We were sad to hear recently of the death of Professor Michael Rush of the University of Exeter. Michael was a pioneering and indefatigable scholar of parliament, whose book, The Role of the Member of Parliament since 1868: from Gentlemen to Players (Oxford 2001), was the first serious study of its kind into the social background and political formation of MPs from the nineteenth century to close to the present. That study was based on an enormous and ever-growing database, which eventually found its way to the History of Parliament and now is a fundamental source for further generations of historians and political scientists. Michael Smethurst, from the House of Commons, was responsible for masterminding its development into an online tool, now available here. Here, Michael explains how it happened.
Professor Michael Rush was a man of books. His house was busy with books. He hadn’t written or contributed to all of them, but he did publish a fair few. His academic career touched on many areas of Parliament, though he was perhaps best known for his expertise and academic output on the social and educational background of Members of the House of Commons.
To help with his writing, Michael compiled a database of his research. Except, back then, it wasn’t a database. Instead, he compiled boxes and boxes of card index files, one card per Member, possibly more for those with longer and more illustrious careers. Both spare bedroom and garage were stacked with boxes of neatly filed cards, bound together into Parliaments and parties by rubber bands.
At some point before we met him, Michael had persuaded a colleague in the Computer Science Department of the University of Exeter to translate the fields on his cards into an Access database. He’d also managed to cajole the odd PhD student or two into taking on data entry duties. Whether everything on those cards made it into the database, we’ll never know. But enough did make it from card to computer, so that, by the time he’d finished – though Michael never actually finished – he had the most valuable dataset on the background of Members that we’ve ever met. So valuable that many other academics and academic institutions wanted to use his database in their own research.
Michael, being a generous man, was always happy to help. Which meant there were copies of his database not only on the PC in his spare bedroom, but also in the House of Commons Library and at the History of Parliament Trust. There were probably many other copies in institutions across the world. We heard tales of at least one copy in one of the famous American Universities. Whether that was Harvard or Yale, we can’t quite remember, but we’re fairly certain it was one of those.
So long as people are only referring to a database, having multiple copies matters little. The problems come when people start writing to their own copies. And write they did. The House of Commons Library added data to their copy that was useful to their work. The History of Parliament Trust did likewise. No doubt other institutions also forked their own version of the data.
There was value in all the data being added, but only value to the holder of that copy of the database. Which is where we came in. The obvious questions being: what if there was one copy, available over the internet, that any trusted academic or institution could not only query but also contribute to? Would that return more value to the community at large?
So we worked with a developer (James Jefferies) to convert the database to Postgres and wrap it in a basic website. The History of Parliament was more than happy to provide a home for it. And crucially, not only did Michael agree to open access, he also agreed to licensing it under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. For which, we and many others in the future will remain grateful. He seemed both pleased and a little surprised. The index cards had been the tools of his trade, but not the output he focussed on. That was always the books – the cards and databases being only stepping stones to publication.
Hosting a website alone wouldn’t have met our goal of seeing the academic community both benefitting from the data and contributing their own knowledge. So James (again) helped us to make our basic website editable, with assorted access levels for the public, for academic users, for editors and for admin staff.
Michael retired from his position at the University of Exeter in 2003, a decade and a half before we met him. His academic life continued: more research, more publications. Every time a general election rolled round, he produced more cards, all to be entered into the newly released database and website.
I think it was at this point that we first met Michael and his wife Jean in person. We travelled down to Exeter to be greeted with tea and biscuits and a touch of political and academic gossip. Visits to Exeter were a little like visiting your favourite grandparents, only with a short seminar in 19th century politics on the side. After which, we’d climb the stairs to his office, to peruse records both on card and computer. Then travel back to Westminster with a box full of cards to enter into the database. Michael continued to research Members and cards continued to be filled in, the last lot arriving in Westminster in a Tefal toaster box by means of a motorcycle courier.
That was the start of more work. Whilst the source database was fine for Michael’s purposes, the reference data was less amenable to querying for other people. Computers are somewhere between hard task masters and really quite dumb. Entries like ‘Eton’ and ‘Eton College’ work fine for you and me on a piece of paper, but make life more difficult than it ideally would be for querying by computer. A team of House of Commons librarians took the Rush data, tidied it and normalised it into new tables – always bearing in mind Michael’s original intent. The work here is a tidying exercise. Should we come across a type of information in Michael’s card catalogue that hasn’t been captured in the database, we’ll give consideration to adding. If there’s no evidence that Michael was interested in capturing a type of data, we will not add. Should you be an academic interested in the social background of MPs, these efforts should make your life easier.
Since then (with generous assistance from Michael, and further work by House of Commons librarians) the project has expanded to incorporate peerage data collected by David Beamish. There is still work to be done. Dates in particular need attention if we’re ever to make queries such as ‘who attended Eton College when David Cameron attended Eton College’ easier to answer. New records for new Members and new information on old ones will be added to the website, the History of Parliament Trust taking care of Members pre-1945 and staff in the Commons Library looking after the more recent.
We’ve had emails from staff and PhD candidates in academic institutions from around the world seeking access to the data. In the early days of the website, they could get in touch with the History of Parliament Trust to request full access – either by granting increased permissions to the website, or by sharing a dump of data from the database sitting behind the website. We’ve added in functionality whereby they can be given access to a Datasette instance, making querying possible without having to ask their IT department to install software.
We feel confident that Michael would be more than happy that his generosity is still helping students of UK political history far and wide – and that his work forms the foundation of systems allowing public access to essential research, both now and into the future.
M.S.
