Writing to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, 3 Dec. 1841, Thomas Attwood summarised his career as an agitator and parliamentarian by saying ‘that for near 30 years, the first object of my life has been to obtain a modification of the Currency, and that all my political labours have been mainly subsidiary to that great end’.
Of Worcestershire stock, Attwood’s grandfather George had moved to Halesowen, Shropshire, in the mid-eighteenth century to mine coal and iron ore, and the family later diversified into land and commerce. In 1791, his father and Isaac Spooner established a bank at Birmingham, which Attwood joined at a young age. Spooner’s son Richard, MP for Birmingham 1844-7 and North Warwickshire 1847-64, was a colleague of Attwood’s in the business, as well as a friend, political comrade, and later, adversary.
Attwood’s first contribution to economic debate came through his 1816 pamphlet, The Remedy, and he soon became one of the leading opponents of the resumption of cash payments (making paper notes convertible into gold), which he thought would depress prices and consequently profits, wages and employment. For the remainder of his political career, he always argued that the rigid and restrictive monetary system instituted in 1819 was at the root of the distress and severe fluctuations of the time. Although he was often accused of advocating unrestricted paper money and inflation, Attwood envisaged a managed currency, with the circulation judiciously adjusted by the government or a state bank, to secure prosperity and full employment.
In the 1820s, Attwood lobbied government and Parliament, the latter with the aid of his elder brother Matthias, Tory MP for Callington at this time, for a change in monetary policy, but faced powerful opponents, notably the economist David Ricardo and the influential minister William Huskisson, later president of the board of trade, who combined against him to good effect when he gave evidence to the 1821 committee on agriculture.
Returned unopposed as a Reformer for Birmingham at the 1832 general election, Attwood was soon disillusioned with the reformed Parliament, telling his son, 9 Feb. 1833, ‘I am quite disgusted with the King’s speech’.
He is a man of one idea … Hence, whatever the subject of debate … he is sure … to lug in a small-note currency, and to hammer away at the idea through at least three-fourths of his speech, whether long or short. […] As a speaker, Mr. Attwood does not rank high. He speaks with sufficient ease, and his language, without being polished, is tolerably correct; but he has a broad, gruff, unearthly voice, aggravated by a strong provincial pronunciation, which sounds strangely in the ears of those who hear him. […] The word Birmingham he always, in the broadest possible accent, pronounces “Brummagem”; and this, too, though every time he does it, he is greeted with the loud laughter of the House. […] He is middle-sized, and proportionally stout. His face has not an intellectual expression. Like his pronunciation, it is “countrified”. It is of an angular conformation. His hair and his complexion are both dark.
J. Grant, Recollections of the House of Commons (1837), 292, 293-4.
Attwood’s attempt to use his membership of the select committee on manufactures, commerce and shipping to press his case was equally unsuccessful and he later described the inquiry and that on the state of agriculture as ‘complete humbugs’.
Although his strident criticism, conspiratorial mindset, wild rhetoric and poor tactics, as well as his radical and unorthodox views, meant that Attwood made a bad impression in his first session, much of the derision he faced stemmed from snobbery, particularly towards his provincial accent, and his critics preferred to ignore or marginalise him, such as when he was counted out, 3 July 1834, rather than engage with his arguments.
Party distinctions were largely irrelevant for Attwood because the measures he most objected to, such as Irish coercion, the 1834 new Poor Law, which he thought ‘monstrous’, and above all the renewal of the Bank Charter Act in 1833, were passed with the support of the Whig and Tory frontbenches.
Attwood’s commitment to currency reform remained undiminished, however, and once signs of economic distress became apparent in 1837, he lobbied the Whig government through three memorials to the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, and moved as an amendment during a debate on the Irish poor law bill, that the present monetary system was inadequate, 5 June 1837.
A weary Attwood removed to Jersey in autumn 1839, and resigned as MP that December, telling his constituents that he had retired as ‘I found it utterly impossible to do any good to my country by honest means, either within … or without the walls of Parliament’.