Tories and Hunters: Swinton College and the Landscape of Modern Conservatism

Fig. 1.

Swinton Conservative College, Country Life, 1966.

With permission of IPC Media.

Between 1948 and 1975 54,000 activists, Agents and other students took courses at Swinton Conservative College. The College was housed in Lord and Lady Swinton’s stately home in North Yorkshire, which they had donated to Rab Butler’s Conservative Political Centre (CPC). It succeeded Ashridge College in Hertfordshire, which had been close to the Conservative Party since 1928.¹ Courses covered policy, campaigning, and history. Swinton was closely identified with Harold Macmillan’s love of shooting and it was this rather than pedagogical targets that led him and the press to Swinton around the ‘glorious twelfth’ for the start of the grouse shooting season. Edward Heath used Swinton for shadow-cabinet policy away-days until 1968 and it would have been famous had it hosted the 1970 meeting that agreed a reputedly more free-market election manifesto, which was held instead at Selsdon Park Hotel. The proto-Thatcherite ‘Selsdon Man’ was very nearly ‘Swinton Man’. By the mid 1960s Swinton had become one of the battlefields for skirmishes between market liberals and Butler-style paternalists. Despite this, the College was an early casualty of Thatcher’s leadership and closed in 1976 because of its cost, its remoteness, a modernizing desire to shed elitism, and the emergence of think-tanks.

This article uses Swinton to examine ideology, activism and Conservatism’s associations with field sports, aristocratic homes and rural images of Englishness. It plots the persistence of this cultural reputation and public association after Swinton, and despite Thatcher’s efforts to shed it. Swinton then has wider historiographical resonances. There was a trace of ‘postcolonial melancholia’ in the nostalgic affections (and affectations) Swinton induced in Conservatives.² It offered a seemingly fixed Englishness to console imperial anxieties and destabilizations of class and nation. As a synecdoche for post-war Conservative identities, historians could hardly have made Swinton up.

My method is to reconstruct Swinton’s ethos and its internal and external story, and to interrogate broader inferences. Buildings and place impart meaning and mesh together politics and culture – much Conservative history, in this period alone, was wrapped up in Cliveden or Selsdon. There were no innate politics to country piles. They hosted numerous Fabian summer schools and Stanford Hall housed the Co-operative Union College from 1945 to 2001. The 1960s project to turn the Arts and Crafts mansion, Plaw Hatch Hall in West Sussex, into a Trade Union Country Club prefigured several unions acquiring country house HQs in the 1970s.³ But the country house exhibited a persistent Conservative valency. The argument here is less about landed power (despite the title’s allusion to E. P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters) than party image. Such associations forged popular and enduring perceptions of the identity and differences between parties – which political historians burrowing into the finer details of policy and ideology ought to remember. This was the case in portrayals by opponents and the media, in the mental assumptions publicly at large, and in party lore.⁴ The world of Swinton was part of the affective structure of Conservatism; its associations with aristocratic, landed lifestyles pre-dated Swinton, were epitomized by it, and survived its closure.

Swinton offers historians access to the undergrowth of Conservatism as well as its grandees. But historians should not lose sight of the site itself. That Swinton is largely absent from histories of Conservatism (despite its papers being in the Party archives) discloses much about the predilections of political historians. Swinton recurrently provided not the subject (thus its neglect), but the setting; it tells historians about the deeper cultural residues as well as the official political message; about the conservative imaginary, instinct and lifestyle, besides ideology and formal Conservatism.

Acres of historical debate have related English national identity, in popular, romantic and traditional forms, to the countryside. Dave Russell summarized this debate in the 1980s, noting how since the nineteenth century a version had emerged ‘that celebrated the pre-industrial past and an idealized...