User:Noswall59/Alfred Welby

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Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alfred Cholmeley Earle Welby (22 August 1849 - 18 May 1937) was a British soldier and politician who was the Member of Parliament for Taunton from 1895 to 1906 and a London County Councillor from 1907 to 1910. He also served as the Secretary of the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation during the First World War.

The youngest son of a Baronet and belonging to a landed family, Welby purchased a commission into the British Army in 1867, and, after successive promotions, was appointed a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1892, commanding the 2nd Dragoons (Royal Scots Greys). He, however, had hoped for a career in politics and stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in 1885, 1886 and 1892, before winning the Taunton seat in the 1895 General Election. He remained in Parliament until he stood for East Finsbury seat in 1906, which went instead to the Liberals. He subsequently served on the London County Council and then, during World War I, became secretary of the Patriotic Fund, being knighted for his work in 1918, before retiring in 1920.

Family background and early life
Alfred Cholmeley Earle Welby was born on the 22 August 1849. He was the seventh son of Sir Glynne Earle Welby-Gregory, 3rd Baronet, and his wife Frances Cholmeley, daughter of Sir Montague Cholmeley, 1st Baronet. His father had changed by Royal Licence his name from Welby to Welby-Gregrory in 1861, but the younger Welby never added the Gregory name to his own or his children's. The Welby family had their seat in Denton, near Grantham, a town in the county of Lincolnshire, and were well-connected in local politics: Alfred Welby's father, grandfather and great-grandfather had each been Members of Parliament for the Borough of Grantham. The younger Welby was educated at Eton College, Berkshire.

Marriage and children
While at Poundisford Lodge, Taunton, the home of Colonel and Mrs Helyar, in the summer of 1897, Welby became acquainted with the occupant's neice, Alice Désirée Copland-Griffiths, a daughter of Arthur Edward Copland-Griffiths. Her father was the son of Major-General Frederick Charles Griffiths and his wife, who was a daughter of Alexander Copland of Gunnersbury Park, Middlesex; while her mother was the daughter of Camille Felix Désire Caillard, JP, DL, a judge on the Wiltshire County Circuit. Welby and Copland-Griffiths became engaged and were married on 14 February 1898; the ceremony took place at St Margaret's Church, Westminster, with a reception following at Westminster Town Hall, while the proceedings were the subject of attention in the Taunton press. With her he had one son and two daughters:


 * Amyse Mary Welby (born 1900) married, in 1929, Capt. Geoffrey Whittaker of the Coldstream Guards
 * Rannulf Alfred Earle Welby (born 1902), commissioned into the Territorial Army army during World War I
 * Eda Désirée Welby (born 1904)

It is worthy of note that Colonel Welby's wife, Désirée Alice Welby, (1877 - 1969; née Copland-Griffiths), often known in her own lifetime as Lady Welby in print, was an amateur sculptress, who exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Educated privately, she produced busts of Lord Cave, Clementine Churchill, Sir Cecil Harcourt Smith, Prebendary A. W. Gough, Lord Charnwood, Sir Leslie Scott, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Sir Hubert Cook, Sir Arthur Hardinge and Sir Ronald Ross (1934). Additionally, she sculpted the figure of Christ for the Wingfield War Memorial; this was stolen from the memorial in 2014, and an earlier plaque listing names of the women and doctors who worked in the nearby hospital during the First World War had been stolen in the early 1970s. She also co-authored The Temptation of Eve, a play produced in London in 1928. She died in 1969.

Military career
After finishing his education at Eton, Welby entered the army. He purchased an appointment to the rank of Ensign in the 85th Foot in October 1867, aged 18; he moved in November of that year to the 56th foot, where he remained until exchanging to the 90th Foot in 1871. The practice of purchasing promotion was common in the British Army at this time and Welby used his family's wealth to secure promotion to the rank of Lieutenant in 1870, a year and a half before the Cardwell Reforms abolished the purchasing of commissions in November 1871. His next promotion came six years later when, in January 1876, he was promoted to be Captain in the 90th Foot, exchanging to the 2nd Dragoons in August. He was then promoted to Major in 1885, before being appointed Lieutenant-Colonel commandant of the 2nd Dragoons in 1892, in the place of Lt.-Col. James Charles Maberley, who had retired. He remained in this post until his own retirement, on the completion of his service, in 1896, when he was replaced by the Hon. Walter Philip Alexander, son of the third Earl of Caledon.

While commanding the regiment, Welby travelled to Russia in 1895 after the appointment of Tsar Nicholas II as Colonel-in-Chief in November 1894, an honorary officer position; he dined with the Emperor in Saint Petersburg, and also with the German Kaiser in Berlin and Queen Victoria in Windsor. He later attended the Tsar's coronation in 1896. It was on one of these visits to Russia that he received the second class grade of the Order of St. Anne, an imperial Russian honour.

Unsuccessful contester
Welby stood as the Conservative candidate for Grantham at the 1885 General Election, opposing the incumbent Liberal Member John William Mellor. Welby was introduced at a Conservative demonstration at Grantham in January 1884; however, a severe hunting injury caused him to be absent for several months in 1885; in November of that year, when the Conservatives began their campaign by addressing crowds at the Exchange Hall, Grantham, Welby was hissed and booed at by the audience, at times making it hard for him to be heard at all; his opposition to the widening of the franchise in 1883 and his admission to having spoke against this publicly also received considerable opposition from the audience, while the attempts of John Compton Lawrance, Conservative MP for Stamford, to promote Welby were met with great opposition too. As it happened, election day (24 November ) saw the constituents quite divided; tricks were played, such as a sign supporting Mellor being placed on a Conservative supporter's house, and Mellor himself marched through the town with about 500 of his supporters. Welby lost the election by 246 votes, out of a total of 2508; the Liberal majority had been reduced by 168 votes. Despite the defeat, he was received by a friendly reception at the Angel Hotel, Grantham; during that night's jubilations elsewhere in the borough, several Conservative supporters' windows were smashed. In April 1886, Welby declined the offer to stand as the Conservative candidate for the seat again; in December of that year, he received a trophy from the Grantham Conservative Association honouring the "gallant fight he made against the Right Hon. J. W. Mellor."

At the 1886 General Election, Welby contested the (East) Poplar seat; despite the Liberal majority reducing to 76 from nearly 2,000, he did not defeat the Liberal candidate, Sydney Buxton; however, he was praised by the Conservative Association, who in December also presented him with an illuminated address and a photograph album. Welby remained involved to some degree in local politics at Poplar, where he would be the Conservative candidate at the 1892 election; for instance, in December 1890, he attended a banquet at the Metropolitan Division of the National Union for Conservative candidates in London; while in November he and his former rival Sydney Buxton jointly proposed the construction of a Free Library for Poplar. Despite what had been perceived as a sizeable gain in 1886, he then lost by over 2,000 votes when he contested the seat again in 1892, in the face of a dock strike and ongoing labour questions.

Member for Taunton
In 1894, the Hon. Alfred Percy Allsopp, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Taunton, announced that he would not stand again, prompting his party to find a new candidate. In November 1894, Welby was recommended by the Conservative Party's Executive Committee to be the candidate for Taunton and was received by applaud at the Conservative Council in Taunton. He was later unanimously selected at their candidate. In the following months, he set about raising his profile, chairing the Taunton and West Somerset Licensed Victuallers' Association annual dinner in February 1895 and, when he made his speech at the Constitutional Club in April of that year, he was again loudly applauded by its members, with the local newspaper reporting that the room was "overflowing" with those listening to him speak; he called for the membership to double, a proposal met with applaud.

The General Election of 1895 took place between July and August, with Taunton's vote being held on the 15 July. Despite rumours that the Radical party were preparing a candidate to stand against him, Welby stood unopposed in 1895 and was duly declared its Member of Parliament, according to the Taunton Herald, "owing to the unprepared state in which [the Radicals] had fallen, and partly owing to the strength of the opposition".

After his election, concern was raised in Parliament when, by September, Welby had not resigned his commission as active commander of the 2nd Dragoons. However, St. John Brodrick confirmed that there was no legislation or protocol banning serving officers of this rank from also taking their seats. Welby was also due to retire in July 1896, and so did not resign.

In 1900, he won Taunton with a majority of 363, out of 2,411 votes, and was duly returned as the member.

Parliamentary record and politics
Welby was a staunch unionist, explicitly declaring this during the 1895 election; in his printed election address, made a few days prior, he declared his opposition to Home Rule in Ireland, stating that such proposals should be "resisted to the utmost"; he also opposed the disestablishment of the Church of Wales and declared that agriculture "demands the attention of the whole country" in order to compete internationally and recover from poor harvests in recent years. Welby also stated his support for a reformed House of Lords. He also, again publicly, granted Joseph Chamberlain's Tariff Reform programme his "whole-hearted allegiance" in 1905; when speaking to the Ancient Society of Cogers in December of that year, while also welcoming Sir Edward Grey's appointment as Foreign Secretary.

He never entered Government office, and spent much of his time on the backbenches; he stands out from his forebears in that he did contribute to debates and is recorded speaking on 235 occasions during his tenure, the first being in 1896 and the last in 1905. The Parliamentary minutes, Hansard, reveal that he spoke most often on matters relating to the military; in 1896, for instance, six of his ten speeches concerned military matters, and in 1897 all of his recorded contributions related to the military. This trend can be seen throughout his tenure. In 1905, he publicly criticised the departing War Secretary, H. O. Arnold-Forster, saying he "cherished extraordinary visions totally unsuited to the needs of the country and offensive to the auxilliary forces," presumably referring to Arnold-Forster's application of the recommendations of the Esther Report of 1903, which called for the implementation of major reforms to the armed forces in Britain.

Campaigning for East Finsbury in 1906
Henry Charles Richards was the Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Finsbury East, situated near London. He died in 1905 and, in the by-election that ensued, the Conservative candidate, Nathaniel Louis Cohen, was defeated by over 700 votes. The Conservative and Unionist Association for the constituency invited Welby to stand in the 1906 General Election, and he accepted, deciding not to stand for Taunton again. Despite recovering some votes, Welby was defeated by a majority of 689 votes (or 16.2% of the vote). On a national level, the election represented a land-slide victory for the Liberals, led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, giving them a 125 majority in the House and bringing to an end the eleven year Conservative rule begun under Lord Salisbury in 1895 and continued under Arthur Balfour from 1902.

Civic career
Welby was a Justice of the Peace (magistrate) for Kesteven and Lincolnshire in 1884. . After his unsuccessful attempt at contesting the Finsbury East seat in 1906, Welby stood for the East Finsbury ward in the London County Council in 1907 and was elected; he served until 1910 and, during this time, was chair of the London County Council Committee for Higher Education.

During the first months of the First World War, in 1914, Major Edward Alexander Stanton had been Secretary of the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation, an organisation established after the Crimean War (1854-6) to provide financial assistance to widows and orphans of War. Stanton took up the post of Military Secretary to the Duke of Connaught, then Viceroy of Canada, and so had to resign his post. Welby was appointed Acting Secretary of the Royal Patriotic Fund Corporation in his place in December 1914 and was eventually confirmed as the full Secretary; he served throughout the War and continued until resigning in 1920. In recognition of the work, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1918, the order being awarded to recognise those who served the war effort in non-combat roles, and the grade of Knight-Commander being the second highest rank and conferring on him the style of knight. 1914-1920.

Later life
Welby lived out his later years at Albany, Piccadilly. He died on 18 May 1937 at Ascot, Berkshire, aged 87.

Publications

 * Welby, A.C.E. Records of the Parish and Prebendal Church the Guilds and Chantries of Grantham (Grantham: Lyne & Sons) http://www.lincstothepast.com/Records/RecordDisplayStandard.aspx?oid=1272537

Marriage notices

 * Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 16 February 1898, p. 6

Obituaries

 * Gloucestershire Echo, 19 May 1937, p. 1
 * Nottingham Evening Post, 19 May 1937, p. 7