Sunday, April 09, 2006

New Conservative History Group Website Launched

The Conservative History Group has a new website. It's at www.conservativehistory.org.uk. There's also a new Conservative History Blog at www.conservativehistory.blogspot.com. If you've got a blog or site yourself we'd be delighted if you'd link to both. We've got three speaker meetings lined up so far this year. On April 25th Peter Mangold will be giving a talk at the House of Commons on the tempestuous relationship between Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle. In June we'll be holding a discussion on the value of Political Diaries with some top class speakers, and at the Party Conference we'll be holding a fringe meeting titled Suez Fifty Years On: Lessons & Parallels to Today. On top of that the Group is publishing a short biography of Sir Michael Hicks Beach next week and two copies of the Conservative History Journal. If you'd like to join the Conservative History Group and receive invitations to all events and free copies of the Journal, click HERE or to join online click HERE.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks. I must get round to joining!

One question that has intrigued me and that is why there doesn't appear to ever have been a biography of Captain David Margesson, Tory Chief Whip in the 1930s, who played a pivotal role under both Baldwin and Chamberlain.

Or am I wrong and that such a learned tome does indeed exist?

Tim Roll-Pickering said...

To the best of my knowledge I am not aware of a biography having ever been published. The nearest things are a chapter in Tim Renton's Chief Whip: People, Power and Patronage in Westminster, published by Politico's in 2004, and the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

The Margesson papers held at Churchill College Cambridge are extremely limited in numbers and scope and do not offer much of a basis for researchers at all.

Lord Margesson appears to have preserved very few personal papers. As John Hill put it "I found it extremely difficult to come across any record by or about him since almost all his whole political activity as Chief Whip was done on a verbal basis for fairly obvious reasons and no records were kept." (letter to Correlli Barnett, 28 February 1984). The small collection of Margesson's papers comprises correspondence and biographical material.

See the Janus entry for more

Tim Roll-Pickering said...

To the best of my knowledge I am not aware of a biography having ever been published. The nearest things are a chapter in Tim Renton's Chief Whip: People, Power and Patronage in Westminster, published by Politico's in 2004, and the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

The Margesson papers held at Churchill College Cambridge are extremely limited in numbers and scope and do not offer much of a basis for researchers at all.

As John Hill put it "I found it extremely difficult to come across any record by or about him since almost all his whole political activity as Chief Whip was done on a verbal basis for fairly obvious reasons and no records were kept." (letter to Correlli Barnett, 28 February 1984).

See the Janus entry for more

Serf said...

Iain, I added both to Right Links directory.