English Labour leader and Liberal politician, born at Littlemore, near Oxford, on the 13th of April 1840, the son of a stonemason. He was educated at the village school, and at the age of thirteen was apprenticed to his father’s trade. He worked at it for nearly twenty years, going to London finally in 1865, where he was employed in the erecting of the House of Commons. In 1872 he was elected chairman of the masons’ committee during a strike, and from that time was prominent as a trade union official. In 1875 he was elected secretary of the parliamentary committee of the trade union congress. He entered Parliament in 1880 as Liberal member for Stoke-on-Trent. In 1885 he was elected for the Bordesley division of Birmingham, and in February 1886 was appointed under-secretary to the Home Office, going out with the Gladstone Government later in the year. He belonged to the older school of trade unionism and was opposed to such demands as an 8-hour day fixed by law. His moderate policy was defeated at the trade union congress of 1890, and he then resigned his secretaryship. Both in 1892 and 1893 he was unsuccessful in his parliamentary candidatures. In 1892 he was appointed a member of the royal commission on Labour, and in 1894 he was elected Liberal member for Leicester, which seat he held until 1906, when he retired on account of ill health. He died at Cromer on the 11th of October 1911. He published the story of his life in 1901, and a book on Leasehold Enfranchisement in conjunction with Lord Loreburn in 1885.
