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Published: 6 May 2010
by NICK KOCHAN

FOR the greater part of the 20th century, London had two parliaments. The less well-known was a debating society in Hampstead. Founded in 1883, the Hampstead Parliament attracted the professional classes who were not catered for by the religious, politically affiliated debating clubs of the day.

The ethos that inspired the parliament was quintessentially Victorian. The quest for self-improvement is illustrated by its founding chairman, H Clarke, who said: “The Society was not established for amusement, but for educational purposes, and to train men in public speaking.”

To hone the characteristics and intellects of up-and-coming administrators, or just good citizens, the founders turned to the most democratic and respectable institution they knew – the Westminster Parliament. They contracted the Westminster parliamentary timetable to make it manageable for a once-weekly schedule.

The parliament sat between late September and Christmas, and January and Easter, and the Liberal, Labour and Conservative parties took turns to form governments. The leading members of the party in power elected a Prime Minister and were given cabinet responsib­ilities. The lesser lights took the names of constituencies. Prior to a government’s period of office, it presented a statement outlining policies it intended to debate.

The timetable of meetings (held every Wednesday in the Old Town Hall) also mirrored Westminster. They began with Prime Minister’s question time. Then followed a debate on an issue of the day. They finished with a quarter-hour adjournment debate.

The parliament’s success was extraordinary. After the first session, more than 500 had joined and a further 2,600 had come to watch debates on subjects like the condition of British Transvaal and Zulu, events in the Gulf of Tonkin and the supply of fresh water to London. Ramsay MacDonald, later Labour’s first Prime Minister, dropped in to watch proceedings.

In the 1930s, admirers of  British Fascist Oswald Mosley attempted a putsch. “Mosley sent about a dozen of his boys to become members of the parliament and take it over,” remembered one former parliamentarian. 

“At the council meeting before the parliament met, there was a great debate over letting them in. The majority were in favour. In the event, when they were up against the real policies, they could only clap and heckle.”

Embarrassment and excitement were generated by the Algerian question in 1959. In a debate on the torturing of Algerians by the French, later publishing mogul Robert Maxwell, foreign minister at the time, refused to oppose the torturing. The Labour Prime Minister of the Parliament, Stanley Clinton Davis, dismissed him to Opposition glee. 

Westminster-style politicking was not the whole story, however. At times ideology gave way to idiocy, as when Richard Butterfield, later to head the Parliament’s Tory party, put down a bill of “pains and penalties” against the leader of the opposition in the Suez debate, because he did not know where the Oman coast of Arabia was. 

It is not recorded whether the “pains and penalties” stipulated – writing 100 lines and a dunking in Hampstead’s Whitestone Pond – were enacted. 

Wit was the mark of Esther Rantzen’s uncle, Commander Rubin Rantzen, who is reported to have said to the parliament, in a debate on the Press: “The variety of daily papers caters for all possible tastes. You had the Daily Mirror for those who couldn’t read, the Herald for those who couldn’t think, and the Daily Worker for those who couldn’t smell.” 

David Napley, who went on to become an influential solicitor, wrote a poem which was distributed to attract new members:

Do you want to be a speaker?

Do you want to be a wit?

Do you hanker after eloquence,

The while you meekly sit?

Are you Socialist or Tory?

Or somewhere in between?

Do you follow in the footsteps

Where the famous once have been?

The parliament’s decline, like that of the Victorian music hall, is attributed to the arrival of television. With its demise in the early 1960s, Hampstead lost not just a forum for debate but also a chance to meet friends and get things off one’s chest.

• Nick Kochan is a local freelance journalist and author