William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford

William Joynson-Hicks, 1923

William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford PC (born June 23, 1865 in Plaistow Hall, Kent , England, † June 8, 1932 in St James's , London ), called Jix , was a British politician ( Conservative Party ). He is still known today primarily because of his rigid legal stance as British Home Secretary from 1924 to 1929. In 1919 Joynson-Hicks was made baronet , in 1929 Viscount Brentford .

Live and act

Early life (1865-1900)

William Joynson-Hicks was born in 1865 as William Hicks, the eldest son of Henry Hicks and his wife Harriett, a daughter of William Watts. From 1875 to 1881 he attended the Merchant Taylors' School in London. At the age of 14 he took the oath there never to drink alcohol, which he apparently kept all his life.

After graduating from high school, Joynson-Hicks began working as a lawyer. His father, who was then the deputy chairman of the London General Omnibus Company and the City Common Council, gave him his first well-paid contracts as a representative of the transport company in legal disputes.

During a trip to Italy in the early 1890s, Hicks met the Joynson family, who belonged to the money aristocracy of the industrial city of Manchester . On June 12, 1895, he married Gracy Lynn Joynson, the only daughter of the family. In 1896 he changed his last name to Joynson-Hicks when he was admitted to the Joynson family.

Joynson-Hick's father-in-law, a wealthy silk manufacturer, used his influence as one of the leading men in Manchester to advance the son-in-law's professional and political career. Joynson-Hicks was able to find great support, especially in the city's conservative and evangelical circles, in which his father-in-law was firmly anchored. In 1898 he was officially named one of Manchester's Conservative candidates in future elections.

Activity as a lobbyist and functionary

In 1907 Jix was elected chairman of the Motor Union, the British motorists interest group. He retained this office until 1922 - even after the Union merged with the Automobile Association in 1911. In this capacity, among other things, he enforced the admissibility of the Automobile Association's warning patrols , which warned drivers of police speed traps. Other associations in which Joynson-Hicks played a leading role included the Lancashire Commercial Motor Users 'Association, the National Threshing Machine Owners' Association and the National Traction Engine Association. He was also a member of the YWCA Finance Committee . In his private life, apart from automobiles, he was also interested in aviation and the telephone, and he acquired a profound understanding of how they worked. In 1906, as a physicist, he published the "Law of Heavy and Light Mechanic Traction of Highways".

Joynson-Hick's enthusiasm as a traditionalist, evangelical advocate for modern technology created widespread amusement among the British public because of the oddity seen in these perceived contradictions.

Political beginnings (1900-1911)

In the elections of 1900 and 1906 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the House of Commons in one of the six constituencies in the Manchester borough. In 1900 he lost to Charles Swann and in 1906 to Winston Churchill . In 1908 he finally managed to win the mandate for the constituency of Manchester North West on the occasion of a by-election in his hometown of Manchester and to enter parliament.

His opponent in this election was the liberal politician Winston Churchill, who had recently been appointed Minister of Commerce in the government of Herbert Henry Asquith . According to the then applicable “Ministers of the Crown Act”, Churchill was obliged to stand for a new election on the occasion of his appointment as cabinet minister in order to have his parliamentary mandate confirmed by the voters. Churchill's defeat by Joynson-Hicks in the Manchester election, which preceded one of the toughest election campaigns in British parliamentary history - Blythe even speaks of the "most brillaint, entertaining and hilarious electoral fight of the century" - was a general surprise.

Joynson-Hicks' victory over Churchill, hated by the Tories as "party traitors" and "defectors" because of his move from Conservatives to Liberals in 1904, earned him great popularity in his party and throughout the Conservative camp. Churchill succeeded, however, a few weeks later, in another by-election in Dundee to win a parliamentary seat, so that he could take his seat in the cabinet.

At the same time, it became common practice across the country to corrupt Joynson-Hicks' last name to Jix, who would be with him for the rest of his life. While his sympathizers did this out of warm affection, his political opponents resorted to this practice out of disgust and ridicule. At that time, he was already noticed in parliament because of his “narrow-minded conservative populism”. Joynson-Hicks called the Labor leader Keir Hardie a "leprous traitor" whose goal is to overthrow the Ten Commandments. The writer HG Wells branded Joynson-Hicks for this in an open letter to the Labor supporters with the words: “Jix represents absolutely the worst (...) in British political life ... an entirely undistinguished man ... and an obscure and ineffectual nobody. "

In the January 1910 elections, Joynson-Hicks failed to defend his seat in the House of Commons. After his attempt to return to the House of Commons in by-elections in Sunderland in December 1910 was unsuccessful, he succeeded a year later in March 1911 thanks to a by-election in Brentford , where he succeeded Alwyne Compton .

Parliamentarians and ministers (1912-1924)

After his return to parliament, Hicks stood out primarily as a representative of the far right wing of his party and as an expert on motor and aviation. During the First World War he distinguished himself above all as an advocate for a strong British air force and for suggesting how the German zeppelin attacks could best be dealt with. In his pamphlet "The Command of the Air", he pleaded for an indiscriminate bombing of open German cities like Berlin in order to terrorize the German population and thus induce an anti-war stance. In 1919 it looked like his career was over.

In 1920, Hicks went on a trip to Sudan and India , where he made a political statement by stopping in Amritsar and stating that he believed the massacre of Indian protesters by British forces under the command of General Reginald Dyer to be justified.

By 1922 he had “earned” the reputation of a “die hard”, an extreme reactionary (“concrete head”). In the same year he appeared as one of the most resolute opponents of the participation of the conservatives in the coalition government with the liberals, which had existed since 1915. With his anti-coalition attitude, he contributed to the overthrow of the coalition government in the autumn of the same year, which was followed by the establishment of a conservative sole government. His extreme stance in recent years has now helped him to get into office and honor, since - unlike many other conservatives - if he were appointed to the new conservative government, he would not be in danger of being identified with the supporters of the old coalition government become.

In the new 15-month Conservative government under Andrew Bonar Law and later under Stanley Baldwin , he first became Parliamentary State Secretary for Overseas Trade on the Board of Trade and Acting State Secretary in the Treasury with the rank of Cabinet Minister and then in quick succession Paymaster General , Postmaster General and finally Minister of Health.

In his capacity as finance secretary, Joynson-Hicks had the Hansard publish an announcement on July 19, 1923 that the state would not prosecute tax evaders who would make a full confession and pay the outstanding taxes, interest or fines.

During the Conservatives' brief opposition period between January and November 1924, Joynson-Hicks served as one of the leaders of the opposition.

Minister of the Interior (1924–1929)

In the new Conservative government formed under Baldwin in 1924, Joynson-Hicks became Home Secretary. In this office he advocated an extremely puritanical and illiberal line which the British politician and political biographer Roy Jenkins - a later successor to Hicks in the office of Home Secretary - described as a course of " sour obscurantism " (" course of dour obscurantism "), from which the British Home Office only recovered after "three to four decades". Other authors spoke of the fact that the home office had made a "leap in the dark".

An example of Joynson-Hicks' puritanical zeal was his policy of mercilessly persecuting literary works that he deemed "pornographic", such as the books by DH Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall and even a translation of the Decameron . His attempts to banish the culture of the nightclubs - which he regularly raided with - and to stamp out all sorts of other "excesses" of the post-war period were on the same line. The British press ridiculed Joynson-Hicks for the narrow-mindedness and backwardness they saw in his struggle against free literary creation as a penniless who lacked the intellectual stature to recognize the literary grandeur of the works he ostracized. The satirist AP Herbert took the efforts of the interior minister as an opportunity to "poke fun at" him in the comedy The Two Gentlemen of Soho . The poet Edmund Clerihew Bentley again published a " Clerihew ", a mocking poem according to which Joynson-Hicks could only count to six while the cartoonist David Low made him one of his favorite victims.

Despite these activities and attitudes, which especially left and intellectuals turned against him, Joynson-Hicks enjoyed great popularity in other parts of the population, such as in the tabloids . On several occasions, the thought arose that Baldwin had made Joynson-Hicks minister in order to amuse the public's attention with a "joke" and to divert attention from the actual activities of the government. Lord Beaverbrook said of Hicks' unexpected late success: “He is one of those curious products you sometimes get in politics, a man who is thought a fool by his colleagues, a fine fellow by the private member, and a romantic hero by the chairman of the local conservative association. "

During the general strike of 1926, Joynson-Hicks was one of those cabinet members who advocated taking a "hard" line on strikers; H. to suppress the strike by means of confrontation, ultimately with violence. Prime Minister Baldwin, however, opted for a more flexible approach. In the same year Joynson-Hicks attended the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth II in his capacity as Home Secretary as an official witness.

In 1927, Joynson-Hicks stood out in the House of Commons as opposed to a revision of the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church , believing that such a change would mask the Protestant roots of the Anglican Church. The changes were then rejected both this year and again the following year. Joynson-Hicks' efforts to fully motorize the British police force were more successful.

Joynson-Hicks became an - "accidental" - socio-political reformer when he expressed in a parliamentary debate in 1925, without prior consultation with the Prime Minister, in the "zeal of the flow of speech" that the conservatives would intend to give all women the right to vote in the future ( Women's suffrage ), who were older than 21 years - previously only single women who were older than thirty were eligible to vote. As a result, the conservatives had to keep this promise at the elections of 1928, in the run-up to which the voting age of women was brought into line with that of men.

Since his appointment as Minister of the Interior, numerous observers have also believed that Joynson-Hick's political ambition was rising: For example, Joynson-Hick's cabinet colleague Leopold Amery noted in his diaries that rumors about “Jix's” ambitions for the office of prime minister were already in October 1925 would have made the rounds. Lord Beaverbrook even said in August 1928 that "Jix is ​​the only possible successor of Baldwin" and in October 1931 urged him to form his own shadow cabinet. Most of his colleagues, however, saw Joynson-Hick's ambition as in no way corresponding to his real position and downright ridiculous and saw only confirmation of Jix as the "wild card" in Baldwin's cabinet rounds.

Late years

After the Conservative loss of power in the 1929 election, Joynson-Hicks accepted peer-to-peer dignity as Viscount Brentford . He subsequently remained a leading figure in his party, but was not asked to join the all-party governments of August and November 1931 due to his dwindling health. Since 1923 he was a member of the Privy Council , since 1929 the Privy Council for Northern Ireland.

Joynson-Hicks died in June 1932 at the age of 66.

Fonts

• The Law of Heavy and Light Mechanical Transport , 1906
• The Command of the Air , 1916.
• The Prayer Book Crisis , 1928.
• Do we need a censor? , 1929.

Web links

• William Joynson-Hicks at Hansard (English)
• William Joynson-Hicks, 1st Viscount Brentford on thepeerage.com , accessed September 11, 2016.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The law firm founded by Hicks still existed in 1989 as a partner, David Lester, the font Joynson-Hicks on UK Copyright. Guide to 1988 Copyright Act published.
2. ↑ Jenkins: Baldwin, London 1987, p. 86. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that Hicks was the "most puritanical, prudest and most Protestant" British Home Secretary of the 20th century.
3. ^ EC Bentley: The Complete Clerihews . House of Stratus, London 2001.
4. ↑ Gibert: Churchill 5, pp. 1318-19.
5. ↑ Gilbert: Churchill, pp. 1318-19
6. ^ Entry on Joynson-Hicks in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

predecessor	Office	successor
New title created	Viscount Brentford 1929-1932	Richard Cecil Joynson-Hicks
Neville Chamberlain	Paymaster General 1923	Archibald Boyd-Carpenter
Neville Chamberlain	Postmaster General 1923	Laming Worthington-Evans
Neville Chamberlain	Minister of Health 1923–1924	John Wheatley
Arthur Henderson	Minister of the Interior 1924–1929	John Robert Clynes