And that's just scratching the surface.
I’d never heard of this bloke until I happened upon a blue plaque for him while looking around the site of Pope’s Villa in Twickenham for one of Alexander Pope. Instead I spotted this one for a more recent occupant of a building that now stands where Pope's Villa once did. (See end of this post for a bit more on Pope).
This is a post about privilege, entitlement, strongly held and, (for me), mostly odious views, Lilly Langtree and Red Indians. Amongst other stuff, including clarification of the title.
This is a post about Henry Labouchère.
He lived from 1831 to 1912 and was an English politician, writer, publisher and theatre owner. He bought Pope’s Villa in Twickenham as a weekend retreat from London in 1881.
Born in London to a wealthy banking family of Huguenot extraction, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. A radical, an agnostic, and a rebel, he took several gap years off, wandering around Latin America, joining a circus, and spending six months in a camp of Chippeway Indians.
His family then got him a place in the diplomatic service in which he served for some ten years. Appointed then to a post in Buenos Aires, he accepted on condition he remained where he was in Baden Baden. That went down like a lead balloon, and led directly to his dismissal.
During a break in his Parliamentary career, Labouchère gained renown as a journalist, editor, and publisher, sending witty dispatches from Paris during the Siege of Paris In 1870–1871, noting the eating of zoo elephants, donkeys, cats and rats when food supplies ran low. This series of articles helped restore the circulation of the Daily News in which he bought a stake in 1868. His bold style gained a large audience for first his reporting, and later his personal weekly journal, Truth, which launched in 1876, and was often sued for libel.
A vehement opponent of feminism, Labouchère campaigned in Truth against the suffrage movement, ridiculing and belittling women who sought the right to vote. He was also a virulent anti-semite, opposed to Jewish participation in British life, using Truth to campaign against "Hebrew barons" and their supposedly excessive influence, "Jewish exclusivity" and "Jewish cowardice".
Labouchère returned to Parliament in the 1880 election, when he won a seat for the Liberals in Northampton. He supported Gladstone over Home Rule for Ireland whilst privately mocking his fervour. Gladstone's tendency to keep an 'ace of trumps' up his sleeve Labouchere apparently found acceptable, but why did he have to pretend that God had put it there?
From 1886 Labouchère worked tirelessly to remove the Conservatives from power. When the government was turned out in 1892, and Gladstone was called to form an administration, Labouchère expected to be rewarded with a cabinet post. Queen Victoria, however, refused to allow Gladstone to offer him an office, harbouring a strong personal dislike of him – "she would never allow such horrid men to enter the Govt". Her dislike stemmed from his editorship of Truth, which she felt had insulted the Royal Family. This was the last time a British monarch vetoed a prime minister's appointment of a cabinet minister.
Away from politics for a moment, he lived with the actress Henrietta Hodson from 1868, marrying in 1887. They had one child together, Mary Dorothea (Dora) in 1884. In 1881 the Labouchères persuaded the young Lillie Langtry to join with Henrietta in a one act play, to be performed near their weekend retreat at the local Twickenham town hall as curtain raiser to a drama called “Plot and Passion”. It was to be a one night show.
Henrietta's next efforts to make an actress out of Lillie led to endless rehearsals on the Pope's Villa lawn of ”She stoops to Conquer”, with Henrietta playing all the other parts to Lillie’s ”Kate Hardcastle”. This eventually came to an end with ”Labby” commenting that "a flock of sheep couldn't have played more havoc with his lawn”.
Another 'theatrical' event was the visit of Buffalo Bill's Circus to England in the Jubilee year of 1887. The Labouchères, having seen it in London, had invited the Indians to lunch in Twickenham. The braves, squaws, and babies arrived in costume, but earlier than expected at 10am on a Sunday morning rather than 2pm in the afternoon as planned. Whilst waiting for the steam launch that was to take them up to Hampton Course Palace, Labouchère showed them around his garden, inviting them to help themselves to the gooseberries and red currants.
At Hampton Court they apparently passed through the maze in record time, not realising it was a maze. A grand dinner followed on their return to Pope's Villa. The roast beef went down well, and dessert, apparently. Tea and coffee followed. Plum pudding, however, along with gooseberries, red currants, grapes, biscuits, cigarettes and cake, evidently ended up in the guests belt-bags.
Back to his working life, Labouchère became increasingly unpopular due to his opposition to the Second Boer War, arguing instead for peace. His reputation was also tarnished by a series of financial scandals: in 1897 he was accused of share-rigging, using Truth to disparage companies, advising shareholders to dispose of their shares and, when the share prices fell as a result, buying them himself at a low price. He failed to reply to the accusations, and his reputation suffered.
When the Liberal party took power in December 1905 Labouchère was not offered any political office by new prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Disappointed, having been a strong supporter of Campbell-Bannerman, he retired from Parliament the following month, and moved to Florence, Italy, where he died seven years later. He left a fortune of half a million pounds sterling to his daughter, Dora.
He is most remembered for the Labouchère Amendment, which for the first time criminalised all male homosexual activity in the UK. It allowed for the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, who was given the maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment with hard labour. Labouchère expressed regret that the sentence was so short, and would have preferred the seven-year term he had originally proposed in the Amendment.
A gambling strategy for roulette is also named after him: the Labouchère System, also called the Cancellation System or Split Martingale. The player decides, before playing, the sum of money they want to win, and compiles a list of positive numbers that add up to the predetermined amount. With each bet, the player stakes an amount equal to the sum of the first and last numbers on the list. If there's only one number left, then that number is the amount of the stake. In the event the bet is successful, the two amounts are removed from the list; if unsuccessful the amount lost is appended to the end of the list. This process continues until either the list is completely crossed out, at which point the targeted amount of money has been won, or until the player runs out of money with which to bet. Aaaargh!
On Pope, I found his blue plaque on the wall of The Mawson’s Arms on Mawson Row, near the Fuller’s Brewery in Chiswick where, before it was converted to a pub, he spent three years of his late twenties, from 1716 to 1719. See Post 50 for more.
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