Brighton

Economic and social profile:

Brighton, or Brighthelmstone as it was also known, was a fashionable coastal resort shaped by the social and architectural excesses of the ‘Prince of pleasure’ (later George IV) and his Royal Pavilion. A bathing place since the mid-eighteenth century, Brighton’s population was ‘chiefly engaged’ in serving its myriad visitors and catering for the ‘season’, which ran from October to March, when high-society descended on its regency villas in droves. There was also a substantial fishing fleet of about 100 boats and a surprising number of agricultural workers employed on inland farms.S. Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of England (1844), i. 361; J. A. Sheppard, ‘Agricultural workers in mid nineteenth-century Brighton’, Agricutural History Review, liv (2006), 93-104; A. Dale, Fashionable Brighton 1820-60 (1987), 18. The completion of the London and Brighton railway in 1841 transformed Brighton’s communications with the capital, and aided by subsequent branch lines and the formation of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Company, which based its engineering works in the town, a new breed of summer holidaymakers and day-trippers began to visit in ever-increasing numbers.Sheppard, ‘Agricultural workers’, 94; Dale, Fashionable Brighton, 18.

Commuting also took hold and by the mid-1850s the lord mayor of London was referring to Brighton as ‘the marine suburb of the metropolis’, owing to the ‘great many’ citizens who ‘went to town to transact their business and returned in the evening’.Morning Chron., 20 Dec. 1855 Tensions between upper-class society and the influx of newcomers were initially allayed by the periodic nature of the season. Inevitably, however, the two increasingly ran into each other and high society began to migrate elsewhere, a development neatly captured by the fate of the Pavilion itself, abandoned from the mid-1840s.Dale, Fashionable Brighton, 17-18. As the Whig diarist Creevey had commented a few years earlier, ‘Now for Brighton. Barry my dear it is detestable: the crowd of unknown human beings is not to be endured ... I have a strong touch of melancholy in comparing Brighton of the present with times gone by’.Creevey Papers, ed. H. Maxwell (1903), ii. 325.

Electoral history:

Brighton never quite shook off its reputation as undeserving of borough representation.As late as the 1860s the constituency was still being held up as ‘a caution against ... any hasty and unadvised experiments on the representative system’: Morning Post, 12 Feb. 1864. Originally allocated one seat by the Grey ministry’s reform bill, but upgraded to two to assist with the arithmetic of redistribution, its enfranchisement in 1832 was derided by the bill’s critics, who contrasted the ‘toy, lemonade, and jelly shops of Brighton’ and the ‘petty interests of its keepers of circulating libraries and vendors of oranges’ with the claims of great commercial centres, such as Stockton-on-Tees, which remained unrepresented. Other objections were that it had a wildly ‘fluctuating’ population and out of season reverted to being ‘a mere fishing town’, that it already ‘influenced the return of one member for Sussex’, and that ‘if Brighton was enfranchised, Margate and other places of fashionable resort would have an equal right to representatives’.Hansard, 5 Mar. 1832, vol. 10, cc. 1119-21; 22 May 1832, vol. 12, c. 1259. Although the subject of a pioneering study of constituency politics by Norman Gash in 1939, Brighton’s doubtful parliamentary pedigree, reinforced by Gash’s contention that it quickly became a pocket borough of the crown, has left it poorly served in recent scholarship.N. Gash, ‘The influence of the crown at Windsor and Brighton in the elections of 1832, 1835, and 1837’, EHR, liv. (1939), 653-63. See also the similar account in N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1953), 384-92. Yet its distinctive system of local government, social tensions, and court connections ensured that its politics became highly contested, revolving around key issues of the day such as the new poor law, Chartism, municipal reform and even an early foretaste of women’s suffrage. Many of these, however, tended to cut across traditional party-lines at the local level, and during this period Brighton became something of a haven for independently-minded MPs.

Brighton’s first election of 1832 attracted five contenders, all of whom were resident. First in the field was Isaac Newton Wigney, a leading figure in the elected commission that governed the town and co-proprietor of its largest bank, Wigney and Co. Widely seen as the front runner, Wigney stood as an advanced Liberal but was nevertheless considered too moderate by some radicals, including the leaders of Brighton’s Political Union, which had been established in September 1831 to agitate not only for the reform bill, but also for universal suffrage, the secret ballot, shorter parliaments, free trade and tax reductions.See N. LoPatin, Political Unions, Popular Politics and the Great Reform Act of 1832 (1999), 83. Their adopted candidate was the ‘ultra-radical’ George Faithfull, a prominent solicitor, Dissenting minister and long-standing associate of Thomas Read Kemp MP, developer of the fashionable new suburb of Kemptown.Dale, Fashionable Brighton, 52-6, 110. Faithfull’s main rival for the second seat (assuming that Wigney headed the poll), was the ‘moderate reformer’ George Richard Pechell of Castle Goring, a wealthy half-pay navy captain and equerry to Queen Adelaide, whose brother Sir Samuel John Brooke Pechell, a Whig minister, was the royal nominee at Windsor. Whether or not Pechell also secured official crown backing is unclear - it was later reported that William IV ‘expressly forbade any of his court to interfere’ - but the Political Union made Pechell and the court their prime target, in what became a highly vitriolic campaign.The Times, 14 Nov; Freeman’s Jnl. 20 Dec. 1832. The appearance of yet another reform candidate, William Crawford, a native of Brighton who had made a fortune in India, prompted the Tories into action, and sensing an opportunity another town commissioner Sir Adolphus John Dalrymple, late MP for a Scottish pocket borough, offered as a self-styled ‘Peelite Conservative’. His role as a military attaché to the king did nothing to dampen the ‘revolutionary mania’ against the court being stirred up by the Union, as a result of which, as one newspaper commented, ‘The question is become whether loyalty or republicanism shall prevail’.The Times, 14 Nov.; Morning Post, 10 Dec. 1832.

The ensuing contest was so rowdy that no speeches were heard or reported. At the nomination, where Faithfull arrived behind a column of marchers from the Political Union, Pechell’s ‘colours were torn to shreds’ by a ‘villainous mob’, who threw missiles at the ‘unpopular candidates’, causing serious injuries. By the end of the first day, during which ‘drunkenness and revelry’ held ‘almost permanent sway’, Wigney had secured 486 votes, Pechell 412, and Faithfull 401, leaving Crawford and Dalrymple far behind on 224 and 23. Next day, however, Faithfull secured a firm lead over Pechell, whose supporters were ‘pelted’ with stones ‘as they came up to poll’.Morning Post, 12, 13 Dec. 1832. The return of ‘two radicals’, amidst such ‘shameful scenes’, seemed to justify all the forebodings of those who had opposed Brighton’s enfranchisement. ‘Some very bad characters have been returned, among the worst Faithfull here’, noted Greville, who was in Brighton at the time.Greville Mems., ed. H. Reeve (1879), ii. 335. ‘The new borough of Brighton’, observed the Tory diarist Raikes, ‘under the very nose of the court has returned two most decided Radicals, Wigney and Faithfull, who talk openly of reducing the allowance made to the King and Queen’.Raikes Jnl., i. 123. Rumours of a petition against the return, on the grounds of intimidation and bribery, however, came to nothing.

William IV’s controversial replacement of the Whigs in November 1834 with a Conservative ministry under Peel inevitably rekindled anti-court sentiment at the 1835 election, when Wigney and Faithfull, who promised to ‘resist Toryism, whatever form it may take’, both stood again.Morning Chron., 15 Dec. 1834. By now, however, their followers had become divided, owing to differences over the repeal of the malt tax, (which Wigney had failed to support), Wigney’s ‘equivocal’ attitude towards the Whig government’s new poor law and his growing association with Pechell, about which a ‘violent quarrel’ erupted in the local press.Morning Chron., 13 Sept. 1833; Brighton Patriot, 17 Mar. 1835. Pechell, who had been cultivating the borough, also offered again, but his hopes of exploiting ‘the rupture between the friends of Mr. Wigney and Faithfull’ were complicated by the change of ministry, which he could hardly oppose whilst retaining his position at court. As one paper put it, ‘if he again professes to come forward on Whig principles, why does he hold office under the Tories?’Morning Chron., 29 Dec. 1834; 1 Jan. 1835. (He was one of the few Whig courtiers not to resign on Peel’s appointment as prime minister.) Sensing another opening, Dalrymple again came forward as a loyal supporter of the new ministry and began canvassing with the premier’s brother Lawrence Peel. His hopes of securing royal backing, however, were scuppered by the king’s private secretary Sir Herbert Taylor, who, after obtaining assurances about Pechell’s future conduct, opted to back Pechell alone.The episode is recounted more fully in Gash, ‘The influence of the Crown’, 659-61 and Politics in the Age of Peel, 385-6 on which this section draws heavily. Pechell’s address ambiguously hoped that ‘reform principles’ would be ‘carried into effect whatever men govern this country’, and his party affiliation led to much ribaldry in the local press.Parliamentary Test Book (1835), 121. His eagerly anticipated grilling on the hustings, however, failed to materialise after he fractured his leg and had to be nominated in absentia. Commenting on his convenient escape over dinner a few days later, Lord Albemarle, an ex-courtier, observed that Pechell’s broken leg had ‘served him in good stead’, to which the wit Horace Smith retorted that ‘it was the only leg he had to stand on’.G. Thomas, Fifty years of my life (1876), ii. 316-7.

After a ‘severe contest’, Pechell was returned in first place, ‘greatly ahead’ of all the other candidates, amidst allegations of ‘unconstitutional interference’ by the court, including ‘exclusive dealing’, and rumours that £20,000 had been at his disposal.Morning Chron., 17 Dec. 1834; The Times, 9 Jan., Morning Post, 26 Jan. 1835. Wigney’s election in second place, a mere 40 votes ahead of the Tory Dalrymple, and the defeat of Faithfull in fourth place appalled the radicals, who amongst other things blamed the voter registration system and set about raising a penny subscription ‘for the purpose of getting the £10 householders registered, in the event of another election, by paying their taxes’.Hants. Advertiser, 14 Feb. 1835. (Brighton had one of the highest compounding levels in England, whereby all houses of less than £20 annual value had their rates collected or ‘compounded’ as part of the rent, forcing householders to pay separately - and slightly more - if they wished to appear in the rate books used to compile the electoral registers.)E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-Century Urban Government (1973), 11.

Both Pechell, who petulantly supported Peel before the reinstatement of the Whig ministry in April 1835, and Dalrymple were attacked mercilessly by the radical press over the ensuing months, most conspicuously by the Brighton Patriot, which following the formation of a Conservative Association at the Old Ship on 4 May 1835, presided over by Sir David Scott, launched a campaign for the establishment of an ‘Independent Election Club’.On Pechell’s difficult relationship with the Peel ministry see Gash, ‘The influence of the Crown’, 659-61. ‘The Conservatives’, they warned, ‘are silently, but perseveringly at work and it is time that the reformers were up and stirring ... The battle, as Blackwood’s states, is to be fought in the registration courts, and the Tories are indefatigable in their exertions to get their voters registered ... The reformers have much to do in this respect and they sadly require organisation’.See Brighton Patriot, 17 Mar., 14 Apr., 19 May, 3 Nov. 1835. Whether or not this club ever took root is unclear, but there is little doubt that the activities of the Conservatives, aided by their regular social events and a large contingent of clergy, allowed them to gain the upper hand in the annual registration revisions of 1835 and 1836.See, for example, the ‘Brighton Conservative Festival’ reported in The Times, 24 May 1837. Moreover, Tory gains on the elected board of guardians that ran Brighton’s system of poor relief, culminating in a ‘total defeat of the Whigs’ in May 1837, gave the Tories important advantages in the administration of poor rates, upon which possession of the parliamentary franchise ultimately depended.Standard, 3 May 1837. For further details of the link between rates and votes see P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local politics and national parties, 1832-41 (2002), 185-209.

It was the issue of poor relief, or more specifically the Whig ministry’s poor law amendment act (1834) and its possible introduction in Brighton, that dominated the 1837 election caused by the accession of Queen Victoria. It has been suggested that Pechell’s ‘position must have been enormously strengthened at the beginning of the election campaign by his appointment as groom-in-waiting the queen’, but in fact he had declined this position to remain as the dowager’s equerry, probably in the hope of ministerial advancement.Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, 389. Offering again as a firm supporter of the Whigs, he defended their record and the new poor law, but saw no reason for Brighton to assimilate to it. Wigney also stood his ground, refuting assertions that he had supported that measure and by his votes (or lack of them) ‘repudiated the Radicals’.The Times, 26 July 1837. Their new candidate was Freeman Eliot, a local resident ‘of independent fortune’ and ‘a warm-hearted friend to the working man’, for whom Faithfull obligingly made way. The Tory Dalrymple also offered again. His condemnation of the new poor law and its workhouse system prompted talk at radical meetings about sharing votes with Dalrymple, rather than assisting a ‘Whig’, a policy evidently encouraged by Eliot’s committee. At the last minute, however, Eliot abandoned the contest and left town, citing ‘increased illness’ in his family. On the eve of the poll, Faithfull, the ‘out-and-out Radical’, took up his reins, declaring, somewhat equivocally, that ‘the tories he hated from the bottom of his heart, but as for the whigs, he liked open better than disguised enemies’.Brighton Patriot, 21, 26 Mar., 11, 18 July 1837.

The ‘most fierce contest’ that had ‘yet taken place’ in Brighton ensued, amidst reports of mob violence, intimidation and ‘unconstitutional interference’ by the court.The Times, 26 July 1837. If the latter was of genuine significance, as has been argued by Gash, it did not extend to supporting more than one candidate - in this case Pechell, who topped the poll - and preventing what Pechell had assured ministers would not happen, namely the return of an opponent.Gash, ‘The influence of the Crown’, 661-62; The Times, 26 July, 11 Aug. 1837. Indeed, a surviving pollbook shows that Pechell, despite urging the electors not to return ‘members who would neutralise each other’s votes’, actually shared 399 votes with the Tory Dalrymple (some 37 and 49 per cent of their respective totals). Along with Dalrymple’s 268 plumpers and 50 votes shared with the Radical Faithfull, this was sufficient to give Dalrymple an 18 vote lead over Wigney. By contrast, Pechell and Wigney shared fewer votes (38 and 44 respectively) with Faithfull, who in the inevitable post-mortem hailed Wigney’s defeat, and the destruction of the ‘base coalition’ of Whigs, as a victory for the borough’s independence.Brighton Pollbook (1837), passim.

Any development of a Tory-Radical alliance after the election, however, was complicated in Brighton by the appearance of Chartism. An offshoot of the old Political Union, whose advanced radical programme had foreshadowed the six points of the charter, Brighton’s Chartist movement, notwithstanding some early ‘missionary’ work by the London Working Men’s Association, was essentially home-grown and included a substantial agricultural element. Fuelled primarily by opposition to the new poor law, but also by Brighton’s special grievances with the electoral registration system, Chartism in Brighton enjoyed a genuine following, with regular meetings being held in the Brewer’s Arms. An 1839 petition in support of the people’s charter attracted 8,000 signatures and it is perhaps no coincidence that in the Commons both Pechell and Dalrymple campaigned actively for improvements to electoral registration and against the Whig ministry’s proposed extension of the new poor law.See M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (2007), 11, 142, 205; D. Thompson, The Chartists (1984), 173; Sheppard, ‘Agricultural workers’, 93-104. For further details of Chartism in Brighton see the unpublished 1969 Sussex DPhil thesis of T. M. Kemnitz, ‘Chartism in Brighton’. On the importance of registration in Chartism see M. Taylor, ‘The six points: Chartism and the reform of parliament’ in O. Ashton et al (eds.), The Chartist Legacy (1999), 1-23. They also attended local protest meetings, including a gathering of over 1,000 people in February 1841 against the new poor law, which ended up being hijacked by Chartist demands for ‘universal suffrage’.The Times, 16 Feb. 1841.

At that year’s general election the sitting Members offered again. Dalrymple was initially ‘considered quite safe’ by the press, owing to his ‘manly and determined opposition to the poor law’, which had ‘procured for him the warmest support among the constituency’ and ‘many of the Chartists’, and the contest was expected to be between Pechell and Wigney, ‘as neither the Radicals nor the Chartists have manifested any intention of starting a candidate’.The Times, 1, 17, 18 June 1841. The Chartists, however, had not been inactive, and after an abortive attempt to bring forward one John Good, ‘formerly a hairdresser in the town’, they managed to persuade Charles Brooker of Alfriston, a wealthy Dissenting preacher and ‘noted Sussex anti-poor law campaigner’ (though not a member of the National Chartist Association) to stand as their candidate.The Times, 11 June 1841; Chase, Chartism, 180; M. Chase, ‘“Labour’s Candidates”: Chartist Challenges at the Parliamentary Polls, 1839-6’, Labour History Review, lxxiv (2009), 81. The question of whose votes he would be most likely to steal, Dalrymple’s or the Whigs’, at first gripped local commentators, but quickly became an irrelevance once the Chartists’ lack of strength on the electoral registers became clear. At a noticeably more ‘decorous and quiet’ nomination than usual, Brooker lamented the loss of the country’s ancient ‘Saxon rights’, including the ‘universal suffrage of the day’ which had existed under King Alfred, and insisted that the Charter was ‘no further democratic than the New Testament was’.The Times, 18, 21 June; Northern Star, 17 July 1841. All four candidates condemned the operation of the new poor law and its separation of husbands, wives and children in the workhouse.The Times, 1 July 1841.

Of the 2,050 who voted in the ensuing poll, just over half (1,095) split their votes between Pechell and Wigney, who were returned in first and second place respectively, in a result clearly at odds with the national trend. The unexpected defeat of the Conservative Dalrymple, who secured 461 plumpers, shared 294 votes with Pechell, 114 with Wigney and three with Brooker, was attributed by many observers to ‘palace influence’, possibly motivated by the queen’s antipathy to Peel, with whom Dalrymple was closely aligned. Brooker’s measly tally of 19 votes, which included 13 shared with Pechell and three plumpers, indicated that in Brighton, as elsewhere, Chartism simply lacked the electoral base to make a substantial impact on the selection of MPs.Brighton Pollbook (1841), passim.; The Times, 2 July 1841.

The Chartists fared no better in the 1842 by-election that followed Wigney’s resignation, prompted by the collapse of his Brighton bank with ‘serious loss’ to the town’s inhabitants, including many of his Liberal supporters.Morning Post, 6 May 1842. Brooker was again endorsed at various Chartist meetings, the largest of which was attended by Feargus O’Connor, who also ‘announced himself as intending to stand’, evidently in order to speak.Northern Star, 2, 9 Apr. 1842. With Dalrymple on the continent, the Conservative Association adopted Lord Alfred Hervey, youngest son of the Tory marquess of Bristol and a staunch Peelite. A number of advanced Liberals also came forward, including the London tea-dealer ‘Mr. Nicholson of 15 Fenchurch Street’, a ‘candidate of the Cobbett school’ committed to ‘the doctrine that taxation and representation should be coextensive’, and Sumners Harford, a supporter of ‘triennial parliaments, household suffrage, vote by ballot, and repeal of the corn laws’, who had just been unseated at Lewes for bribery.Morning Post, 16 Mar., 9 Apr.; Standard, 30 Mar. 1842.

Harford’s endorsement at a Liberal meeting persuaded Nicholson to withdraw from the contest, in which it was expected that bribery would prove decisive, owing to the increasing neglect of Brighton by the queen, who was by now reconciled to Peel, and the financial fallout of Wigney’s bankruptcy. The ensuing poll, which O’Connor declined after speaking at length in favour of the Charter, was venal in the extreme, with many ‘professed Liberals’ either fleeing the town or ‘selling themselves for Tory gold’. Hervey, who was proposed by Lawrence Peel, topped the poll with almost double Harford’s tally, amidst charges of ‘gross corruption’, including the provision of ‘money, meat, and drink’, and wholesale intimidation by his agents.Morning Post, 6 May; Leicester Chron., 16 May 1842. On 13 May 1842 a petition in these terms challenging the result reached the Commons, but a month later it was quietly dropped.CJ, xcvii. 287-8, 366. The involvement of James Coppock, a leading Liberal agent, suggests that the abandonment of this petition, like many others around this time, was probably part of a ‘corrupt compromise’ secretly hatched between the two parties at Westminster.The Times, 14 June 1842. For further details of these 1842 petition compromises see Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, 257-69.

Any remaining influence wielded by the court was soon eradicated by the queen’s abandonment of Brighton as a royal residence. By the time of the 1847 general election the pavilion had been deserted for two years.Dale, Fashionable Brighton, 17. In a bid to end Liberal disunity, a newly formed ‘Brighton Liberal Association’ persuaded William Coningham of Kemp Town, a ‘disciple of Cobden’, advocate of the secret ballot and champion of religious freedom, to run as a second candidate alongside the more moderate Pechell. Undeterred, Hervey stood his ground as a ‘Conservative free trader’, stressing his continued opposition to the new poor law and support for the established Church. Both Coningham and Pechell made much of the rate-paying restrictions affecting Brighton’s voters, in a rather contrived display of partisan unity, but in the ensuing contest Pechell was accused of acting in coalition with Hervey, with whom he was comfortably re-elected.Northern Star, 5 June; Hants. Telegraph, 31 July 1847. An analysis of the poll confirms that while Pechell shared 816 votes with Coningham, as part of the Liberal slate, he also benefited from 668 shared with Hervey. Coningham, by contrast, shared just 24 votes with Hervey, who also pulled in 547 plumpers.1847 Brighton Pollbook, passim. The Members were ‘pelted with stones’ by Coningham’s supporters at the declaration, which ended in an affray.Hants. Telegraph, 31 July 1847. Commenting on his defeat a few years later, Coningham bemoaned ‘the peculiar state of the representation of Brighton, where men still professing to hold Radical opinions vote with Conservatives, for the purpose of returning Members to Parliament who represent antagonistic political principles’.Morning Chron., 5 Mar. 1852.

His remarks were amply borne out at the 1852 general election, when party lines were blurred further by a growing dispute about the creation of a municipal town council, which leading figures in the parish vestry had been agitating for since 1848.The New Encyclopedia of Brighton, ed. R. Collis (2010), 88. As an official report later noted, this highly-charged issue was ‘not one on which parties at Brighton ... divided according to the bias of their political opinions’.PP 1852-3 (280), lxxviii. 347. Against the backdrop of meetings and petitions for and against incorporation, and an approaching privy council investigation, both Pechell and Hervey offered again, saying little about the issue. Hervey added to the confusion by promising to give ‘a general and independent support’ to the Protectionist Derby ministry on all matters, except free trade. They were joined by the ‘advanced Liberal’ John Salusbury Trelawney, whose ‘papist sympathies’ had led to him being unseated at Tavistock, and John Ffooks, an anti-Catholic Liberal. Neither cut much ice with Brighton’s voters, however, and the sitting Members were returned well ahead of Trelawney and Fffook’s combined tally after a subdued contest.The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawney 1858-1865, ed. T. A. Jenkins (1990), 7-8; Hants. Telegraph, 10 July 1852.

The start of the municipal inquiry a few weeks later, 26 July 1852, excited ‘a far more lively interest amongst the inhabitants’, with ‘every statement and allegation’ being ‘obstinately and keenly contested’ by both sides. With the only real complaint against the town commissioners being their neglect of sewers and sloppy book keeping, the main thrust of the campaign for incorporation focused on the £20 household voting qualification laid down for commissioners’ elections, ‘by which a very large body of ratepayers’ were ‘excluded from local affairs’, including many parliamentary electors. The creation of a council under the 1835 Municipal Reform Act, urged the petitioners, would extend the local franchise to all resident ratepayers as well as providing an elected mayor as figurehead. Critics, however, were quick to point out that although the existing franchise disfranchised poorer householders (as well as rewarding wealthier ones with multiple votes), it did permit 1,200 single women with property to vote.PP 1852-3 (280), lxxviii. 338, 342; Brighton Guardian, 15 June 1853. On the plural voting system see Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work, 197. (Single women were denied the municipal franchise until August 1869.) Female suffrage thus became an important issue in the ensuing struggle. As the investigator sent to Brighton reported:

Under the local act, females who possess the requisite qualification have the right of voting, and the number of such in Brighton is considerable, owing to the circumstance that a great many houses which are let furnished by the season are owned by females, and there are also numerous female schools. These, of course, would not be entitled to exercise the municipal franchise if a charter of incorporation is granted ... and it was strongly urged by the opponents of that measure, that this would be a great hardship upon the female owners of property.

Assisted by statistics showing that single women accounted for 1,012 (18%) of Brighton’s 5,781 ratepayers and owned almost a quarter of its property, in January 1853 the privy council rejected the petitioners’ plea for a charter of incorporation.PP 1852-3 (267), lxxviii. 2; (280), lxxviii. 340, 342, 349; The Standard, 1 Jan. 1853. Undeterred, however, on 7 Mar. 1853 the petitioners convened in the town hall to obtain copies of the inquiry, which Pechell, who evidently sympathised with them, successfully moved for in the Commons, 17 Mar. 1853. A new petition was also started.Brighton Guardian, 9 Mar. 1853. In retaliation, the town commissioners held a ‘special meeting’, 14 June 1853, at which George Faithfull, the former Radical MP, astonished his former supporters by defending the ‘influence of property over numbers’ in the town’s elections and the right of ‘unprotected females’ to the vote. ‘What that gentleman had given them today’, observed one critic, ‘was one of the worst specimens of that Toryism which it used to be his delight to condemn’. ‘The favourite doctrine with Mr. Faithfull seemed to be the protection of women (laughter)’, mocked another, adding that ‘he was as fond of the women as any man in Brighton (renewed laughter), but ... he did not think a polling booth was the proper place for a woman (hear, hear)’.Brighton Guardian, 15 June 1853.

Faithfull’s forcing through of a motion against incorporation, on the grounds that it would be ‘highly injurious’ to the town, prompted a series of counter meetings by the ‘pro-charterists’, as they were increasingly known, at which objections to women voters were now given full vent. Female susceptibility to the influence of local officials, most notably ‘the alluring parson and cunning lawyer’, featured heavily, alongside comments about their ‘proper sphere’.Brighton Guardian, 29 June, 6 July 1853. The opposing argument was forcibly put by Brighton’s vicar, Henry Wagner, among others:

There may be ladies of great affluence, of the best education, and of considerable intelligence, possessing a vote under the present act, who would be disfranchised under a corporation; while those in humbler walks of life, illiterate and possessing none of the intelligence of the ladies ... would possess the suffrage. I consider it unjust that a man should have a vote simply because he is a man, and that a lady should be disfranchised because she is a lady and the weaker body.Brighton Guardian, 31 Aug. 1853.

The decisive breakthrough came in the highly contested commissioners’ elections of 4-6 July 1853, which resulted in all 27 new commissioners being ‘favourable to incorporation’ and demanding the transfer of the commission’s powers to an elected council. Another investigator was promptly despatched to Brighton, and the following month heard evidence for eight days, including ‘a speech of five hours duration’ by Faithfull.Brighton Guardian, 13 July, 31 Aug., 7 Sept. 1853. The ensuing report, after discounting all the female signatures, determined that 2,108 male petitioners were in favour of a charter and 1,241 against, and recommended incorporation, 23 Sept. 1853. Addressing concerns about the disfranchisement of women, it noted that ‘the same objections exist here as elsewhere against females exercising control over public affairs’ and cited the ‘system of our national government’.Daily News, 18 Mar. 1853; PP 1854 (231) lxiii. 563-9. Early next year, following the election of another seven commissioners favourable to incorporation, the privy council resolved to grant a charter and on 1 Apr. 1854 Brighton became a municipal borough, divided into six wards.Brighton Gazette, 26 Jan., 6 Apr. 1854; Hants. Telegraph, 4 Feb. 1854; PP 1867 (11), lvi. 368.

The ensuing council election on 30 May 1854 ‘created the greatest excitement’, with both the pro and anti-charterists, whose campaign concentrated on the need for different views to be represented on the new council, fielding candidates and publishing slates. The result was a sweeping victory for the pro-charterists, who took all but three of the 36 seats and filled the aldermanic vacancies with their own nominees, despite appeals for an end to ‘party feeling’ for the ‘general good’.H. Martin, History of Brighton, 189; Brighton Gazette, 25, 30 May, 1 June 1854. Thereafter, however, there was a ‘steady decline in interest’ in council elections. By 1859 half the wards were uncontested and in the others turnout dropped below 50%. As a local party agent advised a select committee investigation the following year, ‘municipal elections have not been so much contested in Brighton’.PP 1860 (455), xii. 257; 1867 (11), lvi. 368.

The precise impact of all this on the parliamentary representation is difficult to pin down. The initial struggle over municipal reform and the first council elections clearly did little to clarify Brighton’s already muddled party lines, with radicals, Chartists, Liberals and Tories participating in both the pro and anti-reform camps. The resulting chaos of loyalties may well have been a factor in the 1853 by-election, triggered by the Liberal-Conservative Hervey’s acceptance of office in the Aberdeen coalition, when attempts by the advanced Liberals to get up an opposition came to nothing, resulting in Brighton’s first uncontested return.Other factors included Hervey’s opposition to Disraeli’s unpopular house-tax proposals: Brighton Gazette, 30 Dec. 1852, 5 Jan. 1853.

In the medium term, the gains made by the pro-charterists undoubtedly assisted the mainstream Liberal Pechell, who after the commissioners failed to surrender all their functions and buildings, took the lead in steering through legislation giving the council total control, in the form of the 1855 Brighton Commissioners Transfer Act.Morning Chron., 18 May 1855; Collis, Encyclopedia of Brighton, 88. He topped the poll comfortably at the 1857 general election, when Hervey was again challenged by Coningham in a replay of 1847. But with 1,566 shared votes now cast for both Liberals, compared with just 542 for Pechell and Hervey, Coningham defeated his former rival with ease, in what appeared to signal the start of a Liberal hegemony.1857 Brighton pollbook, 86. The Liberals secured an even greater majority over a Conservative challenger at the 1859 general election, probably assisted by the fact that their opponent Sir Allan MacNab, a former premier of Upper Canada, ran a somewhat eccentric campaign, based around the advantages of having colonial MPs ‘who would also represent three millions of colonists’.Morning Chron., 3 June 1859. They also notched up another victory in the by-election caused by Pechell’s death the following year, despite having two antagonistic candidates up against a well-connected local Tory, Henry Moor. Bitter divisions surfaced in this contest, however, with Frederick Goldsmid, later Liberal MP for Honiton, and James White, a former Liberal MP for Plymouth, both accusing each other of falsehoods and White repeatedly alluding to Goldsmid’s Jewish ‘co-religionists’ during the campaign. It was only the withdrawal of Goldsmid before the close of polling that allowed White to muster a respectable majority.Morning Chron., 10, 13, 16, 17, 22 July 1860.

Coningham’s unexpected retirement in 1864 prompted yet another by-election, in which further divisions led to the ‘farce’ of Moor being opposed by three Liberal candidates, following an abortive attempt to unite behind Arthur Otway, the former Liberal MP for Stafford.Morning Post, 12 Feb. 1864. Francis Kuper Dumas of London, whose supporters had hijacked meetings for Otway, was first in the field, followed by Julian Goldsmid, the nephew of Frederick and a local resident, and Henry Fawcett, a Cambridge professor of political economy and ‘advanced liberal’. Edward Harper, editor of the Constitution newspaper, also entered the fray as ‘a Protestant champion’ opposed to ‘Romish aggression, Puseyite traitors’ and ‘endowments to Roman Catholic institutions’.Daily News, 16 Feb. 1864.

The chaos in the Liberal camp caught the attention of the trade union journal The Bee-Hive, which strongly backed Fawcett as a friend of the working-classes and urged the 25-year-old Goldsmid ‘to give way to superior merit’. Commenting on Dumas, it remarked, ‘ no one ever heard his name before his address came out. We understand he is a partner in a London bank. We hope the Brighton people will send him back to his bank. It is time a stop was put to the intolerable presumption of wealthy obscurities who thrust themselves into the legislature without any previous training’.The Bee-Hive, 13 Feb. 1864. After an especially unruly nomination, at which all four candidates were assailed with stones and faeces, Moor secured a narrow lead over Fawcett in the poll. Although Dumas eventually agreed to retire in Fawcett’s favour, his decision came too late, and the ‘extraordinary result’, as The Times put it, was ‘the return of a Conservative for one of the most liberal boroughs in the kingdom’. The conduct of both the candidates and electorate, who were accused of negotiating for bribes, was widely condemned.Daily News, 16 Feb., The Times, 17 Feb. 1864. ‘It is fortunate for Brighton’, noted one particularly acerbic critic, ‘that it has not much political character to lose’.Morning Post, 12 Feb. 1864.

Perhaps chastened by this type of commentary, the Liberals managed to reunite behind White and Fawcett at the following year’s general election and topple Moor with ease, in a contest of ‘more than usual good humour’.Daily News, 1 July; Morning Post, 12 July 1865. The sitting Members survived the appearance of another dissident Liberal in 1868, but thereafter Brighton, which retained both its parliamentary seats until 1950, returned Conservatives at all but two of the ten general elections held before 1918, laying the foundations for a post-war Conservative dominance that would last until 1997.