Alistair Lexden was recently commissioned to write a thousand word article on the Primrose League for a new independent website that will be launched in due course to provide short, sharp pieces on a wide range of subjects. The article is based on his history of the Primrose League, now out of print.
0n 17 November 1883 an ambitious young Tory MP established a small political organisation to advance his interests within the Conservative party. There was no reason to suppose that it would amount to very much. Politicians, young and old, often set up clubs and associations to help them on their way; few of them last. This one was different.
The Primrose League, brought into being 134 years ago by Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Sir Winston, broke free from its founder’s control after a short time, grew spectacularly in size at great speed and acquired a membership far larger than the Conservative party itself. Fortunately for the Tory leaders, the League was totally obedient to their commands, and worked for their electoral success with a dedication which few of their own less numerous members demonstrated at that time.
The Primrose League is unique in modern British history, an auxiliary force on which one of the two main political parties became largely dependent for its success over a period of thirty years from the mid-1880s until the First World War.
What led this extraordinary organisation to take its name from a flower, and an unremarkable one at that? It was done to honour the memory of Benjamin Disraeli, the most flamboyant figure on the Victorian political stage, who died on 19 April 1881. Widely mistrusted for much of his career and a bankrupt for part of it, he ended his life a Tory hero. Queen Victoria, who adored him, declared that the primrose had been his favourite flower. Many were unconvinced by the royal testimony, but their doubts were swept aside.
The complete identification of Tory hero and flower was swiftly accomplished. An organisation formed to worship and glorify Disraeli—creating a personal cult without parallel in British history—had no doubt what it should call itself. April 19 became Primrose Day when the hero’s statues and memorials in London and elsewhere were elaborately adorned. Until the 1920s the streets were full of people wearing the flower.
For the rest of the year members proudly displayed the badges, clasps, ribbons and stars –all of them incorporating the primrose in their designs -- that denoted the positions that they filled within the League and recorded the practical political work they had carried out in their localities. Comparison with the historic orders of chivalry was encouraged; leading members of the League were known as knights and dames. Nowhere was the Victorian addiction to exotic flummery more vividly exhibited than in the Primrose League.
The showmanship both rewarded and stimulated political success. Within two years of its foundation the League had become a source of grave anxiety to its political opponents in Gladstone’s Liberal party. A handbook for Liberal party workers at the 1885 election referred in awed tones to the League’s ‘widespread membership and ceaseless activity’. A twentyfold increase in the course of a single year brought its numbers to 200,000 by early 1886; five years later they stood at over a million and almost doubled again by 1910.
A strong sense of community was fostered among members by a wide range of social entertainments to help fill the evenings and weekends. Tories rarely want to spend time thinking. The League had the perfect formula: hard work for their party followed by vigorous but harmless enjoyment, undertaken in memory of their inspiration, Disraeli.
The two main parties kept no national membership records in this period, but by common consent the Primrose League eclipsed both of them. For thirty years it was the largest political organisation in Britain. Membership of the Tory party exceeded the League’s two million only for about a decade and a half after the Second World War.
It was no great exaggeration to call the League’s work ‘ceaseless’. By the 1890s it had some 2,500 branches (known as habitations to add another touch of glamour); most appointed wardens and sub-wardens to organise the regular canvassing of existing voters street by street, and to search out new Tory supporters who met the quite complicated property tests for electoral registration which existed until 1918.
Before the 1880s the political parties had paid people to do such work. A sharp increase in the size of the electorate, and the imposition of a stringent cap on election spending, meant that for the first time ever volunteers were needed on a large scale. With its large numbers and infectious enthusiasm the Primrose League gave the Tories a great advantage over their opponents. Until the mid-1880s the Conservative party lost most elections; they won three of the next four. ‘It has been the frank and universal admission of successful Conservative candidates that they have been lifted into Parliament by the Primrose League’, declared Millicent Fawcett, a leading Liberal.
It was the most socially inclusive organisation Britain had so far seen. It took pride in spanning the class divide. There was hardly a trade or profession not represented in the League by both employers and employees. The literature distributed by its small central office in London stressed that ‘one of the chief duties incumbent on every Primrose centre is to combat and destroy the Radical fallacy that in modern politics classes are antagonistic. The League, on the contrary, brings all classes together’.
In parts of Kent and Sussex, for example, groups consisting of ‘two gentlemen and three working men’ were formed to run the League’s affairs. Throughout the industrial north the working men were everywhere predominant in number, sustaining Tory representation in numerous towns and cities. What in the twentieth century would come to be known as ‘one nation’ Conservatism began its life in the Primrose League.
It was the first mainstream political organisation in which women worked on equal terms with men. About half the League’s habitations were in the overall charge of women. This example of full equality between the sexes hastened the progress of women’s suffrage. By 1900, before Mrs Pankhurst came on the scene, the majority of Tory MPs were supporters of votes for women.
After 1918 the League was a spent force in politics, though it lingered on until 2004. The Conservative party at long last organised itself properly throughout the country. There were no enduring feelings of gratitude to the League. It became—and remained-- but a vague and distant memory.