BRITISH LOBBYING IN NEWSPAPER AND

PARLIAMENTARY DISCOURSE, 1800-1950*

Lobbying is a significant component of the modern politics industry in Britain, but we know

relatively little about its historical origins and evolution. This article draws on parliamentary

debates and three databases which together account for 51 newspaper titles, in order to explore

how lobbying was discussed in parliament and the media between 1800 and 1950, and to gauge

the growing professionalisation of lobbying. Perceptions of lobbying became somewhat less

negative over the period; there are relatively few reports or allegations of corruption associated

with lobbying; and lobbying by the railway industry seems to have been less substantial, while

public sector lobbying was more significant, than is commonly supposed. Direct advocacy with

policymakers is overwhelmingly the dominant tactic used by lobbyists of the period, with few

reports of coalitions or grassroots campaigns. Particular concerns were expressed about the

influence of lobbying around private bills. While lobbying backbench MPs and parliamentary

committees (rather than ministers and civil servants) accounted for over 80% of the activity

revealed across the whole period, there are signs by the middle of the 20th century that the focus

of lobbyists is beginning to turn away from Westminster and towards Whitehall. The article

paints a detailed view of the scale, scope and significance of lobbying as it was developing into a

national and systematic industry.

Keywords: Lobbying; lobbyist; 1800-1950; United Kingdom; British parliament; newspapers;

parliamentary debates

1.

We see daily the centrality of interest groups in British policymaking, and lobbying is now a

sophisticated industry. We lack, however, a detailed understanding of this industry’s historical

evolution. It has been asserted that, ‘Lobbying is as old as government, and in England industrial

lobbying was well developed before the beginning of the eighteenth century’.1 While this seems

superficially plausible, it is true only to a point.2 Prior to the 1800s, relatively few associations

were lobbying regularly, lobbying techniques were often crude, and the process of attempting to

1

influence government was not yet even known as ‘lobbying’. It is possible to point to isolated

examples of industries or causes successfully persuading government of their policy preferences,

yet it could not be said that an organised interest group system had been established. In a

population analysis of United Kingdom (UK) associations, Jordan and Greenan note that around

300 of the bodies in existence in 2006 were formed prior to 1900.3 It does seem that the 19th

century witnessed something of a transformation in the scale of organisations communicating

with policymakers. But who were these groups, and how did they lobby? The data presented here

offers evidence that lobbying emerged during the 1800s as a systematic and national practice,

that it was undertaken by a wide range of interests which were increasingly organised, and that it

exhibited many of the characteristics of the major industry it has become. This article traces

usage of the words ‘lobbying’ and ‘lobbyist’ in journalistic and parliamentary discourse between

1800 and 1950 to shed new light on the early phases of policy influence by socio-economic

interests in Britain.

Wootton traces British pressure groups from 1720 to 1970, supplemented by 101 original

documents by or about organised interests.4 It is striking, though, that of the 101 documents

produced over a 250 year period, the word ‘lobbying’ appears in none. The only use of the word

‘lobbyist’ in them occurs in an extract from the National Farmers’ Union yearbook in 1913

recording the appointment of Charles Weller Kent as its first ‘parliamentary lobbyist’.5 (More

recent research argues that Kent was the first person in the UK to have ‘parliamentary lobbyist’

as a formal job title and that he can therefore be regarded as the founding father of lobbying

professionalisation.6) Although some powerful groups existed in Britain even before parliament,

it was not until the 19th century that ‘the politics of groups’ came to the fore.7 Schonhardt-Bailey

noted in 1991 that there was then little research into 19th century British organised interests

which ‘attempts to gauge the significance of pressure group activity empirically’; that remains

true today.8 In the second half of that century, we see a definite transformation – from purely

local or regional interests to national bodies; from ad hoc and uncoordinated advocacy to

structured and systematic lobbying; from individual to associational mobilisation; and from

commercial interests to wider sectional and cause interests. This happens as a direct response to

changes in the socio-economic environment, in the nature of political parties and electoral

competition, in the relationship between the various institutional components of the

policymaking process.9

2

2. Methodology

(Alongside this article, also published on the journal’s website is a separate file of supplementary

material which contains the full analysis of the entire source material. Not all findings are

thoroughly discussed in this article, but all are shown in the supplementary material.)

While relatively little academic (or professional) interest to date has focused on the

historical development of lobbying in the UK, one reason for that lies in a paucity of easily

accessible source material. Few British interest groups have left systematic and comprehensive

document archives; few scholars or journalists produced books on British lobbying prior to the

1960s. However, the recent digitisation of various databases now permits the researcher to

generate in days source material which might previously have taken months to uncover. This

article utilises keyword searches on several digitised archives to gather extracts from

parliamentary debates and newspaper articles relating to lobbying. Such an approach is not

unproblematic, but it does represent a new opportunity to produce significant empirical and

descriptive insights into historical lobbying practice. This work seeks to discern patterns from the

data and to conceptualise these thematically, rather than using the data to test hypotheses.

Blending qualitative and quantitative readings of the texts enables the discovery of categorical

results from which can be developed propositions capable of being tested in future research.

Srnka and Koeszegi offer a useful five stage process for a generalisation design study by which

qualitative material is inductively transformed into quantitative data: material is sourced; then

transcribed if necessary; it is unitised, or divided into discrete codeable units; then categorised on

the basis of both the data itself and relevant theory; and finally each unit is coded. 10 How each of

these stages was undertaken is discussed below.

Given the exploratory nature of this project, the fundamental research question is quite

straightforward: How was lobbying (in the sense of influencing public policy) in Britain

discussed by journalists and parliamentarians between 1800 and 1950? Although groups were

certainly engaged in attempts to influence public policy prior to 1800, those efforts were not

labelled as ‘lobbying’ at the time. Searching for the term from 1800 should be sufficient to

ensure that we capture the very earliest discussions of the topic. The end point of 1950 was

chosen because that research period of 150 years allows both for a manageable yet sufficiently

3

large number of relevant items to be analysed and for a picture to emerge of an activity

developing over time. Moreover, we already have work such as Stewart and Finer on the

centrality of interest group representation in 1950s and 1960s British politics.11

The first three stages outlined by Srnka and Koeszegi require little explanation – the data

used here was readily available in electronic archives; it was already in written form and thus

needed no transcription; and the unit of analysis used here is the individual newspaper article or

parliamentary speech.12 This study draws upon material gathered from four journalistic and

parliamentary online archives:

Hansard, 1803-1950: The Official Report of parliamentary debates from 1803 to 2005

has been digitised, and can be found at: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/

British Library, British Newspapers 1800-1900: This archive, launched in 2009, contains

two million pages from 48 national and regional newspaper titles from the 19th century. 13

It can be found at: http://find.galegroup.com/bncn/

Times, 1800-1950: This archive, which begins in 1785 (although no relevant items were

identified between then and 1800) and ends in 1985, can be found at:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/archive/

Guardian/Observer, 1800-1950: This database begins in 1791 (for the Observer) and

1821 (for the Guardian), though no relevant items were identified prior to 1800. It

extends for both newspapers to 2003, and can be found at:

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/advancedsearch.html

A three-step process was employed to gather the source material. First, each archive was

searched using a range of keywords associated with lobbying. Table 1 lists the keywords which

were used in this study, alongside the number of ‘hits’ for each descriptor in each archive. That

initial trawl revealed a total of 1,691 items.

[TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]

Second, each item was printed, read and sorted according to the descriptor which had

been searched for. Given that we are interested here in lobbying practice (in terms of external

4

groups influencing public policy) as it evolved in Britain, some items were immediately

discarded as irrelevant. They covered material such as lobbying in other countries, efforts to

influence the policy of non-governmental bodies (such as the Horticultural Society), reviews of

fictional works, character recognition errors (such as ‘hobbyist’ being mistaken for ‘lobbyist’),

and mentions of journalists as ‘lobby correspondents’. Third, those items which remained were

put into chronological order and any duplicates (such as articles which occurred under multiple

keyword searches) were removed so that the material to be analyzed consisted of unique items.14

In total, of the 1,691 individual items some 1,014 were removed.15 Conversely, though, a dozen

articles were considered to make significant reference to both British lobbying and one of the

excluded categories (mostly articles which discuss both British and American lobbying) and so

were added back into the dataset.16

We are thus left with a total of 689 unique items relating to lobbying in Britain. The

distribution of these references over the research period is shown in Figure 1. It is clear that, after

a slow start, there was a sustained – albeit somewhat uneven – increase in the amount of

attention paid to ‘lobbying’ and ‘lobbyists’ in British journalistic and parliamentary discourse.

Over the period 1860-1900, the pattern is one of progressive increases each decade, although at a

relatively low level until the 1890s when 173 items are recorded (close to one and a half times

the cumulative total of the previous 50 years). After 1900 the number of references is relatively

high each decade although in a less linear pattern. It is noticeable that over the 60 years before

1900 there are a total of 296 items based upon a larger dataset (since it includes the British

Library’s archive of 49 newspapers), while in the 50 years after 1900 there are 393 items from a

smaller dataset (just the Hansard, Times and Guardian/Observer archives). Newspaper and

parliamentary coverage of the search terms was more frequent in the first half of the 20th century

than previously, but it was also more erratic.

[FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE]

At this point, the fourth and fifth of the stages outlined by Srnka and Koeszegi were

applied: categorisation and coding.17 Once the 689 unique items were collated, a series of

categories were chosen both inductively (as interesting comments were observed during the

initial sorting of the material described above) and deductively (according to features taken from

5

the existing literature). Finally, the individual items were examined and coded. A single item

could be assigned multiple codes, according to its content. For instance, the tone of each item

was coded: if a single item revealed both positive and negative opinions (such as suggesting that

while business lobbying was excessive, it was useful to see workers beginning to represent their

views to government), it was coded as both positive and negative. Similarly, if a single item

specified several lobbying activities or organised interests, each was coded separately. Table 4

presents an overview of the coding process against the category scheme: from the 689 items

scored against 19 general categories which were broken down into 84 individual coding units, a

total of 5,297 codes were derived (or an average of 7.68 codes per item). Shaw suggests that nine

categories can indicate a relatively comprehensive scheme; the number of categories developed

here is significantly higher than that standard. She also argues that research in which

categorisation is reached inductively will place a greater emphasis on descriptive inferences over

causal arguments than will work generated through purely deductive categorisation; this article

does indeed seek to present quantitative analysis of the data, but does so in order to add texture

to the discussion which follows rather than to prove any hypothesis about the relationships

between multiple categories.18

3. Overview of Results

Table 2 groups the 19 broad categories into 7 thematic areas. Many of the key findings are

discussed in detail below, but all results are presented in the Tables of supplementary material

published on the journal’s website. Several introductory points are evident from this bird’s-eye

view of the general categories. First of all, the scores shown here for the tone of coverage are

consistently similar across the entire time period to the frequency of coverage displayed in

Figure 1. In other words, almost every article or speech expressed some view about the nature of

lobbying; the balance of positive and negative coverage is discussed in more detail below.

Second, much of the terminology currently used to describe lobbying is quite absent in this

dataset. The usage of seven other terms often associated with lobbying was coded, but they

accounted for only 92 references in total, and exactly half of these were items which referred to

‘influence’. The next most common term, with 22 references was ‘log-rolling’, an American

term which refers to one legislator voting for a measure which he or she does not genuinely

6

support in order to cultivate the reciprocal support of that measure’s sponsor for something else.

Rightly or wrongly, lobbyists were sometimes perceived as being responsible for encouraging

much log-rolling. Three of the most popular terms today by which lobbying may be described

received only two mentions between them – over the entire 150 year period not a single article

used the phrase ‘interest group’; ‘organised interest’ (in an American context) appeared only

once; as did ‘pressure group’.Each of these terms would certainly be found in substantial

numbers if articles from 1950 onwards were analyzed.

[TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE]

Third, some interesting trends over time become apparent from the general overview. For

the first few decades, articles were much more likely to deal with lobbying directed at specific

legislation, whereas from 1900 onwards we see lobbying on more general political issues

become prevalent. Lobbying by the private sector is more frequent than public sector lobbying in

every decade analyzed here, accounting for three times as much coverage. During the 1860s-

1880s, lobbying by local or regional interests dominated, but thereafter national interests were

overwhelmingly dominant. And fourth, there was relatively little concern across the time period

about the ethics of lobbying. Of the 19 general categories coded, the third lowest score was for

mentions of corrupt lobbying tactics (only 36 articles) and the fourth lowest score was for

articles dealing with lobbying regulation/reform (40 articles).

Finally, it is noticeable that between 1840 and 1910 there were 67 items which compared

lobbying in Britain to lobbying in the United States, but only 12 such items from 1910 to 1950.

This suggests that in the earlier period, lobbying was relatively unknown in Britain and so

journalists found it necessary to explain it through comparison with how it operated then in

Washington, but that by the middle of the 20th century the word and activity were more widely

recognised in Britain. Early reports tended to define lobbying as an American practice, while

later examples were more likely to accept that lobbying was a feature of British politics which

owed much to British political culture, rather than a foreign curiosity. Indeed, some even

suggested that interest representation was no better in Britain than in America:

7

The obstructive discussion on the Budget makes it quite clear that we must prepare to grapple with the monstrous drink monopoly which has grown up in this country. Three-fourths of the public-houses of the kingdom are in the hands of a few disreputable brewers. The publican is no longer “mine host”; he is the mere agent of a loathsome capitalist who has made a fabulous sum out of the degradation of his fellow countrymen. Some of these vile men are members of the House of Lords; some of the House of Commons. Yet they have the indecency to vote on questions affecting their private interests. Shall we have the impudence to talk of American lobbying in face of facts so disgraceful?19

4. Tone of Coverage

This first set of coding categories, represented in Figure 2, deals with the fundamental question

of what journalists and politicians understood by ‘lobbying’. The tone of the articles and

speeches analyzed is instructive – of the 685 total positive, negative or neutral references to

lobbying, only 24 (3.5%) were positive, while 367 (53.6%) were negative and 294 (42.9%) were

neutral in that they expressed no explicit normative view of lobbying. No positive reference to

lobbying was identified earlier than 1888 when James Bryce (then the Liberal member of

parliament (MP) for South Aberdeen, and author of the classic work on The American

Commonwealth) suggested that lobbying MPs to support particular Bills was ‘a most legitimate

thing to do’.20 Almost all positive mentions noted that interests had a right to articulate their

positions – J.G.A. Baird MP asserted that:

… constituents and Corporations like that of Glasgow visited members in the lobby, and tried to bring influence to bear on them. He looked on this as legitimate influence, and not at all to be compared with the corrupt system which prevailed in America. It was entirely in the way of benefiting the public at large, and the constituency concerned in particular.21

[FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE]

A significant number of the negative references expressed disapproval on one of three

grounds – that lobbying was associated with outright bribery or corruption (52 items), that it

subverted the democratic process (88 items) or that it was so extensively practiced that the

parliamentary system was being overloaded with demands from organised interests (20 items).

While the first and third of these complaints are self-explanatory, the second perhaps requires

8

elucidation. The idea that lobbying was undemocratic can be found in the notion that it operates

covertly: for instance, when the government amended a bill following discussions between a

Treasury minister and the National Telephone Company in 1899, one report condemned the

move ‘not as the result of fair argument in open debate, but as the effect of lobbying and back-

stairs influence’.22 Another element of the disapproval rests on the ability of organised interests

to influence policy by targeting small groups of MPs rather than the House as a whole. Many of

this group of items relate to the role lobbying played in the specific parliamentary process of

private bills which affect only small groups of people or often just a single company. While often

overlooked in the literature, throughout the 19th century there were approximately twice as many

private bills enacted than public legislation. Many private bills in that period were promoted – by

parliamentary agents, lawyers who drafted them and worked to secure their passage, often in

ways very similar to the work of contemporary lobbyists – on behalf of railway companies.23 In

practice, because private bills do not affect the general mass of the public, few MPs tended to

pay much attention to them, and thus those few MPs who served on the standing committee

which considered a private bill could exercise substantial influence over its passage without

receiving much publicity; in turn, those MPs could be greatly influenced by lobbying on behalf

of the company promoting a private bill.

Over the period covered here, coverage of lobbying cannot be said to become positive,

but certainly becomes less negative and more neutral. In the decades up to the 1900s, there are

219 negative items, 162 neutral items and 12 positive references – thus, there were 45 more

negative items than the neutral and positive items combined. This gap narrows significantly from

the 1910s to the 1940s, with 148 negative items and 144 neutral and positive items combined.

5. Lobbying Behaviour

While ‘lobbying tactics’ was the fourth highest category overall (with 561 total references), a

more detailed coding of these articles was less illustrative than may have been expected (see

Table 3). There were 384 mentions of interests meeting policymakers (68.44% of this total) – of

these, 126 references indicated that one or several interest representatives met or were meeting

with policymakers, and 106 referred to a larger delegation, while 152 were very general

mentions from which no indication of the type of meeting could be inferred. When other forms

9

of tactics were searched for, relatively few specific references were identified. (Full results are

reported in SM Table 6 in the file of supplementary material published alongside this article on

the journal’s website.) Of the 561 total items, the next highest scoring tactic after meetings was

petitions/circulars being sent to MPs, which accounted for only 6.77% of this total with 38 items.

Letters to policymakers received only 23 mentions (4.09%), as did references to interests

influencing public opinion through media relations. Some 15 items (2.67%) spoke of mass

lobbies or demonstration, including by Lancashire miners in 1903, demobilised soldiers who had

failed to find post-war employment in 1919, and workers in the film industry in 1938. Only 7

references (1.24%) were found to organised interests having an explicit legislative program or

manifesto which they were asking MPs to support, and none indicated that groups testified

before parliamentary committees – a practice which has long been regarded both in the US and

UK as a common lobbying tactic.

[TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE]

One Washington lobbyist has said that there are ‘three legs [on] the lobbying stool –

direct contact with Capitol Hill, building coalitions, and public outreach’.24 We have seen that

meeting with policymakers was far and away the most frequent tactic mentioned in the articles

and speeches in this database. However, the evidence here is that the other two tactics were very

uncommon across the whole period. Coalitions were noted in only 15 items (2.67% of this total),

and tended to involve very similar groups working together: the Liverpool and Manchester

chambers of commerce worked together on the supply of cotton from Africa, and all the unions

which included former servicemen who were given temporary civil service jobs lobbied to

improve their conditions of employment. With one or two exceptions, we do not find employers

and unions in an industry forming a coalition, or a diverse range of interests from various sectors

combining on a specific policy topic. Concrete instances of grassroots lobbying were only

slightly more frequent, with 19 mentions (3.38%). Among the examples of interest organisations

stimulating grassroots communications were: the railway companies, Catholic clubs in

Lancashire, the Licensed Victuallers’ Association, and shipyard workers. One report noted that

greyhound racing was actively working on a Betting and Lotteries Bill in 1934:

10

As befits the most modern of industries, it is even refining the art of lobbying and turning the models of the Orient to good Western use. A constituent who enjoys corresponding with a member can avail himself of a variety of specimen letters. He can approach the legislator in the best heart-to-heart style either as a citizen anxious for the honour of the dog-turf, as a man-in-the-street who likes a night’s racing now and then, as an employee, or even as a women elector.25

Aside from the choice of tactics to be used (‘how to lobby’), the other major decision

lobbyists face is over the most appropriate set of policymakers to direct the lobbying tactics at

(‘who to lobby’). Of the 689 items which mentioned a particular lobbying venue, 562 were about

lobbying parliament. When these articles were examined in more detail, 402 were found to

involve lobbying backbenchers rather than ministers. Some 76 of these specifically related to

lobbying parliamentary committees, and 75 to lobbying about private bills. Lobbying ministers

was specified in 93 items across the whole period, and lobbying civil servants in only 34. Thus,

lobbying at Westminster accounts for 81.56% of the articles in this category, and lobbying at

Whitehall for 18.44%. However, there is again some evidence here of an evolving practice –

while there were 74 items about lobbying parliament in the 1900s and 11 about lobbying

Whitehall, by the 1940s this balance has changed to 35 and 24 respectively. Lobbyists

everywhere choose to operate in those institutional venues where policy power resides: these

figures perhaps suggest that as executive-legislature relations tilted during the first half of the

20th century towards government, so too did the focus of interest organisations. (Full results are

reported in SM Table 8 in the file of supplementary material published alongside this article on

the journal’s website.)

6. Sources of Lobbying

The categories coded under this theme relate to the issues and interests which prompted lobbying

activity (see Figure 3). While the total number of references to lobbying on specific legislation is

somewhat greater than those to lobbying on general policy issues over the entire period, it is

interesting to note a trend towards general issues. From the 1840s to the 1890s, we see 176

articles mentioning lobbying over specific legislation and only 36 on general issues; from the

1900s to the 1940s, however, the balance is reversed with 162 on specific legislation and 230 on

general issues. A number of factors contribute to explaining this shift, including: a steep decline

in the number of private bills brought before Parliament; a substantial number of articles during

11

the latter period on tariffs being set administratively rather than by legislation; something of a

move by lobbyists seeking less to influence Westminster and more to influence Whitehall

reflecting varying power relations during wartime and during the post-war regulatory state; and

perhaps these findings hint that lobbyists were becoming more adept over time at exerting

influence as policy is being formulated ahead of the introduction of legislation. Next, the figures

for private vs. public sector lobbying may be slightly misleading in one sense: simply because a

lobbying campaign is coded here as private sector, it does not necessarily mean that it is business

lobbying – for instance, lobbying by coal miners counts here as private sector lobbying.

[FIGURE 3 ABOUT HERE]

What is interesting in this classification is firstly that the proportion of about three times

as much private sector than public sector lobbying remains fairly consistent across the whole

period; and secondly that so much public sector lobbying (122 items) was observed in this

database. This is somewhat at odds with other historical accounts of lobbying in which lobbying

by public sector organisations is much less prominent. For instance, Finer’s seminal work on

British lobbying in the 1950s and 1960s classifies organised interests in terms of business,

unions, the co-operative movement, professions, civic groups, special social categories, religious

bodies and educational/cultural/recreational groups, but does not explicitly count local

government as a category.26 It is true that lobbying by local government has been identified as

significant in the contemporary United States: Thomas et al (2008) rank local government units

(such as towns and counties) as the ninth most influential type of interest group in the American

states since the early 1980s.27 And yet even there most scholars continue to disregard lobbying

by public sector agencies and bodies. In the UK, there has been some limited attention over the

last couple of decades to how local government represents its interest at the EU level, but there is

still no established or rigorous body of work examining public sector lobbying efforts in

Westminster and Whitehall. Finally, this theme also coded articles which cited local/regional

interests (166 items) or national interests (423 items) – while local/regional interests dominated

up to the 1880s, the balance reversed decisively at that point, indicating the development of a

national interest group community.

12

7. Organised Interests

A total of 663 references to particular organised interests were identified in this dataset. One

striking finding is that while railways were certainly a significant interest – with 60 items (or

9.04% of the total counts in this category) – it does not appear to be anything like as dominant as

the literature might lead us to expect: ‘Of all the nineteenth-century interest groups, the railway

interest was the most infamous’.28 Railway companies in the nineteenth century were numerous,

offered potential riches to investors, and were intimately connected to parliament as each one

was brought into existence by a private bill. MPs were therefore disproportionately offered

lucrative directorships of these companies. In 1881, Sir Edward Watkin combined being MP for

Hythe with serving as the chairman of nine different railway companies – and heading an early

attempt to construct a Channel Tunnel. Any MP who wished to see the Tunnel excavations

would receive from Sir Edward, ‘an invitation to travel by special train to Dover, to see the

workings of the Tunnel, to lunch at the Lord Warden, and to return to Westminster quite

prepared to express a frank and independent opinion upon the greatest engineering exploit of the

day’.29 However, of these 60 articles, just 50 explicitly refer to railway employers as a lobbying

interest. This dataset thus suggests that railway companies have received disproportionate

attention from scholars in the past. The railway interest was highly active politically for several

decades in the mid-nineteenth century, and a prodigious source of parliamentary lobbying, but it

waned dramatically in influence and scale from the 1880s onwards. Over the whole period

investigated here, railways were a relatively minor concern in the context of the totality of

economic and social interest articulation.

Conversely, local government as an organised interest receives 73 mentions (11.01%),

although it is largely ignored in the literature on historical lobbying in Britain. Easily the most

prominent interest found in this source material was what has been classified here as

manufacturers (107 items, or 16.13%). This is explained in part at least by a relatively high

number of articles from the 1910s to the 1930s on tariff reform, in which manufacturers were

heavily involved. Another relatively frequently mentioned interest was the trade unions – here,

54 items (8.14%) are recorded. However, to this we could add many of the 6 references to

railway workers and of the 33 references to miners: most of these items were about unions in

those industries, but were coded separately from references to other unions. If we assume that all

13

these items refer to those workers lobbying through their unions, the total count for all unions

would be 93 items (14.02%).

[TABLE 4 ABOUT HERE]

Other organised interests which featured in this dataset included both the alcohol industry

(20 items, 3.01%) and the temperance movement (16 items, 2.41%), religious bodies (31 items,

4.67%), financial companies (18 items, 2.71%), shipping companies (14 items, 2.11%),

trading/colonial firms (26 items, 3.92%), and the female suffrage movement (19 items, 2.85%).

We have evidence of the increasing spread of lobbying by a wide range of interest organisations

in the 168 items (or 25.33%) which are classified as ‘others’ – these are interests which were

mentioned in one or several articles but not sufficient to justify an additional code. Thus, there

seem to have been quite a number of relatively small interests which lobbied only infrequently,

but which cumulatively account for significant lobbying activity. In terms of the ideological

basis of the lobbying observed in this dataset, 472 articles in total were considered to relate to

either right wing interests (business/industry/professions) or to left wing interests

(unions/workers/students). Some 329 items (or 69.7% of this total) were classed as right wing,

and 143 items (30.3%) as left wing. No left wing references were noted until the 1880s.

One of the most urgent dichotomies around interest groups over recent decades is the

question of representational bias: does our interest group system signify a pluralist diversity

which is to be encouraged, or is it reflective of the already dominant power of vested elites? In

his pioneering work, The Washington Lobbyists, Lester Milbrath sets out a classic statement of

the pluralist rationale for interest articulation. He sees in the clash of ideas between interest

groups a collective dynamism: ‘nearly every vigorous push in one direction stimulates an

opponent or coalition of opponents to push in the opposite direction. This natural self-balancing

factor comes into play so often that it almost amounts to a law’.30 While Milbrath acknowledges

concerns that this lobbying ‘balance of power’ is skewed in favor of those groups which are

relatively well resourced, nonetheless he insists on its fundamental truth, seeing the sheer scale

and diversity of the interest group population as indicative of a responsive and informed

policymaking process – a position which is broadly consistent with the evidence found in this

dataset.

14

This debate is not found explicitly in the period analyzed here, though there are a few

foretastes of it. The pluralist position was expressed by Maurice Hely-Hutchinson MP, during a

debate on excise duty: ‘I invited one of the vested interests on one side to have a drink with me,

and I invited one of the vested interests on the other side to have luncheon with me. As a result

of what I learned, I came to the conclusion that there was no justification for the removal of the

duty now proposed’.31 This battle of ideas was graphically stated in one article: ‘Let any one go

down to the lobby of the House of Commons between four and five o’clock, and he will find

members and parliamentary agents in close conference. Mr Roebuck last evening drew a comic

picture of Mr Crawford with the agent for the Corporation tugging at one tail of his coat and the

agent for the gas companies pulling the other’.32 On the other hand, the interest group choir has

long had an upper-class accent:

The Telegraph accepts Mr Lowe’s challenge to point out any defects of the present House of Commons. He claims for it immunity from certain American sins of “wire-pulling” and “lobbying”…. Mr Lowe knows as well as anyone that there are members whom it is idle to class as Liberals, Conservatives, or “Independents,” because they represent merely some “financial” undertaking – the adjective is strong, almost libellous, but one can’t help it – some bank, insurance company, or some money-making clique…. Mr Lowe also knows very well that class interests have enormous strength in the present House – that railway reform is obstructed because directors are too powerful for common sense; that poor law reform is delayed because the large landlords have too much weight; and that army and navy reforms are all but hopeless while those holding commissions in one or other of the services can, with their friends, be counted in the House by hundreds.33

8. Characteristics of Lobbyists

The three categories coded under this theme relate to lobbyists themselves, examining who they

were and what skills or experiences they brought to the task of lobbying (see Figure 4). The

results presented here are more valuable qualitatively than quantitatively as the coding decisions

made are more subjective than is the case in other categories. For instance, of the 152 articles

coded for ‘lobbyists’, only 19 were judged as specifically mentioning a lobbyist’s access to

policymakers, even though many more articles discussed lobbyists meeting policymakers (see

Table 3 on lobbying behavior). However, what this data does show is that relatively few items

15

made explicit claims about the backgrounds and roles of lobbyists. Although we would expect

from the literature to find significant mention of lawyers as lobbyists, in fact only 5 items did so.

Among the topics addressed in the 15 articles which related to the personal characteristics of

lobbyists were: powers of persuasion, a willingness to misrepresent facts, perseverance, and an

ability to ingratiate oneself with politicians. Only 2 articles suggested that lobbyists brought to

their task a substantive policy expertise and only 11 described lobbyists in terms of the

information they could provide to policymakers.

By contrast, fully 53 items note that politicians were simultaneously officers in organised

interests. Only 6 of these articles appeared after 1910, indicating that this potential conflict of

interest was essentially a 19th century phenomenon. Often, these MPs were directors of

commercial interests such as railway companies, though some others combined their

parliamentary duties with a trade union post.

[FIGURE 4 ABOUT HERE]

No articles or speeches in this dataset were coded as referring explicitly to in-house

lobbyists. This may be the result of particularly parsimonious coding – in fact, the vast bulk of

all the lobbying identified in this source material would have been undertaken by in-house

lobbyists in the sense that the directors of a company or the secretary of an association did the

lobbying on behalf of their organisation. However, no cases were found in which those people

were stated as having the explicit job title of ‘lobbyist’. There were, though, 19 items which did

clearly identify a contract or commercial lobbyist, indicating the early beginnings of lobbying as

an industry. Among these articles were several about Charles Grissell who claimed that ‘he could

control the decision of the [select committee on the Tower High-Level Bridge Bill], and would

procure its withdrawal or rejection for the sum of £2000’; Grissell became the last non-MP to be

imprisoned in the Clock Tower of the house of commons for failing to comply with a summons

to attend a parliamentary committee.34 One report in 1899 thundered that lobbying had ‘become

not so much a fine art as an open unashamed scandal…. Men were got into the lobby at 100

guineas a day to button-hole MPs’ to support or oppose bills relating to railways, local

government and individual companies.35

16

Finally, some 35 articles in this dataset specifically refer to women as lobbyists in Britain

– certainly in terms of female suffrage, but also on other policies including: the pay and

conditions applied to children and women in textile factories and workshops; the closing hours of

shops; the ordination of women by the Wesleyan Church; the loss of nationality by British

women who married men from overseas; equal pay for women in the civil service; Sunday

performances in theatres; and the pension age for spinsters.

9. Ethics of Lobbying

One striking feature of this dataset is the apparent disparity between the negative tone of much

coverage of lobbying (see Figure 2) and the fact that relatively few articles actually pointed to

the use by lobbyists of corrupt tactics – only 26 items referred explicitly to lobbyists bribing

policymakers (such as that Standard Oil was alleged to have bribed MPs over a Petroleum Bill in

1899) and only 10 noted inappropriate gifts or hospitality offered by lobbyists. While we know

from the literature that Washington lobbyists on occasion used both sexual favours and gambling

contests to influence members of Congress, neither activity received a single mention in British

newspapers or parliamentary debate during the period of this study. Indeed, while 367 of the 689

articles and speeches considered here exhibited a negative view of lobbying, only 40 are coded

as explicitly discussing regulation or reform. Even this level of concern is slightly misleading –

Figure 5 shows that there are three decades in which no regulation/reform article appeared and

three others with have only one item each. Lobbying reform was a sporadic topic, punctuated by

spikes in interest occasioned by specific concerns. Not even all of these 40 items were censorious

in tone – during a debate on refurbishment work in the palace of Westminster, one MP suggested

that ‘there might be some room set apart in which members might see people who had business

with them. It might be argued that it would lead to the increase of the practice of “lobbying”, but

he did not think that it would be found to have that result’.36 Six articles in the 1880s related to a

single incident in which Joseph Dodds MP wrote to colleagues asking them to support the third

reading of the Stockton Carrs Railway Bill; his son was the solicitor for the company promoting

the legislation. The question of lobbying regulation arose often in the context of how

parliamentary procedures might be altered so that the influence of outside interests on private

bills might be reduced.

17

[FIGURE 5 ABOUT HERE]

A later spur to regulation articles came in the 1940s, which saw two particular scandals.

At the start of 1949, a report by Mr Justice Lynskey was published following his inquiry into the

relationship between a junior minister (John Belcher) and a lobbyist or ‘contact man’ (Sidney

Stanley). Belcher had accepted some gifts and hospitality from Belcher who was operating on

behalf of various companies. The report led to Belcher’s resignation as both a minister and MP.37

In December that same year, three items related to a complaint made to the Speaker of the house

of commons that Lt. Commander Christopher Powell – a man who has been described as ‘The

founding father of modern lobbying’ – had attempted to prevent an MP from attending a

Standing Committee on the Censorship of Plays (Repeal) Bill.38 This incident cost Powell his

other job as secretary of the Inter-Parliamentary Union as the Speaker ruled that he should not be

able to obtain privileged access to the commons in that capacity since this could be misused to

the benefit of his commercial clients.

10. Conclusion

This research has thrown up insights into the historical development and evolution of lobbying

practice in the United Kingdom. What it has not done – indeed, what would require a much

larger project – is to produce a definitive analysis of how lobbying has been understood from

1800 to 1950. The approach adopted here is only possible because of recent technological

advances which have allowed newspaper and parliamentary archives to be digitised and searched

relatively easily. However, the technology is not yet ideal – it is reasonable to assume that there

are relevant mentions of ‘lobbying’ in parliamentary debate during this period but because the

search engine in the Hansard database is unable to distinguish between ‘lobbying’ and ‘lobby’ or

‘lobbies’, it produces 13,662 records, almost of all which are not germane to this study. More

fundamentally, the terminology of lobbying creates difficulties. There is some evidence from the

US, for instance, that ‘lobbying’ and ‘lobbyist’ are terms which were created in response to the

even earlier usage of the word ‘lobby’ as a noun (ie, the ‘railroad lobby’, the ‘textile lobby’, the

‘speculators who gathered in the Senate lobby’) and then as a verb (‘they came to Washington to

18

lobby’). Presumably the same is true in the UK. But precisely because of the range of everyday

meanings of the word ‘lobby’, it is problematic to use a simple keyword search in an archive to

restrict results only to those instances which refer to organised interests lobbying politicians and

officials. Thus, this study cannot conclusively identify the first recorded use of ‘lobby’ in the UK

in the sense of an effort to influence public policy. It does not trace how language shifted from

‘lobby’ to ‘lobbying’ and ‘lobbyist’. Nonetheless, what this study does offer is some empirical

evidence of how ‘lobbying’ and ‘lobbyist’ have been used in parliamentary and journalistic

discourse over a 150 year period in Britain. In doing so, it sheds light on the early history of an

important activity and adds a more detailed context to our existing knowledge of lobbying. The

findings presented in this article contribute fresh nuances to how we think of the emergence of

professionalised lobbying in Britain, and can inform future studies (both descriptive and

hypotheses-testing) which utilise different source material.

Finally, while this dataset offers rich detail on the substance of lobbying in Britain, one

cannot avoid noticing that it is bookended by two articles which paint a picture of lobbying that

practitioners would find both familiar and dispiriting. The earliest article recorded in the archives

on which this research is based defines lobbying as it was practiced in the United States as

revolving around social hospitality rather than evidence-based policy information:

There is extensive jobbing and treating relative to private bills, or bills for the establishment of public companies. The parties who apply for the bill, or their agents, come to Harrisburg while the legislature is in session, and, under pretence of explaining the subject to the members, flatter them, give them suppers, and open their understandings by means of plentiful libations of wine…. The technical name for these practices is “lobbying”.39

The last article in this dataset quotes an MP complaining about the conduct of Christopher

Powell who asserted that Powell:

ran a lobbying agency in the House on the American principle, and that his activities ought to be investigated, particularly the facilities he had as secretary of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. There was considerable anxiety in the House that the matter had apparently been allowed to go by default.40

Together, these items reflect the reputational perceptions which professional lobbying has

struggled to counter throughout its history. From its emergence as a recognised activity; through

19

its development into a significant, national and professional interest group system; to the present

day’s powerful and substantial industry – lobbying in Britain has failed to achieve widespread

public understanding and support. The data presented in this study reveals a number of important

developments and changes over time, but this fundamental lack of acceptance and legitimacy

remains as pressing a challenge to today’s lobbyists as it was to their predecessors in the 1840s.

Writing about the history of public relations, L’Etang asserts that, ‘PR practice in the UK is not

particularly good at remembering and celebrating its innovators’.41 Similarly, lobbyists in Britain

should have greater regard for their predecessors and their professional heritage: that in turn

requires academics to offer practitioners a more nuanced and detailed portrait of early lobbying

and interest group behaviour than we currently have.

20

21

Table 1: Incidence of Search Terms by Archive

Descriptor Hansard1803-1950

British Library

1800-1900

Times1800-1950

Guardian/Observer

1800-1950

“lobbyist” 10 148 52 43“lobbying” —a 434 335 481“lobbyer” 1 3 1 1“lobbier” 1 9 4 1“lobby-agent”“lobby agent”“lobby-member”“lobby member”“professional lobbyist”“professional lobbying”“contract lobbyist”“contract lobbying”“commercial lobbyist”“commercial lobbying”“in-house lobbyist”“in-house lobbying”

22

616110011000

446630000002

330011000000

010200000200

a This dash indicates that the term has been searched for but the results are not included in this analysis because the particular archive’s search capability is not sufficiently well calibrated to deliver an accurate count of that term. Hansard includes 13,662 counts of “lobbying” but an initial examination reveals that almost all of these are general references to the parliamentary voting lobbies, and so they have been excluded from this analysis since the time it would take to identify the relatively few relevant items specific to lobbying would be excessive.

22

Figure 1: References in Unique Items to UK Lobbying by Date

23

Table 2: Overview of General Categories Coded

1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s TOTAL

Tone 3 3 20 43 55 167 102 60 83 106 43 685Comparisons with United States 2 3 10 10 13 17 12 4 2 3 3 79Use of associated terms 2 1 9 8 13 29 15 5 1 6 3 92

Lobbying tactics 3 1 11 15 31 134 63 55 68 125 55 561Corrupt tactics 2 0 8 7 6 4 4 0 1 2 2 36

Lobbying on general issues 1 0 7 1 5 22 49 30 38 77 36 266Lobbying on specific legislation 2 1 9 15 25 124 44 29 43 29 7 328Private sector lobbying 1 3 9 18 18 80 65 40 53 68 16 371Public sector lobbying 0 0 0 6 5 51 17 6 12 21 4 122Local/regional interests 0 0 4 18 22 52 30 8 10 18 4 166National interests 0 0 2 1 13 99 59 54 72 92 31 423

Lobbying venues 3 5 20 35 47 182 85 68 70 115 59 689

Organised interests 3 3 19 33 46 191 88 62 78 102 38 663Tariff reform 0 0 0 0 3 0 33 17 18 39 1 111Ideology 2 3 11 20 29 123 75 49 62 78 20 472

Lobbyists 5 0 12 9 25 37 19 6 9 8 22 152Female lobbyists 0 0 1 0 2 11 1 0 7 7 6 35Petitioning for personal claims 1 0 0 0 1 6 0 0 0 0 0 8

Regulation/reform 0 0 1 4 12 8 3 0 1 1 10 40

24

Figure 2: Tone of Coverage

25

Table 3: Lobbying Behaviour

1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s TOTAL

Lobbying tacticsMeeting policymakers 2 0 7 11 18 94 37 36 54 88 37 384(Individual meetings) 1 0 2 2 5 49 8 10 11 21 7 126(Delegations) 0 0 2 1 2 26 15 14 7 28 11 106Mass lobbies/demonstrations 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 2 2 3 6 15Letters to policymakers 0 0 0 1 0 11 3 2 2 3 1 23Petitions/circulars 0 0 1 1 6 14 3 4 1 6 2 38Coalitions of interests 0 0 0 0 1 0 3 2 1 7 1 15Grassroots lobbying 0 0 1 1 0 7 3 0 3 2 2 19Astroturf/manufactured grassroots 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 1 0 3Public opinion/media relations 1 1 1 0 4 1 2 3 1 4 5 23Legislative programs 0 0 0 0 1 3 3 0 0 0 0 7Testifying to committees 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0Formal consultation system 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 3 3 11 1 21Financing candidates/MPs 0 0 1 1 0 1 6 3 1 0 0 13

Lobbying venuesLobbying Parliament 2 3 16 32 43 153 74 52 59 93 35 562(Lobbying backbenchers) 1 0 11 20 22 117 51 38 45 68 29 402(Lobbying committees) 2 0 3 18 15 25 18 0 2 3 0 76(Lobbying on Private Bills) 2 0 4 14 15 23 15 0 0 2 0 75Lobbying ministers 1 2 4 3 2 27 11 11 7 13 12 93Lobbying officials 0 0 0 0 2 2 0 5 4 9 12 34Lobbying political parties 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

26

Figure 3: Sources of Lobbying

27

28

Table 4: Organised Interests

1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s TOTALOrganised interestsBrewers/alcohol industry 0 0 0 1 2 7 3 2 2 3 0 20Prohibition lobby 0 0 0 1 1 10 3 0 1 0 0 16Railways 1 1 8 4 14 17 8 2 4 0 1 60(Employers) 1 1 8 4 8 16 6 2 3 0 1 50(Workers) 0 0 0 0 0 2 3 0 1 0 0 6Local government 0 0 0 6 5 38 12 1 2 7 2 73Mining 0 0 0 0 0 20 10 3 3 6 0 42(Employers) 0 0 0 0 0 3 1 1 0 6 0 11(Workers) 0 0 0 0 0 18 9 2 3 1 0 33Teachers 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 2 0 8Agriculture 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 2Doctors 0 0 0 1 3 0 0 1 0 0 0 5Religion 0 0 1 2 1 12 5 3 4 1 2 31Financial/City 1 0 1 6 1 2 1 2 2 2 0 18Shipping/canals 0 0 0 1 4 4 0 2 3 0 0 14Manufacturers 0 0 0 0 0 2 9 19 28 39 10 107Trading/Colonial 1 0 2 7 3 4 6 2 1 0 0 26Female suffrage 0 0 1 0 2 6 2 3 5 0 0 19Trade unions 0 0 0 0 2 21 12 6 3 5 5 54Others 0 2 6 4 8 46 17 16 15 36 18 168

IdeologyRight wing interests:Business/industry/professions 2 3 11 20 27 68 50 35 43 58 12 329Left wing interests:Unions/workers/students 0 0 0 0 2 55 25 14 19 20 8 143

29

Figure 4: Characteristics of Lobbyists

30

Figure 5: Ethics of Lobbying

31

1* The author would like to thank co-editor David Hayton, two anonymous reviewers, and Anne

Moorhead for their valuable comments on this article.

J.M. Norris, ‘Samuel Garbett and the Early Development of Industrial Lobbying in Great Britain’,

Economic History Review, x (1958), 450-60, 450.2 J. Peacey, ‘Print Culture and Political Lobbying During the English Civil Wars’, Parliamentary

History, xxvi, 30-48; M. Davies, ‘Lobbying Parliament: The London Companies in the Fifteenth

Century’, Parliamentary History, xxiii (2004), 136-48; D. Dean, ‘London Lobbies and Parliament:

The Case of the Brewers and Coopers in the Parliament of 1593’, Parliamentary History, viii

(1989), 341-65.3 G. Jordan and J. Greenan, ‘The Associational Population in the UK and Ireland: Change and

Complexity Over Time’, paper presented at 2009 annual meeting of the American Political Science

Association.4 G. Wootton, Pressure Groups in Britain 1720-1970: An Essay in Interpretation with Original

Documents (Hamden, CT, 1975).5 Wootton, Pressure Groups in Britain 1720-1970, pp. 216-17.6 C. McGrath, ‘Charles Weller Kent: The UK’s First “Parliamentary Lobbyist” (1913-1916)?,

Journal of Legislative Studies, xix (2013), 98-117.7 G.K. Roberts, Political Parties and Pressure Groups in Britain (1970), 83.8 C. Schonhardt-Bailey, ‘Lessons in Lobbying for Free Trade in 19th Century Britain: To

Concentrate or Not’, American Political Science Review, lxxxv (1991), 37-58, 38.9 G. Alderman, Pressure Groups and Government in Great Britain (Harlow, 1984); S.H. Beer,

Modern British Politics: A Study of Parties and Pressure Groups (1965).10 K.J. Srnka and S.T. Koeszegi, ‘From Words to Numbers: How to Transform Qualitative Data into

Meaningful Quantitative Results’, Schmalenbach Business Review, lix (2007), 29-57.11 J.D. Stewart, British Pressure Groups: Their Role in Relation to the House of Commons (Oxford,

1958); S.E. Finer, Anonymous Empire: A Study of the Lobby in Great Britain (2nd edn, 1966).12 Srnka and Koeszegi, ‘From Words to Numbers’. By ‘individual article’, I mean any single item

published in a newspaper: not just news stories, but also items such as a letter to the editor, a

contents list or index, an advertisement, and so on.13 J. Shaw, ‘10 Billion Words: The British Library British Newspapers 1800-1900 Project – Some

Guidelines for Large-Scale Newspaper Digitisation’, paper presented at 2005 annual meeting of the

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. My searches were originally

undertaken in March 2011 when this database was accessible through the British Library website. It

has since been removed from there and is now instead made available through a partnership with

Gale Cengage Learning.

14 By ‘unique items’, I mean those which provide new information. It was common, for instance, in

the 19th century for newspapers to provide very detailed extracts from parliamentary debates: if an

entire statement about lobbying from a parliamentary speech was reproduced in a newspaper, the

article would be discarded and the speech included as a unique item; if the article included other

information which placed the speech into context, both would be regarded as unique items. In

addition, newspaper reports would frequently describe the same speech but attributing different

language to the parliamentarian – each such report would be a unique item. In order to refine the

selection of material solely to unique items, any duplicate articles were discarded. Many of these

came from the British Library archive – given that it covers 49 newspapers, there are many

examples of the same article supplied by a news agency being printed in multiple outlets. In other

cases, searching for ‘lobby-member’ in the Hansard archive produced exactly the same 61

references as searching for the term unhyphenated, and so these items were only included once not

twice.15 SM Table 2 in the accompanying file of supplementary material shows the number of items which

were discarded alongside the criteria by which exclusions were made.16 Generally, though, each item was placed into only one category, according to the specific context

of the reference to lobbying – for example, a brief mention of US lobbying in a longer but more

general article about UK politics would be excluded from this study.17 Srnka and Koeszegi, ‘From Words to Numbers’.18 E. Shaw, ‘(De)coding Content: Code Scheme Development in Content Analysis’, paper presented

at 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.19 ‘The Whiskey Party’, Reynold’s Newspaper, 13 May 1894, p. 4.20 ‘Procedure’, Times, 1 Mar. 1888, p. 6.21 ‘St. Andrew’s Day’, Glasgow Herald, 2 Dec. 1889, p. 8.22 ‘This Morning’s News in Brief’, Liverpool Mercury, 30 June 1899, pp. 6-7.23 D.L. Rydz, The Parliamentary Agents: A History (1979).24 Anne Wexler, quoted in C. McGrath, Lobbying in Washington, London and Brussels: The

Persuasive Communication of Political Issues (Lewiston, NY, 2005), 285.25 ‘The Commons and Betting’, Times, 27 June 1934, p. 17.26 Finer, Anonymous Empire.27 C.S. Thomas, R.J. Hrebenar, and A.J. Nownes, ‘Interest Group Politics in the States: Four

Decades of Developments – the 1960s to the Present’, in The Book of the States, Volume 40, ed.

Council of State Governments (Washington, DC, 2008), 322-331.28 G. Alderman, The Railway Interest (Leicester, 1973), 224.29 ‘London Gossip’, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 22 Mar. 1882, p. 8.

30 L. Milbrath, The Washington Lobbyists (Chicago, 1963), 345.31 ‘Finance Bill Committee Stage’, Hansard, Commons Debates, 5th ser., cccxxxvii, col. 1187:

Maurice Hely-Hutchinson, 22 June 1938.32 ‘Commerce in the House of Commons’, Pall Mall Gazette, 7 Mar. 1866, p. 10.33 ‘Epitome of Opinion in the Morning Journals’, Pall Mall Gazette, 20 Dec. 1866, p. 2.34 ‘Imperial Parliament’, Leeds Mercury, 12 July 1879, p. 6.35 ‘Up to Date’, Reynold’s Newspaper, 27 Aug. 1899, p. 1.36 ‘Civil Service Estimates’, Times, 6 June 1884, p. 6.37 S.W. Baron, The Contact Man (1966); M. Roodhouse, ‘The 1948 Belcher Affair and Lynskey

Tribunal’, Twentieth Century British History, xiii (2002), 384-411.38 C. Souza, So You Want to Be a Lobbyist?: The Inside Story of the Political Lobbying Industry

(1998), 247.39 ‘Legislature of Pennsylvania’, Guardian, 7 Apr. 1841, p. 4.40 ‘The Case of Mr Powell’, Times, 13 Dec. 1949, p. 6.41 J. L’Etang, ‘Writing PR History: Issues, Methods and Politics’, Journal of Communication Management, xii (2008), 319-35, 333.