Churchill’s campaign against the House of Lords, printed for the electors of January 1910, which Richard Langworth ranks the third rarest of his books
CHURCHILL, Winston S. The People’s Rights. Selected from his Lancashire and other recent speeches. London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1910]. First edition, second issue in wrappers, with page 71 correctly numbered and a second Appendix (“Labour Exchanges and Unemployment Insurance”) in place of the Index at pages 149–152. 16mo (pp. vi, [2], 152). With the half-title. Modern maroon half morocco with corners, red cloth sides, the spine with five raised bands ruled in gilt, black and green lettering-pieces and the date in gilt at the foot, the upper side lettered in gilt with title and author. The original yellow-orange pictorial wrappers are bound in. A postcard of Churchill is tipped to a preliminary blank. Published in the week ending 14 January 1910 at one shilling. Cohen A31.3; Woods A16 (ICS A16ab); Langworth p. 99.
Woods records an edition of 5,000 copies. Richard Langworth ranks the book “the third rarest Churchill book, after Mr. Brodrick’s Army and For Free Trade.” It was issued as a campaign pamphlet on cheap pulp paper, and most copies were discarded. The survivors have browned, and the worst have turned brittle. Of all Churchill first editions, Langworth writes, “this is the one most in need of deacidification.” The text was not reprinted until 1970.
Notes
On 30 November 1909 the House of Lords refused Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget.” By 350 votes to 75 the peers carried Lord Lansdowne’s amendment that the House was “not justified in giving its consent to this Bill until it has been submitted to the judgment of the country.” Two days later the Commons condemned the vote as “a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons,” and Asquith’s government went to the country. Churchill, then President of the Board of Trade, spent 3 to 11 December on the platforms of Lancashire. The People’s Rights is, in John P. Nixon’s phrase, “a distillation of these nine days of speeches.”
The book went to press at once. Hodder & Stoughton’s printers already had the text by 16 December. It takes the form of a campaign handbook, six chapters of short paragraphs, each headed in bold type by a statement or a question (Nixon). It opens with the attack on the House of Lords and goes on to the Budget, Free Trade, a graduated income tax, and taxes on luxuries and unearned income. The second Appendix, added in this issue, treats labour exchanges and unemployment insurance. Labour exchanges were the subject of the bill Churchill himself had introduced at the Board of Trade in May 1909. The shilling edition went on sale in the week before polling opened on 15 January 1910. Churchill held Dundee at the head of the poll. The Liberals lost their overall majority but carried the Budget, and the Parliament Act of 1911 then took from the Lords the power to reject money bills.
The book records Churchill at his most radical. Kevin Theakston, Professor of British Government at Leeds, describes him in these years as “a vocal and radical critic of the House of Lords and a champion of ‘the people’s rights’.” In a Cabinet memorandum of February 1910 Churchill went further still. “The time has come for the total abolition of the House of Lords,” he wrote (Theakston, Finest Hour 136, 2007).
The binding is fresh and square, with sharp corners and bright gilt. The text block is evenly browned, as in every copy of this pulp-paper book, with light foxing confined to the first leaves. The original wrappers, preserved in the binding, are torn in places, with small areas of loss. The binding gives the fragile sheets a protection few surviving copies enjoy.
References
Cohen A31.3; Woods A16 (ICS A16ab); Langworth, A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill (1998), p. 99. Churchill’s fourth book of speeches, after Mr. Brodrick’s Army (1903), For Free Trade (1906) and Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909). Cameron Hazlehurst, introduction to the second edition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970); John P. Nixon, Jr., review, Finest Hour 56 (Summer 1987); Kevin Theakston, Winston Churchill and the British Constitution (London: Politico’s, 2004); Kevin Theakston, “‘Part of the Constitution’: Winston S. Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy,” Finest Hour 136 (Autumn 2007); Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 30 November 1909, vol. 4, cols. 1233–346, and House of Commons, 2 December 1909, vol. 13, cols. 546–81.
Churchill’s brief against the peers, printed for the electors of January 1910 and mostly thrown away by them — a scarce survivor of the crisis that ended the Lords’ veto.
Offered by Atelier Zweig LLC. Shipped insured, with signature on delivery.
