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through income from their own estates and through new taxes. The royal estates had shrunk since William the Conqueror held half of England, but they were still substantial enough to produce some £10,000–15,000 a year. Relatively little of this income came directly to the exchequer, but it provided the queen’s dower, households for the royal children and grants of patronage. Royal estates worth at least 20
taxes in Ireland to a consortium of merchants headed by John Forth, an alderman and sheriff of London. 71 William and John Dashwood, both of London, were recruited with five others to raise finance in London to loan against these future taxes, and two further men were recruited in Dublin to organise the collections. Forth and the Dashwoods were prominent among the first investors into a new Royal Africa Company stock that opened in November 1671. 72 Ford arranged a bridging loan for the Irish exchequer
was not a practical idea, for, quite apart from policy differences, it depended on Grenville’s willingness to serve as a mere Chancellor of the Exchequer: he had refused to do so earlier under Bute, and would never now accept such a demotion.5 Chap 7 19/8/02 11:47 am Page 149 The Chatham ministry I (1766–1767) 149 Far from being a successful attack on the ‘factions’, the new ministry was soon opposed by all three of them, and ironically the only political group that dissolved was the one to which George III would not have affixed such a stigma, that hitherto
acquired financial expertise. The contrast between the dazzling and unpredictable Townshend and the sound, reliable North could hardly have been greater. Yet Townshend himself was among those who had discerned the talents of the man now to be his successor.2 George III at once instructed Grafton to offer the Exchequer to Lord North. The Duke later noted that this decision was ‘particularly satisfactory to me, as I knew him to be a man of strict honour: and he was besides the person whom Lord Chatham desired’, recalling the abortive attempt to replace Townshend by North
certain to have grave consequences for the University. It was in no position to solve its problems by laying off part of its workforce or sacking redundant executives. But the University could not afford to accumulate a deficit which it had no means of clearing away. At the end of 1973 Edward Heath’s administration withdrew guarantees that the Government would protect the finances of universities against the effects of inflation. No more would it proclaim itself ready to look with sympathy upon their plight. Anthony Barber, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, reduced
The National Health Service (NHS) officially ‘opened’ across Britain on 5 July 1948, replacing a previous and patchy system of charity and local providers and making healthcare free at the point of use for all. 1 By 1974, Barbara Castle stated that ‘Intrinsically the National Health Service is a church. It is the nearest thing to the embodiment of the Good Samaritan that we have in any respect of our public policy.’ 2 This comparison crossed decades and party lines: in 1992 the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel
The National Health Service (NHS) officially ‘opened’ across Britain in 1948. It replaced a patchy system of charity and local providers, and made healthcare free at the point of use. Over the subsequent decades, the NHS was vested with cultural meaning, and even love. By 1992, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson declared that the service was ‘the closest thing the English have to a religion’. Yet in 2016, a physician publishing in the British Medical Journal asked whether the service was, in fact, a ‘national religion or national football’, referring to the complex politics of healthcare. Placards, posters, and prescriptions radically illuminates the multiple meanings of the NHS, in public life and culture, over its seventy years of life. The book charts how this institution has been ignored, worshipped, challenged, and seen as under threat throughout its history. It analyses changing cultural representations and patterns of public behaviour that have emerged, and the politics and everyday life of health. By looking at the NHS through the lenses of labour, activism, consumerism, space, and representation, this collection showcases the depth and potential of cultural history. This approach can explain how and why the NHS has become the defining institution of contemporary Britain.