1886-1895
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William Ewart Gladstone, 1809-1898
Amongst the number of outstanding statesmen in Victorian Britain, Gladstone was unquestionably the greatest. He brought to his public life an exceptional physical, mental and spiritual vitality. He was a man of independent but by no means unchanging mind. His combination of moral zeal and the willingness to think on and on, no doubt explains…
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Sir William Harcourt, 1827-1904
{…}It took Harcourt, like Gladstone, a long time to become a Liberal, but once this affiliation was decided, he became an active and prominent one. He did not completely fulfil his expected potential, being perhaps the classic case of the best Prime Minister we never had. But as a strong contender for another title, that…
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David Lloyd-George (Earl Lloyd-George and Viscount Gwynedd), 1863-1945
[…]The pinnacle of Lloyd George’s career was the peace-making at Paris in the first half of 1919, leading to the Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919. While rightly criticised in many aspects (such as the war guilt clause, the scale of reparations and many boundaries), Lloyd George tilted the settlement in a more…
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Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse, 1864-1929
Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse, born at Liskeard, Cornwall on 8 September 1864, came from a long line of Anglican clerics. His father, the Venerable Reginald Hobhouse, was Rector of St Ive, near Liskeard, a position he had obtained through his political connections with Sir Robert Peel. His mother was a Trelawney from the prominent West Country…
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John Atkinson Hobson, 1858-1940
John Atkinson Hobson, the economic writer and radical journalist most associated (along with L. T. Hobhouse) with Edwardian New Liberalism was born in Derby on 6 July 1858, the second son of William and Josephine (ne Atkinson) Hobson. William Hobson was the proprietor of the Derbyshire Advertiser, to which his son later contributed, and was…
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Graham Wallas, 1858-1932
Graham Wallas was born in Sunderland on 31 May 1858, the son of an Evangelical clergyman of the Church of England who later became Rector of Shobrooke in Devon, where the young Wallas was brought up. He went to public school at Shrewsbury and thence to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read Greats. Wallas…
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Charles Bradlaugh, 1833-1891
Charles Bradlaugh was born on 26 September 1833 in Hoxton, London, the eldest of the seven children of a poor solicitor’s clerk, and he received only an elementary education. Though brought up in the Church of England, he came to doubt the doctrines of Christianity. Pressure to conform drove him from home in 1850 and…
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Joseph Chamberlain, 1836-1914
In a picture postcard (Tuck & Sons Ltd, c. 1905) Radical Joseph was pictured wearing a coat of many colours. Each segment was labelled with different stages in his political career: socialist, extreme radical, Gladstonian, Liberal Unionist, Conservative and protectionist and food taxer. Inconsistent was one of the more favourable epithets used of Chamberlain. To…
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Herbert Gladstone (Viscount Gladstone), 1854-1930
Herbert John, Viscount Gladstone, was the fourth and youngest son of William Ewart Gladstone and his wife Catherine. He was born on 7 January 1854 at 12, Downing Street (now No. 11), which his father then occupied as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was thus born at the heart of politics, and remained there for most…