Henry Mond, 2nd Baron Melchett

Henry Ludwig Mond, 2nd Baron Melchett (born May 10, 1898 in London , † January 22, 1949 in Miami Beach ), was a British industrialist and politician .

Life and activity

Origin and early years

Mond was the eldest son of the industrialist Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett , and his wife Violet, b. Goetze.

After attending school, Moon trained at Winchester College . From 1915 he took part in the First World War with the South Wales Borderers Regiment.

Interwar period

At the beginning of the 1920s, Mond took over functions in his father's corporate empire, who made him a director of the chemical company Imperial Chemical Industries , which he owned and which was then the largest chemical company in Great Britain. From 1940 to 1947 he was deputy chairman of this company. In addition to his role at Imperial Chemical Industries, Mond served as a director of the Mond Nickel Company and Barclays Bank .

In the British general election of 1923, Mond was elected to the House of Commons , the British Parliament, as the Liberal Party candidate in the constituency for the island of Ely . In the same election, his father, who had previously been a member of the House of Commons for Swansea West, lost his seat in parliament. Mond resigned from parliament after only one year, on the occasion of the early election of 1924, in which he was defeated by a conservative opponent.

On the occasion of the election in 1929, Mond - who had meanwhile joined the Conservatives after the break-up of the Liberal Party - was able to return to Parliament as a member of parliament for the constituency of Liverpool East, which this time he was a member of until the election in 1930. In 1930, due to the death of his father, Mond moved into the House of Lords , the British House of Lords , to which he was henceforth 2nd Baron Melchett.

Although Mond was of Jewish descent, he was raised in a Christian manner. In the 1930s he discovered the Zionist idea for himself, which led him to convert to Judaism as the religion of his ancestors in 1933. Since the 1920s, Mond has also been an emphatic supporter of the plan to form a Jewish state in Palestine, which he imagined should be part of the British Empire. This found manifest expression when he took over the position of chairman of the British Agency for Palestine . He also supported the Jewish youth organization of the Maccabees (World Maccabi Union), of which he temporarily chaired.

In London, Mond owned a lavishly furnished house (Mulberry House) in Smith Square in Westminster.

Brought moon position as a leading figure in Jewish life Britain it about that he came late 1930s targeted by the Nazi police forces that eventually einstuften him as an important target person: In the spring of 1940 that put him Reich Security Main Office in Berlin on the special wanted list GB , a List of people who were considered particularly dangerous or important by the Nazi surveillance apparatus, which is why, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht, they should be located and arrested by the SS special commandos following the occupation troops.

Marriage and offspring

On January 30, 1920, Mond married Amy Gwen Wilson from South Africa. There were two sons and one daughter from the marriage. The son Julian inherited his title as Julian Mond, 3rd Baron Melchett , after Moon's death. The first-born son Derek had previously died in an airplane accident in 1945.

Fonts

• Why the Crisis? , 1931.
• Modern Money: A Treatise on the Reform of the Theory and Practice of Political Economy , 1932.
• Thy Neighbor , 1937.
• Hunting and Polo

literature

• W. Rubinstein / Michael A Jolles (eds.): The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History , 2011, pp. 684f.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Henry Mond, 2nd Baron Melchett in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

predecessor	Office	successor
Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett	Baron Melchett 1930-1949	Julian Mond, 3rd Baron Melchett