Everything about F E Smith 1st Earl Of Birkenhead totally explained
Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead,
GCSI,
PC (
12 July 1872–
30 September 1930) was a
British Conservative statesman and
lawyer of the early
20th century. He was a skilled
orator, noted for his staunch opposition to
Irish nationalism, his wit, pugnacious views, and hard living and drinking. He is perhaps best remembered today as
Winston Churchill's greatest personal and political friend until Birkenhead's untimely death at age 58.
Early life and education
Smith was born in
Birkenhead in
Cheshire and was educated at
Birkenhead School. After a brief two years at the
University College of Liverpool, he went up to
Wadham College, Oxford, in
1896, where he was a contemporary of the politician
John Simon and the athlete
C.B. Fry. He became President of the
Oxford Union, where a bust of him now stands. He obtained only a Second in
Mods before switching to Law, in which he obtained a First and won the Vinerian Scholarship, although to his disappointment he only obtained a Second in his
Bachelor of Civil Law degree. After winning a Fellowship of
Merton College he taught law at
Oxford until
1899, when he was
called to the Bar at
Gray's Inn, where the Birkenhead Award bears his name.
Smith rapidly acquired a reputation as a formidable advocate, first in Liverpool and then in London. He married Margaret Eleanor Furneaux in April
1901 and they'd three children,
Eleanor,
Frederick and Pamela. In 1907, Smith was famously asked to give an opinion on a proposed defamation action by the
Lever Brothers against newspapers owned by
Lord Northcliffe concerning allegations of a conspiracy to raise the price of soap by means of a 'soap trust'. After working all night reading a pile of papers nearly four feet thick and consuming a bottle of champagne and two dozen oysters, Smith opined "There is no answer to this action in libel, and the damages must be enormous." The newspapers subsequently paid Lever £50,000, more than four times the previous record for a defamation action. Adjusted for inflation this amounts to some £1,150,000 as of 2007. He was made a
King's Counsel in February 1908 by
Lord Loreburn, on the same day as his friend and rival from Wadham College, John Simon.
In
1906 he entered the
House of Commons representing the
Walton constituency of
Liverpool, and attracted attention by a brilliant
maiden speech. He was soon a prominent leader of the
Unionist wing of the
Conservative Party, especially in the planned Ulster resistance to
Irish Home Rule in 1912–14.
First World War
On the outbreak of the
First World War he was placed in charge of the Government's Press Bureau, with the rank of colonel and responsibility for newspaper
censorship. He wasn't very successful in this role, and in 1914–1915 served in France as a Staff Officer with the
Indian Corps with the temporary rank of Major. He and his successor as 'Recording Officer' (a Colonel Merewether) later collaborated on an official history entitled 'The Indian Corps in France'.
In May
1915 he was appointed
Solicitor General by
H. H. Asquith, and knighted. He soon after (in October 1915) succeeded his friend
Sir Edward Carson as
Attorney General, with the right to attend Cabinet. In
1916 he worked to secure the conviction and execution of the Irish nationalist
Sir Roger Casement, who had been captured attempting to ship
German arms to
Ireland.
Lord Birkenhead
In
1919 he was created
Baron Birkenhead, of Birkenhead in the County of Cheshire, and appointed
Lord Chancellor by
Lloyd George at the youthful age of forty-seven; the
Morning Post dismissed his appointment as "carrying a joke too far". He played a key role in the passage of several key legal reforms, including the reform of English land law which was to come to fruition in the mid-1920s, and also played an important role in the negotiations that led to the signature of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty in
1921, which established an independent
Irish Free State the following year. His support for this, and his warm relations with the Irish leaders
Arthur Griffith and
Michael Collins, angered some of his former Unionist associates, notably Sir Edward Carson. During the negotiations he remarked to Michael Collins that he might be "signing his political death warrant", to which Michael Collins dryly and with some accuracy replied that he was "signing his
actual death warrant".
Also in 1921 he was responsible for the
House of Lords rejecting a proposal, put forward by
Frederick Alexander Macquisten, MP for
Argyllshire, to criminalize
lesbianism. During the debate, Birkenhead argued that 999 women out of a thousand had "never even heard a whisper of these practices".
Smith was created
Viscount Birkenhead, of Birkenhead in the
County of Chester, in the 1921 Birthday Honours, and
Viscount Furneaux, of
Charlton in the
County of Northampton, and then
Earl of Birkenhead in
1922. By 1922 Birkenhead and Churchill had become the leading figures of the
Lloyd George Coalition and associated with the
Anglo-Irish Treaty, the attempt to go to war with
Turkey over
Chanak, later vetoed by the governments of the Dominions and, in Birkenhead's case if not Churchill's, the general whiff of moral and financial corruption which had come to surround the Coalition. Even a famous speech, the Rectorial Address to
Glasgow University of November 1923, in which Birkenhead told undergraduates that the world still offered "glittering prizes" to those with "stout hearts and sharp swords", now seemed out of kilter with the less aggressive and more self-consciously moral style of politics advocated by the new generation of Conservative politicians such as
Stanley Baldwin and
Edward Wood, the future Lord Halifax. At an earlier meeting before Parliament broke up for the summer, and more famously at the
Carlton Club meeting in October 1922, Birkenhead's hectoring of the junior ministers and backbenchers was one of the factors leading to the withdrawal of support from the Coalition.
Like many of the senior members of the Coalition, Birkenhead didn't hold office in the Bonar Law and Baldwin governments of 1922-4. Unlike the others Birkenhead was rude and open in his contempt for the new governments. He sneered that
Sir George Younger was "the cabin boy" who had taken over the ship, he referred to
Lords Salisbury and
Selborne as "the
Dolly Sisters" after two starlets of the era and remarked that the new Cabinet was one of "second-class brains", to which the reply - variously attributed to Stanley Baldwin and
Lord Robert Cecil - came that this was better than "second-class characters". In the House of Lords he accused the Foreign Secretary
Lord Curzon (who had deserted the Coalition in its final hours and thus retaining his office under
Bonar Law) of making unauthorised promises of support to
Greece in her war against Turkey; he was forced to apologise when Curzon produced the key documents which he'd circulated to the Cabinet, and which Birkenhead had initialled as read. Lady Curzon retaliated by
cutting Birkenhead at a ball, but as she remarked to her husband in a letter, he was "too drunk to notice" the snub.
A
1924 entry in
Evelyn Waugh’s diary states that an English High Court judge presiding in a
sodomy case sought advice on sentencing from Lord Birkenhead. "Could you tell me," he asked, "what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?" Birkenhead replied without hesitation, "Oh, thirty
shillings or two
pounds; whatever you happen to have on you."
From
1924 to
1928 he served as
Secretary of State for India in Baldwin's second government; Baldwin had allegedly declined to reappoint him to the
Woolsack on the grounds that it would be inappropriate for the Lord Chancellor to be seen drunk in the street. After retiring from politics he became Rector of the
University of Aberdeen, a director of
Tate & Lyle, and High Steward of
Oxford University. He died in
London in
1930.
The opinion of
Winston Churchill, who was a friend: "He had all the
canine virtues in a remarkable degree — courage, fidelity, vigilance, love of chase." Of
Margot Asquith, who was not: "F. E. Smith is very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head." As "Lord Birkenhead", he's dramatised in the film
Chariots of Fire, as an official of the
British Olympic Committee.
In the year of his death, he published his utopian
The World in 2030 A.D. with airbrush illustrations by
E. McKnight Kauffer.
(External Link
)
Satire
When the
Welsh Disestablishment Bill came before the
British Parliament in
1913, Smith declared it to be “a bill which has shocked the conscience of every
Christian community in
Europe”. This prompted
G. K. Chesterton to write a satirical poem, “Antichrist, Or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode”, which asked if
Breton sailors,
Russian peasants and Christians evicted by the
Turks would know or care of what happened to the
Anglican Church of Wales, and answered the question with the line “Chuck it, Smith”. Ironically, the Church of Wales was later to be disestablished by the
Lloyd George Coalition, of which the then-Lord Birkenhead was a key member, in
1921.
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