Henry Campbell-Bannerman

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, GCB (7 September 1836 – 22 April 1908) was a British Liberal statesman who served as Prime Minister from 5 December 1905 until resigning due to ill health on 3 April 1908. No previous First Lord of the Treasury had been officially called "Prime Minister"; this term only came into official usage 5 days after he took office.

Early life

Campbell-Bannerman was born at Kelvinside House in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1836 as Henry Campbell. The surname Bannerman was added to his surname in 1871 as required by his maternal uncle's will. It was a condition of his inheritance of his uncle's Kent estate, Hunton Court.

Member of Parliament

In Gladstone's Third (1886) and Fourth (1892-1894) Cabinets and Rosebery's Government (1894-1895) he served as Secretary of State for War, where he persuaded the Duke of Cambridge, the Queen's cousin, to resign as Commander-in-Chief. This earned Campbell-Bannerman a knighthood.

Liberal leader

In 1898 Campbell-Bannerman succeeded Sir William Vernon Harcourt as leader of the Liberals in the House of Commons. The Boer War (1899-1902) split the Liberal party into Imperialist and Pro-Boer camps and Campbell-Bannerman had a difficult time in holding together the strongly divided party, which was defeated in the "khaki election" of 1900. However the Liberal Party was able to unite in 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 had threatened countervailing duties and subsidies of West Indian sugar producers as a negotiating tool. The Convention would phase out export bounties and Britain would forbid the importation of subsidised sugar.² In a speech to the Cobden Club on 28 November 1902 Campbell-Bannerman denounced the Convention as threatening the sovereignty of Britain:

However it was Joseph Chamberlain's proposals for Tariff Reform (protectionism) in May 1903 which provided the Liberals with a great cause on which to campaign.⁴ Chamberlain's proposals dominated politics through the rest of 1903 up until the general election of 1906. Campbell-Bannerman, like other Liberals, held an unshakable belief in free trade.⁵ He proclaimed: "...to dispute Free Trade, after fifty years' experience of it, is like disputing the law of gravitation".⁶ On another occasion he explained the Liberals' support for free trade:

In 1903 the Liberal Party's chief whip negotiated a pact with Ramsay MacDonald of the Labour Representation Committee to withdraw Liberal candidates in order to help LRC candidates in certain seats. 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".⁸ However he was not a socialist.⁹ One biographer has written: "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".¹⁰

The Liberals returned to power in December 1905 when Arthur Balfour resigned as Prime Minister, leaving Campbell-Bannerman to form a minority government. Campbell-Bannerman immediately dissolved Parliament and called a general election. In his first speech as premier on 21 December 1905, Campbell-Bannerman launched the Liberal election campaign, focusing on the traditional Liberal platform of "peace, retrenchment and reform":

Prime Minister

Campbell-Bannerman's premiership saw the Entente with Russia in 1907, brought about principally by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. In that same year, Campbell-Bannerman achieved the honour of becoming the Father of the House, the only serving British Prime Minister to do so to date. Nevertheless his health soon took a turn for the worse, and he resigned as Prime Minister on 3 April 1908, to be succeeded by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Henry Asquith. Campbell-Bannerman remained in residence at 10 Downing Street in the immediate aftermath of his resignation, and became the only (former) Prime Minister to die there, on 22 April 1908. His last words were "This is not the end of me"¹². Campbell-Bannerman was buried in the churchyard of Meigle Parish Church, Perthshire, near Belmont Castle, his home since 1887. A relatively modest stone plaque set in the exterior wall of the church serves as a memorial.

Legacy

On the day of Campbell-Bannerman's death the flag of the National Liberal Club was lowered to half-mast, the blinds were drawn and his portrait was draped in black as a sign of mourning.¹³ John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, paid tribute to Campbell-Bannerman by saying that "We all feel that Ireland has lost a brave and considerate friend".¹⁴ David Lloyd George said on hearing of Campbell-Bannerman's death:

In an uncharacteristically emotional speech on 27 April, the day of Campbell-Bannerman's funeral, his successor H. H. Asquith told the House of Commons:

Robert Smillie, the trade unionist and Labour MP, said that, after Gladstone, Campbell-Bannerman was the greatest man he had ever met.¹⁸

George Dangerfield said Campbell-Bannerman's death "was like the passing of true Liberalism. Sir Henry had believed in Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform, those amiable deities who presided so complacently over large portions of the Victorian era... And now almost the last true worshipper at those large, equivocal altars lay dead".¹⁹ Campbell-Bannerman held firmly to the Liberal principles of Richard Cobden and William Gladstone.¹⁰ It was not until Campbell-Bannerman's departure that the doctrines of New Liberalism came to be implemented.²⁰ Friedrich Hayek said: "Perhaps the government of H. Campbell-Bannerman...should be regarded as the last liberal government of the old type, while under his successor, H. H. Asquith, new experiments in social policy were undertaken which were only doubtfully compatible with the older liberal principles".²¹

There is a blue plaque outside Campbell-Bannerman's house at 6 Grosvenor Place, London SW1. On 6 December 2008 former Liberal Democrat leaders Charles Kennedy and David Steel, now Lord Steel of Aikwood, unveiled a plaque to commemorate Sir Henry at at the home in Bath Street, Glasgow. Lord Steel praised his predecessor as Liberal Party leader as an "overlooked radical" whose 1906 landslide victory had paved the way for a succession of reforming governments. "He led the way for the longest period of successful radical government ever, which was continued by Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George," Lord Steel said.²²

Campbell-Bannerman's Government

Changes

References

^ Campbell [post Campbell Bannerman], Henry in Venn, J. & J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge University Press, 10 vols, 1922–1958.
^ Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation. Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 157.
^ The Times (29 November, 1902), p. 12.
^ John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 394.
^ Wilson, p. 407.
^ Wilson, p. 410.
^ Wilson, p. 413.
^ Wilson, p. 394.
^ Wilson, p. 506.
^ ^a ^b A. J. A. Morris, ‘Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 29 March 2009.
^ 'Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman At The Albert-Hall', The Times (22 December, 1905), p. 7.
^ "Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman at 10 Downing Street". http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page141.asp. Retrieved 2007-01-31.
^ The Times (23 April, 1908), p. 5.
^ The Times (23 April, 1908), p. 5.
^ The Times (23 April, 1908), p. 5.
^ http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1908/apr/27/the-late-prime-minister
^ Wilson, pp. 631-632.
^ Robert Smillie, My Life for Labour (Richmond, 1926), p. 242.
^ George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (Serif, 1997), p. 27.
^ W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition. Volume Two: The Ideological Heritage (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 150.
^ Friedrich Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (Taylor & Francis, 1978), p. 130.
^ "Plaque unveiled to the forgotten Prime Minister, Glasgow Herald, 7 December 2008". http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.2473356.0.Plaque_unveiled_to_the_forgotten_Prime_Minister_from_Glasgow.php. Retrieved 2008-12-07.
^ "British war memorials · paul montford". http://www.web-mouse.co.uk/remembrance/additionalinfo/britishwarmemorials/hf-ai-bwm-montford.htm. Retrieved 2007-01-31.

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