MR JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

New Zealand Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 4259, 19 January 1901, Page 3 (Supplement)

MR JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

A TMuloner by birth, and n member of a Unitarm-n familv of substantial means, who for several generations have hdd ]iiorb office in the ancient Cordwainers’ Company. Mr Cbambemm was orUicatefl at T>rivn*e schools, ann for fayo ■vo-ra under Hr Kev. at Hie. fmyorsity College School, where, when he left at the acre of sixteen, be was two are told in M ; ss MarriV hook about the Bign.. Hon Member for Birmingham) the head mathematical scholar of his year, was bracketed first in mechanics hydrostatics. etc., and also in French (dividing the prize with Jules .Benedict, son of the musician), and was distinguished in Latin. Little was done in the way of athletics at University College School in those davs. and in that little Josenh Chamberlain hardly cared to join. He had been found at his first school by no means Unwilling to use Nature’s weapons In vindication of his natural right to he President of a Peace' Society which he had founded. An athlete he never became, nor a sportsman, hut be en.ioyed swimming, and was good at it. and in Birmingham society, in the later “fifties” and early "sixties” his good dancing was an element in the popularity he enjoyed. For, after’two years spent in acquiring the art and mvstery of cordwaining, it was to Birmingham he was sent to - develop with his cousin Nettleford a new patent for screw-making. ‘ Develop it they did and the whole business .connected with it, until in 1865 out of one hundred and thirty thousand gross of screws produced weeklv in Birmingham, no fewer than ninety thousand gross were turned out hv Nettlefdrd and Chamberlain. And Ibis—old slanders on the subject having long ago withered —they accomplished by r.erfcotly honourable enterprise, marked bv just those kinds of resource and adaptability the lack of which has so often stood in the way of the successfulcompetition of British with Continental manufacturers. • The result was that at the ago of thirtv-eight Mr Chamberlain was able to retire" from business, and to throw himself entirely, young, fresh, and all but unworn, into Those varied forms of public work in whicn he had for several years taken an increasingly active and prominent part.