1956-1976
Roy Jenkins (Lord Jenkins), 1920-2003
Roy Jenkins played a significant role in developing and articulating a new progressive vision of social, political and constitutional change. His reforms at the Home Office helped to transform Britain into a more modern, more civilised society. He was a successful, if orthodox, Chancellor of the Exchequer. He played an important and consistent role in…
Violet Bonham Carter (Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury), 1887-1969
Violet Bonham Carter was born in Hampstead on 15 April 1887 as Helen Violet Asquith, the daughter of Herbert Henry Asquith and his first wife Helen Melland. In 1891 Violet’s mother died of typhoid fever, and in 1894 Asquith married Margot Tennant. At the time of Violet’s birth, Asquith had just entered the House of Commons.…
Jeremy Thorpe, 1929-2014
The infamy of Jeremy Thorpe’s downfall unfairly colours all else in his life. Thorpe was a stylish, progressive and popular politician. Under his leadership the Liberal Party won more votes than ever before or since at a general election and helped drive legislation taking Britain into the European Community through a divided Parliament. But the…
Red Guard versus Old Guard? The influence of the Young Liberal movement on the Liberal Party in the 1960s and 1970s a witness seminar
In the 1960s and early 1970s the press coined the phrase the “Red Guard” to describe the radical politics of the youth wing of the Liberal Party. At the 1966 Party Conference in Brighton, the Red Guard sponsored an anti-NATO resolution. Over the next decade the YLs were active on a number of foreign policy…
Torrington ’58: Liberal survival and revival, 1945-79
On 27 March 1958, Mark Bonham Carter, Asquith’s grandson, won the Parliamentary by-election in the Devon seat of Torrington by a margin of just 219 votes. It was the first Liberal by-election gain since the 1920s. Although the seat was lost in the 1959 general election, it marked the beginning of the first major Liberal…
Labour’s right wing
Review of Stephen Meredith, Labours Old and New: The Parliamentary Right of the British Labour Party 1970-79 and the Roots of New Labour (Manchester University Press, 2008).
Whatever happened to ‘Orpington Man’?
Report of a Liberal Democrat History Group meeting at the National Liberal Club, 23 January 2012, with Dr Mark Egan and Professor Dennis Kavanagh. Chair, Duncan Brack.
Swinging in the 60s to the Liberals
Mary Murphy and Pontypridd Urban District Council.
‘An out-of-date word’
Jo Grimond and the left.