Joseph Chamberlain

In the crowded politics of Victorian Britain, Joseph Chamberlain stood out as a man who had not come up by the usual route. Born in Camberwell on 8 July 1836 and raised in prosperous North London, he excelled at University College School, but did not attend university. At 16 he was apprenticed into the family shoe business, and at 18 he moved to Birmingham to join his uncle’s screw-making firm. The company, later known as Nettlefold and Chamberlain, prospered on a large scale, producing two-thirds of all metal screws made in England at its height and exporting worldwide by the time Chamberlain retired from business in 1874.

Birmingham made Chamberlain. He first became known there as a manufacturer, then as a notable mayor and municipal reformer. He brought to politics the habits of a businessman and a grassroots organiser, along with a sharp dislike of aristocratic privilege. A radical Liberal, he opposed the Elementary Education Act 1870 because he believed it could use local ratepayers’ money to subsidise Church of England schools. When he entered the House of Commons at 39, he was older than many politicians from more privileged backgrounds, but he rose quickly through his influence with Liberal organisation outside Parliament.

In national office, Chamberlain became President of the Board of Trade in William Gladstone’s second ministry from 1880 to 1885. He was then noted for his attacks on the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury, and in the 1885 general election he put forward the “Unauthorised Programme,” which promised benefits for newly enfranchised agricultural labourers, including the famous slogan “three acres and a cow.” The programme was not enacted, but it showed his instinct for bold campaigning and for speaking to voters who had recently gained political power.

Chamberlain’s career was also marked by rupture. In 1886 he resigned from Gladstone’s third ministry in opposition to Irish Home Rule, helped split the Liberal Party, and became a Liberal Unionist. From the 1895 general election, the Liberal Unionists worked in coalition with the Conservatives under his former opponent, Lord Salisbury. As Secretary of State for the Colonies, Chamberlain promoted schemes to build up the British Empire in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies. He also had major responsibility for causing the Second Boer War and was the government minister most responsible for the war effort. In 1900 he was a dominant figure in the Unionist Government’s re-election at the “Khaki Election.”

His private life carried deep losses. Chamberlain’s first wife, Harriet Kenrick, died in 1863 after the birth of their son Austen. His second wife, Florence Kenrick, died in 1875 within a day of giving birth to their fifth child, who also died. These experiences led him, though a Unitarian during his lifetime, to lose personal faith and reject religious creeds. He later married Mary Crowninshield Endicott, the daughter of the United States Secretary of War, after meeting her while leading a British delegation to Washington, D.C., in 1887. She supported his political ambitions and helped ease his acceptance into upper-class society.

Chamberlain never became prime minister, but he helped set the agenda of British colonial, foreign, tariff, and municipal policy, and he split both major British parties. In 1903 he left the Cabinet to campaign for tariff reform, but the Unionists were heavily defeated in the 1906 general election. Soon after public celebrations of his 70th birthday in Birmingham, a stroke ended his public career. His words still carry the sound of a restless, combative politician who believed in organisation, pressure, and repeated effort: “If we fail, let us try again and again until we succeed.”