The Origins of William Ewart Gladstone's Nickname, 'The Grand Old Man'

Abstract

This short Research Note is the first considered account of the origins of William Ewart Gladstone's famous nickname, 'the Grand Old Man' (G.O.M.). When Justin McCarthy was concluding his 1898 biography of William Ewart Gladstone - one of the first full-length biographies published after the Grand Old Man's death - he reflected that: "I do not know, and I suppose nobody knows, who invented this title for him, but it was conferred upon him and it will always endure with him and with his memory. He was called the Grand Old Man, and the Grand Old Man he will always remain." Well over a century later, it remains an open question precisely who originated the famous sobriquet for Britain's dominant political personality of the late nineteenth century. The late Lord Jenkins singled-out 1881 as the point at which Gladstone was so Christened, but in fact he had been called a 'grand old man' since the early days of his Midlothian campaign in the late 1870s. Other scholars have variously sought to pin its inspiration on men as widely divergent in political inclination as Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Rosebery, or Henry Labouchère, but the origins of the nickname are somewhat more complex. Rather than seek out a single originator, or popularizer of the name, it is more important therefore to keep in mind what Ruth Clayton Windscheffel has noted in another context: 'Grand Old Man' was never an 'uncontested identit[y]'. Gladstonian Liberals used the phrase as a way of eliciting the enthusiasm of their constituents (or potential constituents, if they were campaigning on the hustings). Later, Conservative opponents used it sarcastically, as a way of deflating the powerful political myth against which they found themselves arrayed, and as a way of making Gladstone more human and challengeable. It was thus through a combination of, by turns, deferential then cynical usage that 'Grand Old Man' and its abbreviation, 'G.O.M.' were finally affixed to Gladstone. By mid-1882, the man himself, and his nickname, were synonymous in common usage.