ABSTRACT
The suggestion in 1885 that the leading family in the Tory Party in the next century would be the Chamberlains would have brought the speaker a certificate of lunacy. Yet the party of the landed gentry was to pass from the aristocratic custody of the Cecils into the hands of a Birmingham dynasty of screw manufacturers. Joseph, the radical hope of 1885, was never to gain the leadership of the Tory Party but his two sons, Austen and Neville, were each to hold this position. This is both testimony to the glorious unpredictability of British politics, and also symbolic of the major changes which overtook the Conservatives and British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
