Henry Broadhurst (1840 - 1911)
                
Henry was born on 13 April 1840 in the Oxfordshire village of Littlemore.His father, a stone mason, was born Thomas Broadis in Gloucestershire in 1799. He changed his name to Broadhurst sometime after the christening of his thrid child in 1826.

Henry Broadhurst was a prominent British trade unionist and politician. He followed his father into stonemasonry at the age of thirteen. He spent a considerable period during the late 1850s travelling the south of England, attempting to find work. In 1865, he moved to London and worked on the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster.

In 1872, Broadhurst was elected as the Chair of a Masons' Committee during an industrial dispute. After achieving a major victory, Broadhurst began working full time for the Stonemasons Union. He also became the union's delegate to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and was elected to its Parliamentary Committee. In 1873, he became the secretary of the Labour Representation League.

At the 1874 general election, two candidates sponsored by the League were elected, but Broadhurst was unsuccessful at High Wycombe. In 1875, he was elected Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC, the post which was later to become the General Secretaryship.

At the 1880 general election, Broadhurst was elected as the Liberal-Labour Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent. Within the House of Commons, he pushed through legislation enabling working men to act as Justices of the Peace, and for all Government contracts to include a "fair wage" clause. In 1884, he was appointed to the Royal Commission on the housing of the working class.

In 1885 general election, Broadhurst moved to represent Birmingham Bordesley. He was appointed as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department in the Liberal government, the first person from a working-class or labour movement background to hold a ministerial post. He was the first minister to be granted permission not to attend levees. Following his appointment, he resigned from his TUC post. William Gladstone attempted but failed to have his ministerial salary reduced.

For the 1886 general election, Broadhurst moved seats again, this time winning Nottingham West. Free of ministerial responsibilities, he was again elected Secretary of the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC, but became increasingly isolated as more left wing members, such as Keir Hardie, accused him of not sufficiently representing the interests of labour within Parliament. Following a defeat in a crucial vote at the 1890 TUC conference, and citing declining health, Broadhurst resigned the post.

In 1892, Broadhurst was appointed to a second Royal Commission, on the aged poor. He lost his seat at the 1892 general election, and was also defeated at the Grimsby by-election, 1893. However, he returned to Parliament at the Leicester by-election, 1894, holding this seat as a Lib-Lab MP until 1906. Following his retirement, Broadhurst moved to Norfolk, where he became an alderman.

Henry married  Eliza Olley in 1859 and they never had any children. Eliza died in 1905 and Henry on 11th  October 1911 in Cromer, Norfolk.

In his autobiography Broadhurst tells us that he was born in April 1840, the son of a journeyman stone mason - a trade which Henry himself was also to take up. In his early days he had worked in a black- smith's shop, of which there were a number in the Little- more area. During Henry's journeyman's days, he became interested in his fellow workers' conditions of work and was elected secretary of the parliamentary committee at the 1875 Trades Union Congress, eventually becoming the liberal M.P. for Stoke-on-Trent. He sat on a number of Royal Commissions, such as 'housing for the working classes' in 1884, and the aged poor in 1892. By 1880 he was only the third working man to be elected to the House of Commons, and in 1885 the first to hold office as under-secretary of state in the Home Office in Gladstone' s government.
He writes 'Our cottage, which stood some distance from the village, was the largest of a group of three, the two smaller lying at the back after the style of an old fashioned pidgeon cote.' Were there only three cottages, or were there nine? On examining the 1851 census for Littlemore, when Henry would have been eleven years old, I find the family living at 'Mount Pleasant', an early Victorian development of sixteen cottages..

Of Broadhurst's rise from a stone mason's bench to a seat in parliament, he writes 'I am not conscious of ever having a goal for my ambition. I have never burnt the midnight oil considering my next move. Each succeeding morning I have done the work nearest to hand'. Then he quotes another distinguished Littlemore man: 'One step enough for me.'

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