Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Arnold

Sydney 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.

Background

He was a son of W. A. Arnold, of Manchester. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School.

Liberal party

He was a Member of the General Committee of the Manchester Liberal Federation. He was Honorary Treasurer of the North-West Division of the Free Trade Union.^[1] He unsuccessfully contested the Conservative seat of Holderness Division of the East Riding of Yorkshire at the December 1910 General Election.^[2] 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.

Holmfirth by-election, 1912^[3] Electorate 13,035

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±
	Liberal	Sydney Arnold	4,749	42.0	-15.5
	Unionist	Robert 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.^[4] During the war he served as a captain in the South Staffordshire Regiment.^[5] 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.

General Election 1918: Penistone^[6] Electorate

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±
	Liberal	Capt. Sydney Arnold	7,338	39.4
	Unionist	Maj. 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

He supported a levy on capital and the nationalisation of the mines and railways.^[7] He resigned that seat due to ill-health in 1921.

Labour party

In 1922 he joined the Labour Party and was ennobled in 1924 as Baron Arnold, of Hale in the County of Chester,^[8] 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.^[9] He resigned from the Labour Party, in 1938, on account of disagreement with its Foreign Policy.^[10] 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.^[11]

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Sydney Arnold

References

1. Debrett's House of Commons and Judicial Bench, 1916
2. British parliamentary election results 1885-1918
3. British parliamentary election results 1885-1918
4. ‘ARNOLD’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2007; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2012 ; online edn, Oct 2012 accessed 18 Jan 2014
5. Debrett's House of Commons and Judicial Bench, 1916
6. British parliamentary election results 1918-1949
7. The Downfall of the Liberal Party by Trevor Wilson (1966)
8. The London Gazette: no. 32907. p. 1266. 12 February 1924.
9. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-39, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 185
10. ‘ARNOLD’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2007; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2012 ; online edn, Oct 2012 accessed 18 Jan 2014
11. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right, pp. 329-330