15 - Sir John Lubbock: Liberal into Liberal Unionist

Summary

Although the Liberals were defeated at the General Election in February, 1874, Robert Lowe was not opposed, and continued to represent the University until 1880. He must have retained the support of so many of the graduates as to make the prospect of unseating him seem remote, in 1874, even though he had lost popularity in the country and had been moved from the Treasury to the Home Office following ‘financial irregularities’ at the Post Office, for which he had a shared ministerial responsibility. There are no University records of the 1874 election, and there was very little press comment. Gladstone’s decision to dissolve Parliament, on 24 January, seems to have caught the Convocation politicians of all parties unprepared. Certainly it was true of the Liberals. Lowe put out an election address on 27 January 1874, and it was only on the following day that his Committee met to make preparations in case any opposition appeared. But it was reported on 2 February that he would not be opposed; he was duly proposed by Goldsmid and Richard Quain, and declared elected.

The story was very different in 1880. By then the London University Conservative Club was better established, and doubtless more self-confident as a result of there having been a Conservative Government in power for six years. The Club met on 13 June 1879, and decided to set up a Conservative Election Committee of the University of London. Robert Norman Fowler, who had been MP for Penryn and Falmouth in the 1868–74 Parliament, and who was to be elected for the City of London in 1880, was Chairman, and the four other officers were W.M. Ord, Dean of St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School; Albert Kaye Rollit, an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, who would be knighted in 1885 and join the Senate in 1890; Henry Stevens, MD; and R.V. Tidman of New College. At that stage there were altogether fifty-five members of the Committee, of whom twenty-four were medical men.

The Conservative candidate was Arthur Charles, QC, Recorder of Bath, who agreed to stand on being supported by 250 potential voters. Charles was a UCL graduate and Member of the College Council, as well as being a current University Examiner in Common Law.