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Herbert Gladstone

The Right Honourable
The Viscount Gladstone
GCB GCMG GBE PC JP
Herbert John Gladstone.jpg
1st Governor-General of South Africa
In office
31 May 1910 – 8 September 1914
Monarch George V
Preceded by Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson
as High Commissioner for Southern Africa
Succeeded by The Viscount Buxton
Home Secretary
In office
11 December 1905 – 19 February 1910
Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
H. H. Asquith
Preceded by Aretas Akers-Douglas
Succeeded by Winston Churchill
Personal details
Born (1854-02-18)18 February 1854
Downing Street
Westminster, Middlesex, England
Died 6 March 1930(1930-03-06) (aged 76)
Ware, Hertfordshire, England
Nationality British
Political party Liberal
Spouse(s) Dorothy Mary Paget (1876–1953)
(m. 1901; his death 1930)
Alma mater University College, Oxford

Herbert John Gladstone, 1st Viscount Gladstone GCB GCMG GBE PC JP (18 February 1854 – 6 March 1930) was a British Liberal statesman. The youngest son of William Ewart Gladstone, he was Home Secretary from 1905 to 1910 and Governor-General of the Union of South Africa from 1910 to 1914.

Appointed whip in 1899, Gladstone was an innovator who provided a long term strategy, kept the party from splitting over the Second Boer War, introduced more modern constituency structures; and encouraged working-class candidates. In secret meetings with Labour leaders in 1903 he forged the famous Gladstone–MacDonald pact. In two-member constituencies, it arranged that Liberal and Labour candidates did not split the vote. Historians give him much of the credit for the Liberal triumph in 1906, with 400 MPs and a majority of 243.

Rising to Home Secretary in 1906-8, he was responsible for the Workman's Compensation Act, a Factory and Workshops Act, and in 1908 the eight hour working day underground in the Coal Mines Regulation Act. Historian John Grigg states that while his name is not often included in any list of radicals, his radical record is second to none in the Campbell-Bannerman Government. He was, to be sure, no firebrand, but a good party man whose common sense inclined him to be less 'Gladstonian' in the matter of State intervention then than his famous father had been. With his able under-secretary, Herbert Samuel, he sponsored no less than 34 acts Acts of Parliament during his time at the Home Office.


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