IF YOU were to rescue four people from drowning on four different occasions, the first in your early twenties and the last in your fifties, you might expect to be famous for doing so, and perhaps even to have received a little medal or scroll which you could modestly display in the downstairs loo.

But the achievements of Major John Cartwright were such that the four rescues he carried out during his lifetime, one at sea and three in rivers, are nothing but a curious footnote to the story of the man known to history as “the Father of Reform.”
 
He was born in Nottinghamshire in 1740 to a landowning family, which, while still well connected, had once been rich but was now merely comfortable. John joined the navy on leaving school, saved a comrade from drowning, and rose in rank rapidly.

Serious health problems resulting from his service forced him to return home in 1770 as a convalescent. This turned out to have a significant effect on his life since he spent much of his time reading — and he began to develop ideas about constitutional matters which would eventually lead to this distinguished military veteran appearing in court at 80 years old charged with sedition.
 
As the war between Britain and its US colonies approached, Cartwright became convinced that it was the US rebels who had right on their side. Though still a serving naval officer, in 1774, he published a pamphlet arguing that the colonists had an inalienable right to govern themselves.

Despite this, the Navy offered him a commission in US waters the following year. He turned it down, and that was pretty much the end of his career. (He became known for the rest of his life and to posterity as Major Cartwright because he was appointed to command his local county militia — though he was eventually sacked from that position due to his political activities.)
 
Issued in 1776, “Take Your Choice!” was not an 18th-century game show but the title of the most famous of Cartwright’s 80 or so publications. It was a seminal work, influential on generations of reformers, and arguably the first work in English to set out a modern view of parliamentary government.
 
The Father of Reform had come to the conclusion that humans are born with rights and liberties — they are not given them as gifts by rulers. Only by a person’s own criminality could he lose those rights. Any attempt otherwise to deny or restrict them was, therefore, unconstitutional.

Take Your Choice! (which he later reissued under the less eye-catching title, The Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated) put forward the demands that every man (sic) should have the vote, that voting should be by secret ballot rather than by public declaration, and that parliaments should be elected annually to reduce the opportunity for corruption and power-grabbing.
 
The Major was what we might call a “popular front” campaigner, forever trying to achieve unity in action between all who supported reform, from the most respectable moderates to the most determined revolutionaries.

He was unusual among the prominent reformers of the 18th and 19th centuries in that he doesn’t seem to have made enemies easily. He was known as a courteous, generous man who rarely got on the wrong side even of political opponents.
 
Despite the ill-health which had dogged him since his navy days, Cartwright spent decades campaigning at a punishing pace. As well as the lost liberties of the British people, he organised against the slave trade and for the independence of small nations swallowed by empires. He routinely worked 11-hour days, fitting his political duties in around his work as an innovative agricultural landowner.
 
In his sixties, he started the most exhausting activism of his life — repeatedly touring the country, giving speeches, collecting petition signatures, and helping to establish local pro-reform branches, despite the many laws designed to prevent exactly that.

His family’s position in society had protected him to a great extent from state persecution, but now he was going too far. His first arrest came in 1813, but it wasn’t until 1819 that he was finally brought to court and successfully prosecuted after having spoken at an illegal meeting.

He asked the judge to jail him, but this was refused and he had instead to pay a fine of £100. He carried on his work until his death in 1824; his funeral was held in Finchley on September 23.
 
There’s no doubt that Major Cartwright was a “gentleman reformer,” who saw a future in which the country would continue to be governed by much the same type of chaps as before, but in a less tyrannical, self-interested and corrupt manner.

He was certainly no revolutionary, not a full-blooded democrat. But when you begin something, you don’t always have a say over where it leads, and the Major’s importance to the never-ending struggle for democracy lies largely in the fact that his ideas provided a basis on which, later in the 19th century, working-class campaigns would build.

Long after his death, Cartwright was still being quoted as a constitutional authority by successive waves of reformers.
 
John Cartwright wasn’t the only famous member of his family, by the way. His brother Edmund, for instance, a clergyman, is remembered as the inventor of the power loom. Yeah, but did you ever pull anyone out of a river, eh Ed?

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