| Chapter 1: | Two Tory Radicals: Lord Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and the Evolution of their Views on the Irish Question to 1880 |
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for an American screw making machine. This machine revolutionised the production of screws and assured the company of a monopoly. It was this, together with the management expertise of his father, who had moved to Birmingham in 1863, which secured the future of the company. For Joseph Chamberlain, it was more a case of being in the right place at the right time.
At the time of Chamberlain’s arrival, Birmingham was dominated by nonconformist Liberals whose interests were mainly religious. Although Chamberlain, who was a Unitarian, never considered himself a nonconformist, he soon moved into this influential nonconformist society. To the nonconformist families of Birmingham, Toryism represented rule by landowners and landlords and, as a consequence, they gravitated readily towards Liberalism. It was in Birmingham that Chamberlain laid the solid foundations for his future success in business and politics. Within the first few weeks, he joined the Edgbaston Debating Society and started to develop the speaking skills that would later lead to Gladstone remarking, ‘Isn’t he a great speaker?’14 He also joined the Unitarian church in Birmingham and was soon teaching in the Sunday school, not only religion, but also literature, history, French and arithmetic. It was from this experience that he learned the pedagogic skills which he was to use frequently in his later political speeches.
In July 1861, he married Harriet Kenrick. He had observed Harriet in the congregation at a church service he had attended on his first Sunday in Birmingham. She was the daughter of a formidable and reserved Unitarian business man, Archibald Kenrick. Tragically, Harriet died in October 1863 after giving birth to their first son, Joseph Austen. Her death had a profound effect, causing Chamberlain to resign from the council of the Chamber of Commerce and to give up regular attendance at the Debating Society. From the moment of Harriet’s death, Chamberlain became a changed man. As he explained to his friend Charles Dilke many years later:
I began as a devout Unitarian. The death of my first wife brought the whole thing very close to me and the doctrines which did very well before broke down under that calamity.15