1 - Mr. Benn or Lord Stansgate? An Investigation of the Bristol South-East By-Election, May 4, 1961, and Its Consequences [1962]

Summary

The Background

I was born in October 1944 in Bristol. I was pre-constituted as a Nonconformist. This is not to say that I was ‘naturally’ or ‘constitutionally’ disinclined to conform to authority, but rather that my parents were active members of the local Baptist church. It is strictly inaccurate to call them ‘nonconformists’. Historically, protestant denominations were forced to be regarded as such by the attempted imposition, in 1662, of the Act of Uniformity. As David D. Hall has shown recently, this act united, in opposition to the Anglican Church, movements which were fundamentally dissimilar. In particular, the non-conformist label wrongly identified protestants from the reformed tradition with those who were ‘separatist’. As early as the 1590s, however, separatists had ceased to try to reform the established church and had, instead, formed congregations of their own. By this means they avoided the two main problems concerning the English Puritans, as identified by Hall:

The first of these was how to reconcile an inclusive state church with the church as a sanctified community, and the second, how to remain loyal to a Christian prince while acknowledging the authority of divine law. Separatists solved the first by reimagining the visible church as a cluster of small-scale voluntary communities, each of them empowered to exclude the unworthy, and the second by withdrawing from the magistracy-ministry alliance so dear to the Reformed international. (Hall, 2019, 69–70)

As Carlyle wrote in 1845, in his introduction to his edition of Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, the Puritan movement had become ‘unintelligible’: ‘we understand not even in imagination […] what it ever could have meant’ (Carlyle, 1845, vol. 1, 1–11, quoted in Hall, 2019, 349). This seems even more so in 2021, but in my childhood I unconsciously imbibed a sense of separateness. The lives of my parents revolved around the local chapel. My father was a deacon and my mother was a Sunday school teacher. They had no friends outside the chapel community. There was strict adherence to Lord's Day Observance on Sundays and also to total abstinence from alcohol. There was no television in the house until well after the queen's coronation in 1952. I remember no conversation at all about politics. We took the News Chronicle until it ceased in October 1960, which suggests sympathies with the Liberal Party, but I had no knowledge of this orientation.