To the July number of Cornhill I last year contributed an article gleaned from the Recollections of an anonymous observer of the House of Commons from the year 1830 to the close of the session of 1835. It contained a series of thumb-nail personal sketches of eminent members long since gone to ‘another place,’ leaving names that will live in English history. A portion of the musty volume was devoted to descriptions of Parliamentary surroundings and procedure interesting by comparison with those established at the present day.

‘Q,’ as for brevity I name the unknown recorder, describes the old House of Commons destroyed by fire in 1834 as dark, gloomy and badly ventilated, so small that not more than 400 out of the 658 members could be accommodated with any measure of comfort. In those days an important debate was not unfrequently preceded by ‘a call of the House,’ which brought together a full muster. On such occasions members were, ‘Q’ says, ‘literally crammed together,’ the heat of the House recalling accounts of the then recent tragedy of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Immediately over the entrance provided for members was the Strangers’ Gallery; underneath it were several rows of seats for friends of members. This arrangement exists in the new House. Admission to the Strangers’ Gallery was obtained on presentation of a note or order from a member. Failing that, the payment of half a crown to the doorkeeper at once procured admittance.

When the General Election of 1880 brought the Liberals into power, parties in the House of Commons, in obedience to immemorial custom, crossed over, changing sides. The Irish members, habitually associated with British Liberals, having when in Opposition shared with them the benches to the left of the Speaker, on this occasion declined to change their quarters, a decision ever since observed. They were, they said, free from allegiance to either political party and would remain uninfluenced by their movements. This was noted at the time as a new departure. Actually they were following a precedent established half a century earlier.

In the closing sessions of the unreformed Parliament, a group of extreme Radicals, including Hume, Cobbett and Roebuck, remained seated on the Opposition Benches whichever party was in power. Prominent amongst them was Hume, above all others most constant in attendance. He did not quit his post even during the dinner hour. He filled his pockets with fruit—pears by preference—and at approach of eight o’clock publicly ate them.

In the old House of Commons a bench at the back of the Strangers’ Gallery was by special favour appropriated to the reporters. The papers represented paid the doorkeepers a fee of three guineas a session. As they numbered something over threescore this was a source of snug revenue in supplement to the strangers’ tributary half-crown. Ladies were not admitted to the Strangers’ Gallery. The only place whence they could partly see, and imperfectly hear, what was going on was by looking down through a large hole in the ceiling immediately above the principal candle-stocked chandelier. This aperture was the principal means of ventilating the House, and the ladies circled round it regardless of the egress of vitiated air. Mr. Gladstone, who sat in the old House as member for Newark, once told me that during progress with an important debate he saw a fan fluttering down from the ceiling. It had dropped from the hand of one of the ladies, who suddenly found herself in a semi-asphyxiated condition. Something more than half a century later Mr. Gladstone was unconsciously the object of attention from another group of ladies indomitable in desire to hear an historic speech. On the night of the introduction of the first Home Rule Bill there was overflowing demand for seats in the Ladies’ Gallery. When accommodation was exhausted, the wife of the First Commissioner of Works happily remembered that the floor of the House is constructed of open iron network, over which a twine matting is laid. These cover the elaborate machinery by which fresh air is constantly let into the Chamber, escaping by apertures near the ceiling. Standing or walking along the Iron Gallery that spans the vault, it is quite easy to hear what is going on in the House. Here, on the invitation of the First Commissioner’s wife, were seated a company of ladies who, unseen, their presence unsuspected, heard every word of the Premier’s epoch-making speech.

‘Q’ incidentally records details of procedure in marked contrast with that of to-day. In these times, on the assembling of a newly elected Parliament, the Oath is administered by the Clerk to members standing in batches at small tables on the floor of the House. In the old Parliament, members were sworn in by the Lord Steward of His Majesty’s Household. At the same period a new Speaker being duly elected or re-elected was led by the Mover and Seconder from his seat to the Bar, whence he was escorted to the Chair. To-day he is conducted direct to the Chair. When divisions were taken in Committee of the whole House, members did not, as at present, go forth into separate lobbies. The ‘ayes’ ranged themselves to the right of the Speaker’s Chair, the ‘noes’ to the left, and were counted accordingly. The practice varied when the House was fully constituted, the Speaker in the Chair and the Mace on the Table. In such circumstances one only of the contending parties, the ‘ayes’ or the ‘noes’ according to the nature of the business in question, quitted the Chamber. The tellers first counted those remaining in the House, and then, standing in the passage between the Bar and the door, counted the others as they re-entered. The result of the division was announced in the formula: ‘The ayes that went out are’ so many. ‘The noes who remained are’ so many, or otherwise according to the disposition of the opposing forces. A quorum then as now was forty, but when the House was in Committee the presence of eight members sufficed. ‘Q’ makes no reference to the use of a bell announcing divisions. But he mentions occasions on which the Mace was sent to Westminster Hall, the Court of Request, or to the several Committee Rooms to summon members to attend.

At the period of Parliamentary history of which ‘Q’ is the lively chronicler, the ceremony of choosing a Speaker and obtaining Royal Assent to the choice was identical with that first used on the occasion of Sir Job Charlton’s election to the Chair in the time of Charles II. The title of Speaker was bestowed because he alone had the right to speak to or address the King in the name and on behalf of the House of Commons. Of this privilege he customarily availed himself at considerable length. On being summoned to the presence of the Sovereign in the House of Lords he, in servile terms, begged to be excused from undertaking the duties of Speaker, ‘which,’ he protested, ‘require greater abilities than I can pretend to own.’ The Lord Chancellor, by direction of the Sovereign, assured the modest man that ‘having very attentively heard your discreet and handsome discourse,’ the King would not consent to refusal of the Chair. Thereupon the Speaker-designate launched forth into a fresh, even more ornate, address, claiming ‘renewal of the ancient privileges of Your most loyal and dutiful House of Commons.’ Whereto His Majesty, speaking again by the mouth of the Lord Chancellor, remarked, not without a sense of humour, that ‘he hath heard and well weighed your short and eloquent oration and in the first place much approves that you have introduced a shorter way of speaking on these occasions.’

Up to 1883 the Speaker’s salary was, as it is to-day, £5000 a year. In addition to his salary he received fees amounting to £2000 or £3000 per session. On his election he was presented with 2000 ounces of plate, £1000 of equipment money, two hogsheads of claret, £100 per annum for stationery, and a stately residence in convenient contiguity to the House. These little extras made the post worth at least £8000 per annum.

In the present and recent Parliament an ancient tradition is kept up by a member for the City of London seating himself on the Treasury Bench. Two members are privileged to take their places there, but after his election for the City Mr. Arthur Balfour left Sir Frederick Banbury in sole possession of the place. To-day, by the strange derangement of party ties consequent on the war, the ex-Prime Minister has permanently shifted his quarters to the Treasury Bench under the leadership of a Radical Premier. In the first third of the nineteenth century the City of London returned four members, who not only sat on the Treasury Bench on the opening day of the new Parliament, but arrayed themselves in scarlet gowns. Sir Frederick Banbury stopped short of acquiring that distinction.

During the first two sessions of the reformed Parliament the Commons met at noon for the purpose of presenting petitions and transacting other business of minor importance. These morning sittings, precursors of others instituted by Disraeli and since abandoned, usually lasted till three o’clock, the House then adjourning till five, when real business was entered upon. Subsequently this arrangement was abandoned, the Speaker taking the Chair at half-past three. Even then the first and freshest hour and a half of the sitting were spent in the presentation of petitions or in debate thereupon. The interval can be explained only upon the assumption that the petitions were read verbatim.

In the Parliamentary procedure of to-day petitions play a part of ever decreasing importance. Their presentation takes precedence of all other business. But the member in charge of one is not permitted to stray beyond briefest description of its prayer and a statement of the number of signatories. Thereupon, by direction of the Speaker, he thrusts the petition into a sack hanging to the left of the Speaker’s chair, and there an end on’t. There is, it is true, a Committee of Petitions which is supposed to examine every document. As far as practical purposes are concerned, petitions might as well be dropped over the Terrace into the Thames as into the mouth of the appointed sack.

At times of popular excitement round a vexed question—by preference connected with the Church, the sale of liquor, or, before her ghost was laid, marriage with the deceased wife’s sister—the flame systematically fanned is kept burning by the presentation of monster petitions. Amid ironical cheers these are carried in by two elderly messengers, who lay them at the foot of the Table. Having been formally presented, they are, amid renewed merriment, carried forth again and nothing more is heard of them, unless the Committee on Petitions reports that there is suspicious similarity in the handwriting of blocks of signatures, collected by an energetic person remunerated by commission upon the aggregate number.

The most remarkable demonstration made in modern times happened during the short life of the Parliament elected in 1892. Members coming down in time for prayers discovered to their amazement the floor of the House blocked with monster rolls, such as are seen in the street when the repair of underground telegraph wires is in progress. The member to whose personal care this trifle had been submitted rising to present the petition, Mr. Labouchere, on a point of order, objected that sight of him was blocked by the gigantic cylinders. ‘The hon. gentleman,’ he suggested, ‘should mount one and address the Chair from the eminence.’ The suggestion was disregarded, and in time the elderly messengers put their shoulders to wheels and rolled the monsters out of the House.

‘Q,’ whose eagle eye nothing escapes, comments on the preponderance of bald heads among Ministers. Occupying an idle moment, he counted the number of bald heads and found them to amount to one-third of the full muster. ‘Taking the whole 658,’ he writes in one of his simple but delightful asides, ‘I should think that perhaps a fourth part are more or less baldheaded. The number of red heads,’ he adds, ‘is also remarkable. I should think they are hardly less numerous than bald ones. When I come to advert to individual members of distinction it cannot fail to strike the reader how many are red-headed.’

This interesting inference is, if it be accepted as well-founded, damaging to the status of the present House of Commons. I do not, on reflection, recall a single member so decorated.

As to baldheadedness—which in the time of the prophet Elisha was regarded as an undesirable eccentricity, public notice of which, it will be remembered, condemned the commentators to severe disciplinary punishment—it was, curiously enough, a marked peculiarity among members of the House of Commons in an early decade of the nineteenth century. I have a prized engraving presenting a view of the interior of the House of Commons during the sessions of 1821-3. Glancing over the crowded benches, I observe that the proportion of baldheaded men is at least equal to that noted by ‘Q’ in the Parliament sitting a dozen years later.

What are known as scenes in the House were not infrequent in ‘Q’s’ time. He recalls one in which an otherwise undistinguished member for Oxford, one Hughes Hughes, was made the butt. It was a flash of the peculiar, not always explicable, humour of the House of Commons, still upon occasion predominant, to refuse a gentleman a hearing. ‘Hughes’s rising was the signal for continuous uproar,’ ‘Q’ writes. ‘At repeated intervals a sort of drone-like drumming, having the sound of a distant hand organ or bagpipes, arose from the back benches. Coughing, sneezing and ingeniously extended yawning blended with other sounds. A voice from the Ministerial benches imitated very accurately the yelp of a kennelled hound.’

For ten minutes the double-barrelled Hughes faced the music, and when he sat down not a word save the initial ‘Sir’ had been heard from his lips.

The nearest approach to this scene I remember happened in the last session of the Parliament of 1868-74, when, amidst similar uproar, Cavendish Bentinck, as one describing at the time the uproar wrote, ‘went out behind the Speaker’s Chair and crowed thrice.’ This was the occasion upon which Sir Charles Dilke made his Parliamentary début. In Committee of Ways and Means he, in uncompromising fashion that grated on the ears of loyalists, called attention to the Civil List of Queen Victoria and moved a reduction. Auberon Herbert, now a staid Tory, at that time suspected of a tendency towards Republicanism, undertook to second the amendment. Sir Charles managed amid angry interruptions to work off his speech. Herbert, following him, was met by a storm of resentment that made his sentences inaudible.

After uproar had prevailed for a full quarter of an hour a shamefaced member, anxious for the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments, called attention to the presence of strangers. Forthwith, in accordance with the regulation then in force, the galleries were cleared. As the occupants of the Press Gallery reluctantly departed, they heard above the shouting the sound of cock-crowing. Looking over the baluster they saw behind the Chair Little Ben, as Cavendish Bentinck was called to distinguish him from his bigger kinsman, vigorously engaged upon a vain effort to preserve order by a passable imitation of Chanticleer saluting the happy morn.

From ‘Q’s’ report of another outbreak of disorder it would appear that in the House meeting in the ‘thirties of the nineteenth century, exchange of personalities went far beyond modern experience. The once heated Maynooth question was to the fore. In the course of an animated set-to between a Mr. Shaw and Daniel O’Connell, the former shouted ‘The Hon. Member has charged me with being actuated by spiritual ferocity. My ferocity is not of the description which takes for its symbol a death’s head and cross bones.’ O’Connell, as a certain fishwife locally famous for picturesque language discovered, was hard to beat in the game of vituperation. Turning upon Shaw, he retorted ‘Yours is a calf’s head and jaw bones.’

‘Q’ records that the retort was greeted with deafening cheers from the Ministerial side where O’Connell and his party were seated. Mr. Shaw’s polite, but perhaps inconsequential, remark had been received with equal enthusiasm by the Opposition.