Anthony John Mundella

Anthony John Mundella (1825 – 21 July 1897) was an English Liberal Party politician and reformer.

Mundella was born in Leicester to an Italian father and English mother. He worked in the hosiery trade and became a partner in the Nottingham firm of "Hine and Mundella".

He was elected as Member of Parliament for Sheffield in 1868. He had been asked to stand by trade unionist William Dronfield, to defend the interests of labour in the wake of the Sheffield Outrages. He served as President of the second day of the first ever Co-operative Congress in 1869.Citation | title = Congress Presidents 1869-2002| url =http://archive.co-op.ac.uk/downloadFiles/congressPresidentstable.pdf|date=February 2002| accessdate =2008-05-10] When the Sheffield constituency was abolished in 1885, he was elected as MP for Sheffield Brightside, a seat he held until his death.

He served as President of the Board of Education in Gladstone's second administration (1880-1885), and then as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone's last two administrations and Rosebery's administration (1886, 1892-1895).

The system of price regulation which as President of the Board of Trade he imposed upon rail freight was a disaster for the railways and, in the longer term, for the railways' customers. It was based on the fallacious but widely held assumption that the cost of moving a ton of freight was proportional to the distance moved. In fact, the cost per ton mile depends mainly on the number of tons being carried and the amount of loading and unloading involved. It does not cost very much more to move 100 tons 100 miles than to move 1 ton.

The practical consequence was that the railways had to turn away traffic that could be efficiently and profitably moved by rail whilst they were not permitted to raise prices for unprofitable traffic.

References

*Brief biography at [http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/special/mundpape.html the University of Sheffield Library]
*Rayment