LABOUR PIONEER

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 97, 21 October 1935, Page 9

LABOUR PIONEER

DEATH IN ENGLAND

MR. A. HENDERSON PASSES 1

SERVICE AS SECRETARY

t/'ul'ieil Press Association'—My Electric U'uleBrapU—Copyright. (Received October 21, 1 p.m.) LONDON, October 20. The death has occurred of Mr. Arthur Henderson, for many years secretary of the British Labour Party. He was 72 years old.

By birth a Clydesider, he was born in Glasgow in 1863, and went to school there before migrating to Newcastle to serve his apprenticeship as an ironfounder, and afterwards to public life, Mr. Arthur Henderson might be described as by temperament and training a Tynesider. In his political aims he may have had something in common with the modern Glasgow school, but his methods... were those of the North of England trade unionist pioneers, the Burts, the Ben wicks, and John Wilsons, the Enoch Edwardses, and others of that sagacious, steadygoing local-preaching generation whose old-fashioned virtues and inherited loyalties are modified in their presentday successor by a wider range of experience and greater versatility of outlook. Like his predecessors in the movement, Mr. Henderson began as a Liberal, though, unlike them, he eventually became a convert to the doctrine that to fulfil itself Labour must ,stand alone. When Labour first entered office he shared with Mr. Clynes tlie advantage of having been not only chairman of the Labour Party but a Minister as well—first in the Asquith Coalition of 1915-16, as President of the Board of Education, and then as Paymaster-General, Labour Adviser, and Pensions Minister, and afterwards in the Lloyd George Government as Minister without portfolio. IN PARLIAMENT. He first entered Parliament in 1903, when he won Barnard Castle and became one the first eleven Labour M.P.s. He was elected treasurer of the Labour Party, and held that position until 1911, when he was appointed to the influential office of secretary. He was chairman of the Parliamentary Lab"bur Party from 1908 to 1910, and from 1914 to 1917. Mr. Henderson, became a member of the Coalition Cabinet in 1915, his real work being to advise the Government on labour questions, and it was he who laid the foundations of the Ministry of Labour. When the first Coalition fell hi 1916 Mr ' Henderson remained a member of the War Cabinet of five. He resigned in 1917 over the proposal to hold an international conference to form a workingclass peace policy. Mr. Henderson lost his seat in 1918, and again in 1922 and 1923, but on each occasion was returned at-a by-election. He was Home Secretary in the Labour 'Government in 1924. He served several years as Chief Whip, and took that post again after the fall of the Labour Government and the Zinovieff Letter Election. In the next Labour Ministry he held the important post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and went into opposition with ■ the Labour Party in 1931. A man of medium. height, Mr. Henderson was stout and impressive, but he had not a brilliant personality. As a speaker he had qualities as an expounder and as a rhetorician. He spoke with an impassioned' voice, and was respected-and almost feared by his own supporters. He would bave been the last to claim personal popularity, but it is sale to say that there was no one on whom more reliance was placed as one of the architects of the Labour edifice by Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald than on Mr. Henderson, and he was certainly the most distinguished of at least a dozen men who found their way to Parliament, partly at least as the result of their experience as lay preachers or evangelists. DISARMAMENT WORK. Though when Mr. Mac Donald moved on to form a National Government, Mr. Henderson went out with his Labour colleagues, he did not relinquish the post of chairman of the Disarmament Conference to which he had been elected while in office. And here his labours for peace were unceasing, even if not as fruitful as he hoped, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. From a small group in the 1918 Parliament his organising genius has played a big part in transforming the Labour Party into the largest party in the\State, wrote Professor Harold Laski in a tribute published in 1931. He has won for it a devotion from the rank and file, a quality of self-sacri-fice, which is the envy of those to whom the organisation of other parties is entrusted. Efforts have been made to explain Mr. Henderson's separation from Mr. Mac Donald as the outcome of personal ambition. To no one at all intimately acquainted with the detailed history of the last few years could any charge be more ludicrous. Mr. Henderson's most conspicuous quality is his personal loyalty. No leader has ever had more eager devotion from a colleague than Mr. Mac Donald has had from Mr. Henderson. I ;great qualities." "The great qualities of Mr. Henderson are known to all who have worked with him. A bluff and unaffected simplicity, a complete negation of self, a power to go straight to the central principle, involved in any question, an insistence that the standards of political life cannot be set too high; these are integral to his attitude. "Mr. Henderson has won the loyal affection of all who have ever worked for him. . He is always accessible. He has none of that intellectual or social pride which has, not seldom, made political leaders hold themselves aloof from their followers. He believes in consultation with colleagues. He does not act until he has fully surveyed his ground. He has the power of relating detail to principle which is essential to the big task of organisation. "He is not, like Mr. Mac Donald. a supreme popular orator.. His speeches are thoughtful rather than eloquent, convincing rather than moving. He has no rhetorical adornments; he relies upon the power of his argument to win acceptance for his ideas. He does not seek to impose his personality in speech. He sets out a plain, unvarnished tale, and it is upon the substantial quality of its factual texture that he depends."