Stopford Brooke (politician)

Stopford William Wentworth Brooke (1859 – 23 April 1938) was a British politician. He was a Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) from 1906 to 1910.

Biography

Brooke was born in Kensington, London, the son of Stopford Brooke, an Irish clergymen, chaplain to Queen Victoria and writer, and his wife Emma (née Wentworth-Beaumont).^[1] He was educated at Winchester College and University College, Oxford graduating in 1881. He was a Unitarian minister in England between 1883 and 1886 and then went to America where he was minister at the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts.^[2] He married Helen Ellis from Boston in 1903. They had one son and a daughter. His wife died in 1928.^[3]

He was elected to the Commons in the 1906 general election, succeeding the Conservative MP Walter Guthrie in the Bow and Bromley constituency. He left Parliament in the January 1910 general election and was succeeded by the Conservative Alfred du Cros. He tried to re-enter Parliament at the December 1910 general election as a Liberal candidate at Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire and was defeated by the sitting Unionist MP William Ellis Hume-Williams by a narrow 215 vote margin.^[4]

His son, Somerset Stopford Brooke (a past President of the Oxford University Liberal Club) also stood for Parliament. He was Liberal candidate in Guildford in Surrey at the 1929 general election. He came second to the sitting Conservative Henry Cecil Buckingham, trailing by 4,566 votes.^[5] Somerset Stopford Brooke made a second attempt to get into the House of Commons in 1935 when he stood as a Liberal National in Shoreditch. At the time of this election Brooke was described as a member of the stock-exchange.^[6]

References

Specific

General

• Leigh Rayment's Historical List of MPs

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Stopford Brooke