John Elliot Burns

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John Burns (1911)
Caricature by Leslie Ward in Vanity Fair (October 1892)

John Elliot Burns (born October 20, 1858 in London , † January 24, 1943 there ) was a British politician.

Life

Burns was born into a large working-class family. Due to the origin of the father from Ayrshire , he suspected a relationship with the poet Robert Burns . As a ten-year-old he had to finish school and work as an unskilled worker in a candle factory to help support the family. He then did an apprenticeship as a mechanic and worked his way up to become a machine operator. At the age of twenty he worked in West Africa for a year and was therefore later able to take a stand in Parliament from his own perspective on issues relating to the African colonies. In the period of the economic depression that began in 1873 , he became a trade unionist and eloquent public speaker. In 1880 he married Charlotte Gale of Battersea. He published a manifesto with the Fabian Society in 1884 . In 1885 he joined the Social Democratic Federation , founded in 1881 , for which he ran unsuccessfully for the House of Commons in the 1885 elections in the Nottingham constituency. He was arrested for the first time at a trade union demonstration in 1878, again in 1886, and after the "Bloody Sunday" in London in 1887, despite defense by Herbert Asquith, he was sentenced to six months in prison in 1888. He was one of the leaders in the port workers' strike in London in 1889 . In 1889 he was elected to London County Council and advocated minimum wages for public contracts.

Burns was elected to the House of Commons as a Liberal Party candidate in the Battersea constituency in 1892 . He defended his lower house mandate in the following elections in 1895, 1900, 1906 and 1910. Burns campaigned for the eight-hour day , universal suffrage and the Boer War . Burns was a teetotaler .

Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman named him President of the Local Government Board in 1905 . In this ministerial office he also became a member of the Privy Council in 1905 .

As an opponent of the war, like John Morley , he resigned from his ministerial office after the outbreak of war in 1914 , and in 1918 he also ended his membership in parliament. From then on he no longer appeared in public.

Part of his extensive private library went to the University of London Library , and the public archives another part was auctioned off at Sotheby’s in 1943 . In his estate there was also a leather cigar case with the inscription "CARLSBAD" that Karl Marx Engels had brought as a gift from his cure. Friedrich Engels gave this case to John Burns around 1890, who passed this gift on to Yvonne Kapp in 1943 .

Fonts (selection)

  • A manifesto . Fabian tract, No.2, Fabian Society, London 1884
  • Judas Iscariot! John Burns's verdict on himself . in: John Bull , March 23, 1907, separate print Twentieth Century Press, London 1907, 23 pages

literature

  • GH Knott: Mr. John Burns, MP Drane, London 1901. (= Bijou Biographies - No. IV.) Digitized
  • Joseph Burgess : John Burns: the rise and progress of a right honorable . Reformers' Bookstall, Glasgow 1911.
  • Sil-Vara : English statesmen . Ullstein, Berlin 1916, pp. 155-167.
  • GDH Cole : John Burns . V. Gollancz Ltd .: Fabian Society, London 1943.
  • William Kent: John Burns: labor's lost leader; a biography . Williams & Norgate, London 1950.
  • Kenneth D. Brown: John Burns . Royal Historical Society. Swift Printers, London 1977.
  • Burns, John . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 4 : Bishārīn - Calgary . London 1910, p. 855 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : John Burns  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: John Burns  Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Elliott Burns , short biography at National Portrait Gallery
  2. ^ Gareth Stedman Jones : Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society . Clarendon, Oxford 1971, pp. 315f.
  3. ^ John Burns: Labor and drink: a lecture . Lees and Raper Memorial Trustees, London 1904
  4. ↑ The Local Government Board, the Poor Law sparked commission, and organized from 1871 to 1919, the public welfare, it came in the newly created Ministry of Health Department of Health on
  5. ^ University of London. Senate House Library: John Burns papers . 2007.
  6. ↑ Leaflet Number 63 The Great Dock Strike, 1889 (PDF) London Metropolitan Archives
  7. ^ Catalog of the famous library of the late Right Hon. John Burns, PC, MP Sotheby & Co., London 1943
  8. ↑ Tish Collins: A Cigar Case Given to Engels by Marx . In: Bulletin of the Marx Memorial Library . No. 131. Spring 2000, London 2000, pp. 27-29.
personal data
SURNAME Burns, John Elliot
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Burns, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician
DATE OF BIRTH October 20, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1943
Place of death London