Henry Wilson (Holmfirth MP)

Henry Joseph Wilson (14 April 1833 – 29 June 1914) was a British farmer, industrialist and Liberal Party politician.

Henry Joseph Wilson was born at Old Radford, Nottinghamshire, the son of William Wilson who had also lived at Torquay and Mansfield. The Wilson family held strong Nonconformist and Reform sympathies. His half sister was Sarah Poulton Kalley who was a missionary in Brazil. Henry was educated at the West of England Dissenters’ Proprietary School, Taunton and then at University College London. In 1859, he married Charlotte, daughter of Charles Cowan the MP, for Edinburgh. They had three sons and two daughters. One of his sons, Cecil Henry Wilson, was later a Labour Party politician and sat as MP for the constituency of Sheffield Attercliffe.

Wilson began working life as a farmer near Mansfield and in 1867, after fourteen years as tenant of Newlands Farm, he went to Sheffield to manage the family firm, the Sheffield Smelting Company of which he also became a director.

Wilson’s political interests were born of the radical and dissenting tradition he inherited from his father and the Wilson family’s Victorian dedication to public service and devotion to civic duty. His causes included the temperance movement, opposition to the state regulation of vice, non-sectarian education, Disestablishment of the Anglican Church, Irish Home Rule, internationalism, Anti-imperialism and the destruction of the Opium trade. Wilson’s radicalism led him away from the traditional Gladstonian Liberalism of the age, as represented by the dominant group within the party in Sheffield. He was particularly repelled by some of the provisions of the 1870 Education Act such as those which involved payment for religious teaching out of public funds. Nonconformists saw the Act as a violation of religious liberty in education.

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