Crusader on the attack

Why have we forgotten John Bright? In his day he was a massive political celebrity. He could command audiences of 150,000, delivering thrilling impromptu speeches night after night. Perhaps, as Bill Cash suggests, Bright’s eclipse has to do with the decline of conviction politics and public alienation from parliament. Or perhaps, as the novelist Anthony Trollope remarked, the trouble with Bright was that he didn’t actually create anything — he spent a lifetime attacking evils: ‘It was his work to cut down forest trees, and he had nothing to do with the subsequent cultivation of the land’.

Bright was a Quaker, the son of a self-made businessman who established a successful cotton mill in Rochdale, Lancashire. Aged 15, Bright started work in the mill counting-house. His mother died when he was 19, and it was this that drove him to get involved with local radical politics. Quiet Quakers shunned politics, and Bright’s relationship with his faith was always ambivalent. Though he wore sober Quaker black and white, he was a natty dresser. Punch published cartoons of him wearing the obligatory Quaker hat but also a dandy’s monocle. When he was 30, Bright’s wife died. He gave up running the family business, and threw himself into the campaign to repeal the Corn Laws.   

Along with his friend and collaborator, Richard Cobden, Bright stumped the country, calling for free trade in corn. This was class politics — attacking the landed aristocracy — and many saw it as a mill-owner’s dodge, as cheaper bread would allow employers to cut wages. But Bright’s brilliance as a speaker meant that he could raise the game, translating this economic issue into a moral campaign against the evils of aristocratic privilege.

Most historians would agree that the Anti-Corn Law League was only partly responsible for the decision by Robert Peel to repeal the Corn Laws, which was governed largely by the Irish famine.