British politician (1836–1914)
Joseph Chamberlain (8 July 1836 – 2 July 1914) was a British statesman who was first a radical Liberal, then a Liberal Unionist after opposing home rule for Ireland, and eventually was a leading imperialist in coalition with the Conservatives. He split both major British parties in the course of his career. He was the father, by different marriages, of Nobel Peace Prize winner Austen Chamberlain and of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain made his career in Birmingham, first as a manufacturer of screws and then as a notable mayor of the city. He was a radical Liberal Party member and an opponent of the Elementary Education Act 1870 (33 &amp; 34 Vict. c. 75) on the basis that it could result in subsidising Church of England schools with local ratepayers' money. As a self-made businessman, he had never attended university and had contempt for the aristocracy. He entered the House of Commons at 39 years of age, relatively late in life compared to politicians from more privileged backgrounds. Rising to power through his influence with the Liberal grassroots organisation, he served as President of the Board of Trade in the Second Gladstone ministry (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", which was not enacted, of benefits for newly enfranchised agricultural labourers, including the slogan promising "three acres and a cow". Chamberlain resigned from the Third Gladstone ministry in 1886 in opposition to Irish Home Rule. He helped to engineer a Liberal Party split and became a Liberal Unionist, a party which included a bloc of MPs based in and around Birmingham.
From the 1895 general election the Liberal Unionists were in coalition with the Conservative Party, under Chamberlain's former opponent Lord Salisbury. In that government Chamberlain promoted the Workmen's Compensation Act 1897. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies, promoting a variety of schemes to build up the British Empire in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. He had major responsibility for causing the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa and was the government minister most responsible for the war effort. He became a dominant figure in the Unionist Government's re-election at the "Khaki Election" in 1900. In 1903, he resigned from the Cabinet to campaign for tariff reform (i.e. taxes on imports as opposed to the existing policy of free trade with no tariffs). He obtained the support of most Unionist MPs for this stance, but the Unionists suffered a landslide defeat at the 1906 general election. Shortly after public celebrations of his 70th birthday in Birmingham, he was disabled by a stroke, ending his public career.
Despite never becoming Prime Minister, he was one of the most important British politicians of his day, as well as a renowned orator and municipal reformer. Historian David Nicholls notes that his personality was not attractive: he was arrogant and ruthless and much hated. He never succeeded in his grand ambitions. However, he was a highly proficient grassroots organiser of democratic instincts, and played the central role in winning the Second Boer War. He is most famous for setting the agenda of British colonial, foreign, tariff and municipal policies, and for deeply splitting both major political parties. Future Prime Minister Winston Churchill remarked that despite never being prime minister, Chamberlain "made the political weather".
Early life, business career, and family life.
Chamberlain was born on Camberwell Grove in Camberwell to Joseph Chamberlain (1796–1874), a successful shoe manufacturer, and Caroline (1806–1875), daughter of cheese (formerly beer) merchant Henry Harben. His younger brother was Richard Chamberlain, later also a Liberal politician. Raised at Highbury, a prosperous suburb of North London, he was educated at University College School 1850–1852, excelling academically and gaining prizes in French and mathematics.
The elder Chamberlain was not able to provide advanced education for all his children, and at the age of 16 Joseph was apprenticed to the Worshipful Company of Cordwainers and worked for the family business (their warehouse having been at Milk Street, London, for three generations) making quality leather shoes. At 18 he joined his uncle's screw-making business, Nettlefolds of Birmingham, in which his father had invested. The company became known as Nettlefold and Chamberlain when Chamberlain became a partner with Joseph Nettlefold. During the business's most prosperous period it produced two-thirds of all metal screws made in England, and by the time of Chamberlain's retirement from business in 1874 it was exporting worldwide.
In 1859, with the Volunteer movement in full swing, Chamberlain attempted to raise a Volunteer Rifle Company in Birmingham from the Edgbaston Debating Society, but his offer was not accepted by the County.
Marriages and children.
In July 1861 Chamberlain married Harriet Kenrick, the daughter of holloware manufacturer Archibald Kenrick, of Berrow Court, Edgbaston, Birmingham; they had met the previous year. Their daughter, Beatrice Chamberlain, was born in May 1862. Harriet, who had had a premonition that she would die in childbirth, became ill two days after the birth of their son, Austen, in October 1863, and died three days later. Chamberlain devoted himself to business while the children were brought up by their maternal grandparents.
In 1868 Chamberlain married Harriet's cousin Florence Kenrick, daughter of Timothy Kenrick.
Chamberlain and Florence had four children: the future Prime Minister Neville in 1869, Ida in 1870, Hilda in 1871 and Ethel in 1873. The teaching of these four children was taken on by their elder half sister, Beatrice, who was destined to make her mark as an educationalist. On 13 February 1875 Florence gave birth to their fifth child, but she and the child died within a day. Though a Unitarian during his lifetime, the experiences Chamberlain endured with losing both wives in childbirth resulted in him losing personal faith, rejecting religious creeds and not requiring religious adherence of any of his children.
Chamberlain met his third wife, Mary Crowninshield Endicott, the 23-year-old daughter of United States Secretary of War William Crowninshield Endicott, while leading a British delegation to Washington, D.C., to resolve the Newfoundland fisheries dispute in 1887. He described her as "one of the brightest and most intelligent girls I have yet met." Before he left the United States in March 1888, Chamberlain proposed, and they married at St John's Episcopal Church in New York City, wearing white violets rather than Chamberlain's trademark orchid. Mary became a faithful supporter of his political ambitions and eased his acceptance into upper-class society in the second half of his career. They had no children. She survived Chamberlain, to later marry, in 1916, Anglican clergyman William Hartley Carnegie (1859–1936).
Early political career.
Calls for reform.
Chamberlain became involved in Liberal politics, influenced by the strong radical and liberal traditions among Birmingham shoemakers and the long tradition of social action in Chamberlain's Unitarian church. There was pressure to redistribute parliamentary seats to cities and to enfranchise a greater proportion of urban men. In 1866, Earl Russell's Liberal administration submitted a Reform Bill to create 400,000 new voters, but the bill was opposed by the "Adullamite" Liberals for disrupting the social order, and criticised by Radicals for not conceding the secret ballot or household suffrage. The bill was defeated and the government fell. Chamberlain was one of the 250,000, including the mayor, who marched for Reform in Birmingham on 27 August 1866; he recalled that "men poured into the hall, black as they were from the factories...the people were packed together like herrings" to listen to a speech by John Bright. Lord Derby's minority Conservative administration passed a Reform Act in 1867, nearly doubling the electorate from 1,430,000 to 2,470,000.
The Liberal Party won the 1868 election. Chamberlain was active in the election campaign, praising Bright and George Dixon, a Birmingham MP. Chamberlain was also influential in the local campaign in support of the Irish Disestablishment bill. In the autumn of 1869, a deputation headed by William Harris invited him to stand for the Town Council; and in November he was elected to represent St. Paul's Ward.
Chamberlain and Jesse Collings had been among the founders of the Birmingham Education League in 1867, which noted that of about 4.25 million children of school age, 2 million children, mostly in urban areas, did not attend school, with a further 1 million in uninspected schools. The government's aid to Church of England schools offended Nonconformist opinion. Chamberlain favoured free, secular, compulsory education, stating that "it is as much the duty of the State to see that the children are educated as to see that they are fed", and attributing the success of the US and Prussia to public education. The Birmingham Education League evolved into the National Education League, which held its first Conference in Birmingham in 1869 and proposed a school system funded by local rates and government grants, managed by local authorities subject to government inspection. By 1870, the League had more than one hundred branches, mostly in cities and peopled largely by men of trades unions and working men's organisations.
William Edward Forster, vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education, proposed an Elementary Education Bill in January 1870. Nonconformists opposed the proposal to fund church schools as part of the national educational system through the rates. The NEL was angered by the absence of school commissions or of free, compulsory education. Chamberlain arranged for a delegation of 400 branch members and 46 MPs to visit the prime minister William Ewart Gladstone at 10 Downing Street on 9 March 1870, the first time the two men had met. Chamberlain impressed the Prime Minister with his lucid speech, and during the bill's second reading Gladstone agreed to make amendments that removed church schools from rate-payer control and granted them funding. Liberal MPs, exasperated at the compromises in the legislation, voted against the government, and the bill passed the House of Commons with support from the Conservatives. Chamberlain campaigned against the Act, and especially Clause 25, which gave school boards of England and Wales the power to pay the fees of poor children at voluntary schools, theoretically allowing them to fund church schools. The Education League stood in several by-elections against Liberal candidates who refused to support the repeal of Clause 25. In 1873, a Liberal majority was elected to the Birmingham School Board, with Chamberlain as chairman. Eventually, a compromise was reached with the church component of the school board agreeing to make payments from rate-payer's money only to schools associated with industrial education.
Chamberlain espoused enfranchisement of rural workers and a lower cost of land. In an article written for the "Fortnightly Review", he coined the slogan of the "Four F's: Free Church, Free Schools, Free Land and Free Labour". In another article, "The Liberal Party and its Leaders", Chamberlain criticised Gladstone's leadership and advocated a more Radical direction for the party.
Mayor of Birmingham.
In November 1873 the Liberal Party swept the municipal elections and Chamberlain was elected mayor of Birmingham. The Conservatives had denounced his Radicalism and called him a "monopoliser and a dictator" while the Liberals had campaigned against their High church Tory opponents with the slogan "The People above the Priests". The city's municipal administration was notably lax with regards to public works and many urban dwellers lived in conditions of great poverty. As mayor, Chamberlain promoted many civic improvements, promising the city would be "parked, paved, assized, marketed, gas &amp; watered and 'improved'".
The Birmingham Gas Light and Coke Company and the Birmingham and Staffordshire Gas Light Company were locked in constant competition, in which the city's streets were continually dug up to lay mains. Chamberlain forcibly purchased the two companies on behalf of the borough for £1,953,050, even offering to purchase the companies himself if the ratepayers refused. In its first year of operations the new municipal gas scheme made a profit of £34,000.
The city's water supply was considered a danger to public health – approximately half of the city's population was dependent on well water, much of which was polluted by sewage. Piped water was supplied on only three days per week, compelling the use of well water and water carts for the rest of the week. Deploring the rising death rate from contagious diseases in the poorest parts of the city, in January 1876 Chamberlain forcibly purchased Birmingham's waterworks for a combined sum of £1,350,000, creating Birmingham Corporation Water Department, having declared to a House