On this day … 1 August 1868

The Preston Guardian carried a report on the widening of the town’s parliamentary electorate that had given the vote to large numbers of working-class men, following the passing of the Second Reform Act.

The passing of the act, which still did not provide a secret ballot, had sparked a flurry of activity in the town with new groups forming to steer the new electorate in their direction.

First off was the Preston Irish Liberal Association, which by the beginning of July had already been meeting weekly at the Bowling Green Inn in Edward Street. At their 2 July meeting, the chairman, Alexander Wilson, urged, ‘… all present to do their utmost to secure the emancipation of the borough from Tory thraldom’.

And it was not only the Irish who were joining the society. At that 2 July meeting, one of the speakers, a Mr J. Crombleholme, declared that, although not Irish himself, he had ‘a strong sympathy with Irishmen, and the injustice which has been perpetrated on their country’.

He particularly wanted to see the disestablishment of the Irish Church, which gave to the tiny Protestant minority vast revenues collected from the Catholic majority. The Protestant landlords who owned most of the land in that country were ‘alien in race and creed’.

The Conservatives were not far behind, with the formation of a St Peter’s Ward Working Men’s Conservative Association. The members formed up on the same night as the 2 July meeting of the Irish Liberals, at the Church Hotel in Lancaster Road and, ‘headed by a Union Jack and the Prince William Orange fife and drum band’, set off to their new headquarters in North Road. They were accompanied by the Preston Tory grandee Robert Townley Parker, the squire of Cuerden.

Parker chaired the meeting at the new headquarters and urged its working-class members to support the Protestant Church by voting Conservative, but, as the friend of many Catholics in the town, he would not condone any attacks on that religion:

‘I am not a firebrand and desirous to recommend you to burn Roman Catholic Chapels. I say that is an outrage unbecoming a Christian country, and none of you ought to do otherwise than assist in preventing such outrages …’

The passing of the second Reform Act swelled the Preston electorate from 2,578 voters to 11,302. At the first election following the passing of the act the Liberals probably won over some Catholics with their pledge to disestablish the Irish Church, and a Liberal victory was to be expected, given that most of the new voters belonged to the working class.

It was not to be. At the 1868 election, Preston returned two Tory MPs, and continued to vote in Conservatives for both the town’s seats for nearly half a century. The results vindicated the belief of the Conservative prime minister Disraeli, who pushed through the extension of the franchise, that the working-class men to whom he gave the vote were conservative, both socially and politically.

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Sources
Preston Chronicle, freely available to anybody with a Lancashire Library membership: https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/libraries-and-archives/libraries/digital-library/newspapers-old-and-new/
Clemesha’s History of Preston