Conference on British Studies Biographical Series – serie

A sensitive analysis of the thought and intellectual development of G. D. H. Cole (1889-1959) the distinguished Labour historian. Cole's career is traced from his earliest days in the Labour movement to his final years as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Thought at Oxford. Professor Carpenter examines Cole's role in the creation of Guild Socialism; his work in the early 1920s when after the decline of Guild Socialism, he turned towards the analysis of policies, research through the New Statesman and the New Fabian Research Bureau and teaching at Oxford; his attempts to provide a policy for the Left in the 1930s, the idea of economic planning and the Popular Front; his activities during the Second World War; and his place in the debates over the Labour movement's cause after the 1945 government. Finally Professor Carpenter discusses Cole's courageous recognition, towards the end of his life, that Socialism had not come and his attempts to start a new cycle of research in one of the first efforts to create a New Left.

Sir John Brunner, the son of a Swiss schoolmaster who settled in England, was co-founder of Brunner, Mond and Company, one of the great English chemical firms of the nineteenth century and the predecessor of ICI. Always interested in politics, Brunner entered Parliament after his industrial activities had already won for him a reputation as the `Chemical Croesus'. Unlike most wealthy men of his time, he was a staunch supporter of the Liberal Party and a patron of its Radical causes: Irish Home Rule, disestablishment, land reform, welfare legislation, and naval disarmament. He achieved prominence and wide influence in politics, though never Cabinet rank, and presided over the National Liberal Federation in the crucial years before and during the First World War. Although Brunner was a paternalistic employer opposing socialism, one of his last political gestures was his support of a Labour candidate in the 'coupon' election of 1918. Professor Koss' study is based on a wide range of research, including extensive use of letters and other papers in the possession of the Brunner family.

This is a biography of Major John Cartwright (1740-1824), the English advocate of radical reform who had considerable influence in shaping the mainstream of reform in England in the nineteenth century, and whose ideas lay behind the working-class Chartist Movement. Known as the 'Father of Reform', Cartwright was the first person of importance to hold a literal belief in universal male suffrage and was venerated by generations of reformers. Dr Osborne's book clarifies and analyses Cartwright's extensive political plans and ideas against the background of contemporary English radicalism and of social and political change. He shows how Cartwright, as a member of the English landed gentry, tried to understand conditions which were changing at an unprecedented rate and still retained a high degree of traditionalism and conservatism.

This biography analyses the long political career of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), the Conservative politician who became the first Earl of Balfour. Professor Zebel stresses the extraordinary nature of Balfour's career, divided as it was into two specific periods. The first, dating from his entry into Parliament in 1874, and his rapid advancement as a result of family connections, comprised his period as Chief Secretary for Ireland in which he distinguished himself with his policy of 'killing Home Rule with kindness' - his leadership of the Unionists in the House of Commons, and his premiership from 1902 to 1905 in succession to his uncle, Lord Salisbury. The second, beginning in 1914, followed the period of political retirement which resulted from his party's defeat in the 1906 elections and his own loss of the party leadership in 1911. It was the more constructive.

The career of George Joachim Goschen, the man whom Lord Randolph Churchill forgot, illuminates many of the problems faced by the British ruling classes in the late nineteenth century: a Liberal in 1863, Goschen entered the twentieth century a Conservative. In examining his life and career, Professor Spinner shows how this transition took place and how it typified the reaction of many Victorian statesmen to the massive social and economic changes of the period. The son of a German immigrant merchant banker, thoroughly Anglicized by Rugby and Oxford, Goschen had no difficulty in rising to the highest positions of political and economic power. Elected to the Commons in 1863, he served successively in Lord Russell's Cabinet and at the Poor Law Board and the Admiralty during Gladstone's first Ministry.