Following the formation of the National Government in August 1931, roughly half of the MPs in the parliamentary Liberal party attached themselves to the leadership of Sir John Simon and constituted the Liberal National group, pledged to give full support to Ramsay MacDonald's administration in whatever steps were deemed necessary to deal with the country's pressing financial crisis. As was widely understood, this included the introduction of tariffs and a consequent abandonment of the hitherto sacred Liberal creed of free trade. After the Ottawa Agreements of August 1932, which created a system of imperial preference, the divisions within the ranks of British Liberalism were formalized. Liberal ministers owing allegiance to Sir Herbert Samuel resigned from the government before crossing the floor of the Commons and rejoining the forces of opposition in November 1933. The Liberal Nationals, however, remained on the government benches, arguing that a continuing commitment to free trade made no sense in a world that had largely converted to a policy of protection. They also accepted the Conservative argument that the ignominious collapse of the Labour cabinet in the face of the 1931 financial crisis proved that the threat of a future Labour government was something against which all antisocialists should combine. Such an appeal was not without effect, and in both the general elections of 1931 and 1935 the government enjoyed a higher share of the popular vote than was secured in any other electoral contest of the twentieth century. Partnership with the Liberal Nationals helped the Conservatives to broaden their electoral attractions, in Michael Bentley's words, “to radiate a sympathetic message to a discerned political centre to ensure that old Liberals became new Tories.”Footnote 1 Then, as the decade progressed, the Liberal Nationals supported the contention that the maintenance of a broad-based administration was essential to preserve the peace in an ever more threatening international climate. They evolved into the leading non-Conservative component of the National Government, the most tangible expression of the “national” credentials of an administration that remained in power until the fall of Neville Chamberlain in May 1940. The collapse of the National Government removed the party's primary raison d’être, though it clung to an increasingly theoretical institutional independence until the late 1960s, while moving ever closer to the Tories, upon whom it had become politically and electorally dependent. Using Wrexham as a case study, this article will demonstrate that the Liberal Nationals were a far more significant factor in the political history of the middle decades of the twentieth century than has hitherto been recognized.

From the outset, however, the mainstream Liberal party sought to undermine the Liberal Nationals’ claim to be a genuine political party and a viable force in the political life of the country. The dismissive judgment of Herbert Samuel was typical: “That group was supported by no organization in the country. It had failed in its attempts to establish such an organization. It was a plant without root, stuck precariously in the soil; it would not flourish; it would soon wilt and wither. He did not believe there was a single Liberal association throughout the land outside their own constituencies which would adopt as a candidate for parliament any one holding the views of Sir John Simon and his friends.”Footnote 2 Although Samuel's words were uttered as early as October 1932, historical judgments, notwithstanding the advantages of hindsight and perspective, have tended to endorse his assessment. Most accounts of the 1930s have relegated the Liberal Nationals to little more than a contemptuous footnote. Typically, they have been presented as unprincipled renegades, concerned only to save their parliamentary seats and prepared to sell their political souls to the Tory devil in order to maintain a fingerhold on the seat of power. For some, the mere fact of their involvement in the Conservative-dominated National Government of 1931–40 remains a sufficient response to their pretensions to serious consideration. They have been pictured as “traitors, knaves or dupes, men whose tenure of office relied on their political masters and who toed the Tory line in order to survive.”Footnote 3 Indeed, one historian concludes that as early as the autumn of 1933 the Liberal Nationals “had become Conservatives for all practical purposes.”Footnote 4

Yet such assessments fly in the face of the historical record. The Liberal National party (renamed National Liberal in 1948) enjoyed a theoretically independent existence for nearly forty years. In the general elections of 1931 and 1935 the party saw more than thirty of its supporters returned to the House of Commons, giving some credibility to the claim that the Liberal Nationals were the most important “minor” party in mainland British politics in the course of the entire twentieth century. They did this largely by replacing the mainstream Liberal party in a range of constituencies, particularly those where the preexisting brand of Liberalism tended to be right leaning and antisocialist in orientation. It was thus rare for Liberal and Liberal National organizations to coexist in the same constituency, and electoral contests between the two factions were almost unknown before 1945. Local Liberal voters were, therefore, often left with the choice of supporting the breakaway faction—which still claimed to represent Liberal values and ideals—abstaining, or transferring their allegiance to another party, in most instances Labour. In their policy pronouncements, moreover, the Liberal Nationals said little to which an orthodox Liberal could take exception. When the Liberal National Organisation published its Twenty Points of Policy in January 1938, almost all, apart from a continuing commitment to support the National Government, were compatible with traditional Liberal beliefs.Footnote 5

Yet the history of the Liberal National party has been strangely neglected.Footnote 6 The contrast with the British Union of Fascists, which failed to return a single MP to Westminster but which has spawned a veritable library of research and analysis, could not be more stark. Certainly, the Liberal Nationals thought of themselves as far more than the lackeys of the Conservative party. They presented a claim to be the authentic voice of modern Liberalism, fully capable of making an important and distinctive contribution to British politics. Contrary to Samuel's description of a party built on sand, by the mid-1930s the Liberal Nationals had succeeded in establishing the apparatus and organization of a national political movement. Unlike the mainstream party, finally deprived of the fruits of Lloyd George's ill-gotten political fund, the Liberal Nationals were well financed, enjoying the support of a number of wealthy benefactors, including the motor manufacturer Lord Nuffield. By the beginning of 1933 the Liberal National Organisation had been established with headquarters in Old Queen Street, under the direction of the chairman of the Liberal National Council, Lord Hutchison, a former Liberal chief whip.Footnote 7 It was soon agreed to set up area organizations to handle propaganda and platform work in constituencies, both those already held by Liberal National MPs and in those that were not.Footnote 8 The first issue of the Liberal National Magazine was published in March 1936 as a means of propagating the party's ideas and policies. It aimed “to help in every possible way those who are working for the Party; and to do all it can to stimulate the effects of their efforts among the public.”Footnote 9 The holding of a successful first national convention in June 1936, attended by over seven hundred delegates, marked the culmination of a period of intense organizational activity. By that time England had been divided into nine organizational areas, each with its own local headquarters. A Liberal National Council had been formed in South Wales, and one in North Wales was in the process of being set up. A Scottish National Council, comprising two district councils with headquarters in Glasgow and Edinburgh, had already been established.Footnote 10

What was also striking was the way in which, again contrary to Samuel's predictions, Liberal National Associations grew up in constituencies that had stayed loyal to the mainstream party at the time of the original split in 1931. Contrasting views on the merits of free trade had at that time occupied the fault line of division. By the second half of the decade, however, attitudes toward the National Government's foreign policy were more likely to provoke further fissures within the Liberal party. Well-known figures, such as the journalist J. A. Spender and even the former leader Samuel himself, were openly critical of the Liberal party's stance on appeasement. For others, this was the issue that compelled their migration to the ranks of the Liberal Nationals. In Bradford South, for example, a Liberal National Association was set up to support the National Government in the wake of the Munich Agreement of September 1938, with a substantial number of the constituency's former Liberal officials and activists accepting the sitting member's contention that he remained a Liberal who had “never deviated from any Liberal principles” but that “had certain policies been followed our Country would have been at war.”Footnote 11

The constituency of East Denbighshire (Wrexham) provides a revealing case study of the rise and fall of Liberal Nationalism. There the party's fortunes were not, as the Samuelite analysis would have it, in any way dependent upon the defection of a sitting Liberal MP. Indeed, throughout the existence of the local Liberal National Association, the parliamentary seat remained firmly in the hands of the Labour party. Liberals had also long cooperated with the Conservatives in Wrexham. This tradition had grown up in many parts of the country, particularly in municipal politics, as a response to the rise of Labour. It predated the birth of the Liberal Nationals and in many cases never involved a conversion to the breakaway group. But where, as in Wrexham, it did so, the transition was greatly facilitated. This case study also reveals the way in which the defection of a small group of key individuals enabled an existing Liberal organizational infrastructure to be effectively replaced by one owing allegiance to the Liberal Nationals. Finally, it is striking that Wrexham was one of the last constituencies to retain a National Liberal label, even though that label had largely lost its meaning some years before it was finally abandoned, the victim of the big battalions of the Tory party.

The key figure in the emergence of Liberal Nationalism as a force in Wrexham politics was Alderman Edward Hughes. Hughes had entered a local leather works as a bookkeeper, rising to become managing director. At the same time he became prominent in local Liberal politics, elected to the town council in 1898 and serving as mayor in 1907–8. He was a personal friend of Lloyd George, whom he entertained on several occasions at his home, Glyndŵr, in Wrexham. The origins of Hughes's conversion to the ranks of the Liberal Nationals go back to the 1920s.

Once the Liberal party nationally found itself relegated to the position of third party in the state, its members were confronted by a fundamental question. It was one to which the party as a whole failed to give a single, coherent answer throughout the interwar years. A Liberal government was no longer a realistic short-term prospect, but there was always the possibility that the third party would hold the balance in the House of Commons. So Liberals needed to decide whether they would lean to the left or to the right; whether they would prefer to keep a minority Labour or a minority Conservative government in office. On this issue Hughes and the vast majority of those who, whether in 1931 or later, found their way into the Liberal National party were clear. Socialism represented the ultimate danger. Its doctrines of state control were a denial of the central values and principles of Liberalism. Such thinking did not mean that Hughes and those who thought like him ceased to be Liberals. But it did imply that they would have to accept partnership with the Conservatives, certainly in the short term and possibly the long term as well. The hope would be that such close association would open up the possibility of “liberalizing” the Conservative party from within.

The local situation in Wrexham itself added weight to Hughes's analysis. The first decades of the twentieth century saw significant changes in the socioeconomic structure of North-East Wales that were bound to have a profound impact upon the region's political complexion. The weakening of the twin axes of Nonconformist religion and the Welsh language threatened Liberalism's hitherto preponderant position. “Old habits, loyalties and values were gradually evolving,” writes Siân Jones, “and were replaced by new ideas and innovations.”Footnote 12 The area witnessed a significant growth in population, with heavy industry—particularly coal mining—beginning to feature prominently in East Denbighshire. Around Wrexham about half of all men of working age were employed in the mines by 1930.Footnote 13 At the same time the percentage of Welsh speakers declined markedly, as did chapel attendance. Wrexham itself had become “to all intents and purposes an English town situated in Wales.”Footnote 14 In the years after the end of the First World War and in the context of a much enlarged franchise, the Labour party made rapid progress as Liberalism struggled to compete with its appeal to a working-class electorate. The seat fell narrowly to Labour for the first time in 1922.

This was, of course, a time of catastrophic Liberal decline over much of Great Britain. In Wrexham, however, the local party at least tried to respond positively to the new challenge by cultivating closer links with the constituency's industrial workers. By the middle of the decade the Wrexham Liberals were targeting industrial areas and encouraging the attendance of working men at Liberal meetings. Much hope was placed in the establishment of the so-called Liberal Trade Union Group. It was a tragedy, suggested the local Liberal secretary, that “Trades Unionism, after being lifted to a great and powerful position by the hard work of the Liberals in the past, is now largely dominated by extreme socialists.”Footnote 15 But the new organization made only limited progress, being far more successful in attracting traditional Liberal supporters from among shopkeepers and shop workers than in cementing ties with the new industrial workforce.Footnote 16 For many voters, Liberalism in Wrexham was perceived as a party of the right, not least perhaps because in the general elections of 1918 and 1922, when the party nationally was divided, it was the Conservative-supporting Coalitionist wing that held sway.Footnote 17

Overall, the history of the constituency in the 1920s suggested that Labour could not easily be beaten in a three-cornered contest. Only in 1924, when Hughes, as chairman of the local Liberal party, was instrumental in securing the withdrawal of the Conservative candidate, E. F. Bushby, did the Liberals take the seat. Hughes tried hard to repeat this arrangement in the general election of 1929. He warned the sitting Liberal MP, C. P. Williams, that the Labour candidate would win a three-cornered fight: “Our only hope is that moderate Conservatives will vote Liberal and so help to keep out the Labour man.”Footnote 18 Under a veil of secrecy designed to leave Williams untarnished should its details emerge into the public domain, Hughes drew up a plan for the forthcoming election. He sought to persuade the president of the local Conservative Association of the wisdom of withdrawing his candidate, and he did so using the sort of terms that would become a standard argument of the future Liberal National party: “On the Conservative side you may claim that, as your Candidate withdrew on the last occasion, the Liberal Candidate should withdraw on this occasion. That is a perfectly sound argument but I believe that it will not achieve the object. The Conservatives did support the Liberal on the last occasion and secured his return. If the Liberal Candidate did withdraw, I fear that the Liberal Electors would not be as loyal as the Conservatives were and will vote for Labour. In addition to this, the traditions of the Division have always been Liberal.”Footnote 19

To begin with, the Conservatives appeared to be sympathetic to Hughes's suggestion. An arrangement was discussed on the basis of a secret pledge by Williams to commit himself to vote against the installation of a Labour government in the event of a hung parliament, to vote against all proposed measures of nationalization should it prove impossible to avoid a Labour administration, and to vote in support of all Conservative proposals in opposition to socialism. But the plan was wrecked when the Wrexham Leader published an open letter urging the Conservative candidate to stand down. Unwilling to have it appear that he was responding to Liberal pressure, Bushby had little alternative but to insist that his candidature would go forward.Footnote 20 The consequence was entirely as Hughes had predicted. In a three-way contest Labour captured the seat from the Liberals, but on a minority of the popular vote. Hughes insisted that “we must stop talking about a united [Liberal] party” and blamed what he called “an Asquithian gang” for this disappointing outcome. He complained that “one of them queered the pitch as to Bushby withdrawing by publishing a letter in the local paper.”Footnote 21 Significantly, Hughes now expressed the private hope that Lloyd George would “scrap the so-called Liberal Party and form a new ‘Anti-Socialist Party.’”Footnote 22

Events now unfolded in a way that confirmed all of Hughes's misgivings about a Labour government, while at the same time frustrating his hopes that Lloyd George might point the way to salvation. Ramsay MacDonald's second administration (1929–31) had the misfortune to be in office at the time of the Wall Street crash and the onset of the world economic Depression. It is doubtful whether any government would have been able to shine in such a situation. Even so, Labour's handling of the country's mounting unemployment problem was unimaginative in the extreme, and the circumstances of its collapse in 1931 added weight to the views of those such as Hughes who regarded the party as unfit to govern. Yet far from placing himself at the head of an antisocialist coalition, Lloyd George's overall strategy, inconsistently pursued though it was, seemed to be to sustain Labour in office. His hope, never fulfilled, was of eventually extracting a major concession from the government in terms of some form of electoral reform that would give the Liberal party a share of seats in the House of Commons more in line with its percentage of the popular vote. Hughes himself had fallen out with the local Liberal party at the end of 1929, but the circumstances surrounding the general election of 1931, at a time when the mainstream Liberal party, now led by Herbert Samuel, and the emerging Liberal Nationals under Sir John Simon were both supporting the newly formed National Government, were favorable to Hughes's long-held objective of denying the Wrexham constituency to the Labour party. On this occasion the Conservative candidate withdrew as part of a national strategy to protect the anti-Labour vote rather than in response to a secret, locally negotiated bargain. As a result, the Liberal candidate, Aled Roberts, a Liverpool insurance broker and underwriter with impeccable Presbyterian credentials, was able to recapture the seat from Labour by a narrow majority of just over 1,800 votes.

Although the National Government was supposed in the first instance to be only a short-term expedient, the Conservatives and their allies quickly recognized the need to make their partnership permanent. For the Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, association with the Liberal Nationals (and the much smaller National Labour group) enabled him to broaden his party's electoral appeal, while shifting the government's center of gravity subtly to the left in a way that relegated Conservative diehards to the political sidelines. For the Liberal Nationals, membership in the National Government at least ensured a voice within the policy-making process, at a time when their former colleagues in the mainstream party seemed destined for political oblivion. In Wrexham Hughes also saw the need for a strategy for the longer term. But his problem was that Roberts aligned himself with the Samuelite MPs in parliament. The local Conservative party was unlikely to maintain its support indefinitely unless the MP offered wholehearted backing for the government's policies. “There will be another election before long,” Hughes warned, “under conditions less exceptional than those prevailing at this election. Therefore everything possible should be done to prevent the Conservatives from butting in.”Footnote 23

The two Liberal factions at Westminster went their separate ways when the government embarked on a policy of protection. Hughes hoped that Roberts would maintain his position as an “Independent Liberal supporting the National Government in all matters that are not anti-Liberal in character.” His aim as always was to keep Wrexham out of Labour hands: “We must remember that your 1800 majority came from Tories. In some things the local Tories are offended at your votes in the House, but generally your services as Member have given satisfaction to both parties, and I believe if you will continue as an Independent Liberal that the Tories will remain content and they will not nominate a Candidate at the next Election. They know as well as we do that a three cornered contest in the Wrexham Division will make a present of the seat to the Socialists. We should make every effort to prevent that.”Footnote 24 He was therefore understandably disappointed when Roberts followed the lead of Herbert Samuel and crossed the floor of the House of Commons to sit on the opposition benches in November 1933.

This decision represented a considerable blow to Hughes's hopes, not least because the Wrexham Conservative Association, in line with what happened elsewhere in the country, now withdrew its support from the Samuelite Liberal MP.Footnote 25 But the stakes were, Hughes believed, too high to throw in the towel: “If the National Government does not solve the problems it spells Revolution and everything will be in the melting pot. If the Nat Gov does succeed, they will go back, or at least a Tory Government will go back and most of the National Labour and National Liberal members will be left outside.” But the Liberal party itself no longer looked strong enough to affect the course of events. Indeed, Hughes doubted whether he would again see “a Liberal Government in office in our time, if ever.”Footnote 26 As the next general election drew near, Conservatives and Liberal Nationals across the country strengthened their relationship, going into the contest more firmly aligned than had been the case in 1931. In Wrexham, however, the absence of a Liberal National organization meant that Hughes could only hope for Liberal-Conservative cooperation on the basis of a shared opposition to socialism. He renewed contact with local Conservatives and was pleased to discover that the Denbighshire Tory grandee, Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, remained sympathetic to the idea of avoiding a three-way contest. Hughes tried to prepare the ground for Conservative cooperation by edging Roberts toward what was essentially a Liberal National stance. It was no use, he stressed, working through the formal channels of the Wrexham Liberal Association. “Our party locally is somewhat the same as the Samuelites [nationally], very faithful, loyal etc. etc., but they carry no weight.” But there was an alternative:

My suggestion is that a Conference of all liberals in the Division be called—the convenors of this Conference should be carefully selected—at that Conference you will state the position fully. By then I will try to ascertain exactly what the Conservatives are going to do. … If I were in your shoes I would be prepared to take certain risks. I would state quite frankly that I was a convinced Free Trader but that I realised that tariffs had become an accomplished fact and that the only thing to do—while they so remained—was to fight for a universal lowering of tariff walls and to use our tariffs as a weapon in that direction.

In addition, Hughes hoped that Roberts would commit himself to a drastic overhaul of the League of Nations, that he would accept the National Government's policy of limited rearmament, but “above all play the peace card. No war, unless we are attacked by an aggressor, and no war in support of any other country, unless our own vital interests were endangered.” The MP's precise party label would, he admitted, be a problem, but “I have no confidence in the Samuelite label. I believe that a National Liberal label will be more attractive but with certain reservations—pledged to support the National Government in all that they propose for peace and prosperity of our country, with a reservation to withhold that support where you consider that the proposals are not for the good of the country.”Footnote 27

On this occasion, however, Hughes was only partially successful in his negotiations with the local Conservatives. Although no Tory candidate was put forward at the general election of November 1935, Edmund Fitzhugh, the Wrexham party chairman, advised Conservative voters to abstain rather than support Aled Roberts. Considering the size of its existing majority, some swing against the National Government was almost inevitable, with “natural” Labour seats, captured in the exceptional circumstances of 1931, particularly vulnerable. Against a local background of continuing high unemployment and the pit disaster at Gresford in September 1934, when more than 250 miners lost their lives, Roberts resigned himself to defeat.Footnote 28 He was convinced that Fitzhugh was determined to get rid of him, with the longer-term goal of forming an antisocialist alliance after the election and coming back with a new candidate at the next contest.Footnote 29 His pessimism proved justified. In a straight fight Robert Richards recaptured the seat for Labour with a majority of over five thousand. Nationally, the government was returned with a reduced but still extremely comfortable majority of more than 250 seats in the new House of Commons. The Liberal Nationals now held thirty-three seats, while the Samuelite party was reduced to a mere twenty-one, Samuel himself going down to defeat. Hughes was not surprised at the outcome in Wrexham. Roberts “did not play up for the Tory vote like Morris-Jones [the successful Liberal National candidate in the adjoining constituency of Denbighshire West] did. He took his stand on the lines of the 'Boy on the Burning Deck and the Noble Boy of Truth.' That is all right in the Sunday School, but it does not cut any ice in a fight.”Footnote 30

Indeed, it was the performance of Morris-Jones that now encouraged Hughes to embrace the Liberal National cause without reservation. The timing of the setting up of a Liberal National Association in the constituency in 1936 gives credence to the idea that foreign policy was also a relevant factor. Nationally, the apparent reconciliation between the government and the mainstream Liberal party over questions of foreign and defense policy, which had characterized the summer of 1935, did not long survive the general election in November. Realpolitik soon replaced principled internationalism, as the government appeared ready to abandon its commitment to the League of Nations and embrace the appeasement of Italian aggression through the notorious Hoare-Laval pact in December. Certainly, Hughes supported the National Government's pursuit of appeasement as the best means of avoiding war. His words at the time of the Hoare-Laval crisis in December 1935 are unpleasant to a modern ear: “Things are looking black this morning. I hope the Government will steer clear of a War this week and not involve this country in complications in the interests of a lot of Niggers in Abyssinia. It is all very well to talk about the brotherhood of man etc. etc., but unless we can keep down the black population they will overwhelm us sooner or later.”Footnote 31

Events in Wrexham also need to be set in the broader context of the Liberal Nationals’ efforts after the general election to consolidate their organizational infrastructure, partly in order to counter the claims of Samuel and others that their parliamentary strength was an illusion. In the wake of the party's first national convention it was decided to complete the process of regional organization by setting up a Liberal National Organisation for North Wales. Then, at a well-attended meeting at the Queen's Hotel, Chester, in June 1936, at which the principal guest was Liberal National Cabinet Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha, the ground was prepared for a new divisional association in Wrexham. As one speaker put it, “in East Denbighshire Mr Aled Roberts had unfortunately not felt able to come forward as a Liberal National, and the seat was lost to Liberalism, but he thought it could be won again.”Footnote 32 Hughes now acted quickly, calling a meeting in early July to discuss the advisability of forming a Liberal National organization for the Wrexham parliamentary division. Although Hughes personally sent out nearly a hundred selected invitations, Liberal loyalists were well aware of what was afoot and made every effort to pack the meeting. Behind closed doors and after what turned into a lively debate, a resolution to set up a Liberal National Association was defeated by a large majority. Not more than a third of the people present had received a written invitation from Hughes, and many of those who voted against the motion expressed “in emphatic terms” their determination to have no truck with any Liberal candidate who qualified his political label.Footnote 33

Despite this setback, some urged Hughes to press on regardless. “The meeting last Monday was ‘packed,’” insisted Ffoulke Roberts. “No matter. The Liberal Party have insulted us and expelled us. To hell with them. We put the Country before Party. Let us go ahead and win the Wrexham Division for the Nat. Govt.”Footnote 34 From the headquarters of the Liberal National party in London, Major P. G. H. Broadhurst suggested a small meeting of those who could be relied upon who would form themselves into a Liberal National Association, followed by an approach to the local Conservative Association with a view to forming a coordinating committee between the two parties. “All our information,” he stressed, “is that the only hope of winning Wrexham from the Socialists is to take the action which we agreed upon.”Footnote 35 But Hughes knew that the situation was more complex than this. His aim remained to deny Wrexham to the Labour party through the construction of an antisocialist electoral alliance. Yet recent history had shown that even the united forces of Liberalism and Conservatism would be hard-pressed to thwart the constituency's Labour vote. Labour's percentage of the poll in Wrexham had increased at every general election since the end of the First World War. If Hughes now followed the line that was being pressed upon him, a division in the ranks of local Liberalism was all but inevitable, significantly reducing the chance of cementing the necessary electoral coalition to defeat Labour. So while, amid enthusiastic assertions that a Liberal National candidate could win the seat for the government, a Wrexham Liberal National Association was duly set up on 14 October 1936 with Hughes as chairman, Hughes himself continued to pin his hopes on a realignment of Wrexham Liberalism, including the Samuelite faction, around the person of Aled Roberts.Footnote 36 In his favor, the results of the general election forced all orthodox Liberals to consider whether their party still had a future. Many judged that the game was up, and the first months of 1936 witnessed a renewed wave of defections to the Liberal National camp. The task in Wrexham, however, would not be easy. On the one hand, it was reported that the Conservatives would be contesting the constituency at the next election.Footnote 37 On the other hand, Roberts, who had already accepted an invitation to stand again as the Liberal party's candidate, had written to the Wrexham Leader openly criticizing Hughes's actions thus far: “After the rebuff the Alderman and his friends admit having at their meeting one would expect him to write a little less arrogantly; it seems that they still think their little group really counts. Some people cannot take a hint.” Roberts appealed to all Wrexham Liberals to unite behind him, but he remained clear on which side of the Liberal divide he stood. The Liberals in the House of Commons, he insisted, voiced Liberal opinions. The Liberal Nationals attempted to liberalize government policy. But “their efforts during the past four years have not been distinguished by conspicuous success.”Footnote 38

Undeterred, Hughes approached Roberts once again. He was able to report success in persuading the Wrexham Conservatives to delay selecting a candidate by proposing to set up a coordinating committee to choose a national candidate who would stand as “neither Liberal or Conservative. … He may be one or the other but as a candidate he must be N[ational] G[overnment] and that only.” The committee was likely to meet in the near future, and it was Hughes's hope that Roberts's name might be among those considered. Accordingly, he appealed to Roberts to offer himself to Liberal National headquarters as a potential candidate pledged to support the government. Victory at the polls could not be guaranteed, but “whatever money and energy can do to win will be done.” What was certain was that as an independent Liberal Roberts would stand “no chance” of success.Footnote 39 While Roberts was left to contemplate this mixture of flattery and realpolitik, Hughes strove to convert the coordinating committee to his interpretation of the situation. Analyzing the available electoral statistics, he argued that it was the Tories who once again would need to give way. “I pointed out that a National Liberal would have a better chance … than a Conservative, that the ‘die-hards’ among the Liberals would not vote Tory, but possibly would vote Labour.”Footnote 40

Roberts was finally won over and agreed to explore the possibilities at a meeting with Lord Hutchison of the Liberal National Organisation on 23 February 1937. But the chance of agreement seemed to be dashed when Roberts, hoping still to work through the existing Wrexham Liberal Association, objected to the idea that the coordinating committee should have the final say in whether he was to be the National Government's candidate or not.Footnote 41 Once again, Hughes needed to employ all his considerable diplomatic skills to save the day. By mid-April success seemed to be assured. “I think you have handled the situation in Wrexham most skilfully,” complimented Rowland Evans, the Liberal National party's chief agent, “and indications are that things will turn out satisfactorily.”Footnote 42 It was arranged that Aled Roberts should address a private meeting of the Wrexham Conservative Association on 10 June. “What we want,” insisted Hughes, is 100 per cent of the Conservative vote and with yourself as candidate I have confidence that we shall have a large percentage of the Liberal vote. You may drop a few of the old Gladstonian Liberals but the number will be small. The rank and file of the Liberals will vote for Aled Roberts because he is Aled Roberts, irrespective of the particular label he may wear. The Conservative leaders are all in favour, and I have confidence that they will give a lead to the rank and file of the Party—I hope that you can do the same in the Liberal ranks.Footnote 43

It remained only to square the Wrexham Liberal Association. A meeting of the Liberal executive committee was arranged for 17 September, but the secretary, Gwen Roberts, aware that something strange was afoot, initially refused to send out notices and instead got in touch with Liberal headquarters in London. The chairman of the party's national organization committee, Harcourt Johnstone, now wrote to Roberts, stating that matters seemed to have reached a crisis and asking for a clear statement of the candidate's position. A noncommittal reply was sent. The executive committee eventually met a week later than originally envisaged and heard Roberts explain his intention to stand as a Liberal supporter of the National Government. Two-thirds of the executive seemed ready to back him, but there was also significant opposition. Roberts's opponents complained that his tactics were unfair as he was attempting to commit the executive without a discussion. “It looked as if the Association would be hopelessly split. Feeling was high and there was much plain speaking; accusations and counter-accusations.” Only an intervention from Einion Evans, editor of the Welsh-language newspaper Y Cymro, saved the day. At that very moment, he suggested, Conservatives and Socialists were waiting outside the meeting, ready to rejoice at news of a split in the Liberal Association. Einion Evans proposed that Roberts should be authorized to give general support to the government, reserving the right to vote against it on any issue endangering Liberal principles but committed not to vote against the government on any vote of censure that might result in the establishment of a Socialist administration. When Roberts suggested that defining “Liberal principles” was likely to provoke further divisions, this qualification was removed from Einion Evans's resolution. On this basis and with a clear statement that, if elected, Roberts would sit on the government benches, the resolution was carried without further dissent.Footnote 44 Endorsement by the Conservative and Liberal National Associations was now little more than a formality. Only a formal commitment to the Liberal National party was lacking. But, “this is a difficulty which we can overcome. … The phrase used in the resolution was very much the case of face-saving. Any other phrase would undoubtedly have split the Association, but we can now feel certain of the wholehearted support of all the Liberals in the Division.”Footnote 45

Even the best-laid plans, however, could not cope with the onset of world war. The general election anticipated for the autumn of 1939 or the spring of 1940 never took place. In the face of an external enemy, all the main parties, including the Liberal Nationals, observed an electoral truce. By-elections, when they did take place, were limited to contests between the incumbent party and independent candidates. From May 1940 Conservatives, Socialists, Liberals, and Liberal Nationals all served in Churchill's coalition government. Although the domestic political conflict did not disappear completely, party activity inevitably took a back seat in the face of altogether graver challenges on the military, diplomatic, and international horizons. Party organization, particularly at a local level, was one of the leading casualties of the war. Only when the prospect of victory over Nazi Germany was assured did politicians begin to turn to the issues of domestic party conflict in the postwar era, and they did so in a context that had clearly changed from that which had existed in the 1930s.

Early in 1945 the officers of the Wrexham Conservative Association gathered together to review the political situation. Their chairman, Colonel Fenwick Palmer, recalled that before the war agreement with the Liberal Nationals had resulted in the selection of Aled Roberts as a candidate who would support the National Government. But the position was now very different. Roberts had recently made it clear that, if he were to stand again, it could only be as a member of the mainstream Liberals, a party that had already declared its intention of leaving the coalition and resuming independent action once Germany had been defeated.Footnote 46 In this situation Wrexham Conservatives set about the task of finding a suitable candidate for the contest that was bound to follow the ending of hostilities. But the Liberal Nationals too were trying to pick up the pieces of their prewar organization.

Edward Hughes had succumbed to cancer at the end of 1938, but others were prepared to take over the reins, not least his formidable daughter Edna. Indeed, while several Liberal National officers seemed ready to recognize political realities and take second place to the big battalions of the Conservative party, Edna Hughes was determined not to fall in line behind a Tory candidate “without putting up a jolly good fight for our own man first.”Footnote 47 So while the Conservatives selected David Bowen to carry their standard, the Liberal Nationals, having first approached David Lloyd George, the youthful grandson of the celebrated ex–prime minister, settled upon David Milne. The decisive meeting was of the Conservative Association on 18 May, to which representative Liberal Nationals were invited. In any trial of strength between political allies, the Conservatives seemed to have obvious advantages over their Liberal National partners in terms of organization, resources, and sheer numbers. Nonetheless, the Conservative chairman opened the meeting defensively by reporting on the meeting he had held with the Wrexham Liberal Nationals. It appeared, he said, that the candidature of David Bowen under a purely “National” banner was not acceptable to the Liberal Nationals, largely because the latter already had their own candidate in the field. At this point the Liberal National delegates, accompanied by their candidate David Milne, joined the meeting and in the ensuing discussions managed to persuade the Conservatives that the best chance of success lay in adopting Milne rather than Bowen as the National candidate for the Wrexham division. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Liberal National tail had succeeded in wagging the Conservative dog. When the Liberal Nationals left the meeting, the best that the Tories could do was to reassure themselves with a resolution that the adoption of a “National” candidate was “not in any way to be taken as an indication that this constituency is to be regarded as a Liberal seat.”Footnote 48 Astonishingly, Milne was formally adopted as the National candidate for Wrexham at a special general meeting of the local Conservative Association on 30 May with just one dissentient.Footnote 49 These developments caused Labour some concern. At the adoption meeting for the Socialist candidate, Alderman Cyril Jones warned that Milne “would poll all the old Tories and the right-wing Liberals … and that would be a source of weakness to Labour.”Footnote 50

But this Liberal National triumph was short-lived. In Wrexham, as in Britain as a whole, the political winds were blowing strongly in Labour's favor. In a four-way contest Robert Richards increased his majority to more than 13,000. Milne finished second, almost 7,000 votes ahead of J. D. Williams for the Liberals, who had at least succeeded in freeing themselves from the Liberal Nationals’ embrace, while an independent candidate, J. R. Hayes-Jones, lost his deposit. But the antisocialist majority, upon which much of Edward Hughes's prewar thinking had been based, had disappeared. Richards secured 56 percent of the vote. In the wake of the election the reality of the balance of power between Conservatives and Liberal Nationals became increasingly apparent. As before the war there was much talk of an anti-Labour coalition involving Conservatives, Liberal Nationals, and Liberals, but the local Liberal party, following the lead of its London headquarters, insisted on maintaining its independence. And in the continuing dialogue between Conservatives and Liberal Nationals it was clear that the former were no longer prepared to play second fiddle. At a meeting of the Conservative executive committee in March 1947, “Alderman Blew, Colonel Fenwick-Palmer, Mrs Bateson and Mr. Mowat all expressed the opinion that the Association should not consider any amalgamation, and Alderman Blew advocated adopting our own Conservative candidate in order to test the strength of the Party in the Division.”Footnote 51 The following month Blew “again took the view that we should adopt our own Candidate and let other organizations support us if they so wished.”Footnote 52 The Liberal Nationals were keen to adopt their own candidate for the next general election, but the Conservative chairman, Sir Charles Lowther, was able to reassure his colleagues that he had informed the Liberal Nationals that they had “no right” to do this and then expect the Tories to fall into line. With Conservative headquarters still keen on “united action against socialism” and with the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of May 1947 encouraging fusion between the two parties at the constituency level, Wrexham Tories had no alternative but to agree to further discussions with the Liberal Nationals. But Colonel R. C. Roberts wanted the Conservative deputation to these talks to “make it plain to the Liberal Nationals that we were in the strong position in that we have the organization and the members.”Footnote 53

For some time the two parties maintained the stance of a united front against socialism coupled with separate organizational identities. The Liberal Nationals managed to contribute substantially to the cost of public meetings in the division, and cooperation was extended to elections to the local borough council. Here it was agreed in December 1948 that all candidates accepting the support of the Conservative and National Liberal Associations should contest council elections as “Conservative and National Liberal Candidates” and that no candidate would receive the support of either association without agreeing to this designation.Footnote 54 In Wrexham, as in many other constituencies, such cooperation was part of a broad antisocialist alliance that, for a time, threatened the independence not only of the Liberal Nationals but of the mainstream Liberal party as well. In the Offa Ward it was reported in 1949 that local Conservatives were “glad to say we co-operated with National Liberal and Liberal parties to whom we tender our thanks.”Footnote 55

But it was clear that the Conservatives were now the driving force. In July 1948 a joint selection committee put forward the name of Richard Lamb as a suitable prospective parliamentary candidate. It was agreed by the Conservative divisional council that, in the event of Lamb being adopted, he should be asked to stand as a “United Conservative and Liberal National Candidate.” Almost as an afterthought it was then pointed out that “the Liberal National Association would have to be consulted in the matter.”Footnote 56 Less than a year later it was again the Conservatives who took the initiative in deciding that Lamb was not, in fact, a suitable choice—“the rank and file were dissatisfied with his approach to the ordinary voter.”Footnote 57 Finally, in the summer of 1949, the inevitable logic of the situation was accepted, and it was agreed that the two associations should amalgamate as the Wrexham Conservative and National Liberal Association.

“It is, of course, important,” stressed the National Liberals’ chief organizer in London, “that the public should realise clearly that it is not a question of the National Liberals being absorbed by the Conservatives, but of both Associations coming together under a common title.”Footnote 58 Yet it is questionable if this was the reality. Edna Hughes was certainly skeptical. “We are,” she argued, “absorbed by the Conservative Association.” Perhaps had both associations been dissolved and then been reformed into a new joint association with new and jointly agreed rules and procedures, Hughes “could have appreciated the sincerity of the merger.”Footnote 59 As it was, an independent Liberal had warned her, “You are being taken for a ride on a Tiger and be careful or the Tiger will swallow you.”Footnote 60 The Conservative executive council had been very clear that fusion should only be considered on the understanding that members of the National Liberal Association would be eligible to serve as officers of the new association and upon its executive council and various committees “only under the existing rules of the Conservative Association.”Footnote 61

In practice, most National Liberal activists in Wrexham now accepted their subordinate status with good grace and quietly abandoned any pretensions to a meaningful separate identity. But a small group around Edna Hughes, who now became the new association's constituency organizer, and her close associate Councillor Trevor Hanmer continued to insist that National Liberalism still constituted a separate and valuable tradition within the activities of what should be a genuinely joint enterprise. Meetings of the joint association revealed increasing National Liberal dissatisfaction and irritation at their submergence beneath the big battalions of the Conservative party. In July 1952 members of the National Liberal rump raised the issue of Edna Hughes's salary and status. She had been appointed organizer with the specific task of maximizing the “Liberal” vote in the interests of the Conservative–National Liberal alliance, but her position was now “most unsatisfactory and reflected a tendency to neglect the interests of the National Liberals.”Footnote 62 It was certainly the case that the joint association reflected the respective inherent strength of its component parts. Of the fifteen officers of the joint association in 1953, thirteen were Conservatives. But it also seemed that the junior partners were subjected to a series of insensitive and unnecessary slights. The details of the annual conference of the National Liberal party were not brought to the attention of the association, National Liberal literature was not circulated in the division, and no National Liberal speakers were invited to visit the constituency. Astonishingly, when Hanmer offered two cups to be awarded to local youth branches for recruiting the highest numbers of Young Conservatives and Young National Liberals, respectively, that for the National Liberals was rejected. Not surprisingly, Edna Hughes had “no illusion as to [the Conservatives’] ultimate goal—the extermination of all Liberals and any avowed intention of co-operation should be closely scrutinised and tested by counter-proposals.”Footnote 63 Finally, in August 1953, following a carefully prepared meeting, a group of leading National Liberals decided to end their four-year partnership with the Tories. Their declared purpose was “to preserve their independence and safeguard Liberalism as an operative factor in the political life of this country.”Footnote 64

It was a brave but inevitably doomed gesture of defiance. For a while it seemed that the Hughes-Hanmer initiative might merge into a broader National Liberal movement to reassert the party's independence and inherent Liberalism. From the party's Hastings assembly in March 1954 there emerged an eponymous group that aimed to produce “a distinctive Liberal policy which would bring about the union of all Liberals.”Footnote 65 A series of articles and pamphlets followed whose free-market ideas seemed in some ways to anticipate the Conservatism of a later generation—and this at a time when leading figures such as Butler, Eden, and Macmillan were moving the Tories toward a consensual, sometimes corporatist, center ground. Edna Hughes was hopeful that, across the country as a whole, “Joint Associations may disappear.”Footnote 66

The National Liberal leadership understandably viewed such developments with caution. Any genuine reassertion of independence risked alienating the party's Conservative allies with the consequent prospect of subsequent electoral extinction. No sitting National Liberal MP could expect to hold his seat in the face of Tory opposition. The Hughes-Hanmer initiative received no endorsement from the National Liberal Organisation in London, much to Edna Hughes's indignation.Footnote 67 In Wrexham several prominent National Liberals remained loyal to the joint association. Edna Hughes claimed the support of three hundred activists and perhaps five thousand votes in the constituency.Footnote 68 But even if these figures were accurate, the National Liberal infrastructure was now scarcely strong enough to sustain a single organization in the division, let alone one fragmented into two halves. In any case, the National Liberal rebels made it clear that they intended to support the already nominated “Conservative and National Liberal” candidate at the next general election and that they had no wish to split the antisocialist vote.Footnote 69 The rebellion, such as it was, soon petered out.

The rest of this story may be briefly told. At all the general elections of the 1950s, Conservative candidates stood under the “Conservative and National Liberal” banner, but as the decade progressed this label became little more than a historical curiosity. The Conservatives’ intention to broaden their electoral appeal was clear. In 1951 there was, for the first time since the division had been reformed in 1885, no specifically Liberal candidate, and for the Conservatives and National Liberals Willoughby Cooper made an undisguised pitch for the traditional Liberal vote.Footnote 70 Similarly, as the general election of 1955 approached, the Conservative candidate, G. W. Guthrie Jones, insisted that the principles of Liberalism—individual liberty, social justice, and sound finance—were also the principles of the modern Tory party, “liberalized” by its partnership with the National Liberals.Footnote 71 He recognized, as Edward Hughes had done a generation earlier, that a combination of antisocialist votes was the only possible way in which the Labour party's control over the constituency might be broken. Mainstream Liberalism refused to be seduced and, although an independent Liberal candidate only stood at the general election of 1950, it seems likely that the specifically Liberal vote in Wrexham tended to support Plaid Cymru candidates rather than Conservative and National Liberal ones.Footnote 72 Indeed, by the end of the decade a revived Liberal party under Jo Grimond clearly believed that it had more in common with the Labour party of Hugh Gaitskell, whose commitment to “Clause Four socialism” was at best theoretical, than it had with the Conservative party. In these circumstances Wrexham remained firmly under Labour control. Meanwhile, Wrexham's Conservative and National Liberal Association now made only a few token gestures in the direction of a separate National Liberal tradition, as, for example, in the maintenance of a National Liberal stall at the Wrexham Conservative Women's annual Christmas fair—often manned by Edna Hughes. And steps were taken to ensure that Edna Hughes herself would be among the speakers at Griffith Pierce's adoption meeting in March 1966. Finally, however, following the disbandment of the National Liberal Council in London in May 1968, and its formal incorporation inside the Conservative party, the local party in Wrexham was renamed the Wrexham Conservative and Unionist Association.Footnote 73

The history of the Liberal National party in Wrexham is in many ways typical of the experience of constituencies across Britain. While the bitter divisions of 1931–32 over free trade and tariffs tended to fade as the decade progressed, many Liberals became increasingly convinced that the worsening international situation reinforced the ongoing need for a National Government and the suppression of normal party politics. Russell Thomas, who in February 1936 had contested a by-election in Ross and Cromarty on behalf of the mainstream Liberal party, explained his defection to the Liberal Nationals a few months later: “I do not turn my back easily on old loyalties, but the tendency of the Liberal Opposition to flirt with the Parties of the extreme Left is, to my mind, antagonistic to what is best in Liberalism, and can only end in disaster and complete obliteration. I feel, too, that their blind devotion to what is called ‘collective security’ with a tendency to ignore the facts of the European situation, and to hinder the rearmament of our country, shows a lack of realism I can no longer support.”Footnote 74 As has been seen, decisive events were also taking place at this time in Wrexham, which culminated in the formation of the local Liberal National Association in October 1936.

Contrary to the jibes of Herbert Samuel and others, the Liberal National party offered—at least in the 1930s—a credible alternative to a Liberal party that seemed to be heading irreversibly toward electoral extinction. The experience of Wrexham supports this contention. The Liberal Nationals regarded themselves as performing a crucial task in modernizing the message of Liberalism to cope with new circumstances in a new age. Dropping the traditional commitment to free trade was part of this process: “the abandonment of the practice of non-interference in international trade is in itself no more derogatory from essential Liberalism than was the earlier abandonment of the doctrine of non-interference in domestic contract. … It is our belief, the belief of Liberal Nationals, that the creation of our movement was not fortuitous—that it was not a mere flash thrown out from the burning Liberal torch—a flash that was to be bright for a moment and then dimmed for ever, but rather was it the real light itself, preserved and sheltered when the torch was dying.”Footnote 75 In many ways, in the years before the Second World War the impetus was with the Liberal Nationals rather than the mainstream party, and it is possible to argue that, but for the advent of war, they might have succeeded in displacing their rivals as the leading exponents of the Liberal creed.

After 1945 their position was very different. Struggling to piece together the remnants of their party organization, the Liberal Nationals had lost their primary raison d’être, at least as a separate group, with the disappearance of the National Government. Indeed, their participation in that administration no longer seemed an asset. In most minds the National Government stood condemned for both its foreign and domestic performance. It was remembered now as the government of appeasement and the government of the slump. Even the Conservatives soon gave up the effort to convince the electorate of the merits of their prewar conduct. By about 1947 the Conservative opposition, struggling to win back the voters lost at the general election of 1945, began to stress how much they had changed from the party of the prewar era.Footnote 76 By this time, in any case, the formal fusion of Conservatives and Liberal Nationals made good sense in the majority of those constituencies where a Liberal National presence had been established. This was certainly the case in Wrexham, even though the process was delayed for a couple of years after the conclusion of the Woolton-Teviot Agreement at a national level. Thereafter, and notwithstanding the attempted “rebellion” of 1953–54, National Liberalism existed as little more than an increasingly outdated name.

In some other constituencies, especially where there was a sitting National Liberal MP, the party's position was understandably stronger. Neighboring Denbighshire West offers a good example. With Conservative backing Henry Morris-Jones was reelected in 1945, and, upon his retirement in 1950, it was the National Liberals rather than the Tories who secured the succession for one of their own. Not until 1958 did Denbigh Conservatives bite the bullet and insist upon nominating a Conservative to carry their banner at the next general election. Even then, it was thought politic that Geraint Morgan should stand as a “Conservative and National Liberal.”

In Wrexham the National Liberal influence faded more quickly, but the Conservatives had little to lose by the complicated nomenclature by which they still chose to be described. Conservative voters were unlikely to react by transferring their allegiance elsewhere; and if the “Conservative and National Liberal” label succeeded in attracting at least some floating, Liberal-orientated electors into the Conservative camp, so much the better. Thus, as late as the general election of 1966, the Conservative candidate, Griffith Pierce, still stood under the joint party banner. By that stage, however, it seems likely that many of those who cast their votes in the constituency were unaware of what the “Conservative and National Liberal” label actually meant. The National Liberal tradition had all but disappeared, and a political party soon passed into oblivion.

Yet if the party ceased to exist, it is at least arguable that its ideas and values did not. From the antisocialism of the original defection of 1931 to the free-market policies of the Hastings Group, National Liberals had helped keep alive the creed of economic Liberalism in a political climate characterized by ever greater state intervention. By the time of the National Liberal party's demise, Harold Wilson's government presided over a Commons majority of almost one hundred seats, while the prime minister was talking confidently of making Labour into the “natural” party of government. However faintly, voices on the right were beginning to articulate an explanation of where the Conservatives had gone wrong. Appropriately enough, in the very last issue of the National Liberals’ house journal, Griffith Pierce, the unsuccessful Conservative and National Liberal candidate in Wrexham, outlined just such an explanation. Criticizing the “young Fabians of the Right” in such left-leaning Conservative bodies as the Bow Group, he argued that the Tories had been driven “into a sordid rat race with Socialism; the battle cry of 1950 was exchanged for a squalid contest as to which Party could offer the most for nothing which, being translated, means who best could relieve the individual of responsibility and, inevitably, of liberty. So, eventually, the people, who could no longer see the difference, voted for a change which merely altered the name of the current administrators of bureaucratic paternalism.”Footnote 77 It would be for the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s to reverse such trends, while offering a posthumous, and largely unacknowledged, vindication of the National Liberal party.