Walter Long, 1st Viscount Long

Walter Hume Long, 1903

Walter Hume Long, 1st Viscount Long PC (born July 13, 1854 in Bath , † September 26, 1924 in West Ashton , Wiltshire ) was a British politician of the Unionist Party and the Conservative Party , who in his more than 40-year parliamentary career several Held cabinet post.

Life

Long was the eldest of ten children of Richard Penruddocke Long (1825-1875) from Wiltshire and his wife Charlotte Anna, née Dick (1830-1899), from an Anglo-Irish family in County Wicklow . His eldest brother Richard (1856-1938) was raised to Baron Gisborough in 1917 .

Long grew up on his father's estate in Montgomeryshire , Wales. He attended school in Amesbury and then went to Harrow Private School and Christ Church College in Oxford. After the death of his father, who was a landowner, he took over the management of the family property.

Caricature in Vanity Fair , 1886

In the general election in 1880 Long was elected as a Conservative for the constituency of North Wiltshire in the House of Commons . He was to remain a member of this group until he was named a peer in 1921. In 1885 he was re-elected for the constituency of Devizes with a narrow majority. From 1886 he worked as a secretary for the Local Government Board . In the 1892 elections, he ran in the Liverpool West Derby constituency . He became chairman of the Board of Agriculture in 1895 and, after his tenure ended in 1900, chairman of the Local Government Board. He represented the constituency of Bristol South from 1900 to 1906 .

In 1905 Long stepped into the limelight for the first time when Prime Minister Balfour appointed him to succeed George Wyndham as Chief Secretary for Ireland . In the general election of 1906 he was elected to the constituency of South County Dublin and became leader of the Irish Unionists after the death of Edward James Saunderson . In the opposition years, he was an outspoken opponent of the policies of his liberal successor Augustine Birrell and the reform efforts of David Lloyd George . In 1907 he founded the Union Defense League , which was supposed to bring the unionist position on the Irish question closer to the voters in Great Britain. From 1910 to 1918 he represented the Middlesex Strand constituency . In 1911 he was one of the candidates to succeed Balfour as Conservative Party leader, but withdrew his candidacy before the Conservative meeting and Andrew Bonar Law became the new chairman. He firmly rejected the Home Rule for Ireland promoted by the Liberals .

When the Conservatives entered Asquith's second government in 1915 , Long resumed his old post as chairman of the Local Government Board. Among other things, he campaigned for the introduction of conscription and successfully torpedoed the attempt to reach an agreement on the Irish question between Edward Carson and John Redmond . After Asquith's fall in December 1916 and the formation of the successor government, Lloyd George , he was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies . Long then campaigned for an expansion of conscription to Ireland, a corresponding bill triggered the conscription crisis of 1918 .

In the first elections after the end of the war in December 1918, Long was elected to the constituency of Westminster St George’s . In January 1919 he became First Lord of the Admiralty (Minister of the Navy) under Lloyd George as part of a government reshuffle . He had the difficult task of initiating the gradual dismantling of the Royal Navy, which was greatly expanded during the war, due to budget constraints . However, he continued to deal with the Irish question and, as chairman of a government committee, was largely responsible for the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which paved the way for the island to be divided. In the spring of 1921 he resigned from his government office for health reasons and expressly welcomed the election of his former rival Austen Chamberlain as party leader of the Conservatives. On June 4, 1921 he was raised as Viscount Long , of Wraxall in the County of Wiltshire, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom and thereby became a member of the House of Lords .

Long had received an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Birmingham in 1909 and was a Fellow of the Royal Society . From 1920 to 1924 he served as Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire. He died in his country house, Rood Ashton House in Wiltshire.

family

Long married Lady Dorothy Blanche Boyle in 1878, daughter of Richard Boyle, 9th Earl of Cork . He had five children with her, including two sons, the eldest of whom, Walter, died in 1917 as a Brigadier-General in France. The title Viscount Long passed to his son Walter after his death in 1924 .

literature

• John Kendle: Walter Long, Ireland, and the Union, 1905-1920. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and Kingston, 1992, ISBN 0-7735-0908-9 .

Web links

Commons : Walter Hume Long  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Entry on thepeerage.com
• Entry in the 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica on Wikisource
• Walter Hume Long: The Forgotten Unionist Leader , by Gordon Lucy, Director of the Ulster Society, 2005

predecessor	Office	successor
Herbert Gardner	President of the Board of Agriculture 1895-1900	Robert William Hanbury
Henry Chaplin Herbert Samuel	President of the Local Government Board 1900-1905 1915-1916	Gerald Balfour William Hayes Fisher
George Wyndham	Chief Secretary for Ireland 1905	James Bryce
Andrew Bonar Law	Secretary of State for the Colonies 1916-1919	Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner
Eric Geddes	First Lord of the Admiralty 1919–1921	Arthur Lee, 1st Baron Lee
New title created	Viscount Long 1921-1924	Walter Long