ABSTRACT
The first Operative Conservative Association was formed in Leeds in February 1835 by three workers, William Paul, William Beckwith, and Cavie Richardson. Paul worked in the flax spinning mill owned by Hives and Atkinson and qualified to vote in parliamentary elections under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act. He was secretary of the Leeds Association for many years.
Paul published this history of the Association in 1838. Noting the apparent ‘novelty’ of operative support for Conservative principles, he went on to detail the foundation of the organisation on the principles of ‘The Altar, the Throne, the Cottage’. The Association had some 600 members and possessed a library containing nearly 300 books and a host of Conservative newspaper titles (including The Standard, John Bull, Blackwood’s, and Fraser’s magazine). The Association originally met in the Corn Exchange Buildings but relocated to Vicar’s Croft where its general business meeting was held every Tuesday.
Paul acknowledged that attending meetings, making declarations, and reading Conservative newspapers, were, of themselves, no guarantee of Conservative success, were it not for the fact that members of the Association had attended to ‘the borough and the municipal registrations’. Members were scrupulous in attending ward meetings, in order to ‘guard the interest of their friends, and to watch the movements and manoeuvres of their opponents’. He highlighted the municipal elections at Leeds, during 1838, as evidence of a ‘signal victory on the part of the Conservatives’ which was largely owing to the activities of the Association.
The spread of Operative Conservative Associations through Yorkshire and Lancashire was highlighted by Paul, who spent some time explaining why there was no contradiction in operative support for Conservative values. Much of his reasoning evoked the arguments of the Loyalist Association movement of the 1790s, as it attempted to counter the threat of radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789.
