The Curious Tale of Two Plowdens
And their powerful establishment forebears
Political shifts, if not yet earthquakes, are being felt viscerally in the South Gloucestershire, Bath and NE Somerset and Bristol area, just as in the rest of the country. On 1st May we saw the election of a new WECA metro mayor, with the Labour candidate Helen Godwin winning a fairly tight contest, despite a misleading YouGov poll showing Green candidate Mary Page (former Lib Dem: the Green Party in Bristol has a remarkable number of candidates and councillors who have jumped ship from other Parties since their star has been in ascendance ) being ahead by four points. The real news, though, is of course Reform taking second place (also not in YouGov’s tea leaves), with Arron Banks just two percent of the vote behind Godwin. This result was perhaps not as predictable in the Bristol area as Reform’s successes in other parts of the UK, and is therefore a significant indicator of just how many people are feeling frustrated at not being listened to - whether or not their consequent voting strategy is actually going to help them.
Interestingly, however, no-one appears to be talking about the man Godwin is replacing as mayor, with no more news having surfaced about Dan Norris and his arrest for child abuse, abduction and rape just weeks before this election. This is a man who voters elected not only as WECA mayor but also last year as MP for North East Somerset and Hanham, replacing Jacob Rees Mogg. Despite his arrest he is still representing his constituency in Parliament, as an independent.
Norris, according to Wikipedia,
…had an interest in child safety and regularly campaigned against paedophiles. In 1999 he launched a booklet in the House of Commons to educate parents about paedophiles, published by the charities Kidscape, Childline and the Lucy Faithful Foundation; it had a foreword written by Prime Minister Tony Blair.1
Looking at the grounds for his arrest together with his ardent advocacy for child safety, if he is found to be guilty then this is clearly yet another case of a person seeking power and influence in the public sphere audaciously concealing their corruption behind a semblance of ‘doing good’. If this is true of Norris, as we know it has been of many other politicians too, and if neither the public nor his political party knew anything about his history, how are we to know about the suitability of any of the candidates we are presented with in any election to public office? It’s a strange system where we simply put our trust in candidates because we feel we can trust the party they represent, without knowing anything about their background. What do we really know about their motivations and which deeper agendas they may be serving, whilst telling voters what they need to in order to get elected?
One thing is crystal clear in UK politics: there is an ‘establishment’, a social group, which is largely in control of what happens in the country. To become Prime Minister, for example, it certainly helps if you attended a public school and/or Oxford University, and have had a career in either law or banking (look them up). It’s also clear there are many families who have been a part of this establishment for a very long time, but we don’t always know much about them.
In this post I’d like to shine a light on the curious threads I have discovered running through the family connections of the man currently forcing through the ‘liveable neighbourhood’ schemes here in Bristol - Ed Plowden, Chair of the Transport and Connectivity Committee2.
I wish to emphasise that I have no reason at all to caste any aspersions on Ed’s character or moral standing, even though I find his deafness to the people of East Bristol and his ends-justifies-the-means tactics appalling. All I will do is summarise some information that is readily available online about his family lineage, and leave you to ponder on the curious coincidences and interesting patterns to be found.
Not having come across the name before, when I looked Ed up after he replaced Don Alexander as transport lead in Bristol last year, I was surprised how many Plowdens an internet search yields. It quickly becomes clear that the family is an ancient one that has consistently produced influential public figures in politics, policy making and the law, as well as prominent colonialists. Very curiously, although there was a genealogical split in the 18th century, both these branches of the family that originates from Plowden Hall in Shropshire - the Plowdens and the Chichele (or Chicheley) Plowdens - have continued on this trajectory. Ed’s family can most definitely be described as part of ‘the establishment’.
Distant cousins leading parallel lives
I’ll start with the most curious ‘what-are-the-chances-of-that’ coincidence of all - the remarkable parallels between the interests and careers of two prominent current day but only distantly related Plowdens, Bristol’s Edmund, and London’s Benedict.
You see, Ed is not the only Plowden steeped in 21st century transport policy. Readers living in London may also have heard of Ben (Benedict Edmund) Plowden. Both are aged around the 60 mark, yet they have much more in common besides their names and stage of life. Both work in urban transport policy, and both are zealous in their attempts to get us all ‘walking, wheeling & cycling’3 instead of driving cars. Both are deeply involved in ‘sustainable transport’ and active travel charities.
Ed, before (and a few months into) his role as Green councillor for Windmill Hill and Committee Chair, worked as a Programme Director for the cycling charity and lobbying group Sustrans. For many years previous to this he had worked for Bristol City Council as a Service Manager and then Head of Local and Sustainable Transport, where part of his job was to nudge people living in the city to change their behaviour around transport. He is an Extinction Rebellion supporter4. His LinkedIn profile shows he is involved with Atos5, a ‘Digital Workplace Experience Engagement platform’ that strongly pushes diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI - the baby of the World Economic Forum), as well as smart AI solutions. He’s also a member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, which currently appears to be heavily pushing the electrification of vehicles at the same time as ‘accelerating growth’.
Here he is rattling through his response to my questions at the last Public Forum, timestamp 20:40:
Over in London, Ben is also passionate about persuading people to walk and ride bikes:
Ben was one of the country's leading environmental campaigners, ending up as the first paid Director of the Pedestrians Association, which he re-launched as Living Streets in 2000 to campaign for improved public spaces.6
After this he spent many years as a Director at Transport for London, where he was responsible for ‘the delivery’ of walking and cycling and ‘smart mobility’ during the 2012 Olympics as well as later on for the COVID-19 Restart and Recovery Programme.
This was until 2021, when his ‘staggeringly inappropriate’ eco-activist connections became breaking news, leading to his resignation. Ben was discovered to have been married to and living in a £1.5 million home with an Insulate Britain activist who had been arrested several times for blocking the M25 and had ‘vowed to unleash hell on motorists’ unless the government did what she said.
Ben remained undeterred and ploughed on, becoming Chair of the Transport Planning Society in 2023. He is also involved in the French urban planning and ‘transitions’ public-private think tank La Fabrique de la Cite, and the Centre for Science and Policy, which brings together academia and public policy making. He has strong connections with the London School of Economics, being a senior associate at LSE Cities. And he very much wants to restrict our mobility, just like Ed, as can be seen from this article he wrote for PA Consulting, Designing for humans: why sustainable economic development must be about enabling access, not increasing movement.
There are certainly astonishing parallels between Ed and Ben’s work that feel less like coincidence and more like a genetic mission, including the focus on smart ‘solutions’. This impression only gains in depth when we examine their fathers’ careers.
Like Fathers, Like Sons
Ed’s father was Stephen Plowden (1933-2018), a descendent of the Chichele Plowden line (for the family tree see here).
The Chichele ( also Chicheley or Checheley) Plowdens are a cadet branch of the Plowdens of Plowden in Shropshire. They are the descendants of Sir Edmund Plowden, of Wanstead, Hants., 1st Earl Palatine of New Albion, and Mabel, daughter and heiress of Peter Maryner of Wanstead and other estates in Hampshire, his wife. Their great-grandson, James Plowden of Lasham and Ewhurst (1684-1729) married (circa 1709) Sarah Chichele, daughter of Sir John Chichele, Kt., Lord High Admiral. Edmund of Wanstead was the second son of Francis Plowden of Plowden in Salop and Shiplake, Oxon.7
The son of a judge, he was born in India, where the Chichele Plowdens had had colonial connections throughout the 19th century (see below), and educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. In Ed’s words (he wrote his father’s obituary in the Guardian) he was ’chiefly known for his work as a pioneer of safe and sustainable transport’.8
Stephen lobbied for a national speed limit of 55 mph, 20mph limits and electric cars, and was anti-high speed trains, including the H2S rail link. He wasn’t just active in the UK, but seems to have been quite the globalist. According to Transport Xtra:
From the 1970s to the 1990s Stephen also worked internationally, including for the European Economic Community, United Nations, the World Bank, World Health Organisation and multiple national governments on road safety, and policy development and implementation in developing nations. Work in Holland in the 1970s helped shape the policy of challenging the dominance of the car, which has been systematically applied since then and made the country an international leader in sustainable transport.9
He helped create the Independent Commission on Transport, now the ITC, a policy think tank. Also a prolific writer, his publications included Towns Against Traffic (1972), Changing Directions (1974), Taming Traffic (1980) and Danger on the Road – the Needless Scourge (1984) - all works seeking to change transport policy to become less car-centred.
In 1998 Stephen wrote this letter to the Independent on his perception of the need for regulations around vehicle design and use rather than tax. He ended thus:
Civilising the vehicle does not remove the need to reduce car travel in towns. Road pricing could be helpful in some towns but other policy instruments are more important. They include traffic avoidance through land-use planning; the reallocation of road space from cars to pedestrians, cyclists and buses; restrictions on car parking; the creation of car-free zones, including residential areas as well as shopping and commercial centres.
In 2010, before the general election of that year, he published a piece in Open Democracy, Trust the People on Climate Change, calling for politicians to take global warming caused by carbon emissions seriously, claiming:
I believe that the British people would be prepared to make sacrifices, even heavy ones, for the sake of posterity if the need was clearly explained and the burden was fairly shared.
I wonder if Ed’s ploughing on anyway in East Bristol is part of a mission to fulfil his father’s legacy? The same could be speculated about Ben, whose father William and grandfather Edwin were both very influential public policy makers in the twentieth century, as we shall now see.
William Julius Lowthian Plowden (1935-2010), just like Stephen, attended Eton and King’s College Cambridge, where they were just a couple of years apart. He became a civil servant, specialising in a wide range of policy making, including (you guessed it!) transport, but also social and healthcare policy, and government. For five years he worked at the Board of Trade under then Minister Ted Heath, and, like his son Benedict, had strong connections with the London School of Economics. In 1971, the year before Stephen brought out his Towns Against Traffic, he published a paper highly critical of cars, The Motor Car and Politics in Britain. Like many Plowdens from these two generations, his preferred mode of transport was apparently the bicycle.10
William seems to be most famous for his role as a founder member of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), also under Ted Heath, now Prime Minister, in 1971, the first director of which was Lord Rothschild11. This controversial Cabinet Office Think-Tank, ‘an independent unit within the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom tasked with developing long term strategy and co-ordinating policy across government departments’ (Wikipedia), was heavily influenced by bankers and the oil industry, which is interesting considering William’s scepticism regarding motor vehicles. For more on William, see his obituaries in The Independent and The Guardian.
A further generation back, William’s father Edwin Noel Auguste Plowden, Lord Plowden of Plowden (1907-2001), was the son of a banker in Scotland. He was created a life peer in 1959, with his title clearly showing his descendancy from the Plowdens of Plowden Hall. Educated at a progressive school in Switzerland and in Hamburg, though neither a transport planner nor known for campaigning against the motor car, he was an industrialist, and possibly an even more influential public servant and government advisor than his son. We find him, in the war, working in the Ministries of Economic Warfare (later the London School of Economics) and of Aircraft Production. In 1947 he became Chief Officer in the Central Economic Planning Staff under Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford Cripps. Together with Robert Hall he played a major role in the devaluation of 1949, the UK’s rearmament prompted by the Korean war in 1950, and in 1952 thwarting ‘Operation Robot’ (a plan to make sterling convertible by blocking sterling balances and floating the pound). Subsequent to his role as economic advisor he became Chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority from 1954-9, and Chairman of Tube Investments in the 1960s. His retirement was marked by Margaret Thatcher inviting him to a lunch in his honour. For his obituary see here.
The threads woven through pre-twentieth century Plowdens: Middle Temple lawyers, politicians, colonialists and Jesuits
So, it is clear that since the mid-twentieth century both branches of the Plowden family have been associated with influential public policy making, most recently in the field of transport. And if we now dive back further into the annals of the past, we find the family story is littered with many other interesting characters involved in politics, the legal profession, stubborn Roman Catholicism, and colonialism. None of these are unusual in themselves, but the observable patterns running through time give one pause for thought.
The Middle Temple Lawyers
Plowden Hall has spawned a number of members of the legal profession with connections to the Middle Temple (part of the area in the City of London built by the Knights Templar - mediaeval Christian soldiers and ‘proto-international bankers - as their London headquarters). The first was the prominent Tudor jurist, legal theorist and recusant Roman Catholic under Elizabeth I, Edmund Plowden (1519/20-1585). A descendant of the crusader Roger Plowden, during his prolific career he also became a surgeon and physician. He is buried, complete with effigy, in Temple Church.12
His Jesuit eighteenth century descendant, the barrister Francis Peter Plowden (1749-1829), also of Plowden Hall, entered the Middle Temple as a conveyancer during further times of discrimination against practising Roman Catholics. He too was a legal theorist, publishing in 1792 his Jura Anglorum, ‘a conservative formulation of natural rights and contract theory’.
An unpopular man, ‘his improvidence, extreme views, and intractable disposition made his life a troubled one’13. Abandoning the Bar, he left for Ireland to concentrate on writing. This resulted in a Government prosecution against him for libel, the damages for which he refused to pay. He died in comparative poverty after escaping to Paris.
At least two of his brothers were Roman Catholic priests: Robert (1740-1823) - who was responsible for the building of St Joseph’s Church in Fishponds here in Bristol - and Charles (1743-1821) - who is notable for being a prolific writer and the director of the English Jesuit Stonyhurst College, as well as mistakenly being given a military funeral after dying on his way home from a visit to Rome!
The Middle Temple connection has survived into modern times. Here is another Plowden Middle Temple barrister, this time from the 19th century, and a brief internet search will find several current day Plowden lawyers, for example here and here, as well as this Middle Temple law firm:
Politicians
Our Tudor Edmund Plowden was not only a lawyer, theorist, and medical practitioner, but also served as Member of Parliament for three different constituencies (Wallingford, Reading and Wooton Bassett) - another pattern we see repeated down the generations.
The Jacobite Francis Plowden (c.1644 - 1712), whose father and brother were both named Edmund, was a politician, official and courtier under James II. He was active in politics in Galway, and in 1688 was appointed a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. Staying true to James after his deposition during the ‘Glorious Revolution’, he served briefly as an MP in James’s Patriot Parliament in Dublin, and in 1691 was appointed a Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, tasked with acting on the fled king’s behalf.
In the eighteenth century, we find William Henry Chichele Plowden (1787-1880) elected Conservative MP for Newport, Isle of Wight, and his son, Sir William Chichele Plowden (1832-1915) in a different political boat as the Liberal MP for Wolverhampton West.
Sir Edwin, of course, sat in the House of Lords.
Colonialists in America and India
There is also a more obviously darker side to the Plowden story, although it is of course not unusual in British history: there are strong links with British colonialism.
This began with Tudor Edmund’s grandson, Sir Edmund Plowden (1590-1659), who played a prominent part in early attempts to colonise the New World. Holding the title of Lord Earl Palatinate14, he was Governor and Captain-General of the planned Province of New Albion in North America. According to Wikipedia, ‘this attempt, fraught with mutiny, legal woes, lack of funds, and bad timing and compromised by Plowden's ill-temper, was a failure, and Plowden returned to England in 1649’.
His descendants on the Chichele side of the family picked up this thread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in India.
Among the most prominent Plowdens active in India were the aforementioned MP William Henry Chichele Plowden, who, previous to his seat in Parliament, had a career as a director of the East India Company - the massive and brutal trading corporation that acted as a vehicle for expanding the British Empire. In this role and as a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was ‘an active promoter of the Trigonometrical Surveys of India, and other scientific operations carried on by the East India Company; and generally attached to science and anxious to promote its progress’. His son William was a civil servant and member of the Legislative Council in India. He served as Census Commissioner for India in the Bengal Civil Service, and as Secretary of the Board of Revenue of the North West Provinces. Other influential Plowden colonialists in India can be found here.
Finally, it appears that the name of Plowden, despite Sir Edmund’s failures to establish New Albion, was closely connected with the slave trade in the USA. This time, however, the name appears as a forename, indicating that it could have been passed on through a female member wishing to preserve her family name. Of course, it may also just be a coincidence, but at the level of pattern recognition this is certainly noteworthy.
Let’s take a brief look at Plowden Weston (1738/9-1827) and his grandson Plowden C.J. Weston (1819/21-64).
Grandfather Plowden Weston was a protestant, which implies a considerable separation from the dedicated Roman Catholics bearing the name as a surname. He arrived in the colony of South Carolina in 1757, from Hagley, Warwickshire, and was a rice and cotton plantation and slave owner.15 Notable amongst his children were Francis Marion Weston 1783-1854, and Tony, who was the son of Weston and an enslaved woman. Francis, who bought further plantations, was the father of Plowden CJ Weston, who, after his Harrow and Cambridge education, inherited these from his father and became 50th Lieutenant Governor of the state. He became one of the wealthiest men there and one of the largest slave owners. There is even an inventory of his slaves to be found here.
Slavery was abolished in the USA in 1865, the year after Plowden CJ’s death.
So, I think that’s quite enough Plowdens for us to be getting on with for now.
Are the similarities between Ed and Ben a coincidence? Why are the names Edmund and Francis passed down through the generations so consistently? Doesn’t Ed’s behaviour towards East Bristolians feel a little entitled? Behind him lies the weight of a powerful and influential establishment bloodline. Whose agenda is he really serving, and is he even aware of it? And if our Ed comes from such a family, who else currently attempting to micro-manage our lives does too?
I’d love to know what you all think!
This article has taken quite a lot of time and energy to research and write, so if any subscribers would like to take out a paid subscription, even for just a month or two, in the spirit of giving and receiving, I would be immensely grateful! Thanks!
And if Ed would like to employ a family biographer, he knows where to come…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Norris
I am not entirely sure this body should not be renamed the Transport and Dis-connectivity Committee, considering how difficult it is making mobility in Bristol, but anyway…
Yet another neat 3-word propaganda slogan, designed to normalise ‘active travel’ and make the idea stick.
Ed has an XR sticker on his laptop, I have been reliably informed.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-plowden/details/interests/?detailScreenTabIndex=1
https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/network/ben-plowden/
https://www.plowden-wardlaw.de/Chichele.php
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/08/stephen-plowden-obituary
https://www.transportxtra.com/publications/local-transport-today/news/58177/stephen-plowden-and-the-making-of-modern-transport-planning
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jul/05/william-plowden-obituary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Policy_Review_Staff
The Temple Church is a ‘royal peculiar’, under the direct jurisdiction of the monarch and not the diocese . It acted as the royal treasury under King John (1199-1216). See Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Plowden_(barrister)#Works
With authority over his Earldom that was reasonably independent from the crown
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Weston-5190
The arrogance, the belief that they have a right to take away our freedom, is just so absurd and terrifying. Thank-you for your work, Helen.
Thanks - very interesting. Funny how the super-rich push these narratives. In 2022 the single biggest individual donor to Extinction Rebellion was "Sir” Chris Hohn, ultimate vulture capitalist and former business partner of Rishi Sunak.
https://tonyseymour.substack.com/p/about-rishi-sunak