It was the Horror from Hornchurch who started it. And it took a good half-century to rectify it. The Horror from Hornchurch was the sobriquet bestowed by Ulster Unionist MPs at Westminster on Geoffrey Bing, the Labour member for the Essex constituency of Hornchurch, writes Wesley Boyd
To put it mildly the Unionists were not enamoured of Geoffrey. Not only was he responsible for getting one of their colleagues disqualified from sitting in the House of Commons, not only was he a tireless advocate of an united Ireland but he was one of their own, an Ulster Protestant.
It was Bing who first questioned the right of the Rev. J.G. MacManaway, the Unionist MP for West Belfast, to sit in the Commons. MacManaway was a Church of Ireland minister and Bing argued that as such he was disqualified from membership under the House of Commons (Clergy Disqualification) Act 1801.
Nonsense, cried his opponents, who included the Attorney General of Northern Ireland and other distinguished legal heavyweights. The Church of Ireland had been disestablished in 1869 so, ipso facto, its ordained priests were no longer disqualified, they claimed. Bing doggedly pursued his case that the disqualification clauses in the 1801 Act extended to all priests who had ever been episcopally ordained and there began a long parliamentary trawl into the place of clergy in Parliament.
Lords spiritual
In early times the monarch traditionally summoned bishops, abbots and priors to the assemblies which eventually evolved into the Parliament we know today. They represented wealth and power through their vast feudal landholdings and were the best-educated members of society.
Until the time of Henry VIII the lords spiritual actually outnumbered the lords temporal. Following Henry's spat with the Church and the dissolution of the monasteries only bishops were summoned. Every bishop of the established Church was entitled to a seat (except during the Cromwellian period) until 1847 when numbers began to get out of hand and parliament decreed there should be no further increase and set a limit of 26. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester always sit in the Lords and the other 21 seats are filled by diocesan bishops on the basis of seniority of date of consecration.
The Church of Ireland had four representatives in the Lords until the Irish Church Act 1869 dissolved its union with the Church of England. Bing contended that there was no express provision in the 1869 Act removing the disqualification clauses in the 1801 Act and that MacManaway would have to go in spite of disestablishment.
The House of Commons set up a select committee to consider whether the West Belfast MP's election was void under the 1801 Act. The committee kicked for touch - legislative action was necessary to clarify the law. The Commons then asked the Home Secretary to refer the matter to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council whose membership is comprised of the most senior Law Lords who report directly to the Monarch.
Bing was delighted at their judgment which was: "Their Lordships answer the questions of law referred to them as follows. They will humbly advise His Majesty that the Reverend James Godfrey MacManaway is disabled from sitting and voting in the House of Commons by reason of the fact that having been ordained as a priest according to the use of the Church of Ireland he has received episcopal ordination."
On October 19th, 1950, the House of Commons declared that MacManaway was disqualified from sitting. There was a great deal of sympathy for the popular MP. Born in 1898, the son of the Bishop of Clogher, he had gone as a youth into the first World War fighting with the cavalry and the new air force. After studying at TCD he was ordained by the Archbishop of Armagh in 1923. He enlisted again for the second World War and ended up as Chaplain to the 1st Armoured Division.
Along the way he was "mentioned in dispatches", that peculiar military term to mark some deed of derring-do.
Professor Robert Blackburn, a specialist in electoral law, questioned the Law Lords judgment. "MacManaway was unfortunate," he said, "in losing the legal right to sit in the Commons after his local electorate had given him the political right to do so. The more appropriate interpretation of the 1801 Act, after the Church of Ireland, was disestablished in 1869, was that ordained priests in the Church of Ireland were no longer disqualified." MacManaway died just over a year after being evicted from the Commons.
Bing continued to sit in the Commons until 1955. He was born in 1909 at Craigavad in Co. Down where his father was headmaster of a highly regarded private school. He went to Oxford and became a barrister. Like MacManaway he served in the second World War and he, too, was mentioned in dispatches.
He was one of the band of left-wing ex-servicemen who were swept into Westminster in 1945 to oust Churchill and the Tory Party.
Reform enacted
After the Commons he resumed his law practice and in 1957 he accepted an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah to become Attorney General of the newly independent Ghana (formerly the British colony, the Gold Coast).
At the time Nkrumah was seen as the great hope for establishing democratic socialist systems in the emerging independent Africa but his government soon became a dictatorship and he was overthrown in a coup in 1966. Bing returned to England in 1961 and died in 1977.
Over the years a few half-hearted attempts were made at Westminster to deal with the anomaly where clergy who are ordained by a bishop cannot sit in the Commons but clergy and ministers of religion who are not can become MPs.
A positive step was made in 1999 when the Labour MP, Siobhain McDonagh, introduced a bill to rectify the position. It had cross party support but failed to get adopted.
The Government said it was sympathetic to the bill but wanted to consult the Churches whose clergy were disqualified. So the Church of England, Church of Scotland, Church of Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Ireland were consulted. All said they would be content to see the statutory disqualifications removed.
Last year the Bill removing "any disqualification from membership of the House of Commons that arises by reason of a person having been ordained or being a Minister of a religious denomination" was passed.
I imagine that in their celestial pastures MacManaway nodded his approval and the Horror from Hornchurch started looking for flaws.