The change was not ennobling but it gave infinitely more varied food for thought. I watched the social levelling-up of Radicalism and saw stern, unbending Nonconformists honoured and decorated for all the world like Tory supporters of the Establishment. At one time Baxter-Whittingham, looking strangely like a famished undertaker in his loose, half-clerical clothes, had criticized the Government as persistently as Campion or Dillworth; his mind stored with the memory of working-class conditions in Shadwell, his voice throbbing with indignation and pity, he had arraigned a Ministry that wasted days on the Address and hours on the obsolete circumlocutions of "Honourable and gallant members," "Mr. Speaker, I venture to say--and I do not think the most captious critic will contradict me ...," while men starved and women trod the path of shame, while little children went barefoot and verminous.
The silent fortitude of the Treasury Bench under his attacks was a thing to mark and remember. "It amuses him and doesn't hurt us," said my friend Jellaby, the Whip. "So long as he _votes_...." And Baxter-Whittingham never divided the House against the Government. Once when the Feeding of School Children Bill was in Committee he became dangerous: the Treasury Bench was deserted, and he lavished fine irony on the Ministerial passion for reform. Free-lances and others who had entrusted their social consciences to Whittingham, or were nettled by the intolerable aloofness of Ministers, followed in the same strain, and an excited Whip drove me out of the tea-room and bade me hold myself in readiness for trouble.
The following day the smoking-room presented a strange appearance. Seven members of the Cabinet and four lesser Ministers mingled with the common herd--like naughty schoolboys propitiating a ruffled master. They cracked jokes and slapped us on the back, bade us take pot-luck with them, and asked how things were looking in our constituencies. I lunched with a Secretary of State that day and, to redress the balance, kept my promise to dine with Sir Gerald Matley, the Wesleyan potter and Liberal knight. We were given a wonderful dinner, starting with caviar and ending with cigars like office-rulers, which we were urged to pocket, six at a time, to smoke on the way home. Flushed and rebellious, Philip drunk swore to move the adjournment unless he got a promise of warmer support for the School Children Bill. Philip sober was a shade less valiant. Matley and I, alone of that heroic cave, kept to our undertaking, and our fellow-braves avoided the House for a couple of days. The Treasury Bench smiled a little contemptuously as we proceeded to the Orders of the Day, but the lesson was not entirely thrown away. When the Minimum Wage Appeal Board was set up, Baxter-Whittingham (and who more fit?) was appointed Controller at a salary of £1250 a year, and Shadwell and the House of Commons knew him no more.