Britain's transformation from a limited, property-based franchise into a mass democracy through the passage of the Fourth Reform Act of 1918 signalled the opening of a new phase in the nation's political life.Footnote 1 The achievement of universal suffrage shifted the centre of gravity in British politics away from the problem of who should have the vote and on what terms, and towards the challenge of integrating and socializing a mass citizenry. The effect of this shift on party officials at Central Office and Transport House was a renewed focus on the task of grassroots organization as both parties sought to build mass followings in the country.Footnote 2 Precise figures are elusive, but it has been estimated that Conservative party membership soared to several millions over the course of the period, while by the late 1930s, Labour had succeeded in recruiting almost half a million individual members, in addition to its massive affiliated trade union membership and the allied Co-operative movement.Footnote 3
Yet parties were not the only organizations seeking to define and mobilize the new political nation created by the extension of the franchise. For the interwar decades also witnessed the growth of mass membership associations of a non-party character, which met with remarkable success in engaging voters in alternative forms of activism and organized sociability. In particular, this period saw the expansion of new kinds of civic organization, often secular in character, strongly invested in a discourse of active citizenship, and committed to creating and defending a space within associational life which was free of partisan or sectarian conflict. By exploring the new opportunities for democratic participation which these associations pioneered beyond the arena of conventional party politics, this article seeks to present a fresh perspective on the character of British political culture during the first period of universal suffrage.
The role of voluntary associations in constituting modern democratic societies has come under the scrutiny of both historians and political scientists, the latter primarily concerned with contemporary contexts.Footnote 4 Yet, whilst the idea that the quality of a society's associational life has implications for its wider democratic performance is well established, relatively few studies exist which unpack in detail the working out of this relationship in Britain during the key decades following the Fourth Reform Act. This article aims to correct this omission by exploring the experiences of four civic associations which were established around the time of the First World War or soon after, and which achieved growing prominence within both national and community life in the years that followed. These are: the National Federation of Women's Institutes, which organized rural housewives; the British Legion, which served ex-servicemen and their dependants; Rotary International, a ‘service club’ for business and professional men; and finally the League of Nations Union, a mass-membership pressure group campaigning on international affairs.
To date, these organizations have been the subject of dedicated monographs or studied in only very specific contexts, such as the women's movement, ex-servicemen's activism, and popular pacifism. By contrast, this article conceptualizes the four voluntary bodies as case studies in political culture and seeks, through comparative analysis, to produce fresh insights into the character of popular participation in the early years of mass democracy in Britain. Although each pursued very different aims, all four cultivated mass memberships which they engaged in a range of public activities whilst always locating themselves firmly outside the arena of partisan controversy. These professed ‘non-political’ or ‘non-party’ credentials aroused the suspicion of some left-wing critics, who feared that such labels served simply as a fig-leaf for middle-class anti-socialism, and who thus looked on anxiously at the success with which many non-party associations attracted working-class adherents. This critique is reproduced in the influential account of interwar social relations advanced by Ross McKibbin, who argues that the ‘apolitical’ mode of sociability fostered within the expanding associational networks of suburban England helped to unite a geographically and occupationally diverse middle class in opposition to the political aspirations of organized labour.Footnote 5 By looking in closer detail at the political dynamics of these four organizations, this article suggests that the true picture was more complex, and that being ‘non-party’ was rapidly becoming the established modus operandi of the politics of pressure after the war and an increasingly important category of democratic participation. This was partly a consequence of major party-political realignment, but, more importantly, it was constituent of a wider political response to the destabilizing forces of class conflict, ideological warfare, and economic fragility with which the nation was confronted during these years. By defending their ideals of inclusive, pluralist participation, these organizations, and others like them, played an important role in anchoring British politics ideologically in the centre-ground, therefore providing important insulation against the currents of political extremism which convulsed other European societies in this period.
I
For the British, associational life began to change in significant ways after the First World War. Whilst surviving the social upheaval of the war years, organized religion and older networks of urban sociability experienced increasing pressure to adapt to the new conditions of the post-1918 world and the rapid expansion of new kinds of voluntary association. One of the most thoroughly researched aspects of this phenomenon to date is the impact of female suffrage on women's public activities.Footnote 6 All three parties formed or extended their women's sections, but non-party bodies, too, such as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, the Women Citizens' Associations, and the Townswomen's Guilds, introduced thousands of women to the processes of committee work and helped them put their newly won political power to effective use. Campaigning on issues ranging from equal pay and birth control to slum clearance and women's representation in local government, and aided by improvements in housing and labour-saving devices giving housewives more leisure, they constituted what James Hinton calls a ‘female public sphere’, in which a ‘specifically feminine public culture’ came to be nurtured.Footnote 7
The National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) belonged to this world. The movement's origins lay in a model of rural organizing developed by pioneer women in Canada and taken up in Britain in 1915 by the state-funded Agricultural Organization Society as a means of boosting wartime food production. At the end of the war, the National Federation became independent and began to focus on spreading its network of self-governing village-based meeting places for rural women further across the countryside.Footnote 8 The Women's Institutes (WIs), which met monthly or more frequently, aimed not only to deepen women's understanding of the local agricultural economies to which they belonged, but, as one publication put it, to encourage every member to feel ‘her sense of obligation to the country in which she is a citizen, to help develop her mental powers, to make her realize the importance of the intelligent use of the vote’.Footnote 9 This desire to extend rural women's political influence was reflected in the emphasis placed on educating members on the workings of local government as well as encouraging them to stand for election to parish, district, and county councils.Footnote 10 Under the capable leadership of Lucy Denman, the philanthropist and birth control campaigner, the movement had assembled 4,000 Institutes by 1925 with a collective membership of over 250,000.Footnote 11
While the WIs belonged to a feminine public culture, the British Legion and Rotary International belonged to a correspondingly masculine one. Although relief organizations for veterans existed before 1914, the wartime experience greatly increased the public visibility of the figure of the ex-service man and produced, in the British Legion, a mass movement to protect and promote his interests. Founded in 1920 out of a merger of four existing bodies, the Legion developed an extensive grassroots presence through its branches and clubs, ran the famous Poppy Day appeal annually as a means of funding relief work, and lobbied government on issues affecting ex-servicemen, most notably war pensions and unemployment.Footnote 12 Under the patronage of the prince of Wales and the presidency of Field-Marshal Haig, the Legion grew steadily throughout the 1920s, building a membership of 300,000 by the end of the decade, rising to over 400,000 by 1938.Footnote 13 Its leaders called upon ex-servicemen to serve their nation as faithfully in civilian life as they had on the battlefield and to join the Legion on the grounds, as Chairman T. F. Lister put it, that ‘its aims, objects and aspirations are as compatible as possible with the highest citizenship’.Footnote 14
Rotary International, by contrast, had its origins in the North American ‘business networking’ culture, having been founded in 1905 in Chicago as an informal luncheon club, before rapidly growing into a global movement.Footnote 15 The first Rotary club in the British Isles appeared shortly before the war, admitting one ‘representative’ individual from each local business or profession with the aim of creating a cross-section of leading citizens who would put their influence to good use in the local, national, and even international community. This entailed upholding high ethical standards as businessmen and employers, philanthropic work in the community, and building friendships with Rotarians overseas.Footnote 16 By the eve of the Second World War, Rotary's membership stood at 21,000 spread over 450 clubs. On the weight of numbers alone, Rotary could not hope to rival the older homosocial networks of Freemasonry, whose membership in this period possibly ran into the hundreds of thousands.Footnote 17 But Rotary prided itself on encouraging a higher level of civic engagement and a forward-looking approach amongst its members, whereas Freemasonry, as Rotary's monthly journal suggested, ‘deliberately focusses attention on old-world happenings, long since past and done for, and has no time to spare for the crowding problems and the mighty achievements of to-day’.Footnote 18 A further mark of the movement's modernity was the frequent use of members' Christian names and its relatively relaxed attitude towards including wives and daughters in club life.Footnote 19
This identification with modernity was shared by other new civic movements. One such was Round Table, which adapted the Rotary ‘service club’ model for younger men; another was Soroptimist International, which did the same for women in business and the professions.Footnote 20 The Scout and Guide Associations, although established in the Edwardian period, might also be added to this list, as they shed much of their more chauvinistic overtones after 1918 in favour of a new emphasis on class harmony, ‘good turns’, and world brotherhood, and grew massively as a result.Footnote 21 Nor was this an exclusively secular phenomenon; prominent Anglicans such as Philip ‘Tubby’ Clayton and William Temple developed new institutional vehicles for the renewal of Christian social action, often on ecumenical lines. The former led Toc H, an inter-denominational body founded during the war which subsequently provided club-life for young men recently arrived for employment in Britain's largest cities as well as opportunities for volunteering in various worthy schemes.Footnote 22 In 1924 Temple orchestrated the ecumenical Christian Conference on Politics, Economics, and Citizenship (Copec) for the purpose of rallying Christian bodies behind a new social gospel focused on solving the distinctive problems of the post-war world.Footnote 23
All these civic movements displayed a keen interest in the work of the fourth of our selected organizations, the League of Nations Union (LNU). The popular internationalism so striking of the interwar period largely drew its succour from one institution, the League of Nations, established after the war as a means of settling disputes between nations peacefully. The popularity of the League amongst the British public was due in no small part to the efforts of the LNU, founded in 1918 as an independent, non-party pressure group and rapidly becoming by far the largest associational presence of the interwar peace movement. Led by the charismatic Tory minister and later peer, Lord Robert Cecil, and by the Oxford classicist and Liberal, Gilbert Murray, the LNU aimed to educate the British public on international affairs and to persuade the British government to root its foreign policy in the collective system represented by the League.Footnote 24 LNU leaders believed that universal suffrage, set alongside the principles of publicity and transparency on which the League was founded, offered the potential for a far-reaching democratization of foreign policy in Britain.Footnote 25 This was to be achieved by building a broad-based, genuinely ‘mass’ movement, a vision which the LNU came close to realizing in the early 1930s when its individual membership peaked at over 400,000 and affiliated corporate membership comprised more than 3,000 bodies of various kinds, with a particularly strong showing from church congregations.Footnote 26 Local LNU activities ranged from large public meetings with keynote speakers to garden parties, study circles, and peace-themed amateur dramatics.
II
The LNU, like the NFWI, the British Legion, and Rotary, thus belonged to the wider associational world of civic sociability, a world in which the political parties sought to extend their presence after the war in a bid to spread partisan identification amongst the mass electorate. These four organizations, however, located themselves firmly outside this process. WIs observed a bar on all party-political topics at monthly meetings in order that, as the movement's journal, Home and Country put it, ‘all country women, Conservative, Labour and Liberal, may meet together and discuss freely questions of general interest and importance’.Footnote 27 The British Legion's very foundation in 1920 was the product of widespread concern that the partisan alignment of existing ex-servicemen's organizations had bred disunity.Footnote 28 It too insisted on strict non-partisanship within branch life so as to ensure, in the words of one spokesman, that ‘the most hide bound Tory and extreme Communist could meet as members in perfect amity’.Footnote 29 At Rotary luncheons party politics was a proscribed topic, and clubs were forbidden to request potential new recruits to declare any political affiliations. The LNU, with its constitutional commitment to educating ‘citizens of all parties and of none’, always presented the League of Nations as an institution which partisans of all colours and creeds could support. ‘In the service of our cause’, read one LNU publication, ‘there is neither Conservative nor Liberal nor Socialist … There is only a body of men and women pledged to a life of devotion to the ideal of a world order, based upon justice collectively administered and enforced.’Footnote 30
This policy of non-partisanship was also reflected in the four organizations' external relations. Strict rules governed the affiliation of individual WIs to outside bodies in order to eliminate unwelcome political influence, and collective canvassing of candidates by Institutes at election time was discouraged. This cautious stance was shared by other women's organizations of the period, reflecting continuity with the non-party traditions of the pre-war suffrage campaign. Ada Nield Chew, for example, recalled in 1920 how the hostility of male politicians had forced her and her fellow Suffragists to ‘detach ourselves more or less from party’, adding that ‘the non-party habit of thought pursues us even in these days of enfranchisement’.Footnote 31 This did not mean, however, that the WIs were hostile to party altogether. ‘Outside the Institute’, a Home and Country editorial declared, ‘the individual has the right to join any party she considers likely to adopt the best methods to carry into effect measures or reforms on which she has formed a considered opinion and which seem to her to be necessary for the wise building up of the state’.Footnote 32 The NFWI worked happily with party women through umbrella organizations like the National Council of Women (also resolutely non-party) and the Consultative Committee of Women's Organizations on a range of campaigns relating to equal pay, widows' pensions, and a married woman's right to work.Footnote 33 Action on such cross-party agendas was acceptable, but on politically divisive issues, such as birth control or protective labour legislation, the Institutes were to adopt a position of strict neutrality. ‘Every Institute member, no matter how strong a party politician she may be as an individual’, Home and Country told readers, ‘must remember the Institute is a school where the students want to gain knowledge of every side of the subjects discussed in order to fit themselves to become useful citizens.’Footnote 34
Rotary, like the NFWI, encouraged members as private individuals to stand for municipal office in order that the much vaunted ‘Rotary spirit’ might be extended further into the community, but direct interventions by clubs into local politics were discouraged.Footnote 35 By contrast, the Legion and the LNU were both willing to countenance canvassing by branches of candidates and sitting MPs, usually by issuing questionnaires at election time as a means of obtaining declarations of support. Care, however, was to be taken to ensure these interventions did not slide over into partisanship; Legion headquarters circularized every branch with details of a speech made by Lister, in October 1922, which informed members that ‘what was absolutely essential to avoid was members utilising a branch of the British Legion to further their own political views and, despite the favourable replies of all candidates, issuing some recommendations based on prejudice or party feeling’.Footnote 36 Similarly, when Cecil wrote to LNU branch secretaries in 1933 to suggest the forming of ‘constituency committees’ for the purpose of lobbying MPs, he stressed that ‘such a committee should be composed of three persons belonging to different political parties. Or, at the very least, a “constituency representative” should be chosen who is not himself prominently identified with any political party.’Footnote 37 This emphasis on cross-party representation was replicated across the Union's entire structure of internal governance and efforts were made to ensure that all three major parties were represented on platforms at LNU events.Footnote 38
The rationale behind such strictures was the belief, held by the leaders of all four organizations, that the unrestrained expression of partisan identities would threaten the unity and effectiveness of their movements. The viability of their organizations was understood to rest on their ability to create a distinctive kind of sociability, and to defend it from what were perceived to be the destructive forces of partisanship. This position did not resemble the sort of anti-party attitudes propounded in the 1930s by figures like Oswald Mosley or Stephen Spender, who believed all institutions of liberal democracy, including parliament itself, to be rotten to the core.Footnote 39 Rather, these organizations wished to keep party politics compartmentalized, and to preserve a place within associational life for creating responsible and publicly engaged citizens free from the demands and discipline of a party machine. Contemporaries attested to these organizations' wider civic function in educating individuals for citizenship. Surveying the field of voluntary action in 1938, social studies lecturer Constance Braithwaite wrote:
in active participation in any voluntary democratic organisation, the member learns to listen patiently and peaceably to expressions of opinion with which he disagrees, to abide by the result of a majority vote, to contribute to a joint decision, to elect representatives and to trust them when elected, and to judge and act in relation to the good of the organisation as a whole instead of in relation to his own interests.Footnote 40
III
Lady Denman or Lord Cecil could hardly have put it better themselves. Yet, how much store should we set by this highly idealized interpretation of the democratic function of non-party organizations such as the four surveyed here? And how far should we accept their professed commitment to pluralism and non-partisanship at face value? During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the political fault-lines of gender, class, and sectarian religion ran squarely through the arena of associational voluntarism, exposing, sometimes starkly, the limits of participatory or inclusive ideals.Footnote 41 Certain kinds of association, such as the ‘Phil and Lit’ societies which flourished in many cities, the mid-Victorian Working Men's Clubs and, to some extent, the early trade union and Co-operative movements, strove to uphold the cause of secular and non-partisan sociability in a manner similar to our inter-war case studies.Footnote 42 However, this neutrality became harder to sustain after the Second Reform Act of 1867, when the Liberal and Conservative parties alike sought to build durable electoral coalitions by cultivating extra-party allies alongside their own auxiliary organizations, in the former case through the chapel, temperance society, and crusading pressure group, and in the latter through the church, pub, and football club.Footnote 43 In Wolverhampton, for instance, Conservatives were successful in tapping into local issues, playing on gendered lifestyles, building on workplace relationships, and deploying ‘non-political’ discourses in their bid to transform electors' wider social identities into political, or, more precisely, party-political, loyalties.Footnote 44
If this politicization of the structures of civic sociability was behind the formation of the political sociology of late Victorian Britain, we might, then, wish to look at the participatory forms pioneered by ‘non-party’ movements of the period after 1918 in the same light. In his book, Classes and cultures (1998), Ross McKibbin offers a highly suggestive interpretive framework for analysing the political significance of certain forms of self-consciously ‘non-party’ association during this period.Footnote 45 In brief, he views the professedly non-political character of many of the associations frequented by the middle classes, amongst which he counts Rotary alongside Freemasonry, the Chambers of Commerce, and a wide array of suburban sports clubs, as serving to shore up the anti-socialist mentalities of their members and thus to reinforce the electoral hegemony of the Conservative party. These organizations represented a social forum which integrated men of different backgrounds and occupational status into a shared middle-class culture, a function achieved by ‘the elimination of divisive or “embarrassing” behaviour’, as well as by the exclusion from conversation of potentially divisive topics, such as party politics and sectarian religion.Footnote 46
This tendency to depoliticize social relationships was, in fact, McKibbin argues, deeply political, signalling the ‘informal Conservative hold on bourgeois associational life’ which, crucially, now took in the previously Liberal-voting nonconformist elements of the middle classes.Footnote 47 As a process, it mirrored at grassroots the discursive elision of Conservatism and the ‘national interest’ achieved in the public language of Conservative party leader and prime minister Stanley Baldwin and helped to reinforce the idea that ‘it was the Labour Party which dragged “politics” into everything, which took everything so “seriously”’.Footnote 48 This dichotomy was reflected too in the ostensibly non-partisan labels often adopted by anti-socialist alliances in local politics, whereby Labour candidates would find themselves up against opponents from the ‘Citizen's Party’, the ‘Municipal’ or ‘Ratepayers’ Alliance, or a nominal ‘Independent’.Footnote 49 This discursive strategy identifying anti-socialism with the ‘public’ interest achieved perhaps its greatest success in the ‘National’ label given to the Conservative-dominated governments which kept Labour out of power between 1931 and the outbreak of the Second World War.Footnote 50 In other words, according to McKibbin, the non-partisan space occupied by Rotary and its ilk between the wars was a middle-class, Conservative, space, and the non-partisan values these organizations inculcated were middle-class, Conservative, values. We should see them, in this sense, as unofficial auxiliaries of the party, affiliated in all but name, doing covertly for Conservatism what the trade union and Co-operative movements did openly for Labour.
How far do our four organizations support this line of analysis? Whilst Rotary features prominently in his account, McKibbin does not specifically address the other three, which held similar views on the necessity of excluding political controversy from social intercourse, although their memberships were not exclusively middle class. The criticisms levelled at the WIs and the British Legion by contemporaries, however, would imply at first glance that the framework might well be usefully extended. Some Labour activists were alarmed at the inroads made by many non-party associations amongst their ‘natural’ constituency of the working class. In 1920, for example, the Labour Women's Conference passed a resolution urging ‘all women in industrial organisations to become members of the political Labour movement, and to avoid dissipating their energies in non-party political organisations’.Footnote 51 The WIs were singled out for criticism by R. B. Walker, the general secretary of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, who insisted in the Daily Herald in 1922 that they were working ‘insidiously against the Labour Party and the trade unions, and in favour of “leaving things as they are”’.Footnote 52 Margaret Llewellyn Davies, a leading figure in the Women's Co-operative Guild, echoed the sentiment. In her view, the Institutes were ‘powerless to promote economic independence while the squire and the parson dominate the countryside’, whereas her own movement, with its roots in the Co-operative tradition, she argued, had a stronger track record in improving the lives of working-class housewives.Footnote 53
The suspicion that reactionary forces lurked beneath the innocuous ‘non-party’ label was voiced also in relation to the British Legion. Some commentators on the left viewed its militaristic trappings and (in their view) paternalistic relief work as operating in direct opposition to their own socialist cause. In the early 1920s, the Daily Herald invited readers to send in accounts of British Legion activities in their towns and villages, and a steady stream of letters followed, telling of branches refusing to admit socialists, openly endorsing Conservative candidates at elections, or even using unemployed ex-servicemen to break strikes.Footnote 54 One correspondent from London wrote: ‘The British Legion's advertisement should read “non-Labour” and not “non-political”.’Footnote 55 Another from Swansea concurred: ‘The British Legion is not of Labour, therefore it must be against Labour.’Footnote 56 Similar charges were levelled at the ‘uniformed’ youth movements – the Scouts, Guides, OTCs, Cadets, and so forth – which Labour activists believed were indoctrinating children in militarism and anti-socialism. Leslie Paul, founder of the socialist children's group the Woodcraft Folk, estimated that between 1·3 and 1·5 m were enrolled in such organizations and remarked: ‘Each, of course, is careful to make a show of political neutrality. But a glance at their subscription lists quickly reveals who approve of their activities.’Footnote 57
IV
These fears recalled a much older set of leftist anxieties about the ‘apathetic’ character of large sections of the working class, and their perceived vulnerability to the lure of commercialized leisure, the chauvinistic popular press, and the paternalistic agendas of middle-class social reformers.Footnote 58 For many years, these anxieties were reproduced by historians of the late Victorian and Edwardian urban working class, and are present too in McKibbin's account of inward-looking working-class communities between the wars, whose members preferred to view their material circumstances in personal and localized rather than collective and ideological terms.Footnote 59 But whilst the four organizations surveyed here might superficially fit into this class-based framework, upon closer examination weaknesses in the argument begin to appear. Starting with Rotary, the most conspicuously ‘middle class’ of the four, McKibbin draws on a reference in A. A. Jackson's Semi-detached London (1973) to suggest the movement's close links with grassroots anti-socialism. In deepest suburban Edgware, Jackson finds, one of the key movers behind the formation of a Rotary club in 1930 was local builder and ‘independent’ anti-socialist councillor A. W. Curton, who was also an active member of the Ratepayers' Association.Footnote 60 Such connections were almost certainly not unusual. Labour could, however, comfort itself with having one Rotary vote at least, that of T. A. Cawthorne of East Ham, who wrote in to the movement's journal to protest at an editorial run the previous month which implied that Rotary was incompatible with socialism. Writing ‘as a Rotarian and a Socialist’, he asked his fellow clubmen whether Rotary is ‘not an ideal to be held aloft by Tory, Liberal, and Socialist alike?’Footnote 61 Several more Rotarians revealed themselves to be of advanced views in the early 1930s by arguing in favour of admitting trade union officials to the movement.Footnote 62
These left-leaning sorts may have been atypical, but so too were open expressions of virulent hostility to organized labour. Rotary discourse more generally emphasized the need for greater understanding between employers and men – even in the tense years of the early 1920s – and members took a strong interest in industrial welfare, profit-sharing schemes, Whitleyism, and other forms of ‘industrial democracy’.Footnote 63 Whilst none of these interests were incompatible with anti-socialism, Rotary's commitment to community work meant that relationships with local Councils of Social Service, YMCAs, and boys clubs loom far larger in the records than do any machinations in municipal politics. These local ‘good works’ – which ranged from hosting Christmas parties for the needy elderly to organizing ‘Spending for Employment’ schemes to help workless men – displayed the traditional middle-class genius for social leadership at work, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that this did far more to unite these small-town Babbitts than the politics of anti-socialism. James Hinton makes a similar point in relation to Conservative women active in the Women's Voluntary Service during the Second World War, suggesting that a commitment to public service via non-party civic associations was at least as important to these women's social identity as their anti-socialist politics, if not more so.Footnote 64
Indeed, like Labour, Conservative party workers were often alarmed by the threat which WIs posed to their own efforts at organizing rural women along partisan lines.Footnote 65 In 1920, a leader in the Conservative Agents' Journal reflected fearfully upon the growth of new organizations for women: ‘Operating under all sorts of disguises, in name non-party, but in very truth, manipulated by socialistically inclined women’, the editorial declared these bodies to be ‘to the disadvantage of our own party organisations, in money, membership, in energy and in influence.’Footnote 66 One Conservative organizer complained to an Institute member in 1924 that WI women ‘were so conscientious about the non-party rule that she often found it extremely difficult to persuade them to take part in any political work’.Footnote 67 This rather puts fears voiced on the left into perspective. Despite their undoubted passion for ‘jam and Jerusalem’, recent research reveals the WIs to have been rather less parochial in outlook than is commonly supposed. Their democratic structures were typically far less hierarchical than the average Conservative Association, initiating, as Pat Thane puts it, ‘a shift in rural power relationships among women whilst also providing experience of political organising’.Footnote 68 One chronicler of the movement reported a conversation between himself and a peeress who had suggested that ‘county women’ had, through membership of the Institutes, gained an insight into the lives of working-class women as well as having ‘learnt something about the implications of democracy, and that Socialists have the good of the country as much at heart as Conservatives’.Footnote 69 Indeed, staff members at headquarters were frequently accused by a handful of irate members of nursing leftist tendencies, as evidenced by the ‘strong bias towards Socialistic Liberalism’ which one Institute president detected in the Current Affairs column in Home and Country.Footnote 70
Whatever the political biases at headquarters, there is little doubt that WI members shared many of the same concerns as socialist women regarding rural amenities, housing stock and the social and economic status of housewives. Together with Labour Women's Sections, the Women's Co-operative Guild, and other non-party groups, the NFWI did much to turn the home into a legitimate object of public policy between the wars.Footnote 71 By the mid-1930s, even the Daily Herald had softened its stance, congratulating Lady Denman in 1934 for banning speakers from the Navy League from addressing Institute meetings.Footnote 72 In 1937 it published a letter which suggested that WIs in the south-west represented a prime recruiting ground for Labour, due to the manner in which they educated members ‘soundly on democratic lines’ and their freedom from the rule of the vicarage.Footnote 73
Nor is the portrayal of the British Legion as a bastion of reaction entirely accurate. Along with the searing condemnations, the Daily Herald's survey elicited some favourable replies from readers, including one Legion member from Birmingham, who wrote: ‘I have found more real comradeship and sincerity of effort during the three years I have been a member of the British Legion than I found in my 20 years of political activity, which I have now renounced.’Footnote 74 A journalist who had covered every meeting of the Wood Green and Southgate branch for his paper added: ‘I feel it but fair to bear my impartial testimony, that in this branch, at any rate, men of known Labour principles have had a fair show.’Footnote 75 Indeed, if the Legion's non-party rule was never entirely sacrosanct, then its violation could apparently benefit the left as well as the right. In Bury, for example, the Women's Section of the British Legion helped to campaign for and elect its secretary, Mrs E. Goodall, the wife of a trade unionist, as a Labour councillor in November 1934. ‘Councillor Goodall’, the newspaper report read,
said she was proud to be their secretary, and also that she had topped the poll with such a majority. The Section was non-political, and politics was never discussed, but she was sure she was in order in thanking the members of the British Legion and the members of the Women's Section who had worked so hard for her.Footnote 76
The difficulty of identifying the political alignment of Rotary, NFWI, and the British Legion was further demonstrated by the relationships which all three developed with the LNU. Rotary began to co-operate formally with the Union in 1925, collaborating on a number of conferences and instructing local clubs to address League topics at their luncheon meetings. There was much overlapping in personnel too. In Leicester, for example, the retired draper Ebenezer Hancock, who was founder and general-secretary of the local branch of the LNU, frequently evangelized for the League on Rotary's International Service Committee.Footnote 77 Similarly in Bury, LNU activist L. R. Strangeways persuaded his fellow Rotarians in October 1934 to donate two guineas to support the movement.Footnote 78 Well over 500 WIs were affiliated as corporate associates of the Union by the mid-1930s, and many more were addressed by LNU speakers at their meetings.Footnote 79 In some parts of the country British Legion branches took a warier stance towards the LNU, suspecting it of diehard pacifism, but at the 1928 Annual Conference the leadership encouraged members to support Union activities, and in other places relations between the organizations appeared to be strong.Footnote 80
The LNU's success in converting these three organizations to its brand of popular internationalism problematizes the case for viewing the ‘non-party’ label as merely a fig-leaf for anti-socialism. For the LNU enjoyed anything but warm relations with the Conservative party, despite frequent efforts to court Conservatives as part of its cross-party strategy. These relations became even icier in 1934 when the Union launched its famous ‘Peace Ballot’, a national referendum designed to demonstrate the strength of pro-League opinion in Britain, to which the Labour and Liberal parties – but not the Conservative – pledged their support. The Conservatives' refusal reflected in part the party's substantive reservations about the League system itself, but it also expressed deep resentment at the manner in which the LNU deployed the legitimating discourse of non-partisanship against them, presenting the Ballot as a ‘National’ declaration, supported by all sections, which would reveal the true wishes of the ‘public’ concerning their country's foreign policy.Footnote 81 This, it should be remembered, was the discursive trick which the Conservative party had historically pulled off so well; since the time of Disraeli, Conservatives promoted their credentials as the ‘National Party’, aligned with the public interest and representative of the entire community, unlike the faddist Liberals and a Labour party in thrall to the trade unions and ‘sectional’ interests.Footnote 82
In the case of the Peace Ballot, however, Conservative critics like Austen Chamberlain and Leo Amery quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the argument, primarily because they misjudged the power of the LNU's agenda to rouse Middle England as well as the usual pacifist and leftist suspects. In Eastbourne, the roll-call of organizations supporting the Ballot was impressive, including: the Scout Association, the Chamber of Commerce, the Co-operative Women's Guild, the Divisional Liberal Association, Eastbourne Brotherhood, Eastbourne Council of Women, Eastbourne Headmistresses' Association, East Dean Women's Institute, Eastbourne Temperance Council, the National British Women's Total Abstinence Union, the Ratepayers' Association, Toc H, the Trades' Council and Labour party, the Women's Liberal Council, and the YMCA.Footnote 83 This level of civic support allowed the LNU to beat off attacks from the right by stigmatizing opponents as Blimp-like diehards who, by refusing to join in, were turning a great national debate on peace into a narrow party issue. Gilbert Murray wrote to the Times in 1935 singling out Duff Cooper and Leo Amery as particularly virulent opponents and declaring: ‘It is they, not we, who are importing party politics into the business.’Footnote 84
V
The Peace Ballot arguably exemplified the new, post-war politics of pressure, in which the pre-war tactics of capturing and working through a single party were eschewed in favour of broad-based, cross-party organizing, more suited to an age of three-party politics, an expanding state bureaucracy, and a mass electorate containing what many believed to be a large section of unattached voters.Footnote 85 The rise of Labour during the 1920s and the relegation of the Liberals to third-party status, speeded, to a large extent, by the dissolution of the party's historic alliance with nonconformity, created a new political reality which was marked by considerable instability in the relationship between party labels, policies, and programmes.Footnote 86 This breaking down of older electoral alliances created new possibilities for cross-party co-operation and contact, often facilitated by Liberals or former Liberals, now bereft of a viable parliamentary vehicle and searching for alternative channels of influence.Footnote 87 As Arthur Marwick noted, the 1930s witnessed the appearance of a raft of ‘centrist’ groupings, including the Next Five Years Group, Political and Economic Planning, the short-lived National Labour Committee, Lloyd George's Councils of Action movement, the LNU, and the various efforts made in the later 1930s to form a broad-based ‘People's Front’ to resist Fascism. These all formed what Marwick called ‘middle opinion,’ and their efforts to tackle major social and economic problems across party lines draw attention, he argued, to the ‘agreement’ side of the politics of the decade.Footnote 88
The appearance of these new kinds of policy groupings was also apparent to contemporaries, such as the Liberal intellectual C. Delisle Burns, who rattled off a slightly different list in 1934, naming the Workers Educational Association, the Westminster Housing Association and the Sunlight League, along with the ever-ubiquitous LNU. ‘Each of these cuts across the traditional party divisions’, he observed, ‘and makes a new adjustment of “public opinion” towards specific purposes of public policy’.Footnote 89 As he wrote on an earlier occasion:
The new groups for some specific policy – in education or foreign affairs, for example – may make it possible for a man or woman to work for some public good which is not the main purpose of any political party. Policy on this or that point may thus be freed from party dogmatism.Footnote 90
The merits of such freedom with respect to campaigning for gender equality were repeatedly preached by interwar feminists like Eleanor Rathbone, and Headway, the LNU's monthly journal, pushed the case for suspension of party rivalries even further by promoting the idea that the wider public was increasingly turned off by narrowly partisan appeals: ‘For many years the British people have been loosening party ties and escaping from the old rigid party inhibitions’, an editorial declared in December 1934. ‘When they consider the pressing questions of the day they scrutinize and weigh the relevant facts for themselves and come to their own conclusions, neither for nor against a particular party, often without troubling to remember that parties exist.’Footnote 91
The call to put ‘country before party’ was, of course, an old one; ever since the institution of party came into being there had been those who wished to subvert or evade its disciplinary practices.Footnote 92 What made the seismic party realignment of the decades after the First World War distinctive was the unprecedented extent to which the tremors were felt throughout the entire society, touching not only the lives of the Westminster elite and party workers, but also affecting the structures of civic sociability through which hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women accessed the public sphere. Furthermore, this partisan realignment must be mapped on to a wider set of responses to the pressures and tensions facing post-war society, from widespread industrial unrest and ideological cleavage to the perceived ‘brutalization’ which four years of war had visited upon the British people. For many onlookers, the advent of universal suffrage could not have arrived at a worse time, raising the spectre of political instability and the rule of the irrational masses. Yet, as economic conditions stabilized from the early 1920s, politicians began to change the way they talked about and conceptualized the political nation, denigrating the pre-war norms of rowdiness and aggression and declaring the people's preference for calm, reasoned argument over frenzied party cries.Footnote 93 This portrayal of the mass electorate as a ‘silent majority’ was one element within a wider vision of the British as a uniquely peaceable people, hostile to the use of violence in public politics, moderate and domesticated in national temperament.Footnote 94
This shift in collective self-representation did not mirror reality in any straightforward sense: political violence did not disappear overnight and extremist ideologues succeeded in whipping up discontent amongst some sections of the public.Footnote 95 Yet, commitment from across the party spectrum to occupying and strengthening the political centre-ground distinguished the British response to the challenge of mass democracy and, later, economic depression, from that of other European nations.Footnote 96 National political continence was a narrative capacious enough to accommodate and unite the ‘Liberal Toryism’ of the Baldwinite Conservative party with the gradualism and constitutionalism of Labour, both party leaderships withstanding incursions from diehard right and radical left respectively, eschewing polarizing rhetoric in favour of gentler, more harmonious visions of the democratic public.Footnote 97 In this essentially ‘centrist’ project, politicians were joined by educationalists, religious leaders, writers, and broadcasters of all shades who wove the discursive threads of civic responsibility and selfless service into a narrative of social cohesion and national community.Footnote 98
Within this narrative, civic associations occupied a particularly special place, for they appeared in the minds of many early twentieth-century pluralist thinkers, to stand at the very heart of civic virtue and social solidarity, and were routinely invoked by politicians on both the left and right as living proof of Britain's special genius for democracy.Footnote 99 The extensive presence of WIs, Rotary, the British Legion, and the LNU in Britain's villages, suburbs, and towns thus served to ground this language of social consensus in social reality. They demonstrated both the resilience of Britain's voluntarist structures and their capacity for renewal, and served to constrain in the process the possibilities available to those who might have wanted to describe interwar society in more polarizing terms. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that their locus on the political spectrum was so hotly contested. Contemporaries could (and historians still can) read the non-partisan, non-sectarian, secular, and democratic character of these associations in at least three different ways: as the basis for a liberal project of inclusion and integration, a conservative vehicle for fostering hierarchy and deference, or a social democratic struggle to transform the prevailing relations of power within civil society. At different times and in different places, one can glimpse all three agendas at work, which explains why these associations could stand, in the eyes of both Conservative and Labour party organizers, as an opportunity as well as a threat. If our four case studies manifestly failed to remain below the radar of conventional party politics as was their stated aim, then neither did they institutionalize partisan conflict in the manner which was so disastrous in other European societies. The fact that the British Legion rejected the violent, highly politicized path travelled by ex-servicemen in other nations, that the Women's Institutes were dismayed by the ‘political bias’ and national chauvinism which they saw in German countrywomen's organizations, that British Rotarians steeled their commitment to democratic government as German and Italian Rotary Clubs were closed down by the Fascist state, and that the League of Nations Union steered away from more revolutionary forms of internationalism – the fact that none of these things happened tells us much about the distinctive character of associational life in Britain between the wars, and offers at least part of the explanation as to why the political extremism which wrecked democratic government in other countries failed to cultivate a popular base within British society.Footnote 100
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Organizations like the NFWI, the British Legion, Rotary International, and the LNU carved out a distinctive space within British associational life between the wars, providing opportunities for hundreds of thousands of men and women to participate in democratic politics without being required to invest in a partisan identity. They have been largely overlooked by political historians because this period has traditionally been understood as belonging to parties, with ‘the rise of Labour’, ‘the decline of Liberalism’, and ‘Conservative electoral hegemony’ identified as the problems requiring most urgent historical attention. From the conventional perspective of ‘high’ politics, the neglect of civic associations is arguably justified. By keeping out of party politics and believing they could wield influence from a position of political neutrality, the four organizations considered here limited their potential field of action and displayed a certain level of naivety about the way political power was exercised.Footnote 101 All four experienced more success at local level, infiltrating the committees, working groups, and other administrative structures which proliferated within the arena of local government, but even here, they were frequently hamstrung by the need to remain politically neutral.Footnote 102
Nonetheless, to the movements' leaders, defending the ideal of a common meeting ground, whatever difficulties that might entail, seemed more important than intervening directly in the political process and risking internal dissension as a result. Ultimately, this calculated compromise was the defining characteristic of these associations and the key to understanding their relationship to the wider political culture of the period. Undoubtedly, more research on a greater number of associations would further enrich this account of organized sociability and political participation. Yet, the analysis presented in this article is sufficient in itself to remind us that Britain's historical transformation into a democratic society engaged a wide range of actors and agencies in multiple forms of activity, of which joining or supporting a political party was only one. Whilst this was true too of the Victorian era, with its rich worlds of extra-parliamentary pressure and civic activism, 1918 marked a turning point in so far as the achievement of universal political citizenship supplied a new impetus for the creation of mass, broad-based, voluntary associations; these subsequently became integral to the political culture of Britain's nascent mass democracy and, as such, deserve far greater attention from historians of modern British politics than they have hitherto received.
