F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

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Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead, GCSI, PC (12 July 1872–30 September 1930) was a British Conservative statesman and lawyer of the early 20th century. He was a skilled orator, noted for his staunch opposition to Irish nationalism, his wit, pugnacious views, and hard living and drinking. He is perhaps best remembered today as Winston Churchill's greatest personal and political friend until Birkenhead's untimely death at age 58.

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Marriage 3 First World War 4 Baron Birkenhead 5 Satire 6 External links

[edit] Early life and education

Smith was born in Birkenhead in Cheshire and was educated at Birkenhead School. After a brief two years at the University of Liverpool, he went up to Wadham College, Oxford in 1896, where he was a contemporary of the politician John Simon and the athlete C.B.Fry. After losing his Liverpool accent he became President of the Oxford Union, where a bust of him now stands. He obtained only a Second in Mods before switching to Law, in which he obtained a First and won the Vinerian Scholarship, although to his disappointment he only obtained a Second in his Bachelor of Civil Law degree. After winning a Fellowship of Merton College he taught law at Oxford until 1899, when he was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn where he now lends his name to the F. E. Smith Birkenhead Award Scholarship.

In 1906 he entered the House of Commons representing the Walton constituency of Liverpool, and attracted attention by a brilliant maiden speech. He was soon a prominent leader of the Unionist wing of the Conservative Party, especially in the planned Ulster resistance to Irish Home Rule in 1912-14.

[edit] Marriage

He married Margaret Eleanor Furneaux in April 1901 and they had three children, Eleanor, Frederick and Pamela.

He later had an affair with a young woman named Mona Dunn, who died of peritonitis. In his History of the Twentieth Century Conservative Party, Alan Clark placed the word "peritonitis" in inverted commas, presumably implying that her death was the result of a failed abortion.

[edit] First World War

On the outbreak of the First World War he was placed in charge of the Government's Press Bureau, with the rank of colonel and responsibility for newspaper censorship. In 1915 he was appointed Solicitor General by H. H. Asquith, and soon after succeeded his friend Sir Edward Carson as Attorney General, with the right to attend Cabinet. In 1916 he worked to secure the conviction and execution of the Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement, who had been captured attempting to ship German arms to Ireland.

[edit] Baron Birkenhead

In 1919 he was created Baron Birkenhead, of Birkenhead in the County of Cheshire, and appointed Lord Chancellor by Lloyd George and the youthful age of forty-seven; the "Morning Post" dismissed his appointment as "carrying a joke too far". He played a key role in the passage of several key legal reforms, including the reform of English Land Law which was to come to fruition in the mid-1920s, and also played an important role in the negotiations that led to the signature of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, which established an independent Irish Free State the following year. His support for this, and his warm relations with the Irish leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, angered some of his former Unionist associates, notably Sir Edward Carson. During the negotiations he remarked to Michael Collins that he might be "signing his political death warrant", to which Michael Collins dryly (and accurately) replied that he was "signing his actual death warrant".

The same year (1921) he was also responsible for the House of Lords rejecting a proposal, put forward by Frederick Macquisten MP, to criminalize lesbianism. During the debate, Birkenhead argued that 999 women out of a thousand had "never even heard a whisper of these practices".^[1]

Smith was created Viscount Birkenhead, of Birkenhead in the County of Chester, in 1921, and Viscount Furneaux, of Charlton in the County of Northampton, and Earl of Birkenhead in 1922. By 1921-2 Birkenhead and Churchill had become the leading figures of the Lloyd George Coalition, associated with the Irish Treaty, the attempt to go to war with Turkey over Chanak (vetoed by the governments of the Dominions) and (in Birkenhead's case if not Churchill's) the general whiff of moral and financial corruption which had come to surround the Coalition. Even a famous speech in which Birkenhead told undergraduates that the world still offered "glittering prizes" to those with "stout hearts and sharp swords" seemed out of kilter with the more pacific and self-consciously moral style of politics advocated by the new generation of Conservative politicians such as Baldwin and Edward Wood (the future Lord Halifax). At an earlier meeting before Parliament broke up for the summer, and at the more famous Carlton Club meeting in October 1922 Birkenhead's hectoring of the junior ministers and backbenchers was one of the factors leading them to withdraw support from the Coalition.

Like many of the senior members of the Coalition, Birkenhead did not hold office in the Bonar Law and Baldwin governments of 1922-4. Unlike the others Birkenhead was rude and open in his contempt for the new governments. He sneered that Sir George Younger was "the cabin boy" who had taken over the ship, he referred to Lords Salisbury and Selborne as "the Dolly sisters" after two starlets of the era and remarked that the new Cabinet was one of "second-class brains", to which the reply - variously attributed to Stanley Baldwin and Lord Robert Cecil - came that this was better than "second-class characters". In the House of Lords he accused the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon (who had deserted the Coalition in its final hours and thus retained his office under Bonar Law) of making unauthorised promises of support to Greece in her war against Turkey; he was forced to apologise when Curzon produced the key documents which he had circulated to the Cabinet, and which Birkenhead had initialled as read. Lady Curzon retaliated by "cutting" Birkenhead at a ball, but as she remarked to her husband in a letter, he was "too drunk to notice" the snub.

From 1924 to 1928 he served as Secretary of State for India in Baldwin's second government; Baldwin had allegedly declined to reappoint him to the Woolsack on the grounds that it would be inappropriate for the Lord Chancellor to be seen drunk in the street. After retiring from politics he became Rector of the University of Aberdeen, a director of Tate & Lyle, and High Steward of Oxford University. He died in London in 1930.

The opinion of Winston Churchill, who was a friend: "He had all the canine virtues in a remarkable degree — courage, fidelity, vigilance, love of chase." Of Margot Asquith, who was not: "F. E. Smith is very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head. As "Lord Birkenhead", he is a character in the movie Chariots of Fire, an official of the British Olympic Committee.

In the year of his death, he published his utopian The World in 2030 A.D. with airbrush illustrations by E McKnight Kauffer.[1]

[edit] Satire

When the Welsh Disestablishment Bill came before Parliament in 1913, F. E. Smith declared it to be "A Bill which has shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe". This prompted G. K. Chesterton to write a satirical poem, "Antichrist, Or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode", which asked if Breton sailors, Russian peasants and Christians evicted by the Turks would know or care of what happened to the Anglican Church of Wales, and answered the question with the line "Chuck it, Smith". Ironically, the Church of Wales was later to be disestablished by the Lloyd George Coalition, of which the then Lord Birkenhead was a key member, in 1921.

[edit] External links

• Works by F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead at Project Gutenberg

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by James Henry Stock	Member of Parliament for Liverpool Walton 1906–1918	Succeeded by Harry Warden Stanley Chilcott
Legal Offices
Preceded by Stanley Buckmaster	Solicitor General for England and Wales 1915	Succeeded by George Cave
Preceded by Edward Carson	Attorney General for England and Wales 1915–1919	Succeeded by Gordon Hewart
Political offices
Preceded by The Lord Finlay	Lord Chancellor 1919–1922	Succeeded by The Viscount Cave
Preceded by The Lord Olivier	Secretary of State for India 1924–1928	Succeeded by The Viscount Peel
Peerage of the United Kingdom
Preceded by New Creation	Earl of Birkenhead 1922–1930	Succeeded by Frederick Smith
Preceded by New Creation	Viscount Birkenhead 1921–1930
Preceded by New Creation	Baron Birkenhead 1919–1930
Preceded by New creation	Baronet (of Birkenhead) 1918–1930