William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford

William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford, (23 June 1865 – 8 June 1932), known as Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Bt, from 1919 to 1929 and popularly known as Jix, was an English solicitor and Conservative Party politician.

He first attracted attention in 1908 when he defeated Winston Churchill, a Liberal Cabinet Minister at the time, in a by-election for the seat of North-West Manchester but is best known as a long-serving and controversial Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin's Second Government from 1924 to 1929. He gained a reputation for pious authoritarianism, opposing Communism and clamping down on nightclubs and what he saw as indecent literature. He also played an important role in the fight against the introduction of the Church of England Revised Prayer Book, and in lowering the voting age for women from 30 to 21.

Early life and career

Background and early life

William Hicks, as he was initially called, was born in Canonbury, London on 23 June 1865. He was the eldest of four sons and two daughters of Henry Hicks, of Plaistow Hall, Kent, and his wife Harriett, daughter of William Watts. Hicks was a prosperous merchant and senior evangelical Anglican layman who demanded the very best from his children.

William Hicks was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London (1875–1881).

Motoring expert

Joynson-Hicks was an early authority on transport law, particularly motoring law. In 1906 he published "The Law of Heavy and Light Mechanical Traction on Highways". He was beginning to acquire a reputation as an evangelical lawyer with a perhaps paradoxical interest in the latest technology: motor cars (of which he owned several), telephones and aircraft.

Joynson-Hicks called Labour leader Keir Hardie "a leprous traitor" who wanted to sweep away the Ten Commandments. This prompted H. G. Wells to send an open letter to Labour sympathisers in Manchester, saying Joynson-Hicks "represents absolutely the worst element in British political life ... an entirely undistinguished man ... and an obscure and ineffectual nobody."

Joynson-Hicks defeated Churchill by 429 votes. This provoked a strong reaction across the country with The Daily Telegraph running the front-page headline "Winston Churchill is OUT! OUT! OUT!" (Churchill shortly returned to Parliament as MP for Dundee.) Subsequent allegations that he was personally anti-Semitic formed an important strand of the authoritarian streak that many, including recent scholars David Cesarani and Geoffrey Alderman, detected in his speeches and behaviour. Cesarani cautioned that "although he may have been nicknamed 'Mussolini Minor', Jix was no fascist." Other work has disputed the notion that Joynson-Hicks was an anti-Semite, most notably a major article by W. D. Rubinstein which asserted that as Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks would later allow more Jews to be naturalised than any other holder of that office. Whether or not it was justified, the notion that Joynson-Hicks was an anti-Semite played a large part in his portrayal as a narrow-minded and intolerant man, most obviously in the work of Ronald Blythe.

Early Parliamentary career

Joynson-Hicks lost his seat in the January 1910 general election. He contested Sunderland in the second general election in December that year, but was again defeated. He was returned unopposed for Brentford at a by-election in March 1911. In 1916 he published a pamphlet The Command of the Air in which he advocated indiscriminate bombing of civilians in German cities, including Berlin. However, he was not offered a government post.

In 1918, his old constituency having been abolished, he became MP for Twickenham, holding the seat until his retirement from the House of Commons in 1929. This episode established his reputation as one of the "die-hards" on the right-wing of the party, and he emerged as a strong critic of the party's participation in a coalition government with the Liberal David Lloyd George.

As part of this campaign, he led an abortive attempt to block Austen Chamberlain's nomination as leader of the Unionist party on Bonar Law's retirement, putting forward Lord Birkenhead instead with the express aim of "splitting the coalition".

Entering government

Joynson-Hicks played a small role in the fall of the Lloyd George Coalition, which he had so disliked, in October 1922. The refusal of many leading Conservatives, who had been supporters of the Coalition, to serve in Bonar Law's new government opened up promotion prospects. Joynson-Hicks was appointed Secretary for Overseas Trade (a junior minister, effectively deputy to the President of the Board of Trade). In the fifteen-month Conservative administration of first Bonar Law and then Stanley Baldwin, Joynson-Hicks was rapidly promoted. In March 1923, he became Paymaster General then Postmaster General, filling positions left vacant by the promotion of Neville Chamberlain.

Following the hung parliament, amounting to a Unionist defeat in the general election of December 1923, Joynson-Hicks became a key figure in various intra-party attempts to oust Baldwin. At one time, the possibility of his becoming leader himself was discussed, but it seems to have been quickly discarded. He was involved in a plot to persuade Arthur Balfour that should the King seek his advice on whom to appoint Prime Minister, Balfour would advise him to appoint Austen Chamberlain or Lord Derby Prime Minister instead of Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald. The plot failed when Balfour refused to countenance such a move and the Liberals publicly announced they would support MacDonald, causing the government to fall in January 1924. MacDonald then became the first Labour Prime Minister.

Home Secretary

thumb|Cigarette card, 1926

The Conservatives returned to power in November 1924 and Joynson-Hicks was appointed as Home Secretary. Francis Thompson described him as "the most prudish, puritanical and protestant Home Secretary of the twentieth century".

Public morals

Joynson-Hicks was portrayed as a reactionary for his attempts to crack down on night clubs and other aspects of the "Roaring Twenties". He was also heavily implicated in the banning of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), in which he took a personal interest.

He wanted to stem what he called "the flood of filth coming across the Channel". He clamped down on the work of D. H. Lawrence (he helped to force the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in an expurgated version), as well as on books on birth control and the translation of The Decameron. He ordered the raiding of nightclubs, where a great deal of after-hours drinking took place, with many members of fashionable society being arrested. The nightclub owner Kate Meyrick, proprietor of the 43 Club amongst other venues, was in and out of prison five times, her release parties being causes for big champagne celebrations. He instructed the head of London's Metropolitan Police, William Horwood that "it is a place of the most intense mischief and immorality [with] doped women and drunken men. I want you to put this matter in the hands of your most experienced men and whatever the cost will be, find out the truth about this club and if it is as bad as I am informed prosecute it with the utmost rigour of the law".

All of this was satirised in A. P. Herbert's one act play The Two Gentlemen of Soho (1927). During the general strike of 1926, he was a leading organiser of the systems that maintained supplies and law and order, although there is some evidence that left to himself he would have pursued a more hawkish policy – most notably, his repeated appeals for more volunteer constables and his attempt to close down the Daily Herald.

Having been a hardliner during the general strike, he remained a staunch anti-communist thereafter, although the left appear to have warmed a little to him over the Prayer Book controversy. Against the wishes of Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain he ordered a police raid on the Soviet trade agency ARCOS in 1927, apparently actually hoping to rupture Anglo-Soviet relations. He was popular with the police and on his retirement a portrait of him was erected in Scotland Yard, paid for by police subscription. Joynson-Hicks had been President of the evangelical National Church League since 1921, and he went against Baldwin's wishes in opposing the Revised Prayer Book. However, Francis Thompson (2004) wrote that the Baldwin government would probably not have taken action without Joynson-Hicks' pledge. He made a concerted effort to improve the conditions of the prisons under his jurisdiction, and earned a compliment from persistent offender and night-club owner Kate Meyrick, who noted in her memoirs that prisons had improved considerably thanks to his efforts.

Joynson-Hicks sided with Churchill over the general strike and India, but parted company with him on the topic of greyhound racing, which Joynson-Hicks believed served a useful social function in getting poor people out of the pubs. He also thought that Churchill's view that totalisers were permissible for horse-racing but not for greyhounds smacked of one law for the rich and another for the poor.

Later career

As the time for a new general election loomed, Baldwin contemplated reshuffling his Cabinet to move Churchill from the Exchequer to the India Office, and asking all ministers older than himself (Baldwin was born in 1867) to step down, with the exception of Sir Austen Chamberlain. Joynson-Hicks would have been one of those asked to retire from the Cabinet if the Conservatives had been re-elected.

The Conservatives unexpectedly lost power at the general election in May 1929. A month after the election Joynson-Hicks was raised to the peerage as the Viscount Brentford, of Newick in the County of Sussex in the Dissolution Honours (necessitating a by-election at which the Conservatives narrowly held his old seat).

Joynson-Hicks died at Newick Park, Sussex, on 8 June 1932, aged 66.

His widow the Viscountess Brentford died in January 1952. yet he was not included in a list of long-serving Home Secretaries presented to Jack Straw in 2001 on his departure from the Home Office. He is also virtually the only major politician of the 1920s not to have been accorded a recent biography.

For many years detailed discussion of Joynson-Hicks' life and career was hampered by the inaccessibility of his papers, which were kept by the Brentford family. This meant the discourse on his life was shaped by the official biography of 1933 by H. A. Taylor, and by material published by his contemporaries – much of it published by people who hated him. As a result, public discourse has been shaped by material that portrayed him in an unflattering light, such as Ronald Blythe's biographical chapter in The Age of Illusion.

In the 1990s the current Viscount lent his grandfather's papers to an MPhil student at the University of Westminster, Jonathon Hopkins, who prepared a catalogue of them and wrote a short biography of Joynson-Hicks as part of his thesis. In 2007, a number of these papers were deposited with the East Sussex Record Office in Lewes (which transferred to The Keep in Brighton in 2013) where they are available to the public. Huw Clayton, whose PhD thesis concerned Joynson-Hicks' moral policies at the Home Office, has announced that he plans to write a new biography of Joynson-Hicks with the aid of these sources.

In 2023, historian Max Hastings wrote a Times article suggesting that those who consider some current Tory ministers and ex-ministers to be the "worst ever" to revisit Joynson-Hicks' career and perhaps conclude that "more than a few of our past politicians make the present ones look ... not as awful as Jix".

William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford

Early life and career

Background and early life

Motoring expert

Early Parliamentary career

Entering government

Home Secretary

Public morals

Later career

Arms

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links