- published: 09 May 2007
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- author: DowningSt
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- 1922 Committee
- 92 Group
- A.V. Dicey
- Adam de Harvington
- Alan Clark
- Alec Douglas-Home
- Alistair Darling
- Alma mater
- Andrew Bonar
- Andrew Provand
- Anglo-Irish Treaty
- Anglo-Irish War
- Annie Bonar Law
- Anthony Barber
- Anthony Eden
- Archibald Salvidge
- Arthur Balfour
- Austen Chamberlain
- Australia
- Backbencher
- Balmoral Castle
- Banker
- Benjamin Disraeli
- Blenheim Palace
- Bolshevik
- Bonar Law
- Bow Group
- British Army
- British Covenant
- British Isles
- Bruges Group
- Buckingham Palace
- C change
- Canada
- Carlton Club
- Caroline Spelman
- Cecil Parkinson
- Chanak Crisis
- Charles James Fox
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- Cherkley Court
- Chess
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- Clement Attlee
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- Coalition government
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- Golf
- Gordon Brown
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Australia
Australia (
/əˈstreɪljə/), officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent as well as the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area. Neighbouring countries include Indonesia, East Timor and Papua New Guinea to the north; the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east.
For at least 40,000 years before European settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who belonged to one or more of roughly 250 language groups. After discovery by Dutch explorers in 1606, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades; the continent was explored and an additional five self-governing Crown Colonies were established.
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Blenheim Palace
Blenheim Palace (/ˈblɛnəm/) (pronounced "Blen-im") is a monumental stately home situated in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. It is the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough. The palace, one of England's largest houses, was built between 1705 and circa 1724. UNESCO recognised the palace as a World Heritage Site in 1987.
The palace's construction was originally intended to be a gift to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough from a grateful nation in return for military triumph against the French and Bavarians at the Battle of Blenheim. However, it soon became the subject of political infighting, which led to Marlborough's exile, the fall from power of his duchess, and irreparable damage to the reputation of the architect Sir John Vanbrugh.
Designed in the rare, and short-lived, English Baroque style, architectural appreciation of the palace is as divided today as it was in the 1720s. It is unique in its combined usage as a family home, mausoleum and national monument. The palace is also notable as the birthplace and ancestral home of Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.
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Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace is the official London residence and office of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality. It has been a focus for the British people at times of national rejoicing and crisis.
Originally known as Buckingham House, the building which forms the core of today's palace was a large townhouse built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1705 on a site which had been in private ownership for at least 150 years. It was subsequently acquired by George III in 1761 as a private residence for Queen Charlotte, and known as "The Queen's House". During the 19th century it was enlarged, principally by architects John Nash and Edward Blore, forming three wings around a central courtyard. Buckingham Palace finally became the official royal palace of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the East front which contains the well-known balcony on which the Royal Family traditionally congregate to greet crowds outside. However, the palace chapel was destroyed by a German bomb in World War II; the Queen's Gallery was built on the site and opened to the public in 1962 to exhibit works of art from the Royal Collection.
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Canada
Canada ( /ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km2 (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.
The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.
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Carlton Club
The Carlton Club is a gentlemen's club in London which describes itself as the "oldest, most elite, and most important of all Conservative clubs." Membership of the club is by nomination and election only.
The club was founded in 1832, by Tory peers, MPs and gentlemen, as a place to coordinate party activity after the party's defeat over the First Reform Act. It later played a major role in the transformation of the Tory party into its modern form as the Conservative Party. The club lost its role as a central party office with the widening of the franchise after the Reform Act 1867, but remained the principal venue for key political discussions between Conservative ministers, MPs and party managers.
The club was formed at the Thatched House Tavern in 1832 and its first premises were in Carlton Terrace (provided by Lord Kensington), from which it drew its name. These premises quickly became too small. The second club house was situated next to the Reform Club in Pall Mall, London, and was purpose-built in 1835. It was replaced by a third club house on the same site in 1856.
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Cherkley Court
Cherkley Court, near Leatherhead, Surrey, in England, is a late Victorian mansion and estate of 370 acres, once the home of Lord Beaverbrook.
The house was built in 1866-70 for wool manufacturer Abraham Dixon (1820–1900) and re-built for him in 1893 after a fire, being lived in by his wife until her death in 1909. Cherkley Court was acquired in 1910 by Lord Beaverbrook, politician and owner of the Express Newspapers group, with him living there for the next 50 years. During Beaverbrook's time, the house attracted many famous weekend guests including Winston Churchill, Andrew Bonar Law, Rebecca West, H.G. Wells, Harold Macmillan and Rudyard Kipling.
Beaverbrook passed the house on to his son Max some years before his death in 1964. After the death of Beaverbrook's second wife in 1994, the house became the property of the Beaverbrook Foundation, a charitable foundation set up by Lord Beaverbrook.
By 2002 Cherkley Court had fallen into disrepair but over seven years the Beaverbrook Foundation restored the property, with the intention of opening it to the public in the same way as the great houses owned by the National Trust.
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Dominion of Canada
Canada ( /ˈkænədə/) is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean. Spanning over 9,900,000 km2 (3,800,000 sq mi), Canada is the world's second-largest country by total area, and its common border with the United States is the longest land border in the world.
The land that is now Canada has been inhabited for millennia by various Aboriginal peoples. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French colonial expeditions explored, and later settled, along the region's Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years' War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy; the Canada Act 1982 severed the vestiges of legal dependence on Britain.
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Dundee
Coordinates: 56°27′50″N 2°58′12″W / 56.464°N 2.970°W / 56.464; -2.970
Dundee
i/dʌnˈdiː/ (Scottish Gaelic: Dùn Dè) is the fourth-largest city in Scotland and the 38th most populous settlement in the United Kingdom. It lies within the eastern central Lowlands on the north bank of the Firth of Tay, which feeds into the North Sea. Under the name of Dundee City, it forms one of the 32 council areas used for local government in Scotland.
The town developed into a burgh in Medieval times, and expanded rapidly in the 19th century largely due to the jute industry. This, along with its other major industries gave Dundee its epithet as the city of "jute, jam and journalism".
In mid-2008, the population of the City of Dundee was estimated to be 152,320. Dundee's recorded population reached a peak of 182,204 at the time of the 1971 census, but has since declined.
Today, Dundee is promoted as 'One City, Many Discoveries' in honour of Dundee's history of scientific activities and of the RRS Discovery, Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic exploration vessel, which was built in Dundee and is now berthed in the city harbour. Biomedical and technological industries have arrived since the 1980s, and the city now accounts for 10% of the United Kingdom's digital-entertainment industry. Dundee has two universities—the University of Dundee and the University of Abertay Dundee. A £1,000,000,000 master plan to regenerate and to reconnect the Waterfront to the city centre which started in 2001 is expected to be completed within a 30 year period, with the Dundee Victoria & Albert Museum opening within 5.
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England
Englandi/ˈɪŋɡlənd/ is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, while the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separate it from continental Europe. Most of England comprises the central and southern part of the island of Great Britain in the North Atlantic. The country also includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.
The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but it takes its name from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in AD 927, and since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world. The English language, the Anglican Church, and English law—the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world—developed in England, and the country's parliamentary system of government has been widely adopted by other nations. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's Royal Society laid the foundations of modern experimental science.
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France
France (Englishi/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] (
listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km2 (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km2 / 4,383,000 sq mi).
Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.
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Genoa
Genoa
/ˈdʒɛnoʊ.ə/ (Italian: Genova [ˈdʒɛːnova] (
listen); Genoese and Ligurian Zena [ˈzeːna]; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is the capital of Liguria and the sixth largest city in Italy, with a population of 608,676 within its administrative limits on a land area of 243.6 km2 (94 sq mi). The urban zone of Genoa extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 718,896. The urban area of Genoa has a population of 800,709. In the metropolitan area live between 859,000 and 1.4 million or 1.5 million people. Genoa is one of Europe's largest cities on the Mediterranean Sea and the largest seaport in Italy.
Genoa has been nicknamed la Superba ("the Superb one") due to its glorious past and impressive landmarks. Part of the old town of Genoa was inscribed on the World Heritage List (UNESCO) in 2006 (see below). The city's rich art, music, gastronomy, architecture and history, allowed it to become the 2004's European Capital of Culture. It is the birthplace of Christopher Columbus.
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Germany
Germany (i/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.
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Glasgow
Coordinates: 55°51′29″N 4°15′32″W / 55.858°N 4.259°W / 55.858; -4.259
Glasgow (i/ˈɡlɑːzɡəʊ/, locally /ˈɡlazɡo/, GLAZ-goh; Scots: Glesga listen (help·info); Scottish Gaelic: Glaschu ([ˈkɫ̪as̪əxu] listen (help·info))) is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's West Central Lowlands.
Glasgow grew from a small rural settlement on the River Clyde to become one of the largest seaports in Britain. Expanding from the medieval bishopric of Glasgow and the later establishment of the University of Glasgow in the 15th century, it became a major centre of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century. From the 18th century the city also grew as one of Britain's main hubs of transatlantic trade with British North America and the British West Indies. With the Industrial Revolution, the city and surrounding region shifted to become one of the world's pre-eminent centres of heavy engineering, most notably in shipbuilding and marine engineering industry, which produced many innovative and famous vessels. Glasgow was known as the "Second City of the British Empire" for much of the Victorian era and Edwardian period. Today it is one of Europe's top ten financial centres and is home to many of Scotland's leading businesses. Glasgow is also ranked as the 57th most liveable city in the world.
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Glasgow University
The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, United Kingdom, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of nineteen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the world.
A major centre of the Scottish Enlightenment during the 18th century, from the 19th century it became a pioneer in British higher education by providing for the educational needs of students from the growing urban and commercial middle classes, as well as the upper class. Glasgow served these students by preparing them for professions: the law, medicine, civil service, teaching, and the church. It also trained smaller numbers for careers in science and engineering. In 2007, the Sunday Times ranked it as "Scottish University of the Year." The university is a member of the elite Russell Group and of Universitas 21.
Since 1870, the main University campus has been located on Gilmorehill in the West End of the city. Additionally, a number of university buildings are located elsewhere in the city: a facility at Loch Lomond, the University Marine Biological Station Millport, and the Crichton Campus in Dumfries.
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Helensburgh
Coordinates: 56°01′00″N 4°44′00″W / 56.016667°N 4.733333°W / 56.016667; -4.733333
Helensburgh (Baile Eilidh in Gaelic) is a town in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. It lies on the north shore of the Firth of Clyde and the eastern shore of the entrance to the Gareloch.
Helensburgh was formerly in Dumbarton District, but was re-allocated under local government reorganisation in 1996. Prior to 1975 it was part of the former Dunbartonshire.
Helensburgh was founded in 1776 when Sir James Colquhoun of Luss built spa baths on the site of Ardencaple Castle, which dated back to about 1600. He then had the seaside resort town constructed to the east of the spa on a formal layout in the style of Edinburgh New Town, and named it after his wife Helen. A ferry service he arranged across the Firth of Clyde to Greenock was successful in attracting residents who could commute from jobs there to attractive homes in the new town.
In 1808, Henry Bell bought the public baths and hotel, which his wife superintended while he continued his interest in early steamboats such as the nearby Charlotte Dundas and the North River Steamboat which Robert Fulton had just introduced at New York City. To improve hotel trade, he had the paddle steamer Comet constructed and in 1812 introduced Europe's first successful steamboat service, bringing passengers down the River Clyde from Glasgow to Greenock and Helensburgh. The Clyde steamer trade developed rapidly, and Helensburgh pier and Craigendoran pier at the east end of the town both became major departure points. From 1858 holidaymakers were brought to the resort and the steamers by the Glasgow, Dumbarton and Helensburgh Railway terminus built in the centre of the town, and in 1894 a second railway station was opened higher up the hill on the West Highland Railway to Fort William.
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House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster.
The House of Lords is independent from, and complements the work of, the House of Commons – they share responsibility for making laws and checking government action. Bills can be introduced into either the House of Lords or the House of Commons and members of the Lords may also take on roles as Government Ministers.
Unlike the House of Commons, most new members of the House of Lords are appointed. Membership of the House of Lords is made up of Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal. There are currently 26 Lords Spiritual, who sit in the Lords by virtue of their ecclesiastical role in the established Church of England. The Lords Temporal make up the rest of the membership; of these, the majority are life peers who are appointed by the Monarch on the advice of the Prime Minister, or on the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
Membership was once a right of birth to hereditary peers but, following a series of reforms, only 92 members (as of 1 July 2011 (2011 -07-01)[update]) sitting by virtue of a hereditary peerage remain. The number of members is not fixed; as of 1 April 2012 (2012 -04-01)[update] the House of Lords has 786 members (plus 21 who are on leave of absence or otherwise disqualified from sitting), as against the fixed 650-seat membership of the House of Commons.
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India
India (i/ˈɪndiə/), officially the Republic of India (Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west;China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Burma and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four of the world's major religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CE and also helped shape the region's diverse culture. Gradually annexed by and brought under the administration of the British East India Company from the early 18th century and administered directly by the United Kingdom from the mid-19th century, India became an independent nation in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by non-violent resistance led by Mahatma Gandhi.
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Italy
Italyi/ˈɪtəli/ (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja]), officially the Italian Republic or the Republic of Italy (Italian: Repubblica italiana), is a unitary parliamentary republic in south-central Europe. To the north, it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia along the Alps. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia–the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea–and many other smaller islands. The independent states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland. The territory of Italy covers some 301,338 km2 (116,347 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. With 60.6 million inhabitants, it is the fifth most populous country in Europe, and the 23rd most populous in the world.
Rome, the capital of Italy, was for centuries a political and religious centre of Western civilisation as the capital of the Roman Empire and site of the Holy See. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Italy endured numerous invasions by foreign peoples, from Germanic tribes such as the Lombards and Ostrogoths, to the Byzantines and later, the Normans, among others. Centuries later, Italy became the birthplace of Maritime republics and the Renaissance, an immensely fruitful intellectual movement that would prove to be integral in shaping the subsequent course of European thought.
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London
Londoni/ˈlʌndən/ is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who named it Londinium. London's ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its square-mile mediaeval boundaries. Since at least the 19th century, the name London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, governed by the elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
London is a leading global city, with strengths in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism and transport all contributing to its prominence. It is the world's leading financial centre alongside New York City and has the fifth-largest city GDP in the world (and the largest in Europe). London has been described as a world cultural capital. It was the world's most visited city during 2011 and London Heathrow is the world's busiest airport by number of international passengers. London's 43 universities form the largest concentration of higher education in Europe. In 2012 London will become the first city to host the modern Summer Olympic Games three times.
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New Brunswick
New Brunswick (French: Nouveau-Brunswick; pronounced: [nuˈvo bʁɔnˈzwik]) is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the only province in the federation that is constitutionally bilingual (English–French).Fredericton is the capital and Saint John is the most populous city. Greater Moncton is the province's largest Census Metropolitan Area. Through the 2011 nation wide census, Statistics Canada estimates the provincial population in 2011 to have been 751,171; a majority of the population is English-speaking, but there is also a large Francophone minority (33%), chiefly of Acadian origin.
The province's name comes from the English and French partial transcription of the city of Brunswick (Braunschweig in German) located in modern day Lower Saxony, northern Germany (and former duchy of the same name), the ancestral home of the Hanoverian George III of the United Kingdom.
New Brunswick is bounded by: on the north by Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula and Chaleur Bay; along the east coast by the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and Northumberland Strait; in the southeast corner the narrow Isthmus of Chignecto connects New Brunswick to the Nova Scotia peninsula; in the south by the Bay of Fundy coast, (which with a rise of 16 m (52 ft), has amongst the highest tides in the world); and in the west by the US state of Maine.
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New Zealand
New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa) is an island country located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The country geographically comprises two main landmasses ‒ that of the North and South Islands ‒ as well as numerous smaller islands. New Zealand is situated some 1,500 kilometres (900 mi) east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and roughly 1,000 kilometres (600 mi) south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. Because of its remoteness, it was one of the last lands to be settled by humans.
During its long isolation, New Zealand developed a distinctive biodiversity of both animal and plant life. Most notable are the large number of unique bird species, many of which became extinct after the arrival of humans and introduced mammals. With a mild maritime climate, the land was mostly covered in forest. The country's varied topography and its sharp mountain peaks owe much to the tectonic uplift of land and volcanic eruptions caused by the Pacific and Indo-Australian Plates clashing beneath the earth's surface.
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Richibucto River
The Richibucto River is a river in eastern New Brunswick, Canada which empties into the Northumberland Strait north of Richibucto. It is 80 kilometres long.
The river's name means "river of fire" in the Mi'kmaq language.
Other villages situated along the river include Rexton and Elsipogtog First Nation. Andrew Bonar Law, the British Prime Minister, was raised along the river.
Coordinates: 46°49′27.9″N 64°56′33.9″W / 46.824417°N 64.94275°W / 46.824417; -64.94275
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Russia
Russiai/ˈrʌʃə/ or /ˈrʊʃə/ (Russian: Россия, tr. Rossiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijə] ( listen)), also officially known as the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, tr. Rossiyskaya Federatsiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijskəjə fʲɪdʲɪˈratsɨjə] ( listen)), is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, and the US state of Alaska by the Bering Strait. At 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area. Russia is also the eighth most populous nation with 143 million people. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning nine time zones and incorporating a wide range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources and is the largest producer of oil and natural gas globally. Russia has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's fresh water.
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Scotland
Scotland (Scottish Gaelic: Alba ([ˈalˠ̪apə] listen (help·info))) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the southwest. In addition to the mainland, Scotland constitutes over 790 islands including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides.
Edinburgh, the country's capital and second largest city, is one of Europe's largest financial centres. Edinburgh was the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, which transformed Scotland into one of the commercial, intellectual and industrial powerhouses of Europe. Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, was once one of the world's leading industrial cities and now lies at the centre of the Greater Glasgow conurbation. Scottish waters consist of a large sector of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the European Union. This has given Aberdeen, the third largest city in Scotland, the title of Europe's oil capital.
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South Africa
Coordinates: 30°S 25°E / 30°S 25°E / -30; 25
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is a country located at the southern tip of Africa. It is divided into nine provinces and has 2,798 kilometres (1,739 mi) of coastline. To the north of the country lie the neighbouring territories of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe; to the east are Mozambique and Swaziland; while Lesotho is an enclave surrounded by South African territory.
South Africa is multi-ethnic and has diverse cultures and languages. Eleven official languages are recognised in the constitution. Two of these languages are of European origin: South African English and Afrikaans, a language which originated mainly from Dutch that is spoken by the majority of white and Coloured South Africans. Though English is commonly used in public and commercial life, it is only the fifth most-spoken home language. All ethnic and language groups have political representation in the country's constitutional democracy comprising a parliamentary republic; unlike most parliamentary republics, the positions of head of state and head of government are merged in a parliament-dependent President.
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Southampton
Southamptoni/saʊθˈhæmptən/ is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated 120 kilometres (75 mi) south-west of London and 30 kilometres (19 mi) north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest. It lies at the northernmost point of Southampton Water at the confluence of the River Test and River Itchen, with the River Hamble joining to the south of the urban area. The local authority is Southampton City Council, which is a unitary authority.
The city represents the core of the Greater Southampton region, and the city itself has an estimated population of 239,700 Southampton combines with Portsmouth to form a single metropolitan area; with a population of over a million this makes the region one of the United Kingdom's most populous metropolitan areas. The city's name is sometimes abbreviated in writing to "So'ton" or "Soton", and a resident of Southampton is called a Sotonian.
Significant employers in Southampton include the University of Southampton, Southampton Airport, the Ford Transit factory, Ordnance Survey, BBC South, the NHS, ABP and Carnival. Southampton is noted for its association with the RMS Titanic, the Spitfire and more recently a number of the largest cruise ships in the world.
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Turkey
Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), known officially as the Republic of Turkey ( Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (help·info)), is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia (mostly in the Anatolian peninsula) and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Azerbaijan (the exclave of Nakhchivan) and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. The Mediterranean Sea and Cyprus are to the south; the Aegean Sea is to the west; and the Black Sea is to the north. The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (which together form the Turkish Straits) demarcate the boundary between East Thrace and Anatolia; they also separate Europe and Asia.
Turkey is one of the six independent Turkic states. The vast majority of the population are Muslims. The country's official language is Turkish, whereas Kurdish and Zazaki languages are spoken by Kurds and Zazas, who constitute 18% of the population.
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
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Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English, later British and later still (and currently) monarchs of the Commonwealth realms. The abbey is a Royal Peculiar and briefly held the status of a cathedral from 1540 to 1550.
Westminster Abbey is a collegiate church governed by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, as established by Royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I in 1560, which created it as the Collegiate Church of St Peter Westminster and a Royal Peculiar under the personal jurisdiction of the Sovereign. The members of the Chapter are the Dean and four residentiary canons, assisted by the Receiver General and Chapter Clerk. One of the canons is also Rector of St Margaret's Church, Westminster, and often holds also the post of Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. In addition to the Dean and canons, there are at present two full-time minor canons, one precentor, the other succentor. The office of Priest Vicar was created in the 1970s for those who assist the minor canons. Together with the clergy and Receiver General and Chapter Clerk, various lay officers constitute the college, including the Organist and Master of the Choristers, the Registrar, the Auditor, the Legal Secretary, the Surveyor of the Fabric, the Head Master of the Choir School, the Keeper of the Muniments and the Clerk of the Works, as well as 12 lay vicars, 10 choristers and the High Steward and High Bailiff. There are also 40 Queen's Scholars who are pupils at Westminster School (the School has its own Governing Body). Those who are most directly concerned with liturgical and ceremonial matters are the two minor canons and the organist and Master of the Choristers.
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A.V. Dicey
Albert Venn Dicey (4 February 1835 – 7 April 1922) was a British jurist and constitutional theorist, who wrote An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885), and younger brother of Edward Dicey. The principles it expounds are considered part of the uncodified British constitution. He was a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, and became Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford and a leading constitutional scholar of his day. Dicey popularised the phrase "rule of law", although its use goes back to the 17th century.
His father was Thomas Edward Dicey, senior wrangler in 1811 and proprietor of the Northampton Mercury and Chairman of the Midland Railway. His brother was Edward James Stephen Dicey.
He became a lawyer in 1863 and was appointed to the Vinerian Chair of English Law at Oxford in 1882. In his first major work, the seminal An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution he outlined the principles of parliamentary sovereignty for which he is most known. In the book, he defined the term "constitutional law" as including "all rules which directly or indirectly affect the distribution or the exercise of the sovereign power in the state". He understood that the freedom British subjects enjoyed was dependent on the sovereignty of Parliament, the impartiality of the courts free from governmental interference and the supremacy of the common law.
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Alan Clark
Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (13 April 1928 – 5 September 1999) was a British Conservative MP and diarist. He served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's governments at the Departments of Employment, Trade, and Defence, and became a privy counsellor in 1991. He was the author of several books of military history, including his controversial work The Donkeys (1961), which is considered to have inspired the musical satire, Oh, What a Lovely War!.
Clark became known for his flamboyance, wit, and irreverence. Norman Lamont called him "the most politically incorrect, outspoken, iconoclastic and reckless politician of our times". He is particularly remembered for his three-volume diary, a candid account of political life under Thatcher, and a moving description of the weeks preceding his death, when he continued to write until he could no longer focus on the page.
Clark was a passionate supporter of animal rights, joining activists in demonstrations at Dover against live export, and outside the House of Commons in support of Animal Liberation Front hunger-striker Barry Horne. When he died after radiation therapy for a brain tumour, his family said Clark wanted it to be stated that he had "gone to join Tom and the other dogs."
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Alistair Darling
Alistair Maclean Darling (born 28 November 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1987, currently for Edinburgh South West. He served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007 to 2010. Darling was one of only three people to have served in the Cabinet continuously from Labour's victory in 1997 until its defeat in 2010 (the others being Gordon Brown and Jack Straw).
Darling was initially appointed as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1997, moving to become Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in 1998. Spending four years at the department, he spent another four years as Secretary of State for Transport, also becoming Secretary of State for Scotland in 2003. Prime Minister Tony Blair moved Darling for a final time, to Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in 2006, before Gordon Brown promoted Darling to Chancellor in 2007.
Alistair Darling was born in London the son of a civil engineer, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. He is the great-nephew of Sir William Darling, who was Conservative MP for Edinburgh South (1945–1957). He was educated in Kirkcaldy, and the private Loretto School,Musselburgh, East Lothian, then attended the University of Aberdeen where he was awarded a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B). He became the President of Aberdeen University Students' Representative Council.
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Annie Bonar Law
Andrew Bonar Law (known as Bonar; 16 September 1858 – 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative Party statesman and Prime Minister. Born in the colony of New Brunswick, he is the only British Prime Minister to have been born outside the British Isles. He was also the shortest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century, spending 211 days in office.
Law was born to a rural preacher and his wife in New Brunswick, where he spent his early life. A few years after his mother's death in 1861, his father remarried, and in 1870 Law moved to Helensburgh, Scotland, to live with his mother's sister Janet and her family, who ran a successful merchant bank. After an education at a preparatory school in Hamilton and the High School of Glasgow, Law left school aged sixteen to gain a "commercial education" at the family firm. A few years later the firm was sold to the Clydesdale Bank, putting Law's career in jeopardy until his uncles loaned him the money to buy a partnership in an iron merchants firm. Through hard work and his business acumen the firm flourished under Law, and by the time he was thirty he was a comparatively rich man.
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Anthony Barber
Anthony Perrinott Lysberg Barber, Baron Barber, PC, DL (4 July 1920 – 16 December 2005) was a British Conservative politician who served as a member of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Barber was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer by Edward Heath in 1970 after the early death of Iain Macleod, serving in that capacity until he retired in 1974. Barber became Chairman of Standard Chartered Bank until 1987.
Barber was the third son of John Barber and his Danish wife, Musse. Barber's unusual forenames arose from his mother, who contributed the "Lysberg", and French grandmother, who contributed the "Perrinott". His father was secretary-director of a Doncaster confectionery works. He had two brothers: Noel, who became a well-known journalist and novelist, and Kenneth, who became secretary of Midland Bank.
Barber was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School in Retford, Nottinghamshire. He became an articled clerk, but joined the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry shortly before the Second World War started. He was commissioned into the Territorial Army Royal Artillery in 1939 and served in France with a unit from Doncaster as part of the British Expeditionary Force. He was evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940, but later he became a pilot in the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit of the RAF. He ran out of fuel on a reconnaissance mission on 25 January 1942 and ditched near Mont St Jean, but was captured by the Germans. He was Mentioned in Dispatches for helping escapes from the prison camp at Stalag Luft III: he himself once escaped as far as Denmark. His POW experiences were recalled by his friend and fellow RAF pilot POW Thomas D. Calnan who met Barber at Oflag IX-A/H at Spangenberg in February 1942:
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Anthony Eden
Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, KG, MC, PC (12 June 1897 – 14 January 1977) was a British Conservative politician, who was Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957. He was also Foreign Secretary for three periods between 1935 and 1955, including during the Second World War. He is best known for his outspoken opposition to appeasement in the 1930s, his diplomatic leadership in the 1940s and 1950s, and the failure of his Middle East policy in 1956 that ended his premiership.
Eden's worldwide reputation as an opponent of appeasement, a "Man of Peace", and a skilled diplomat was overshadowed in the second year of his premiership when the United States refused to support the Anglo-French military response to the Suez Crisis, which critics across party lines regarded as an historic setback for British foreign policy, signalling the end of British predominance in the Middle East. Most historians argue that he made a series of blunders, especially not realizing the depth of opposition to military action by the US. Most historians say that Eden completely dominated the British decision-making process in the Suez crisis. However, Jonathan Pearson argues in Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (2002) that Eden was more reluctant and less bellicose than most historians say.
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Archibald Salvidge
Sir Archibald Tutton James Salvidge KBE PC (5 August 1863 – 11 December 1928) was an English politician, most notable for securing the political dominance of the Conservative Party in Liverpool through the use of the Working Men's Conservative Association (WMCA), earning him the nickname "the king of Liverpool" (by Warden Chilcott, MP for Liverpool Walton). Salvidge was not a member of the Orange Order but he claimed on the Glorious Twelfth of July 1891 that his principles and the Orangemen's were one and the same due to the WMCA's requiring members "to be a sound Protestant". Due to the high Irish immigration into Liverpool and the widespread sectarianism in the city, Salvidge managed to galvanise Liverpool's Protestant population behind the Conservative Party in their opposition to Irish Home Rule.
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Arthur Balfour
Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC, DL (/ˈbælfʊər/; 25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930) was a British Conservative politician and statesman. He served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 1902 to December 1905, and was later Foreign Secretary in 1916–1919.
Born in Scotland and educated as a philosopher, Balfour first entered parliament in the 1874 general election. At first seen as something of a dilettante, he attained prominence as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887–1891. In this post, he authored the Perpetual Crimes Act (1887) (or Coercion Act) aimed at the prevention of boycotting, intimidation and unlawful assembly in Ireland during the Irish Land War.
Balfour succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader in July 1902 (Balfour had been Conservative leader in the House of Commons since 1891). As Prime Minister, Balfour oversaw such events as the Entente Cordiale, but his party was split over tariff reform and in December 1905 he relinquished power to the Liberals. The general election the following January was a disaster for the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies, left with a mere 157 seats in Parliament. Balfour himself lost his Manchester East seat and was rushed back to parliament in a by-election for the City of London constituency. He continued as Leader of the Opposition throughout the crisis over the Lloyd George People's Budget and the Parliament Act, but after failing to win either of the two General Elections in 1910 he resigned as leader in November 1911.
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Austen Chamberlain
Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain, KG (16 October 1863 – 17 March 1937) was a British statesman, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and half-brother of Neville Chamberlain.
Austen Chamberlain was born in Birmingham, the second child and eldest son of Joseph Chamberlain, then a rising industrialist and political radical, later Mayor of Birmingham and a dominant figure in Liberal and Unionist politics at the end of the 19th century. His mother, the former Harriet Kenrick, died in childbirth. Joseph Chamberlain was so shaken by this event that for almost twenty-five years he maintained a distance from his first-born son. In 1868, Joseph married Harriet's cousin, Florence, and had further children, the oldest of whom, Neville, would become Prime Minister in the year of Austen's death.
Austen was educated first at Rugby School, before passing on to Trinity College, Cambridge. While at Trinity College, he became a lifelong friend of F.S. Oliver, a future advocate of Imperial Federation and, after 1909, a prominent member of the Round Table movement. Chamberlain made his first political address in 1884 at a meeting of the university's Political Society and was vice-president of the Cambridge Union Society.[citation needed]
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Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, FRS, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British Prime Minister, parliamentarian, Conservative statesman and literary figure. He served in government for three decades, twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Although his father had him baptised to Anglicanism at age 12, he was nonetheless Britain's first and thus far only Prime Minister who was born into a Jewish family—originally from Portugal. He played an instrumental role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party after the Corn Laws schism of 1846.
Although he was a major figure in the protectionist wing of the Conservative Party after 1844, Disraeli's relations with the other leading figures in the party, particularly Lord Derby, the overall leader, were often strained. Not until the 1860s would Derby and Disraeli be on easy terms, and the latter's succession of the former assured. From 1852 onwards, Disraeli's career would also be marked by his often intense rivalry with William Ewart Gladstone, who eventually rose to become leader of the Liberal Party. In this feud, Disraeli was aided by his warm friendship with Queen Victoria, who came to detest Gladstone during the latter's first premiership in the 1870s. In 1876 Disraeli was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Beaconsfield, capping nearly four decades in the House of Commons.
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Bonar Law
Andrew Bonar Law (known as Bonar; 16 September 1858 – 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative Party statesman and Prime Minister. Born in the colony of New Brunswick, he is the only British Prime Minister to have been born outside the British Isles. He was also the shortest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century, spending 211 days in office.
Law was born to a rural preacher and his wife in New Brunswick, where he spent his early life. A few years after his mother's death in 1861, his father remarried, and in 1870 Law moved to Helensburgh, Scotland, to live with his mother's sister Janet and her family, who ran a successful merchant bank. After an education at a preparatory school in Hamilton and the High School of Glasgow, Law left school aged sixteen to gain a "commercial education" at the family firm. A few years later the firm was sold to the Clydesdale Bank, putting Law's career in jeopardy until his uncles loaned him the money to buy a partnership in an iron merchants firm. Through hard work and his business acumen the firm flourished under Law, and by the time he was thirty he was a comparatively rich man.
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Caroline Spelman
Caroline Alice Spelman (née Cormack; born 4 May 1958) is a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Meriden in the West Midlands since 1997. In May 2010 she became Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in David Cameron's coalition cabinet, and was sworn as a Privy Counsellor on 13 May 2010.
Born in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, Spelman attended Herts and Essex High School for Girls (now called The Hertfordshire and Essex High School), in Warwick Road, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, and received a BA First Class in European Studies from Queen Mary College, University of London.
She was Sugar Beet commodity secretary for the National Farmer's Union from 1981 to 1984. She was deputy director of the International Confederation of European Beet Growers (officially known as La Confédération Internationale des Betteraviers Européens – CIBE) in Paris from 1984–9, then a research fellow for the Centre for European Agricultural Studies (part of the University of Kent and since 2000 known as the Centre for European Agri-Environmental Economics) from 1989 to 1993. She co-owns Spelman, Cormack & Associates, a lobbying firm for the food and biotechnology industry, with her husband. Based in Dorridge (her constituency is in the Borough of Solihull).
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Cecil Parkinson
(Edward) Cecil Parkinson, Baron Parkinson,PC (born 1 September 1931 in Carnforth, Lancashire), is a British Conservative politician and former Cabinet Minister.
The son of a railway worker, Parkinson was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, a state-run day and boarding school for boys, from where he won a scholarship to Cambridge University, where he read English at Emmanuel College, later switching to read Law. While at university, he was a Labour supporter and for a time was a member of the Labour Party. He did National Service as an NCO in the Royal Air Force. He married Ann Mary Jarvis in 1957. They have three daughters: Mary, Emma and Joanna.
After leaving university, Parkinson worked as a manager for the MetalBox Company, later becoming a consultant. He trained and qualified as a Chartered Accountant and in 1961, founded Parkinson-Hart securities.
In the June 1970 general election he stood as candidate for Northampton but was not elected. Parkinson was elected as MP for Enfield West at a by-election in November 1970, following the death of Iain Macleod. When that constitituency was abolished for the February 1974 general election he was elected for the new South Hertfordshire constituency. After the 1979 General Election, he was made a junior trade minister. In September 1981 he was made Chairman of the Conservative Party, and Paymaster-General with a seat in the cabinet and in 1982 was given the added official title of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Despite his relatively junior status, he was a member of the small War Cabinet which Mrs Thatcher set up to run the Falklands War.
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Charles James Fox
Charles James Fox PC (24 January 1749 – 13 September 1806), styled The Honourable from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned thirty-eight years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and who was particularly noted for being the arch-rival of William Pitt the Younger. His father was a leading Whig and Fox rose to prominence in the House of Commons as a forceful and eloquent speaker with a notorious and colourful private life, though his opinions were rather conservative and conventional. However, with the coming of the American War of Independence and the influence of the Whig Edmund Burke, Fox's opinions evolved into some of the most radical ever to be aired in the Parliament of his era.
Fox became a prominent and staunch opponent of George III, whom he regarded as an aspiring tyrant; he supported the American Patriots, even dressing in the colours of George Washington's army. Briefly serving as Britain's first Foreign Secretary in the ministry of the Marquess of Rockingham in 1782, he returned to the post in a coalition government with his old enemy Lord North in 1783. However, the King forced Fox and North out of government before the end of the year, replacing them with the twenty-four-year-old Pitt the Younger, and Fox spent the following twenty-two years facing Pitt and the government benches from across the Commons.
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Charles Townshend
Charles Townshend (29 August 1725 – 4 September 1767) was a British politician. He was born at his family's seat of Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England, the second son of Charles Townshend, 3rd Viscount Townshend, and Audrey (died 1788), daughter and heiress of Edward Harrison of Ball's Park, near Hertford, a lady who rivalled her son in brilliancy of wit and frankness of expression. At the Dutch university, where he matriculated on 27 October 1745, he associated with a small knot of English youths, afterwards well known in various circles of life, among whom were Dowdeswell, Wilkes, the witty and unprincipled reformer, and Alexander Carlyle, the genial Scotsman, who devotes some of the pages of his Autobiography to chronicling their sayings and their doings.
He represented Great Yarmouth in Parliament from 1747 to 1756, when he found a seat for the admiralty borough of Saltash, subsequently transferring in 1761 to Harwich, another borough where the seat was in the government's gift. Public attention was first drawn to his abilities in 1753, when he delivered a lively attack, as a younger son who might hope to promote his advancement by allying himself in marriage to a wealthy heiress, against Lord Hardwicke's marriage bill. Although this measure passed into law, he attained this object in August 1755 by marrying Caroline Campbell (d. 1794), the eldest daughter of the 2nd duke of Argyll and the widow of Francis, Lord Dalkeith, the eldest son of the 2nd duke of Buccleuch.
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Chris Patten
Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC (born 12 May 1944) is a British Conservative politician and administrator. He is the current chairman of the BBC Trust, and was the last Governor of British Hong Kong.
Patten was Member of Parliament for Bath, eventually rising to a cabinet minister and party chairman. In the latter capacity, he orchestrated the Conservatives' unexpected fourth consecutive electoral victory in 1992, but lost his own seat in the House of Commons. He then accepted the post of Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Hong Kong, and oversaw its handover to the People's Republic of China in July 1997. As Governor and Commander-in-Chief, Patten presided over a steady rise in the living standards of ordinary Hong Kongers while encouraging a significant expansion of Hong Kong's social welfare system.
From 2000 to 2004 he served as one of the United Kingdom's two members of the European Commission. After leaving that post, he returned to the UK and became the Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 2003, and he was made a Life Peer in 2005.
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Clement Attlee
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was a British Labour politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951, and as the Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. He was also the first person to hold the office of Deputy Prime Minister, under Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition government, before leading the Labour Party to a landslide election victory over Churchill's Conservative Party in 1945. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to serve a full Parliamentary term, and the first to command a Labour majority in Parliament.
The government he led put in place the post-war settlement, based upon the assumption that full employment would be maintained by Keynesian policies, and that a greatly enlarged system of social services would be created – aspirations that had been outlined in the wartime Beveridge Report. Within this context, his government undertook the nationalisation of major industries and public utilities as well as the creation of the National Health Service. After initial Conservative opposition to Keynesian fiscal policy, this settlement was broadly accepted by all parties until Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979.
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David Cameron
David William Donald Cameron (pronunciation: /ˈkæmərən/; born 9 October 1966) is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service and Leader of the Conservative Party. He represents Witney as its Member of Parliament (MP).
Cameron studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford, gaining a first class honours degree. He then joined the Conservative Research Department and became Special Adviser to Norman Lamont, and then to Michael Howard. He was Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications for seven years.
He was defeated in his first candidacy for Parliament at Stafford in 1997, but was elected in 2001 as the Member of Parliament for the Oxfordshire constituency of Witney. He was promoted to the Opposition front bench two years later, and rose rapidly to become head of policy co-ordination during the 2005 general election campaign. With a public image of a youthful, moderate candidate who would appeal to young voters, he won the Conservative leadership election in 2005.
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David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor OM, PC (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was a British Liberal politician and statesman. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the head of a wartime coalition government between the years 1916–22 and was the Leader of the Liberal Party from 1926–31.
During a long tenure of office, mainly as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was a key figure in the introduction of many reforms which laid the foundations of the modern welfare state. He was the last Liberal to be Prime Minister, as his coalition premiership was supported more by Conservatives than by his own Liberals, and the subsequent split was a key factor in the decline of the Liberal Party as a serious political force. When he eventually became leader of the Liberal Party a decade later he was unable to lead it back to power.
He is best known as the highly energetic Prime Minister (1916–22) who guided the Empire through the First World War to victory over Germany and her allies. He was a major player at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that reordered the world after the Great War. Lloyd George was a devout evangelical and an icon of 20th century liberalism as the founder of the welfare state. He is regarded as having made a greater impact on British public life than any other 20th century leader, thanks to his leadership of the war drive, his postwar role in reshaping Europe, and his introduction of Britain's social welfare system before the war.
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Edward du Cann
Sir Edward Dillon Lott du Cann, KBE (born 28 May 1924) is a retired politician from the United Kingdom. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1956–87, and served as Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1965–67, and Chairman of party's 1922 Committee from 1972–84.
Du Cann was educated at Colet Court, Woodbridge School and St. John's College, Oxford, where he was a friend of Kingsley Amis. He then became a company director. In 1951, du Cann contested Walthamstow West without success, and failed to win at Barrow-in-Furness in 1955. He was elected as MP for Taunton in a 1956 by-election.
Du Cann served as the Economic Secretary to the Treasury from 1962, and as a Minister of State at the Board of Trade 1963–64. He was then the Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1965–67, and Chairman of the 1922 Committee from 1972–84. He was appointed a Member of the Privy Council in 1964.
Two years into his Chairmanship of the 1922 Committee, du Cann played an influential part in the events surrounding the elevation of Margaret Thatcher to the leadership of the Conservative Party. Following two narrow defeats for the Conservatives at the polls in February and October 1974, significant disquiet in the party had developed over the leadership of Edward Heath, who had now lost three elections as leader. This was given direction on 14 October 1974, when the executive of the 1922 Committee met at du Cann's home amidst a good deal of press attention. This was soon followed by a more public meeting of the executive at Du Cann's offices at Keyser Ullman on Milk Street where it was decided that the Committee would press Heath to hold a leadership election. The location of this meeting led to Fleet Street nicknaming the attendees, "The Milk Street Mafia." As Alec Douglas Home, at Heath's request, considered the procedures for a leadership election, there was some speculation that du Cann would himself stand as a representative of the party's right-wing against Heath.
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Edward Heath
Sir Edward Richard George "Ted" Heath, KG, MBE, PC (9 July 1916 – 17 July 2005) was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–74) and as Leader of the Conservative Party (1965–75).
Born in Broadstairs, Kent, Heath studied at Oxford and served in the Second World War. He was first elected in the 1950 general election, for Bexley and was government Chief Whip during the 1950s. Entering the Cabinet as Minister of Labour in 1959, he was then Lord Privy Seal responsible for Macmillan's unsuccessful EEC entry negotiations, then President of the Board of Trade. In 1965 Heath won the leadership of the Conservative Party against Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell. The general election of 1966 saw the Labour government of Harold Wilson achieve a large increase in seats, however Heath remained Conservative leader.
Heath became Prime Minister after winning the 1970 general election. In 1971, Heath oversaw the decimalisation of British coinage and in 1972, he implemented major reform to the UK's system of local government. In foreign policy, Heath took the UK into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973. Heath's premiership oversaw the height of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, with the suspension of the Stormont parliament and the imposition of direct British rule. Unofficial talks with IRA delegates were unsuccessful, as was the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, which caused Ulster Unionists to withdraw from the Conservative whip.
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Eric Pickles
Eric Jack Pickles (born 20 April 1952) is a British Conservative Party politician. Pickles was appointed Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government of the coalition government headed by Prime Minister David Cameron on 12 May 2010.
He was the Chairman of the Conservative Party until being replaced by Baroness Warsi in May 2010 and has been Member of Parliament for Brentwood and Ongar in Essex since 1992. He was Co-Chairman of the Joint Committee Against Racism between 1982 and 1987.
Pickles is a member of the controversial Peniel Pentecostal Church, a local "happy clappy" church located in Pilgrims Hatch, Brentwood, Essex.
Born in Keighley, Yorkshire, he went to Greenhead Grammar School (which became Greenhead High School and is now University Academy Keighley) on Greenhead Road in Utley, north Keighley, then attended Leeds Polytechnic. He was born into a Labour supporting family – his great grandfather was one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party, and described himself as "massively inclined" towards communism as a boy – but he joined the Conservative Party in 1968 after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.
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European Democrats
The European Democrats was a loose association of conservative political parties in Europe. It is a political group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. It was also a political group in the European Parliament, until 1992, when it became a subgroup of EPP-ED.
The European Democratic Group (ED) was formed on 17 July 1979 by British Conservative, Danish Conservative and other MEPs after their success in the 1979 elections. It supplanted the earlier European Conservative Group.
In the late seventies and early eighties, the ED was the third-largest group in the Parliament.
However, the group saw its membership fall sharply in the late 1980s, as many centre-right members moved to the rival European People's Party group, dominated by the German CDU and the ideology of Christian democracy in general. The ED had been somewhat further from the political centre and less pro-European than the EPP. Largely isolated, even hardline eurosceptics like Margaret Thatcher conceded that the British Conservatives could not be effectively heard from such a peripheral group.
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F.E. Smith
Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead GCSI, PC, KC (12 July 1872 – 30 September 1930), best known to history as F. E. Smith (and also Galloper Smith), was a British Conservative statesman and lawyer of the early 20th century. He was a skilled orator, noted for his staunch opposition to Irish nationalism, his wit, pugnacious views, and hard living and drinking. He is perhaps best remembered today as Winston Churchill's greatest personal and political friend until Birkenhead's death at age 58 from pneumonia caused by cirrhosis of the liver.
Smith was born in Birkenhead in Cheshire and was educated at Birkenhead School. After two years at the University College of Liverpool, he went up to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1896, where he was a contemporary of the politician John Simon and the athlete C.B. Fry. He became President of the Oxford Union, where a bust of him now stands. He obtained only a Second in Mods before switching to Law, in which he obtained a First. However, to his disappointment, he only obtained a Second in his Bachelor of Civil Law degree. After winning a Fellowship of Merton College he taught law at Oxford until 1899, when he was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn, where the Birkenhead Award bears his name. The F.E. Smith Memorial Mooting Prizes commemorate him at Merton.
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First World War
World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.
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Francis Maude
Francis Anthony Aylmer Maude (born 4 July 1953) is a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he currently serves as the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, and as a Member of Parliament (MP) representing the constituency of Horsham. He is the son of the former Conservative Cabinet minister Angus Maude.
Maude was educated at the private fee-paying Abingdon School, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and at the College of Law. He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1977, and practised criminal law.
Maude served a councillor for the City of Westminster from 1978 to 1984.
Maude was first elected to the House of Commons to represent the constituency of North Warwickshire in the Conservative Party's landslide victory at the 1983 general election. In 1984, he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Employment Peter Morrison. Maude then became an assistant government whip (1985–87) and Minister for Corporate and Consumer Affairs (1987–89). In 1989, he became the Minister for Europe in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
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Frederick Sykes
Air Vice-Marshal The Right Honourable Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes GCSI, GCIE, GBE, KCB, CMG (23 July 1877 – 30 September 1954) was a military officer, British statesman and politician.
Sykes was a junior officer in the 15th Hussars before becoming interested in military aviation. He was the first Officer Commanding the Military Wing of the Royal Flying Corps before World War I and later served as the Flying Corps' Chief of Staff in France during the 1914 and 1915. Later in the War, he served in the Royal Naval Air Service in the Eastern Mediterranean before returning to Great Britain where he worked to organise the Machine Gun Corps and manpower planning. In late 1917 and early 1918, Sykes was the deputy to General Wilson on the Supreme War Council and from April 1918 to early 1919 he served as the second Chief of the Air Staff.
After the War, Sykes was appointed the Controller of Civil Aviation and he continued in this role until 1922 when he entered politics, becoming the Conservative MP for Sheffield Hallam, which he held until 1928 when he resigned. From 1928 to 1931 Sykes was Governor of Bombay, after which time he returned to Great Britain where he involved himself in business and public life. During World War II, Sykes was an MP once more, this time for Central Nottingham. He lost his seat in 1945 and he died nine years later.
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Geoffrey Howe
Richard Edward Geoffrey Howe, Baron Howe of Aberavon, CH, QC, PC (born 20 December 1926) is a former British Conservative politician. He was Margaret Thatcher's longest-serving Cabinet minister, successively holding the posts of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, and finally Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Prime Minister. His resignation on 1 November 1990 is widely considered to have precipitated Thatcher's own downfall three weeks later.
Geoffrey Howe was born in 1926 at Port Talbot in Wales. A pupil of the Bridgend Preparatory School, Bryntirion, he then attended Abberley Hall School, Worcestershire and Winchester College. He then did National Service as a Lieutenant with the Royal Corps of Signals in East Africa, by his own account giving political lectures in Swahili about how Africans should avoid communism and remain loyal to "Bwana Kingy George". Having declined an offer to remain in the army as a captain, he went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read Law and was chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, and on the committee of the Cambridge Union Society. He was called to the Bar in 1952 and was made a QC in 1965. He stood as the Conservative Party candidate in Aberavon at the 1955 and 1959 general elections, losing in a very safe Labour Party seat. He became chairman of the Bow Group, an internal Conservative think tank of 'young modernisers' in the 1960s, and edited its magazine Crossbow.
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George Canning
George Canning PC, FRS (11 April 1770 – 8 August 1827) was a British statesman and politician who served as Foreign Secretary and briefly Prime Minister.
Canning was born into an Anglo-Irish family at his parents' home in Queen Anne Street, Marylebone, London. Canning described himself as "an Irishman born in London". His father, George Canning, Sr., of Garvagh, County Londonderry, Ireland, was a gentleman of limited means, a failed wine merchant and lawyer, who renounced his right to inherit the family estate in exchange for payment of his substantial debts. George Sr. eventually abandoned the family and died in poverty on 11 April 1771, his son's first birthday, in London. Canning's mother, Mary Anne Costello, took work as a stage actress, a profession not considered respectable at the time. Indeed when in 1827 it looked as if Canning would become Prime Minister, Lord Grey remarked that "the son of an actress is, ipso facto, disqualified from becoming Prime Minister".
Because Canning showed unusual intelligence and promise at an early age, family friends persuaded his uncle, London merchant Stratford Canning (father to the diplomat Stratford Canning), to become his nephew's guardian. George Canning grew up with his cousins at the home of his uncle, who provided him with an income and an education. Stratford Canning's financial support allowed the young Canning to study at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford.[citation needed] Canning came out top of the school at Eton and left at the age of seventeen. His time at Eton has been described as "a triumph almost without parallel. He proved a brilliant classic, came top of the school, and excelled at public orations".
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George Nicoll Barnes
George Nicoll Barnes CH PC (2 January 1859 – 21 April 1940) was a Scottish politician and a leader of the Labour Party.
Barnes was born in Lochee, Dundee, the second of five sons of James Barnes, a skilled engineer and mill manager from Yorkshire, and his wife, Catherine Adam Langlands. The family moved back to England and settled at Ponders End in Middlesex, where his father managed a jute mill in which George himself began working at the age of eleven, after attending a church school at Enfield Highway. He then spent two years as an engineering apprentice, first at Powis James of Lambeth then at Parker's foundry, Dundee. After finishing his apprenticeship he worked for two years at the Vickers shipyard in Barrow before returning once again to the London area, where he experienced unemployment during the slump of 1879. He had a number of short-term jobs before settling for eight years at Lucas and Airds in Fulham. In 1882 he married Jessie, daughter of Thomas Langlands, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
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George Osborne
George Gideon Oliver Osborne,MP (born 23 May 1971 in Paddington, London) is a British Conservative politician. He is the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom, a role to which he was appointed in May 2010, and has been the Member of Parliament for Tatton since 2001.
Osborne is part of the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy, known in Ireland as the Ascendancy. He is the heir to the Osborne baronetcy (of Ballentaylor, in County Tipperary, and Ballylemon, in County Waterford).
He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalen College, University of Oxford, before entering politics.
Osborne is the eldest of four sons. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, 17th Baronet, co-founded the firm of fabric and wallpapers designers Osborne & Little. His mother is Felicity Alexandra Loxton-Peacock, the daughter of artist Lady Clarisse Loxton Peacock.
Originally named Gideon Oliver, he changed his name to George when he was 13. In an interview in July 2005, Osborne said: "It was my small act of rebellion. I never liked it. When I finally told my mother she said, 'Nor do I'. So I decided to be George after my grandfather, who was a war hero. Life was easier as a George; it was a straightforward name."
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George V
George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June 1865 – 20 January 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 through the First World War (1914–1918) until his death in 1936.
George was a grandson of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and the first cousin of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. From 1877 to 1891, he served in the Royal Navy. On the death of Victoria in 1901, George's father became King Edward VII, and George was made Prince of Wales. On his father's death in 1910, he succeeded as King-Emperor of the British Empire. He was the only Emperor of India to be present at his own Delhi Durbar.
As a result of the First World War, other empires in Europe fell while his expanded to its greatest extent. In 1917, he became the first monarch of the House of Windsor, which he renamed from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as a result of anti-German public sentiment. His reign saw the rise of socialism, communism, fascism, Irish republicanism, and the Indian independence movement, all of which radically changed the political landscape. The Parliament Act 1911 established the supremacy of the elected House of Commons of the United Kingdom over the unelected House of Lords. In 1924 he appointed the first Labour ministry and in 1931 the Statute of Westminster recognised the dominions of the Empire as separate, independent kingdoms within the Commonwealth of Nations. He was plagued by illness throughout much of his later reign and at his death was succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII.
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George Ward Hunt
George Ward Hunt (30 July 1825 – 29 July 1877) was a British Conservative Party politician and statesman, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1st and 2nd ministries of Benjamin Disraeli.
He was born at Buckhurst in Berkshire, the only surviving son of a minister, and graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, in 1851, and 21 November of that year was called to the bar at the Inner Temple.
He finally entered the House of Commons in 1857 as Member of Parliament for Northamptonshire North, at the end of the year, having made several unsuccessful attempts previously. He was a Secretary to the Treasury from 1866 to 1868, in the ministry of the 14th Earl of Derby. He was then appointed to the Exchequer when Disraeli took office. By repute, when he presented his one and only Budget speech to parliament he discovered that he had left the ministerial "Red Box" containing it at home. This is said to be the start of the tradition that, when a Chancellor leaves for the House of Commons on Budget Day, he shows the assembled crowd the box by holding it aloft.
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Gerald Balfour
Gerald William Balfour, 2nd Earl of Balfour PC (9 April 1853 – 14 January 1945), known as Gerald Balfour until 1930, was a British nobleman and Conservative politician.
Balfour was the fourth son of James Maitland Balfour, of Whittingehame, Haddingtonshire, and Lady Blanche Cecil, daughter of James Gascoyne-Cecil, 2nd Marquess of Salisbury. Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, was his elder brother, and Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, his uncle. He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained 1st Class Honours in the Classical Tripos.
Balfour sat as Conservative Member of Parliament for Leeds Central from 1885 to 1906. During this time he was a member of Commission on Labour, and Private Secretary to his brother Arthur Balfour, when he was President of the Local Government Board in 1885 to 1886. He later served as Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1895 to 1900, as President of the Board of Trade from 1900 to 1905 and as President of the Local Government Board in 1905. He was admitted to the Privy Council of Ireland in 1895 and to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom in 1905. On retiring from the House of Commons, he was Chairman of the Commission on Lighthouse Administration in 1908, and Chairman of the Cambridge Committee of the Commission on Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He received an Honorary LLD from Cambridge University, and was a Fellow of Trinity. He succeeded his brother Arthur as second Earl of Balfour in 1930 according to a special remainder in the letters patent and took a seat in the House of Lords.
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Godfrey Giffard
Godfrey Giffard (ca. 1235 – 1302) was Chancellor of the Exchequer of England, Lord Chancellor of England and Bishop of Worcester.
Giffard was the son of Hugh Giffard of Boyton in Wiltshire, a royal justice, and of his wife Sibyl, daughter and co-heiress of Walter de Cormeilles. He was born about 1235 and was the younger brother of Walter Giffard who was to become Archbishop of York and whose successful career ensured the preferment of Godfrey. His sister Mabel was the Abbess of Shaftesbury Abbey.
Giffard appears to have profited from his brother's position, and held the following positions:
Complaints were later made to the Pope at Rome about the way in which the Archbishop had given this and many other benefices to his brother – as Godfrey was it was claimed, "...only in minor orders and deficient in learning".
Giffard was still Chancellor when the monks of Worcester elected him as Bishop of Worcester about 13 June 1268, on the translation of Bishop Nicholas of Ely to the See of Winchester. Henry III accepted his appointment, and he received the temporalities on 13 June 1268. After some little resistance, Archbishop Boniface of Savoy confirmed his election, but it was not until 23 September that he was consecrated by the archbishop at Canterbury and he was enthroned in Worcester Cathedral on Christmas Day 1268.
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Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007, becoming the longest-serving holder of that office in modern history. Brown has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1983, for Dunfermline East until 2005, and currently for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.
Brown became Prime Minister on 27 June 2007, after the resignation of Tony Blair and three days after becoming Leader of the governing Labour Party. His tenure ended on 11 May 2010, when he resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. Brown was one of only three people to serve in the Cabinet continuously from Labour's victory in 1997 until its defeat in 2010, the others being Jack Straw and Alistair Darling.
Brown has a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh and spent his early career working as a lecturer at a further education college and a television journalist. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1983; first for Dunfermline East and since 2005 for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. As Prime Minister, he also held the offices of First Lord of the Treasury and the Minister for the Civil Service.
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H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, KG, PC, KC (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928) served as the Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. He was the longest continuously serving Prime Minister in the 20th century until 5 January 1988.
As Prime Minister, he led his Liberal party to a series of domestic reforms, including social insurance and the reduction of the power of the House of Lords. He led the nation into the First World War, but a series of military and political crises led to his replacement in late 1916 by David Lloyd George. His falling out with Lloyd George played a major part in the downfall of the Liberal Party.
Before his term as Prime Minister he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1905–08) and as Home Secretary (1892–95). He was known as H. H. Asquith until his elevation to the peerage (1925), when he became Lord Oxford.
Asquith's achievements in peacetime have been overshadowed by his weaknesses in wartime. Many historians portray a vacillating Prime Minister, unable to present the necessary image of action and dynamism to the public. Others stress his continued high administrative ability. The dominant historical verdict is that there were two Asquiths: the urbane and conciliatory Asquith, who was a successful peacetime leader, and the hesitant and increasingly exhausted Asquith, who practised the politics of muddle and delay during the Great War.
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Harold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC, FRS (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986) was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963.
Nicknamed 'Supermac' and known for his pragmatism, wit and unflappability, Macmillan achieved notoriety before the Second World War as a Tory radical and critic of appeasement. Rising to high office as a protégé of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he believed in the post-war settlement and the necessity of a mixed economy, and in his premiership pursued corporatist policies to develop the domestic market as the engine of growth. During his time as prime minister, average living standards steadily rose while numerous social reforms were carried out such as the 1956 Clean Air Act, the 1957 Housing Act, the 1960 Offices Act, the 1960 Noise Abatement Act, the Factories Act 1961, and the introduction of a graduated pension scheme to provide an additional income to retirees.
As a One Nation Tory of the Disraelian tradition, haunted by memories of the Great Depression, he championed a Keynesian strategy of public investment to maintain demand, winning a second term in 1959 with an increased majority on an electioneering budget. Benefiting from favourable international conditions, he presided over an age of affluence, marked by low unemployment and high if uneven growth. In his Bedford speech of July 1957 he told the nation they had 'never had it so good', but warned of the dangers of inflation, summing up the fragile prosperity of the 1950s.
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Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, FRS, FSS, PC (11 March 1916 – 24 May 1995) was a British Labour politician and Leader of the Labour Party. He was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the 1960s and 1970s, winning four general elections, including a minority government after the February 1974 general election resulted in a hung parliament. He is the most recent British Prime Minister to have served non-consecutive terms.
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Harriet Harman
Harriet Ruth Harman QC (Hon.) (born 30 July 1950), is a British Labour Party politician, who is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Camberwell and Peckham, and was MP for the predecessor Peckham constituency from 1982 to 1997. She was the interim Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 11 May to 25 September 2010, until Ed Miliband took over the role.
In 2007, she was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and served in the Cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal, and Minister for Women and Equality from 2007 to 2010. Following the resignation of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and Labour Leader on 11 May 2010 following his failure to win the general election (which ended in a hung parliament) five days earlier, Harman became interim Party Leader and interim Leader of the Opposition. She served in both roles until the Labour Party elected Ed Miliband Leader.
Miliband appointed her Shadow Secretary of State for International Development and in the 2011 reshuffle, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. She acts as stand-in Leader during Prime Minister's Questions during Milliband's absences, and shadows current Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg during Deputy Prime Minister's Questions. She is currently the longest continuously serving female MP in the House of Commons.
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Henry Bilson-Legge
Henry Bilson-Legge PC (29 May 1708 – 23 August 1764) was an English statesman. He notably served three times as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1750s and 1760s.
Bilson-Legge was the fourth son of William Legge, 1st Earl of Dartmouth, by his wife Lady Anne, daughter of Heneage Finch, 1st Earl of Aylesford. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford.
He became private secretary to Sir Robert Walpole. In 1739 was appointed secretary of Ireland by the lord-lieutenant, William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Devonshire; being chosen Member of Parliament for the borough of East Looe in 1740, and for Orford, Suffolk, at the general election in the succeeding year.
Legge only shared temporarily in the downfall of Walpole, and became in quick succession Surveyor-General of Woods and Forests, a Lord of the Admiralty, and a Lord of the Treasury. In 1748 he was sent as envoy extraordinary to Frederick the Great, and although his conduct in Berlin was sharply censured by George II, he became Treasurer of the Navy soon after his return to England. In April 1754 he joined the ministry of the duke of Newcastle as chancellor of the Exchequer, the king consenting to this appointment although refusing to hold any intercourse with the minister; but Legge shared the elder Pitt's dislike of the policy of paying subsidies to the landgrave of Hesse, and was dismissed from office in November 1755.[citation needed]
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Henry Goulburn
Henry Goulburn PC FRS (19 March 1784 – 12 January 1856) was an English Conservative statesman and a member of the Peelite faction after 1846.
Born in London, Goulburn was the eldest son of Munbee Goulburn, of London, by his wife Susannah, eldest daughter of William Chetwynd, 4th Viscount Chetwynd. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1808, Goulburn became Member of Parliament for Horsham. In 1810, he was appointed Under-Secretary of State for Home Affairs, and two and a half years later, he was made Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. It was in this capacity that James Meehan named Goulburn, New South Wales after him, a naming that was ratified by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Still retaining office in the Tory government, he became a Privy Counsellor in 1821, and shortly afterwards was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, a position which he held until April 1827. Here, although he was frequently denounced as he was considered an Orangeman, he had a successful period of office on the whole, and in 1823 he managed to pass the Irish Tithe Composition Bill. In January 1828, he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Duke of Wellington; like his leader, he disliked Roman Catholic emancipation, which he voted against in 1828.
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Henry Seymour Conway
Field Marshal Henry Seymour Conway (1721 – 9 July 1795) was a British general and statesman. A brother of the 1st Marquess of Hertford, and cousin of Horace Walpole, he began his military career in the War of the Austrian Succession and eventually rose to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Forces.
Conway was the second son of Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Baron Conway (whose elder brother Popham Seymour-Conway had inherited the Conway estates) by his third wife, Charlotte Seymour-Conway (née Shorter). He entered Eton College in 1732 and from that time enjoyed a close friendship with his cousin Horace Walpole.
Conway joined the Molesworth's Regiment of Dragoons on 27 June 1737 as a lieutenant. He was transferred to the 1st Foot Guards and was promoted to captain on 14 February 1741 and to captain-lieutenant (the equivalent of lieutenant colonel) on 10 May 1742.
During the War of Austrian Succession he served on the staff of Field Marshal George Wade at Dettingen in June 1743 and on the staff of the Duke of Cumberland at the Fontenoy in May 1745. Appointed colonel of the 48th Foot on 6 April 1746, he took part in Culloden later that month during the Jacobite Rebellion. His next battle, in July 1747, was at Lauffeld, in which he narrowly escaped death, being captured by the French but released on parole a few days later. In July 1749, he transferred from the 48th Foot to the 34th Foot, and served with his regiment in the garrison of Minorca in 1751.
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Herbert Morrison
Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth, CH, PC (3 January 1888 – 6 March 1965) was a British Labour politician; he held a various number of senior positions in the Cabinet, including Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister.
Morrison was the son of a police constable and was born in Lambeth, London. As a baby he lost the sight in his right eye due to infection. Like many early Labour leaders, he had little in the way of formal education and left school at 14 to become an errand boy. His early politics were radical, and he briefly flirted with the Social Democratic Federation over the Independent Labour Party (ILP). As a conscientious objector, he worked in a market garden in Letchworth in World War I.
Morrison eventually became a pioneer leader in the London Labour Party. He was elected to the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney in 1919 when the Labour Party won control of the Borough, and he was Mayor in 1920–21. Morrison was a follower of Clapton Orient FC and became a shareholder in the club. He was elected to the London County Council (LCC) in 1922 and at the 1923 general election he became Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney South, but lost that seat the following year when Ramsay MacDonald's first administration lost the general election.
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Hervey de Stanton
Hervey de Stanton (or Staunton) (1260 – November 1327) was an English judge (serving both as Chief Justice of the King's Bench and as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He was a descendant of Sir William de Staunton, or Stanton, of Staunton, Nottinghamshire, by Athelina, daughter and coheiress of John de Masters of Bosingham, Lincolnshire. He seems to have held the living of Soham, Norfolk, as early as 1289; afterwards he held the livings of Thurston and Werbeton, and about 1306, on being ordained priest, received the living of East Dereham. In November 1300 there is mention of him as going to the court of Rome.
He was a justice itinerant in Cornwall in 1302 and in Durham in 1303. In the parliament of September 1305 he was a receiver of petitions from Ireland and Guernsey, and on 20 April 1306 was appointed one of the judges of the common pleas. On the accession of Edward II, Stanton was reappointed to the common pleas, and is frequently mentioned in judicial commissions.
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Hugh Childers
Hugh Culling Eardley Childers (25 June 1827 – 29 January 1896) was a British and Australian Liberal statesman of the nineteenth century. He is perhaps best known for his reform efforts at the Admiralty and the War Office. Later in his career, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his attempt to correct a budget shortfall led to the fall of the Liberal government led by Lord Rosebery.
Childers was born in London, the son of Reverend Eardley Childers and his wife Maria Charlotte (née Smith), sister of Sir Culling Eardley, 3rd Baronet and granddaughter of Sampson Eardley, 1st Baron Eardley. He was educated at Cheam School and then both Wadham College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. from the latter in 1850. Childers then decided to seek a career in Australia and on 26 October 1850 arrived in Melbourne, Victoria along with his wife Emily Walker.
Childers joined the government of Victoria and served as inspector of schools and immigration agent; in 1852 he became a director of the Melbourne, Mount Alexander and Murray River Railway Co. Childers became auditor-general in October 1852 and was nominated to the Victorian Legislative Council. In 1852 he placed a bill before the state legislature proposing the establishment of a second university for Victoria, following the foundation of the University of Sydney in 1850. With the receipt of the Royal Assent in 1853, the University of Melbourne was founded, with Childers as its first vice-chancellor.
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Hugh Dalton
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton PC (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947, when he was implicated in a political scandal involving budget leaks.
Born in Neath, in Wales, his father, John Neale Dalton, was chaplain to Queen Victoria and tutor to the future King.
Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School in Summertown, a suburb of Oxford, and then at Eton College, in the small town of Eton in Berkshire, where he was head of his house, but was disappointed not to be elected to "Pop". After leaving school he went up to King's College, Cambridge, where his socialist views, then very rare amongst undergraduates, earned him the nickname "Comrade Hugh". Whilst there, he made three unsuccessful attempts to be elected Secretary of the Cambridge Union.
He went on to study at the London School of Economics and the Middle Temple. During the First World War, he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery. He served as a Lieutenant on the French and Italian Fronts, where he was awarded the Italian decoration, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, in recognition of his 'contempt for danger' during the retreat from Caporetto; he later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. Following demobilisation, he returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer, where he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on the principles of public finance in 1920.
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Hugh Gaitskell
Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell, CBE (9 April 1906 – 18 January 1963) was a British Labour politician, who held Cabinet office in Clement Attlee's governments, and was the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955 until his death in 1963.
He was born in Kensington, London, the third and youngest child of Arthur Gaitskell (1870–1915), of the Indian Civil Service, and Adelaide Mary Gaitskell, née Jamieson (died 1956), whose father, George Jamieson, was consul-general in Shanghai. He was educated at the Dragon School from 1912 to 1919, at Winchester College from 1919 to 1924 and at New College, Oxford from 1924 to 1927, where he gained a first class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1927.
His serious interest in politics came about as a result of the General Strike of 1926, and he lectured in economics for the Workers' Educational Association to miners in Nottinghamshire. Gaitskell moved to University College London in the early 1930s at the invitation of Noel Hall, and became head of the Department of Political Economy[citation needed] when Hall was appointed Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in 1938. He also worked as a tutor at Birkbeck College.
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Iain Macleod
Iain Norman Macleod (11 November 1913 – 20 July 1970) was a British Conservative Party politician and government minister.
Iain Macleod was born at Clifford House, Skipton, Yorkshire on 11 November 1913. His parents were from the Isle of Lewis in the Western Isles of Scotland. They moved to Skipton in 1907. Macleod grew up with strong personal and cultural ties to Scotland, as his parents bought in 1917 part of the Leverhulme estate on the Isle of Lewis. Macleod's father, Dr. Norman Alexander Macleod, was a well-respected general practitioner in Skipton, with a substantial poor-law practice.
He was educated at Ermysted's Grammar School in Skipton, North Yorkshire and Fettes College in Edinburgh. Macleod showed no great academic talent but did develop an enduring love of literature, especially poetry, which he read and memorised in great quantity and his results were good enough for him in 1932 to go to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained a Lower Second in History three years later, in 1935.
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J.L. Garvin
James Louis Garvin (12 April 1868 – 23 January 1947) was an influential British journalist, editor, and author. In 1908 Garvin agreed to take over the editorship of the historic Sunday newspaper The Observer, revolutionizing Sunday journalism and restoring the paper, facing financial troubles at the time, to profitability in the process.
The youngest of two children, Garvin was born in Birkenhead. His father, Michael Garvin, was an impoverished Irish laborer who died at sea when Garvin was two, leaving him to be raised by his mother Catherine. Though a voracious reader, he left school at the age of thirteen and worked first as a messenger, then as a clerk. His elder brother, Michael, became a teacher; his status as the family's primary source of income led them to move, first in 1884 to Hull, then to Newcastle five years later.
Though Garvin underwent examination to join the civil service, from an early age he yearned to become an editor. As a teenager he contributed letters and articles to the Eastern Morning News and the Dublin Weekly Freeman, much of which reflected his early advocacy for Home Rule. In 1891, Garvin applied to Joseph Cowen for a position at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. Given a position as a proof-reader and occasional contributor, Garvin spent the next eight years honing his skills as a journalist, with Cowen serving as his mentor and father-figure. Yet Garvin yearned for a larger stage, and by the end of the decade he became a regular (though anonymous) contributor to the Fortnightly Review, then edited by W. L. Courtney.
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Jack Straw
John Whitaker "Jack" Straw (born 3 August 1946) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Blackburn since 1979. He served as Home Secretary from 1997 to 2001, Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006 and Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons from 2006 to 2007 under Tony Blair. From 2007 to 2010 he was the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and the Secretary of State for Justice, appointed as part of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's first Cabinet. Straw is one of only three people to have served in Cabinet continuously from 1997 to 2010 (the others being Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling).
When the Labour Party lost power in May 2010, he briefly became the Shadow Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and the Shadow Deputy Prime Minister, but stood down from the frontbench after the Labour Party elected a new Shadow Cabinet.
Straw was born in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, England. One of his maternal great-grandparents was a Jewish German immigrant. Straw was brought up at Loughton, Essex by his mother, Joan Sylvia Gilbey on a council estate after his father Walter Arthur Whitaker Straw, an insurance salesman, left the family and condemned them to poverty. Walter Straw had been sent to prison in 1939 for being a conscientious objector.
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James Callaghan
Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, KG, PC (27 March 1912 – 26 March 2005), was a British Labour politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980. Commonly known as Jim Callaghan (and nicknamed "Sunny Jim", "Gentleman Jim", "Lucky Jim" or "Big Jim"), Callaghan is the only person to have served in all four of the Great Offices of State: Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary.
Callaghan was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1964 to 1967 during a turbulent period in the British economy in which he had to wrestle with a balance of payments deficit and speculative attacks on the pound sterling. In November 1967, the Government was forced to devalue the pound sterling despite having already denied this would be done, both publicly and to the House of Commons. Callaghan offered to resign, but was persuaded to swap his ministerial post with Roy Jenkins, becoming Home Secretary from 1967 to 1970. In that capacity, Callaghan took the decision to use the Army to support the police in Northern Ireland, after a request from the Northern Ireland Government.
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Jeremy Hanley
Sir Jeremy James Hanley, KCMG (born 17 November 1945), is a politician and chartered accountant from the United Kingdom. He served as the Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1994–95, and as a Member of Parliament (MP) representing the constituency of Richmond and Barnes from 1983-97.
Hanley was educated at Rugby School, and began his career with Peat Marwick Mitchell & Company (now KPMG) as an articled clerk in 1963. He qualified as a chartered accountant in 1969, and as a certified accountant and chartered secretary in 1980. He joined the Financial Training Company, responsible for training chartered accountants, as a Lecturer in Law and Accountancy, and rose to become the organisation's Deputy Chairman.
Hanley stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative Party candidate in the 1978 Lambeth Central by-election, before becoming the MP for Richmond and Barnes at the 1983 general election. On his first day in the House of Commons he ended up sitting next to Ian Paisley and introduced himself saying: "How do you do? I did not realise that you were on our side", to which Paisley famously replied: "Never confuse sitting on your side with being on your side."
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John Aislabie
John Aislabie or Aslabie ( /ˈeɪzləbɪ/; 4 December 1670 – 18 June 1742) was a British politician, notable for his involvement in the South Sea Bubble and for creating the water garden at Studley Royal.
Aislabie's family were originally Yeoman farmers who lived in Hemingbrough. His father George married into the highly influential Mallory family. He attended St. John's College and Trinity Hall at Cambridge. He inherited the Studley estate from his mother's family in 1693, and started serious development of the garden around 1716, becoming the first in England to introduce natural landscaping. (His son William Aislabie added the ruins of Fountains Abbey to the estate.)
Aislabie was elected as a Member of Parliament for Ripon in 1695, apparently on the assumption he was a Tory, though his political views were somewhat fluid. He became more active in politics from 1704, especially on the economy. He eventually became associated with the Country Whigs. Under the patronage of Robert Harley he was appointed a Lord of the Admiralty from 1710 in the Tory administration. This proved a precarious appointment as Aislabie's Whig sympathies manifested in votes against the government.
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John Biffen
William John Biffen, Baron Biffen, PC, DL (3 November 1930 – 14 August 2007), was a Conservative member of the House of Lords, who previously spent 36 years in the House of Commons.
The son of a tenant farmer Victor Biffen and his wife 'Tish', John Biffen was born at Combwich, a small village on the River Parrett near Bridgwater, Somerset in 1930. He was educated firstly at Otterhampton village school followed by Dr. Morgan's Grammar School, Bridgwater. He then earned a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge where he graduated with a first class honours degree in History. From 1953 to 1960 he worked for Tube Investments Ltd.
Biffen was the Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Oswestry, later renamed Shropshire North, from the time of his election at a by-election in 1961 until his retirement at the 1997 general election. In the same year he was made a life peer, sitting as Baron Biffen, of Tanat in the County of Shropshire.
In his early political career he was a disciple of Enoch Powell, voting for him in the Conservative leadership election of 1965. Biffen was a Eurosceptic and voted against Britain's entry into the EEC in a parliamentary division in 1972 against his own party. Biffen championed tight fiscal policy and opposed state intervention in economic management.
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John Charles Herries
John Charles Herries PC (November 1778 – 24 April 1855), known as J. C. Herries, was a British politician and financier and a frequent member of Tory and Conservative cabinets in the early to mid 19th century.
Herries was the eldest son of Charles Herries, a London merchant, by his wife Mary Ann Johnson, and was educated at Cheam and the University of Leipzig.
Herries worked his way up in the Treasury and eventually became Secretary to the First Lord of the Treasury, Commissary-General to the Army, Paymaster of the Civil List, Secretary to the Treasury (1823–1827), Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Goderich's government (1827–1828), Master of the Mint under the Duke of Wellington (1828–1830), briefly President of the Board of Trade (1830), Secretary at War under Sir Robert Peel (1834–1835), and finally President of the Board of Control in Lord Derby's first government (1852). During his tenure as Commissary-General, he used the help of Nathan Mayer Rothschild to transfer money to British and allied army troops on the continent, which was not an easy task during the Continental Blockade. Rothschild's successful conclusion of these transfers was one of the foundations of the house's English banking empire.
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John Ernle
Sir John Ernle (1620–1697) was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1654 and 1695. He was one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer of England, a position he held from 2 May 1676 to 9 April 1689.
Ernle was the eldest surviving son of John Ernle of Whetham House, Calne and his wife Philadelphia Hopton, daughter of Sir Arthur Hopton of Witham Friary, Somerset. In 1654, he was elected Member of Parliament for Wiltshire in the First Protectorate Parliament. He was elected MP for Wiltshire again in 1660 for the Convention Parliament. In 1661 he was elected MP for Cricklade in the Cavalier Parliament. He was knighted by 4 April 1663. In 1671 he was commissioner for accounts, loyal and indigent officers and was comptroller of naval stores from 1671 to 1676.
Ernle was appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer on 2 May 1676 and was named a Privy Councillor in 1676. He held the post of Chancellor until 9 April 1689. He was named one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty on 26 September 1677. He was the only member of the Plantation Committee, which dealt with the American colonies, to attend all three sessions of July 1677, although he usually attended only a quarter of those meetings.
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John Hotham
Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet, of Scorborough (died 3 January 1645), English parliamentarian, belonged to a Yorkshire family, and fought on the continent of Europe during the early part of the Thirty Years' War.
In 1622 he was made a baronet. He was Member of Parliament for Beverley in the five parliaments between 1625 and 1640, and High Sheriff of Yorkshire in 1634. In 1639 he was deprived by the king of his office of governor of Hull, and joining the parliamentary party, he refused to pay ship-money. In January 1642 Hotham was ordered by the parliament to seize Hull, where there was a large store of munitions of war; this was at once carried out by his son (John Hotham the younger). Hotham snr took command of Hull and in April 1642 refused to admit Charles I to the town. Later he promised his prisoner, Lord Digby, that he would surrender the town to the king, but when Charles appeared again he refused a second time and drove away the besiegers.
Meanwhile the younger Hotham was taking an active part in the Civil War in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, but was soon at variance with other parliamentary leaders, especially with Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas Fairfax, and complaints about his conduct and that of his troops were made by Oliver Cromwell and by Colonel John Hutchinson. Soon both the Hothams were corresponding with the Earl of Newcastle, and the younger one was probably ready to betray Hull; these proceedings became known to Parliament, and in June 1643 father and son were captured and taken to London.
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John Major
Sir John Major, KG, CH, PC, ACIB (born 29 March 1943) is a British Conservative politician, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He held the posts of Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Cabinet of Margaret Thatcher and was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon from 1979 to 2001.
Despite Thatcher's "notorious" assertion that "she expected to continue in control as a backseat driver," Major's mild and consensual style was seen as complete contrast to Thatcher's forceful and confrontational manner. Early in his term, he presided over British participation in the First Gulf War (March 1991) and negotiated "Game, Set and Match for Britain" at the Maastricht Treaty (December 1991). Despite the British economy then being in recession he led the Conservatives to a fourth consecutive election victory, winning the most votes in British electoral history in the 1992 general election, albeit with a much reduced majority in the House of Commons. He is to date, the last Conservative leader to win an outright majority in a general election.
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John Maunsell
Sir John Maunsell (c. 1190/1195–1265), also Sir John Mansel, Provost of Beverley, was king's clerk, and a judge. He served as chancellor to King Henry III and was England's first secretary of state.
His grandfather, Robert Mansel, was a Templar under Baron Gilbert de Lacy in Palestine. Robert led a small force of Welsh and Aquitaines by night to put to rout a much larger force of Turks under Sultan Nur ad-Din Zangi, at his camp outside Damascus during the reign of King Henry II. His father, Walter, a deacon, was Napkin Bearer to the King. John Maunsell is first heard of when he was sent from Scotland as orator from Alexander, King of Scotland in 1215 to the court of John. As the son of a deacon under orders, his birth status periodically came into question eventually resulting in a letter from Pope Innocent IV ratified by Pope Alexander IV in 1259 stating "Approbation, addressed to John Mansel, Chancellor of London, the King's Clerk, of the dispensation given to him, at the King's request, by Pope Innocent, to be ordained and promoted, notwithstanding that his mother married his father, a man of noble birth, not knowing that he was a deacon, and was accounted for the time being his lawful wife; his father, after some time, repenting, resumed his orders, a divorce having been declared by their diocesan. The dispensation is approved, even if his mother's plea of ignorance and the reputation of a lawful marriage cannot be sustained."
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John Sandale
John Sandale (or Sandall) was a medieval Lord High Treasurer, Lord Chancellor and Bishop of Winchester.
He was a canon of Lincoln and St. Paul's and provost of Wells before being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1307 on the accession of Edward II. He was dismissed the following year for political reasons.
He served as Lord High Treasurer from 1310 to 1311 and as acting treasurer from 1312 to 1314. He later became Lord Chancellor on 26 September 1314, holding the office until 11 June 1318.
A pluralist, Sandale was at one time chancellor of St Patrick's, Dublin, treasurer of Lichfield, and dean of St Paul's with prebends in Dublin, Beverley, Wells, Lincoln, London, York, and Glasgow, as well as ten rectories from Chalk in Kent to Dunbar in Scotland. He was elected to the see of Winchester about 27 July 1316 and consecrated on 31 October 1316. And he was master of the hospital of St Katharine's by the Tower in 1315.
He was again appointed Lord High Treasurer in November 1318 until his death. He died in Southwark on 2 November 1319 and was buried in St Mary Overie.
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Joseph Chamberlain
Joseph Chamberlain (8 July 1836 – 2 July 1914) was an influential British politician and statesman. Unlike most major politicians of the time, he was a self-made businessman and had not attended Oxford or Cambridge University.
Born in London, Chamberlain made his career in Birmingham, first as a manufacturer of screws and then as a notable Mayor of the city. During his early adulthood he was a radical Liberal Party member and a campaigner for educational reform. He entered the House of Commons aged almost forty, relatively late in life for a front-rank politician. Rising to power through his influence with the Liberal grassroots organisation, he served as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone's Second Government (1880–85). At the time, Chamberlain was notable for his attacks on the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury, and in the 1885 general election he proposed the "Unauthorised Programme" of benefits for newly enfranchised agricultural labourers. Chamberlain resigned from Gladstone's Third Government in 1886 in opposition to Irish Home Rule, and after the Liberal Party split he became a Liberal Unionist, a party which included a bloc of MPs based in and around Birmingham.
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Kenneth Clarke
Kenneth Harry "Ken" Clarke, PC, QC, MP (born 2 July 1940) is a British Conservative politician, currently Member of Parliament for Rushcliffe, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. He was first elected to Parliament in 1970; and appointed a minister in Edward Heath's government in 1972. One of Britain's best-known politicians, his past government roles include Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Since 1997 he has been President of the Tory Reform Group.
Clarke was a minister throughout the 18 years of successive Conservative governments from 1979 to 1997, serving in the cabinets of both Margaret Thatcher and John Major. After the Conservative defeat in the 1997 general election Clarke became a backbencher. He has contested the Conservative Party leadership three times—in 1997, 2001 and 2005—and was defeated each time. Although he is considered popular with the general public, his pro-European integration views conflict with the modern Conservative Party's EU-sceptic stance. Notably, he is President of the Conservative Europe Group and Vice-President of the European Movement UK. Despite this conflict, and his involvement with the tobacco industry, Conservative leader David Cameron returned Clarke to the Shadow Cabinet in March 2009 as Shadow Business Secretary. When Cameron became Prime Minister in May 2010 he appointed Clarke Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice.
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Leo Amery
Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery CH (22 November 1873 – 16 September 1955), usually known as Leo Amery or L. S. Amery, was a British Conservative Party politician and journalist, noted for his interest in military preparedness, India, and the British Empire.
Leopold Amery was born in Gorakhpur, India to an English father and a Hungarian Jewish mother. His father was Charles Frederick Amery (1833–1901), of Lustleigh, Devon, an officer in the Indian Forestry Commission. His mother Elisabeth Johanna Saphir (c. 1841–1908), who was the sister of the orientalist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, had come to India from England, where her parents had settled and converted to Protestantism. In 1877 his mother moved back to England from India and in 1885 divorced Charles.
In 1887 Amery went to Harrow, where he was a contemporary of Winston Churchill. Amery represented Harrow at gymnastics and held the top position in examinations for a number of years, also winning prizes and scholarships.
After Harrow Amery went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he performed well: he gained a First at in classical moderations in 1894; in literae humaniores in 1896; he was proxime accessit (runner-up) to the Craven scholar in 1894 and Ouseley scholar in Turkish in 1896, also winning a half-blue in cross-country running.
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Leo Maxse
Leopold James Maxse (1864–1932) was a journalist and editor of the conservative British publication, National Review, between August 1893 and his death in January 1932. He was succeeded as editor by his sister, Violet Milner.
He was President of the Cambridge Union Society, in 1886, and a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
Before the Great War, Maxse argued against liberal idealism in foreign policy, Cobdenite pacifism, Radical cosmopolitanism and constantly warned of the German menace.
Maxse argued that the 1918 victory against Germany gave the Allies a fleeting opportunity to destroy German power. He viewed the Treaty of Versailles as ineffectual towards that aim and blamed Allied politicians, Lloyd George especially, for bowing to President Wilson's pressure to make the treaty less harsh. Maxse believed Germany was still able to restore itself as the dominant European power.
The League of Nations was vehemently opposed by Maxse: the League was a "front-bench affair hurriedly adopted and recklessly advocated simply and solely to please President Wilson". He claimed Hindenburg and Ludendorff controlled Germany from behind-the-scenes regardless of which politician was in office and that it was unnecessary to appease Germany to stop her from going Bolshevik because Prussian militarism was still the dominant force.
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Liam Fox
Liam Fox (born 22 September 1961) is a British Conservative politician, Member of Parliament for North Somerset, and former Secretary of State for Defence.
Fox studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and worked as a GP and Civilian Army Medical Officer before being elected as an MP in 1992. After holding several ministerial roles in John Major's Conservative government, Fox served as Constitutional Affairs Spokesman (1998–1999), Shadow Health Secretary (1999–2003), Conservative Party chairman (2003–05), Shadow Foreign Secretary (2005) and Shadow Defence Secretary (2005–10).
Fox stood unsuccessfully in the 2005 Conservative leadership election. In 2010, he was appointed Secretary of State for Defence, a position from which he resigned on 14 October 2011 over allegations that he had given a close friend, lobbyist Adam Werritty, access to the Ministry of Defence and allowed him to join official trips overseas.
Fox was born and raised in East Kilbride, Scotland and brought up in a council house that his parents later bought. Along with his brother and two sisters he was educated in the state sector; he attended St. Bride's High School. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow Medical School, graduating with MB ChB degrees in 1983. Fox is a general practitioner (he was a GP in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, before his election to Parliament), a former Civilian Army Medical Officer and Divisional Surgeon with St John Ambulance. He is a member of the Royal College of General Practitioners.
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Lord John Cavendish
Lord John Cavendish PC (22 October 1732 – 18 December 1796) was a British politician.
Cavendish was the youngest son of William Cavendish, 3rd Duke of Devonshire, and his wife Catherine, daughter of John Hoskins. Prime Minister William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, Lord George Cavendish and Field Marshal Lord Frederick Cavendish were his elder brothers. He was educated in Hackney and at Peterhouse, Cambridge.
He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1782 and 1783, and was sworn of the Privy Council in 1782. He was a supporter of Lord Rockingham, and subsequently of the Fox-North Coalition that brought the Duke of Portland to power. He lost his seat in the election of 1784, when the coalition fell, and did not return to the House of Commons until 1794, in the family seat of Derbyshire.
Cavendish died in December 1796, aged 64.
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Margaret Beckett
Margaret Mary Beckett (née Jackson; born 15 January 1943) is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Derby South since 1983, rising to become the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party under John Smith, from 18 July 1992 to 12 May 1994, and briefly serving as Leader of the Party following Smith's death. She later served in the Cabinet under Tony Blair, most notably being appointed Foreign Secretary in 2006.
Beckett was first elected to Parliament in 1974 and held junior positions in the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. She lost her seat in 1979 but returned to the House of Commons in 1983 and became a senior member of the Labour Party. She was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1992 and was briefly its leader in 1994 following the premature death of John Smith, the first woman to occupy either role.
After Labour's victory in the 1997 general election, Beckett became a member of Tony Blair's Cabinet. Initially the President of the Board of Trade, she was later the Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. In 2006, Blair appointed her Foreign Secretary, making her the first woman to hold the position, and—after Margaret Thatcher—the second woman to hold one of the Great Offices of State.
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Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS, née Roberts (born 13 October 1925) is a British politician and the longest-serving (1979–1990) British prime minister of the 20th century, and the only woman ever to have held the post. A Soviet journalist nicknamed her the "Iron Lady", which later became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style. As prime minister, she implemented conservative policies that have come to be known as Thatcherism.
Originally a research chemist before becoming a barrister, Thatcher was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Finchley in 1959. Edward Heath appointed her Secretary of State for Education and Science in his 1970 government. In 1975 Thatcher defeated Heath in the Conservative Party leadership election and became Leader of the Opposition, as well as the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom. She became prime minister after winning the 1979 general election.
After entering 10 Downing Street, Thatcher introduced a series of political and economic initiatives to reverse what she perceived as Britain's precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Thatcher's popularity during her first years in office waned amid recession and high unemployment, until economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support, resulting in her re-election in 1983. Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her Community Charge (popularly referred to as "poll tax") was widely unpopular and her views on the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister and party leader in November 1990, after Michael Heseltine launched a challenge to her leadership.
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Michael Ancram
Michael Andrew Foster Jude Kerr, 13th Marquess of Lothian, PC, DL, QC (born 7 July 1945), known as Michael Ancram, is a British Conservative Party politician. He is a member of the House of Lords, former Member of Parliament, and a former member of the Shadow Cabinet. He is also the Chief of the Scottish Kerr Clan.
Michael Ancram was born in London, and is of Scottish descent. He was educated at Ampleforth College, an independent school in North Yorkshire, followed by Christ Church at the University of Oxford (BA History 1966, MA), where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, and the University of Edinburgh (LLB 1968).
Ancram was called to the Scottish bar in 1970 and continued to practise as an advocate until 1979, apart from a brief period in 1974 when he first sat as an MP. He became a Queen's Counsel in 1996.
Ancram unsuccessfully contested the West Lothian parliamentary seat in 1970. He was first elected to Parliament in the February 1974 general election, when he contested and won the seat of Berwickshire and East Lothian, but lost the seat in the October election of the same year. He re-entered Parliament at the 1979 election as the Member of Parliament for Edinburgh South, beating future Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He lost his seat again at the 1987 general election, but returned to Parliament at the 1992 election representing Devizes.
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Michael Foot
Michael Mackintosh Foot, FRSL, PC (23 July 1913 – 3 March 2010) was a British Labour Party politician, journalist and author, who was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1955 and from 1960 until 1992. He was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980, and later became the Leader of the Opposition from 1980 to 1983.
Associated with the Labour left for most of his career, he was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and British withdrawal from the European Economic Community. He was first promoted to Cabinet as Employment secretary under Harold Wilson in 1974, and later served as Leader of the House of Commons under James Callaghan. A passionate orator, he was Labour leader at the 1983 general election when the party received its lowest share of the vote since 1918.
His parallel career as a journalist included appointments as editor of Tribune, on several occasions, and the Evening Standard newspaper. Among the books he authored are Guilty Men (an attack on Neville Chamberlain and others for the policy of appeasement), a biography of Jonathan Swift (The Pen and the Sword, 1957) and a biography of Aneurin Bevan.
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Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS (18 March 1869 – 9 November 1940) was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. When Adolf Hitler continued his aggression by invading Poland, Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, and Chamberlain led Britain through the first eight months of the Second World War.
After working in business and local government and after a short spell as Director of National Service in 1916 and 1917, Chamberlain followed his father and older half-brother in becoming a Member of Parliament in the 1918 general election at age 49. He declined a junior ministerial position, remaining a backbencher until 1922. He was rapidly promoted in 1923 to Minister of Health and then Chancellor of the Exchequer. After a short Labour-led government, he returned as Minister of Health, introducing a range of reform measures from 1924 to 1929. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the National Government in 1931.
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Nigel Lawson
Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, PC (born 11 March 1932), is a British Conservative politician and journalist. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) representing the constituency of Blaby from 1974–92, and served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the government of Margaret Thatcher from June 1983 to October 1989. He was made a life peer in 1992.
Lawson is the father of food writer and celebrity cook Nigella Lawson, and journalist Dominic Lawson.
Lawson was born to a wealthy family in Hampstead in 1932. His father, Ralph Lawson (1904–1982), was the owner of a commodity-trading firm in the City of London, while his mother, Joan Elisa Davis, was from a wealthy family of stockbrokers. His family was Jewish. His paternal-grandfather Gustav Leibson, a merchant from Mitau (now Jelgava in Latvia) changed his name from Leibson to Lawson after becoming a British Citizen in 1911. Nigel was educated at Westminster School (following in the footsteps of his father, who had also been sent there) and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a first class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, he carried out his military service in the Royal Navy – during which time he commanded a small torpedo boat. Lawson began his career as a financial journalist and progressed to the positions of city editor of The Sunday Telegraph in 1961 and editor of The Spectator (1966–1970).
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Norman Fowler
(Peter) Norman Fowler, Baron Fowler,PC (born 2 February 1938) is a British Conservative politician who was from 1981 to 1990 a member of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet.
He was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School in Chelmsford, in the county of Essex; after which he did National Service as a Second Lieutenant in the Essex Regiment. Whilst studying at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he was Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association in Michaelmas 1960, in which term he entertained both the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Home Secretary (and de facto Deputy Prime Minister, although he did not hold the title until 1962) Rab Butler. He then became a journalist, and worked on The Times.
During the mid 1970s Fowler was shadow Minister of Transport. In April 1976 he was photographed outside the Palace of Westminster having just taken delivery of his third four cylinder MG MGB GT, having reportedly rejected the idea of buying a V8 version on account of the cost. At a time when a recently promoted Minister of Transport had imputed ownership of the family car to his wife, apparently on grounds of political correctness, former journalist Fowler's acknowledgment of his choice of a sports car provided an interesting contrast.
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Norman Tebbit
Norman Beresford Tebbit, Baron Tebbit, CH, PC (born 29 March 1931), is a British politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he served in the Cabinet from 1981 to 1987 as Secretary of State for Employment (1981–83), Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (1983–85), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1985–87) and Chairman of the Conservative Party (1985–87). He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1970 to 1992, representing the constituencies of Epping (1970–74) and Chingford (1974–92). In 1984, he was injured in the Provisional Irish Republican Army's bombing of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, and his wife Margaret was left permanently disabled.
Born into a working class family in Ponders End, Middlesex, Tebbit went to Edmonton County School, an academically selective state school in north London. He was then a journalist for the Financial Times before serving with the Royal Air Force, during which he flew Meteor and Vampire jets and once had to break open the cockpit canopy of a burning Mosquito aircraft to escape from it. On leaving the RAF he joined BOAC in 1953 as a pilot, during which time he was an official in the British Air Line Pilots' Association. He was elected MP for Epping in 1970 and then for Chingford in Feb 1974. He is recorded as an MP member of the Conservative Monday Club in 1970.
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Peter Hain
Peter Gerald Hain (born 16 February 1950) is a British Labour Party politician, who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Neath since 1991, and served in the Cabinets of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He was the Leader of the House of Commons from 2003 to 2005 and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007 under Blair, and as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales from 2007 to 2008 under Brown. In 2007, he ran for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party, coming fifth out of six candidates, although his failure to declare donations during this contest led to his resignation in 2008. He later returned to the Cabinet from 2009 to 2010 as Welsh Secretary, before becoming Shadow Welsh Secretary in Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet from 2010 until 2012, when he announced his retirement from front-line politics.
He came to the UK from South Africa as a teenager, and was a noted anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1970s. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the ill-fated Alternative Vote system campaign in May 2011, together with his close friend and fellow former Young Liberal Richard Burden.
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Rab Butler
Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, KG CH DL PC (9 December 1902 – 8 March 1982), who invariably signed his name R. A. Butler and was familiarly known as Rab, was a British Conservative politician. Butler was one of only two British politicians (the other being John Simon, 1st Viscount Simon) to have served in three of the four Great Offices of State (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary) but never to have achieved the Premiership, for which he was twice passed over.
Butler was born in Attock Serai, Attock in India (now Punjab, Pakistan) to Sir Montagu Sherard Dawes Butler and his wife, Anne Gertrude (née Smith). His maternal uncles were Charles Aitchison Smith, Sir George Adam Smith and Sir James Dunlop Smith. His father later remarried and thus he gained a half-sister, Iris Mary Butler, who became Iris Portal upon her marriage.
Butler's was a family of Cambridge dons and Indian Governors; as a child his right arm was injured in a riding accident, leaving his hand never again fully functional. His limp handshake and inevitable lack of military experience (and stooping donnish manner at a time when many politicians were former officers) were political handicaps in later life. He was educated at Marlborough College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was President of the Cambridge Union Society in the summer term of his third year; in March 1924, as a newly-elected President, he entertained the Opposition Leader Stanley Baldwin at a debate.
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Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald, PC, FRS (12 October 1866 – 9 November 1937) was a British politician who was the first ever Labour Prime Minister, leading a minority government for two terms.
MacDonald entered Parliament at the 1906 General Election and had become chairman of the Labour MPs by 1914. His opposition to the First World War made him unpopular and he was defeated at the 1918 General Election, returning to Parliament at the 1922 General Election, at which Labour replaced the Liberals as the largest left-wing party in the UK. MacDonald was a powerful if woolly orator and by then had earned great public respect for his opposition to the war. His first government - formed with Liberal support - in 1924 lasted nine months, but was defeated at the 1924 General Election amidst allegations, now thought to have been fabricated, that his government was endorsed by the Soviet Foreign Minister Zinoviev.
Labour returned to power - this time as the largest party - in 1929 but was soon overwhelmed by the crisis of the Great Depression, in which the Labour government was split by demands for public spending cuts to preserve the Gold Standard. In 1931, he formed a National Government in which only two of his Labour colleagues agreed to serve and the majority of whose MPs were from the Conservatives. As a result, MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party, which accused him of "betrayal". The Gold Standard soon had to be abandoned after the Invergordon Mutiny and MacDonald's National Government won a huge "doctor's mandate" at the 1931 General Election, at which the Labour Party was reduced to a rump of around 50 seats in the House of Commons.
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Raymond Poincaré
Raymond Poincaré (French pronunciation: [ʁɛmɔ̃ pwɛ̃kaʁe]; 20 August 1860 – 15 October 1934) was a French statesman who served five times as Prime Minister, and as President from 1913 to 1920. He was a conservative leader, primarily committed to political and social stability.
Trained in law, Poincaré was elected a Deputy in 1887, and served in the cabinets of Dupuy and Ribot. In 1902, he co-founded the Democratic Republican Alliance, the most important center-right party under the Third Republic, becoming Prime Minister in 1912 and President in 1913. He was noted for his strongly anti-German attitudes, and twice visited Russia to maintain strategic ties. At the Peace Conference, he favoured re-occupation of the Rhineland, which he was able to carry out in 1923 as Prime Minister. Throughout this period he was making highly prescient statements about Germany's likely intentions.
Born in Bar-le-Duc, Meuse, France, Raymond Poincaré was the son of Nicolas Antonin Hélène Poincaré, a distinguished civil servant and meteorologist. Raymond was also the cousin of Henri Poincaré, the famous mathematician. Educated at the University of Paris, Raymond was called to the Paris bar, and was for some time law editor of the Voltaire.
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Reginald Maudling
Reginald Maudling PC (7 March 1917 – 14 February 1979) was a British politician who held several Cabinet posts, including Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had been spoken of as a prospective Conservative leader since 1955, and was twice seriously considered for the post; he was Edward Heath's chief rival in 1965. He also held many directorships in the British financial world.
As Home Secretary, he was responsible for the British Government's Northern Irish policy during the period that included Bloody Sunday in 1972; shortly thereafter, he left office because of an unrelated scandal in one of the companies of which he was director.
Reginald Maudling was born in Woodside Park, North Finchley, and was named after his father, Reginald George Maudling, an actuary, who contracted to do actuarial and financial calculations as the Commercial Calculating Company Ltd. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Bexhill, to escape German air raids; he won scholarships to the Merchant Taylors' School and Merton College, Oxford. At Oxford, Maudling stayed out of undergraduate politics and studied the works of Georg Wilhelm Hegel; he was to formulate his conclusions later as the inseparability of economic and political freedom: "the purpose of State control and the guiding principle of its application is the achievement of true freedom". He obtained his degree in Classics with first class honours.
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Robert Borden
Sir Robert Laird Borden, PC GCMG KC (June 26, 1854 – June 10, 1937) was a Canadian lawyer and politician. He served as the eighth Prime Minister of Canada from October 10, 1911 to July 10, 1920, and was the third Nova Scotian to hold this office. After retiring from public life, he served as the chancellor of Queen's University.
Robert Laird Borden was born and educated in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia, a farming community at the eastern end of the Annapolis Valley, where his great-grandfather Perry Borden, Sr. of Tiverton, Rhode Island had taken up Acadian land in 1760. Perry had accompanied his father, Samuel Borden, the chief surveyor chosen by the government of Massachusetts to survey the former Acadian land and draw up new lots for the Planters in Nova Scotia. Robert Borden was the last Canadian Prime Minister born before Confederation. Borden's father Andrew Borden was judged by his son to be "a man of good ability and excellent judgement", of a "calm, contemplative and philosophical" turn of mind, but "He lacked energy and had no great aptitude for affairs". His mother Eunice Jane Laird was more driven, possessing "very strong character, remarkable energy, high ambition and unusual ability". Her ambition was transmitted to her first-born child, who applied himself to his studies while assisting his parents with the farm work he found so disagreeable. His cousin Sir Frederick Borden was a prominent Liberal politician.
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Robert Carr
Leonard Robert Carr, Baron Carr of Hadley, PC (11 November 1916 – 17 February 2012) was a British Conservative Party politician.
Robert Carr was educated at Westminster School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, graduating in 1938. After graduation he applied his knowledge of Metallurgy at John Dale & Co, the family metal engineering firm.
He was elected Member of Parliament for Mitcham in 1950 and served there until 1974 when the seat was merged and he moved to Carshalton. In Edward Heath's government he served as Secretary of State for Employment and was responsible for the Industrial Relations Act 1971, which balanced the introduction of compensation for unfair dismissal with curbs on the freedom to strike and the virtual abolition of closed shop agreements.
In 1971 he escaped injury when The Angry Brigade anarchist group exploded two bombs outside his house. More than thirty years later a member of the group issued a public apology to Carr, and sent him a Christmas card.
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Robert de Ashton
Sir Robert de Ashton, also called "Robert Assheton" or "Robert de Assheton" (died 1385), was a civil, military, and naval officer under Edward III of England who achieved distinction alike in court and camp, by land and by sea.
Ashton was of the great northern family of Ashton or Assheton, of Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire. The house claims descent from Emma, the daughter of Albert de Gresley, the first baron of Manchester; she married Orm, the son of Ailward, and received from her father as a dowry a portion of the lands he had received from Roger of Poictou. From this union, probably of Norman heiress and Saxon thane, descended Sir John Ashton, who was twice married. The date of the birth of his son Robert is not known, nor are there records of his early career.
He was twice married. By his first wife, whose surname is not known, he left a son, Thomas, and a daughter, Eleanor. His second wife was the widow of Lord Matthew de Gomey, and after Ashton's death married Sir John Tiptoft, knt., and died in 1417.
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Robert de Stratford
Robert de Stratford (c.1292 – 9 April 1362) was an English bishop and was one of Edward III of England's principal ministers.
Stratford was the son of Robert Stratford of Stratford-on-Avon and brother of John de Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury. He studied at Oxford.
Stratford served for a time as deputy to his brother John. From 1331 to 1334 he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and from March to July 1338 as Lord Chancellor. He was dismissed as chancellor in 1338 but regained the office for six months in 1340.
Stratford was elected Bishop of Chichester about 24 August 1337, and was consecrated about 18 August 1337.
Stratford died on 9 April 1362 and was buried in Chichester cathedral.
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Robert Lowe
Robert Lowe, 1st Viscount Sherbrooke PC (4 December 1811 – 27 July 1892),British and Australian statesman, was a pivotal but often forgotten figure who shaped British politics in the latter half of the 19th century. He held office under William Ewart Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1868 and 1873 and as Home Secretary between 1873 and 1874. Lowe is remembered for his work in education policy, his opposition to electoral reform and his contribution to modern Company Law. The Division of Lowe, a now abolished Australian electoral division located in Sydney, was named after him. Gladstone appointed Lowe as Chancellor expecting him to hold down public spending. Public spending rose, and Gladstone pronounced Lowe "wretchedly deficient"; most historians agree. Lowe repeatedly underestimated the revenue, enabling him to resist demands for tax cuts and to reduce the national debt instead. He insisted that the tax system be fair to all classes. By his main own criterion of fairness - that the balance between direct and indirect taxation remain unchanged - he succeeded. However historians do not believe this balance is a good measure of class incidence and was by that time thoroughly archaic.
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Robert Peel
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet (5 February 1788 – 2 July 1850) was a British Conservative statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 December 1834 to 8 April 1835, and again from 30 August 1841 to 29 June 1846. While Home Secretary, Peel helped create the modern concept of the police force, leading to officers being known as "bobbies" (in England) and "Peelers" (in Northern Ireland). While Prime Minister after 1841, Peel repealed the Corn Laws and issued the Tamworth Manifesto (1834), leading to the formation of the Conservative Party out of the shattered Tory Party.
Peel was born in Bury, Lancashire, England, to the industrialist and Member of Parliament Sir Robert Peel, 1st Baronet. His father was one of the richest textile manufacturers of the early Industrial Revolution. Peel was educated first at Hipperholme Grammar School, then at Harrow School and finally Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a double first in classics and mathematics. He is also believed to have attended Bury Grammar School. While living in Tamworth, he is credited with the development of the Tamworth Pig by breeding Irish stock with some local Tamworth pigs.
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Robert Walpole
Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, KG, KB, PC (26 August 1676 – 18 March 1745), known before 1742 as Sir Robert Walpole, was a British statesman who is generally regarded as having been the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. Although the position of "Prime Minister" had no recognition in law or official use at the time, Walpole is nevertheless acknowledged as having held the office de facto because of his influence within the Cabinet.
A Whig who was first elected in 1701, Walpole served during the reigns of George I and George II. His tenure is normally dated from 1721 when he obtained the post of First Lord of the Treasury; others date it from 1730 when, with the retirement of Lord Townshend, he became the sole and undisputed leader of the Cabinet. The "longer" version of the tenure is generally upheld by the contemporary press, most notably that of the opposition, who focused far more attention upon Walpole than his counterpart. Walpole continued to govern until his resignation in 1742 prompted by the Battle of Cartagena disaster, making his administration the longest in British history. Because of his homely ways and strong Norfolk roots, he was often known to both friends and detractors as the "fat old Squire of Norfolk."
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Robin Cook
Robert Finlayson Cook (28 February 1946 – 6 August 2005), known as Robin Cook, was a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Livingston from 1983 until his death, and notably served in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001.
He studied at the University of Edinburgh before becoming a Member of Parliament for Edinburgh Central in 1974. In parliament he was noted for his debating ability which saw his rise through the political ranks and ultimately to the Cabinet.
He resigned from his positions as Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons on 17 March 2003 in protest against the invasion of Iraq. At the time of his death, he was President of the Foreign Policy Centre and a vice-president of the America All Party Parliamentary Group and the Global Security and Non-Proliferation All Party Parliamentary Group.
Robin Cook was born in the County Hospital, Bellshill, Scotland, the only son of Peter and Christina Cook (née Lynch). His father was a chemistry teacher who grew up in Fraserburgh, and his grandfather was a miner before being blacklisted for being involved in a strike.
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Roy Jenkins
Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead OM, PC (11 November 1920 – 5 January 2003) was a British politician.
The son of a Welsh coal miner who later became a union official and Labour MP, Roy Jenkins served with distinction in World War II. Elected to Parliament as a Labour member in 1948, he served in several major posts in Harold Wilson's First Government. As Home Secretary from 1965–1967, he sought to build what he described as "a civilized society", with measures such as the effective abolition in Britain of capital punishment and theatre censorship, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, relaxing of divorce law, suspension of birching and the legalisation of abortion. As Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1967–1970, he pursued a tight fiscal policy later praised by Margaret Thatcher. In 1970, he was elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, but resigned in 1972 because he supported entry to the Common Market, while the party opposed it.
When Wilson re-entered government in 1974 Jenkins returned to the Home Office, but, increasingly disenchanted by the swing to the left of the Labour Party,[citation needed] he chose to leave British politics in 1976 and was appointed President of the European Commission in 1977, serving until 1981: he was the first and to date only British holder of this office. In 1981, dismayed with the Labour Party's continuing leftward drift, he was one of the "Gang of Four" - Labour moderates who formed the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In 1982 he won a famous by-election in a Conservative seat and returned to parliament; but after disappointment with the performance of the SDP in the 1983 election he resigned as SDP leader.
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Second Boer War
The Second Boer War (Dutch: Tweede Boerenoorlog, Afrikaans: Tweede Vryheidsoorlog or Tweede Boereoorlog) was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902 between the British Empire and the Afrikaans-speaking Dutch settlers of two independent Boer republics, the South African Republic (Transvaal Republic) and the Orange Free State. It ended with a British victory and the annexation of both republics by the British Empire; both would eventually be incorporated into the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire, in 1910. The conflict is commonly referred to as The Boer War but is also known as the South African War outside South Africa, the Anglo-Boer War among most South Africans, and in Afrikaans as the Anglo-Boereoorlog or Tweede Vryheidsoorlog ("Second War of Liberation" or lit. "Second Freedom War") or the Engelse oorlog (English War).
The Second Boer War and the earlier, much less well known, First Boer War (December 1880 to March 1881) are collectively known as the Boer Wars.
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Selwyn Lloyd
John Selwyn Brooke Lloyd, Baron Selwyn-Lloyd CH PC CBE TD (28 July 1904 – 18 May 1978), known for most of his career as Selwyn Lloyd, was a British Conservative Party politician who served as Foreign Secretary from 1955 to 1960, then as Chancellor of the Exchequer until 1962. He was Speaker of the House of Commons from 1971 to 1976.
Lloyd was educated at Fettes College and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was President of the Cambridge Union and the Cambridge University Liberal Club. He was a Liberal Parliamentary candidate at Macclesfield in the 1929 general election, coming third.
He served as a councillor on Hoylake Urban District Council 1932–40.
During the Second World War he reached the rank of brigadier and was Deputy Chief of Staff of the British Second Army.
He was elected to the House of Commons to represent Wirral in the 1945 general election. Originally a Liberal, he became a member of the "Young Turks" faction of the Conservative Party.
When the Conservatives returned to power under Churchill in 1951, Lloyd served under Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1951 to 1954.
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Spencer Perceval
Spencer Perceval, KC (1 November 1762 – 11 May 1812) was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 4 October 1809 until his death on 11 May 1812. He is the only British Prime Minister to have ever been assassinated. He is also the only Solicitor General or Attorney General to have been Prime Minister.
The younger son of an Irish earl, Perceval was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, practised as a barrister on the Midland Circuit and in 1796 became a King’s Counsel before entering politics at the age of 33 as a Member of Parliament for Northampton. A follower of William Pitt, Perceval always described himself as a "friend of Mr Pitt" rather than a Tory. Perceval was opposed to Catholic emancipation and reform of Parliament; he supported the war against Napoleon and the abolition of the slave trade. He was opposed to hunting, gambling and adultery, did not drink as much as most Members of Parliament, gave generously to charity, and enjoyed spending time with his twelve children.
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Stafford Cripps
Sir Richard Stafford Cripps (24 April 1889 – 21 April 1952) was a British Labour politician of the first half of the 20th century. During World War II he served in a number of positions in the wartime coalition, including Ambassador to the Soviet Union and Minister of Aircraft Production. After the war he served in the Attlee Ministry, firstly as President of the Board of Trade and between 1947 and 1950 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the latter position, Cripps was responsible for laying the foundations of Britain’s post-war economic prosperity, and was, according to the historian Eric Shaw, “the real architect of the rapidly improving economic picture and growing affluence from 1952 onwards.”
Cripps was born in London. His father was a Conservative member of the House of Commons who late in life, as Lord Parmoor, joined the Labour Party. His mother, the former Theresa Potter, was the sister of Beatrice Webb. Cripps grew up in a wealthy family and was educated at Winchester College and at University College London, where he studied chemistry. He left science for the law, and in 1912 was called to the bar as a barrister. He served in the First World War as an ambulance driver in France, and managed a factory producing armaments. He remained a barrister during the 1920s, where he specialised in patent cases, and was reported to be the highest paid lawyer in the country.
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Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC, FRS (3 August 1867 – 14 December 1947) was a British Conservative politician, who dominated the government in his country between the two world wars. Three times Prime Minister, he is the only one to serve under three different monarchs (George V, Edward VIII and George VI).
Baldwin first entered the House of Commons in 1908 as the Member of Parliament for Bewdley, and held government office in the coalition ministry of David Lloyd George. In 1922 Baldwin was one of the prime movers in the withdrawal of Conservative support from Lloyd George and became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Bonar Law's Conservative ministry. Upon Bonar Law's resignation in May 1923, Baldwin became Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader. He called an Election on the issue of tariffs and lost the Conservatives' majority, after which Ramsay MacDonald formed a minority Labour government.
After winning the 1924 General Election Baldwin formed his second government, which saw important tenures of office by Sir Austen Chamberlain (Foreign Secretary), Winston Churchill (at the Exchequer) and Neville Chamberlain (Health). That government also saw the General Strike in 1926 and the 1927 Trades Disputes Act to curb the powers of trade unions, although Baldwin was supportive of Labour politicians at Westminster forming minority governments. Baldwin lost the 1929 General Election and his continued leadership was subject to criticism by the press barons Rothermere and Beaverbrook.
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Stanley Jackson
Sir Francis Stanley Jackson, GCSI, GCIE, PC, KStJ (21 November 1870 – 9 March 1947), known as the Honourable Stanley Jackson during his playing career, was an English cricketer, soldier and Conservative Party politician.
Jackson was born in Leeds. His father was William Jackson, 1st Baron Allerton. During Stanley's time at Harrow School his fag was fellow parliamentarian and future Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1889.
Jackson played for Cambridge University, Yorkshire and England. He spotted the talent of Ranjitsinhji when the latter, owing to his unorthodox batting, was struggling to find a place for himself in the university side, and was responsible for Ranji's inclusion in the Cambridge First XI. He was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1894.
He captained England in 5 Test matches in 1905, winning 2 and drawing 3 to retain The Ashes. Captaining England for the first time, he won all five tosses and topped the batting and bowling averages for both sides, with 492 runs at 70.28 and 13 wickets at 15.46. These were the last of his 20 Test matches, all played at home as he could not spare the time to tour.
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Steven Runciman
Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman CH (7 July 1903 – 1 November 2000) — known as Steven Runciman — was a British historian known for his work on the Middle Ages. His best known work is his three volume A History of the Crusades (1951-54).
Born in Northumberland, he was the second son of Walter Runciman, 1st Viscount Runciman of Doxford, and Hilda Runciman, Viscountess Runciman of Doxford. Both of his parents were or became Members of Parliament for the Liberal Party. His father was created Viscount Runciman of Doxford in 1937. His paternal grandfather, Walter Runciman, 1st Baron Runciman, was a shipping magnate. He was named after his maternal grandfather, James Cochran Stevenson, the MP for South Shields.
It is said that he was reading Latin and Greek by age five. In the course of his long life he would master an astonishing number of languages, so that, for example, when writing about the Middle East, he relied not only on accounts in Latin and Greek and the Western vernaculars, but consulted Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian sources as well. A King's Scholar at Eton College, he was an exact contemporary and close friend of George Orwell. While there, they both studied French under Aldous Huxley.
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The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register (it became The Times on 1 January 1788). The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News International, itself wholly owned by the News Corporation group headed by Rupert Murdoch. The Times and The Sunday Times do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have only had common ownership since 1967.
The Times is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, including The Times of India (1838), The Straits Times (1845), The New York Times (1851), The Irish Times (1859), the Los Angeles Times (1881), The Seattle Times (1891), The Daily Times (Malawi) (1900), The Canberra Times (1926), and The Times (Malta) (1935). For distinguishing purposes it is therefore sometimes referred to, particularly in North America, as the "London Times" or "The Times of London".
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Theresa May
Theresa Mary May (née Brasier, born 1 October 1956) is a British Conservative politician who is Home Secretary in the Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition government. She was elected to Parliament in 1997 as the Member of Parliament for Maidenhead, and served as the Chairman of the Conservative Party, 2003–04. Appointed to the Privy Council in 2003, she became Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Shadow Minister for Women before being appointed Home Secretary and the Minister for Women and Equality in David Cameron's Cabinet on 11 May 2010.
May was born 1 October 1956 in Eastbourne, Sussex. She is the daughter of Rev Hubert Brasier, a Church of England clergyman and Mrs Zaidee Brasier. Her education was completed at a combination of state primary, independent convent and state secondary schools. She initially attended Heythrop Primary School, Oxfordshire, followed by St. Juliana's Convent School for Girls, a Roman Catholic independent school in Begbroke, which closed in 1984. At the age of 13, she gained a place at the former Holton Park Girls' Grammar School in Wheatley in Oxfordshire. In 1971, the school was abolished and became the site of the new Wheatley Park Comprehensive School during her time as a pupil. May then attended the University of Oxford where she read Geography at St Hugh's College, taking a BA (Hons) in 1977.
wn.com/Theresa_May -
Thomas Agar-Robartes
Thomas Charles Reginald Agar-Robartes (22 May 1880 – 30 September 1915) was a British Liberal politician.
Tommy Agar-Robartes was the eldest son and heir of Thomas Agar-Robartes, 6th Viscount Clifden, and his wife Mary (née Dickenson) and was brought up at Lanhydrock House, Bodmin. He was elected a Member of Parliament for Bodmin in the 1906 general election, but lost his seat in June 1906 following a controversial election petition by the defeated candidate alleging illegal payments to potential voters. He was elected to the St Austell Division of Cornwall in a by-election in 1908 and held the seat until his death.
At the outbreak of World War I he joined the Royal Bucks Hussars as an officer. Tommy then joined the Coldstream Guards and was subsequently posted to France & Flanders. Captain The Honourable Thomas Charles Reginald Agar-Robartes, in command of No. 2 Coy, 1st Bn, the Coldstream Guards, was wounded in the Battle of Loos on 28 September and killed by a sniper on 30 September 1915 after rescuing a wounded comrade under heavy fire for which he was recommended for the Victoria Cross.
wn.com/Thomas_Agar-Robartes -
Thomas Lovell
Sir Thomas Lovell (died 1524) was an English soldier and administrator, Speaker of the House of Commons, Secretary to the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He was fifth son of Sir Ralph Lovell of Barton Bendish in Norfolk, by Anne, daughter of Robert Toppe, alderman of Norwich; his family was Lancastrian in politics. Thomas Lovell seems to have been entered at Lincoln's Inn.
He adhered to Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and was attainted in the first parliament of Richard III. He returned with Henry, fought at the battle of Bosworth Field, and his attainder was reversed in Henry VII's first parliament.
On 12 October 1485 he was created chancellor of the exchequer for life; on 27 October he became esquire of the king's body, with a pension, and he was advanced to be knight of the king's body before August 1487. He was also treasurer of the king's and queen's chambers.
In the parliament summoned for 7 November 1485 Lovell was chosen for Northamptonshire, and on 8 November 1485 he was elected speaker. He headed the commons on 10 December 1485, when they requested the king to marry Elizabeth of York, to whom he subsequently lent £500 on the security of her plate. On 3 July 1486 he was one of the commission to treat with the Scots. He probably continued to sit in parliament, though it is only certain that he was elected to that summoned for 16 January 1497. Sir John Mordaunt was chosen speaker in 1488.
wn.com/Thomas_Lovell -
Thomas Thwaites
Sir Thomas Thwaites or Thwaytes (c.1435–1503) was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1471 to 1483, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster between April 2, 1478 - July 7, 1483 and Treasurer of Calais from 1483 to 1490.
He was knighted in 1483. He was arrested for treason in 1493 for involvement in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy.
He owned the manor of Barnes in London.
wn.com/Thomas_Thwaites -
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He resigned from all of these positions in June 2007.
Blair was elected Leader of the Labour Party in the leadership election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party used the phrases "New Labour" and "New Socialism" to define its policy, and moved away from its support of state socialism since the 1960s and created a new version of the ethical socialism that was last pursued by Clement Attlee. Critics of Blair claim that "New Labour" did not adhere to socialism as claimed, and that it effectively advocated capitalism. Blair subsequently led Labour to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. At 43 years old, he became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. In the first years of the New Labour government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto pledges, introducing the minimum wage, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
wn.com/Tony_Blair -
Tony Newton
Antony Harold Newton, Baron Newton of Braintree, PC, OBE, DL (29 August 1937 – 25 March 2012), was a British Conservative politician and former Cabinet member. He was the member of Parliament for Braintree from 1974–1997, and was later a member of the House of Lords.
Newton was born in Harwich, Essex. He was educated at Friends School Saffron Walden and Trinity College, Oxford, where he was President of Oxford University Conservative Association and the Union.
Newton was first elected for the new constituency of Braintree in February 1974 with a majority of 2,001, and successfully retained the seat in the October 1974 general election with a reduced majority of 1,090. The Conservative victory at the 1979 general election boosted his majority dramatically to 12,518, and it increased at every subsequent election to a high of 17,494 at the 1992 general election before his defeat in the Labour landslide at the 1997 general election.
Newton was appointed a government whip when the Conservatives came to power in 1979. In 1982 he moved to a junior ministerial position at the Department of Health and Social Security, where he remained until 1988, becoming Minister for Social Security and Disabled People in 1984, and Minister for Health in 1986.
wn.com/Tony_Newton -
Walter Mildmay
Sir Walter Mildmay (bef. 1523 – 31 May 1589) was an English statesman who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer of England under Queen Elizabeth I, and was founder of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Mildmay was the fourth and the youngest son of Thomas Mildmay of Chelmsford, by his wife, Agnes Read. As the Commissioner for receiving the surrender of the monasteries, his father Thomas had made a large fortune and in 1540 granted the manor of Moulsham, near Chelmsford, and here built a fine mansion.
Mildmay was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, but apparently failed to take his degree. He later became a student of law at Gray's Inn (1546), and there obtained some employment under his father in the Court of Augmentation.
When the Court of Augmentation was reconstituted, about 1545, Mildmay was made one of its two surveyors-general. During Edward VI's reign, Mildmay extended his official connection. On 22 February 1546-7 he was knighted, and on 14 September prepared, along with three others, an inventory of the late King's wardrobe. Sixteen days later he was appointed a Commissioner to report upon the Crown revenues. In 1548 he acted on commissions for the sale of lands (March) and for the maintenance of such grammar schools as had belonged to the dissolved chantries. After the Duke of Somerset's arrest he was ordered by the Privy Council on 12 November 1549, to examine the royal palace at Westminster, which had been in the Duke's custody, and on 8 March 1550-1 to take charge of the Duke's property at Syon House.
wn.com/Walter_Mildmay -
William Catesby
William Catesby, esq. (1450 – August 25, 1485) was one of Richard III of England's principal councillors. He also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Speaker of the House of Commons during Richard's reign.
He was the son of Sir William Catesby of Ashby St Ledgers, Northamptonshire (died 1470) and Philippa, daughter and heiress of Sir William Bishopston. He was trained for the law in the Inner Temple.
As an aspiring lawyer Catesby initially progressed in the service of William, 1st Lord Hastings. He married Margaret, daughter of William La Zouche, 6th Baron Zouche of Harringworth.
He was a member of the Council that ruled during the reign of Edward V. After Richard was enthroned, Catesby was one of King Richard's closest advisors. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as Speaker of the English House of Commons during the Parliament of 1484, in which he sat as knight of the shire for Northamptonshire. He also received a substantial grant of land from the king, enough to make him richer than most knights.
wn.com/William_Catesby -
William Huskisson
William Huskisson PC (11 March 1770 – 15 September 1830) was a British statesman, financier, and Member of Parliament for several constituencies, including Liverpool. He is best known today, however, as the world's first widely reported railway casualty as he was run over by George Stephenson's locomotive engine Rocket.
Huskisson was born at Birtsmorton Court, Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of William and Elizabeth Huskisson, both members of Staffordshire families. He was one of four brothers. After their mother Elizabeth died, their father William eventually remarried and had further children by his second wife. His half-brother Thomas Huskisson was a captain of the Royal Navy, an eyewitness of Trafalgar, and was appointed as the Paymaster of the Navy. His other half-brother George Huskisson was an officer in the Royal Marines before taking up his appointment as Collector of Customs at Saint Vincent.
Huskisson was a student at Appleby Grammar School (later renamed Sir John Moore Church of England Primary School), a boarding school designed by Sir Christopher Wren on the Leicestershire/Derbyshire borders. In 1783, Huskisson was sent to Paris to live with his maternal great-uncle Dr. Richard Gem, who was physician to the British embassy there. He remained in Paris until 1792, and his experience as an eyewitness to the prelude and beginning of the French Revolution gave him a life-long interest in politics. Huskisson first came to public notice while still in Paris. As a supporter of the moderate party, he became a member of the "Club of 1789," which favoured making France into a constitutional monarchy. On 29 August 1790, he delivered a speech entitled "Sur les Assignats", about the issue of assignats by the French government. This speech gave him a reputation as an expert in finance. From 1790 to 1792, the Marquess of Stafford was the British ambassador to Paris. Huskisson became a protégé of the Marquess, and returned to London with him.
wn.com/William_Huskisson -
William Jacks
William Jacks (18 March 1841 – 9 August 1907) was a British ironmaster, author and Liberal politician
Jacks was born at Cornhill-on-Tweed, near Coldstream, Northumberland the son Richard Jacks, a farmer and land steward, and his wife, Mary Lamb. His father died when he was very young and his mother moved to Swinton, near Duns where he was educated at Swinton Village School. He served an apprenticeship in the shipbuilding yard Pile & Co. at West Hartlepool. In his spare time, he studied foreign languages and other subjects and this helped him develop a career in the iron and steel industry.
Jacks moved to a shipyard in Sunderland, and then became manager of Sunderland and Seaham Engine Works and Foundry. With his language skills, he was sent on an errand to Italy to intercept goods that the buyer did not intend to pay for, and not only retrieved the goods, but sold them at a higher price and obtained fresh business for his employers. He was encouraged to join a business in Glasgow in 1870 and founded the iron and steel merchants William Jacks & Co in 1880. He built and sold steamers, completed large contracts for ironwork, and became a director of several companies. It was in the 1880s that Jacks took as a junior partner in the firm Andrew Bonar Law, future Conservative prime minister. Although Jacks' politics were on the opposite side of those of the junior partner, his example may have had an influence on the younger man.
wn.com/William_Jacks -
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British Conservative politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century, he served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States.
Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jenny Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.
wn.com/Winston_Churchill
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Bonar Law forms a new Government (silent)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:47
- Updated: 24 Jul 2012
In this fascinating silent film from the BFI, Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law and his new Cabinet assemble for the first time in the State Dining Room of No10. The year is 1922.
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_forms_a_new_Government_silent
The Question Andrew Bonar Law.mp4
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:18
- Updated: 14 Aug 2011
If I could turn back time, where would I go? www.myantiques.tv Andrew Bonar Law, an expert on rare Irish maps, provides a rather unusual answer.
http://wn.com/The_Question_Andrew_Bonar_Lawmp4
Bonar Law - Wiki Article
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 83:51
- Updated: 21 Nov 2012
In this name, the family name is Law, not Bonar Law. Andrew Bonar Law (known as Bonar; 16 September 1858 -- 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative Party statesman and Prime Minister. Born in the... Bonar Law - Wiki Article - wikiplays.org Original @ http All Information Derived from Wikipedia using Creative Commons License: en.wikipedia.org Author: Unknown (Bain News Service, publisher) Image URL: en.wikipedia.org ( This work is in the Public Domain. ) Author: Verne Equinox Image URL: en.wikipedia.org ( Creative Commons ASA 3.0 ) Author: Unknown Image URL: en.wikipedia.org ( This work is in the Public Domain. ) Author: J. Beagles & Co., Ltd. Image URL: en.wikipedia.org ( This work is in the Public Domain. ) Author: Ellis William Roberts (1860 - 1930) Image URL: en.wikipedia.org ( This work is in the Public Domain. ) Author: Bain Collection Image URL: en.wikipedia.org ( This work is in the Public Domain. ) Author: Unknown Image URL: en.wikipedia.org ( This work is in the Publi...
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Wiki_Article
Bonar Law Talent Show 07
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:26
- Updated: 11 Jun 2012
Bonar Law Talent Show held in 2007 Theo Levi Conrad Clement Michael Allain
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Talent_Show_07
Bonar Law Common - British Car Days of NB 2010
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:11
- Updated: 13 Nov 2012
Great food... Great folks... Great show... At the 3rd Annual British Car Show at the Bonar Law Common, Rexton, NB Canada
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Common_British_Car_Days_of_NB_2010
Bonar Law Common Music By The Water August 15, 2010
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:41
- Updated: 21 Aug 2010
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Common_Music_By_The_Water_August_15,_2010
Bonar Law, Amersham Arms, March 2007
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:26
- Updated: 22 Aug 2010
An absolutely SICK band playing one of their songs at the Amersham Arms in New Cross. Check their myspace at myspace.com/bonarlaw
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law,_Amersham_Arms,_March_2007
Bonar Law Common Tri community Picnic
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:23
- Updated: 10 Sep 2010
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Common_Tri_community_Picnic
The End Of Bonar Law
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:06
- Updated: 06 Oct 2010
Project done in Digital tech. LOL ending is half @$$ :)
http://wn.com/The_End_Of_Bonar_Law
Bonar Law Common Big Dad's Car Show August 15, 2010
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:54
- Updated: 20 Aug 2010
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Common_Big_Dad's_Car_Show_August_15,_2010
Bonar Law Museum Minute
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:25
- Updated: 11 Aug 2012
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Museum_Minute
Bonar Law Common and Big Dad's Car Show August 14 2011
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:33
- Updated: 15 Aug 2011
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law_Common_and_Big_Dad's_Car_Show_August_14_2011
Funeral Cortege of Bonar Law, Prime Minister (1923)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:17
- Updated: 16 May 2011
November 12th, 1923. The funeral Cortege of Bonar Law makes its way to Westminster Abbey. 12 novembre 1923. L'ancien Premier Ministre anglais Bonar Law est enterré à l'Abbaye de Westminster.
http://wn.com/Funeral_Cortege_of_Bonar_Law,_Prime_Minister_1923
The End Of Bonar Law UNEDITED
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:32
- Updated: 25 Jul 2010
The End Of Bonar Law Part 1 UNEDITED
http://wn.com/The_End_Of_Bonar_Law_UNEDITED
8 Canadians Well-Known Elsewhere other than Canada
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 13:31
- Updated: 13 Nov 2012
Recognizing 8 Great Canadians that are more famous in other parts of the world other than Canada. 8. Andrew Bonar Law 7. David Altmejd 6. Joe Ruelle 5. Kathleen Reiter 4. Rob Stewart 3. Mozhdah Jamalzadah 2. Jack Cowin 1. Mark Rowswell
http://wn.com/8_Canadians_Well-Known_Elsewhere_other_than_Canada
Horatius Bonar - God's Way of Holiness: The Saint and the Law (6 of 9)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 36:27
- Updated: 13 Aug 2012
Horatius Bonar - God's Way of Holiness: The Saint and the Law Horatius Bonar playlist: www.youtube.com HoratiusBonar had a passionate heart for revival and was a friend and supporter of several revivalists, He was brother to the more well-known Andrew Bonar, and with him defended DL Moody's evangelistic ministry in Scotland. He authored a couple of excellent revival works, one including over a hundred biographical sketches and the other an addendum to Rev. John Gillies' Historical Collections bringing it up to date. Horatius was in fact one of eleven children, and of these an older brother, John James, and a younger, Andrew, also became ministers and were all closely involved, together with Thomas Chalmers, William C. Burns and Robert Murray M'Cheyne, in the important spiritual movements which affected many places in Scotland in the 1830s and 1840s. In the controversy known as the "Great Disruption," Horatius stood firmly with the evangelical ministers and elders who left the Church of Scotland's General Assembly in May 1843 and formed the new Free Church of Scotland. By this time he had started to write hymns, some of which appeared in a collection he published in 1845, but typically, his compositions were not named. His gifts for expressing theological truths in fluent verse form are evident in all his best-known hymns, but in addition he was also blessed with a deep understanding of doctrinal principles. Examples of the hymns he composed on the fundamental doctrines ...
http://wn.com/Horatius_Bonar_God's_Way_of_Holiness_The_Saint_and_the_Law_6_of_9
Simon Schama's Tour of Downing Street. Pt3: The Dining Room
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:33
- Updated: 24 Jul 2012
Simon Schama looks at the history and style of Downing Street's State Dining Room.
http://wn.com/Simon_Schama's_Tour_of_Downing_Street_Pt3_The_Dining_Room
Stadacona Band - School Concerts
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:42
- Updated: 27 Apr 2012
For two to three weeks every year .... the Stadacona Band performs a series of concerts at elementary and junior high schools throughout the Halifax Regional Municipality and the Maritimes. Here is a sampling of our program from a presentation at the Bonar Law Society Junior High in Rexton NB in March of 2011.
http://wn.com/Stadacona_Band_School_Concerts
UK Prime Minister Song
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:57
- Updated: 16 Nov 2012
All of the Prime Ministers of the UK from Walpole... Thanks for watching and subscribing! Come and say hi on Twitter: www.twitter.com (I'll put a comprehensive list up soon!) Lyrics: Robert Walpole was only stopped At 21 his bubble popped Second in came Spencer Compton Then, sadly, he died in office. Henry Pelham makes it three Reorganised the kings navy Pelham-Holles was number four Led us to the seven years war William but which one? Then Thomas Pelham-Holles again john stuart George Greenville lowered domestic taxation Charles Watson wentworth William founded the empire Augustus Fitzroy Frederick North he did expire De Ja Vu Its Charles Watson Wenworth once more... William, William, William, Henry William, William, William Spencer Perceval, thank word his names not William Then There is Robert banks jenkinson No doubt bugged napoleon Not a fan of emanicipation George Canning Frederick Robinson He handed his notice in Duke of wellington His feet were never soggy Charles grey Lovely cuppa i must say Another William, who didnt stay wellesley, did came out again play Sencond turn Sir Peel had no majority Then William took authority Victoria did oversee the second sir peel ministry And then the run of whigs Lord john Mp for city of London Stanley smith, did stumble on before George Hamilton Gordon Henry John temple He did pass divorce, in a dash Edward smith Stanley Thought hed give it a second bash Henry John Temple Back as a liberal in a flash Second liberal russel But ...
http://wn.com/UK_Prime_Minister_Song
Kyle Jones - Evolution of Dance
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:48
- Updated: 10 Jul 2012
Kyle Jones doing the evolution of Dance, this was at the Bonar Law High School musical talent show called Bengals Night Out. Great job Kyle!
http://wn.com/Kyle_Jones_Evolution_of_Dance
Carson Of The UVF
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:39
- Updated: 16 Nov 2012
Sir Edward Henry Carson (1854-1935) led the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force in opposing Home Rule plans for the whole of Ireland, eventually succeeding in ensuring Northern Ireland remained part of the union. Born on 9 February 1854 to a Protestant family - ironically in southern Ireland, in Dublin - Carson established his name in the legal profession as a formidable advocate. It was Carson who as Queens Counsel cross-examined the Irish writer Oscar Wilde and brought about his conviction for the then illegal practice of homosexuality. Early on in his career, while living and working in Ireland, Carson developed a mistrust of Irish separatists. He was appointed Irish Solicitor General in 1892, the same year he was elected to the House of Commons. He was called to the Bar the following year, serving as British Solicitor General from 1900-05. In February 1910 Carson ended his prospects of leading the Conservative Party in the House of Commons by accepting the leadership of the Irish Unionists - a party determined chiefly with an anti-Home Rule policy. Carson quickly ran up against Herbert Asquith's Liberal administration which in 1912 resolved to bring forward an Irish Home Rule bill. Carson spoke out vociferously - and persuasively - against Home Rule in the House of Commons, while signing (along with other prominent leaders) a so-called 'covenant of resistance' to Home Rule on 28 September 1912. Establishing a provisional government in Belfast in apparent readiness for ...
http://wn.com/Carson_Of_The_UVF
RPM is learning about Canada
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:01
- Updated: 03 Aug 2012
1. What is the origin of the name "Canada"? Canada is a name derived from the Huron-Iroquois kanata meaning, a village or settlement 2. Who was the first Prime Minister of Canada? Sir John A. Macdonald 3. What animal is on the Canadian quarter? the CARIBOU 4. How many oceans touch Canada? THREE - the Atlantic on the east, the Pacific on the west and the Arctic to the north 5. How many countries border Canada? ONE - the United States of America 6. How many provinces in Canada? TEN - from west to east they are: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland 7. What is the capital city of Canada (the national capital)? Ottawa 8. True or False? Canada is the world's second largest country, by land mass? TRUE 9. What is the Canadian $1 coin called? the Loonie (the loon is a Canadian bird and is pictured on the coin, thus the name) 10. How many territories in Canada? THREE - from west to east they are: Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut 11. What is the most recent territory in Canada called? Nunavut 12. When was the most recent territory in Canada formed? April 1, 1999 13. When was the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms included in the Constitution Act? 1982 (no, that isn't a typo) Unlike the majority of democratic countries whose basic law derives from one document, Canada's basic law derives not only from a set of documents known as Constitution Acts, but also a set of unwritten laws ...
http://wn.com/RPM_is_learning_about_Canada
photo: AP / Jerome Delay
27 Nov 2012
M23 rebels controlling the eastern city of Goma in the DR Congo have said they are not about to withdraw as demanded by regional leaders. ... Goma is the main city in DR Congo's North Kivu province. ... Al Jazeera And Agencies. Share. Send Feedback. Featured on Al Jazeera. Cuba's Ladies in White. ... News. Africa. ..._." target="_blank" class="a_keyword_link">. " />. ... International law, the Gaza war, and Palestine's state of exception. ... International law, the Gaza war, and Palestine's state of exception. ... ....(size: 17.7Kb)
photo: UN / Jan Golinski
27 Nov 2012
Doha conference is warned that climate models do not yet take account of methane in thawing permafrost. Frozen ground in Siberia. Permafrost covers nearly a quarter of the northern hemisphere. Photograph: Francis Latreille/Corbis. The United Nations sounded a stark warning on the threat to the climate from methane in the thawing permafrost as governments met for the second day of climate change negotiations in Doha, Qatar. ... ....(size: 5.3Kb)
photo: AP / George Osodi
25 Nov 2012
Twin suicide car bombs exploded Sunday at a church inside one of Nigeria's top military bases, killing at least 11 people and wounding another 30 in an embarrassing attack showing the continued insecurity that haunts Africa's most populous nation. ... The attack began just after noon and targeted the St. ... Gen. ... The group has said Nigeria must implement strict Shariah law and free its imprisoned members before it will stop its attacks. ... ___. ... ....(size: 4.1Kb)
photo: AP / Henry Griffin
26 Nov 2012
Article by WN.com Correspondent Dallas Darling. "In our opinion and from our experience," declared John Kerry in 1971, "there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom..is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy...". ... The U.S....(size: 6.4Kb)
photo: AP / Jerome Delay
25 Nov 2012
Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has held direct talks with the leader of the M23 rebels in Uganda, hours after a regional summit called on them to end their offensive in the east of the country. ... Share. ... International law, the Gaza war, and Palestine's state of exception. ... International law, the Gaza war, and Palestine's state of exception. ... International law, the Gaza war, and Palestine's state of exception. ... ....(size: 20.0Kb)
The New York Times
27 Nov 2012
By HARVEY MORRIS. LONDON — Britain’s press reached for the soccer analogy to explain why a foreigner had been picked to head the Bank of England, the country’s central bank. Reporting the surprise announcement that Mark J. ... Andrew Bonar Law, Conservative prime minister from 1922 to 1923, was born in New Brunswick in 1858 (although sticklers will point out that was nine years before the province joined the Canadian Confederation). ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)
Foreign Policy
26 Nov 2012
For instance, to be a member of parliament according to British law, you need only be "18 years of age, and a
British citizen, or citizen of a Commonwealth country or the Republic of
Ireland." To date, the only prime minister born outside the British isles was New Brunswick's own Bonar Law....(size: 2.6Kb)
CBC
16 Nov 2012
Police received a report that a man with a gun was seen just outside Bonar Law Memorial High School at around 8:30 a.m., ......(size: 0.6Kb)
The Guardian
14 Nov 2012
Letters show Guardian editor thanking US correspondent for Robert Kennedy coverage, and Cooke criticising rivals' 'flash dubious hard news'. Alistair Cooke in 1972. ... Photograph: AP. ... The subjects of the first stories included a speech by Bonar Law, recently returned to the leadership of the Conservative party and newly into Britain's briefist stint as prime minister, notwithstanding his victory in the general election the following day. ... ....(size: 6.3Kb)
Irish Times
11 Oct 2012
It must become law in the exact shape in which it will leave the House of Commons at the end of the present Session. ... As Mr Bonar Law [Conservative /Unionist party leader] pointed out yesterday, the extraordinarily difficult question of Irish representation in the House of Commons must be exhausted in six and a half hours of parliamentary time....(size: 3.1Kb)
Belfast Telegraph
25 Sep 2012
"No idle sightseers ... but a genuine political force [and] ... a most effective organisation with that of the men.". These were the words which unionist, Roland MacNeill used to describe the Ulster Womenâs Unionist Council (UWUC) in 1922. ... She was also an influential patron of the unionist leader, Edward Carson who regarded her as his best friend and of the Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law. ... ....(size: 9.6Kb)
Belfast Telegraph
24 Sep 2012
By May 1912, when the Liberal Unionists merged with the Conservatives to become the Conservative and Unionist Party under the leadership of Andrew Bonar Law, Carsonâs political focus was on Ireland....(size: 8.9Kb)
The Guardian
27 Aug 2012
Conservative politician regarded as a safe pair of hands who became deputy chief whip in the House of Lords. In his maiden speech in the Lords, Viscount Davidson opposed metrication. Photograph: Photoshot. ... JCC Davidson had been a trusted intimate of two Tory prime ministers, Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin, and, in 1927, at the age of 38, the youngest chairman of the Conservative party. ... His second wife, Pamela, died in 2006. ... ....(size: 3.8Kb)
The Guardian
27 Aug 2012
Conservative politician regarded as a safe pair of hands who became deputy chief whip in the House of Lords. In his maiden speech in the Lords, Viscount Davidson opposed metrication. Photograph: Photoshot. ... JCC Davidson had been a trusted intimate of two Tory prime ministers, Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin, and, in 1927, at the age of 38, the youngest chairman of the Conservative party. ... His second wife, Pamela, died in 2006. ... ....(size: 3.8Kb)
The Observer
12 Aug 2012
Former prime minister John Major, with Prince Harry and Peter Phillips, at London's Olympic velodrome. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images. We saw David Cameron all too often, at one point playing uneasy host to Vladimir Putin. ... After the unknown soldier, they were burying "the unknown prime minister", Herbert Asquith quipped at the funeral of Andrew Bonar Law, and the tag sometimes seemed to apply to Major. ... Your first name. ... ....(size: 6.0Kb)
The Independent
21 Jul 2012
Planning permission was granted in May, but an appeal against the decision was referred to Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Community. Yesterday, a spokesman for Mr Pickles told the developers, Longshot, there was insufficient reason for him to intervene, meaning the development will go ahead. ... "We already had the consent of the Foundation. ... It was there that Bonar Law agreed to allow Lloyd George to run the War Office, in 1916. ... ....(size: 6.3Kb)
The Independent
21 Jul 2012
Planning permission was granted in May, but an appeal against the decision was referred to Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Community. Yesterday, a spokesman for Mr Pickles told the developers, Longshot, there was insufficient reason for him to intervene, meaning the development will go ahead. ... "We already had the consent of the Foundation. ... It was there that Bonar Law agreed to allow Lloyd George to run the War Office, in 1916. ... ....(size: 6.3Kb)
The Independent
21 Jul 2012
Planning permission was granted in May, but an appeal against the decision was referred to Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Community. Yesterday, a spokesman for Mr Pickles told the developers, Longshot, there was insufficient reason for him to intervene, meaning the development will go ahead. ... "We already had the consent of the Foundation. ... It was there that Bonar Law agreed to allow Lloyd George to run the War Office, in 1916. ... ....(size: 6.3Kb)
In this name, the family name is Law, not Bonar Law.
| The Right Honourable Bonar Law |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Prime Minister of the United Kingdom | |
| In office 23 October 1922 – 22 May 1923 |
|
| Monarch | George V |
| Preceded by | David Lloyd George |
| Succeeded by | Stanley Baldwin |
| Leader of the Opposition | |
| In office 13 November 1911 – 25 May 1915 |
|
| Monarch | George V |
| Prime Minister | Herbert Henry Asquith |
| Preceded by | Arthur Balfour |
| Succeeded by | Vacant next held by Sir Edward Carson on 19 October 1915 |
| Chancellor of the Exchequer | |
| In office 10 December 1916 – 10 January 1919 |
|
| Prime Minister | David Lloyd George |
| Preceded by | Reginald McKenna |
| Succeeded by | Austen Chamberlain |
| Secretary of State for the Colonies | |
| In office 25 May 1915 – 10 December 1916 |
|
| Prime Minister | Herbert Henry Asquith David Lloyd George |
| Preceded by | The Viscount Harcourt |
| Succeeded by | The Viscount Long |
| Lord Privy Seal | |
| In office 10 January 1919 – 1 April 1921 |
|
| Prime Minister | David Lloyd George |
| Preceded by | The Earl of Crawford |
| Succeeded by | Austen Chamberlain |
| Member of Parliament for Glasgow Central |
|
| In office December 1918 – 30 October 1923 |
|
| Preceded by | John Mackintosh MacLeod |
| Succeeded by | William Alexander |
| Member of Parliament for Bootle |
|
| In office March 1911 – December 1918 |
|
| Preceded by | Thomas Myles Sandys |
| Succeeded by | Thomas Royden |
| Member of Parliament for Dulwich |
|
| In office May 1906 – December 1910 |
|
| Preceded by | Frederick Rutherfoord Harris |
| Succeeded by | Sir Frederick Hall |
| Member of Parliament for Glasgow Blackfriars |
|
| In office October 1900 – January 1906 |
|
| Preceded by | Andrew Dryburgh Provand |
| Succeeded by | George Nicoll Barnes |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1858-09-16)16 September 1858 Rexton, New Brunswick, Canada |
| Died | 30 October 1923(1923-10-30) (aged 65) London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Conservative |
| Spouse(s) | Annie Pitcairn Robley |
| Alma mater | University of Glasgow, United Kingdom (night classes) |
| Profession | Banker |
| Religion | Presbyterian |
| Signature |  |
Andrew Bonar Law (known as Bonar; 16 September 1858 – 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative Party statesman and Prime Minister. Born in the colony of New Brunswick, he is the only British Prime Minister to have been born outside the British Isles.[1] He was also the shortest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th century, spending 211 days in office.
Law was born to a rural preacher and his wife in New Brunswick, where he spent his early life. A few years after his mother's death in 1861, his father remarried, and in 1870 Law moved to Helensburgh, Scotland, to live with his mother's sister Janet and her family, who ran a successful merchant bank. After an education at a preparatory school in Hamilton and the High School of Glasgow, Law left school aged sixteen to gain a "commercial education" at the family firm. A few years later the firm was sold to the Clydesdale Bank, putting Law's career in jeopardy until his uncles loaned him the money to buy a partnership in an iron merchants firm. Through hard work and his business acumen the firm flourished under Law, and by the time he was thirty he was a comparatively rich man.
Law first entered politics in 1897, when he was asked to be the Conservative Party candidate for the seats of Glasgow Bridgeton and then Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown, accepting Blackfriars. Despite a large Liberal Party majority in his seat, Law campaigned successfully for the 1900 general election and was returned to Parliament. In the House of Commons he became noted for his excellent memory and oratory, and soon gained a position on the Conservative front bench. A strong supporter of tariff reform, Law was made Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade in 1902. The issue of tariff reform split the Conservative Party, and Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned, prompting a general election in which the Conservative Party were forced into opposition. In opposition Law continued to argue for tariff reform, both in Parliament and within his party, largely avoiding the constitutional crisis surrounding the People's Budget in 1909. His appointment as a Privy Councillor that year marked him out as a conservative frontrunner, and when it became clear that Arthur Balfour would resign as Leader of the Conservative Party, Law put his name forward. Despite trailing third before Walter Long and Austen Chamberlain Law eventually won the election when the strong possibility of a draw between Long and Chamberlain that would split the party forced both to withdraw.
As Leader of the Conservative Party, Law focused his attentions on two main areas; tariff reform, which he supported, and Irish Home Rule, to which he was opposed. As leader of the opposition he was in no position to make active changes, but his strong campaigning, particularly on Home Rule, turned Liberal attempts to pass the Third Home Rule Bill into a three year struggle eventually halted by the start of the First World War.
Early life and education[link]
Law was born on 16 September 1858 in Kingston (now Rexton), New Brunswick, to the Reverend James Law, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland with Scottish and Irish ancestry, and his wife Eliza Kidston Law.[2] From the perspective of the time, Law was not born in Canada, as at the time New Brunswick was a separate colony, and Canadian confederation did not occur until 1867.[2] His mother originally wanted to name him after Robert Murray M'Cheyne, a preacher she greatly admired, but as his older brother was already called Robert he was instead named after the Reverend Andrew Bonar, a biographer of M'Cheyne. Throughout his life he was always called Bonar (rhyming with honour) by his family and close friends, never Andrew. He originally signed his name as A.B. Law, changing to A. Bonar Law in his thirties, and he was referred to as Bonar Law by the public as well.[3]
James Law was the minister for several isolated townships, and had to travel between them by horse, boat and on foot. To supplement the family income he bought a small farm on the Richibucto River, which Bonar helped tend along with his brothers Robert, William and John, and his sister Mary.[3] Studying at the local village school,[4] Law excelled at his studies, and it is here that he was first noted for his excellent memory.[5] After Eliza Law died in 1861, her sister Janet travelled to New Brunswick from her home in Scotland to look after the Law children. When James Law remarried in 1870 his new wife took over Janet's duties, and Janet decided to return to Scotland. She suggested that Bonar Law should come with her, as the Kidston family were wealthier and better connected than the Laws, and Bonar would have a more privileged upbringing.[6] Both James and Bonar accepted this, and Bonar left with Janet, never to return to Kingston.[7]
Law went to live at Janet's house in Helensburgh, near Glasgow. Her brothers Charles, Richard and William were partners in the family merchant bank Kidston & Sons, and as only one of them had married (and produced no heir) it was generally accepted that Law would inherit the firm, or at least play a role in its management when he was older.[8] Immediately upon arriving from Kingston, Law began attending Gilbertfield School,[9] a preparatory school in Hamilton.[10] In 1873 when he was fourteen he transferred to the High School of Glasgow, where with his excellent memory he showed a talent for languages, excelling in Greek, German and French.[8] During this period he first began to play chess – he would carry a board on the train between Helensburgh and Glasgow, challenging other commuters to matches. He eventually became an excellent amateur player, and competed with internationally renowned chess masters.[11] Despite his excellent academic record it became obvious at Glasgow that he was better suited to business than to university, and when he was sixteen Law left school to become a clerk at Kidston & Sons.[8]
Business career[link]
At Kidston & Sons, Law was paid a nominal salary, with the intent being that he would gain a "commercial education" from working there that would serve him well as a businessman.[12] In 1885 the Kidson brothers decided to retire, and agreed to merge the firm with the Clydesdale Bank.[13] The merger would have left Law without a job and with poor career prospects, but the retiring brothers found him a job with William Jacks, an iron merchant who was pursuing a parliamentary career.[13] The Kidson brothers lent Law the money to buy a partnership in Jacks' firm, and with Jacks himself no longer playing an acting part in the company, Law effectively became the managing partner.[14] Working long hours (and insisting that his employees did as well), Law turned the firm into one of the most profitable iron merchants in the Glaswegian and Scottish markets.[14]
During this period Law became a "self-improver"; despite his lack of formal university education he sought to test his intellect, attending lectures given at Glasgow University and joining the Glasgow Parliamentary Debating Association,[13] which adhered as closely as possible to the layout of the real Parliament of the United Kingdom and undoubtedly helped Law hone the skills that served him so well in the political arena.[12]
By the time he was thirty Law had established himself as a successful businessman, and had time to devote to more leisurely pursuits. He was an avid chess player, whom Andrew Harley called "a strong player, touching first-class amateur level, which he had attained by practice at the Glasgow Club in earlier days".[15] Law also worked with the Parliamentary Debating Association and took up golf, tennis and walking.[16] In 1888 he moved out of the Kidson household and set up his own home at Seabank, with his sister Mary (who had earlier come over from Canada) acting as the housekeeper. Two years later he met Annie Robley, a 24-year-old daughter of a Glaswegian merchant Harrington Robley.[17] They quickly fell in love, and were married on 24 March 1891. Little is known of Law's wife, as most of her letters have been lost. It is known that she was much liked in both Glasgow and London, and that her death in 1909 hit Law hard; despite his relatively young age and prosperous career, he never remarried.[17] The couple had five sons and two daughters, although the first son was stillborn. The youngest son was Richard Law, later Baron Coleraine,[17] the third Charlie Law, who as a soldier with the King's Own Scottish Borderers was killed at the Second Battle of Gaza.[18] His eldest son, a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down and killed on 21 September of that year, and the deaths made Law even more melancholy and depressed than before.[19] Isabel, the eldest daughter, married Sir Frederick Sykes and Catherine, the youngest, married George Archibald, 1st Baron Archibald.[12]
Entry into politics[link]
In 1897 Law was asked to become the Conservative Party candidate for the parliamentary seat of Glasgow Bridgeton. Soon after he was offered another seat, this one in Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown, which he took instead of Glasgow Bridgeton.[20] Blackfriars was not a seat with high prospects attached; a working-class area, it had returned Liberal Party MPs since it was created in 1884, and the incumbent, Andrew Provand, was highly popular.[20] Although the election was not due until 1902, the events of the Second Boer War forced the Conservative government to call a general election in 1900, later known as the khaki election.[21] The campaign was unpleasant for both sides, with anti- and pro-war campaigners fighting vociferously, but Law distinguished himself with his oratory and wit. When the results came in on 4th October, Law was returned to Parliament with a majority of 1,000, overturning Provand's majority of 381.[22] He immediately ended his active work at Jacks and Company (although he retained his directorship) and moved to London.[23]
Bonar initially became frustrated with the slow speed of Parliament compared to the rapid pace of the Glasgow iron market,[23] and Austen Chamberlain recalled him saying to Chamberlain that "it was very well for men who, like myself had been able to enter the House of Commons young to adapt to a Parliamentary career, but if he had known what the House of Commons was he would never had entered at this stage".[24] He soon learnt to be patient, however, and on 18 February 1901 made his debut speech. Replying to anti-Boer War MPs including David Lloyd George, Law used his excellent memory to quote sections of Hansard back to the opposition which contained their previous speeches supporting and commending the policies they now denounced.[23] Although lasting only fifteen minutes and not a crowd- or press-pleaser like the debut speeches of F.E. Smith or Winston Churchill, it attracted the attention of the Conservative Party leaders.[25][26]
Tariff reform[link]
Law's chance to make his mark came with the issue of tariff reform. To cover the costs of the Second Boer War, Lord Salisbury's Chancellor of the Exchequer (Michael Hicks Beach) suggested introducing import taxes or tariffs on foreign metal, flour and grain coming into Britain. Such tariffs had previously existed in Britain, but had been abolished in the 1870s because of the free trade movement.[27] The issue became "explosive",[27] dividing the British political world, and continued even after Salisbury retired and was replaced as Prime Minister by his nephew, Arthur Balfour. Law took advantage of this, making his first major speech on 22 April 1902, in which he argued that while he felt a general tariff was unnecessary, an imperial customs union (which would put tariffs on items from outside the British Empire, instead of on every nation but Britain) was a good idea, particularly since other nations such as Germany and the United States had increasingly high tariffs.[28] Using his business experience, he made a "plausible case" that there was no proof that tariffs led to increases in the cost of living, as the Liberals had argued. Again his memory came into good use — when William Harcourt accused Law of misquoting him, Law was able to precisely give the place in Hansard where Harcourt's speech was to be found.[28]
As a result of Law's proven experience in business matters and his skill as an economic spokesman for the government, Balfour offered him the position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade when he formed his government, which Law accepted,[29] and he was appointed on 8 August 1902.[30] As Parliamentary Secretary his job was to assist the President of the Board of Trade, Gerald Balfour. At the time the tariff reform controversy was brewing, with the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, an ardent tariff reformer who "declared war" on free trade, leading.[29] After returning from a speaking tour of South Africa in 1903, Chamberlain found that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer (C.T. Ritchie) had removed the tariff reforms suggested by Hicks Beach from the budget.[29] Angered by this, Chamberlain spoke at the Birmingham Town Hall on 15 May without the government's permission, arguing for an Empire-wide system of tariffs which would protect Imperial economies, forge the British Empire into one political entity and allow them to compete with other world powers.[31]
The speech and its ideas split the Conservative Party into two wings — the Free-Fooders, who supported free trade, and the Tariff Reformers, who supported Chamberlain's tariff reforms. Law was a dedicated Tariff Reformer, but for more mundane and worldly reasons than Chamberlain; while Chamberlain dreamed of a new golden age for Britain, Law focused on more practical results, such as a reduction in unemployment.[31] L.S. Amery said that to Law, the tariff reform program was "a question of trade figures and not national and Imperial policy of expansion and consolidation of which trade was merely the economic factor".[31] Keith Laybourn attributes Law's interest in tariff reform not only to the sound business practice that it represented but also that because of his place of birth "he was attracted by the Imperial tariff preference arrangements advocated by Joseph Chamberlain".[32] Law's constituents in Blackfriars were not overly enthusiastic about tariff reform — Glasgow was a poor area at the time that had benefited from free trade.[31] In Parliament itself Law worked exceedingly hard at pushing for tariff reform, regularly speaking in the House of Commons and defeating legendary debaters such as Winston Churchill, Charles Dilke and Herbert Henry Asquith, former Home Secretary and later Prime Minister.[33] His speeches at the time were known for their clarity and common sense; Sir Ian Malcolm said that he made "the involved seem intelligible", and L.S. Amery said his arguments were "like the hammering of a skilled riveter, every blow hitting the nail on the head".[33] Despite Law's efforts to forge consensus within the Conservatives, Balfour was unable to hold the two sides of his party together, and resigned in December 1905.[33]
In opposition[link]
The new Prime Minister, a Liberal named Henry Campbell-Bannerman, immediately dissolved Parliament and forced a general election in which, despite strong campaigning and a visit by Arthur Balfour, Law lost his seat.[34] This was part of a wider loss; the Conservative Party lost 245 seats, leaving them with only 157 Members of Parliament who were themselves divided into two factions.[35] Despite his loss, Law was at this stage such an asset to the Conservatives that an immediate effort was made to get him back into Parliament. The retirement of Frederick Rutherfoord Harris, MP for the safe Conservative seat of Dulwich, offered him a chance.[36] As the Conservative candidate he was returned to Parliament in the ensuing by-election, also increasing the Conservative majority to 1,279.[35]
The party was struck a blow in July 1906, when two days after a celebration of his seventieth birthday, Joseph Chamberlain suffered a stroke and was forced to retire from politics.[37] He was succeeded by Austen Chamberlain, Joseph's son, who despite previous experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer and enthusiasm for tariff reform was not as skilled a speaker as Law.[38] As a result Law joined Balfour's Shadow Cabinet as the principal spokesman for tariff reform.[38] The death of Law's wife on 31 October 1909 led him to work even harder as a coping strategy, and as a result he saw his political career not only as a job but as a cure for his loneliness.[38]
The Peoples' Budget and the House of Lords[link]
Campbell-Bannerman resigned as Prime Minister in April 1908 and was replaced by Herbert Henry Asquith.[39] In 1909 he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George introduced the People's Budget, a budget which through tax changes and tariffs sought to redistribute wealth and fund social reform programs.[40] By parliamentary convention financial and budget bills are not challenged by the House of Lords, but in this case the predominately Conservative Lords rejected the bill on 30 April, setting off a constitutional crisis.[40] The Liberals called a general election in January 1910, and Law spent most of the preceding months campaigning up and down the country for other Conservative candidates and MPs, sure that his Dulwich seat was safe, and when the results came in he held an increased majority of 2,418.[41] The overall result was more confused; while the Conservatives had gained 116 seats, bringing their total to 273, this was not enough to overturn the Liberal majority, and produced a hung parliament.[41] The Liberals formed a temporary coalition government with the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the budget passed through the House of Commons a second time without significant problems.[41]
This created a constitutional question — should the House of Lords be able to overturn bills passed by the House of Commons? The Liberal government introduced a bill in February 1910 which would prevent the House of Lords vetoing finance bills, and would force them to pass any bill which had been passed by the Commons in three sessions of Parliament.[41] This was immediately opposed by the Unionists, and both parties spent the next several months in a running battle over the bill.[41] The Conservatives were led by Arthur Balfour and Lord Lansdowne, who headed the Conservatives in the House of Lords, while Law spent the time concentrating on the continuing problem of tariff reform.[41] The lack of progress had convinced some senior Conservatives that it would be a good idea to scrap tariff reform altogether, which Law disagreed with, successfully arguing that tariff reform "was the first constructive work of the [Conservative Party]" and that to scrap it would "split the Party from top to bottom".[42]
With this success, Law returned to the constitutional crisis surrounding the House of Lords. The death of Edward VII on 6 May 1910 prompted the leaders of the major political parties to secretly meet in a "truce of god" to discuss the Lords. The meetings were kept almost entirely secret — outside of the party representatives, the only people aware were F.E. Smith, J.L. Garvin, Edward Carson and Bonar Law.[43] The group met approximately twenty times at Buckingham Palace between June and November 1910, with the Conservatives represented by Arthur Balfour, Lord Cawdor, Lord Lansdowne and Austen Chamberlain.[42] The proposal presented at the conference by David Lloyd George was a coalition government with members of both major parties in the Cabinet and a program involving Home Rule, poor law reforms, imperial reorganisation and possibly tariff reforms.[43] The interesting element of the Home Rule proposal was that it involved devolution — the idea that the United Kingdom could become a federal system, with "Home Rule all around" for Scotland, Ireland and England and Wales.[43] In the end the plans fell through — Balfour told Lloyd George on 2 November that the proposal would not work, and the conference was dissolved a few days later.[43]
December 1910 general election[link]
With the failure to establish a political consensus after the January 1910 general election, the Liberals called a second general election in December. The Conservative leadership decided that a good test of the popularity of the tariff reform program would be to have a prominent tariff reformer stand for election in a disputed seat.[44] They considered Law a prime candidate, and after debating it for a month he guardedly agreed, enthusiastic about the idea but worried about the effect of a defeat on the Party.[44] Law was selected as the candidate for Manchester North West, and became drawn into party debates about how strong a tariff reform policy should be put in their manifesto.[45] Law personally felt that duties on foodstuffs should be excluded, something agreed to by Alexander Acland-Hood, Edward Carson and others at a meeting of the Constitutional Club on 8 November 1910, but they failed to reach a consensus and the idea of including or excluding food duties continued to be something that divided the party.[45]
During this period, the idea of using general elections as referendums for particular policies came into play.[45] After a sarcastic suggestion by Lord Crewe, Arthur Balfour announced to a crowd of 10,000 at the Royal Albert Hall that the coming election would be used as a referendum on tariff reform, something he described as "Bonar Law's proposal" or the "Referendum Pledge".[46] The suggestion was no more Law's than it was any of the other dozens of conservatives who had suggested this to Balfour, and his comment was simply an attempt to "pass the buck" and avoid the anger of Austen Chamberlain, who was furious that such an announcement had been made without consulting him or the party.[46] While Law had written a letter to Balfour suggesting that a referendum would attract wealthy Conservatives, he said that "declaration would do no good with [the working class] and might damp enthusiasm of best workers".[47]
Parliament was dissolved on 28 November, with the election to take place and polling to end by 19 December.[47] The Conservative Party as a whole gained the largest number of seats of any one party, but with the support of the Irish Nationalists the Liberal Party formed a government. Law called his campaign in Manchester North West the hardest of his career; his opponent, George Kemp, was a war hero who had fought in the Second Boer War and a former Conservative who had joined the Liberal party because of his disagreement with tariff reform.[48] In the end Law narrowly lost, with 5,114 votes to Kemp's 5,559, but the election turned him into a "genuine [Conservative] hero", and he later said that the defeat did "more for him in the party than a hundred victories".[49] In 1911, with the Conservative Party unable to afford him being out of Parliament, Law was elected in a by-election for the safe Conservative seat of Bootle.[49] In his brief absence the Liberal suggestions for the reform of the House of Lords were passed as the Parliament Act 1911, ending that particular dispute.[50]
Leader of the Conservative Party[link]
On the coronation of George V on 22 June 1911, Bonar Law was made a Privy Counsellor on the recommendation of the new Prime Minister and Arthur Balfour.[51] Within the Conservative Party, Privy Counsellorship was evidence of party seniority and importance.[51] Balfour had been becoming increasingly unpopular as Leader of the Conservative Party since the 1906 general election; tariff reformers saw his leadership as the reason for their electoral losses, and the "free fooders" had been alienated by Balfour's attempts to tame the zeal of the tariff reform faction.[52] Balfour refused all suggestions of party reorganisation until a meeting of senior Conservatives led by Lord Salisbury after the December 1910 electoral defeat issued an ultimatum demanding a review of party structure.[53]
The defeat on the House of Lords issue turned a wing of the Conservative Party led by Henry Page Croft and his Reveille Movement, against Balfour.[53] Leo Maxse began a Balfour Must Go campaign in his paper the National Review, and by July 1911 Balfour was contemplating resignation.[54] Law himself had no problem with Balfour's leadership, and along with Edward Carson attempted to regain support for him.[55] By November 1911 it was accepted that Balfour was likely to resign, with the main competitors being Law, Carson, Walter Long and Austen Chamberlain.[55] When the elections began Long and Chamberlain were the frontrunners, Chamberlain commanding the support of many tariff reformers and Long the leader of the Ulster Unionists.[55] Carson immediately announced that he would not stand, and Law eventually announced that he would run for Leader, the day before Balfour resigned on 7 November.[56]
At the beginning of the election Law held the support of no more than 40 of the 270 Members of parliament; the remaining 130 were divided between Long and Chamberlain. Although Long believed he had the most MPs, his support was largely backbenchers and most of the whips and frontbenchers preferred Chamberlain.[56] With Long and Chamberlain almost equal they called a meeting on 9 November to discuss the possibility of a deadlock. Chamberlain suggested that he would withdraw if this became a strong possibility, assuming Long did the same. Long, now scared that his weak health would not allow him to survive the stress of party leadership, agreed.[57] Both did so on 10 November, and on 13 November 232 MPs assembled at the Carlton Club, where Law was nominated to be leader by Long and Chamberlain. With the unanimous support of the MPs, Law became Leader of the Conservative Party despite never having sat in Cabinet.[58]
As Leader, Law first "rejuvenated the party machine", selecting newer, younger and more popular whips and secretaries, elevating F.E. Smith and Robert Cecil to the Shadow Cabinet and using his business acumen to reorganise the party, resulting in better relations with the press and local branches, along with the raising of a £671,000 "war chest" for the next general election that was almost double that available at the previous one.[59] On 12 February 1912 he finally unified the two branches of the party (Conservatives and Unionists) into the awkwardly named National Unionist Association of Conservative and Liberal-Unionist Organisations. From then on all were referred to as "Unionists" until the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, after which they became Conservatives again.[60]
In Parliament, Law introduced the so-called "new style" of speaking, with harsh, accusatory rhetoric, that dominates British politics to this day.[61] This was as a counter to Arthur Balfour, known for his "masterly witticisms", because the party felt they needed a warrior-like figure. Law did not particularly enjoy his tougher manner, and at the State Opening of Parliament in February 1912 apologised directly to Asquith for his coming speech, saying "I am afraid I shall have to show myself very vicious, Mr Asquith, this session. I hope you will understand".[62] Law's "warrior king" figure helped unify the divided Conservatives into a single body, with him as the leader.[63]
Social policy[link]
During his early time as Conservative leader, social policy was the most complicated and difficult to set up. In his opening speech as leader he said that the party would be one of principle, and would not be reactionary, instead sticking to their guns and holding firm policies.[64] Despite this he left things such as womens suffrage alone, leaving the party unwhipped and saying that "the less part we take in this question the better".[65] In terms of social reform (legislation to improve the conditions of the poor and working classes) Law was similarly unenthusiastic, believing that the area was a Liberal one that they could not successfully compete in.[65] His response to a request by Lord Balcarres for a social program was simply "as the [Liberal Party] refuse to formulate their policy in advance we should be equally absolved".[66] His refusal to get drawn in may have actually strengthened his hold over Conservative MPs, many of whom were similarly uninterested in social reform.[66]
In his first public speech as leader at the Royal Albert Hall on 26 January 1912 he listed his three biggest concerns: an attack on the Liberal government, for failing to submit their ideas for Home Rule to a referendum; tariff reform; and the Conservative refusal to let the Ulster Unionists be "trampled upon" by an unfair Home Rule bill.[67] Both tariff reform and Ulster dominated his political work, with Austen Chamberlain saying that Law "once said to me that he cared intensely for only two things: Tariff Reform and Ulster; all the rest was only part of the game".[67]
More tariff reform[link]
After further review with members of his party, Law changed his initial beliefs on tariff reform and accepted the full package, including duties on foodstuffs. On 29 February 1912 the entire Conservative parliamentary body met at Lansdowne House, with Lord Lansdowne chairing.[68] Lansdowne argued that although the electorate might prefer the Conservative party if the dropped food duties from their tariff reform plan, it would open them to accusations of bad faith and "poltroonery".[68] Law endorsed Lansdowne's argument, pointing out that any attempt to avoid food duties would cause an internal party struggle and could only aid the Liberals, and that Canada, the most economically important colony, would never agree to tariffs without British support of food duties.[68]
Lord Salisbury, who opposed food duties, wrote to Law several weeks later suggesting they separate foodstuffs from tariff reform for the referendum. If the electorate liked food duties, they would vote for the entire package; if not, they did not have to.[69] Law replied arguing that it would be impossible to effectively do so, and that with the increasing costs of defence and social programs it would be impossible to raise the necessary capital except by comprehensive tariff reform. He also argued that a failure to offer the entire tariff reform package would split the Conservative Party down the middle, offending the tariff reform faction, and that if such a split took place "I could not possibly continue as leader".[69] Law held off on withdrawing the "Referendum Pledge" of a tariff reform referendum into 1912 because of the visit of Robert Borden, the newly elected Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, to London planned for July.[69] Meeting with Borden on his arrival, Law got him to agree to make a statement about the necessity of Imperial tariff reform, promising reciprocal agreements and saying that failure by London to agree tariff reform would result in an "irresistible pressure" for Canada to make a treaty with another nation, most obviously the United States.[70]
Law decided that the November party conference was the perfect time to announce the withdrawal of the Referendum Pledge, and that Lord Lansdowne should be the one to do it, firstly because he had been leader in the House of Lords when the pledge was made and secondly because of his relatively low profile during the original tariff reform dispute.[71] When the conference opened the British political world was a jittery one; on 12 November the opposition had narrowly defeated the government on an amendment to the Home Rule Bill, and the next evening Asquith attempted to introduce a motion reversing the previous vote, something met with hysterical shouting from the opposition. As the MPs filed out at the end of the day Winston Churchill began taunting the opposition, and in his anger Ronald McNeil hurled a copy of Standing Orders of the House at Churchill, hitting him on the head.[71] Law refused to condemn the events, and it seems apparent that while he had played no part in organising them they had been pre organised by the party Whips.[71] As party leader, he was most likely aware of the plans even if he did not actively participate.[71]
The conference was opened on 14 November 1912 by Lord Farquhar, who immediately introduced Lord Lansdowne.[72] Lansdowne revoked the Referendum Pledge, saying that the government had completely failed the agreement to submit Home Rule to a referendum, and that the agreement that tariff reform would also be submitted was null and void. Lansdowne promised that when the Unionists took office they would "do so with a free hand to deal with tariffs as they saw fit".[72] Law then rose to spoke, and in line with his agreement to let Lansdowne speak for tariff reform mentioned it only briefly when he said "I concur in every word which has fallen from Lord Lansdowne".[72] He instead promised a reversal of several Liberal policies when the Unionists came to power, including the disestablishment of the Church of Wales, land taxes and Irish Home Rule.[72] The crowd "cheered themselves hoarse" at Law's speech.[72]
The reaction from the party as a whole was not a positive one, however, despite the speeches warm reception at the conference. Law had failed to consult the constituencies and the local parties about his plan, and several important constituency leaders led by Archibald Salvidge and Lord Derby planned for a meeting of the Lancashire party, the centre of discontent, on 21 December.[73] Law was preoccupied with the problem of Irish Home Rule and was unable to give the discontent his full attention. Despite it he continued to believe that his approach to the problem of tariff reform was the correct one, and wrote to John Strachey on 16 November saying that "it was a case of a choice of two evils, and all that one could do was to take the lesser of the two, and that I am sure we have done".[73] Speaking to Edward Carson, F.E. Smith, Austen Chamberlain and Lord Balcarres in December after two weeks of receiving negative letters from party members about the change, Law outlined that he would not be adverse to a return to the previous policy considering the negative feelings from the party, but felt that this would require the resignation of both Law and Lansdowne.[73]
Despite this offer of a return, Law again wrote to Strachey saying that he continued to feel this policy was the correct one, and only regretted that the issue was splitting the party in a time when unity was needed to fight the Home Rule problem.[73] At the meeting of the Lancashire party the group under Derby condemned Law's actions and called for a three week party recess before deciding what to do about the repeal of the Referendum Pledge.[74] This was an obvious ultimatum to Law, giving him a three-week period to change his mind.[74] Law believed that Derby was "unprincipled and treacherous", particularly since he then circled a questionnaire among Lancashire party members with leading questions such as "do you think the abandonment of the referendum will do harm?"[74] Law met the Lancashire party on 2 January and ordered that they must replace any food tariff based resolutions with a vote of confidence in him as a leader, and that any alternative would result in his resignation.[75]
After a chance meeting at which Edward Carson learnt of Law and Lansdowne's acceptance of possible resignation, he was spurred to ask Edward Goulding to beg Law and Lansdowne to compromise over the policy and remain as leaders.[76] The compromise, known as the January Memorial, was settled on by Carson, James Craig, Law and Lansdowne at Law's house between 6–8 January, affirmed the support the signers had of Law and his policies, noting that his resignation was not wanted.[77] Within two days 231 of the 280 Conservative MPs had signed it; 27 frontbenchers had not been invited, neither had five who were not in London, seven who were ill, the Speaker and a few others who could not be found — only eight MPs actively refused to sign.[77] Law's official response took the form of an open letter published on 13 January 1913, in which Law offered a compromise that food duties would not be placed before Parliament to vote on until after a second, approving election took place.[78]
Irish Home Rule[link]
The January and December elections in 1910 destroyed the large Liberal majority, meaning they relied on the Irish Nationalists to maintain a government.[79] As a result they were forced to consider Home Rule, and with the passing of the Parliament Act 1911 which made the Commons superior to the Lords, the Conservative Party became aware that unless they could dissolve Parliament or sabotage the bill it would most likely become law by 1914.[79]
As the child of an Ulster family who had spent much time in the area (his father had moved back there several years after Law moved to Scotland), Law understood the gap between Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism, and believed it could never be crossed. Despite this he said little about Home Rule until the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911, calling it the "Home Rule In Disguise Act" and saying it was an attempt to change parliamentary demographics so as to allow Home Rule "through the back door".[80] After the passing of the Act he made a speech in the Commons saying that if the Liberals wished to pass a Home Rule Bill they should submit it to the electorate by calling a general election. His elevation to the leadership of the Conservative Party allowed him a platform to voice his opinion to the public, and his speeches (culminating with the January 1912 speech at the Royal Albert Hall) were centred around Home Rule as much as they were around tariff reform.[80] Law was supported by Edward Carson, leader of the Ulster Unionists.[80] Although Law sympathised with the Ulster Unionists politically he did not agree with the religious intolerance shown to Catholics.[80]
Third Home Rule Bill[link]
The 1912 session of Parliament opened on 14 February with a stated intent by the Liberal Party in the King's Speech to introduce a new Home Rule Bill.[81] The bill was to be introduced on 11 April, and four days before that Law travelled to Ulster for a tour of the area. The pinnacle of this was a meeting on 9 April in the grounds of the Royal Agricultural Society near Balmoral, attended by seventy Unionist MPs, the Primate of All Ireland and topped by "perhaps the largest Union Jack ever made" – 48 feet by 25 feet on a flagpole 90 feet high.[82] At the meeting both Law and Carson swore to the crowd that "never under any circumstances will we submit to Home Rule".[82] Finding a way to succeed in this venture was difficult, however; the Parliament Act and the government majority made such a victory against the Bill unlikely unless the government could be dissolved.[83] A second problem was that not all Unionists opposed Home Rule to the same degree; some were hardcore anti-Home Rulers who would oppose any attempt at home rule, others thought it inevitable that the Bill would pass and were simply trying to get the best deal possible for Ulster. The spectre of civil war was also raised — the Ulstermen began to form paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteers, and there was a strong possibility that if it came to fighting the British Army would have to be sent in to support the underfunded and understaffed Royal Irish Constabulary.[83]
The argument of Law and the Unionists between 1912 and 1914 was based on three complaints. Firstly, Ulster would never accept forced Home Rule, and made up a quarter of Ireland; if the Liberals wanted to force this issue, military force would be the only way. Law thundered that "Do you plan to hurl the full majesty and power of the law, supported on the bayonets of the British Army, against a million Ulstermen marching under the Union Flag and singing 'God Save The King'? Would the Army hold? Would the British people — would the Crown — stand for such a slaughter?".[84] A second complaint was that the government had so far refused to submit it to a general election, as Law had been suggesting since 1910. Law warned that "you will not carry this Bill without submitting it to the people of this country, and, if you make the attempt, you will succeed only in breaking our Parliamentary machine".[84] The third complaint was that the Liberals had still not fulfilled their obligations under the Parliament Act 1911, the preamble of which said that the purpose was "to substitute for the House of Lords as it present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis".[85] The Unionist argument was that the Liberals were trying to make a massive constitutional change while the nature of Parliament itself was unresolved, suspending the constitution.[85]
In July 1912 Asquith travelled to Dublin (the first Prime Minister to do so in over a century) to make a speech, ridiculing Unionist demands for a referendum on the issue via an election and calling their campaign "purely destructive in its objects, anarchic and chaotic in its methods".[86] In response the Unionists had a meeting on 27 July at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, one of Asquith's ministers.[86] More than 13,000 people attended, including over 40 peers. In Law's speech he said "I said so to [the Liberals] and I say so now, with the full sense of the responsibility which attaches to my position, that if the attempt be made under present conditions, I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will go, in which I shall not be ready to support them, and in which they will not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people".[87] This speech was more known and criticised than any others; it implied both he and the British people would support the Ulstermen in anything, including armed rebellion against the Crown.[87]
Despite the conflict and fierce resistance, the Bill continued its passage through Parliament. It moved to its second reading on 9 June, and the Committee stage on 11 June, where it became fraught in controversy after a young Liberal named Thomas Agar-Robartes proposed an amendment excluding four of the Ulster counties (Londonderry, Down, Antrim & Armagh) from the Irish Parliament.[88] This put Law in a delicate situation, since he had previously said that he would support a system allowing each county to remain "outside the Irish Parliament", at the same time saying that he would not support any amendment that didn't have Ulster's full cooperation.[88] If he accepted the amendment, he would be seen as abandoning the Irish Unionists, but on the other hand if the amendment was carried it might disrupt the government by causing a split between the Liberals and Irish Nationalists, dissolving Parliament.[89] If the Unionists wished to win the ensuing election they would have to show that they were willing to compromise. In the end the amendment failed, but voting on it saw the Liberal majority reduced by 40, and when a compromise amendment was proposed by another Liberal MP the government Whips were forced to trawl for votes. Law saw this as a victory, as it highlighted the split in the government.[89] Edward Carson tabled another amendment on 1 January 1913 which would exclude all nine Ulster counties, more to test government resolve than anything else. While it failed, it allowed the Unionists to portray themselves as the party of compromise and the Liberals as stubborn and recalcitrant.[89]
The Unionists in Ulster itself proved to be committed to independence from any Irish Home Rule. They secretly authorised a Commission of Five to write a constitution for "a provisional Government of Ulster... to come into operation on the day of the passage of any Home Rule Bill, to remain in force until Ulster shall again resume unimpaired citizenship in the United Kingdom".[90] On 28 September 1912, Carson led 237,638 of his followers in signing a Solemn League and Covenant saying that Ulster would refuse to recognise the authority of any Parliament of Ireland arising from Home Rule.[90] When Parliament resumed in October after the summer recess, the Home Rule Bill was passed by the Commons. As expected, the House of Lords rejected it 326 to 69, and under the provisions of the Parliament Act it could only be passed if it was passed twice more by the Commons in successive Parliaments.[91]
Second passage[link]
The end of 1912 saw the end of a year of political struggle for Law. As well as the problem of Home Rule, there were internal party struggles; supporters of the Church of England or military reform lambasted Law for not paying attention to their causes, and tariff reformers argued with him over his previous compromise on food duties. Despite this, most Conservatives realised that as a fighting leader, Law could not be bettered.[92] The results of by-elections throughout 1913 continued to favour them, but progress on the Home Rule Bill was less encouraging; on 7 July it was again passed by the Commons, and again crushed by the Lords on 15 July.[93] Parliament rose for the summer recess on 15 August, and Law and the Unionists spent the summer trying to convince the King to voice an opinion on the issue. Their first suggestion was that he should withhold the Royal Assent on it, something that horrified Law's constitutional law advisor A.V. Dicey. The second was more reasonable — they argued that the Liberals had put the King in an impossible position by asking him to ratify a bill that would infuriate half of the population.[93] His only option was to write a memo to Asquith saying this and requesting that the problem of home rule be put to the electorate via a general election. After thinking on this, the King agreed, and handed a note to Asquith on 11 August requesting either an election or an all-party conference.[93]
Asquith responded with two notes, the first countering the Unionist claim that it would be acceptable for the King to dismiss Parliament or withhold assent of the Bill to force an election, and the second arguing that a Home Rule election would not prove anything, since a Unionist victory would only be due to other problems and scandals and would not assure supporters of the current government that Home Rule was truly opposed.[93] The King instead pressed for a compromise, summoning various political leaders to Balmoral Castle individually for talks. Law arrived on 13 September and again pointed out to the king his belief that if the Government continued to refuse an election fought over Home Rule and instead forced it on Ulster, the Ulstermen would not accept it and any attempts to enforce it would not be obeyed by the British Army.[94]
By early October the King was pressuring the British political world for an all-party conference. Fending this off, Law instead met with senior party members to discuss developments. Law, Balfour, Smith and Long discussed the matter, and other than Long all were favourable of a compromise with the Liberals.[95] Long represented the anti-Home Rule elements in Southern Ireland, and from this moment onwards Southern and Northern attitudes towards Home Rule began to diverge.[95] Law then met with Edward Carson, and afterwards expressed the opinion that "the men of Ulster do desire a settlement on the basis of leaving Ulster out, and Carson thinks such an arrangement could be carried out without any serious attack from the Unionists in the South".[95]
On 8 October Asquith wrote to Law suggesting an informal meeting of the two party leaders, which Law accepted.[96] The two met at Asquith's house, Cherkley Court, on 14 October.[97] The meeting lasted an hour, and Law told Asquith that he would continue to try to have Parliament dissolved, and that in any ensuing election the Unionists would accept the result even if it went against them.[98] Law later expressed his fear to Lansdowne that Asquith would persuade the Irish Nationalists to accept Home Rule with the exclusion of four Ulster counties.[98] Carson would not accept this, requiring all six counties to be excluded, and such a move might split the Unionists.[98] Law knew that Asquith was unlikely to consent to a general election, since he would almost certainly lose it, and that any attempt to pass the Home Rule Bill "without reference to the electorate" would lead to civil disturbance.[99] As such, Asquith was stuck "between a rock and a hard place" and was sure to negotiate.[99]
Asquith and Law met for a second private meeting on 6 November,[100] at which Asquith raised three possibilities. The first was one suggested by Sir Edward Grey, and consisted of "Home Rule within Home Rule" – Home Rule covering Ulster, but with partial autonomy for the Ulster region.[101] The second was that Ulster would be excluded from Home Rule for a number of years before becoming part of it, and the third was that Ulster would be excluded from Home Rule for as long as they liked, with the opportunity of joining when they wished.[101] Law made it clear to Asquith that the first two options were unacceptable, but the third may be accepted in some circles.[101] The leaders then discussed the problem of the geographical definition of Ulster. It was technically nine counties, and was usually considered to be at least six, but the number varied. Carson always referred to the nine counties of Ulster, but Law told Asquith that if an appropriate settlement could be made with a smaller number Carson "would see his people and probably, though I could not give any promise to that effect, try to induce them to accept it".[101]
The third meeting was on 10 December and Law, angry that Asquith had not yet presented a concrete way to exclude Ulster, made little progress.[102] Law brushed aside Asquith's suggestions and insisted that only the exclusion of Ulster was worth considering.[103] He later wrote that "My feeling, however, is that Asquith has no hope whatsoever of making such an arrangement and that his present idea is simply to let things drift in the meantime.. I do not understand why he took the trouble of seeing me at all. The only explanation I can give is that I think he is in a funk about the whole position and thought that meeting me might keep the thing open at least".[103]
With the failure of these talks, Law accepted that a compromise was unlikely, and from January 1914 onwards returned to the position that the Unionists were "opposed utterly to Home Rule".[104] The campaign was sufficient to bring the noted organiser Lord Milner back into politics to support the Unionists, and he immediately asked L. S. Amery to write a British Covenant saying that the signers would, if the Home Rule Bill passed, "feel justified in taking or supporting any action that may be effective to prevent it being put into operation, and more particularly to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the people of Ulster of their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom".[105] The Covenant was announced at a massive rally in Hyde Park on 4 April 1914, with hundreds of thousands assembling to hear Milner, Long and Carson speak. By the middle of the summer Long claimed over 2 million people had signed.[105]
Army Annual Act[link]
Law was not directly involved in this campaign as he was focusing on a practical way to defeat the Home Rule Bill. His first attempt was via the Army Annual Act, something that "violated a basic and ancient principle of the constitution".[106] Since the Glorious Revolution, Parliament had passed an Act every year which fixes the number of soldiers in the British Army. If the Act was rejected by Parliament it would cause a constitutional crisis and technically make the British Army an illegal institution.[106] Lord Selborne had written to Law in 1912 to point out that vetoing or significantly amending the Act in the House of Lords would force the government to resign, and such a course of action was also suggested by others during 1913 and 1914.[106] Law believed that forcing Ulstermen away from the union with Britain and under a Dublin-based government they did not recognise was itself constitutionally damaging, and that amending the Army Annual Act to prevent the use of force in Ulster (he never suggested vetoing it) would not violate the constitution any more than the actions the government had already undertaken.[106]
By 12 March he had established that, should the Home Rule Bill be passed under the Parliament Act 1911, the Army Annual Act should be amended in the Lords to stipulate that the Army could not "be used in Ulster to prevent or interfere with any step which may thereafter be taken in Ulster to organise resistance to the enforcement of the Home Rule Act in Ulster nor to suppress any such resistance until and unless the present Parliament has been dissolved and a period of three months shall have lapsed after the meeting of a new Parliament".[106] The Shadow Cabinet agreed that it would be necessary to consult a panel of legal experts, who after deliberation agreed wholeheartedly with Law's suggestion.[106] Although several members expressed dissent, the Cabinet decided "provisionally to agree to amendment of army act. but to leave details and decisions as to the moment of acting to Lansdowne and Law".[107] In the end no amendment to the Army Act was offered, though; many backbenchers and party loyalists became agitated by the scheme and wrote to him that it was unacceptable – Ian Malcolm, a fanatical Ulster supporter, told Law that amending the Army Act would drive him out of the Party.[107]
World War I[link]
On 30 July 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, Law met with Asquith and agreed to temporarily suspend the issue of Home Rule to avoid domestic discontent during wartime. By the following day both leaders had convinced their parties to agree to this move. On 3 August Law spoke openly in the House of Commons, saying that "the Government already know, but I give them now the assurance on behalf of the party of which I am leader in this House, that in whatever steps they think it necessary to take for the honour and security of this country they can rely upon the unhesitating support of the Opposition". The following night, Germany rejected British demands for a withdrawal from Belgium, and Britain declared war.[108]
Over the coming months, the Liberal, Labour and Conservative whips worked out a truce suspending confrontational politics until either 1 January 1915 or until the end of the War. On 4 August both Asquith and Law made speeches together at the Middlesex Guildhall, and uncomfortably socialised with each others parties. On 6 August, the Conservatives learnt that Asquith planned to put the Home Rule Bill on the statute books; Law wrote an angry letter to Asquith, the response of which was that Asquith could either pass the bill immediately, suspending it for the duration of the conflict, or make it law with a six month delay and with a three year exclusion for Ulster. Law responded with a speech in the Commons, saying that "the Government have treated us abominably... but we are in the middle of a great struggle. Until that struggle [is] over, so far as we are concerned, in everything connected with it there would be no parties, there would openly be a nation. In regard to this debate I have made protest as well as I could, but when I have finished we shall take no further part in the discussion". The entire Party then left the Commons silently, and although a strong protest (Asquith later admitted that "it was unique in my or I think anybody's experience") the bill was still passed, although with a suspension for the duration of the War.[109]
The Conservatives soon began to get annoyed that they were unable to criticise the Government, and took this into Parliament; rather than criticising policy, they would attack individual ministers, including the Lord Chancellor (who they considered "far too enamoured of German culture") and the Home Secretary, who was "too tender to aliens".[110] By Christmas 1914 they were anxious about the war; it was not, in their opinion, going well, and yet they were restricted to serving on committees and making recruitment speeches. At about the same time, Law and David Lloyd George met to discuss the possibility of a coalition government. Law was supportive of the idea in some ways, seeing it as a probability that "a coalition government would come in time".[111]
Coalition Government[link]
Background and information[link]
The crisis which led to a coalition government forming was twofold; first the Shell Crisis of 1915, and then the resignation of Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord. The Shell Crisis arose because of the failure to fully organise British industry into a state of total war, and the matter was raised in Parliament on 21 April 1915. Asquith tried to ward off the criticism the day before the debate, praising the government efforts and saying that "I do not believe that any army has ever either entered upon a campaign or been maintained during a campaign with better or more adequate equipment". The Conservatives, whose sources of information included officers such as Sir John French, were not put off, and instead became furious.[112]
Over the next few days the Conservative backbenchers threatened to break the truce and mount an attack on the government over the munitions situation. Law forced them to back down on 12 May, but on the 14th an article appeared on The Times blaming the British failure at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on the lack of munitions. This again stirred up the backbenchers, who were only just kept in line. The Shadow Cabinet took a similar line; things could not go on as they were. The crisis was only halted with the resignation of Lord Fisher. Fisher had opposed Winston Churchill over the Gallipoli Campaign, and felt that he could not continue in government if the two would be in conflict. Law knew that this would push the Conservative back bench over the edge, and met with David Lloyd George on 17 May to discuss Fisher's resignation. Lloyd George eventually agreed that "the only way to preserve a united front was to arrange for more complete cooperation between parties in the direction of the War".[113]
Lloyd George reported the meeting to Asquith, who agreed that a coalition was inescapable. He met with Law in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, and after a quarter of an hour they came to an agreement to form a coalition government.[114]
Law's next job, therefore, was to assist the Liberal Party in creating a new government. In their discussions on 17 May, both Law and Lloyd George had agreed that Lord Kitchener should not remain in the War Office, and removing him became top priority. Unfortunately the press began a campaign supporting Kitchener on 21 May, and the popular feeling that this raised convinced Law, Lloyd George and Asquith that Kitchener could not be removed. In order to keep him and at the same time remove the munitions supply from his grasp to prevent a repeat of the "shells crisis" the Ministry of Munitions was created, with Lloyd George becoming Minister of Munitions.[115]
Law eventually accepted the post of Colonial Secretary, an unimportant post in wartime; Asquith had made it clear that he would not allow a Conservative minister to head the Exchequer, and that with Kitchener (whom he considered a Conservative) in the War Office, he would not allow another Conservative to hold a similarly important position. Fearing for the integrity of the coalition, Law accepted this position.[116] Outside of Law's position, other Conservatives also gained positions in the new administration; Arthur Balfour became First Lord of the Admiralty, Austen Chamberlain became Secretary of State for India and Edward Carson became Attorney General.[117]
Colonial Secretary[link]
During Law's time as Colonial Secretary, the three main issues were the question of manpower for the British Army, the crisis in Ireland and the Dardanelles Campaign. Dardanelles took priority, as seen by Asquith's restructuring of his War Council into a Dardanelles Committee. Members included Kitchener, Law, Churchill, Lloyd George and Lansdowne, with the make-up divided between political parties to defuse tension and provide criticism of policy. The main discussion was on the possibility of reinforcing the forces already landed, something Law disagreed with. With Asquith and the Army in support, however, he felt that he was ill-equipped to combat the proposal. Five more divisions were landed, but faced heavy casualties for little gain. As a result Law led a strong resistance to the idea at the next Committee meeting on 18 August. The idea only avoided being scrapped thanks to the French promise to send forces in early September, and the arguing became an immense strain on the government.[118]
Law entered the coalition government as Colonial Secretary in 1915, his first senior Cabinet post, and, following the resignation of Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader Asquith, was invited by King George V to form a government, but he deferred to Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War and former Minister of Munitions, who he believed was better placed to lead a coalition ministry. He served in Lloyd George's War Cabinet, first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. His promotion reflected the great mutual trust between both leaders and made for a well co-ordinated political partnership; their coalition was re-elected by a landslide following the Armistice. Law's two eldest sons were both killed whilst fighting in the war. In the 1918 General Election, Law returned to Glasgow and was elected as member for Glasgow Central.
Post-war and Prime Minister[link]
At war's end, he gave up the Exchequer for the less demanding sinecure office of Lord Privy Seal, but remained Leader of the Commons. In 1921, ill health forced his resignation as Conservative leader and Leader of the Commons in favour of Austen Chamberlain. His departure weakened the hardliners in the cabinet who were opposed to negotiating with the Irish Republican Army, and the Anglo-Irish War ended in the summer.
By 1921–2 the coalition had become embroiled in an air of moral and financial corruption (e.g. the sale of honours). Besides the recent Irish Treaty and Edwin Montagu's moves towards greater self-government for India, both of which dismayed rank-and-file Conservative opinion, the government's willingness to intervene against the Bolshevik regime in Russia also seemed out of step with the new and more pacifist mood. A sharp slump in 1921 and a wave of strikes in the coal and railway industries also added to the government's unpopularity, as did the apparent failure of the Genoa Conference, which ended in an apparent rapprochement between Germany and Soviet Russia. In other words, it was no longer the case that Lloyd George was an electoral asset to the Conservative Party.
Lloyd George, Birkenhead and Winston Churchill (still distrusted by many Conservatives) wished to use armed force against Turkey (the Chanak Crisis), but had to back down when offered support only by New Zealand, but not Canada, Australia or South Africa; an anonymous letter appeared in "The Times" supporting the government but stating that Britain could not "act as the policeman for the world", and it was an open secret that the author, "A Colonial", was in fact Bonar Law. At a famous meeting at the Carlton Club, Conservative backbenchers, led by the President of the Board of Trade Stanley Baldwin and influenced by the recent Newport by-election which was won by a Conservative from the Liberals, voted to end the Lloyd George Coalition and fight the next election as an independent party. Austen Chamberlain resigned as Party Leader, Lloyd George resigned as Prime Minister and Bonar Law returned on 23 October 1922 in both jobs.
Many leading Conservatives (e.g. Birkenhead, Arthur Balfour, Austen Chamberlain, Robert Horne) were not members of the new Cabinet, which was contemptuously referred to as "the Second Eleven". Although the Coalition Conservatives numbered no more than thirty, they hoped to dominate any future Coalition government in the same way that the similarly sized Peelite group had dominated the Coalition Government of 1852–5 – an analogy much used at the time.
Parliament was immediately dissolved, and a General Election ensued. Besides the two Conservative factions, the Labour Party were fighting as a major national party for the first time and indeed became the main Opposition after the election; the Liberals were still split into Asquith and Lloyd George factions, with many Lloyd George Liberals still unopposed by Conservative candidates (including Churchill, who was defeated at Dundee nonetheless). Despite the confused political arena the Conservatives were re-elected with a comfortable majority.
Questions were raised about whether the elderly Conservative Party Treasurer, Lord Farquhar, had passed on to Lloyd George (who during his premiership had amassed a large fund, largely from the sale of honours) any money intended for the Conservative Party. The Coalition Conservatives also hoped to obtain Conservative Party money from Farquar. Bonar Law found Farquar too "gaga" to properly explain what had happened, and dismissed him.
One of the questions which taxed Bonar Law's brief government was that of inter-Allied war debts. Britain owed money to the USA, and in turn was owed four times as much money by France, Italy and the other Allied powers, although under the Lloyd George government Balfour had promised that Britain would collect no more money from other Allies than she was required to repay the USA; the debt was hard to repay as trade (exports were needed to earn foreign currency) had not returned to prewar levels. On a trip to the USA Stanley Baldwin, the inexperienced Chancellor of the Exchequer, agreed to repay £40 million per annum to the USA rather than the £25 million which the British government had thought feasible, and on his return announced the deal to the press when his ship docked at Southampton, before the Cabinet had had a chance to consider it. Bonar Law contemplated resignation, and after being talked out of it by senior ministers, once again vented his feelings in an anonymous letter to The Times.
Resignation and death[link]
Bonar Law was soon diagnosed with terminal throat cancer and, no longer physically able to speak in Parliament, resigned on 22 May 1923. George V sent for Baldwin, whom Bonar Law is rumoured to have favoured over Lord Curzon. However Law did not offer any advice to the King.[119] Bonar Law died later that same year in London at the age of 65. His funeral was held at Westminster Abbey where later his ashes were interred.
Bonar Law's estate was probated at £35,736 (approximately £1,510,000 as of 2012).[120]
Bonar Law was the shortest serving PM of the 20th century. He is often referred to as "the unknown Prime Minister", not least because of a biography of that title by Robert Blake; the name comes from a remark by Asquith at Bonar Law's funeral, that they were burying the Unknown Prime Minister next to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Sir Steven Runciman is reported to have said that he had known all British Prime Ministers in his lifetime, except Bonar Law whom no one knew.
A tiny hamlet (unincorporated village) in the municipality of Stirling-Rawdon, Ontario, Canada, is named Bonarlaw after the British Prime Minister. It had been known as "Big Springs" and then "Bellview". The high school in Bonar Law's birthplace, Rexton, New Brunswick, Canada, is also named in his honour.
Bonar Law's Government, October 1922 – May 1923[link]
For a full list of Ministerial office holders, see Conservative Government 1922-1924
- Andrew Bonar Law – Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons
- Lord Cave – Lord Chancellor
- Lord Salisbury – Lord President of the Council and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
- Stanley Baldwin – Chancellor of the Exchequer
- William Clive Bridgeman – Secretary of State for the Home Department
- Lord Curzon of Kedleston – Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Leader of the House of Lords
- The Duke of Devonshire – Secretary of State for the Colonies
- Lord Derby – Secretary of State for War
- Lord Peel – Secretary of State for India
- Lord Novar – Secretary for Scotland
- Leo Amery – First Lord of the Admiralty
- Sir Philip Lloyd-Greame – President of the Board of Trade
- Sir Robert Sanders – Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries
- Edward Frederick Lindley Wood – President of the Board of Education
- Sir Montague Barlow – Minister of Labour
- Sir Arthur Griffith-Boscawen – Minister of Health
Changes[link]
- April 1923 – Griffith-Boscawen resigns as Minister of Health after losing his seat and is succeeded by Neville Chamberlain.
Popular culture[link]
Bonar Law plays a supporting, if off-screen, role in Upstairs, Downstairs. He is even said to have recommended family patriarch, Richard Bellamy, to be offered a peerage.
His name was referenced by Julian and Sandy in Round the Horne, in a sketch called "Bona Law".
References[link]
- ^ Hamilton, William Baillie (1996), Place names of Atlantic Canada, University of Toronto Press, p. 123, ISBN 978-0-8020-7570-3
- ^ a b R.J.Q. Adams (1999) p.3
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.4
- ^ Laybourn (2001) p.37
- ^ Adams (1999) p.5
- ^ Adams (1999) p.6
- ^ Sforza (1969) p.193
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.7
- ^ Birkenhead (1977) p.1
- ^ Taylor (2007) p.6
- ^ Adams (1999) p.9
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.11
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.12
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.13
- ^ Edward Winter, Andrew Bonar Law and Chess, Chess Notes. Retrieved 2010-04-21.
- ^ Adams (1999) p.16
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.17
- ^ Taylor (2007) p.11
- ^ Taylor (2007) p.12
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.18
- ^ Adams (1999) p.19
- ^ The Times Oct 05, 1900, page 8
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.20
- ^ Taylor (2007) p.8
- ^ Adams (1999) p.21
- ^ Sforza (1969) p.194
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.22
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.23
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.24
- ^ Taylor (2007) p.9
- ^ a b c d Adams (1999) p.25
- ^ Laybourn (2001) p.38
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.26
- ^ Adams (1999) p.27
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.28
- ^ Birkenhead (1977) p.4
- ^ Adams (1999) p.30
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.31
- ^ Adams (1999) p.37
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.38
- ^ a b c d e f Adams (1999) p.39
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.40
- ^ a b c d Adams (1999) p.41
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.42
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.43
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.44
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.45
- ^ Adams (1999) p.46
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.47
- ^ Adams (1999) p.48
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.49
- ^ Adams (1999) p.54
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.55
- ^ Adams (1999) p.56
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.57
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.59
- ^ Adams (1999) p.63
- ^ Adams (1999) p.64
- ^ Adams (1999) p.67
- ^ Adams (1999) p.68
- ^ Adams (1999) p.61
- ^ Adams (1999) p.73
- ^ Adams (1999) p.72
- ^ Adams (1999) p.70
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.74
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.75
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.76
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.79
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.80
- ^ Adams (1999) p.81
- ^ a b c d Adams (1999) p.82
- ^ a b c d e Adams (1999) p.83
- ^ a b c d Adams (1999) p.84
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.86
- ^ Adams (1999) p.87
- ^ Adams (1999) p.89
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.90
- ^ Adams (1999) p.91
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.99
- ^ a b c d Adams (1999) p.98
- ^ Adams (1999) p.102
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.103
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.104
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.105
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.106
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.107
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.109
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.111
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.112
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.113
- ^ Adams (1999) p.116
- ^ Adams (1999) p.118
- ^ a b c d Adams (1999) p.124
- ^ Adams (1999) p.126
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.129
- ^ Adams (1999) p.132
- ^ Adams (1999) p.133
- ^ a b c Adams (1999) p.134
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.136
- ^ Kendle (1992) p.80
- ^ a b c d Adams (1999) p.137
- ^ Kendle (1992) p.82
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.141
- ^ Adams (1999) p.145
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.146
- ^ a b c d e f Adams (1999) p.147
- ^ a b Adams (1999) p.150
- ^ Adams (1999) p.171
- ^ Adams (1999) p.172-4
- ^ Adams (1999) p.175
- ^ Adams (1999) p.178
- ^ Adams (1999) p.180
- ^ Adams (1999) p.184
- ^ Adams (1999) p.185
- ^ Adams (1999) p.187
- ^ Adams (1999) p.188
- ^ Adams (1999) p.189
- ^ Adams (1999) p.196
- ^ Alan Clark, The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State 1922–1997 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998) page 25 ISBN 0-7538-0765-3
- ^ UK CPI inflation numbers based on data available from Lawrence H. Officer (2010) "What Were the UK Earnings and Prices Then?" MeasuringWorth.
Bibliography[link]
- Adams, R.J.Q. (1999). Bonar Law. John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. ISBN 0-7195-5422-5.
- Birkenhead, Frederick E. (1977). Contemporary Personalities. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 0-8369-0061-8.
- Eccleshall, Robert (1998). Biographical dictionary of British prime ministers. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-10830-6.
- Ensor, Robert (1936). England 1870 – 1914. Clarendon Press. OCLC 400389.
- Kendle, John (1992). Walter Long, Ireland and the Union, 1905–1920. McGill-Queen's Press. ISBN 0-7735-0908-9.
- Laybourn, Keith (2001). British political leaders: a biographical dictionary. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 1-57607-043-3.
- Mackintosh, John Pitcairn (1981). The British Cabinet (3rd ed.). Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-416-31380-9.
- Malcolm, Ian Zachary (1977). Vacant thrones. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 0-8369-0672-1.
- Mowat, Charles Loch (1978). Britain between the wars: 1918–1940 (2nd ed.). Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-416-29510-X.
- Pugh, Martin (1974). "Asquith, Bonar Law and the First Coalition". The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press) 17 (4). ISSN 0018-246X.
- Raymond, E. T. (2007). Uncensored Celebrities. Read Books. ISBN 1-4067-7397-2.
- Sforza, Carlo (1969). Makers of modern Europe: portraits and personal impressions and recollections. Ayer Publishing. ISBN 0-8369-1064-8.
- Smith, Jeremy (1993). "Bluff, Bluster and Brinkmanship: Andrew Bonar Law and the Third Home Rule Bill". The Historical Journal (Cambridge University Press) 36 (1). ISSN 0018-246X.
- Taylor, Andrew (2006). Bonar Law. Haus Publishing. ISBN 1-904950-59-0.
- Taylor, A.J.P (1965). English History 1914–1945. Clarendon Press. OCLC 174762876.
- Turner, John (1988). Britain and the First World War. Routledge. ISBN 0-04-445109-1.
External links[link]
| Find more about Bonar Law on Wikipedia's sister projects: | |
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Learning resources from Wikiversity |
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Quotations from Wikiquote |
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Source texts from Wikisource |
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Textbooks from Wikibooks |
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Andrew Bonar Law
- More about Andrew Bonar Law on the Downing Street website.
- The Bonar Law Papers at the UK Parliamentary Archives
- 1903 illustrated article with photo of Bonar Law
- Portraits of Andrew Bonar Law at the National Portrait Gallery, London
- Archival material relating to Bonar Law listed at the UK National Register of Archives
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Law, Andrew Bonar |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | Prime Minister of the United Kingdom |
| Date of birth | 16 September 1858 |
| Place of birth | Rexton, New Brunswick, Canada |
| Date of death | 30 October 1923 |
| Place of death | London, England |
http://wn.com/Bonar_Law
Related pages:
http://it.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
http://cs.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
http://es.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
http://ru.wn.com/Бонар Лоу, Эндрю
http://nl.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
http://pt.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
http://pl.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
http://fr.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
http://de.wn.com/Andrew Bonar Law
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonar_Law
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| Horatius Bonar | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | (1808-12-19)19 December 1808 Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Died | 31 May 1889(1889-05-31) (aged 80) |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Occupation | churchman, poet |
Horatius Bonar (19 December, 1808 – 31 May, 1889) was a Scottish churchman and poet.
Contents |
Life[link]
The son of James Bonar, Solicitor of Excise for Scotland, he was born and educated in Edinburgh. He comes from a long line of ministers who have served a total of 364 years in the Church of Scotland. One of eleven children, his brothers John James and Andrew Alexander were also ministers of the Free Church of Scotland. He had married Jane Catherine Lundie in 1843 and five of their young children died in succession. Towards the end of their lives, one of their surviving daughters was left a widow with five small children and she returned to live with her parents. Bonar's wife, Jane, died in 1876. He is buried in the Canongate Kirkyard.
In 1853 Bonar earned the Doctor of Divinity degree at the University of Aberdeen.
Service[link]
He entered the Ministry of the Church of Scotland. At first he was put in charge of mission work at St. John's parish in Leith and settled at Kelso. He joined the Free Church at the time of the Disruption of 1843, and in 1867 was moved to Edinburgh to take over the Chalmers Memorial Church (named after his teacher at college, Dr. Thomas Chalmers). In 1883, he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland.
Works[link]
He was a voluminous and highly popular author. He also served as the editor for "The Quarterly journal of Prophecy" from 1848 to 1873 and for the "Christian Treasury" from 1859 to 1879. In addition to many books and tracts wrote a number of hymns, many of which, e.g., "I heard the voice of Jesus say" and "Blessing and Honour and Glory and Power," became known all over the English-speaking world. A selection of these was published as Hymns of Faith and Hope (3 series). His last volume of poetry was My Old Letters. Bonar was also author of several biographies of ministers he had known, including "The Life of the Rev. John Milne of Perth" in 1869, - and in 1884 "The Life and Works of the Rev. G. T. Dodds", who had been married to Bonar's daughter and who had died in 1882 while serving as a missionary in France.
His hymns include:
- Fill thou my life, O Lord, my God
- I heard the Voice of Jesus say
- Thy way, not mine, O Lord
- Here, O my Lord, I see Thee face to face
- A few more years shall roll
- Come Lord and tarry not
Some of his books include:
- The Everlasting Righteousness. Banner of Truth. 1996. ISBN 978-0-85151-655-4.
- God's Way of Holiness. Christian Focus Publications. 1999. ISBN 978-1-85792-503-6.
- How Shall I Go to God. Baker Book House. 1977. ISBN 978-0-8010-0713-2.
- Night of Weeping. Christian Focus Publications. 1999. ISBN 978-1-85792-441-1.
- God's Way of Peace ISBN 1-4590-9630-4
- Follow the Lamb ISBN 0-906731-63-1
- Light & Truth: Bible Thoughts and Themes on The Acts & Larger Epistles - commentary on Acts, Romans, and 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians ASIN B002ZJRS9K
- Light & Truth: Bible Thoughts and Themes on Revelation] - commentary on the Book of Revelation ASIN B002ZRQ55U
See also[link]
- "So Soon in the Morning", a song by Joan Baez and Bill Wood (1329) containing two lines from Bonar's "I heard the voice of Jesus say"
References[link]
- "The Life and Works of Horatius Bonar CD-Rom". This contains virtually all the extant writings of this author, along with much biographical material. LUX Publications. http://www.horatiusbonar.com. Retrieved 2007-07-23.
- Julian, John (June, 1907). A Dictionary of Hymnology. London: John Murray. pp. 161–162.
- Bailey, Albert Edward (1950). The Gospel in Hymns. New York: Charles Scribner's sons. pp. 451–455.
- "New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge". http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/encyc02/Page_220.html. Retrieved 2007-02-17.
- Heath Christian Book Shop Charitable Trust. "Horatius Bonar 1808-1880". http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freegrace/library/Bonar/bonarbiog.htm. Retrieved 2007-02-17.
External links[link]
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Horatius Bonar |
- "I heard the voice of Jesus say" - words and score for Bonar's hymn
- The Hymns of Horatius Bonar
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J. M. Dent & Sons; New York, E. P. Dutton.
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Bonar, Horatius |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | 1808-12-19 |
| Place of birth | Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Date of death | 1889-05-31 |
| Place of death | |
http://wn.com/Horatius_Bonar
Related pages:
http://de.wn.com/Horatius Bonar
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatius_Bonar
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
The Saint may refer to:
|
Fiction[link]
- Simon Templar, also known as "The Saint", the protagonist of a book series by Leslie Charteris and subsequent adaptations:
- The Saint (film series), starring Louis Hayward (1938; 1953), George Sanders (1939–1941) and Hugh Sinclair (1941–1943)
- The Saint (radio show) (1944–1951), a radio program starring Vincent Price and others on NBC Radio
- The Saint (comics) (1948-1961), a long-running comic strip series
- The Saint (TV series) (1962–1969), a British television series starring Roger Moore
- For the 1970s series starring Ian Ogilvy, see Return of the Saint
- The Saint (TV Films) 1989 TV movie series starring Simon Dutton
- The Saint (film) (1997), an American film starring Val Kilmer
- The Saint (soundtrack), a soundtrack album from the 1997 film
- The Saint (novel), a novelization of the 1997 film, by Burl Barer
- "The Saint" (Law & Order: Criminal Intent), an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent
- Il santo (novel), a novel by Antonio Fogazzaro
- The Saint, an omnibus edition of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels, Honour Guard through Sabbat Martyr, by Dan Abnett
Music[link]
- The Saint (music venue), a club showcasing live, original music in Asbury Park, New Jersey
- "The Saint" (song), a song by Orbital from the 1997 film soundtrack of the same title
- The Saints (band), an Australian punk band
- The Saints (1960s band), an English instrumental band
Newspapers[link]
- The Saint (UK newspaper), a student newspaper at the University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, United Kingdom
- The Saint (newspaper), a student newspaper at St. Clair College in Ontario, Canada
Other uses[link]
- The Saint (club), gay nightclub in New York City that operated from 1980 to 1990
- Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua, known locally as "il Santo"
- Play Radio (Hampshire), a radio station formerly known at "The Saint"
- Ian St. John, Scottish football player nicknamed "The Saint"
- WVCR-FM, Siena College radio station
See also[link]
 |
This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. |
http://wn.com/The_Saint
Related pages:
http://fr.wn.com/Le Saint
http://de.wn.com/The Saint
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saint
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| Simon Schama | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | (1945-02-13) 13 February 1945 (age 67) London |
| Nationality | British |
| Institutions | Columbia University |
| Alma mater | Christ's College, Cambridge |
Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is a British historian and art historian. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University.[1] He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. Other works on history and art include The Embarrassment of Riches, Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes,[2] and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens.[1] Schama is an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker.[1]
Contents |
Life and early career[link]
The son of Jewish parents with roots in Lithuania, Romania, and Turkey, Schama was born in London.[1][3] In the mid-1940s, the family moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex before moving back to London. Schama writes of this period in the Introduction to Landscape & Memory (pp. 3–4)
I had no hill [the previous paragraph had talked of his enthusiasm for Puck of Pook's Hill], but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. ... It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. ...
In 1956 Schama won a scholarship to the independent Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Cricklewood, (from 1961 Elstree, Herts.), followed by Christ's College, Cambridge, reading history under J. H. Plumb and graduating with a Starred First in 1966.[1]
He worked for short periods as a lecturer in history at Cambridge, where he became a Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and at Oxford, where he was made a Fellow of Brasenose College in 1976, specialising in the French Revolution.[1] At this time, Schama wrote his first book, Patriots and Liberators, which won the Wolfson History Prize. The book was originally intended as a study of the French Revolution, but as published in 1977, it focused on the effect of the Patriot revolution in The Netherlands, and its aftermath.
His second book, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978), is a study of the Zionist aims of Edmond James de Rothschild and James Armand de Rothschild.
He is married to Ginny Papaioannou, a geneticist from California; they have two children.[4]
In the United States[link]
In 1980 Schama took up a chair at Harvard University. His next book, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), again focused on Dutch history.[5] In it, Schama interpreted the ambivalences that informed the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, held in balance between the conflicting imperatives, to live richly and with power, or to live a godly life. The iconographic evidence that Schama draws upon, in 317 illustrations, of emblems and propaganda that defined Dutch character, prefigured his expansion in the 1990s as a commentator on art and visual culture.[6]
Citizens (1989), written at speed to a publisher's commission, finally saw the publication of his long-awaited study of the French revolution, and won the 1990 NCR Book Award. Citizens was very well received and sold admirably. Its view that the violence of the Terror was inherent from the start of the Revolution, however, has received serious criticism.[1][7]
In 1991, he published Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations),[8] a relatively slender work of unusual structure and point-of-view in that it looked at two widely reported deaths a hundred years apart, that of General James Wolfe – and the famous painting by Benjamin West – and that of (by murder) George Parkman, uncle of the better known Francis Parkman. Schama mooted some possible (invented) connections between the two cases, exploring the historian's inability "ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing the documentation," and speculatively bridging "the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration." Not all readers absorbed the nuance of the title: it received a greatly mixed critical and academic reception. Traditional historians in particular denounced Schama's integration of fact and conjecture to produce a seamless narrative[9] but later assessments took a more relaxed view of the experiment.[10] It was an approach soon taken up by such historical writers as Peter Ackroyd, David Taylor and Richard Holmes.[11] Sales in hardback exceeded Schama's earlier works.[12]
Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995) focused on the relationship between physical environment and folk memory, separating the components of landscape as wood, water and rock, enmeshed in the cultural consciousness of collective "memory" that are embodied in myths, which Schama finds to be expressed outwardly in ceremony and text. While in many ways even more personal and idiosyncratic than Dead Certainties, roaming through widening circles of digressions, this book was also more traditionally structured and better-defined in its approach. While many reviews remained decidedly mixed, the book was a definite commercial success and won numerous prizes.[13]
Appropriately, many of the plaudits came from the art world rather than from traditional academia. This was borne out when Schama became art critic for The New Yorker in 1995. He held the position for three years, dovetailing his regular column with professorial duties at Columbia University; a selection of his best essays on art for the magazine, chosen by Schama himself, was published in 2005 under the title Hang Ups. During this time, Schama also produced a lavishly illustrated Rembrandt's Eyes, another critical and commercial success. Despite the book's title, it contrasts the biographies of Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens.
BBC[link]
In 1995 Schama wrote and presented a series called Landscape and Memory to accompany his book of the same name.
The year 2000 saw Schama return to the UK, having been commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of television documentary programmes on British history as part of their Millennium celebrations, under the title A History of Britain. Schama wrote and presented the episodes himself, in a friendly and often jocular style with his highly characteristic delivery, and was rewarded with excellent reviews and unexpectedly high ratings. There has been, however, some irritation and criticism expressed by a group of historians about Schama's condensed recounting of the British Isles' history on this occasion, particularly by those specialising in the pre-Anglo-Saxon history of insular Celtic civilisation.[14] The series was eventually expanded to three, with 15 episodes[15][16] produced in total covering the complete span of British history up until 1965;[16] it went on to become one of the BBC's best-selling documentary series on DVD. Schama also wrote a trilogy of tie-in books for the show, which took the story up to the year 2000; there is some debate as to whether the books are the tie-in product for the TV series, or the other way around. The series also had some popularity in the United States when it was first shown on the History Channel.[16]
In 2001 Schama received a CBE. In 2003 he signed a lucrative new contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three new books and two accompanying TV series. Worth £3 million (around US$5.3m), it represents the biggest advance deal ever for a TV historian. The first result of the deal was a book and TV show entitled Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, dealing in particular with the proclamation issued during the Revolutionary War by Lord Dunmore offering slaves from rebel plantations freedom in return for service to the crown.
In 2006 the BBC broadcast a new TV series, Simon Schama's Power of Art which, with an accompanying book, was presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to art history for him, treating eight artists through eight key works: Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa, Rembrandt's Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, Jacques-Louis David's The Death Of Marat, J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship, Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Crows, Picasso's Guernica, and Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals.[17] It was also shown on PBS in the United States.[18]
In October 2008 BBC broadcast a four-part television series called The American Future: A History presented and written by Schama. In March 2009, Schama presented a BBC Radio 4 show entitled 'Baseball and Me', both exploring the history of the game and describing his own personal support of the Boston Red Sox.
In 2010, Schama presented a series of ten talks for the BBC Radio 4 series A Point of View:
- Why We Like Tough Guys in Politics: When times are hard people seem to prefer tough leaders.
- Singing in the Rain: Schama looks forward to spring with personal reflections on the changing seasons.
- At the Heart of the Matter: The politics surrounding President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms.
- The Gift of the Gab: The history of political rhetoric and the power during election campaigns of televised debates.
- Behold, Newstralia!: Celebrates the distinctive history and culture of New Zealand and regrets any renewed talk of joining forces with Australia.
- A Welcome Slice of American Pie: Reflection on the quality of American food and eating habits.
- The Drama of Politics: The timeless drama of British politics.
- When Money is Just an Illusion: Reflection on the meaning of money as represented by coins and notes and in art.
- Hearts of Oak: Reflection on the significance of one of the sights that will greet new MPs in the chamber of the House of Commons - the panelling made of solid oak.
- Britain's New Politics: Reflection on the 2010 United Kingdom General Election, favourably comparing the British system for a swift handover of power to the cumbersome American one.
Politics[link]
Schama is a supporter of the Labour Party, donating £2,000 to Oona King's bid to become Labour's candidate for the 2012 London Mayoral election.[19]
Israel[link]
Schama was critical of a call by British novelist John Berger for an academic boycott of Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians. Writing in The Guardian in an article co-authored with lawyer Anthony Julius, Schama compared Berger's academic boycott to policies adopted by Nazi Germany, noting "This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On 1 April 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores."[20]
In 2006 on the BBC, Schama debated with Vivienne Westwood the morality of Israel's actions in the Israel-Lebanon war.[21] He characterised Israel's bombing of Lebanese city centres as unhelpful in Israel's attempt to "get rid of" Hezbollah.[21] With regard to the bombing he said: "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand. You've even got to understand Israel's point of view."[21]
United States[link]
Schama is a vocal supporter of President Barack Obama[22] and critic of George W. Bush.[23] He appeared on the BBC's coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, clashing with John Bolton.[24]
Writing style[link]
Schama has a literary way of writing that is attractive to both historians and a wider readership. It is "packed with evocative detail: rich fruit cakes crammed with raisins, currants, nuts and glacé cherries all mulled in brandy sauce".[1] He has also received criticism for dumbing down history, presenting a "grossly oversimplified and mythologising view of the history of nations" and not fostering critical thinking.[25]
Criticism[link]
Susan Buck-Morss criticizes Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age for its "selective national history" of the Dutch Republic, "that omits much or all of the colonizing story."[26] "One would have no idea that Dutch hegemony in the slave trade (replacing Spain and Portugal as major players) contributed substantially to the enormous 'overload' of wealth that he describes as becoming so socially and morally problematic during the century of Dutch 'centrality' to the 'commerce of the world.'"[27]
Publications[link]
- Books
- Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (1977)
- Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978)
- The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987)
- Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989)[1]
- Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1991)
- Landscape and Memory (1995)[2][13]
- Rembrandt's Eyes (1999)[2]
- A History of Britain Vol. I (2000, ISBN 0-563-48714-3)
- A History of Britain Vol. II (2001, ISBN 0-563-48718-6)
- A History of Britain Vol. III (2002, ISBN 0-563-48719-4)
- Hang Ups: Essays on Art (2005)
- Rough Crossings (2005, ISBN 0-06-053916-X)
- Simon Schama's Power of Art (2006, ISBN 0-06-117610-9)[18]
- The American Future: A History (2009, ISBN 0-06-053923-2)
- Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill and My Mother
- Documentaries
- Landscape and Memory (1995), in five parts
- Rembrandt: The Public Eye and the Private Gaze (1995)
- Simon Schama's A History of Britain – BBC (2000), in 15 parts
- Simon Schama's John Donne - 2009
- Murder at Harvard - PBS (2003)
- Rough Crossings – BBC (2005)
- Simon Schama's Power of Art – BBC (2006), in eight parts
- The American Future: A History – BBC (2008), in four parts
- Simon Schama's: Obama's America – BBC (2009).
Prizes & Other Honors[link]
- 1977 Wolfson History Prize, for Patriots and Liberators
- 1977 Leo Gershoy Award, for Patriots and Liberators
- 1987 New York Times Best Books of the Year, for The Embarrassment of Riches
- 1989 New York Times Best Books of the Year, for Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
- 1989 Yorkshire Post Book Award, for Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
- 1996 Lionel Trilling Book Award, for Landscape and Memory
- 1996 WH Smith Literary Award, for Landscape and Memory
- 2001 Broadcasting Press Guild Writer's Award, for A History of Britain
- 2001 Nominated for BAFTA Huw Wheldon Award for Specialised Programme or Series (Arts, History, Religion and Science), for A History of Britain
- 2002 Nominated for BAFTA Richard Dimbleby Award for the Best Presenter (Factual, Features and News), for A History of Britain
- 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-fiction winner, for Rough Crossings[28]
- 2006 Hessell-Tiltman Prize Shortlist, for Rough Crossings
- 2007 Nominated for BAFTA Huw Wheldon Award for Specialized Factual Programme or Series, for Simon Schama's Power of Art
- 2008 The Daily Telegraph's 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library, for Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Notes[link]
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Snowman, Daniel. "Simon Schama." History Today 54, no. 7 (July 2004): 34–36. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 30 April 2009)
- ^ a b c Binstock, Benjamin. “Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 361–366. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051386 (accessed 30 April 2009).
- ^ "Schama’s art of making history". by The Jewish Chronicle. http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=46437&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchtxt=1&srchhead=1&srchauthor=1&srchsandp=1&scsrch=0. Retrieved 2006-07-23.
- ^ Penguin Authors: Simon Schama (retrieved 11 April 2010)
- ^ Daniel, M., and S. Steinberg. "Simon Schama." Publishers Weekly 238, No. 22 (17 May 1991): 46. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 30 April 2009).
- ^ "He provides a reading of cultural tints and social textures," the reviewers in Contemporary Sociology (Vol. 17.6 (November 1988:760–62) found, "at a level of visual detail that is usually reserved for art history."
- ^ Notably in Timothy Tackett, "Interpreting the Terror" French Historical Studies 24.4 (Autumn 2001:569–578); Tackett's view of swiftly evolving revolution in his prosopography of the deputies, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789–1790 (Princeton University Press) 1996, was not fundamentally at variance with Schama.
- ^ Halttunen, Karen. Review of “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations.) by Simon Schama.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Sep., 1992), p. 631 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2080071 (accessed 30 April 2009).
- ^ Windschuttle, Keith (2000). The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. San Francisco: Encounter Books. p. 252. ISBN 1-893554-12-0. "...drawing absolute conclusions from ... fragments of evidence"
- ^ Toplin, Robert Brent (1996). History by Hollywood: the use and abuse of the American past. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 7quote=a fascinating experiment in historical writing.. ISBN 0-252-06536-0.
- ^ Byatt, A. S. (2000). On histories and stories: selected essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 10. ISBN 0-674-00451-5.
- ^ Amazon sales ranks (hardback versions), as at December 2010: Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, 103,781; Citizens, 320,762; The Embarrassment of Riches, 877,177.
- ^ a b Williams, Michael. Review of: “Landscape and Memory. by Simon Schama.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 564–565 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2564086 (accessed 30 April 2009)
- ^ "Simon Schama Antidote". History News Network. Retrieved on 28 March 2007.
- ^ "A History of Britain". IMDb. Retrieved on 28 March 2007
- ^ a b c Cooper, Barbara Roisman. "A Wild Ride" Through A History Of Britain With Simon Schama. British Heritage 23, no. 6 (November 2002): 48. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 30 April 2009)
- ^ Simon Schama's Power of Art. BBC Arts. Retrieved on 28 March 2007.
- ^ a b Nalley, Richard. "SIMON SCHAMA'S POWER OF ART." Forbes 180 (18 September 2007): 165–165. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 30 April 2009).
- ^ White, Michael (13 August 2010). "David Miliband hits it rich in leadership race as stars back Burnham and Balls". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/13/labour-leadership-donations-miliband-burnham-balls.
- ^ John Berger is wrong, Simon Schama and Anthony Julius, The Guardian, 22 December 2006
- ^ a b c Simon Schama & Vivienne Westwood, This Week, BBC, 24 July 2006
- ^ Schama, Simon (30 August 2008). "In its severity and fury, this was Obama at his most powerful and moving". The Guardian (London): pp. 34. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/30/barackobama.democrats20081. Retrieved 5 November 2008.
- ^ Schama, Simon (3 November 2008). "Nowhere man: a farewell to Dubya, all-time loser in presidential history". The Guardian (London): pp. 1–2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/03/george-bush-legacy-dubya. Retrieved 5 November 2008.
- ^ "Road to the White House". The Evening Times. 5 November 2008. http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.2465762.0.road_to_the_white_house.php. Retrieved 5 November 2008.
- ^ "SIMON SCHAMA; Dumbed Down." New York Times (24 November 2002): 4. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 1 May 2009).
- ^ Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. (Summer, 2000), pp. 821-865.
- ^ Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. (Summer, 2000), pp. 821-865.
- ^ JULIE BOSMAN. "National Briefing | Arts: National Book Critics Circle Winners." New York Times (9 March 2007): 20. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 1 May 2009).
References[link]
- Binstock, Benjamin. “Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 361–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051386 (accessed 30 April 2009).
- Cooper, Barbara Roisman. "A Wild Ride" Through A History Of Britain With Simon Schama. British Heritage 23, No. 6 (November 2002): 48. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 28 April 2009)
- Daniel, M., and S. Steinberg. "Simon Schama." Publishers Weekly 238, No. 22 (17 May 1991): 46. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 30 April 2009)
- Halttunen, Karen. Review of “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations.) by Simon Schama.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Sep., 1992), p. 631 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2080071 (accessed 29 April 2009).
- JULIE BOSMAN. "National Briefing | Arts: National Book Critics Circle Winners." New York Times (9 March 2007): 20. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 1 May 2009).
- Nalley, Richard. "SIMON SCHAMA'S POWER OF ART." Forbes 180 (18 September 2007): 165. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 30 April 2009).
- "SIMON SCHAMA; Dumbed Down." New York Times (24 November 2002): 4. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 1 May 2009).
- Snowman, Daniel. "Simon Schama." History Today 54, No. 7 (July 2004): 34–36. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed 30 April 2009)
- Williams, Michael. Review of: “Landscape and Memory. by Simon Schama.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 564–565 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2564086 (accessed 30 April 2009)
External links[link]
- Columbia History faculty page
- Columbia Art History faculty page
- "Free Fight", with Schama, offers "a new look at Britain, the United States, slavery and freedom during the Revolutionary War". The Brian Lehrer Show, 8 May 2006.
- Simon Schama’s The American History: A Future A Talk at the Shanghai International Literary Festival
- Audio: Simon Schama in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion programme The Forum
- Booknotes interview with Schama on Citizens, 14 July 1989.
- Works by Simon Schama on Open Library at the Internet Archive
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This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (December 2011) |
- For the Canadian football player, see Kyle Jones (Canadian football)
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This article relies on references to primary sources or sources affiliated with the subject, rather than references from independent authors and third-party publications. Please add citations from reliable sources. (July 2008) |
Kyle W. Jones (born 1955) is a professional musician, mathematician, archivist and is a former Maine state politician, notable for his influence on the state's energy industry.
Background and musical career[link]
Born in Bar Harbor to a pianist mother and a drummer father, Jones grew up surrounded by music. He sang in the local church choir through high school and began playing bass guitar at age 12. He has performed widely, including before the United Nations, alongside such jazz notables as J. Eric Johnson, Steve Hunt, Premik Russell Tubbs and Hal Russell. In 1995, Jones released a recording of his composition Meltdown, on the C.D. of that name, in honor of his happenstance visit to Three Mile Island, on the night of March 28, 1979. He earned Summa Cum Laude degrees in mathematics, American studies and a Doctorate in Law from the University of Maine System. As noted by Chancellor J. Michael Orenduff in his 1995 State of Education address to the Maine House and Senate, Jones is the only student in the history of the University of Maine System to complete an entire mathematics degree in just two semesters.
Political career[link]
First elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 1994, Jones became Chair of the Joint Select Committee on Utilities and Energy in 1996. In this position, he drafted and sponsored Maine's Electric Deregulation Act, chairing all hearings and workshops. The act passed unanimously, and the resulting influx of cheap electricity and loss of monopoly status led to the closure of Maine Yankee Nuclear Plant in 1997. The act also mandates a 30% renewable resource portfolio for all companies selling electricity in Maine. He was named the 1997 Public Official of the Year in Maine. After serving for four years in the Maine House of Representatives, Jones chose not to run for office a third time.
Jones currently works as the senior archivist for composer Carman Moore.
External links[link]
| Persondata | |
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| Name | Jones, Kyle W. |
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| Short description | American politician |
| Date of birth | 1955 |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Jones
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
