Constituency : Lincoln 1847-8, 1861-85
Charles chalked up another gain when he took the second Lincoln seat for the Liberals in November 1861 after the death of the Tory.
Charles was born in the city as a miller's son . He made his fortune selling pig iron to the navy for ballast holding them to the contract after technology had made its use obsolete. He later moved into coal mining and became a huge landowner on the Isle of Wight. He was first elected in 1847 as a Chartist sympathiser but his election was declared void for vote-rigging; Charles naively said he thought it was the custom in Lincoln.
In 1864 Charles played host to both Garibaldi and Mazzini and hosted a reception for the former at his house in London. He supported the Second Reform Act because he thought that if it failed the next attempt would be more extreme. In 1868 he chaired the Commons committee on Admiralty Reform. He became their scourge , relentlessly identifying inefficiencies and mismanagement. In the 1870s he commissioned Myles Foster to paint 50 watercolours of Venice.
Charles was a supporter of working class education and founded libraries on the Isle of Wight.
Charles was small and frail-looking but he actually enjoyed good health to an advanced age still riding for hours round his estate in his eighties.
He died in 1887 aged 84. Both his son and grandson were called Charles and their terms as MPs overlapped causing some confusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment