He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, played a significant role in bringing about women’s suffrage, and was national Labour Party leader three times, but how many Glaswegians know of Arthur Henderson, born in Anderston in 1863?
When his father, a textile worker, died in 1872, leaving the family in poverty, Arthur was just 10 years old but had to leave school to work in a photographer’s shop.
When his mother remarried, the family moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Arthur went back to school for three years, before starting an apprenticeship at the local foundry. He joined the Ironfounders’ Union at the age of eighteen and went on to hold office at local, district and national level.
Arthur married Eleanor Watson in 1888 and they had four children. Their eldest son was killed in action during World War I.
In 1896, the family moved to Darlington, where Arthur became its first Labour mayor. In 1900 he was one of the 129 trade union and socialist delegates who passed Keir Hardie’s motion to create the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) – the forerunner of the Labour Party. In 1903, he was elected as MP for Barnard Castle. In 1908, when Hardie resigned as Leader of the Labour Party, Henderson was elected to replace him. He was leader a further twice.
With socialist reformer Sidney Webb, he largely wrote the party constitution. He was a determined campaigner for peace, and a central figure at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1934 – the year he won the Nobel Prize. According to the Nobel Prize website, Arthur was recognised internationally as an ‘apostle of peace’. He backed universal suffrage – votes for all – and in early 1916 threatened to resign from Government if the proposed Parliamentary reform Bill did not include women’s suffrage. He died in October 1935.
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