Charles Masterman

Charles Masterman
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
In office 11 February 1914 – 3 February 1915
Prime Minister	Herbert Henry Asquith
Preceded by	Charles Hobhouse
Succeeded by	Edwin Samuel Montagu

Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman PC (24 October 1873 – 17 November 1927) was a British Liberal Party politician and journalist. He was distantly related to the Gurney family of Norfolk. His Great-grandfather was William Brodie Gurney; his brother was Howard Masterman who became the Bishop of Plymouth.

Early life

He graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge University, where he was President of the Union,^[1] and joint Secretary of Cambridge University Liberal Club from 1895 to 1896.^[2] At university he had two primary interests: social reform (influenced by Christian Socialism) and literature. His first published work was From The Abyss, a collection of articles he had written anonymously whilst living in the slums of south east London. These were highly impressionistic pieces, and reflected his literary leanings. Following this he became involved in journalism and co-edited the English Review with Ford Madox Ford. In 1901, he edited a collection of essays by eminent people of the day, entitled The Heart of the Empire: a discussion of Problems of Modern City Life in England. A second edition of that book was published in 1907. In 1905 he published In Peril of Change, a collection of his own essays. He also wrote a biography of the Reverend F D Maurice (Frederick Denison Maurice), which was published in 1907. During the period of his life up to 1906, he established many of the literary friendships that would be important in his later role as head of British propaganda in World War One.

Political career

Masterman in 1906

He was an unsuccessful candidate at the Dulwich by-election, 1903, but in the Liberal Party landslide victory at the 1906, he was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for West Ham North. In 1909 he published his best known book The Condition of England, in a survey of contemporary society with particular focus on the state of the working class. He married Lucy Blanche Lyttelton, a poet and writer, in 1908. Her biography of him was published in 1939. He worked closely with Winston Churchill and Lloyd George on the People's Budget of 1909 and was responsible for the passage through parliament of the National Insurance Act 1911. Beatrice Webb was to note her in her diaries his "almost unnaturally close friendship" with Churchill.^[3]

Masterman was re-elected in January 1910 and in December 1910, but the December election was later declared void.^[4] He was returned to Parliament at a by-election in July 1911 for the Bethnal Green South West constituency.^[5][6]

He was sworn as a Privy Councillor in 1912,^[7] and in 1914 he was appointed to the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. However under the law at the time, any MP accepting an "office of profit under the Crown" was legally required to recontest their seat in a by-election. Masterman lost his own seat, though this was not uncommon, and then stood in a by-election at Ipswich, losing again. He resigned from the Government as a result. Many believed that a promising political career had been destroyed by the legal requirement, a hangover from the era when Parliament had sought to curb the influence of the Crown on MPs, which would be amended and finally repealed altogether in the next twelve years.

War role

When the First World War began, he served as head of the British War Propaganda Bureau (WPB), set up at Wellington House, London, whose sole aim was to provide support for Britain through the manipulation of information about the Central Powers. In this role, he recruited writers (such as John Buchan, H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle) and painters (e.g., Francis Dodd, Paul Nash) to support the war effort. The main objective of this department was to encourage the United States to enter the war on the British and French side. Lecture tours and exhibitions of paintings were organised in the U.S. Drawing on an extensive network of the most important and influential figures in the London arts scene, Masterman devised the most comprehensive arts patronage schemes ever to be supported in the country. Eventually subsumed into John Buchan’s Department of Information, and in 1918, Lord Beaverbrook’s even grander Ministry of Information, it became a template for the war art scheme in the Second World War, headed by Sir Kenneth Clark.^[8]

Masterman played a crucial role in publicising reports of the Armenian Genocide, in part to strengthen the moral case against the Ottoman Empire. For his role in this, Masterman has been the target of repeated Turkish allegations that he fabricated, or at least embellished, the events for propaganda purposes.

Later life

In 1919, he suggested to his colleagues that they pay attention to Mustafa Kemal and said " This Kemal will bother us a lot". In 1922, he published How England is Governed. Masterman eventually returned to the House of Commons in the 1923 general election, as MP for Manchester Rusholme, but by this point the Liberal Party was in decline and, like most other Liberals, he lost his seat in the 1924 general election. His health declined rapidly, hastened by drug and alcohol abuse. He died in 1927 whilst in the clinic; it has been suggested that he committed suicide.

References

Further reading

• Eric Hopkins - Biography of Charles Masterman (1873-1927) Politician and Journalist: The Spendid Failure

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Charles Masterman
• Tennyson as a Religious Teacher (1900)
• The Child and Religion article in collection edited by Thomas Stephens (1905)
• To colonise England: a plea for a policy edited with W B Hodgson and others (1907)
• Ruskin the Prophet article in collection edited by J H Whitehouse (1920)
• England after War: A study (1922)
• Full text of 'The Condition of England'