Western Wood (MP)

Western Wood (4 January 1804 – 17 May 1863) was a British businessman and a Liberal Party politician. He sat in the House of Commons from 1861 to 1863.

He married Sara Leititan Morris on 16 June 1829. One of their sons Western Wood was a Member of the Queensland Legislative Council.

Wood was the fourth child, and second son, of Sir Matthew Wood, 1st Baronet (1768–1843) and his wife Maria née Page. His father had been a Lord Mayor of London, and was a Member of Parliament (MP) for 36 years. His brother William (1801–1881) was a barrister and Liberal MP who was ennobled as Lord Hatherley and became Lord Chancellor; his older brother John (1796–1866) was the father of Katharine O'Shea, whose divorce from her husband remarriage Charles Stuart Parnell became a major political scandal in 1890.

Wood was a merchant in the City of London, and a member of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, of which he was a warden by 1861.

When the Lord John Russell, the Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for the City of London, was elevated to the peerage as Earl Russell, Wood was chosen as the Liberal candidate for the resulting by-election.

At the selection meeting in the London Tavern on 18 July, one person favoured inviting the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone, to be their candidate, but the others preferred Wood. He told the meeting that, like his father Sir Matthew and his brother Sir William, he supported the secret ballot. In an election address issued that evening he stated his selection was due "entirely to the favourable recollection of the services of my late father". He said that he had been a reformer since his youth, when those principles were not dominant, and pledged himself to support any measures to extend the franchise, expand education, and to achieve an "equitable adjustment of the vexed question of church-rates". In foreign policy, he pledged to follow the principles of Lord John Russell when Foreign Secretary, and said that while it was Britain's duty to express a "lively sympathy for the efforts of other nations to secure their civil and religious liberty", they should abstain "from all interfence with the development of the national will".

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