Paddy Logan – Harborough’s radical Liberal hero

Feeling was running high in the House of Commons as debate ended on the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone’s bill to set up a devolved Irish legislature in Dublin. Joseph Chamberlain had compared Gladstone to Herod, and TP O’Connor, an Irish Nationalist who sat for a Liverpool constituency, had called Chamberlain “Judas”. The division bell rang, but arguments still smouldered in the crowded chamber.

At this point on the evening of 27 July 1893 one of my political heroes entered history. JW “Paddy” Logan, the Liberal MP for Harborough, crossed the chamber and sat down next to Edward Carson on the Conservative front bench. A Tory MP pushed him away, Logan elbowed back and was grabbed by more Tories, whereupon the Irish Nationalists waded in to support him. MPs came to blows and it turned into a free-for-all.

The radical Liberalism of Paddy Logan

It looks like the fight will go on for a while, so I have time to tell you more about Logan. He was a railway contractor whose firm Logan & Hemingway carried out important work in the East Midlands, including the building of the Great Central Railway through Nottinghamshire, the expansion of the Port of Grimsby and the construction of the pier at New Holland. He began as a Conservative, but after coming across extreme poverty in Ireland he returned, not just a Liberal but a thoroughgoing Radical with a strong interest in the lot of agricultural workers and land reform. It was because of his support for Irish home rule that John William Logan came to be nicknamed Paddy.

He gained the Harborough constituency from the Conservatives at a by-election in 1891 and it was to remain in Liberal hands for the next 27 years, though Logan himself twice stood down from parliament because of poor health. He sat for Harborough between 1891 and 1904 and then again between 1910 and 1916. The Liberal Party in Harborough shared his radicalism, because its successful candidate in the 1904 by-election was Philip Stanhope, who had lost his previous seat in Lancashire because of his opposition to the Boer War. Here is Logan in action, speaking on a Conservative education bill in 1897, as reported in Hansard:

In the Board Schools the children were not taught to curtsey to the squire or to the parson. In the Church Schools the children were taught to fall down and worship the great god of the Clerical party – the landowner. Hon. Gentlemen might laugh, but he knew what he was talking about. He saw it too frequently.
What the children were being taught in thousands of villages today might be summed up in the words: “God bless the Squire and the Squire’s relations/And make us know our proper stations.” … The Church had always been against progress.

As if to prove him right, the Church of England barred Logan from using its halls for village meetings. His answer was Free Speech Hall, a flatpack wooden building that could be put up on village greens. It was 30 feet long, 12 feet wide, heated and, claims a contemporary account, could accommodate about 150 people. On one of its long outside walls was painted: “The system that will not bear discussion is doomed.”

picture of the front of the former Village Hall at East Langton (L) picture of the former village hall from a side angle at East Langton (R)

Isabel Logan – imprisoned suffragette

Though the Harborough constituency took in a swathe of Leicester’s southern suburbs in Logan’s day – even when the first residents moved into the city’s Saffron Lane Estate in the mid-1920s, they still voted in Harborough – it took lots of work and money to keep it in Liberal hands. Much of the money was Logan’s own: his largesse included paying for Market Harborough’s first swimming baths and for a public hall in his home village of East Langton.

Walking round the village today you may notice that some walls are patched with blue industrial bricks – it must have been useful having a railway contractor on the rural district council. You will also come across a private house that was once a cottage home maintained by Logan for the children of men permanently injured on his works. This sounds like Dickensian satire, but when you notice there are several doors from the house into the garden, it is easy to imagine children having a happier life here than they did in the vast, barrack-like homes the big children’s charities favoured. Isabel Logan, Paddy’s daughter (they both get a potted biography in The Who’s Who of Radical Leicester) was a suffragette and one of 27 women arrested in June 1908 when windows were smashed in Whitehall and Downing Street. Rather than pay a fine she chose to go to prison, and on her return to East Langton her father wrote:

My daughter Isabel has just come home, so I learn at first hand the punishment meted out to her and twenty-five other women for the awful crime of endeavouring to make a speech in Parliament-square in support of their belief that in justice and equity women cannot be denied a voice in the selection of those who make the laws that they are compelled to obey. Do the men and women of England really know that these political prisoners have solitary confinement twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four!

Logan himself was a pioneer of pigeon racing, won the House of Commons steeplechase and – Harborough was still Harborough – a keen rider to hounds. Even this was turned to political advantage: when he planted a covert on his land he named it “Home Rule Covert” and that name duly appeared in hunting reports in all the Tory papers. And to be fair to him, a quote from an 1897 Commons speech by Logan turns up in James Hawes’s The Shortest History of England:

Let our manufacturers do as the German manufacturers did, and bring up their sons to be better manufacturers than themselves, instead of bringing them up to be gentlemen who did nothing but hunt and shoot.

The radicals in the Liberal party were often right

Back at Westminster, the Serjeant-at-Arms has restored order after a fight between frock-coated MPs lasting 20 minutes. Top hats have been flattened, coats torn and faces bruised. Eventually Gladstone’s bill will be passed by the Commons but blocked by the House of Lords.

Logan’s career stands as a reminder, not least to Liberals themselves, of just how radical his wing of the party used to be and how often it was right. More than 30 years after this episode of fisticuffs on the floor of the Commons, George V said to his Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald: “What fools we were not to have accepted Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill.”