William Hutt MA MP (later Sir William) is arguably one of the most neglected figures in the South Australian colonial lexicon, especially given his early and protracted interest in systematic colonisation.
Robert Gouger believed Hutt was among the first to ‘attach to the principles of the scheme’. Moreover, George Strickland Kingston’s claim in 1869 that Hutt was more central to the Wakefield experiment than George Fife Angas is not very far from the truth.
After the published brilliance of a morally bankrupt Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the epiphany and subsequent mortised attachment to his ideas by Colonel Robert Torrens, and the dedicated but sometimes manic determination by Gouger, it was Hutt who most strongly and intellectually took up the cause for a colony in South Australia.
Hutt was among the inaugural members of the National Colonization Society (in 1830) and his name was frequently the first on the lips of Gouger, John Brown, John Morphett and Thomas Gilbert on the day the Committee sat to name the Adelaide streets. It is unthinkable that Gouger would forget it was his faithful friend William Hutt MP who advanced £500 to help defray the cost of the South Australia Act and who accompanied him to interview with Lord Glenelg in his quest to secure the Colonial Secretaryship in South Australia. Glenelg gave no pledge and only bowed! Nevertheless, Gouger’s appointment was secured. So too Hutt’s place in history.
Hutt Street, the most easterly thoroughfare running north and south in the city of Adelaide proper, is named after Sir William Hutt, who was both member of the South Australian Colonization Commission and a radical member of the Reform Parliament of 1833. He and Matthew Davenport Hill were dual members in the liberal cause for the north-eastern seat of Kingston on Hull. They were swept into power on the back of the Reform Bill of 1832. Hutt was more of a Philosophical Radical than a Whig in his early years in parliament and one of George Grote’s team in the House of Commons who ushered the South Australia Act through in 1834.
Hutt was one of a bright group of intellectuals known as the Trinity School who graduated from Cambridge University and who became members of parliament, literary figures, diplomats or public servants in this fecund period of political and social upheaval. When the South Australian Association formed in December 1833, his support was unequivocal and he remained enthusiastic to the end.
There is little doubt that like Gouger, Hutt was first attracted to the idea of colonisation because of a need to address social and economic distress among the paupers and underclasses in Britain, especially in Ireland. These were issues for debate up at Cambridge, and on more than one occasion a young John Stuart Mill also joined in. Several of these young men were also to hold breakfast meetings and debating struggles in London over the next several years where they wrestled with such momentous issues.
The Hutts were of Huguenot extraction and used to fighting for their freedom. (The name Hutt is derived from the French name Huet through Hewet to Hutt.) Escaping harassment and potential genocide in France, following the Edict of Nantes, the Hutt family fled to Britain, where it is believed they settled in Surrey during the seventeenth century.
Family records can be traced back to Captain John Hutt, who was born at Hatton Garden on 28 November 1746. He was reputed to be a profligate adventurer of some property who ‘squandered his money and went to America leaving two sons, John and Richards Hutt and a daughter Ann’. Ann Hutt married a Mr Roberts, who purchased the estate of Appley in Ryde, on the shores of the Isle of Wight. John and Richards Hutt went to Christ’s Hospital, or the ‘Blue Coat’ school in London, and from there into the Royal Navy.
Richards Hutt served as a naval Captain in the East India Company before marrying Jilley Flower, the daughter of another East India Company man, Captain John Flower. She delivered him no less than thirteen children, including the oldest son, John Hutt (born 1795) and later Governor of Western Australia, and William Hutt MP, the eighth child and third boy who is the subject of this chapter.
William Hutt was born in London at No. 2 Chester Place in the Parish of St Mary, Lambeth, on 6 October 1801. He was baptised in the following February and educated at private schools, firstly at Camberwell and then at Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
William matriculated at the historic St Mary Hall at Oxford University in February 1820, the same year his father died and also the year in which his wife- to-be, a decade yet into the future, hastily married the aged and infirmed 9th Earl of Strathmore. After matriculating, William went to Cambridge, where he entered Trinity College and earned his first degree, a Bachelor of Arts, in 1827. By this time he had become one of the Trinity School and graduated with a Master of Arts in 1831. These were heady days at Cambridge and William was one of the radical philanthropists at Trinity College and a strong supporter of Wakefield and the National Colonisation Society.
While reading for his Master of Arts, William was commissioned by the Countess of Strathmore to tutor her only son, John Bowes, the 10th Earl of Strathmore who had previously studied at Eton before going to Cambridge sometime between 1827 and 1831. In the process, Hutt became romantically attached to her, despite her being many years his senior. They were married in 1831, probably soon after William had graduated. William was only 30 and she was 56, which explains why William Hutt had no issue. He was a handsome young debonair Cambridge Don, described as having a ‘fine head’ and a ‘good intellect’; she was a woman of wealth and poise.
Assured of financial security because of his marriage, and perhaps somewhat opportunistically, Hutt decided to make a life of radical politics. With the redistribution of electoral boundaries inherent in the Reform Bill of 1832 there was a number of outstanding electoral opportunities for those who fancied themselves as noblesse obligeor who had some particular burning issue to put before the public. As one of the Trinity School from Cambridge, Hutt was full of ideas for reform, including the implementation of E.G. Wakefield’s idea for a colony in Terra Australis. As already stated, both Hutt and Matthew Davenport Hill were successful in their liberal cause for the seat of Kingston on Hull.
He became the member for Hull from 1832 until 1841 except for a brief hiccup in 1837, when some of the more radical liberals lost their seats in the face of a more united Tory opposition under Robert Peel. It only took five years or so of Whig/radical dominance to degenerate into complacency and lack of unity, and by 1840 the Philosophical Radicals had all but disappeared from the scene.
Hutt’s seat fell to the son of William Wilberforce in the 1837 general election, but he retrieved it on petition and resumed it in 1838. Thenceforth he never looked back. In 1841 he ran for the seat of Gateshead, which he held for 33 years right up until 1874.
South Australia was often on his mind during his early years in parliament and he repeatedly called on Britain to abolish the crushing duties on South Australian grain. Indeed, as the member for Gateshead he proposed that corn imported from all of what were later to become the Commonwealth Countries of the British Empire be subject to the same duty as that imposed on Canadian corn. By this time Edward Geoffrey Stanley was prime minister and he took a determined contrarian stance against any further reduction of colonial tariffs.
In his formative years in the parliament William Hutt was more radical than later in his career. Some of the more burning issues of the day which he is known to have supported included the admission of the sons of dissenters to both Cambridge and Oxford; the admission of Jews to parliament; Lord Brougham’s 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act; and the repeal of the Corn Laws. He was against flogging in the armed services and capital punishment for criminals. With an obvious empathy with Harriet Martineau, Harriet Grote and Harriet Taylor Mill he also ‘backed the first Married Women’s Properties Act’. His marriage to the Dowager Countess of Strathmore bears heavily on this point.
After his marriage Hutt’s business interests exploded because Mary and her son John drew wealth from some of the most productive collieries in the north of England.
Quite naturally William became interested in both railways and shipping, and it is fair to say that he was eventually driven more by economic imperatives than social philanthropy. He held directorships in the New Zealand Company, the Durham County Coal Company, the London and York Railway and the Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle upon Tyne Junction Railway. He was Chairman of the Western Australian Company, which was intent on setting up the new settlement of Australind, following the failure of the Swan River colony in 1829–30.
Hutt’s enthusiasm for rational economics was palpable. With the concept of colonisation always uppermost in his mind, and once the South Australia experiment became a reality, he turned his attention to some of Wakefield’s other schemes, especially the proposed colony in New Zealand. Hutt had great faith in Wakefield, despite ‘his unpopular habit of abducting heiresses’. He remained a faithful disciple and continuing apologist throughout.
On the question of native title, which arose in so many dominions annexed by Britain, Hutt’s position also needs scrutiny, for on this issue he too can only be described as amoral. When negotiations were proceeding for Wakefield to establish settlements in New Zealand, the Colonial Office sought to regulate the sale of land in an orderly manner. This prompted the prospect of legislation precluding potential investors from purchasing any land in the colony except through the government. Hutt protested that investors in the New Zealand Company would have to pay the government price, which ‘was (thought) likely to be 500% above what they might be able to negotiate from the natives privately’. On this issue he struggled to remove the moat in his eye and was clearly blindsided to any sense of justice over the purchase of so called waste lands. Nevertheless, he remained as a figurehead for colonial matters in London.
Hutt’s interest in all of Britain’s dominions remained strong throughout, leading him to form a new body known as the Colonial Society, which met in Parliament Street, Westminster. This organisation lasted for five years before evolving into the Royal Colonial Society and ultimately the Royal Commonwealth Society, which continues to this day.
William Hutt’s parliamentary career also flourished during the 1840s, although it must be said he never rose to any great heights in executive government. He did, however, serve on a number of parliamentary committees and boards of inquiry. In 1859 he became Vice President of the Board of Trade, a role from which he negotiated a treaty of commerce between Great Britain and Austria in 1863.
His parliamentary career lasted for more than forty years, which probably says something about his intellect and wealth. However, he was never more comfortable in the role and at the height of his powers than in 1843 when some 250 electors and businessmen in the Gateshead electorate presented him with an elaborate silver plate in appreciation of all he had done for reform and commerce in Hull. Having been denied representation up until the Reform Bill, the artisans, industrialists and men of commerce in Hull were genuinely thankful for the widened franchise, and the tribute was received in the spirit in which it was meant.
William Hutt’s private, intellectual and spiritual interests are also worthy of comment. They included membership of the Committee of the Episcopal Church of New Zealand along with Francis Baring and John Abel Smith (Carrington); inaugural membership of the Reform Club (1836) at Pall Mall; and membership of the Humber Masonic Lodge of Kingston on Hull (1834). The Hutt family is said to have a long heritage of freemasonry, which extended back to the Constancy Lodge and their French Huguenot beginnings.
On religious questions Hutt was ambivalent. Nominally Anglican but intellectually radical, he supported the liberation of both the religious tests for admission to Oxford and Cambridge and the repeal of penalties applied to non-conformists who met behind closed doors. On the question of how the Sabbath should be observed he took a more libertine position, arguing that people should be allowed to enjoy the day in a recreational sense, if they so choose.
William and Mary Hutt were married for thirty years. They lived for most of that time at Gibside in comfortable circumstances. As William’s stature as a politician grew the couple was sometimes visited by men of the calibre of Lord John Russell and William Gladstone. Both were prime ministers during Hutt’s parliamentary tenure.
When the Countess died on 5 May 1860 she was buried in the crypt in Gibside Chapel alongside the 9th Earl of Strathmore. She provided handsomely for William, entrusting him with an annual pension of £18,000. He continued to live at Gibside until 1875, during which time he took another wife in 1861, Fanny A.J., who was the daughter of Sir Francis Stanhope.
Hutt was made Knight Commander of the Order of Bath (KCB) by Queen Victoria in 1865. Eventually, towards the very end of his life, he was called to his spiritual home on the Isle of Wight. With powerful childhood memories of the Appley estate, he repurchased the property and set about rebuilding it. The most prominent feature of the upgrade was a freestanding tower with turrets built close to the beach. This became known as Hutt’s folly and remains a landmark.
Hutt died at Appley Tower on 24 November 1882. He was 81 years old.
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