Argyll link to UK’s first Prime Minister

Leaders of British Governments were called First Lord of the Treasury, a title they still also hold, until the election of Glaswegian Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in December 1905. Five days after assuming office, he took the superior title Prime Minister.

Born Henry Campbell, he was the youngest of six children of Sir James Campbell, Lord Provost of Glasgow in the 1940s. The Bannerman was added to his name in 1871. It was a condition of the will of his Mother’s uncle, enabling him to inherit the Hutton Court estate in Kent.

After studying classics at Glasgow University and Cambridge he became a partner in the family drapery business in Glasgow’s Ingram Street – J&W Campbell & Co.

This was in 1860, the same year as his marriage to Charlotte Bruce, daughter of Major General Sir Charles Bruce KCB of Kingairloch in Argyll. The Campbell-Bannermans made their country home at Belmont Castle in Meigle in Perth.

Charlotte was the more ambitious and the more strategic of the two, effectively managing the political career of her husband through a singularly devoted marriage. Never playing a public part in his political life, she was his constant adviser. A shrewd judge of character she guarded CB’s (as he was known) reputation fiercely and never forgot a slight to him, carrying resentments with her.

With Charlotte’s encouragement, CB became a member of Parliament in 1868, the start of forty years representing Stirling Burghs.

After various posts in Government – during which he earned his knighthood for persuading the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, to resign as Commander-in-Chief, he became Leader of the Liberals in 1898.  Here he had a particularly tough job on his hands as, after its defeat in 1900 in the so-called khaki election, the parliamentary party tore itself apart in internal conflict.

One of CB’s major achievements was making the party coherent again. He became Prime Minister in December 2005 as leader of a Liberal-led minority administration and within a few months, in February 1901, saw his party win a general election with a huge majority.

The legislative successes of his Government have remained little know yet they laid the foundation in philosophy and in law of the modern Welfare State. What was known as their Liberal reforms were fuelled by a strong social conscience and included the introduction of sick pay and pensions.

Interestingly, CB’s assumption of the Prime Ministership in December 1905 coincided almost exactly with the promotion to Admiral of the Fleet of the then First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot (Jackie) Fisher.

A controversial figure, the charismatic Fisher was arguably the greatest strategic brain ever to rule the Admiralty. He understood the technological and social changes that were happening and saw far earlier than most what they would mean for the coming shape of warfare, particularly at sea.

He predicted that 1914 would see the start of a war between Britain and Germany – a prediction that proved exactly right. He saw the absolute value of the development and deployment of the submarine and championed its case with characteristic vigour. He realised how obsolete was the existing design of warships, trapped in the aspic of an earlier age and how much this limited their performance.

Fisher drove the design of an entirely new breed of battleship, called by the name of the first in its class to be commissioned – the Dreadnought. This became the defining moment in naval warfare at the time, immediately consigning all earlier battleships to the general title of pre-Dreadnought.(Interestingly, when Fisher was made First Baron Fisher of Kilverstone in December 1909, he took as the motto on his coat of arms ‘Fear God and dread nought’.)

Dreadnought entered service in 1906, the first year of Campbell-Bannerman’s premiership following his resounding election success. Dreadnought was the first capital ship to be powered by steam turbines, making her the fastest ship in the world when she was completed. She had a uniform battery of main guns, unlike her predecessors which had a few main guns and a big battery of smaller ones. She was so awesome she sparked a major international arms race as the navies of other countries, particularly Germany’s, scrambled to outbuild each other in numbers of the only battleship type worth having.

As Admiral of the Fleet, one of Fisher’s first actions – causing huge public outrage, was to sell off 90 obsolete and small ships of the navy and to mothball another 64. He described these as: ‘too weak to fight and too slow to run away’ and also as ‘a miser’s hoard of useless junk’. Easy to see why, depending on which side of the establishment you sat, Fisher equally excited devotion and opposition.

All of this marked the short period of Campbell-Bannerman’s leadership. His beloved Charlotte had been all but totally disabled by illness throughout his premieriership. He cared for her himself in No 10 Downing Street – which he described as ‘a rotten old barracks’ – and admitted to the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, that the amount of time and energy he devoted to his wife left him short in his prime-ministerial duties.

Charlotte died during her sleep in a healing visit to the spa at Marienbad at the end of August 1906, during the Parliamentary recess.

The loss of his wife was devastating and shortly after it Campbell-Bannerman had the first of a series of heart attacks culminating in very bad one in November 1907 that led to his resignation as Prime Minister in April 1908.

He died later that same month, less than two years after Charlotte and was succeeded as Prime Minister by HH Asquith, one of an extremely talented group of his ministers, two more of which went on to become Prime Minister – David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.

Campbell Bannerman may not have been much of an orator but he was a capable and confident man. Less secure Prime Ministers tend to surround themselves with a considerably less stellar cabinet. His Argyll adviser, his wife Charlotte who shared their 46 year-long happy marriage, will have had as much to do with his choice of Ministers as she had with his unjealous confidence.

The very substantial achievements of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Government have at last been recognised by the installation of a Plaque in his memory at his early family home at 129 Bath Street in Glasgow. It was unveiled on 6th December 2008 by two stalwarts of today’s Scottish Liberal elite, former party leaders Lord Steel and Charles Kennedy.

Henry and Charlotte are buried in the churchyard of the parish church at Meigle in Perth, near their home at Belmont. An understated stone plaque in the outside wall of the church is the memorial there to this unshowy man.

Both photographs above are free of copyright. They show Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman during his premiership; and Captain John (Jackie) Fisher in 1883, who went on to become Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet and later Lord Fisher, first Baron of Kilverstone.

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