Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Arnold

Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Arnold (13 January 1878 – 3 August 1945) was a radical British Liberal Party politician who later joined the Labour Party and served as a government minister.

A son of W. A. Arnold, of Manchester, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School. As a member of the General Committee of the Manchester Liberal Federation, he served as Honorary Treasurer of the North-West Division of the Free Trade Union.[1]

Politics

He unsuccessfully contested the Conservative seat of Holderness Division of the East Riding of Yorkshire at the December 1910 General Election. He was elected in 1912 as Member of Parliament for Holmfirth in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire at a by-election following the resignation of the long-serving Liberal MP Henry Wilson.

1912 Holmfirth by-election[2] Electorate 13,035
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Liberal Sydney Arnold 4,749 42.0 -15.5
Unionist Geoffrey Ellis 3,379 29.8 +2.2
Labour William Lunn 3,195 28.2 +13.3
Majority 1,370 12.2 -17.7
Turnout 86.9
Liberal hold Swing -8.8

In 1914 he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jack Pease, the President of the Board of Education. He was also appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Edwin Samuel Montagu the Financial Secretary to the Treasury.[3] During the war he served as a captain in the South Staffordshire Regiment.[1]

When his constituency was abolished for the 1918 general election, he was elected for the new Penistone constituency against a Coalition Government endorsed Unionist candidate. He supported a levy on capital and the nationalisation of the mines and railways.[4] He resigned that seat due to ill-health in 1921.

General election 1918: Penistone[5] Electorate
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Liberal Sydney Arnold 7,338 39.4
Unionist Phillip Gatty Smith 6,744 36.2
Independent Labour Frederick William Southern 4,556 24.4
Majority 594 3.2
Turnout 58.4
Liberal win

Labour party

In 1922 he joined the Labour Party and was ennobled in 1924 as Baron Arnold, of Hale in the County of Chester,[6] and served as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in Ramsay MacDonald's short-lived 1924 Labour Government, and as Paymaster General from 1929 to 6 March 1931 in Macdonald's second government.

In the late 1930s he was a member of the Parliamentary Pacifist Group. He also served as a member of the council of the Anglo-German Fellowship.[7] He resigned from the Labour Party, in 1938, on account of disagreement with its Foreign Policy.[3]

Subsequently, his name was one of twenty-six attached to a letter printed in The Times supporting a policy of appeasement towards Germany. Because signatories included Barry Domvile and other leading members it was dubbed "The Link Letter" and its various signatories, including political moderates such as Arnold, William Harbutt Dawson, Smedley Crooke and Lord Londonderry, came under suspicion as far right supporters.[7][n 1]

Arms
Coat of arms of Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Arnold
Crest
In front of an Eagle's Head erased per chevron Gules and Or two Pheons fesswise Sable
Escutcheon
Per chevron Azure and Or in chief two Garbs and in base a Pheon counterchanged
Supporters
Dexter: A Lion proper; Sinister: A Wolf also proper, each charged on the shoulder with a Pheon Or
Motto
Laborare et orare (To work is to pray) [8]

Notes
  1. The twenty-six signatories were: Captain Bernard Acworth; Lord Arnold; Sir Raymond Beazley; C. E. Carroll; John Smedley Crooke; William Harbutt Dawson; Admiral Sir Barry Domvile; A. E. R. Dyer; Lord Fairfax of Cameron; Lord Hardinge of Penshurst; Admiral Sir Edward Inglefield; F. C. Jarvis; Douglas Jerrold; Sir John Latta; A. P. Laurie; Lord Londonderry; Admiral Vincent Molteno; Lord Mount Temple; Admiral Wilmot Nicholson; Captain George Pitt-Rivers; Captain Archibald Ramsay; Lord Redesdale; Captain Arthur Rogers; Major-General Arthur Solly-Flood; Mrs Nesta Webster; Bernard Wilson.[7]

References
  1. Debrett's House of Commons and Judicial Bench, 1916.
  2. British parliamentary election results 1885–1918
  3. "ARNOLD", Who Was Who, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2007; online edn, Oxford University Press, December 2012; online edn, October 2012; Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  4. Trevor Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (1966) Archived 23 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine
  5. British parliamentary election results 1918–1949
  6. "No. 32907". The London Gazette. 12 February 1924. p. 1266.
  7. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–39, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 185, 329–30
  8. "Arnold, Baron (UK, 1924 - 1945)". Cracroft's Peerage.
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