Henry Campbell-Bannerman
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1905 to 1908 and Leader of the Liberal Party from 1899 to 1908. He also was Secretary of State for War twice, in the cabinets of Gladstone and Rosebery. He was the first First Lord of the Treasury to be officially called the "Prime Minister", the term only coming into official usage five days after he took office. He remains the only person to date to hold the positions of Prime Minister and Father of the House at the same time, and the last Liberal leader to gain a UK parliamentary majority.
Known colloquially as "CB", Campbell-Bannerman firmly believed in free trade, Irish Home Rule and the improvement of social conditions, including reduced working hours. A. J. A. Morris, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, called him "Britain's first and only Radical prime minister". Following a general-election defeat in 1900, Campbell-Bannerman went on to lead the Liberal Party to a landslide victory over the Conservative Party at the 1906 general election – the last election in which the Liberals gained an overall majority in the House of Commons. The government he subsequently led passed legislation to ensure trade unions could not be liable for damages incurred during strike action, introduced free school meals for all children, and empowered local authorities to purchase agricultural land from private landlords. Campbell-Bannerman resigned as prime minister in April 1908 due to ill-health and was replaced by his chancellor, H. H. Asquith. He died 19 days later – the only prime minister to die in the official residence, 10 Downing Street.
Early life
Henry Campbell-Bannerman was born on 7 September 1836 at Kelvinside House in Glasgow as Henry Campbell, the second son and youngest of the six children born to James Campbell of Stracathro and his wife Janet Bannerman. James Campbell had started work at a young age in the clothing trade in Glasgow, before in 1817 going into partnership with his brother, William Campbell, to found J.& W. Campbell & Co., a warehousing, general wholesale and retail drapery business. His cousin James was married to Jessie Campbell, pioneer of women's higher education in Glasgow.In 1831 James Campbell was elected as a member of Glasgow Town Council and in the 1837 and 1841 general elections he stood as a Conservative candidate for the Glasgow constituency. He served as the Lord Provost of Glasgow from 1840 to 1843.
Campbell-Bannerman was educated at the High School of Glasgow, the University of Glasgow, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he achieved a Third-Class Degree in the Classical Tripos. After graduating, he joined the family firm of J. & W. Campbell & Co., based in Glasgow's Ingram Street, and was made a partner in the firm in 1860. He was also commissioned as a lieutenant into the 53rd Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteer Corps, which was recruited from employees of the firm, and in 1867 was promoted to captain.
In 1871, Henry Campbell became Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the addition of the surname Bannerman being a requirement of the will of his uncle, Henry Bannerman, from whom in that year he had inherited the estate of Hunton Lodge in Hunton, Kent. He did not like the "horrid long name" that resulted and invited friends to call him "C.B." instead.
Henry Campbell-Bannerman had an older brother, James Alexander Campbell, who in 1876 inherited their father's 4000-acre Stracathro estate. He served as the Conservative Member of Parliament for Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities from 1880 to 1906.
Marriage
In 1860, Campbell-Bannerman married Sarah Charlotte Bruce, and he and his new bride set up house at 6 Clairmont Gardens in the Park district of the West End of Glasgow. The couple never had any children.Campbell-Bannerman and Charlotte were an exceptionally close couple throughout their marriage; in the words of one historian, they "shared every thought and possible moment". Charlotte may have been the person who mostly encouraged Campbell-Bannerman to stand for election, given his local profile.
For several years an aunt occupied the big house at Hunton which Campbell-Bannerman had inherited in 1871. For their country residence, Campbell-Bannerman and his wife lived elsewhere, including Gennings Park, which they did not leave until 1887. They first occupied Hunton Lodge in 1894.
Campbell-Bannerman spoke French, German and Italian fluently, and every summer he and his wife spent a couple of months in Europe, usually in France and at the spa town of Marienbad in Bohemia. Campbell-Bannerman had a deep appreciation for French culture, and particularly enjoyed the novels of Anatole France. They also had an occasional home at Belmont Castle, Meigle, in Scotland.
Campbell-Bannerman and his wife were both reported to be enormous eaters, and in their later years each weighed nearly. Charlotte died on 30 August 1906. After losing her, Campbell-Bannerman was said to 'never be the same'.
Member of Parliament
In April 1868, at the age of thirty-one, Campbell-Bannerman stood as a Liberal candidate in a by-election for the Stirling Burghs constituency, narrowly losing to fellow Liberal John Ramsay. However, at the general election in November of that year, Campbell-Bannerman defeated Ramsay and was elected to the House of Commons as the Liberal Member of Parliament for Stirling Burghs, a constituency that he would go on to represent for almost forty years.Campbell-Bannerman rose quickly through the ministerial ranks, being appointed as Financial Secretary to the War Office in Gladstone's first government in November 1871, serving in this position until 1874 under Edward Cardwell, the Secretary of State for War. When Cardwell was raised to the peerage, Campbell-Bannerman became the Liberal government's chief spokesman on defence matters in the House of Commons. He was appointed to the same position from 1880 to 1882 in Gladstone's second government, and after serving as Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty between 1882 and 1884, Campbell-Bannerman was promoted to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1884, an important role with ongoing Home Rule debates.
In Gladstone's third and fourth governments, in 1886 and 1892 to 1894 respectively, as well as the Earl of Rosebery's government from 1894 to 1895, Campbell-Bannerman served as the Secretary of State for War. His only military experience was thirty years earlier with the 53rd Lanarkshire Rifles Volunteers. During his time in the War office, he introduced an experimental eight-hour day for the workers at the Woolwich Arsenal munitions factory. The results demonstrated that there was no loss in production. Therefore, Campbell-Bannerman extended the eight-hour day to the Army Clothing Department.
He persuaded the Duke of Cambridge, the Queen's cousin, to resign as Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces. This earned Campbell-Bannerman a knighthood in the form of a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in Rosebery's 1895 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours. In 1895, Campbell unwittingly caused the fall of Rosebery's ministry, when the Earl's government lost a vote over C.B.'s handling of cordite reserves. Unionist MPs unexpectedly forced a successful motion of censure, and the failure led to Rosebery's resignation and the return to power of Lord Salisbury.
After the 1895 general election, Campbell-Bannerman lobbied strongly to succeed Arthur Peel as Speaker of the House of Commons, in part because he sought a less stressful role in public life. Rosebery, backed by the Liberal Leader in the Commons, Sir William Harcourt, refused since Campbell-Bannerman was viewed as indispensable to the Government's front-bench team in the lower House.
Leader of the Liberal Party
On 6 February 1899, Campbell-Bannerman succeeded William Vernon Harcourt as Leader of the Liberals in the House of Commons, and Leader of the Opposition. The Boer War of 1899 split the Liberal Party into Imperialist and Pro-Boer factions, with CB strongly critical of the use of concentration camps as 'methods of barbarism'. Campbell-Bannerman faced the difficult task of holding together the strongly divided party, which was subsequently and unsurprisingly defeated in the "khaki election" of 1900. Campbell-Bannerman caused particular friction within his own party when in a speech to the National Reform Union in June 1901 and shortly after meeting Emily Hobhouse, he described the concentration camps set up by the British in the Boer War as "methods of barbarism".The Liberal Party was later able to unify over its opposition to the Education Act 1902 and the Brussels Sugar Convention of 1902, in which Britain and nine other nations attempted to stabilise world sugar prices by setting up a commission to investigate export bounties and decide on penalties. The Conservative Government of Arthur Balfour had threatened countervailing duties and subsidies of West Indian sugar producers as a negotiating tool. The convention's intent was to lead to the gradual phasing out of export bounties, and Britain would then forbid the importation of subsidised sugar. In a speech to the Cobden Club on 28 November 1902, Campbell-Bannerman denounced the convention as threatening the sovereignty of Britain.
It means that we abandon our fiscal independence, together with our free-trade ways; that we subside into the tenth part of a Vehmgericht which is to direct us what sugar is to be countervailed, at what rate per cent. we are to countervail it, how much is to be put on for the bounty, and how much for the tariff being in excess of the convention tariff; and this being the established order of things, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer in his robes obeys the orders that he receives from this foreign convention, in which the Britisher is only one out of ten, and the House of Commons humbly submits to the whole transaction. Sir, of all the insane schemes ever offered to a free country as a boon this is surely the maddest.
However, it was Joseph Chamberlain's proposals for Tariff Reform in May 1903 that provided the Liberals with a great and nationally resonating cause on which to campaign and unify, due to its protectionist nature. Chamberlain's proposals dominated politics through the rest of 1903 up until the general election of 1906. Campbell-Bannerman, like other Liberals, held an unshakeable belief in free trade. In a speech at Bolton on 15 October 1903, he explained in greater detail the reasoning behind Liberal support for free trade.
We are satisfied that it is right because it gives the freest play to individual energy and initiative and character and the largest liberty both to producer and consumer. We say that trade is injured when it is not allowed to follow its natural course, and when it is either hampered or diverted by artificial obstacles.... We believe in free trade because we believe in the capacity of our countrymen. That at least is why I oppose protection root and branch, veiled and unveiled, one-sided or reciprocal. I oppose it in any form. Besides we have experience of fifty years, during which our prosperity has become the envy of the world.
In 1903, the Liberal Party's Chief Whip Herbert Gladstone negotiated a pact with Ramsay MacDonald of the Labour Representation Committee to withdraw Liberal candidates to help LRC candidates in certain seats, in return for LRC withdrawal in other seats to help Liberal candidates. This attempt to undermine and outflank the Conservatives, which would prove to be successful, formed what became known as the "Gladstone–MacDonald pact". Campbell-Bannerman got on well with Labour leaders, and he said in 1903 "we are keenly in sympathy with the representatives of Labour. We have too few of them in the House of Commons". Despite this comment, and his sympathies with many elements of the Labour movement, he was not a socialist. One biographer has written that "he was deeply and genuinely concerned about the plight of the poor and so had readily adopted the rhetoric of progressivism, but he was not a progressive".