The Spectator’s Notes | 8 February 2018

A reader writes: ‘In my last letter, I called you a numbskull. However I should have qualified this with “sometimes you are a numbskull”.’ I must apologise for an example of my sometimes-numbskullery in this column last week when I asserted that Joe Chamberlain had opposed votes for women in Parliament in 1917. This would have been impossible, as he had been dead three years. I saw the ‘Rt Hon. J.A. Chamberlain’ in Hansard’s division lists and lazily failed to check. J.A. was, in fact, Joe’s son, Austen.

In the course of looking into my error, I learn that all Chamberlains (including Neville) inherited Joe’s hostility to women’s suffrage; but his daughter Beatrice, who campaigned for the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League (of which Gertrude Bell was hon. secretary), changed her mind because of the first world war. She became zealous for Unionist (i.e. Conservative) women’s organisations, fearing that ‘lively’ women would otherwise be dragged into movements ‘ostensibly outside politics, but in reality under Radical direction’.