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city’s tradition of vibrant nonconformity, and with folk memories of Plymouth’s role as a bastion of parliamentarianism, almost republicanism, during the civil wars of the 1640s. Men recalled the siege of Plymouth during those wars, and the citizens’ proud resolve not to be starved by the royalist armies into surrender. There was a permanent monument to it in Freedom Fields, close to the later home of Isaac Foot and his family. The man who really established the Foot tradition and mystique was Michael’s grandfather, the elder Isaac (1843–1927).¹ A carpenter and part-time undertaker by profession, he moved to Plymouth from Horrabridge in north Devon, reportedly with just £5 in his pocket. He built his own house, branched out as a small entrepreneur and as such took a more public role in the civic life of Plymouth. A passionate Methodist and teetotaller, he was anxious to civilize the somewhat turbulent seaport in which he lived, and left as his legacy a Mission Hall in Notte Street, near the city centre, which he himself had financed and built, along with Congress Hall for the Salvation Army. His son, the younger Isaac (1880–1960), began life with clear expectations of a professional career. He qualified as a solicitor, and after a brief period in London was articled to a solicitor back in Plymouth, married a Scots fellow Methodist, Eva Mackintosh, in 1904, set up his own firm of solicitors, Foot and Bowden, in the same year, and moved to live in Lipson Terrace, a comfortable upmarket road in the northern part of the town. It was in this secure bourgeois enclave that the seven children of the Foot dynasty were born.

      Isaac Foot, Michael’s father, was the sixth of eight children, of whom five were to live to a considerable age.² He was a memorable personality of dominating influence. As its patriarch, he was passionate in his defence of the Foot family. When he wrote to congratulate Michael on a fine maiden speech in Parliament in August 1945, at the same time he condemned Churchill for not appointing his other son Dingle to the Privy Council after his service at the Ministry of Economic Warfare: ‘I shall never forgive him for that. Now the Foot family move to the attack. When folk attack the Foot family, they are biting granite.’³ His outlook and lifestyle were challenging and highly individual. Of all the seven children of this Liberal patriarch it was Michael who was said most to resemble him. Until his nineties Michael would readily turn to his father’s views on politics and literature, on Cromwell or Napoleon, on Swift or Hazlitt or Burke, to bolster his own line of argument. Isaac Foot had been a radical youth, and at the age of eighteen was attracted to H. M. Hyndman’s Marxist party the Social Democratic Federation (SDF),⁴ but not for long. He was one of many young professional men stirred by the Liberal landslide victory in the general election of January 1906, when both the two Plymouth seats were captured by Liberals from the Conservatives. In 1907 he was elected a Liberal councillor and rose to become Deputy Mayor in 1920, at hand to take an enthusiastic part in the celebrations of the tercentenary of the sailing from the city of the Mayflower. He was basically an old Liberal, committed to the traditional battles with the bishop, the squire and especially the brewer. He shared to the full the nonconformist crusade for civic equality which made Devon, Cornwall and (to a lesser degree) Somerset more similar to the political outlook of rural Wales than to the rest of southern England. But Isaac responded very positively also to Lloyd George’s social radicalism, his ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 with its new taxes to pay for social reform, which the Lords rejected, and the successful battle with the Upper House in 1909–11, resulting in the passage of the Parliament Act. Despite the huge Liberal schism created later by the ‘coupon election’ in December 1918, when Lloyd George and his followers continued in coalition with the Unionists (Conservatives), the Welshman remained something of a Foot family talisman from then on. Isaac Foot actually stood for Parliament in January 1910 as Liberal candidate for Totnes, but was heavily defeated by the Conservative. He stood again in December 1910, this time for Bodmin, a seat held by another Liberal the previous January by the slender margin of fifty votes, and was defeated there by an even narrower margin, just forty-one votes. The turnout was 86.6 per cent in this traditionally hard-fought seat, and Foot stayed on as candidate.

      During the war he was among those numerous West Country Liberals who took the side of the fallen Asquith after Lloyd George had ousted the Prime Minister in a putsch involving leading Conservatives and press men like Max Aitken (soon to become Lord Beaverbrook) in December 1916. Isaac Foot had in any case been a strong critic on libertarian grounds of the conscription measure passed by the Asquith coalition that May, and defended many conscientious objectors in tribunals during the war. This was not popular, and ensured his heavy defeat in a second contest for Bodmin in the general election of December 1918; he also failed in a by-election in Plymouth in 1919, after which the successful Conservative candidate Nancy, Lady Astor became the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament. But Isaac hung on, and eventually won Bodmin in a by-election in February 1922 with a strong majority of over three thousand. He held on to the seat in the general elections of 1922 and 1923, lost in 1924 and was returned again to represent the same constituency in 1929 and then in 1931 when (from 3 September) he served in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government as Minister for the Mines.

      Isaac Foot was in every sense a prominent figure in the political and civic life of Plymouth and the West Country. In all he fought Bodmin seven times, and established himself as a powerful politician of charisma and pugnacity. As an orator (and later a broadcaster) he was remarkable, drawing from his lay preaching in Cornish chapels a revivalist style and a vivid vocabulary with which righteously to smite the opposing Philistines. In the 1930s he was to become Vice-President of the Methodist Conference. But for all his devout Methodism and moralism, he showed little compunction in using fair means or foul to make his political points. ‘He fought with the gloves off,’ was his son’s later reflection. He threw himself into electioneering with gusto, taunting the Tories such as the Astor family interest in Plymouth with popular refrains such as ‘Who’s that knocking at my door?’. He was a fund of political and other jokes, and was liable to break into comic songs, sung in a rich Devonian accent.

      He showed himself to be equally forceful in following one of his main private interests, the Cromwell Association, of which he was a founder member and which he served as secretary from 1938 and chairman until 1951. Here he would staunchly defend Oliver’s reputation and integrity against all comers. There is reference to Isaac on the monument unveiled in 1939 to mark Cromwell’s great victory at Marston Moor in 1644. Here indeed, as Michael Foot was to describe him, was ‘a Rupert for the Roundheads’.⁵ Episcopal opponents were particularly relished. On 20 February 1949, in his seventieth year, Isaac had a ferocious duel in the Observer with the Bishop of London, who had dared to impugn Cromwell’s reputation as a champion of liberty and toleration. Isaac swept the charges contemptuously back in his face. The Bishop’s accusation that Cromwell had condemned prelacy was, however, joyfully endorsed.⁶ Isaac flung at him one of Cromwell’s contemporaries, who scorned

      You reverend prelates, clothed in sleeve of lawn

      Too meek to murmur, and too proud to fawn

      Who, still submissive in their Maker’s nod

      Adore their Sovereign and respect their God.

      In Isaac’s mind, old flames of controversy over tithe, church rate, university tests or Welsh disestablishment still burned fiercely. Cromwell’s reputation went through many vicissitudes over the centuries, from Whigs hailing the champion of parliamentary liberties, to Victorians who saw his Major-Generals as the last refuge of military rule in Britain, on to working-class radicals who revered ‘the People’s Oliver’. For Isaac, Cromwell was simply the great liberator, Milton’s ‘chief of men’, in peace and in war. In 1941 he published with Oxford University Press Cromwell Speaks!, a compendium of militant and patriotic quotations from the great man’s letters and speeches, to help in sustaining the national morale at a time of supreme crisis. His Cromwell Association made a point of honouring their hero’s statue on Cromwell Green in front of the Palace of Westminster, a memorial which had been bitterly attacked by Irish MPs in the 1890s. Isaac Foot was a true believer. He celebrated Cromwell and Milton

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