Waldron Smithers

Sir Waldron Smithers (5 October 1880 – 9 December 1954) was a Conservative Party politician in the United Kingdom.

Smithers was educated at Charterhouse and in France and became a member of the London Stock Exchange. He was the eldest son of Sir Alfred Waldron Smithers, who had been Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Chislehurst until 1922.

At the 1924 general election he stood for his father's constituency and won a three-cornered fight with a majority of more than 10,000. In his 30 years in the House of Commons he was always a backbencher, described by "The Times" as a 'diehard Tory' although well-liked on both sides of the house. In his memoirs, "Way of Life", his fellow Conservative John Boyd-Carpenter described Smithers as "an extreme Tory out of a vanished age" and both deeply religious and "not insensitive to the consoling effect of alcohol". [John Boyd-Carpenter, Way of Life, Sidgwick & Jackson, London (1980), p.79] Harold Macmillan said he "fondly believed himself to be a good Tory". [Harold Macmillan, "Memoirs Vol III: Tides of Fortune", (1969), p. 306]

Smithers remained as member for Chislehurst until the 1945 general election, when he switched to the newly-created Orpington constituency. Chislehurst fell to the Labour Party, but Smithers was comfortably elected in Orpington, and held the seat until he died.

During the Cold War, while MP for Orpington, Smithers regularly pressed for a "House of Commons Select Committee on un-British Activities" to be created to conduct anti-communist investigations, to mirror the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. [Peter Hennessy, "The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War" (2002), page 92.]

In 1904 he married Marjorie Page-Roberts, with whom he had one son and two daughters. He was knighted in 1934.

In the 2008 TV drama The Long Walk to Finchley, about the early career of Margaret Thatcher, Smithers was played by Michael Cochrane.

References

*Obituary, "The Times", 10 December 1954.