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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:24] Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark Darcy. Coming up this week.

[00:00:27] Ruth Fox: Devalued promises. Why politicians should be very careful about the pledges they make to aggrieved groups like the WASPI women.

[00:00:34] Mark D'Arcy: A Christmas rising on the committee corridor as members of two committees choose their own chairs in defiance of the customary Westminster carve up.

[00:00:43] Ruth Fox: And with Christmas just around the corner, we thought we'd deviate from our usual format a little. We'll talk to authors of a couple of parliamentary history books that are ideal if you're still looking for a present for the parliamentary nerd in your life.

[00:01:00] Mark D'Arcy: But first Ruth, I suppose we've really, really got to talk about it. The whole issue of the government saying that it can't afford to compensate women who lost out from the change in the state pension age, the WASPy women as they've come to be called, has dominated the parliamentary week. An awful lot of Labour MPs are finding that their pledges in opposition, that this should be done, are now being used in evidence against them.

[00:01:24] The Conservatives are rather enjoying themselves, having been hammered by Labour over the issue for ages, to discover that Labour's reached exactly the same conclusion that they'd reached.

[00:01:33] Ruth Fox: Yes, we should explain, Mark, just for our international audience. Listeners in particular who may not be okay with this that the phrase waspy women stands for women against state pension Inequality and they've been waging a campaign for a number of years now for compensation because the decision to equalize the state pension age meant that in their view they weren't properly informed about it and they've lost out as they see it financially.

[00:01:55] Mark D'Arcy: Because once upon a time women got the state pension in Britain for five years earlier than men, and that was gradually phased out, and at one point the speed of the phase out was increased, essentially, to save the government money.

[00:02:06] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and that was, I think, in 2011 that that decision was taken. So this has been a long running political campaign, and basically women who were born in the 1950s in particular say that they've been unfairly affected. They weren't notified properly by the Department of Work and Pensions about this.

[00:02:22] It's thought to affect something in the region of two and a half million women, but not all of them, of course, would have been financially affected because some of them would have known about it and would have made financial provision for it. That's part of the government's argument about this. It's accepted that maladministration took place, that the government at the time did not properly inform these women who were going to be affected as they could have done, but that not everybody would necessarily have suffered a financial injustice.

[00:02:46] This has all gone through MPs advice surgeries. A number of sample cases have ended up before the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman, sort of the public advocate for cases of maladministration where the

[00:03:00] Mark D'Arcy: state has trodden on someone essentially.

[00:03:02] Ruth Fox: And, uh, it's even been to judicial review. It's been reviewed by the appeal court.

[00:03:08] And basically earlier this year, the Ombudsman issued a report, which concluded that, uh, maladministration had taken place, which they'd found a couple of years earlier, and that there had been some financial injustice and an appropriate remedy, an appropriate mechanism for a remedy was needed. And it basically said to the government and to parliament, you need to decide what that remedy should be.

[00:03:30] And it recommended something in the region of a payment of between one and three thousand pounds, which you might think, well, doesn't sound that huge. But then when you talk about two and a half million people affected, potentially, the bills the government was looking at was something in the region of three and a half billion to ten and a half billion pounds.

[00:03:47] Hence, Rachel Reeves has concluded it cannot be afforded.

[00:03:51] Mark D'Arcy: And apart from the considerable injustice that's being complained of here, this is a cautionary tale for opposition parties about which bandwagons they should clamber aboard. During the last Parliament when Labour were in opposition, you'd see endless Labour MPs posing in front of placards saying we're going to deliver justice for the WASPI women, signing pledges. So not unreasonably the WASPI women assumed that a Labour Government would actually pay out this compensation and it hasn't come to pass and you do wonder where Rachel Reeves, when she was Shadow Chancellor, was when all this was being said.

[00:04:30] Because even then, it must have been apparent it was going to be very, very difficult for any government to come up with several billion quid for compensation here. Not least because they're coming up with several billion quid for lots of other compensation - infected blood schemes, the Post Office workers who were caught up in the Horizon scandal and unjustly convicted of criminal offences.

[00:04:48] Lots and lots of compensations are having to be paid out by this government. And this, I suspect, has been viewed in the Treasury as a compensation settlement too far.

[00:04:57] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think that's one of the concerns is that by comparing this WASPI campaign to things like the Horizon scandal and the Infected Blood scandal, actually, they're not comparable in terms of the effect that this has had on people's lives.

[00:05:09] But yeah, why does this matter? It matters for the question of truth and trust in politics and MPs in particular, as you say, you do wonder what were they thinking in opposition that led them to sign those pledges without really thinking about it. And I was very struck by a social media post by Paul Johnson of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, who I think it's fair to say is somewhat frustrated with the behavior of our leading politicians.

[00:05:32] And he said in the last 24 hours, "Genuinely, I don't get politicians. This was obviously a campaign with little merit. How can serious people hoping for high office support, knowing they can't deliver. Similar with all three main parties at different times on student finance, which of course is a reference to the Liberal Democrats, and on tax and spend in the last election campaign."

[00:05:54] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, and you do wonder whether this is going to turn out to be Sir Keir Starmer's "Nick Clegg moment";. To rehearse the ancient history behind that remark - in the run up to the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats were promising to give students a much better deal on student tuition fees to try and reduce the level of debt they were facing. And when the Liberal Democrats entered government with the Conservatives, they dropped that pledge very, very rapidly indeed. And were never forgiven in many student constituencies for it. Remember, the Lib Dems used to represent an awful lot of university constituencies. So they were reneging on a pledge that was directly relevant to their electoral heartland and they lost an awful lot of those seats as a result and Nick Clegg went from being almost the hero of the 2010 election campaign - remember when everyone was saying "I agree with Nick"; - to being the zero, the politician who immediately reneged on a key pledge that he'd more or less signed in blood. Now the same thing seems to be happening to Labour. Amusingly, the Liberal Democrats are now saying we absolutely back the WASPI women, this is a terrible decision by the government. And I wonder if this is A they've slightly forgotten their own saga on student finance or B is it because they they're rather enjoying the opportunity of sticking it to Labour the way Labour really had a go at them over Nick Clegg's behavior back in 2010.

[00:07:14] So is it revenge or is it amnesia? I'm not quite sure

[00:07:18] Ruth Fox: It is easier for the Lib Dems and the SNP here to have a go because there's no expectation that they were going to be in government this time and were going to have to be dealing with it.

[00:07:25] Mark D'Arcy: They might be in government next time.

[00:07:27] Ruth Fox: They might.

[00:07:27] Mark D'Arcy: Either of those, you could imagine being in some centre left coalition after the next general election and then possibly having to renege on the pledge again.

[00:07:36] Ruth Fox: But I think the Conservatives have got a bit of brass neck. I mean, they're pressing for a parliamentary vote on this. Sir Gavin Williamson, former Chief Whip in a previous Conservative government pressing for a parliamentary vote, of course, because he wants to put the pressure on Labour and have all those Labour MPs having to walk through the lobbies and vote against a compensation scheme.

[00:07:53] But, you know, there's no chance that the Conservatives were going to do this either.

[00:07:56] Mark D'Arcy: But the Conservatives weren't implying that they were. And that's the distinction.

[00:08:01] Ruth Fox: Not to the same degree. There were some who were supportive of it.

[00:08:04] Mark D'Arcy: Although I must say, given the record of recent Conservative governments naming no particular blonde haired Brexiteer prime ministers, they really aren't in a position to deliver great lectures on broken promises, I feel.

[00:08:16] Ruth Fox: No, no, quite. But I think the other reason this matters, well, two more reasons why I think this matters. It goes to Paul Johnson's tweet about, "I genuinely don't understand politicians. It was a campaign with little merit. Why did they sign up to this in the first place?"; It's partly the role of the Ombudsman and the role that it plays in terms of MPs and their relationship with constituents.

[00:08:36] So one of the reasons that MPs on the Labour benches signed up to this was because they've got a parade of women coming into their constituency advice surgeries and pressing the case, and they don't want to say no. That's part of it. Part of it, of course, may be that they actually do think there's a significant injustice and perhaps didn't understand some of the implications in terms of the scale of this, which is where they needed a steer from their front bench, from Rachel Reeves and others, about what they should and shouldn't do.

[00:09:02] Mark D'Arcy: Maybe they thought the money could be found.

[00:09:03] Ruth Fox: Maybe, possibly, although you have to wonder where they've been over the last couple of years to think that. But the other thing is though that, In order to take a case to the Ombudsman, there's two avenues. So it's a Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman.

[00:09:16] If you're taking a health case, you can go direct to the Ombudsman. If you're taking another case about a government department or a government agency, another public body, you have to have exhausted all your avenues of complaint and you have to get a referral from the MP. So you have to go through the MP's office, their advice surgery, you have to get them to refer you.

[00:09:38] Mark D'Arcy: So MPs have some skin in the game.

[00:09:40] Ruth Fox: They have some skin in the game. And one, are you going to refuse a referral because you might not be sure whether there has been maladministration that's worth investigating to see if there's been a financial injustice that needs remedying. But also, you know, it's pretty difficult to say no to them at the local level.

[00:09:57] But of course, this is one of the reasons why there is this growth in constituency social work because they are the gatekeepers to the route for remedy through things like the Ombudsman. So I think that's a problem. And the Ombudsman itself is not without some criticism. I mean, it's got a huge backlog of cases.

[00:10:17] It falls under the scrutiny auspices of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee. It's been called up before that committee several times in recent years because of concern about the backlog of its own cases. It was taken to judicial review by the WASPI women themselves, who weren't happy when it initially said it didn't think they'd suffered financially, sufficient for a remedy. That was judicially reviewed. It was settled. And as a consequence of that, the subsequent Ombudsman report then concluded, actually, no, there had perhaps been a financial setback. Problem that needed remedying and hence the report we got this March recommending Parliament and Government come up with a settlement

[00:10:59] Mark D'Arcy: What you've got here is a picture of an institution that's actually in a bit of a mess now and there has been talk of new laws to sort out the position of the Ombudsman within the spectrum of complaints mechanisms available to citizens against the government, and that has somehow never happened.

[00:11:15] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I think it was 2016, I think, when there was an in principle acceptance on the part of bodies within Parliament and the government at the time that the whole Ombudsman role needed overhauling and they needed to merge various ombudsman bodies and modernise the model. Why hasn't it happened then, you question?

[00:11:33] And the answer comes back all the time, a lack of parliamentary time.

[00:11:36] Mark D'Arcy: Oh, Gordon Bennett. I mean, the oldest horiest and actually least valid excuse of all. If you look at what the House of Commons is doing early next year, there's endless backbench general debates, all doubtless on quite important subjects, but the idea that there's no time to legislate or some of that time couldn't be repurposed to get moving on the issue of sorting out the Ombudsman is just plain nonsense. It's a choice. They could choose to do something else and frankly, if they were that bothered about it, they could even get MPs to sit on a Friday and pass a bill then. Governments are perfectly capable of doing all these things. They do control the parliamentary agenda as we constantly whinge on about here.. They've just chosen not to. It's as simple as that.

[00:12:16] Ruth Fox: Yeah. And actually, that's one of the causes, if you like, that our friends at MySociety are taking up. We've talked on the podcast before about the fact that the new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has had an inquiry taking evidence from stakeholders about what they think we should focus on in terms of future parliamentary reform and reforms to working practices and so on.

[00:12:37] And MySociety's got a blog out, we'll put it out in the show notes, that fixing the Ombudsman should be a priority and they make the point that if you can get a better system in place, you'd ease the workload of MPs and increase the effectiveness of the complaint system.

[00:12:52] Mark D'Arcy: I do think though that when the Ombudsman system was first brought in, which would have been, what, the 1970s?

[00:12:58] They didn't envisage it making decisions of quite this magnitude, you know, individual cases of injustice for the state might occasionally have involved more than a few thousand, maybe the occasional one that was worth a couple of million, but I'm sure they didn't envisage the Ombudsman basically turning around and saying you've got to reverse a policy decision, this is going to cost several billion.

[00:13:19] Ruth Fox: Yeah, and that's part of the problem here, isn't it? But it's a cautionary tale. And I think an interesting question, above and beyond the politics of this, which I think are harmful for the government, on top of things like the Winter Fuel Allowance, it's corrosive of public views of politicians and what they say and whether they can be trusted.

[00:13:38] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, promise the earth and deliver a few grains of dust. Yeah. It's bound to stoke public cynicism. It's what destroyed Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015. It could easily do an awful lot of damage to Keir Starmer. And if you come in saying you're Mr. Clean, and you're going to be different, and you're going to do better, and then you turn out to be just like all the rest, well, woe betide you, because the electorate don't easily forgive or forget that.

[00:14:03] Ruth Fox: No, and that, of course, is reflected in the polls at the moment. Well, Mark, it's otherwise been a relatively quiet week so far. So as we're recording, we were hoping that we might have news of the new Labour peers that are apparently going to be appointed, 30 of them, according to the press. But we haven't got that announcement yet.

[00:14:20] And as we're recording, Keir Starmer has not yet appeared before the Liaison Committee, so we can't talk about that either.

[00:14:27] Mark D'Arcy: Not that the Liaison Committee appearances by Prime Ministers are renowned for generating mega stories, but there you are..

[00:14:33] Ruth Fox: But one item of news that took my attention this week, we talked last week about the Intelligence and Security Committee that was confirming its membership several months after the election.

[00:14:42] And we talked about the possibility of who might be its chair. And I recall you saying the committee is a mechanism to reassure the Commons about the intelligence services. And we expected, in its customary way, that it would choose a member of the House of Commons as its chair. But it seems they've revolted and chosen a Peer.

[00:15:01] Mark D'Arcy: Kevin Jones, Labour MP as was, a former Defence Minister, and actually quite a long serving member of the Intelligence and Security Committee in previous parliaments, has now been elected as its Chair and he's now a Peer, he's now Lord Jones, so he's not going to be able to sort of sit in the Commons and be able to intervene in debates and speak as the Chair of the Committee in the way that previous incumbents like Julian Lewis in the last parliament, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, people like that had before.

[00:15:28] Ruth Fox: And there's then another revolt on the committee corridor another joint committee. Another iteration,

[00:15:33] Mark D'Arcy: yeah.

[00:15:33] Ruth Fox: Yeah, so the Joint Committee on Human Rights has done the same. Customarily, it would choose an MP to chair that joint committee, and usually it's a sort of an agreed deal between the party business managers, but they have gone for the crossbench peer Lord Alton.

[00:15:47] Mark D'Arcy: David Alton is quite an interesting figure actually. He first came into Parliament as a Liberal, not a Liberal Democrat, a Liberal in the Edge Hill by election in Liverpool, which was held a matter of weeks before the 1979 general election, which brought Margaret Thatcher to power. So he fought a by election, won it, and then immediately he had to fight the seat again in a general election and managed to hold on to it then.

[00:16:08] And then was in Parliament for really quite a long time afterwards as a Liberal MP. Slightly fell out with the Liberal Democrats after a while because he's a Catholic, he has views on abortion that were not congenial to other members of his party. So he's not now sitting in the House of Lords as a Liberal Peer He sits as an Independent, but he's been a very very active campaigner against human rights abuses in China. Rarely a bill goes by without David Alton attempting to attach an amendment to it in the House of Lords to try and crack down on some aspects of Chinese activity or punish human rights abusers in Xinjiang And he's closely allied to people like Ian Duncan Smith in the House of Commons. There's now quite an active kind of China hawk lobby that feels that the British state needs to do a great deal more to combat Chinese political influence and potentially Chinese subversion in this country as well as taking a much sterner view of what China is doing in its Xinjiang province. And so here is this campaigner chairing that committee so we can I suspect anticipate a great deal more human rights activity from David Alton now with the authority of the chair of the Joint Committee behind him.

[00:17:21] Ruth Fox: Yeah, I mean, I say, you know, this may have been a revolt against the whips, but actually, they may not have been, because it reflects a lack of seniority amongst the MPs on the committee itself.

[00:17:30] You know, this is one of the challenges, I think, of some of these committees, that there are so few MPs on them that have got a back history on these issues. You know, they're new to Parliament, they're relatively inexperienced, and therefore a decision may have been taken in this case. and in the case of the Intelligence and Security Committee, we were saying last week, there's just a lack of people on that committee with real in depth security and intelligence experience, so they've turned to the Peers.

[00:17:55] Mark D'Arcy: It's worth remembering that Boris Johnson's government in 2019 wanted to install the former cabinet minister Chris Grayling as the chair. He was nominated to the committee, but it's for the committee to elect its chair, and they decided to elect Julian Lewis, a Conservative backbencher with a long track record of interest in defence and security matters, instead of Chris Grayling, and actually the government was so cross with him that the Conservative whip was withdrawn from Julian Lewis for a while.

[00:18:21] I'm not sure he was that bothered. Uh, so, perhaps the precedent was set there for those committees to be a little bit more robust and not necessarily accept someone nominated from on high would definitely chair the committee.

[00:18:35] Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, shall we leave it there? Take a break. Um, we'll be back in a, in a minute or so.

[00:18:40] But before we do, if you're enjoying the podcast, please post a short review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps Mark and I because it enables others to find the podcast and helps us to build the Parliament Matters community. So please do leave a review, four, five stars.

[00:18:57] Mark D'Arcy: Five, definitely. Five, five, definitely. No footling around with four stars, five stars.

[00:19:03] Ruth Fox: And, uh, we'll be back in a minute with some Christmas gifts.

[00:19:06] Mark D'Arcy: A history hit. With you again soon. Well, our first guest in our Christmas history hit is Mari Takayanagi , who's a parliamentary archivist, currently actually on leave, going to other archives of other parliaments elsewhere in the world.

[00:19:22] But Mari has written a book, Necessary Women, tracing the sometimes rather surprising story of the role played by women in the world of Westminster back through the centuries. And so Mari, first of all, what attracted you to this as a subject? It's an untold story and I suppose that begs to be told.

[00:19:39] Mari Takayanagi: Absolutely. So I have worked in Parliament for 24 years and I've always wondered about my predecessors. Who was the first woman archivist? What were the women working particular roles? And so as part of my PhD, which I did quite a long time ago now, I started to look into those early women staff. And I always knew that was what I wanted to go back to and look more into.

[00:19:56] And then I found that Elizabeth Hallam Smith, who used to be the House of Lords Librarian and still works in the building, was also researching women's staff. And so we got together and we decided we would write a book about it. And the result is Necessary Women, The Untold Story of Parliament's Working Women.

[00:20:10] Tracing the story back through roughly 1800, when women worked as cooks. cleaners, housekeepers, and other kind of roles in the old Palace of Westminster before the fire. Then through the fire, through the late 19th century, as women start to come into secretarial office roles. And then into the 20th century, with the impact of the First World War and the Second World War, when women started to come into professional roles, and we end about 1960, basically when the archival sources stop and when living memory begins and people start to remember what it was actually like.

[00:20:39] Mark D'Arcy: So paint a picture for us, first of all, of those very early days before the fire that destroyed the Houses of Parliament, the old houses in 1834, because it was a rather different place then. It was kind of a community. People had private houses on what would now be the parliamentary estate. There were all sorts of people living there, there were all sorts of commercial operations underway.

[00:20:58] Mari Takayanagi: The Palace of Westminster that we see today is of course a Victorian building, built after the fire and finished around 1860.

[00:21:03] Before that it was quite a sort of ramshackle selection of buildings built. Sort of

[00:21:07] Mark D'Arcy: Gormenghast like.

[00:21:08] Mari Takayanagi: Yes, absolutely. And Westminster Hall, which we imagine today as the great empty hall, that it is most of the time today, used to have shops, businesses, courts operating in different corners. And there was a huge parliamentary community.

[00:21:20] And I think it's one of the things that people working there today don't realise, because we assume Parliament is a place of work. But it was actually a place where families lived,

[00:21:28] where office holders lived, where people like the Speaker of the House of Commons, senior staff like the Clerk of the Parliaments, the Clerk of the House, the Librarian, Black Rod, they had residences. In some cases quite large residences, and there were also many humble residences there as well, where some of the cooks, the cleaners, lived in, so they didn't have to go out.

[00:21:45] And this idea that you had families living there, some really quite ordinary families, maybe with children, and people went out from there to work elsewhere, and they were living in Parliament. It's one of those sort of quite extraordinary things. This carried on as well after the fire, and if you, if you walk around the Palace of Westminster today, of course, there's been a huge amount of building work there over the last 160 years or so.

[00:22:06] And if you walk around the courtyards in particular, then you start to understand that actually Barry built this to be something like maybe an Oxbridge College or an Inn of Court, he built it with great big doors and staircases leading up. So people like the House of Lords housekeeper, for example, who was the only woman officer in the 19th century, had a huge palatial apartment built for her by Barry after the fire, extending over several floors next to the Victoria Tower.

[00:22:31] Barry built the Palace to be residences and have some rooms for the chamber, the committees and so on. What he didn't build it was to have offices either for members or particularly for staff. Members in particular didn't need offices, they all went back to their clubs if their House wasn't sitting. And the number of staff was much smaller then.

[00:22:47] As I say, there were a lot of domestic support staff, but in terms of office staff, they were very small in number. So the Palace has been basically adapted to that ever since.

[00:22:56] Ruth Fox: And Mari, your title, "Necessary Women", so you've got some absolutely fabulous stories about the women in Parliament, that we'll go through a few, but the title "Necessary Women", it was a particular role, we wouldn't think of it as a particularly nice role, but it was actually quite a senior role that attracted people who wanted that job because of its seniority.

[00:23:15] Mari Takayanagi: Yes, well I've mentioned the Lord's Housekeeper, so Jane Julia Bennett, who was the Housekeeper at the time of the 1834 fire, as I say, was one of the most senior office holders, and when the Palace was finished, Charles Barry gave her the keys to the Palace, because she was the one responsible for unlocking and locking up the House of Lords, and had huge responsibilities, including running tours, security, as well as cleaning.

[00:23:36] And when you think about how many people work in a building today in those areas, and it's an absolutely vast number. The title, "Necessary Woman" ;, though, comes from a particular job title, as you mention, the very earliest, uh, woman that we could find mentioned that we knew by name, who definitely worked in the building, was employed by the House of Lords, was a "Necessary Woman".

[00:23:53] And she's right there in the records, in the parliamentary archives, “Necessary Woman”. We managed to trace it all the way back to the Restoration, when Charles II came to the throne and the House of Lords was re-established after the Commonwealth. The Lords employed a “Necessary Woman”. The first named one is Margery Hatrum. And that role passed down four generations of women from mother to daughter. And we think of course, of the House of Lords as being, it was of course, a hereditary body in those days, but the same was true for the staff and not just the male staff, but female staff as well. And so “necessary woman” sounds very strange today, but basically it was a woman who did the “necessary” providing close personal services.

[00:24:28] So the Royal family, particularly the Queen, maybe had, had a “necessary woman” who would have been responsible for emptying her chamber pot and being there, right there in the bedroom with her. If you know the film The Favourite about Queen Anne, I think we see quite how up close and personal some of those servants were.

[00:24:42] And so the House of Lords also employed a “necessary woman”, because it was basically very much like a stately home in many ways, with grandfamilies in it. And the role of “necessary woman” then comes down to the centuries and is only stopped around the time of the fire when there's various reforms in staffing.

[00:24:56] But parallel to that, we have the housekeeper, as I say, with great responsibilities. Over in the Commons it's a little different, but in the Lords I think because it was, um, very much run, run like a stately home where you might, if you think back to Downton Abbey kind of idea, where you maybe have the, the butler and the housekeepers, you know, on site, they might be married, they might sort of live in the cottage on the estate or something like that and run a large staff, there's an element to which the House of Lords resembles that.

[00:25:17] Mark D'Arcy: Some of these stories were not very happy stories. Some of them were outright tragic.

[00:25:22] Mari Takayanagi: Some of the earliest sort of anecdotal stories about women in Parliament, uh, uh, they appear initially doing things like selling fruit. And, uh, there's a strong implication with, uh, maybe some of those very early women that they're not just selling fruit. But, um, yes, indeed.

[00:25:37] And in terms of, um, it being a hard life for a woman working in Parliament, sort of, um, the best example of this is probably Eliza Arscot, who was Principal Housemaid to the House of Lords in the late 19th century. She's one of the women on the cover of Necessary Women and she's the one in the middle with a big lace collar staring out with huge dark circles under her eyes.

[00:25:56] And this photo was taken in an asylum because, uh, very sadly she suffered a mental breakdown and she went mad, to use the parlance of the time. She was employed by the Lords in 1895, by which point the housekeeper role which had been very high ranking had been downgraded to save money and so when she was appointed initially she was put on a monthly salary rather than annual salary it wasn't pensionable and she didn't get the housekeeper's grand residence either.

[00:26:20] It was only after a lot of arguments and with the Office of Works that she was allowed to live on site which the Lords thought was necessary for her to do her job and she was allowed to live initially in two unfurnished rooms. I can't imagine how miserable it must have been for this poor working class woman to be told she can live in two rooms with no furniture.

[00:26:35] Eventually, they managed to get her some furniture. But then, after she's worked there for a few years, the complaints start to roll in from her team of housemaids and from doorkeepers and so on. The son of one of her housemaids writes to the Secretary to the Lord Great Chamberlain, who's in charge of her saying that his mother is being bullied basically by Eliza Arscot.

[00:26:55] There's a woman housemate who makes a complaint and said that she would leave her job if she didn't have to support her children and she cried bitterly describing this. And so she's on a final warning when just a few days before Christmas, in fact, in December 1901, she's found wandering the courtyards in the House of Lords, knocking on staff doors and refusing to go to bed.

[00:27:10] She's trying to knock up the Clerk of the Parliaments, the most senior official in the Lords, she wants to talk to his wife. And of course, this cannot do. They call a doctor. Eventually, she's persuaded to go back to her rooms and the next day, she's removed from the premises and sent first to a workhouse. And then, because she's behaving so erratically, she goes to the local asylum, Hanwell Asylum.

[00:27:31] And the photograph of her on the cover of Necessary Women is from the asylum casebook. And this was one of those sort of great archival discovery moments, because I went there thinking, if I can just find out if she was definitely admitted and how long she was there for and what they thought was wrong with her.

[00:27:44] And the archivist there advised me what to order up, and I found, yes, fantastic, she was admitted. It says, gave her residence as House of Lords, Victoria Tower, which was very amusing for me. Then I turned the pages, and there she was, staring out at me. And there's very few photographs of these early women, even some of the high ranking ones.

[00:27:59] We've got no pictures at all. And here was one of the most humble women working in Parliament. And there she was looking at me because they just took photographs of their inmates. And the doctor's notes make very sad reading. There's a lot of delusional talk, but also if you know a little bit about her, you can see some of the truth behind it.

[00:28:15] So the doctor's write sort of very disparagingly, you know, she says she comes from the House of Lords and she owns the place. Whereas in fact, as I say she's the principal there, and her job title was Principal Housemaid. So there's a grain of truth, but there's also a lot of exaggeration. And she talks a lot about furniture. And again, if you know that she had to fight for her furniture, you can understand that. But then, sort of, more disturbing, you get hints of abuse. She talks about being murdered by four men and brought to life again, which, we can only speculate as to what that might mean, but it's not going to be good. And very sadly, she never left the asylum, and she died there in her seventies, uh, in 1933.

[00:28:48] Mark D'Arcy: This is all traceable through parliamentary records, you know, you've got account books presumably going back for hundreds of years.

[00:28:56] Mari Takayanagi: So the survival of records is patchy, because in part of the fire, which destroyed virtually all the historic records of the House of Commons, the Lords records survived because they were kept in the Jewel Tower, which still survives today as an English Heritage building.

[00:29:08] But it's, uh, fortunately, that does include some of the records of the earliest “necessary women”. There was a dispute in the early 19th century about who was the necessary, who had been appointed the “necessary woman” and they appoint not one, but two House of Lords Select Committees to look into it. But the fire is a bit of a watershed, and there's a most magnificent account book that survives from the time of the fire, which recalls the name of the House of Commons Refreshment Department staff.

[00:29:28] And right at the top of the list of names is Elizabeth Favill.. This is a very legendary woman who was written about by Charles Dickens. So Charles Dickens, we know him as a novelist today, but he was a parliamentary reporter and wrote various sketches, sketches by Boz, a couple of which focus on Parliament.

[00:29:43] One of these, he writes about old Nicholas, the butler who presided over Bellamy's refreshment room. Bellamy's of course still exists today in modern form. And back then, Bellamy's was the place to eat in Parliament at the time of the 1834 fire.

[00:29:55] Mark D'Arcy: William Pitt the elders dying words were supposed to be “I think I could eat one of Mr Bellamy's veal pies.”

[00:29:59] Mari Takayanagi: Indeed, but it was probably Mrs. Bellamy who cooked it and served it. And, uh, yeah, that's, that's not a joke. Mrs. Bellamy was absolutely there with John Bellamy. It then goes down through generations of Bellamys. And at the time of the fire, as I say, we have old Nicholas the butler, who Dickens describes as sort of wearing all black and sort of very tall and stiff and presiding over things.

[00:30:17] And then there's Jane, goddess of Bellamy's. So he calls her the “Hebe of Bellamy's”, who's there joshing with the MPs, taking jokes and bantering back and giving as good as she gets. And Jane was a pseudonym. The waitresses seemed to have adopted pseudonyms in those days, I think possibly for their own protection against the joshing and bantering of MPs who they saw every day.

[00:30:37] But the research by my co-author, Elizabeth Hallam Smith has identified her as Elizabeth Favill, and she's right there at the top of this account book. And this is because at the time of the fire, they might have, uh, snatched some records about, uh, chamber or committee business, but no, people still needed to be fed. The business had to go on, they were busy rigging up temporary House of Commons, House of Lords in the, in the smoking ruin, and so Bellamy's had to go on, and they had to pay the staff, so they snatched the accounts book, and you can see Jane right there at the top of the list.

[00:31:03] Mark D'Arcy: I suppose that the big dividing line that came along in all this was the moment when women moved up, as it were, from the ancillary roles of doing the cooking, and the cleaning, and the personal service, and took places in the actual law making machine of Parliament.

[00:31:19] And that was much later on.

[00:31:21] Mari Takayanagi: Yes, so from the late 19th century you get women coming in in secretarial roles, so not quite as a part of the legislative machine, but certainly supporting the work of the chamber and committees. My favorite character in Necessary Woman is May Ashworth, who's uh, one of the women on the cover.

[00:31:35] She looks like a Victorian governess on the cover because they're very sort of straight laced and sort of high collar, but she was in fact an entrepreneur who set up her own typing agency at a time when typing was the new technology, the AI of its day and managed to win a competitive contract to supply typing services to the House of Commons in 1895.

[00:31:53] Ashworths is still recognised today by some people who have been working in the building a very long time as a nickname for the typing pool, because although she died in 1928 she ran her firm there through marriage, divorce, war and death because, as I say, it carries on in rooms off Westminster Hall until at least the 1960s.

[00:32:09] So you have women supporting the business. Ashworths is an agency, but then the House of Commons and House of Lords also start employing women. And so again, it's initially it's in secretarial roles and we have a House of Lords employ a woman accountant, May Court, who's another woman on the front cover of Necessary Women.

[00:32:26] And she is employed after the First World War and carries on running her all female department through many years until she retires and then dies sadly during the Second World War. In terms of women playing a part in the legislative machine, they're in the, in the chamber directly supporting the work of the MPs. That comes during the Second World War. This is when we really get change. Men were called up to fight, this happened during the First World War, and then again during the Second World War, and so women step in and take their places. And we get the first woman Clerk in the House of Commons, who's appointed directly to free up a man for war service. This is the motivation.

[00:32:59] She answers an advert in the press, I think she may be the first woman, necessary women who's actually employed that way and not through some connection or whatever. Her background is working for the League of Nations in Geneva. So the League of Nations have been busy trying to prevent war and promote sort of international cooperation and failed sadly, um, because then we have the Second World War.

[00:33:18] And so all the League of Nations contracts, staff contracts are suspended. She comes back home to the UK and then ends up working in the House of Commons, having been supporting committees in the League of Nations for the previous however many years. She's working in the Committee Office. And at first sort of in a support role, and then it becomes clear she's got the ability to clerk a committee herself.

[00:33:35] And so she supports the work of the National Expenditure Committee, which had a very important role scrutinising the expenditure of government during the Second World War. She strikes up a rapport and a friendship with the two women MPs on the committee, Joan Davidson, Viscountess Davidson, and Irene Ward, who is better known for her sort of post Second World War role supporting equal pay, and perhaps we'll come back to that.

[00:33:56] But, uh, during the war, um, she's busy supporting the committee. She's going out on trips, organising things, and also right there in the chamber. So she's left an oral history recording, which is at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And, uh, in this she, she talks about how during the war, she used to go into the chamber and hear Churchill give all his famous war speeches.

[00:34:13] And he used to glare at her, and she was expecting to be sent out or something, but that didn't happen. And she said it was great fun. And then it came to laying the report of her committee on the table of the House. And her male colleague said to her, you better not do that, it's never been done by a woman before.

[00:34:26] So she said, well for that reason I'm going to do it. She was clearly quite a personality. And I think she probably had to be in this otherwise very male office. But she also goes on to say in her oral history recording, but there was also lots of prejudice and never any chance of promotion. There are staff records about this in the Parliamentary Archives, which show that she was paid less than half of her male colleagues, doing exactly the same job as her.

[00:34:47] And, uh, Irene Ward and Joan Davidson get wind of this, and they go to the Speaker and they say she needs to be paid more, and she does get a pay rise after a lot of argument. It's still less than her male colleagues. Eventually she leaves Parliament. She goes to work first for the Foreign Office and then after the Second World War she goes to work for the United Nations.

[00:35:02] So she comes full circle and works for the UN for many years, first in New York and then in Geneva. Um, and that's why there's an oral history recording, not because of her role in Parliament, but because of her important role supporting the UN. But, uh, I was very glad and very, especially to be able to hear her voice.

[00:35:18] Ruth Fox: And when is the first woman employed as a Hansard reporter?

[00:35:22] Mari Takayanagi: So the first woman Hansard reporter was Jean Winder. And this very much carries on what we were just saying about unequal pay, because that's really what her career became known for. So Jean Winder was appointed in 1944, initially on a temporary basis, when the editor of debates was desperate for staff and unable to find a suitable man.

[00:35:40] And that's how he describes it to a select committee when they asked him about it that year. Jean Winder, just like Kay Midwinter, the first woman clerk, came with an excellent pedigree in her case, as a verbatim shorthand taker in her case. She had previously worked for the Royal Commission on the Caribbean, had gone out to the Caribbean in 1938-39 as one of two verbatim reporters, which is reported in the press as two women secretaries taking lots of notebooks, and they would get a special mention in the report.

[00:36:06] She had an excellent pedigree, and once she started working, it was absolutely, she was doing the same job as the men, and got lots of plaudits for it, and her editors, successive editors, immediately made her permanent when a male colleague retired and wanted to keep her. But she also was being paid substantially less than her male colleagues.

[00:36:22] And I think it was clear in a clerkley role, but particularly in a Hansard role, where they're up there working their rotations and going up, replacing each other, getting it all typed up and then going up again. And she was there on the rota playing her absolutely equal part with the men and being paid less.

[00:36:37] Initially, she gets sort of paid rises. And when she gets to the top of her female equivalent band, she asks to be paid more. And this is when you get her correspondence with the Treasury. So the Treasury correspondence is at the National Archives and it's a huge fat file and it's an immensely depressing read, page after page after page of her asking what sounds very reasonable to us today, which is to be paid the same rate for doing the same job.

[00:37:00] Um, the Treasury wished to preserve the principle of sex discrimination. So this is well before, of course the sex Discrimination Act, Equal Pay Act, anything like that. Equal pay does not exist in the civil service and they want to keep that differentiation. She gets support in Parliament from everyone from the Speaker downwards and it's particularly Irene Ward MP who fought a battle for the Clerks in the Second World War and then in the early 1950s.

[00:37:22] Irene Ward stands up in the House of Commons, and of course you can read about it in Hansard, the irony, saying that the House of Commons is run on the basis of equal pay, she's referring to Members of course, female Members were never paid less than male Members, but uh, there is one woman in here who has not got equal pay, I have got Mrs Winder's, permission to draw attention to this intolerable constitutional position. And that was very much Irene Ward's sort of take on it. And you can read Irene Ward's own correspondence on this as well. She clearly supported Jean Winder, both in public, as I say, recorded in Hansard itself, and in private, uh, writing backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards to Treasury over many years.

[00:37:55] And eventually she wears them down, and they concede equal pay in the early 1950s, ahead of equal pay being introduced in the wider civil service. But Jean Winder, although she won her battle for equal pay, she remains the only woman Hansard reporter, even at her retirement in 1960. She gives a press interview on her retirement where she talks about, um, some of the MPs she remembers, and she gives particular mention to Irene Ward and says, um, when she became an MP, someone told her you must never break a promise, and she never did.

[00:38:22] And that was clearly sort of referring to her own situation, even though she doesn't say that in the press interview. But it's really interesting to see that sort of close relationship that can sometimes happen, it seems, between staff and Members, and in this case, definitely affected the Member's work.

[00:38:35] Definitely affected Irene Ward's attitude to politics, her parliamentary colleagues and her actions, um, both in this individual case and for equal pay and other sort of staff in Parliament as well.

[00:38:45] Mark D'Arcy: Was there a, a kind of threshold moment where it became a lot more normal to have women working as parliamentary clerks in the law making machine.

[00:38:56] Was there a kind of event horizon where that became the norm?

[00:39:00] Mari Takayanagi: Sadly, not in the period covered by Necessary Women. There are several women clerks during the Second World War, but the last one leaves on marriage in 1946 and there are no other women at that point working in the committee office other than in secretarial roles.

[00:39:13] Mark D'Arcy: If anything, after the war it rolled back.

[00:39:15] Mari Takayanagi: The only place in Parliament that employed more women in professional positions after the war was the Library in the House of Commons. Which had a lot of pressure because of the post 1945 general election. A whole load of new MPs rolled in. This was the Labour landslide, of course, led by Clement Attlee.

[00:39:30] They needed support and they expected more professional services from their Library than had maybe been provided before the war, when it was maybe more of a sort of relaxed, clubbish kind of bookish place. So you get the start of proper research services starting in the Second World War, and as a result you also get the first professional women library staff working both as sort of library clerks and in research roles and then in sort of professional library roles.

[00:39:51] And this carries on through the 60s, 70s and beyond. But apart from the Library. Parliamentary Archives, which was then called the House of Lords Record Office, also employs its first woman archivist in 1950, Elisabeth Poyser. She leaves eventually in 1965, but was also, rather like Jean Winder, a bit of an outlier, sort of no other women employed at that time.

[00:40:10] And so it's not until we get the impact of second wave feminism in society more broadly that eventually comes to Parliament in the late 1960s and early 70s, that women start to come into professional roles. So we get the first two women clerks appointed in 1969, Alda Milner Barry and Jacqui Sharp, both still around today, who retired after long successful careers in the House of Commons.

[00:40:32] You also, I think, then get the second woman Hansard reporter appointed in 1968, I think it is. And then once we get into the 70s, I think it then sort of hits that event horizon, as you put it, and it becomes more normal. The Lords are a little bit slower, but the Lords, again, appoint their first woman Clerk during the 1980s.

[00:40:50] And we get to the position where we are today, where we have a woman Clerk Assistant in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, although the actual positions of Clerk of the House and Clerk of the Parliaments have not yet been held by women.

[00:41:02] Mark D'Arcy: But it begins to look like a matter of time, doesn't it?

[00:41:05] Mari Takayanagi: Well, we've had, since I've been working in Parliament, we've had the first female Serjeant at Arms and the first female Black Rod. And I think when I started working in House of Lords in 2000, I think it would have been unthinkable or very difficult to imagine a female Black Rod in particular, because these were traditionally military roles.

[00:41:20] And of course, women entering the armed forces, only sort of comparatively recently, the idea that a woman could advance through the ranks and end up in a role like Serjeant or Black Rod. But of course the nature of the roles changes. And, um, of course we've seen the current Black Rod oversee some monumentous events in Parliament in recent years.

[00:41:36] The death of the Queen, lying in state and then the Coronation. So absolutely women have achieved all they possibly can in those roles. And it's just those CEO roles at the very top of the clerkly rungs in both houses that I think are the last, um, the last bastions. The last bastion, yes.

[00:41:49] Mark D'Arcy: Mari, thanks very much indeed for talking to us on Parliament Matters.

[00:41:52] It's a fascinating account of an almost unexplored dimension of parliamentary history.

[00:41:56] Mari Takayanagi: Thank you very much.

[00:42:00] Ruth Fox: And we're back. So we're joined now by Tudor historian and Professor of History at York University, John Cooper, who is also Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London. And John's written a book called The Lost Chapel of Westminster, which, which, John, in your book you say is essentially the story of how a redundant Catholic chapel, St Stephen's, is repurposed as the House of Commons, and how this chapel has had a profound impact on the culture of our parliamentary democracy that we feel even today.

[00:42:31] And the book charts the transition from sort of the, the sacred to the secular.

[00:42:35] Mark D'Arcy: Some might say the profane.

[00:42:37] Ruth Fox: Of course, Mark, the imprint, the footprint of the chapel is still there.

[00:42:41] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, as I understand it, and John will correct us if we're wrong on this, that St Stephen's Hall, which is at the top of Westminster Hall and leads into almost the main body of the Victorian Palace of Westminster, is pretty much on the footprint of the old St Stephen's Chapel.

[00:42:56] John Cooper: Yes, Mark, you're absolutely right. Obviously, the Palace of Westminster burned, the medieval Palace of Westminster burned in 1834. But quite a substantial amount of that structure survived. So, underneath modern St. Stephen's Hall, there is the chapel of St. Mary Undercroft, which is still a functioning chapel, and there's also St. Stephen's Cloister, which partially survives. But you're absolutely right that when the House of Commons burns out in 1834, it kind of survives, as a ruin for a few years and most of the architects actually for the new Palace at Westminster say they're going to retain it and then it gets quietly demolished by Charles Barry, I have to say, and rebuilt as St Stephen's Hall, but on exactly the same footprint.

[00:43:39] So the modern St Stephen's Hall is a kind of ghostly impression of what St Stephen's Chapel would once have looked like on the same footprint and with a similar sort of degree of height and reverence about it. I mean people always are in hushed voices when they walk through St. Stephen's Hall, it has a rather ecclesiastical feel to it.

[00:43:56] Mark D'Arcy: Could you give us an impression of what the medieval chapel would have been like because this was a royal chapel of the Plantagenet Kings.

[00:44:05] John Cooper: It was an extraordinarily sumptuous royal chapel, a two storey chapel. So it would have been seen as a reference to the French Sainte Chapelles, particularly the Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité in Paris.

[00:44:19] But we're actually talking about a very tall building in Gothic construction that's also quite, quite small and narrow. So I suppose if you're looking for a comparator building, then if you think about the proportions of the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge, then you're talking about a building that is externally as extraordinary and striking as that, but on a slightly smaller scale.

[00:44:42] So from the outside, it's very elaborately decorated and it's built over a long period of time, from the 1290s to the 1360s. So it actually covers various different phases in the evolution of English Gothic architecture. But the really stunning aspect of St. Stephen's was the interior. To some extent we have to reconstruct that from the building accounts, because so far as we know there are no surviving interior views of St. Stephen's Chapel, the medieval chapel, when it was still a chapel. We have to go by a few fragments of stonework and some really stunningly good building accounts, but just think a blaze of colour, really, so that the plantagenet colours of red and blue, a huge amount of gilding, a huge amount of gold leaf, a very deep, polished, burnished grey of the Perbeck marble that was used for the floors and that was used for the columns as well.

[00:45:38] So we're talking about a very intimate royal chapel space that's staggeringly beautiful and also decked out with altars and a magnificent pulpitum and stained glass, which we would dearly like to know more about. And of course, you know, when you add the chapel choir and the haze of incense, it must have been a pretty spectacular space within which the royal family worshipped.

[00:46:01] Mark D'Arcy: But all that sumptuousness, all that medieval wonder that was St Stephen's Chapel was pretty much summarily destroyed during the Reformation, when sumptuously decorated chapels went very much out of fashion, and King Edward VI stripped it, dissolved the college of priests who would officiate, and the choir, and eventually it was handed over as a debating chamber for the House of Commons as it was in the Tudor era. And the story has it that they came in, turned the pews round to face one another, and bam, two party politics was born. I'm sure that's a grotesque oversimplification, but is that kinda what happened?

[00:46:40] John Cooper: Er, hmmmm. Yes and no! Grotesque is possibly putting it a bit strongly because you do see this in the scholarly literature.

[00:46:48] You do see this argument that the reason that we have oppositional two party politics is because the House of Commons moved into a royal chapel designed for antiphonal singing designed for, for singing either side of an aisle. And there is something in that and indeed that's, for the big research project the AHRC funded research project that underpins the book here, that was the assumption that we started with. In fact we've revised that, as as a team working on this, and we now think sort of rather differently about that, but where you are absolutely right is that St Stephen's Chapel is a victim of the Reformation.

[00:47:23] And of course, St. Stephen's is quite a wealthy institution. It has a permanent foundation of canons, quite a powerful landowner, in fact, both in London and more widely abroad. In Edward VI's reign, when the crown is essentially going bankrupt actually following Henry VIII's death, the Duke of Somerset and his cronies are casting around for any way they can make money to support the army in Ireland and to stop the economy tanking.

[00:47:48] And that's when colleges and chantries are dissolved. So chantries being the places where masses are sung for the dead. And that's the principal work, actually, of St. Stephen's Chapel as a religious institution. It sang multiple masses a day, but it sang mass for the dead. And Henry VIII wobbles on the existence of purgatory.

[00:48:08] He's slightly in two minds. It looks like he might announce that purgatory doesn't exist, but then right at the last moment, in his own will, he endows lots and lots of masses to be sung for his soul, presuming that he was going to end up in purgatory. But within weeks, actually, of Henry VIII's death, all of that is swept away, and the ecclesiastical colleges are dissolved, and all of the lands are redistributed, and all of the buildings are repurposed.

[00:48:34] So it's like, it's almost like a second wave. So the dissolution of monasteries has happened already. The colleges have survived until Edward VI's reign. But then it's, it's dissolved. And St. Stephen's is one of the very first of the colleges to be dissolved, in fact. And so you've got this prime piece of real estate sitting there, right in the heart of the Palace of Westminster, where the law courts are, where the council chamber is, where the House of Lords already is, meeting in the Painted Chamber right across the courtyard from St Stephen's Chapel. And so by a process that we don't fully understand, St Stephen's gets repurposed to become the House of Commons. But the reason that I think this is so significant is, up until this point, there has been no House of Commons in the sense of that being a permanent place.

[00:49:23] So if we're looking for a moment in English and then British parliamentary history, constitutional history at which the House of Commons becomes a place that everybody knows as the House of Commons, then it's this exact moment in the middle of the 16th century and that's why I think this is so significant

[00:49:38] Mark D'Arcy: Because before that of course the House of Commons has had a kind of nomadic existence. It used to meet in the refectory of Westminster Abbey, it met at Blackfriars, it would meet in other cities as well, you know, Nottingham or Oxford or all sorts of other places. So giving it a permanent home was obviously quite as you say a significant thing to do. Do we know anything about the kind of effect that had?

[00:49:58] John Cooper: We know quite a lot about the effect that that had, actually, and actually, you refer to the previous accommodation of the House of Commons when it was a more sort of itinerant body.

[00:50:06] When the House of Commons was meeting in the monks Refectory at Westminster Abbey, or meeting in the Chapter House, those were very different spaces. The Chapter House, of course, was round, St Stephen's Chapel is oblong, but the monks Refectory was much bigger, actually, than St Stephen's Chapel. St Stephen's, the main part of the chapel, because it's a sanctuary part of the chapel, is tiny.

[00:50:25] It's only 60 odd feet by 32 feet. So you kind of translate this into tennis court terms. It is smaller than a modern doubles play tennis court. And you're packing hundreds and hundreds of MPs into that space. So they have to squash up a lot more than they had had to do in previous buildings. So I think if we're looking for a sort of an origin point of what Churchill reverentially calls the kind of crowded and intimate nature of British parliamentary politics, this is an origin point for that in the middle of the 16th century.

[00:51:00] Even in Elizabeth I's reign there are 462 MPs. Now just imagine trying to pack 462 MPs into a space that's smaller than a modern doubles play tennis court. And what of course you have to do is to construct tiered seating, and everybody has to really squash up if everybody turns up. You know, Parliament is sometimes ill attended in Elizabeth's reign, but for big debates, lots of people turned out and you simply could not seat everybody at one go, even in Elizabeth I's reign. And so that sense of the crowded nature, the intimate nature, and the fact that a lot of MPs have to stand, they have to hang around by the doorway.

[00:51:43] Subsequently, they construct galleries, but everybody is very, very cramped and squashed together. So that's one of the significant impacts that St. Stephen's has. And I think the other one actually is the culture of voting, which, of course, the House of Commons, for the moment, retains this rather curious culture of voting by division, voting in person, which most other legislatures have abandoned, whether European legislatures or Congress or the devolved assemblies of the United Kingdom. The idea of voting in person, you know, through division lobbies is seen as positively archaic.

[00:52:20] But this is actually a culture, we've got a very clear description from John Hooker of how this functions in the 1570s.

[00:52:27] Ruth Fox: Were there division lobbies alongside the side of the chapel? Did they build in the division lobbies behind the seating?

[00:52:33] John Cooper: No, and again that's a sort of slight misapprehension of the modern Parliament looking back. So the creation of two division lobbies, a lobby for the ayes and a lobby for the noes, that's actually a function of the rebuilt Commons chamber, the Barry and Pugin chamber from the 1840s onwards. Before that, MPs who were voting for a change in the law had to get up and move out into the lobby space to be counted, and that space is again very cramped, but that culture is discussed quite clearly in the Elizabethan literature, but it's a real disincentive to voting for a change in the law.

[00:53:10] Because once you'd fought to get a seat in the Elizabethan House of Commons, you didn't want to give it up. And so, if somebody called a division, then you might think, well actually, in theory, I would like to vote in favour of a change in the law. But, I'm just going to keep my seat. So there's a kind of in built inertia there, in terms of the English, at that point, constitution, which I think is really interesting.

[00:53:33] Mark D'Arcy: What we don't know about the Elizabethan House of Commons is, what it looked like. We've got a vague idea, you know, Speaker sits at one end, door at the other end, MPs on benches around it, but there's no drawings or images at all of what it actually looked like.

[00:53:47] John Cooper: It's curious that, isn't it, because we would assume, I think, because we're, you know, architectural history is becoming a big thing in the later 16th century.

[00:53:58] There are lots of people drawing plans of buildings, drawing exterior elevations of buildings. We don't have any physical evidence for the appearance of the Elizabethan chamber. So far as we know, unless another piece of evidence turns up, in which case I really, really want to know about that, so far as we know, we don't have any interior views of the House of Commons until the 1620s.

[00:54:20] We've got a good engraving from the 1620s and another good engraving from the 1640s. And as I argue in the book, I think those dates are really significant because both in the early 1620s and in the 1640s, we're talking about a period in which parliamentary politics is hugely contested, and there is a big premium on trying to show the amount of opposition, loyal opposition, but opposition to the crown that is built up in the House of Commons.

[00:54:48] Just how many representatives of the towns how many representatives of the counties were packed onto those benches, wedged in like herrings in a barrel as somebody says in the 19th century, you know they are are political statements, they're not simply just, oh, it's tremendously interesting that we should capture what the interior of the House of Commons looks like.

[00:55:09] But no, we don't have those interior views of the Elizabethan Commons, but because of Hooker and a lot of parliamentary diarists from the Elizabethan period, we do have some fascinating hints about what the building looked like. We know about the benches. We know about the royal arms. We know about the Speaker's chair.

[00:55:28] We know it had a clock. We know that already, at least the Privy Counsellors were sitting on cushions in green cloth. On the front benches indeed. Yeah, that green colorway that we associate so strongly with the House of Commons, that really does date back to the Elizabethan period and there were just some really tantalising hints that that some of that medieval chapel decoration had survived.

[00:55:54] A lot of it has been covered up, a lot of it has been defaced, but clearly at least one of those Elizabethan MPs could see medieval heraldry because he incorporates it into one of his speeches. He's looking around and talking about the heraldry. So that means that traces of St. Stephen's Chapel as a chapel were visible in the Elizabethan House of Commons that was converting England to become a Protestant country.

[00:56:20] Now that strikes me as a historian as being very interesting.

[00:56:22] Mark D'Arcy: Now, one of the most interesting details I found in the book was the account of a new Speaker's chair being built for 27 pounds, three shillings and nine pence in 1646. But the chamber got a number of makeovers, and each time it had a makeover, a bit more of the original chapel was lost.

[00:56:40] Christopher Wren does a big redesign and puts in galleries and things and creates a slightly more elegant St Stephen's Chapel. There's another extension when Irish MPs are added to the House of Commons and each time a bit more of the old chapel is lost.

[00:56:56] John Cooper: Yes, so initially the medieval chapel is covered over and then it's very controversially lost at the very beginning of the 19th century, yes.

[00:57:05] You're absolutely right that Christopher Wren, I mean in a sense he turns the House of Commons into a space that looks remarkably like a chapel again, but it looks like a non conformist chapel. It looks like a Unitarian chapel. And we do have a lot of images of the 18th century House of Commons chamber after that makeover by Wren.

[00:57:25] And it looks like a very sort of serious, very sober place that really does look like a kind of 18th century chapel space. But the fascinating thing is that a lot of that medieval stonework, and we think some of the wall paintings, survived behind Wren's panelling. And we know that because from, as some of my colleagues on the original St. Stephen's Chapel project established, from the 1780s and 1790s, entrepreneurial antiquaries start getting access to the House of Commons, and with a lantern, as one of them famously says, crawling around like Guy Fawkes with a lantern behind the panelling. And what he says he finds behind Wren's panelling, is he says he finds Edward III's wall painting still intact.

[00:58:13] He says he finds all sorts of medieval stonework, and he claims he finds an altar as well, a side altar. I'm slightly skeptical about the altar, actually, but we know that some of those wall paintings have survived because he paints them. So at the Society of Antiquaries in London, we have these extraordinarily beautiful series of watercolors, in particular by John Carter, that capture those medieval wall paintings, wall paintings dating from the 14th century, a devotional sequence, and all sorts of heraldry as well, associated with Edward III, until, highly controversially, another makeover of the House of Commons in 1800.

[00:58:51] And then again, that this is because of another influx of MPs from Ireland this time, rather than Scotland. So they need to make the Commons chamber bigger. And so the highly controversial architect, James Wyatt thinks, well, I know how to do that. I can just take back the walls, but in the process of taking back the walls, he destroys those medieval wall paintings and he literally destroys them.

[00:59:11] He puts them on a skip as far as we can tell. To howls of dismay and protest from the Society of Antiquaries who very much want this to be preserved or at least studied. And we have a couple of tiny fragments of those wall paintings. It's an absolute tragedy and it's a huge test case actually for the preservation of heritage.

[00:59:32] There's such a rumpus about it that 20 or 30 years later Wyatt would never have been able to get away with that kind of destruction of medieval material culture.

[00:59:41] Mark D'Arcy: Thirty odd years later, the whole medieval Palace of Westminster pretty much, with a few notable exceptions like Westminster Hall, burns down.

[00:59:50] And the chapel, as you say, is gutted, but the stonework is still there. The arches are visible in drawings of the remains of the Palace. Do we know why? What looked like a salvageable building was in the end not salvaged.

[01:00:02] John Cooper: We don't know what state St. Stephen's Chapel was in after it burned out. So the, certainly the roof caved in and the building is just left as an empty shell.

[01:00:13] It seems to be stable enough. I mean, there's at least one of the drawings in the Palace of Westminster collection and the Parliamentary Works of Art collection, dated around about 1835, we think, appears to show stonemasons shoring up and restoring St Stephen's Chapel. Now, whether that's just been wrongly labelled, whether they're actually beginning to take it down and it's been slightly misstated, we just don't know.

[01:00:37] But, certainly, that building survives long enough for all sorts of people to go in and study it, and draw it, and paint it. Souvenir hunters go in. You could pay a few shillings or bribe somebody to go in and just kind of search around amongst the rubble. And people find all sorts of interesting bits of sort of medieval work amongst the rubble.

[01:00:57] You can see the stuff being eBay-ed even now. Every now and again there are bits of St Stephen's Chapel that come up for sale. And then all of the architects who submit plans for the new Palace of Westminster, say they're going to preserve St Stephen's Chapel. And some of them are really extravagant and say they're not just going to preserve it, they're going to build another one.

[01:01:15] They're going to build an equivalent chapel for the House of Lords, or it's going to be turned into the new Commons Library. I mean, Caroline Shenton's books on the Palace of Westminster have explored some of this. But then somehow the building is just quietly demolished. So Barry, Charles Barry, he's given the strong impression to the select committees who are responsible for this, that he's going to retain St Stephen's Chapel.

[01:01:40] And then there's almost something surreptitious about it, that suddenly it seems that the building is unsafe and it's just quietly demolished.

[01:01:49] Mark D'Arcy: And so the chamber of Pitt, of Walpole, of Cromwell, indeed, is just gone forever at that point, and the Commons moves to new accommodation a few hundred yards away.

[01:01:58] John Cooper: It's gone forever, and we don't know where the stonework went. But mudlarks are very active along the foreshore by the Palace of Westminster, and on a really, really low tide, you can still dig up bits of medieval encaustic tile and so on from the original Palace of Westminster. So the presumption is, I mean, talking to Caroline Shenton years ago, I asked her about this, and her presumption was that a lot of that stonework from the medieval, uh, St. Stephen's probably just ended up as part of the London Embankment or ended up underneath the massive concrete raft that had to be constructed to stop the new Palace of Westminster sinking into the silt. Because actually Westminster is marshland, which is why Big Ben leans a little bit. It's actually settled a bit.

[01:02:44] So it was a massive engineering operation to construct the new Palace of Westminster and they needed an enormous amount of footings and foundations. And I think If you were to go beneath that concrete raft, you probably find quite a lot of bits of medieval stonework.

[01:02:58] Mark D'Arcy: Rather a sad end to one of the glories of medieval English architecture.

[01:03:02] John Cooper, thanks very much indeed for joining us on Parliament Matters.

[01:03:06] Ruth Fox: Thanks, John.

[01:03:07] John Cooper: It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

[01:03:09] Ruth Fox: Well, Mark, I'm a historian, so I'm, I'm an easy one for this, but I found those two discussions fascinating. They bring home that the history of Parliament is not just about the parties and the politics.

[01:03:21] It's about the thousands of stories of the people who've inhabited the Palace of Westminster and the way in which the buildings have changed and have so influenced the way democracy operates today.

[01:03:31] Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, people got quite fond of quoting the Winston Churchill line about, we shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.

[01:03:37] But it's so true about the House of Commons. Imagine if it had been put into a much larger building. You know, maybe Edward VI had found some other abbey or something to stick the MPs into instead of the Palace of Westminster. Imagine if it had been a semicircular chamber. Instead, would the shape of party politics have taken quite a different evolution?

[01:03:57] Ruth Fox: Yeah. But I think the other thing is, is how, in a sense, it's, it's a happy or unhappy accident, however you want to view it. The fact that they've got this beautiful palace that they are basically downgrading, getting rid of as a result of the Reformation, what to do with it? And it becomes the place for the legislature.

[01:04:16] And there's no real great thought behind this other than giving it a permanent location, a permanent place to meet. It's not planned out.

[01:04:24] Mark D'Arcy: It was sort of hand to mouth convenience, there was this handy piece of real estate going unused. And off you go boys, yeah, and it was all done on the cheap, they went in there and put up the benches as cheaply as possible, and stuck the Speaker at the end, and that was that, and the rest is history.

[01:04:40] Ruth Fox: And the fact that they then stay there for 300 years, until essentially the place burns down, is a salutary lesson for us, I think, because many of us fear that that could well be the fate of this current building.

[01:04:51] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, I wonder in a few hundred years if scholars will be debating the effect on British parliamentary politics of having to have the House of Commons in, I don't know, the QE2 Centre or somewhere else instead.

[01:05:01] Ruth Fox: Terrible thought. Well, Mark, with that, I think we draw things to a close for 2024. This is our last episode, regular episode at least. We've got some Christmas specials coming up though for our listeners.

[01:05:13] Mark D'Arcy: Yes, we've been working on a series called Whipping Yarns. We've been talking to some of the whips who've prowled the corridors of Westminster about their experiences working for various different parties and indeed various different factions and some of those episodes will be appearing between now and our return to normal podding which should come on January the 10th.

[01:05:32] So a few extra goodies for you and indeed we've also been promising you an interview with some Sam Freedman, whose book, Failed State, is a very interesting analysis of quite what's going wrong in British government, and that should be out in, in the coming days and weeks as well.

[01:05:47] Ruth Fox: Yes, so with that, very happy Christmas to all our listeners, and we will see you again in 2025.

[01:05:54] Mark D'Arcy: See you then.

[01:05:55] Ruth Fox: Bye.

[01:06:01] Well that's all from us for this week's episode of Parliament Matters. Please hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to get the next episode as soon as it lands.

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[01:06:19] Ruth Fox: Mark, tell us more about the algorithm.

[01:06:21] Mark D'Arcy: Well, what do I know about algorithms? You know, I write my scripts with a quill pen on vellum and then send it in by carrier pigeon.

[01:06:28] Ruth Fox: Well, before we go, a quick reminder also that you can send us your questions on all things Parliament by visiting hansardsociety.org.uk/pmuq.

[01:06:38] Mark D'Arcy: We'll be discussing them in future episodes, including our special Urgent Questions editions dedicated to what you want to know about Parliament.

[01:06:45] Ruth Fox: And you can find us across social media @HansardSociety to get more content related to the show and the wider work of the Hansard Society.

[01:06:59] Speaker: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media @HansardSociety.