OBITUARY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3005, 18 October 1911, Page 29

OBITUARY.

MR HENRY BROADHURST

LONDON, October 11. Mr Henry Broadhurst is dead ; aged 72 years.

Henry Broadhurst, a stonemason who became a Minister of the Crown, and the twelfth son of a stonemason, was born in. April, 1840, near Oxford, in the village of Littlemore. Such education as he received was gained in a small private scnool in the village, but his school days were over before he reached his teens and he went into the local smithy to blow the bellows and lead the shod horses back to the farmers. At 13 he started to learn stone-masonry. But the completion of a church on which all the local masons, were engaged found him, as he described himself, " a hobbledehov without employment," and so he went on tramp in search of work. In 1865 he reached London, and found work with a contractor who was then building the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament. The marks of his chisel are to be found on the pile under which he later made another kind of mark; and he did journeyman's work in Westminster Abbey, Albert Hall, the Foreign Office, the Guild Hall, and in many mansions of Mayfair, as well as in the Home Office, where 2CT years later he was to sit as Under-Secretary of State. At the general election of 1880 he entered Parliament as a Liberal member for Stoke-on-Trent. Mr Broadhurst unwisely declined the invitation of StoKe to contest the seat in 1885, and he had described his xefusal as the biggest political blunder of his career for he was immensely popular in North Staffordshire. He won Bordesley, with John Bright s help, in 1885. Home Rule had become a test question within the Birmingham area by the time the next election came round, and as Mr Broadhurst was a Home Ruler he had to go elsewhere, .and found a seat in Nottingham. In 1892 he failed to hold the seat, and at the formation of Mr Gladstone's last Administration he was ineligible for the ministerial office which would no doubt have been offered to him again, for in 1885 he was appointed by Mr Gladstone Under-Secretary of State fox the Home Department. In 1894 Mr Picton resigned his seat at'Leicester, and Mr Broadhurst took his place, and sat for that constituency until, in 1906, he resigned owing to failing health He was the pioneer of many causes which were championed by the Labour party of a later day as thougn they were new political aspirations, but the adversity of parliamentary procedure and the fact that he was before his time were against him. In" 1888 he brought. forward the question of feeding hungry school children—a cause that was seriously pressed forward only 17 years later. He "divided the House on the payment of election expenses, and it was largely on his initiative that the (Government adopted the attitude of "model employers." He also considerably influenced tho parliamentary opinion which in 1884 produced the Roval Commission in the Housing of the; Poor, pf which the Prince of Wales was chairman; secured the appointment of working men to the magistracy, by his recommendation to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; pressed for the appointment of working men inspectors under the Factory Acts, and was able to show the disinterestedness of his action by refusing an offer' of £6OO a year for an inspectorship. His membership of the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor brought him into contact with its illustrious chairman. The Prince of Wales invited the commissioners down to Sandringham, partly as an act of hospitality and partly to ihow them the model dwellings which had been erected on the Sandringham Estate. Mr Broadhurst, who confessed that he had sartorial shortcomings as well as scruples, begged to be excused, and fhe Prince wrote a charming letter to him saying that he and the Princess regretted his absence, but "quite understood and appreciated the reason." But his Royal Highness afterwards renewed the myitation, promising that his guest's sartorial deficiencies — they were mainly concerned with the lack of a dress suit—would be respected and accommodated; and so Mr Broadhurst went to Sandringham to_ dine in his own room, and to have the heir to the throne stirring his bedroom fire and assuring himself that all was made comfortable fqr the working man member of Parliament. When Mr Broadhurst was Under-Secretary of State he horrified the Home Secretary by saying that he could not possibly contemplate the incongruity of a man with, a nominal income of £2OO a year being presented at a levee in a suit which Vould absorb the greater part of that income; but he persisted in his point of view, and, received an unofficial intimation that Queen "Victoria had dispensed with his attendance at court, which was obligatory upon him as a Minister. For the same reason, Mr Broadhurst found himself unable to attend the Speaker's offioial receptions, and Mr Peel invited Mr Broadhurst and his colleagues to a morning-dress dinner, but the invitation did not become a practice. Mr Broadhurst was a Labour member of the old trade unionist type, and though he was during the seventies and eighties one of its foremost figures, the advance of "the-new unionism" left him behind, so that when he retired from Parliament there was little in common with him and the Labour party as it existed after the election of 1906. i

cvIISS HESBA STRETTON. LONDON, October 9. The death of Miss Hesba Stretton is announced*

When quite a girl Hesba Stretton wrote a little story for private perusal, and her sister Elizabeth quietly despatched it to Dickens, then editor of Household Words. Dickens repbed by sending a cheque for £5, with a request for more stories, and thus Hesba Stretton became a regular contributor. Her best-known work is "Jessica's First Prayer," which has been translated into at least 11 different languages, and was ordered by the Minister of Public Instruction in Russia to be given a place in every infant school Li the Empire. Her last published work wa« " Thoughts of Old Age," which was brought out about eight years ago.

MR HARRY RICKAEDS. SYDNEY, October 14. Advices have been received of the death in London of Mr Harry Rickarde, the

well-known theatrical proprietor. The cause of death was apoplexy.