Town’s links to famous Prime Minister
Compare Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill: both were twice elected Prime Minister; both swapped political parties to give themselves the best chance of electoral success.
Both were equally at home at the writing desk as they were in the House of Commons – Churchill penning his History of the English Speaking Peoples; Disraeli with his often scurrilous semiautobiographical novels such as Sybil and Endymion.
Churchill and Disraeli were both masters of the quotable quote. While many know Churchill’s wartime “fight them on the beaches” and so on, we often also quote Disraeli, perhaps without realising it. “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Both were also masters of the put-down. An inebriated Churchill was told by a disgusted Labour MP Bessie Braddock: “You are drunk!” To which he replied: “Yes Madam, and you are ugly, but I shall be sober in the morning!”
Disraeli (while in opposition) was pulled up for his unparliamentary language in the Commons. He responded: “Mr Speaker, I withdraw my statement that half the cabinet are asses - half the cabinet are not asses!”
Churchill of course is credited with supplying us with the backbone and resolve to defeat Hitler. Disraeli’s Governments passed a host of laws that greatly improved life for ordinary working people.
Even before he became Prime Minister, Disraeli sponsored the Reform Act that saw the expansion of voter suffrage, and although it was still a long way from the universal suffrage of today, it was a step in that direction.
His Government passed the Corrupt Practices Act that did much to end electoral bribery. It authorised an early version of nationalisation, having the Post Office buy up the telegraph companies, and greatly expanded education.
It passed the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act, which made inexpensive loans available to towns and cities to construct working-class housing. It passed the Public Health Act 1875, modernising sanitary codes throughout the country, and the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, setting standards for food provision; the Protection of Property
Act, which allowed peaceful picketing, and the Employers and Workmen Act which enabled workers to sue employers in the civil courts if they broke legal contracts.
One difference between the two is that while Churchill ended his career (and life) in Kent, at Chartwell, Disraeli began his in the county.
Disraeli had twice failed to get elected as a Radical.
It was not until he met the MP for Maidstone, Wyndham Lewis, that his career took off. Lewis was independently wealthy and a great patron of Maidstone, where he spread his wealth around generously.
Maidstone then was a two-member seat, and at the election in 1837, Lewis chose Disraeli as his running partner, even bankrolling his election expenses. Both were elected and gave a victory speech from the balcony of the Royal Star Hotel.
Disraeli’s tenure at Maidstone was brief. Lewis died suddenly a year later, and without his support Disraeli decided to contest the easier seat of Shrewsbury in the next election in 1841.
He did, however, take something of the town with him. In 1839, he marred
Lewis’s widow, Mary Evans.
Disraeli went on to become a favourite of Queen Victoria.
He died on April 19, 1881, aged 76. His wide appeal was shown by a hand-written note he received on his death bed. Signed ‘A Workman,’ it read: “Don’t die yet, we need yer.”
Protocol prevented Victoria from attending his funeral, but she sent a wreath of primroses, his favourite flower.
For some years afterwards, the anniversary of his death was commemorated as Primrose Day, and her gift also gave rise to the naming of the Primrose League, a mass movement of Tory supporters, particularly popular among women, which strove to see the continuation of Disraeli’s “One Nation” ideals.
Today, in Maidstone, there is surprisingly little to commemorate the town’s connections to such an important figure. In Park Wood, there is a road named after him – Disraeli Close. The balcony at The Royal Star still stands, having been restored when the hotel was converted to a shopping mall in 1989, and if you look carefully at a building in Earl Street, erected in 1893, you will see a bust of Disraeli, over the portico.