Talk:Parliamentary records of the United Kingdom

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Longest Sitting?

My history textbook^[1], on the topic of Charles Stewart Parnell and his use of obstructionism in parliament, claims that:

In July 1877, [Parnell] and five others kept the House of Commons sitting for 45 hous non-stop.

Can anyone verify whether this claim is correct, since it would render the record listed on this page as incorrect?

89.124.88.196 (talk) 15:42, 8 December 2007 (UTC)ClareK[reply]

I think it's false. I wrote a little Python script (https://pastebin.com/312Lz8A6) to scrape all the Commons-related records for July 1877 from https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/sittings/1877/jul/index.html. Then I searched for "house adjourned". I found a mention of the house adjourning for every commons sitting. Only two of them indicated that the house had continued sitting past midnight. One is from July 2nd (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1877/jul/02/orders-of-the-day), and says:

House adjourned at a quarter after Seven o'clock in the morning.

The other is from July 31st, and says:

House adjourned at a quarter after Six o'clock, P.M. (Wednesday).

I note that July 31st was a Tuesday. The Hansard records irritatingly don't seem to indicate when the house started each sitting, so I can't deduce precisely how long this sitting was that started on Tuesday and ended 18:15 on Wednesday. However, the absolute mathematically possible maximum (if we make the extremely improbable assumption that the house started sitting at 00:00 on Tuesday) is 42-and-a-quarter hours; most likely, it was far less. So I do not think your source's claim can possibly be true.

(Annoyingly the Hansard records of when adjournments occurred don't trivially corroborate the claim in the article, either, since there simply are no records for January 1881. But at least they don't contradict it! And there's also a record of them grumbling about the long sitting at https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1881/feb/02/order-privilege-protection-or-person-and with some entertaining turns of phrase - one characterises making politicians sit for so long as an act of "cruelty to animals".)

Aha - but I also just came across Appendix C of https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-information-office/p04.pdf, which has both the 31st July 1877 sitting I noted and the 31st Jan 1881 one, whose lengths it puts at 26-and-a-quarter hours and 41-and-a-half hours respectively. That seems to further corroborate that the article is right and your source is wrong! ExplodingCabbage (talk) 13:16, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I added a further citation, this time of the aforementioned UK government source, to corroborate the claim we were previously relying on the Guinness Book of Records for. ExplodingCabbage (talk) 13:27, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

[1] Movement for Reform - 1870-1914, © M.E. Collins 2004; The Educational Company (Edco)

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