In December 1831 Charles Philip Yorke MP gave an election night dinner at the White Hart Hotel in Reigate to celebrate his return as Reigate’s Member of Parliament. He had not had to work very hard for his success as no votes were cast and he was returned unopposed.
The itemised bill for the dinner, preserved in the archives at the Surrey History Centre as an election expense, came to £131 and two shillings. This was a vast sum of money in 1831, when £130 was enough to buy two labourers’ cottages in Surrey outright.
The host of the dinner was Charles Philip Yorke, a Royal Navy officer and Conservative politician. He had been elected as MP for Reigate as recently as July in the same year but his actions had caused a second by-election.
Yorke had resigned his newly won Reigate seat a month earlier to have a shot at a more prestigious seat in Cambridgeshire but campaigning on a ticket of opposition to electoral reform had not endeared him to their electorate. When he lost in Cambridgeshire he slunk back to Reigate where he became the MP for the second time in five months. He did not even need to canvas Reigate’s 59 registered voters as he stood unopposed.
It was to be the last by-election in Reigate before the constituency lost one of its two seats in the Great Reform Act of 1832 because it had so few voters. At the time the double election did not attract much political attention but the Weekly Despatch, a radical anti-establishment Sunday newspaper campaigning for reform, later called Yorke, ‘one of the worst specimens of servile, bigoted Toryism.’
In the early 1800s elections were notorious for the practice of ‘treating’ (essentially bribing) voters, town officials and influential locals by inviting them to a banquet of fine food and alcohol. Charles Yorke’s dinner did not get reported in the local newspapers but we can get some idea of what it was like from the very detailed write up of a similar election night dinner for Reigate’s next MP Viscount Eastnor.
Lord Viscount Eastnor’s Dinner
About eighty sat down to a most excellent dinner at the White Hart Inn, Reigate, to celebrate that Nobleman’s return to Parliament as their Representative. The room was very tastefully decorated with flags, devices &, and the dinner, wine and dessert did infinite credit to the highly respectable landlord, Mr Relf
Albion and the Star, 24 February 1835
The dinner was probably attended by other local MPs and dignitaries, as well as members of the local gentry and clergy.
At Viscount Eastnor’s dinner in 1835 there were upwards of twenty toasts, which no doubt led to the consumption of a large quantity of alcohol. Election night dinners were men-only affairs and a guest could easily drink one to two full bottles of wine plus several glasses of fortified spirits and punch, over the course of a five-hour evening.
The itemised invoice for Charles Yorke’s dinner shows that guests dined on a choice of mock turtle or oxtail soup, goose, turkey, boiled fowls, beef sirloin and partridges and pheasants.
Oxtail soup was a hearty and popular classic. Mock turtle soup was made from a calf's head to replicate the gelatinous texture of turtle meat and it became a highly fashionable delicacy in its own right.
Serving such a large variety of heavy meats on platters simultaneously seems surprising but it was standard for a style of dining called service à la Française, (French service). The partridges and pheasants were a particular luxury as only the landed gentry who owned a certain amount of property were legally allowed to hunt or sell game.
The drinks, (sherry and madeira, wines, and old port, negus and punch), accounted for over half the election night bill. Sherry and madeira would have been served with the soup course, the wines with the meat and the port with the dessert.
Traditional punch typically combined a strong spirit or wine with citrus, sugar, water, and spices. It was served warm or chilled in large communal punch bowls and ladled into individual glasses at the end of the meal, with the drink continuing to flow until it was time to go home.
Negus was the final drink served, a popular, diluted hot punch used to rehydrate and warm the weary reveller before they departed for home. Invented in the early eighteenth century by Colonel Francis Negus, it had a base of port, sherry or claret, mixed with boiled water, sugar, lemon juice, and freshly grated nutmeg.
The £131 that the election night dinner cost was equivalent to four and a half year’s wages for the average Reigate agricultural worker, earning only eleven shillings a week. It could have supported 80 local people at the standard rate of ‘outdoor relief’ to provide winter survival funds for the three months from December to February when agricultural piece rates were at their lowest point in the year. A single gallon of the punch the guests consumed was worth up to thirty loaves of bread.
The dinner was held only a year after the peak of the Captain Swing Riots when agricultural workers were protesting about their extreme poverty. It is sobering to reflect that some were earning as little a shilling a day in the winter months, the price of a loaf of bread.
Humours of an election, An Election Entertainment, (1754/5), William Hogarth, Sir John Soane's Museum
Itemised Bill for the Election Dinner on 15 December held at Surrey History Centre
Weekly Dispatch (London), 6 January 1833
Albion and the Star, 24 February 1835
"Pöç çorbası" (oxtail soup) from the cuisine of Turkey, E4024, (2017)
The Smoaking Club, After Robert Dighton, (1793), © The Trustees of the British Museum