to obtain support for a workingman to be adopted as a party candidate had been defeated. William Owen, the chief spokesman for pottery workers’ unions, had led this internal struggle. Rather than meek acceptance of defeat, however, Owen’s actions produced a challenge to the official Liberal candidates, George Melly and W.S.Roden. An organisation called The Labour Representation League promoted the cause of working men in Parliament and A.A.Walton came out of this to stand in the name of Liberal working men wanting class representation in the House of Commons. He came bottom of the poll but had only 170 votes fewer than the losing Liberal, W.S.Roden. The Conservatives scored the victory they hoped for and the Liberals held the other seat. Spokesmen for Liberal workingmen, however, felt their point had been proven. There was huge support for the party putting up two candidates of different class origins. Together they could dominate the constituency, separately they were self-defeating. In the immediate aftermath, it was popularly believed that some promise had been made that next time the party leaders would adopt men from different sections of the Liberal interest, in effect Alfred Walton.
In January 1875 Liberal faithfulness was suddenly tested. Melly appeared to have been in cahoots with Walton to achieve the latter’s adoption. In fact, therefore, party leaders found themselves with no choice, and clearly reluctantly officially proposed Alfred Walton. It should have been a straight fight with Conservatives and it should have been a win for Walton, albeit with a small majority. Disappointed middle-class Liberals would have expressed their anger by abstaining and few would have been any the wiser as to the extent of opposition to workingmen’s candidates in Parliament. Knowingly or otherwise, Edward Kenealy stepped into a contest in which he could attract dissidents from all sides while facing prophesies of utter failure for being outside the established political structure.
Kenealy received a delegation of supporters from the Potteries at a Manchester hotel on Monday 18 January 1875 asking him to stand. It is not known whether this as a genuine upsurge of spontaneous enthusiasm catching Kenealy unawares, or whether he had instituted the process himself. The latter must be the more likely action. On Wednesday he was in Longton holding a public meeting. On Friday his election address appeared. During Monday 25 January he spoke at Hanley in the afternoon and in Burslem in the evening. The following day he was back in Longton drumming up support. It was probably his first meeting in the town which he, or one of his underlings, described so vividly (and possibly imaginatively) in The Englishman. Local newspapers were not so lurid in their accounts, but one of them reprinted an extract from Kenealy’s paper.
“Never was any scene witnessed in modern times since Garibaldi’s entry into London, equal to that which greeted Dr. Kenealy as he was conveyed in a carriage, drawn by two splendid white horses, from the hotel in Longton to the theatre where he delivered his lecture. Long before 7 o’clock the theatre was filled; the private boxes were occupied by ladies and gentlemen of position in the Potteries; the pit and immense gallery were thronged; hundreds were turned away from the doors through want of space inside. More than 10,000 persons thronged the streets – male and female – which led from the hotel to the theatre. A splendid brass band preceded the three carriages which conveyed Dr. Kenealy, Mr Onslow and the members of the reception committee … it was a spectacle of grandeur and solemnity …” [iii]
The meeting Kenealy addressed in Burslem Town Hall on the evening of 25 January was another lively occasion, according to the reporter for the Daily Sentinel. The building was crammed full and large crowds attempted to get in nevertheless. “A volley of knocks was showered upon the door for a considerable time after the meeting commenced”, but without avail. Indeed, the crowds outside were not inclined to let Kenealy in because they were excluded. It was “not without great difficulty that the Doctor himself, with a few friends could be got into the building.” Policemen stationed inside had to come out to clear a path! Those in the hall gave great cheers when Kenealy spoke and told them, among other things that he was in favour of triennial parliaments. He was reported as stating that he “stood before them aspiring to be the leader of the English people … They had no leaders since Bright and Cobden retired …” The crux of the event, however, was an intervention by William Owen whose move to the front of the platform was greeted with groans and hisses as well as cheers. He asked to be allowed to debate some points in Kenealy’s speech, although he confessed to doing so with timidity. With what was probably heavy sarcasm, if the wording of the report is a guide, Owen pointed out how Kenealy equated himself with Gladstone, Disraeli and Bright – on the word of his friends at any rate – implying, of course, that he was nothing of the kind. Owen was not allowed to develop any case, however – “How much are you paid to come here?” was only one of the crowd’s witticisms. Kenealy stepped forward and appealed for some quiet, saying that he had never known a public meeting where someone who interrupted didn’t find enough rope to hang himself. Immense cheering all but drowned Owen, though he tried valiantly to put a motion in support of Alfred Walton. At least the subsequent call for a motion in favour of Kenealy simply brought even greater confusion. [iv]
Three more public meetings were addressed by Kenealy before polling day – or more precisely, were reported in the local press – at Deep Pit Bank, Hanley, at Dresden and also at Tunstall. In the first case, Kenealy spoke from a straw covered coal wagon and again had Mr. Booth as a supporting speaker. Booth compared Kenealy to a “burnished sword” quite superior to “a spade”, by which he meant Alfred Walton. [v] Whether these meetings were different from earlier assemblies in other towns which, according to local journalists, would not listen to Kenealy, isn’t known. Certainly, at the one held in the Music Hall in Hanley, the observer for the Staffordshire Advertiser recounted that, although more than the 3,000 who could be accommodated in the building did attend, they were mostly “devotees of St. Monday”. These, in other words, were potters extending their weekend break from work in a time-honoured fashion! They were especially susceptible to Kenealy’s “bombastic peroration”, after which “the fustian brought the house down”. This was not the sort of support which need concern the other candidates was the implication.
Kenealy’s meeting in Dresden Temperance Hall on Saturday 30 January was by ticket only. It was reported in the Daily Sentinel in a short item preceded by a word from the editor. This was to the effect that A. Ridgway, secretary to Kenealy’s committee, had posted a note to the newspaper announcing the meeting and requesting that the editor send a reporter. What followed was the result of the editor complying. He was somewhat disgruntled because he had been publicly condemned – unfairly he thought - for pointedly not reporting Kenealy’s speeches on the grounds that Kenealy was not paying for advertisements. At Dresden, Kenealy appeared to confine himself to local politics and the position he held vis-a-vis Walton, who had split the Liberal interest disastrously, and Davenport, who for all his eminent worth, was not the man to represent the concerns of the mass of the electorate. Even so, Kenealy got in his dislike of the British army being sent to Ashantee to butcher natives to no purpose, and that he “was a working woman’s as well as a working man’s candidate”, believing that “women ought to have as much voice in the management of the national affairs as the men themselves.” [vi]
Kenealy’s chief promoters were identified in the press. The principal figure on his platforms was Thomas Booth, of High Street, Hanley, said to be a “metal mounter”. He was an elected councillor in Hanley Borough. [vii] E. Shaw, a “tripe, cowheel and fried fish” dealer and Thomas Oulsnam were among others named by reporters. E. Baddeley took the chair at one meeting and James Buxton at another. An interesting character noted was W. L. Evans, the author of ‘The Moral Hero’ who lived in Eastwood Terrace, Hanley. However, he very pointedly sent in a letter to the editor of the Advertiser disassociating himself from Kenealy’s campaign. [viii] The list of fourteen signatures on his nominations forms was also given in full, but then so was that of the other candidates. Incidentally, Kenealy gave his address of Lancing in Sussex and employed as his agent one Ahmed Kenealy, also of Lancing. He must have been one of the eleven legitimate children credited to Kenealy. [ix]
Unusually, election day was a relatively quiet occasion. Not that this had been anticipated. About 300 extra police had been drafted into the district and a troop of infantry was held at the ready in Newcastle. The result though was a bombshell in the Potteries. Kenealy won by a landslide. He had a majority of nearly 2,000 over his Liberal opponent and the Conservative vote in 1874 had been cut by a third. Without question, Kenealy won the popularity contest against the full weight of local party organisations. But the post-mortem was bedevilled by a puzzle – where had all those votes come from?
Walton’s vote was down by just over 1,000 (20%) of his 1874 score. Melly in 1874 had shown that there were at least 6,700 Liberal votes to be had, which meant that Walton had received scarcely 62% of these at the by-election. It could only be that middle-class Liberals had deserted the party, and quite a few workingmen as well. Walton only had 29.3% of the total votes, whereas Kenealy had 43.4%. There was something like a 76% turnout, which was not much down on what was to be expected.
Kenealy marched off triumphantly to the House of Commons. There a scene of ludicrous comedy awaited him as no fellow MP would accompany him to the Speaker of the House following the traditional custom of being introduced by existing members. Disraeli had to intervene to point out that the custom was one designed to ensure that the new member was exactly who he said he was and not some imposter, and since Dr Kenealy was so widely recognised throughout the land there was no doubt of his identity. John Bright then nobly stood with him, explaining that out of deference to the hugely important constituency that had voted him in he deserved to be admitted.
There is no doubt that Stoke-on-Trent electors were considered pariahs in the Parliamentary system for casting their votes as they did. Local Liberals were aghast. Another self-inflicted wound lost them their MP. Kenealy had a platform in Parliament to continue his campaigns and reclaim his respectability as a self-appointed people’s champion. That he had such a chance was, lucky for him, a conjunction of circumstances in the long road to convincing the Liberal Party that it contained within its body the embryo of quite a different political animal destined one day to either transform its character or emerge from it as a separate, rival, entity. But that’s hindsight for you.
I
It was alleged at the time that Kenealy lost his Parliamentary seat in 1880 that he had spent about £1,600 obtaining it in 1875. He did not have to suffer the disappointment of defeat long, for he died in April 1880. Just what he made of his time in the House of Commons is another story. [x]He was the catalyst for major changes in Stoke-on-Trent’s Liberal Party such that both seats were regained, one by a Burslem pottery manufacturer, William Woodall, and the other by Henry Broadhurst who stood in the name of working men. Kenealy’s intervention in 1875 was a hard lesson for local politicians to learn, but they took it to heart. Reviled he may have been, but his walk-on part in the longer drama of North Staffordshire’s political history is worth another look.[xi]
[i] Potteries Examiner 1875 February 20 p4 (hereafter Potts Exam)
[ii] F. Leveson Gower Bygone Years p59 for fellow QC and reference to poem Goethe
[iii] Staffordshire Advertiser (hereafter Staffs Advert] 30 January p5 quoting The Englishman
[iv] Staffordshire Daily Sentinel (hereafter Sentinel) 26 January 1875 p3
[v] Potts Exam 6 Feb 1875 p7
[vi] Sentinel 29 January 1875 p2 : 3 February 1875 p3
[vii] Potts Exam 30 Jan 1875 p 6-7
[ix] Potts Exam 13 Feb 1875 p1
[x] Up to a point he nursed his constituency, for example, attempting to establish a daily newspaper called The Staffordshire News and Trade Advertiser with Ahmed Kenealy as editor. Issue number one came out 25 June 1877.
[xi] More information setting this article in its context may be found in
Paul Anderton, ‘A Challenge to the Liberal Establishment: the General Election of 1874 in Stoke-on-Trent’ in Staffordshire Studies, edited P Morgan, (University of Keele 1987 : ISBN 0 903160 28 5)