Thomas Fenby

Thomas Davis Fenby (1875 - 4 August 1956) was a British Liberal politician and blacksmith.

Early life

Fenby was born in Bridlington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the son of a master of a local blacksmith’s forge. He was educated at Bridlington School. He learned his father’s trade and later headed the family business, often working at the forge himself until only a few years before his death. In 1900 he married Elizabeth Ann Adamson; they had two daughters [Obituary, The Times, 6.8.56] .

Yorkshire public life

Fenby was important in local public life. Appointed a magistrate in 1910, he was for many years the Chairman of the Pickering magistrates and he succeeded the Earl of Halifax as chairman of quarter sessions. He was also Chairman of the East Riding Summary Jurisdiction Appeals Committee and vice-Chairman of the Rating Appeals Committee, the rates being a question he later addressed in Parliament. [The Times, 12.2.27] He was granted an extension to serve as a magistrate by the Lord Chancellor and only finally retired from the Bench in 1951. In the 1940s he was a member of the Management Committee of the Bridlington Hospital. [http://www.savebridlingtonhospital.co.uk/bridhistory/bridlingtonhospitalhistory.pdf] He died at his home in Bridlington aged 81. ["Who was Who", OUP 2007]

Politics

Fenby first entered local politics and was Mayor of Bridlington and a County Councillor, eventually becoming vice-Chairman of East Riding County Council and an Alderman. At the 1923 general election he unsuccessfully contested the Buckrose division of Yorkshire for the Liberals but in1924 he was elected Liberal Member of Parliament for East Bradford, defeating the sitting Labour MP and First Commissioner of Works,Frederick William Jowett in a straight fight by just 66 votes. [The Times, 31.10.24] . However he lost the seat back to Jowett in the 1929 general election, although again the Conservatives decided not to put up a candidate. Fenby apparently gained a reputation at Westminster for being unconventional and independent minded and was a good platform speaker. He was well regarded for his knowledge of local government and agricultural and associated issues, which he often championed with the Ministry of Agriculture (e.g. The Times, 24.6.26). He was sometime chairman of the Association of North of England Smallholders and urged the government to provide local authorities with the funds to provide additional smallholdings to keep agricultural labourers on the land and often spoke in favour of smallholders in Parliament [e.g.The Times, 10.3.25, 21.3.25] . He was made a Whip of the English Liberal MPs in 1926 [The Times, 17.11.26] .

The Radical Group of Liberal MPs

Inevitably, Fenby was caught up in the turmoil within the Liberal Party arising from the rivalries of David Lloyd George and H H Asquith. With Asquith out of the House of Commons after 1924, Lloyd George was elected chairman of the Parliamentary Liberal Party. Looking back to Lloyd George’s Coalition government with the Conservatives which had ended as recently as 1922, many Liberal MPs were cautious about their new leader’s role and relationship with the Tories. Ironically in the light of Lloyd George’s record of introducing or supporting progressive social policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer after 1908 and his equally radical stance on social, industrial and economic issues in the run-up to the 1929 general election, his opponents at this time thought him unreliable and unlikely to pursue radical policies. They formed a Radical Group in December 1924 and tried to use the Parliamentary Liberal Party to signal clearly their opposition to the government of Stanley Baldwin. Fenby was a founder member of this Radical Group whose published aim was to influence the party to adopt radical proposals in Parliament and, if it did not, to act independently without leaving the party [R S Grayson, "Liberals, International Relations and Appeasement"; Frank Cass, 2001 pp105-106] . Fenby’s distrust of Lloyd George lasted at least until 1926 when he was one of ten Liberal MPs who voted against his continuing leadership of the Parliamentary party. [R Douglas, "The History of the Liberal Party, 1895-1970"; Sidgwick & Jackson, 1971 p.196n]

Two radical causes Fenby espoused were birth control and the abolition of capital punishment. In April 1926 he was a signatory to a letter to the "Manchester Guardian", along with Bertrand Russell, H N Brailsford and Violet Bonham Carter - amongst others - urging support for a bill not to withhold birth control information given to married women. In December 1924 he was part of delegation to then Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks unsuccessfully seeking a reprieve from execution for a convicted murderer from Hull, William Smith (The Times, 9.12.24).

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