Wason’s family had benefited from the growth of the iron industry in West Derby, Lancashire, and reciprocal toll exemptions available to Bristol and Liverpool freemen. His maternal grandfather Peter Rigby (d. 1794) was mayor of Liverpool, 1774-5, when the corporation negotiated the purchase of a reversionary interest in the lordship of Liverpool from the 1st earl of Sefton; and in February 1777 he himself bought the reversion of properties in Lord Street for less than £7,000.
He speaks with some rapidity and is usually fluent enough in his utterance, but at times he hesitates a little. His language is unpolished ... but his style is correct. He is not wordy; he expresses himself with great conciseness, and is always clear, were he sufficiently audible in his statements and arguments. He is not a man of superior intellect but he has a sound judgement ... [and is] exemplary in his attention to his parliamentary duties.
[J. Grant], Random Recollections of Commons (1838), ii. 61-66.
Wason’s particular interests in 1831-2 lay in supporting reform and the bill to prevent bribery and treating at Liverpool, opposing the anatomy bill, promoting the Westminster improvement scheme and re-establishing Ipswich’s right to hold the assizes. He was praised by The Times when, on 29 June 1831, the paymaster general and architect of the reform bill Lord John Russell wrote conceding his request that half-yearly rate payments should not be a prerequisite for qualification as £10 voters.
You would be amused at the issue of Benett’s resolutions. Wason came into the House with all the pomp and circumstance of a judge about to record the final sentence of disfranchisement against the freemen. He was armed with a large black book in mourning for the carpenters and other victims of his legislative justice. Great was his wrath when John Wood so promptly put an end to the proceedings; and he seemed well disposed to quarrel with me. This I shall avoid as much as I should his acquaintance.
Manchester New Coll. Oxf., William Shepherd mss VII, f. 53.
He voted for the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July. Opposing the issue of a new Liverpool writ, he made his first speech on the prevalence of bribery and corruption there, 8 July, when he urged Members not to take pity on the borough merely because it was a large, populous town.
contribute only £32,151 in taxes and contain only 50,000 inhabitants ... 12,000 voters would return a sixth of the Members of this House. Looking to these facts, I say that it is impossible that schedule B should remain a final measure in a reformed Parliament. The only way I see by which we can prevent the rediscussion of it, is to make the boroughs in that schedule contributory boroughs; and instead of returning 39 Members, to return only 16, giving to each borough a constituency of about 800 voters.
Claiming that he was not ‘bound hand and foot to the bill’, he voted in the minority for awarding Stoke-on-Trent two Members, 4 Aug., and suggested doing the same for all towns in schedule D because of their large numbers of £10 houses. He made a point, when Whitehaven was considered, 6 Aug., of asking the anti-reformer John Croker if he would seek separate representation for neighbouring Workington, Harrington and Bissington, and proposed enfranchising Toxteth Park independently of Liverpool. He withdrew the motion for want of government support, but his speech, drawing parallels with Gateshead, to which the bill accorded separate representation from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was extensively reported in the Liverpool press.
He divided for the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831, and for its details. Referring to Ipswich, which had ‘only 800 persons assessed to the rates at £10 and upwards ... but about 1,800 who occupy houses of the value of £10 and upwards’, 3 Feb. 1832, he opposed Denison’s amendment settling the £10 householder qualification on particular properties in each borough, and another raising the qualification to £15 in boroughs where the number of £10 houses exceeded 500; but he now conceded that £10 was ‘too low a franchise for Liverpool’, where rents were high, properties frequently subdivided and poor rate assessments ‘fiddled’ to prevent large families becoming chargeable on the parish. His amendment clarifying the residence qualification of freeman voters retaining their franchise under the bill was deemed ‘advantageous and proper to be adopted’, 7 Feb. Another preventing metropolitan police officers from voting until 12 months after retirement was rejected outright, 8 Feb.; and one limiting polling to one day in constituencies with electorates below 1,000 was defeated by 95-1, 15 Feb. He recommended sorting voters ‘by alphabet’ rather than ‘by district’ in Liverpool, 15 Feb., thought Totnes should take Dartmouth’s place in schedule B, 23 Feb., and, in a renewed call for the enfranchisement of Toxteth Park, 28 Feb., he asked for maps of Bath, Bristol and Liverpool to be made available for scrutiny before the House divided on the separate enfranchisement of Gateshead and Salford. He explained that unlike last year, when there were 30 ‘vacancies’, there were now none, and he therefore wished to combine Salford with Manchester and Gateshead with Newcastle; he spoke and voted against awarding a Member to Gateshead, 5 Mar. At the bill’s third reading, 22 Mar., when he divided in the government majority, he reaffirmed his commitment to it, despite his opposition to separating Gateshead and Newcastle and to particular clauses. He spoke in passing of his support for Sadler’s bill to regulate child labour. Later in the debate, he repudiated a suggestion by the anti-reformer Sugden that ministers had enfranchised £10 householders who paid rent quarterly in order to pacify the political unions, and explained that he himself had secured the concession, two days before the unions had raised the problem, by bringing to the attention of ministers the case of ‘a property belonging to my family and myself situated in the best part of Liverpool, and amounting to £10,000 per annum, for which not a single tenant would have had the right of voting, all the rents being paid quarterly’. He voted for the address calling on the king to appoint only ministers who would carry the reform bill unimpaired, 10 May, and against a Conservative amendment to the Scottish measure, 1 June. He said he would vote to retain the proposed £300 property qualification for parliamentary candidates in the Scottish districts of burghs, 22 June 1832.
The editor of the Albion had speculated from the outset ‘whether his motive is actuated by private pique or by public principle’, and by 1832 it was rumoured at Westminster that Wason’s agent had admitted that he was promoting the Liverpool disfranchisement bill so that he could subsequently take legal action against individuals to recover penalties.
Wason’s liberalism generally ‘stopped short of radicalism’,
Wason was returned for Ipswich as a Liberal at the general election of 1832, petitioned successfully following his defeat there in 1835 by Fitzroy Kelly, who challenged him to a duel, and was re-elected at the ensuing by-election. His ‘match extraordinary’ in 1837 with Kelly, commemorated in MacLean’s cartoon ‘Cock-a-doodle-do practising the bar’, left them both without seats. Wason topped the poll at Ipswich in 1841, but was unseated on petition, and he did not stand for Parliament again. He remained a member of the Reform Club, ‘ever conspicuous and attractive on the hustings’.