OBITUARY.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18819, 6 March 1931, Page 12

OBITUARY.

EARL RUSSELL. United Press Association — By Electrlo Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, March 4. Earl Russell died suddenly at Marseilles yesterday, aged 66. He had been recuperating in the south of France after his recent illness. He was about to return when he was overcome by a fatal attack. . . _ .. Earl Russell was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport in the Labour Government in 1929. Later in the same year he succeeded Dr Drummond Shiels as Under Secretary for the India Office. His brother, Mr Bertrand Russell, the famous mathematician, and the author of many philosophical works, succeeds to the peerage. John Francis Stanley Russell, second Earl Russell, barrister, electrical engineer, was born in August, 1865, and educated at Winchester and at Balliol College, Oxford. His father, Viscount Amberley, having died in 1876, he succeeded in 1878 to the Earldom on the death of his grandfather the first Earl, the famous Liberal who, as Lord John Russell, introduced the Reform Bill of 1832. His ability promised a j brilliant career, but even in boyhood he showed signs of a temperament which set him at perpetual warfare with the , orthodox. When at Winchester he one day walked out of chapel because the Athanasian Creed was recited. After leaving Oxford he qualified as a barrister and also as an electrical engineer, running a business at Maidenhead. In 1895 he was elected to the London County Council. Socialism attracted him, and a few years later he joined the Fabian Society and came out openly as a Socialist. He was a strong advocate of the suffrage for women in the early days of the movement. In 1901 he was the defendant in a famous trial by the House of Lords. In 1890 he had married a daughter of Sir Claude Scott. The marriage was unhappy, his wife making certain charges against him. These he denied, and, as she repeated them, he held that he was entitled to a divorce on the legal ground of “cruelty.” To emphasise this view, he went to the United States and got a divorce. He then, in 1901, married Mrs Sommerville. On his return to England he was accused of bigamy, and, claiming the privilege of a peer, was tried by the House of Lords. The result was a sentence of six months' imprisonment, but a pardon quickly followed. Both marriages were afterwards dissolved. In 1916 he married the Countess van Arnim, formerly Miss May Beaucham, the author of “Elizabeth and her Gel-man Garden.” When | Labour came into power in June, 1929, he was made Parliamentary Secretary ; to the Ministry of Transport. Lord Russell, who was an agnostic, wrote a , volume of “Lay Sermons.” In 1912 he • published “Divorce,” in which he de- ; , manded equality for the sexes in matrii | menial cases and the dissolution of ; marriage by consent. In 1923 he wrote j his reminiscences.