‘What does it mean by faggot?’ asked my husband when I showed him a newspaper item headed ‘Champion faggot’. The cutting, from the Northern Daily Mail for 6 November 1897, was sent to me by the historian Andrew McCarthy who had found the headline when looking for something else, and had no idea what it meant either, until he sensibly looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary.
There it explains that (when votes depended on property), a faggot was ‘a vote for a particular candidate or party fraudulently contrived by nominally transferring sufficient property to a person who would not otherwise be qualified’.
The ‘champion faggot’ in the cutting refers to the Revd Washbourne West, who had died that year, managing at the age of 80 ‘to record votes for 17 Conservative candidates in different parts of the country in the 1892 election’. He was Senior Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.
I’m not sure all his votes were fraudulently contrived. Another newspaper article that Mr McCarthy has found points out that London’s division into 27 boroughs allowed an elector to vote in any where he had business interest, citing four brothers in the coal trade with 100 votes between them in a general election.
This notion of faggot was probably an adaptation of the sense ‘a man temporarily hired as a dummy soldier to make up the required number at a muster’, itself deriving from the military use of faggots to fill ditches. It does not come from fags at school or faggots in the American sense. At the time critics were fierce against political faggots. Thorold Rogers, the Liberal economist, called Mr West ‘a corrupt, lying and malignant Tory, an absolute son of Belial’. Already some took Tory and lying as synonymous.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in