Benjamin Hall, 1st Baron Llanover
Benjamin Hall, Baron Llanover was a Whig / Liberal politician and social, church, health and local government reformer who served in the House of Commons from 1831 until his elevation to the peerage in 1859. As President of the Board of Health in 1854–1855 he was a minister in the Cabinet and thereafter occupied the non-Cabinet position of First Commissioner of Public Works until 1858. In 1859 he was made a Peer as Lord Llanover of Llanover and Abercarn and served in the House of Lords until his death in 1867. He was a Minister under Lords Aberdeen and Palmerston and was a member of the Privy Council.
He was a prominent reformer whose primary focus in parliamentary debates was on church reform, local government and sanitation. He was the United Kingdom's first Minister of Health, playing an import role in the development of modern systems for the management of health and sanitation in London and later, as First Commissioner for Works, established the Metropolitan Board of Works, the first metropolis-wide government for London. He also oversaw the completion of the new Houses of Parliament and is today chiefly remembered as the person after whom Big Ben, the largest bell in its Elizabeth Tower, is named.
Early life
Lord Llanover was the eldest son of Benjamin Hall, a Welsh ironmaster and Member of Parliament, and Charlotte, the daughter of Richard Crawshay, a prominent ironmaster and pioneer of the Industrial Revolution in Wales and, in his time, one of the wealthiest men in the United Kingdom.Educated at the Westminster School in London, he matriculated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1820.
Thereafter he travelled in the United Kingdom and Europe and in 1826, at the age of only 24, served a year in the ceremonial role of Sheriff of Monmouthshire. During his travels he visited New Lanark, the model settlement and social experiment managed by Robert Owen a philanthropist and social reformer. The visit is said to have influenced Hall's management of his own estates in Wales and his general views on the direction of social reform. Upon his return he took up the oversight of his estates at Llanover and Abercarn and served as a Magistrate. From the time of his marriage to Augusta Waddington in 1823, and under her influence, he also became interested in the revival of the Welsh language and culture, a cause the couple championed throughout their lives.
Member of Parliament for Monmouth Boroughs and Marylebone
In 1830 he entered politics, standing for election to the Monmouth Boroughs seat in Parliament. In so doing he took on the powerful and conservative Somerset family, headed by the Duke of Beaufort, which had since the time of Henry the VIII dominated Monmouthshire politics and controlled the seat in the House of Commons. At the time Monmouth Boroughs was held by the Marquis of Worcester, son and heir to the Duke. In the General Election of April–June 1831 Hall took the seat from Lord Worcester. His platform was pro-reform against a sitting MP who had publicly announced his opposition to the Reform Bill which Hall, in his first actions in the House of Commons, supported during its first and second readings in June and July 1831. However, Lord Worcester disputed the loss of his seat on the grounds of wrongful appointment of new burgesses in Newport who had voted in the election and, following an investigation by a committee of the House, he was reinstated as MP for Monmouth in July 1831, with Hall losing his seat.In the election of December 1832 he again contested the Borough of Monmouth against Lord Worcester whom he once more defeated. He was reelected in January 1835, this time surviving another petition contesting the validity of his support. For the election of 1837 he switched his seat to the Marylebone constituency in London which he continued to represent until his elevation to the peerage in 1857.
As an MP Hall was a noted reformer focusing particularly on social issues and reform of the church and local government. He was also an early opponent of the death penalty and in his first years in Parliament supported the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
Religious tolerance and reform of the established church
Although an Anglican, he was known for his tolerance of other faiths and defence of the rights of Catholics, Jews and dissenters at a time when such views were not held by the majority. He had a reputation for taking up such causes in Parliament, criticising what he believed to be the failings of the leadership of the established church and was an outspoken proponent of church reform. His attitudes and the reasons for his reputation as a vehement critic of the Church are well reflected in a speech delivered during an 1850 debate on remuneration and housing of the Anglican clergy, also published as a pamphlet under the title "A letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on the state of the Church". In his speech and pamphlet he emphasised the disparities in stipends, where some bishops received over £50,000 per year while the lower clergy were paid as little is £40 per annum, and a situation where nearly £144,000 had been spent on bishops palaces with only £5,295 allocated for housing of what he called the "working clergy". In this same debate, he dealt with what he regarded as the many other abuses of the considerable property holdings of the church and how they were used to enrich senior clergy rather than being applied to religious purposes. Other issues covered included nepotism in church appointments, non-residence of clergy in their parishes and pluralism, a practice whereby a clergyman was appointed to more than one parish, receiving stipends from each and then employing curates to serve in the parishes in which he did not reside, pocketing the difference between income from the 'living' and the lower wages he paid to curates.As a promoter of Welsh culture and language, he also campaigned for the appointment of Welsh speaking Anglican clergy and bishops in Wales and for Welsh Bishops to be resident in their diocese.
He also spoke out against the practice of barring Jewish MPs from taking their seats because they objected to taking the oath of allegiance due to its wording requiring them to acknowledge being Christian.
As himself the grandson of a senior clergyman, Rev Dr Benjamin Hall, a Canon in and Chancellor of Llandaff Cathedral, many of his views on the church would have been anathema to his grandfather who was a substantial pluralist who simultaneously held three livings and two prebendaries, earning a handsome income from distant parishes that he could rarely if ever have visited.
Chartism and Irish unrest
While a critic of the Chartists and their agenda, following the Chartist unrest of 1839, he showed understanding and sympathy for the underlying causes of the discontent, but no support for acts of violent rebellion. He was one of the few to speak in support of John Frost, the leader of the Newport Rising, during his 1840 trial for high treason.By the time of the European revolutions of 1848, which in the United Kingdom manifested themselves through further Chartist unrest and the Young Ireland rebellion, he remained firmly opposed to violence, condemning the leaders of the Irish unrest as maniacs and propagators of "falsehood and hypocrisy" and those of the Chartists as "contemptible and hateful".
In June 1852 he was involved in an incident in the House of Commons where he was assaulted by the Irish Chartist MP Feargus O'Connor.
The Corn Laws and famine in Ireland
From the 1830s up to the time of their repeal in 1846, and despite being a large landholder, he opposed the Corn Laws which protected agricultural interests, but led to higher food prices in urban areas. He was a member of the Anti–Corn Law League which campaigned for repeal of the laws. On the matter of relief for Ireland during the course of the Irish Famine, which was exacerbated by the impact of the Corn Laws, he campaigned hard for Irish landlords to be taxed in the same way as their English counterparts and generally to equitably contribute to famine relief.Local government and sanitary services
From the early 1850s, he started to raise matters concerning local government, in particular the need to improve sanitation and the efficiency of the governance of London. In 1850 he commenced his criticism of the Corporation of London which, unlike municipal authorities in other large cities, had been exempted from the provisions of the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. Reform of the corporation was his major focus over the following period. In March 1853 he gave notice in Parliament of his intention to introduce a bill to reform the London Corporation, something he eventually achieved during his tenure as First Commissioner for Public Works. This threat appears to have encouraged the government to set up a commission to investigate reform of London's system of government.During debate in the Commons on the Public Health Bill in 1854 he was a vocal critic of the management and operations of the Board of Health, the instrument set up by the Public Health Act 1848, and in particular the conduct of the leading commissioner, fellow social reformer, Edwin Chadwick. This criticism focused on the failure of the Public Health Act to provide a significant role for local government and the side-lining by Chadwick and the third Commissioner, Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, of the First Commissioner of Works, who represented the government on the Board. He was particularly concerned about the way in which Chadwick and Southwood Smith set a programme that frequently put the Board at odds with local government and how, in his opinion, this made it ineffective.