Abstract
If the 1920s and 1930s were for many years the poor relations of modern British history, and particularly political history, the last 20 years have seen a notable renaissance of interest in this period. There has in particular been an upsurge of interest in interwar Conservatism, with the likes of Philip Williamson and Ross McKibbin, David Jarvis and David Thackeray all producing work that has greatly enhanced our understanding of the Party and the period.
This latest book from Stuart Ball is undoubtedly the weightiest addition to that genre, weighing in at well in excess of 500 pages. The product of many years – indeed, many decades - of research, Portrait of a Party is perhaps the closest thing to an encyclopaedia of interwar Conservatism that is ever likely to be produced, and explores in considerable detail the organisation and culture of the Party in the decades between the two World Wars. Undoubtedly the greatest strength of the book is the nature of archival material on which Ball can call, a resource that is striking in its variety as much as in its sheer scope. His bibliography of primary sources runs to in excess of a dozen pages (of fairly small type) and includes the records of more than 200 constituency organisations and area associations, alongside the private papers of dozens of Conservative peers and MPs. Having such diverse archival material at his fingertips allows Ball to interrogate the challenges facing the Party from a number of different perspectives, and to draw useful conclusions about the relationship between the leadership and the grassroots.
Indeed, this variety of material informs the structure of the book, which is akin to that of a Russian doll. After an extensive initial survey of the ‘principles and temperament’ of interwar Conservatism, the book then proceeds to gradually strip away the layers of the Party, beginning with the outermost (the electorate) and proceeding to the innermost (the leadership). This approach has the significant advantage that it allows Ball to explore the way in which the same events were perceived by different sections of the Party, and he is thus able to give a nuanced and multi-layered account of the nature of Conservative activity and organisation during the 1920s and 1930s.
For many readers the chapter on the electorate is likely to prove the most interesting, and here Ball is able to provide a rounded picture of the Party’s electioneering alongside a detailed breakdown of Conservative electoral support. Subsequent chapters on constituency associations and Conservative Central Office may, on the surface, appear to be of rather less general interest, but there is fascinating information here on the relationship between the centre and the grassroots, the state of the Party’s finances, and, in particular, the role of women. That women played a prominent role in interwar Conservative politics has long been well-known, but here Ball is able to demonstrate the true extent of women’s involvement in constituency activity. Quite apart from swelling the membership considerably – Ball estimates that there may have been as many as one million female Conservatives by the beginning of the 1930s – their fundraising efforts were, in many constituencies, vital to party finances. Subsequent chapters on the parliamentary party and the leadership offer fewer revelations – here the sources have been more extensively mined by previous generations of historians – but nevertheless shed useful light on the difficulties of party management in this period.
This thematic approach does not always work in the book’s favour, however. One consequence of trying to view the period through the eyes of different sections of the Party in this way is that any reader wishing to gain a full understanding of a particular issue has little choice but to try and put the pieces together for themselves. Anyone seeking to discover how the Party felt about coalitions, for instance, would need to refer to at least three different chapters; references to Beaverbrook’s Empire Crusade and the crisis in Baldwin’s leadership in the spring of 1931 are similarly scattered throughout the book.
Moreover, it is sometimes difficult to escape the suspicion that some of Ball’s most interesting discoveries have been buried in the avalanche of archival material. There are tantalising hints throughout of potential avenues for research that have been left unexplored, and it is tempting to think that these might have yielded interesting new discoveries if they had been pursued. There are, for example, numerous clues here that suggest that there is interesting research still to be done on the Party’s use of popular culture in its pursuit of newly enfranchised voters, despite the important work of Jarvis and Thackeray. For instance, the Plays for Patriots series – short dramas commissioned by NUCUA, and performed by local associations – provides further evidence of the Party’s attempts to exploit popular culture for political purposes. Similarly, the mention of an early experiment with telephone canvassing (in 1935) suggests that the Conservatives’ use of new technologies in their electioneering merits further exploration. Though the Party’s use of cinema vans has received far more historical attention, this apparently rather more prosaic experiment in campaigning was probably of greater long-term importance – an example, perhaps, of Cowley’s Law in action.
These observations should not distract from the merits of the book, which are that it provides a comprehensive and multi-layered account of the organisation and culture of the British Conservative Party between the wars. Few other works will be able to match the scope and variety of Ball’s archival material, nor the detail in which he is able to discuss the Party’s grassroots activities and electoral performance. But it is to be hoped that future historians will be tempted to use Ball’s book as the basis for further exploration of interwar Conservatism, rather than to see it as the final word.