John Howard Whitehouse

John Howard Whitehouse (1873–1955) was the founder and first Warden of Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight and a Member of Parliament. A Quaker, George Whitehouse was an uncompromising Gladstonian Liberal whose strong views on issues such as Irish Home Rule and opposition to the politics of Liberal Unionist, later Conservative, leader Joseph Chamberlain were to shape his son's political views. Whitehouse, throughout his career in politics and later at Bembridge, was an intense believer in the right of the individual to shape his own life and a bitter opponent of any form of bureaucratic control.

He attended the Midland Institute and Mason Science College (which became the University of Birmingham), specialising at the former in literature, history and political economy. It was here that he first read the works of John Ruskin, of whom he became a lifelong disciple.

In 1894, Whitehouse joined the firm of Cadbury as a clerk. Living in Bournville, the model village, in 1899 he founded and managed a large youth club. In 1901 he began a campaign to establish a national memorial to Ruskin in the village. Ruskin Hall, now the Bournville Centre for Visual Arts, comprised a library, museum and lecture hall. In the early twentieth century he acted as treasurer to Birmingham Technical Education Committee.

Whitehouse founded the Ruskin Society of Birmingham in 1896, organising lectures by notable speakers, focused on the social questions of the day. Every year he organised excursions to places of Ruskinian interest, including some of England's great cathedrals. He founded and edited the society's influential quarterly journal, Saint George (1898–1911), managing its business affairs and eventually becoming its publisher.

In November 1903 he was appointed secretary to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, resigning because of irreconcilable differences with the trustees in 1905, when he joined the university settlement, Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, east London, as secretary. He took a keen interest in its education and youth work, and had lectured widely on such matters since the late 1890s.

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