18th April sees the 90th anniversary of the formation of the 1922 Committee or, to give it is full name, the Conservative Private Members (1922) Committee, which held its first meeting on this day in 1923.
As Lord Norton makes clear in his just-published The Voice of the Backbenchers. The 1922 Committee: the first 90 years, 1923-2013 (Conservative History Group, 2013), the Committee was not named after the famous meeting of Conservative MPs held at the Carlton Club in October 1922 which ended the Lloyd George coalition, but after the intake of MPs first elected at the November 1922 General Election.
The 1922 Committee, now effectively the Conservative Parliamentary Party, was convened by Gervais Rentoul, MP for Lowestoft (below) who was subsequently elected as its first chairman, ‘for the purpose of mutual co-operation and assistance in dealing with political and parliamentary questions, and in order to enable new Members to take a more active interest and part in Parliamentary life.’
The minutes of the 1922 Committee dating back to 1923 are held in the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (see catalogue).
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| Gervais Rentoul, MP for Lowestoft, 1922-1934, and first chairman of the 1922 Committee |