History of Hansard

The following is a guest post from the Parliamentary Discourse project’s consulting historian, Dr Andrew Struan, on the history of Hansard.

Hansard is the edited records of all parliamentary debates, votes, written ministerial statements and answers from the Houses of Commons and Lords. Its purpose is to provide day-to-day and accurate accounts of the proceedings in Parliament in order that they might be freely and easily accessed by any member of the interested public.

Members’ words are recorded by Hansard reporters and are edited to remove repetitions and obvious mistakes. This work is done without ever taking away from the original intended meaning. The ways in which Members’ contributions are recorded are regulated by a number of parliamentary regulations – perhaps the most significant being adopted by the House of Commons Select Committee report in 1907 which stated that the record ‘though not strictly verbatim, is substantially the verbatim report with repetitions and redundancies omitted and with obvious mistakes (including grammatical mistakes) corrected’. The records and reports, however, must ensure that they leave ‘out nothing that adds to the meaning of the speech or illustrates the argument’.

The records of Hansard are protected under the same parliamentary privilege rights as Members themselves, and are therefore not subject to accusation of libel. This freedom to print the words of Members without fear of libel was established in 1840, following the case of Stockdale vs Hansard (1839) which claimed that Parliament’s publications were not subject to the same privileges as Members and could therefore be charged under the normal rules of publication. This situation was resolved the following year by the Parliament Papers Act (1840) which stipulated that all parliamentary publications were to be subject to the same legal protection as Members themselves.

This idea of parliamentary privilege, and the extent to which the proceedings of Parliament should be widely known, has undergone a revolution since Hansard’s inception at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Reports of debates before this time are oftentimes difficult to locate or incomplete because of the contemporary belief that what was said inside the debating chambers should not be reported to the electorate or general population at large. The belief was that Members would not act according to the best interests of the country, and their constituencies, if they were under the pressure of public scrutiny. The desire to protect the independence of Members from the influence of the electorate meant that there tended to be no reports of parliamentary debates, and there was certainly no official record of what was said. The publication of anything said in the debating chambers was treated as a breach of parliamentary privilege and punished as such. After the events of the Civil War(s) in the 1640s, and the increasingly influential role of propaganda, reports of parliamentary proceedings began to emerge as fictitious accounts of political clubs, such as the Report of the Senate of Lilliputia.

By 1771, and after extensive campaigning by the (in)famous John Wilkes, the suppression of parliamentary debates ended. In that year, the then Lord Mayor of London, Brass Crosby,  failed to stop the printing of details from the chamber. He was called to report before the Houses of Parliament for his failure to stop what was an illegal publication, sent to the Tower of London, and put on trial. After a public outcry and a refusal on the part of the judges involved to try the Lord Mayor, Parliament ceased to punish those who published the proceedings of the Houses of Commons and Lords. There followed numerous unofficial publications which documented the details of what Members said in the debating chambers.

Initially William Cobbett proved to the most successful publisher of debates; he authored the History of Parliament from 1066 to 1802 and the Parliamentary Register, which saw the first concentrated effort to standardise the recording of debates. Cobbett granted the publishing rights of Debates to a publishing family company, run by Luke Hansard and his three sons. However, after being tried for seditious libel, Cobbett and one of Luke Hansard’s sons, Thomas Curson Hansard, were found guilty and imprisoned. Cobbett’s financial situation soon collapsed and he sold the rights to Debates to Thomas Curson Hansard in 1812.

Initially, the Hansard publications were created by gathering reports from various sources (including, for example, newspapers, diaries and letters). By the 1830s, the name ‘Hansard’ appeared on the title page of all copies being produced but the venture remained a private one. It continued in this way throughout the nineteenth century, and had competition – The Times newspaper, for example, published a short-lived attempt to rival Hansard in the 1890s which allowed Members to correct and adjust their statements before printing.

This situation continued until 1909 when Parliament decided – noting that many other countries, including Australia, Canada and the United States, had already standardised their records – to take control of the process of publication. When Parliament initially assumed direct control of the publication, the name Hansard was removed as the publishing company was no longer to be involved. This was changed in 1943, after the realisation that the name which had graced the title page for so long, and which had been copied in Canada and Australia, had not dropped out of usage and was the common, and popular, term for the documents.

The recorded debates have been, since 1909, professionally recorded by Hansard reporters and provide a comprehensive, detailed and in-depth account of the day-to-day events of Parliament. In these records can be found the political discussions surrounding the past two hundred years of British, British Empire, and global history.

June 3, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Author Parliamentary Discourse | Leave a Comment 

Parliamentary Discourse

Welcome to the Parliamentary Discourse project blog! We’re a six-month project funded under the JISC eContent programme 2011, and we’re working on Hansard (the record of British parliamentary debates) from 1803-2003, taking existing data and enhancing it for various users, including linguists, cultural scholars, historians and the general public.

The first stage of the project – working on improving the existing data with part-of-speech tagging – has been delayed slightly because of our decision to use a new, much higher-quality dataset than what we originally had, although we believe using this improved data is more than worth the slight delay. Very soon, our partners at UCREL (Lancaster University) and GATE (University of Sheffield) will run the data through their systems, and we’ll be back on schedule. In the meantime, the project Co-I, Professor Christian Kay and the RA, Marc Alexander, are working through previous studies of British parliamentary discourse, while the project’s consulting historian, Dr Andrew Struan, is looking into the history of Hansard itself – of which more in a future post.

June 2, 2011 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Author Parliamentary Discourse | Leave a Comment 

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