Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J.H. Whitley (1866-1935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons
J.H. Whitley came from an established business family in Halifax, where he engaged in youth work and municipal politics before becoming MP for Halifax from 1900 to 1928. He was a Liberal Radical who worked with Labour, gave his name to the industrial councils of the First World War and was Speaker of the House of Commons 192128, presiding over the debates at the time of the General Strike of 1926. In 192931 he toured India as chairman of the Royal Commission on Indian Labour and he was chairman of the BBC between 1930 and 1935.
He was thus a vitally important political figure who was active at the rise of Labour and the decline of Liberalism, involved in the Liberal reforms of the Edwardian age, and deeply concerned about industrial relations in early twentieth-century Britain and beyond.
This volume brings together leading academics and provides new information and analysis on the life, work and times of J.H. Whitley, offering a study of his career in British politics and society, focusing particularly on the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.
John A. Hargreaves is an Associate of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Historical Association and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He has written extensively and co-edited Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution (2012).
Keith Laybourn is the Diamond Jubilee Professor of the University of Hud-dersfield, a prolific writer on British labour history, and both President and Secretary of the Society for the Study of Labour History. He co-authored Britains First Labour Government (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 2013) and has recently published The Battle for the Roads of Britain: Police, Motorists and the Law c. 18901970 (2015).
Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. He is widely published and his most recent book (co-written with Martin Thomas) is Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 18821956 (2017).
Routledge Studies in Modern British History
https://www.routledge.com/history/series/RSMBH
Charles Pelham Villiers
Aristocratic Victorian Radical
Roger Swift
Women, Mission and Church in Uganda
Ethnographic encounters in an age of imperialism, 18951960s
Elizabeth Dimock
British Politics, Society and Empire, 18521945
Essays in Honour of Trevor O. Lloyd
David W. Gutzke
Deprivation, State Interventions and Urban
Communities in Britain, 196879
Peter Shapely
Private Secretaries to the Prime Minister
Foreign Affairs from Churchill to Thatcher
Edited by Andrew Holt and Warren Dockter
Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations:
J.H. Whitley (18661935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons
Edited by John A. Hargreaves, Keith Laybourn and Richard Toye
Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J.H. Whitley (1866-1935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons
Edited by John A. Hargreaves, Keith Laybourn and Richard Toye
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2018 selection and editorial matter, Jhon A. Hargreaves, Keith Laybourn and Richard Toye; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of John A. Hargreaves, Keith Labourn and Richard Toye to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-29398-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-23179-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This collection is dedicated to the memory
of John Wilson Barrett
12 February 19632 October 2016
A Halifax man whose values inspired him to work
on a biography of J.H. Whitley
Contents
by John Whitley (grandson)
by John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons
JOHN A. HARGREAVES, KEITH LAYBOURN AND RICHARD TOYE
JOHN A. HARGREAVES
C.S. KNIGHTON
CLYDE BINFIELD
KEITH LAYBOURN
GREG PATMORE
RICHARD TOYE
GRAHAM E. SEEL
AMERDEEP PANESAR, AMY STODDART, JAMES TURNER, PAUL WARD AND SARAH WELLS
DAVID HENDY
CHRISTINE VERGUSON
KEITH ROBBINS
JOHN BARRETT
Figures
Colour plates
Table
Editors
Dr John A. Hargreaves has taught extensively in secondary, higher and adult education, mainly in West Yorkshire. He obtained his first degree at the University of Southampton and later completed a masters degree and PhD part-time at the University of Huddersfield, where he is now a Visiting Research Fellow in History. He is also an Associate of the Leeds Centre of Victorian Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Historical Association and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He is currently preparing a third edition of his history of Halifax and writing a bicentenary history of the Halifax Choral Society. He has written over forty articles for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , edited twenty-five volumes of the Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society and a volume of nineteenth-century manorial court rolls published by the Yorkshire Archaeological Society. He co-edited Slavery in Yorkshire. Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution for the University of Huddersfield Press in 2012 and reviews regularly for the Historical Association website.
Professor Keith Laybourn is the Diamond Jubilee Professor at the University of Huddersfield within the Division of History where he has also been Professor of Modern British History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association. He edited the Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature for the Historical Association for eleven years and has written and edited more than forty books and written about eighty articles. He has written extensively on British Labour history, including a co-authored book on Britains First Labour Government (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 2013) and has just published The Battle for the Roads of Britain: Police, Motorists and the Law c.1890s1970 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).