Hansard: The Man Behind the Name
Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
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29 October 1828. The death of a London printer whose name became part of the language.
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, a man who became a word.
Not just any word. A word spoken in the corridors of power. A word known to every Member of Parliament. A word that’s travelled halfway round the world.
Hansard.
You’ve heard of Hansard. The official record of what’s said in Parliament. The speeches, the arguments, the questions, the answers. The promises. The evasions. The occasional pearl of wisdom. The considerably more frequent helping of parliamentary hot air.
All of it, preserved for posterity.
Hansard.
Sounds as though it’s been around forever, doesn’t it? Sounds almost medieval. Something handed down from the days of Magna Carta.
But Hansard was a man.
A printer.
And 198 years ago today, on 29 October 1828, he died here in London.
His name was Luke Hansard.
Take a look at his portrait, by the way. Good heavens, what a face! Stern. Grim. Severe in the extreme. Not a smile. Not even the rumour of one.
A man who spent his working life recording the words of politicians and looks as though he disapproved of every last one of them.
And here’s what I particularly like about this story. It gives us two London locations. Two places you can go to. Two places you can stand and think about a man whose name is still being spoken nearly two centuries after he died.
But first, let’s get to know him.
Our story begins in Norwich. The year is 1752. George II is on the throne. London is a city of perhaps three-quarters of a million people. And in Norwich, on the fifth of July, a boy is born.
Luke Hansard.
Nothing especially grand about his beginnings. His father was a manufacturer. Young Luke was educated in Lincolnshire, then apprenticed to a printer in Norwich.
And then came the big move.
London.
He set off for the capital with, according to an early account of his life, just one guinea in his pocket.
A guinea. Twenty-one shillings.
Not exactly a fortune with which to conquer the metropolis.
But he had something considerably more valuable.
He knew his trade.
He was a compositor. That lovely old printing word. A man who set type. Who took individual pieces of metal, each bearing a letter, and assembled them, backwards, into words, sentences, paragraphs and pages.
Think of it. Letter by letter. Line by line.
Every newspaper. Every pamphlet. Every book. Every parliamentary document.
Human hands putting the words into place.
And the young man from Norwich was good at it.
Very good indeed.
He found work at a printing establishment in Great Turnstile, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
And this wasn’t just any printing establishment.
It was the office of the printer to the House of Commons.
There was serious work to be done here. Parliamentary journals. Reports. Documents. Mountains of paper generated by the machinery of government.
By 1774, Hansard was effectively running the show. He became a partner. And in 1800, the whole business became his.
Luke Hansard had arrived.
His business grew. His reputation grew. Eventually the firm needed additional premises in Parker Street, Drury Lane.
And this was no little backstreet operation.
It was a substantial printing enterprise, a hive of activity.
Imagine those rooms.
The smell of ink. The clatter of machinery. The thump of presses. Paper everywhere. Compositors bent over their cases of type. Proofs being checked. Corrections being made.
And behind it all, the pressure.
Because Parliament wanted its documents.
And Parliament wanted them quickly.
But above all, Parliament wanted them right.
Hansard delivered.
He had a formidable reputation for accuracy. The great classical scholar Richard Porson praised his Greek printing. Dr Johnson valued his attention to detail. Edmund Burke was among the distinguished authors whose works passed through the printing house.
And there’s a lovely little detail about Hansard himself.
He was a religious Nonconformist. And when he wrote his autobiography in 1817, he used a lowercase ‘i’ when referring to himself.
A small act of humility.
A man whose name would eventually loom so large in British public life deliberately made himself a little smaller on the printed page.
I like that.
Now, there’s a twist to this story.
Because strictly speaking, the Hansard whose name became attached to the parliamentary debates wasn’t Luke.
It was his son.
Thomas Curson Hansard.
And that distinction matters.
Luke was the great parliamentary printer. The man who built the family reputation for reliability, precision and getting the job done.
Thomas went into the same trade, but established his own printing business.
And in 1812, he took over the publication of parliamentary debates from William Cobbett.
Cobbett! Another remarkable character. Radical journalist. Political firebrand. A man who knew how to make himself thoroughly unpopular with people in high places.
But Cobbett’s finances were in a dreadful state. And his parliamentary debates passed into the hands of Thomas Hansard.
Now, here’s another surprise.
For much of its history, Parliament had been decidedly hostile to people reporting what was said within its walls.
The public’s right to know?
Not exactly a principle enthusiastically embraced by every eighteenth-century MP.
Indeed, reporting parliamentary debates had once been treated as a breach of parliamentary privilege.
Imagine that today. A politician being able to say something in Parliament and prevent the public from reading what he’d said.
Though come to think of it, I can imagine a few politicians finding the arrangement rather attractive.
Anyway, the world was changing.
Parliamentary reporting became an established business. The debates were published. The public could follow what its representatives were saying.
And in 1829, the year after Luke died, Thomas put the family name into the publication’s title.
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates.
There it was.
The surname was on its way to becoming an institution.
Eventually, Hansard became the familiar name for the parliamentary record. In 1909 Parliament took responsibility for its own official report.
And today the name has travelled well beyond Westminster.
You’ll find Hansards in other parliamentary democracies, including Australia and Canada.
One family name. An extraordinary geographical reach.
Not bad for a Norwich lad who arrived in London with a guinea in his pocket.
But let’s return to Luke.
Because the date is October 29th, 1828.
And here’s where we get our London locations.
Luke Hansard died at his son’s house in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square.
Not Southampton Row. And not that other Southampton Street, the one that runs between the Strand and Covent Garden.
This was Southampton Street in Bloomsbury, now called Southampton Place.
Just south of Bloomsbury Square.
I know that stretch of London. It’s part of the territory of our Literary Bloomsbury walk.
And I love discoveries like this.
Because a street you know suddenly becomes a different street.
You walk along it, perhaps for the hundredth time, and now there’s somebody there.
Not physically, of course.
But in your mind.
Luke Hansard. An old printer. A man nearing the end of his life. A family gathered in a Bloomsbury house on an autumn day in 1828.
And then the news goes out.
Luke Hansard is dead.
He was 76.
The second location is his burial place.
St Giles-in-the-Fields.
That magnificent old church just off Tottenham Court Road.
Think of it as Tottenham Court Road Station’s church. It’s right there, just a short walk away.
And that’s where Luke Hansard was buried.
Now, you can walk past St Giles a hundred times and barely give it a thought.
Busy London. Traffic. Buses. Shoppers. People coming and going.
But once you know that Luke Hansard is buried there, something changes.
The church has another story to tell.
And so does Southampton Place.
Two places on your London map. One man you’ve only just met.
And next time somebody mentions Hansard on the radio, or you hear a politician refer to something being recorded in Hansard, perhaps you’ll think of that young man making his way down to London with a guinea.
The compositor setting tiny letters into type.
The businessman building a great printing house.
The old man in Bloomsbury.
And his son, who put the family name on the parliamentary debates and sent it marching down the centuries.
There’s something rather wonderful about that.
We think of history as kings and queens, prime ministers and generals, great victories, great disasters.
But here’s a man who didn’t command an army. Didn’t sit on a throne. Didn’t write the speeches that changed the nation.
He printed words.
And the words made his name immortal.
That’s London for you.
Making the familiar unfamiliar. And then making it familiar again in a completely different way.
The walk ends. The London they’ve discovered stays with them.
And perhaps that’s a good place to leave Luke Hansard.
Still doing what he did best.
Making sure the words live on.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead.
And tomorrow, another London story.
Word of the Day: Compositor
A compositor is a person who arranges type for printing, traditionally by assembling individual metal letters into lines of text.
The word comes from Latin componere, meaning ‘to put together’, from com- (‘together’) and ponere (‘to place’).
And here’s the beautiful thing. Compose is the same family of words we use for music, literature and even ourselves when we ‘compose’ our thoughts.
A composer arranges notes. A writer arranges words. A compositor arranges letters.
And Luke Hansard spent his working life putting things together.
Until, in the end, the letters came together to spell his own name.
HANSARD.
See you tomorrow.