Robert Ascroft, JP. MP, (1847 – 19 June 1899) was a prominent

Lancashire Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated ''Lancs'') is a ceremonial county in North West England. It is bordered by Cumbria to the north, North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire to the east, Greater Manchester and Merseyside to the south, and the Irish Sea to ...

solicitor A solicitor is a lawyer who traditionally deals with most of the legal matters in some jurisdictions. A person must have legally defined qualifications, which vary from one jurisdiction to another, to be described as a solicitor and enabled to p ...

and an English politician. He entered the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the Bicameralism, bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of ...

on 13 July 1895 and was one of the two Members of Parliament for

Oldham Oldham is a town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies amongst the Pennines on elevated ground between the rivers River Irk, Irk and River Medlock, Medlock, southeast of Rochdale, and northeast of Manchester. It is the administrative cent ...

between

1895 Events January * January 5 – Dreyfus affair: French officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his army rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island (off French Guiana) on what is much later admitted to be a false charge of tr ...

until his death, as a member of the Conservative Party. He was known as the "Workers' Friend" and after his death, a public subscription enabled a statue of him to be erected in Alexandra Park, Oldham. Robert Ascroft is mentioned in Chapter XVII of

Sir Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 (Winston Churchill in the Second World War, ...

's book '

My Early Life ''My Early Life'', also known in the US as ''A Roving Commission: My Early Life'', is a 1930 book by Winston Churchill. It is an autobiography from his birth in 1874 to around 1902. The book closes with mention of his marriage in 1908, stating t ...

'. In the seventeenth chapter, entitled 'Oldham', Mr Churchill recalls the day where Mr Ascroft, MP for Oldham, talked to him about running the constituency together. Oldham was a two-member constituency and evidently, Mr Ascroft believed the young Winston -a war hero and celebrity- was ripe for the job.

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* 1847 births 1899 deaths Conservative Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies UK MPs 1895–1900 Politics of the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for constituencies in Lancashire {{England-Conservative-UK-MP-1840s-stub