Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Arnold (13 January 1878 – 3 August 1945) was a radical British Liberal Party politician who later joined the Labour Party and served as a government minister. A son of W. A. Arnold, of Manchester, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School. As a member of the General Committee of the Manchester Liberal Federation, he served as Honorary Treasurer of the North-West Division of the Free Trade Union.''Debrett's House of Commons and Judicial Bench, 1916''.

Politics

He unsuccessfully contested the Conservative seat of Holderness Division of the East Riding of Yorkshire at the December 1910 General Election. He was elected in 1912 as Member of Parliament for Holmfirth in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire at a by-election following the resignation of the long-serving Liberal MP

Henry Wilson Henry Wilson (born Jeremiah Jones Colbath; February 16, 1812 – November 22, 1875) was an American politician who was the 18th vice president of the United States from 1873 until his death in 1875 and a senator from Massachusetts from 1855 to ...

. In 1914 he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to

Jack Pease Joseph Albert Pease, 1st Baron Gainford (17 January 1860 – 15 February 1943), known as Jack Pease, was a British businessman and Liberal politician. He was a member of H. H. Asquith's Liberal cabinet between 1910 and 1916 and also served a ...

, the

President of the Board of Education The secretary of state for education, also referred to as the education secretary, is a secretary of state in the Government of the United Kingdom, responsible for the work of the Department for Education. The incumbent is a member of the ...

. He was also appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Edwin Samuel Montagu the Financial Secretary to the Treasury."ARNOLD", ''Who Was Who'', A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2007; online edn, Oxford University Press, December 2012; online edn, October 2012
Retrieved 18 January 2014. During the war he served as a captain in the South Staffordshire Regiment. When his constituency was abolished for the 1918 general election, he was elected for the new Penistone constituency against a Coalition Government endorsed Unionist candidate. He supported a levy on capital and the nationalisation of the mines and railways. He resigned that seat due to ill-health in 1921.

Labour party

In 1922 he joined the Labour Party and was ennobled in 1924 as Baron Arnold, of Hale in the County of Chester, and served as

Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies The Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies was a junior Ministerial post in the United Kingdom government, subordinate to the Secretary of State for the Colonies and, from 1948, also to a Minister of State. Under-Secretaries of State for the Co ...

in Ramsay MacDonald's short-lived 1924 Labour Government, and as

Paymaster-General His Majesty's Paymaster General or HM Paymaster General is a ministerial position in the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom. The incumbent Paymaster General is Jeremy Quin MP. History The post was created in 1836 by the merger of the pos ...

from 1929 to 6 March 1931 in Macdonald's second government. In the late 1930s he was a member of the Parliamentary

Pacifist Pacifism is the opposition or resistance to war, militarism (including conscription and mandatory military service) or violence. Pacifists generally reject theories of Just War. The word ''pacifism'' was coined by the French peace campaig ...

Group. He also served as a member of the council of the Anglo-German Fellowship.Richard Griffiths, ''Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933–39'', Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 185, 329–30 He resigned from the Labour Party, in 1938, on account of disagreement with its Foreign Policy. Subsequently, his name was one of twenty-six attached to a letter printed in ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' ...

'' supporting a policy of

appeasement Appeasement in an international context is a diplomatic policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power in order to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the UK governme ...

towards Germany. Because signatories included Barry Domvile and other leading members it was dubbed " The Link Letter" and its various signatories, including political moderates such as Arnold, William Harbutt Dawson, Smedley Crooke and Lord Londonderry, came under suspicion as

far right Far-right politics, also referred to as the extreme right or right-wing extremism, are political beliefs and actions further to the right of the left–right political spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of being ...

supporters.

Arms

Notes

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Arnold, Sydney 1st Baron Arnold 1878 births 1945 deaths Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies UK MPs 1910–1918 UK MPs 1918–1922 UK MPs who were granted peerages Labour Party (UK) hereditary peers Barons in the Peerage of the United Kingdom Politics of Penistone United Kingdom Paymasters General Barons created by George V