On this day … 19 September 1885

The Preston Chronicle carried a small item about a new branch of a strange-sounding organisation called the Primrose League, whose officers included two sons of Preston’s most powerful cotton lord.

Local branches of the league were known as habitations, and the leadership of this one, the Poulton and Singleton Habitation, provides an example of how ‘local notables’ took charge.

The Ruling Councillor (the title given to the head of the habitation) was Thomas Horrocks Miller Esq, of Singleton Park, an estate stretching to 3,223 acres and earning him £5,856 a year in rents. Serving with him on the habitation’s executive council was his brother William Miller Esq, of Thistleton, a somewhat smaller estate. The Millers were the sons of the late Thomas Miller, head of the Horrocks company, who had defeated the strike by Preston’s cotton operatives in 1854.

The league was founded in 1883 to commemorate Benjamin Disraeli, whose favourite flower was the primrose. John Gorst, a former pupil of Preston Grammar School, and, along with the Miller brothers, a member of the Winckley Square ‘aristocracy’, was a founding member and served as its president until 1906. Gorst was MP for Chatham and was shortly to become Solicitor General.

Its real but unstated purpose was to win leadership of the Tory party for Winston Churchill’s father, Randolph. That move failed and Randolph went into political exile. But the league prospered, rapidly gaining membership to become a powerful grassroots organisation dedicated to putting and keeping the Tories in power.

This it did for some twenty years, especially in industrial Lancashire, to the despair of the Liberals who were kept from power despite a widening of the electorate to include many working-class men, who they thought would be their natural supporters.

As one Liberal writer commented: ‘Frailty! thy name is Lancashire’.

Preston, where the electorate returned Tories to both the town’s parliamentary seats for nearly half a century, had its Beaconsfield Habitation (Disraeli was the Earl of Beaconsfield). It was formed in 1887 at a public meeting attended by eight of the town’s Anglican clergy and the grammar school headmaster, with George Curzon, then Southport MP but later to be Viceroy of India, as principal speaker.

A flavour of the league’s operation in Preston can be found in a Preston Chronicle report that showed that on the morning of 19 April 1890 (then named Primrose Day, the anniversary of Disraeli’s death) consignments of freshly-gathered primroses were arriving in town. They came from the local gentry, including Mrs. Birley of Clifton Hall, Mrs Jacson of Barton Hall, Miss Salisbury of Myerscough Hall and Mr. W. J. Fitzherbert-Brockholes of Claughton Hall.

The borough’s two MPs, Robert Hanbury and William Tomlinson, both contributed their share of primroses, and another consignment came from a Miss Bottomley and the children of Samlesbury School. They were sported in button holes by Tory males of all classes and carried as nosegays by their wives and daughters. More of the delicate blooms went to decorate the town’s Conservative clubs.

At first, the league was not taken seriously by many in the town, who underestimated its ability to turn working-class deference into Conservative votes. But not for long, as a correspondent to the Chronicle noted:

‘Puerile and childish, not to say idiotic, as the Primrose League might have been, and probably was thought when it was established, there can be no doubt that the association is becoming a considerable political power.’

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Source
Preston and the Primrose League